Reviews
Twain at Sea: The Maritime Writings of Samuel Langhorne Clemens edited by Eric Paul Roorda (University Press of New England/Seafaring America, Hanover, NH, 2018, 263pp, illus, map, notes, biblio, index, isbn 978-1-5126-0151-0; $19.95pb) It is relatively common knowledge that Samuel Clemens’s famous pseudonym Mark Twain came from his work on riverboats; it is equally common to associate Twain with the riverside lives of his most enduring characters. Eric Paul Roorda’s excellent new edited volume Twain at Sea: The Maritime Writings of Samuel Langhorne Clemens shows us a different Twain, “the salty Samuel C,” as Roorda calls him. Thoughtfully arranged chapters provide a rich and detailed account of Twain’s extensive deep-water ocean travels, illuminating the influence of the sea on his career and on his capacious imagination. Roorda’s skilled curatorial eye also gives us a fascinating picture of global travel at the end of the nineteenth century as only Twain could tell it. On the first page of Roorda’s introduction is, appropriately, a map that clearly lays out Twain’s many ocean crossings, beginning with his first sail from San Francisco to Hawaii in 1866, and through his steamship circumnavigation of the world in 1895–96. The volume is smartly constructed a bit like the map; some chapters focus on specific regions, such as the Mississippi (the only “brown water” section) or the North Atlantic, while others focus on specific voyages, such as his trips from New York to California and back, or a world lecture tour that included stops in Australia, New Zealand, and India. Roorda also explores how the sea shaped Twain’s literary imagination. “Maritime language infused Clemens’s work, which he peppered with references to ships, frequently incorporating salty characters.” Indeed, there is an excellent chapter here, “Mark Twain’s Iconic Sea Captain,” which traces the fictionalized recurrence across forty years of essays and stories of real-life Captain Edgar “Ned” Wakeman, whom he first met en route to Nicaragua in 1866. In Roorda’s afterword, “The Dark Wilderness of the Sea—and of Life,” he provides excerpts from three of Twain’s latest and strangest stories, all of which take place at sea and 58
seem to grapple with the writer’s profound grief after the death of his oldest daughter in 1896. This final section exemplifies one of the greatest strengths of the whole volume: the depth and variety of the source material. Roorda provides salty selections from titles that readers will easily recognize, like Roughing It or Innocents Abroad, but these are combined with Twain’s letters, passages from his notebooks, early journalism and periodical writing, and other texts that have fallen out of circulation and study. These materials provide a new vision of Twain as one of America’s most significant maritime writers.
Interspersed throughout the volume are Roorda’s compelling biographical sketches. Often brief, always informative, they appear at the beginning of each chapter, and sometimes within chapters between excerpts in order to maintain clear links between Twain’s life, travels, and writing. They are also consistently just plain fun; Roorda writes very much in the spirit of Twain’s great eye for detail and his love of a wild story. We learn that Twain found $50 dollars blown against the side of a house and decided to use it to start a Brazilian cocoa farm; on his way south he met the man who would eventually train him to be a riverboat pilot. He never quite got to Brazil. Elsewhere we learn that the most important scoop of his early journalistic career, involving interviews with the survivors of the wreck of the Hornet, came
about in part because he was suffering from infected saddle sores from too much horseback riding around Hawaii. He conducted the interviews in the Honolulu hospital where the survivors were being treated, having been carried there himself on a stretcher. Roorda balances these colorful tales with real insights and compassion for the financial woes and family tragedies that kept Twain writing and traveling right up until the last few months before his death in 1910. Taken as a whole, this volume masterfully takes the man Samuel Clemens and the icon Mark Twain from the familiar Mississippi River and sends his legacy out to sea, where it so clearly belongs. Amy Parsons Vallejo, California World War II at Sea: A Global History by Craig L. Symonds (Oxford University Press, New York, 2018, 792pp, illus, maps, notes, biblio, index, isbn 978-0-19024-3678; $34.95hc) The term “rock star” is not commonly used in the academic arena, but when it comes to Craig Symonds and naval history, he well deserves the accolade. A professor emeritus from the United States Naval Academy, where he taught for thirty years, Symonds currently serves as the distinguished visiting Ernest J. King Professor of Military History at the United States Naval War College. He was awarded the Lincoln Prize for Lincoln and His Admirals (2008), and the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature for Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (2014). His list of publications is long and impressive; his position among the top in the field is undeniable. In his latest book, Dr. Symonds tackles the broadest naval topic possible, World War II at sea. The books covering individual navies, theaters, battles, leaders, and ships are too numerous to name, but in this single volume Symonds endeavors to capture it all—a daunting endeavor. As he states in his introduction: “No single volume evaluates the impact of the sea services from all nations on the overall trajectory and even the outcome of the war. Doing so illuminates how profoundly the course of the war was charted and steered by maritime events.” SEA HISTORY 166, SPRING 2019