To California By Sea: A Maritime History of the California Gold
James P. Delgado, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1989. 237 pp. Photos. Bib. Ind. $24.95 ($22.45).
Reviewed by William H. Flayhart III
This book is the first comprehensive maritime history in 40 years of this great human migration. The previous syntheses—Oscar Lewis’s Sea Routes to the Gold Field (Knopf, N.Y., 1949), and John Haskell Kemble’s The Panama Route: 1849-1869 (Berkeley, 1943)— remain classics, but considerable additional research and publication have occurred in the intervening decades. Delgado’s outstanding achievement is the creation of a fine narrative of this dramatic period in our national history, and an expert analysis of a wealth of data from both primary and secondary sources.
Those who voyaged the sea routes to California via the isthmus of Panama (both Nicaragua and Darien) and around Cape Horn experienced triumphs and tragedies. With the discovery of gold, literally hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts traveled by sea in search of their fortunes. More than 800,000 came via Panama (1848-69) alone, and 160,000 returned by the same route, carrying $64 million in gold. Not all those eastbound Were accompanied by fortunes, however. Heinrich Schliemann, the financial entrepreneur and later archaeologist, noted that the sober nature of those traveling from San Francisco to Panama contrasted strikingly with the high spirits of passengers going westbound. Schliemann attributed the melancholia of those returning east to despair among those adventurers who had lost everything, and the anxiety of those who had made fortunes and were worried about getting them home safely.
The U.S. Navy and the precursor to the U.S. Coast Guard played large roles in developing California. The Navy was no stranger to the Pacific Coast from the voyage of Columbia (1787), the exploration of the Wilkes Expedition (1838-42), and the activities of the Pacific Squadron. In fact, the U.S. naval presence along the
California coast during the Mexican- American War (1848) established the U.S. claim to the region at the peace table. Once California was acquired and gold discovered. Commodore Thomas Ap Catesby Jones observed that the presence of his ships was the principal foundation of government authority and social order discouraging the murder, rapine, and piracy inspired by the insanity of the Gold Rush. In his own case, Catesby’s refusal to leave San Francisco was tempered by the handsome profits he was making through various transactions outside his official responsibilities.
Two decades would pass between the discovery of gold and the completion of the transcontinental railroad. In the meantime, news, as well as people and supplies, first reached California by sea. Nothing more dramatically underlines the importance of California’s maritime history than the scene as the Pacific mail steamer Oregon entered San Francisco Bay flying a special pennant for all to read: “California a State,” and bringing with her the first news of statehood.
James P. Delgado is generous in his acknowledgments to earlier generations of historians, but he protests in vain that his work is not definitive for our time. His frequent citations and extensive bibliography are a “mother lode” for historians seeking to explore one of the most fascinating eras of our national development. The excellence of his research and the beauty of his narrative writing have resulted in a book that should delight any lover of the sea and ships.
Lifeline of the Confederacy: Blockade Running During the Civil War
Stephen R. Wise. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1988. 403 pp. Photos, lllus. Maps. Append. Notes. Bib. Ind. $24.95 ($22.45).
Reviewed by C. S. Fuqua
On 9 April 1861, the captain of the U.S. mail steamer James Adger headed his ship out of Charleston harbor into rough seas. On the starboard side, he had clear view of the U.S. flag over Fort Sumter; on the portside, the South’s flag flew above Fort Moultrie. The captain was no fool. Stormy seas looked a lot more inviting than having his merchantman sitting in a Southern harbor when the South and North finally opened fire on each other. As the James Adger and other Northern ships fled Confederate waters. Southern businessmen began meeting to form companies that would eventually take full advantage of the U.S. split— that, in time, would provide the lifeline for Confederate survival.
Author Stephen Wise, a University of South Carolina instructor and Parris Island Museum director, sets out to strip away the myths and romanticism that surround early accounts of blockade running. What is left is a clear picture of the business greed that laid the foundation for success.
Until 1861, Northern interests had dominated overseas trade in the South. Northern companies delivered their own and European goods to Southern ports and took away Southern produce— especially the South’s primary commodity, cotton. When Southern secession ended normal trade between North and South, businessmen from Charleston seized events to turn a profit. They began operations by sending representatives to Liverpool, England, to form Liverpool- to-Charleston steamship lines.
Union officials also realized the South’s need to develop a reliable import-export trade. After all, the South had never seen fit to industrialize; until secession, it had been in the supply business, producing raw goods for Northern industries. The new nation suddenly found itself unable to manufacture products required for daily life and, more important, for war.
In the North, a blockade board decided to cut the South’s shipping lifeline before it could be connected. The board targeted Mobile, Alabama; Savannah, Georgia; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Charleston, South Carolina, as the most likely ports from which the South would build foreign trade. Using steam-powered warships, the North established the first modem naval blockade. The South’s best gulf port. New Orleans, fell early, which left foreign trade to be conducted primarily through East Coast ports. Since the North’s steam-powered warships were much faster than conventional, sail- driven merchantmen, shipbuilding in Europe boomed, spawned by businesses needing fast, steam-powered ships.
During the early months of the blockade, the South ignored and then lost its chance to form an effective, government- controlled blockade running effort. The need for “King Cotton,” it believed, would eventually generate European intervention. The eventual failure of cotton to live up to expectations forced the Confederacy to rely primarily on private blockade runners—who demanded high prices—for the bulk of rations and military supplies. The government would have paid an even higher price, though, had it failed to contract with the private companies.
In 1864 the North solidified its blockade and captured Southern ports, finally severing the South’s import-export lifeline. The Confederate government crumbled. Although private contracts had cost the government dearly, the blockade runners had proved efficient in moving goods in and out of the country. More than 75% of the attempts by steamers to run the blockade had been successful.
Wise gives the reader an unobscured look at the businessmen whose primary drive was not patriotism to the new country, but devotion to profit. And though it’s one of the book’s greatest accomplishments, it may be its biggest failure.
By concentrating on motivation and facts, the author ignores adventure. In text and language that occasionally border on tedium (for example, detailed ship specifications and facts available in notes and appendices, and the overuse of the word “however”). Wise rarely generates the sense of risk and excitement that the ships’ crews must have experienced. He does describe several quick ship chases and port life, but at best, these only hint at the dangers and decadence encountered by the well-paid crews. The reader is left wanting more flavor, more adventure.
On the other hand. Wise has compiled a thoroughly accurate accounting of the Confederacy’s “lifeline,” down to the construction, size, and histories of blockade running ships. With 22 appendices, he furnishes complete listings of blockade runners arriving and clearing Southern ports. And for the adventure-hungry reader, a bibliography and the author’s text notes will furnish other sources where Lifeline’s missing excitement may be found. The book’s numerous maps, illustrations, and photographs provide the visual complement needed to make this exhaustive study a worthwhile and interesting read and a valuable reference work on blockade running during the Civil War.
From Shore to Shore; The Final Years: The Diaries of Earl Mountbatten of Burma, 1953-1979
Philip Ziegler, editor, London Collins, 1989. 400 pp Photos $39.95 ($35.95)
Reviewed by Captain John Coote, Royal Navy (Retired)
Philip Ziegler wrote the masterly official biography of Mountbatten (Knopf' 1985), among whose sources were one and a half million words of the admiral’s private diaries. He has edited the diaries down to manageable proportions in three volumes, the last of which is this book, covering the quarter of a century between Mountbatten’s time as Commander in Chief Mediterranean until shortly before his assassination by the Irish Republican Army.
The selection process leaves some tantalizing gaps. For example, Ziegler fails to mention Mountbatten’s first visit to the United States as First Sea Lord in 1955. when Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover used his political clout to block Admiral Arleigh Burke’s invitation to take his British opposite number to sea in the USS Nautilus (SSN-571). Instead, the diaries suggest that Mountbatten’s encounter with the misanthropic father of the nuclear navy was an entirely agreeable visit to Electric Boat at Groton, Connecticut when Mountbatten asked all the right questions and began the process of winning the confidence of the one man who could open the Pandora’s box of nuclear propulsion secrets, to the lasting benefit of the Royal Navy.
Many irritating faults in the 1943-46 diaries are repeated. Meetings are described as “useful and interesting” when the other party is persuaded to Mountbatten’s point of view, which is not always apparent, since Mountbatten rarely reveals the agenda. Another yardstick for assessing the success of a meeting with a dignitary is if it overruns its allotted time—a point which is always recorded. The nickname-dropping also gathers pace in this volume. This time the decode is in the front of the book, all the way from Alice to Solly, mostly newcomers to th1 cast of thousands. It seems that “Charles” is the Prince of Wales; but in the diary covering Mountbatten’s days as Supremo in South-East Asia, “Charles” was Squadron Leader Charles St. John, an equerry who has since disappeared. At one state banquet, Mountbatten records having sat between Lilibet and Elizabeth (the Queen of England and her mother, although the general reader might be forgiven for thinking that Richard Burton’s wife somehow got on to the guest list, since the author does not help with a footnote, as he does in exposing “Eddie” as the Duke of Kent).
One of the few events on which these diaries shed new light was the brief rapprochement between Wallis Simpson and the British Royal Family after the death of the Duke of Windsor. Mountbatten’s account of sustaining her in the face of the hostility and prejudice she had every reason to fear from the constitutional monarchy at Windsor is an important and convincing pastiche. Briefly one even feels some sympathy for the adventuress from Baltimore, although in the event all concerned put their private feelings aside in their moment of shared grief.
Later, Mountbatten’s relationship with Wallis degenerates, as he tries overtly to pry some of her fortune out of her to support his admirable United World College scheme. After his retirement as Chief of the Defence Staff and his wife Edwina’s untimely death, he traveled more than ever. At every stop on the way he gets in a plug for his pet project. He also tried to drum up business for his interior decorator son-in-law, David Hicks, even suggesting to the top Kremlin brass that they should entrust the decor of Aeroflot’s overseas offices to him.
Mountbatten was less successful in trying to sell his 12-part television autobiography in the United States. His account of importuning the network chiefs in New York is depressing, if not downright degrading. Whatever reason impelled him, it was not money. At the end, Julian Goodman of NBC stopped Mountbatten’s Patter by asking whether British television would concede 12 hours prime time the life of Eisenhower. Instead of saying, probably correctly, that it would have been snapped up, Mountbatten dwelt on the fact that Ike had been unheard of until he was 52, whereas he had been in the public eye since the age of 14, when his father had been hounded out of office as First Sea Lord at the outbreak of 'he Great War because he was a German, the fact that Eisenhower won the war in Europe and went on to become President was not put in the scales. The comparison Nearly offended Mountbatten. According to his official biography, the nearest he got to being Prime Minister was when he listened to a wild plot cooked up by the newspaper tycoon Cecil King to make him head of a government of national unity. Unfortunately, it is one of the critical episodes in his life that he either did not record in his diaries or the editor decided to excise.
Above all, Mountbatten enjoyed being sent as the Queen’s representative to official functions overseas, when protocol and uniforms had to be carefully enforced. One should spare a thought for his valets, three of whom are named in this book. They must have worked overtime to get their master turned out correctly dressed for every occasion. Of the 50 photographs in this book, only two do not feature him center-stage. He is shown to be wearing nine different uniforms, five fancy-dress disguises—from a Mexican charra to a Maori chief—and a wide variety of plain clothes. Wearing the right stars and sashes of Orders preoccupied him as much as the correct order of disembarking from the aircraft bearing the United Kingdom’s official delegation to a funeral or coronation that did not rate the Queen’s personal attendance.
This book does add to the historical record. Unhappily, Mountbatten’s own view of events, with its emphasis on trivia, has given added impetus to the accelerating process of debunking the great man’s rightful place in the history of the country he served so well.
Canada’s Submariners: 1914-1924
J. David Perkins. Erin, Ontario: The Boston Mills Press, 1989. 226 pp. Photos. Append. Bib. Ind. $35.00 ($31.50).
Reviewed by Captain T. C. Pullen, Royal Canadian Navy (Retired)
Five years of diligent research by the author, a latter-day submariner, have borne fruit in this detailed history of Canada’s submariners starting in 1914. With war imminent, the Royal Canadian Navy unexpectedly found itself for the first time the owner of two submarines thrust upon it in questionable circumstances.
As the European crisis deepened, the impetus for this irregular example of naval procurement sprang from a U.S. shipyard president ever alert for a quick deal and a handsome profit. A willing collaborator was a Canadian provincial premier set on protecting his British Columbian coastline from the apprehended depredations of Admiral Maximilian von Spee’s German squadron, which was then loose in the Pacific. The Royal Canadian Navy’s only contribution to west coast defense at that time was the obsolescent cruiser, HMCS Rainbow, no match for von Spee. The involuntary third party was a cash-strapped South American government refusing to accept two submarines built for it in a Seattle shipyard because it claimed they were “unsafe and unacceptable.”
In the end, a retired U.S. Navy submariner and locally hired crews, in the best cloak-and-dagger tradition, successfully smuggled the submarines out of Seattle under cover of fog and darkness. Later, safely beyond the reach of neutrality minded U.S. authorities, a $1.15 million check changed hands, Canadian crews took over, and Chile’s Iquique and Antofagasta became respectively, Canada’s CC1 and CC2.
Also in 1914, more clandestine negotiations got under way, instigated this time by the entrepreneurial Charles M. Schwabb, president and chairman of the board of Bethlehem Steel, and involving the First Sea Lord, the irascible Jackie Fisher, who was supported by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. The plot was to build ten Holland- type submarines in Canada for the Royal Navy at the Vickers yard in Montreal, all of which were to be completed in less than ten months. They were indeed finished, reflecting favorably on American drive and organization. The undertaking, however, was a “well-kept secret, not even the Canadian government being consulted or even informed,” reflecting little credit on the probity of the parties involved in this shabby affair.
When reading about the wartime activities of the Royal Navy’s submarines, one cannot help but respect the Canadians who served in more than 30 different British boats. They were treated as full members of “The Trade,” as the Royal Navy submarine service was called. One Canadian who emerges in a positive light throughout this book is Commander B. L. “Barney” Johnson, D.S.O., Royal Naval Reserve, who was still on the active list in October 1939, as were others whose names are familiar to latter-day naval officers—Godfrey, Oland, Donald, and Wood, all of whom fought again in World War II.
I never served in submarines but spent World War II pursuing them, and was torpedoed for my efforts during the dark days in the Atlantic. Any lack of envy for those who served in the boats was and remains more than offset by unstinting admiration. Life in the early versions was an undoubted ordeal, as the author takes pains to describe, offset in part by extra pay, which was truly earned. Accommodations were spartan in the extreme with crews sleeping on the decks that had no water, no refrigeration, no heads. Concerning three H-boats on passage to St. John’s, Newfoundland, en route to England, we read of a stormy night being “one of great apprehension . . . they were in unfamiliar waters, aboard untried vessels, had no logs, gyros, or wireless sets, and to complete their discomfiture their compasses had not been corrected and could not be relied on.” One marvels at the caliber of the people involved who were, to a man, volunteers.
In the years following the Great War, Canada decided that submarines were no longer to play a role in its navy. In his foreword, Canadian Vice Admiral J. C. Wood, sometime Maritime Commander, notes that proponents of submarines could not convince Canada of the vital role submarines could play: “They failed because a central government and unimaginative naval leadership could not grasp the significant role these strange vessels could and would play in naval warfare.” Alas, in this regard, little has changed in the seats of the mighty, as evidenced by the abrupt cancellation of the Canadian Navy’s nuclear-submarine procurement program.
Profusely illustrated (more than 100 excellent photographs) plus general- arrangement drawings of HMC S/M CC2 and a Royal Navy “H”-class boat in the end papers, this handsome book is a visual feast that also provides absorbing reading for naval history buffs, particularly submariners from Canada, the United States, and Great Britain.
Other Titles of Interest
Beyond the Khyber Pass: The Road to British Disaster in the First Afghan War
John H. Waller. New York: Random House 1990. 329 pp. Illus. Notes. Bib. Ind. $24.9? ($22.45).
The Central Pacific Campaign, 1943- 1944: A Bibliography
James T. Controvich. Westport, CT: Meckld 1990. 152 pp. Bib. Ind. $35.00.
The Devil’s Secret Name: True Adventures of a Combat Veteran/ Journalist in Third World Wars!
Jim Morris. Canton, OH: Daring Books- 1989. 304 pp. Ind. $18.95 ($17.05).
Edward Teller: Giant of the Golden Age of Physics
Stanley A. Blumberg and Louis G. Panos. New York: Charles Scribner’s and Sons, 1990 Photos. Notes. Bib. Ind. $24.95 ($22.45)-
The First World War: Context and Commentary
Dominic Hibberd. London: Macmillan Education, Ltd., 1990. 212 pp. Illus. Tables. Blind. $39.95 ($35.95).
Mosby’s Rangers: From the High Tide of the Confederacy to the Last Days at Appomattox—The Story of the Most Famous Command of the Civil War and Its Legendary Leader, John S. Mosby
Jeffry D. Wert. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990. 384 pp. Photos. Append. Notes. Bib. Ind. $22.95.