The Battleship Book
Robert M. Farley. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2015. 256 pp. Biblio. Illus. $19.99.
Reviewed by Paul Stillwell
In the event of a survey course called Battleship 101, Robert Farley’s work would serve as a suitable textbook. The Battleship Book is a wide-ranging primer on the subject of battleships, battle cruisers, near-battleships, and quasi-battleships.
The book comprises encyclopedia-style entries on 62 different warships; separate chapters on Jutland, naval treaties, and Pearl Harbor; and a number of sidebars. The time period moves from the 1885 keel-laying for HMS Victoria to the current Russian battle cruiser Pyotr Velikiy (Peter the Great). Ships from a variety of nations are represented. Profiles of ships from countries not generally known for fielding battleships—such as Spain, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil—are particularly helpful, as they are usually not covered in books on the subject.
Each brief profile stands on its own. The selections can be compared to a sampling from an hors d’oeuvres table—tasty but not filling. Taken as a whole and read in sequence, the chapters lead the reader on a chronological march through advancing technology and the various political factors (including battleship envy) that led to the building of ships in various time periods. The drawback to this approach is that quite a few of the ships intersected with each other, which produces a lot of repetition, especially because so many capital ships were involved in the 1916 Battle of Jutland. Another quibble is that the illustrations vary greatly in quality.
For the reader who long ago mastered Battleship 101, the hors d’oeuvres selections still contain plenty of enjoyable morsels, including the author’s observations at the ends of the chapters. In many cases, the facts imparted in this volume can be the answers to trivia questions. For example, we learn that Henry Allingham, who served in a naval trawler at the Battle of Jutland, died in 2009 at the age of 113—the last survivor of that conflict. (In keeping with the pattern of repetition, Allingham’s accomplishment is mentioned twice.)
Other trivia: The French ship Jean Bart, launched in 1940, was party to a duel with the USS Massachusetts (BB-59) at Casablanca in 1942. However, she did not go into full service until 1952, as the last battleship of any nation to be completed. The USS Wisconsin (BB-64) was the last battleship of any nation to fire her guns in anger, doing so during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. The biggest battleship ever, the Japanese Yamato, displaced 72,000 tons and was armed with 18.1-inch guns. She played little part in World War II and met her death on a suicide mission in April 1945. The author speculates that she could have been a valuable asset in the Japanese campaign against Guadalcanal in late 1942.
In November 1918 two Italian commandos attached a time bomb to the hull of the Viribus Unitis. She had been completed in 1912 as the first Austrian dreadnought and was later turned over to Croatia, a predecessor of the evolving nation of Yugoslavia. The Italians were captured and warned the ship’s commanding officer, Admiral Janko Vukovich, about the bomb and recommended evacuating the crew. The captain released the Italians and ordered the evacuation, but the bomb did not explode when predicted. The admiral and a number of crew members returned aboard and were killed when the delayed explosion occurred.
Great Britain’s last battleship, HMS Vanguard, was completed in 1946 with essentially obsolete 15-inch turrets left over from World War I and not used subsequently because of the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922. Indeed, mention of that treaty keeps popping up throughout the book because of its widespread impact—the scrapping of many existing ships and the non-completion of others whose construction was in progress. The U.S. Navy was a beneficiary of the treaty in that two hulls designed as battle cruisers wound up as the aircraft carriers Lexington (CV-2) and Saratoga (CV-3). The two ships were important in developing carrier doctrine prior to World War II and training many of the aviators who served in that war.
As many battleship histories report, HMS Dreadnought, completed in 1906, was the first to sport an armament of all big guns in her main battery instead of a mixture of sizes. Less well known is her antisubmarine-warfare role. In 1915 she rammed and sank the German submarine U-29.
The battleships and their kin were versatile in their time, culminating in the shore-bombardment role for U.S. ships in the final decades of the dreadnought era. The era is now over. Farley’s book makes it worth studying through his rearview mirror.
Shipwrecked in Paradise: Cleopatra’s Barge in Hawai’i
Paul F. Johnston. College Station, TX: Texas University Press, 2015. 204 pp. Notes. Biblio. Index. Illus. $39.95.
Reviewed by Andrew C. A. Jampoler
The first of five chapters in Paul Johnston’s interesting—and lavishly illustrated—book about the 1824 wreck of King Kamehameha II’s handsome brig Moku Haheo (Proud Vessel in Hawaiian, sometimes also called Ha’aheo o Hawai’i, or Pride of Hawaii) in Kauai’s Hanalei Bay begins with a thumbnail sketch of the ship’s short and colorful history. It goes on to describe Johnston’s five seasons of dives on the wreck site. These began in the summer of 1995 and continued each summer through the end of the century. More than a fascinating ship’s history, Johnston’s book is also a primer on marine archaeology.
Johnston—a curator then and now at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History—and his many volunteers faced many challenges, including a byzantine state government permitting process that he repeatedly was required to navigate successfully, and the fact that the near-shore site had been salvaged twice in the 19th century, washed over since the wreck by three tsunamis, and in September 1992 by a Category 4 hurricane, “Iniki.”
Built in 1816 by Retire Becket of Salem for the personal use of the wealthy, self-indulgent George Crowinshield Jr (1766–1817), also of Salem, and named Cleopatra’s Barge, the 14-gun brig was sold to the new Hawaiian king in mid-November 1820—in surprisingly poor condition, as the recipient learned some 16 months later. “From the main chains aft above water, she was a complete mass of dry rot,” a surveyor reported in April 1822. For that, the king had agreed to pay the equivalent of $80,000 in sandalwood, an aromatic prized by the Chinese that would soon be harvested to extinction on the islands.
Cleopatra’s Barge was then rebuilt (badly). On 6 April 1824, three months before Kamehameha II died of measles in London, the former royal Hawaiian yacht parted her cables in a storm and was driven up on the reefs in Hanalei Bay, near the mouth of the Waipa River, where she sank. (Her crew was most likely drunk.) A huge salvage operation was mounted weeks later; a second attempt followed in 1857. She’d been largely undisturbed since then until Johnston’s team began its careful work some 140 years later.
The second chapter tells the ship’s story in detail, focusing first on her service as Crowinshield’s private yacht. Johnston provides enough Hawaiian history during this era of transition from isolated island kingdom to object of foreign appetites to provide context for Cleopatra’s Barge’s short and very improbable next service in the Pacific under the Hawaiian flag. For the student of maritime history, this longish chapter is especially interesting—as is much of the next one, “The Ship Structure and Equipment.”
What emerges from the sources, most held by Salem’s Peabody Essex Museum, is George Ropes Jr.’s stunning 1818 portrait of Cleopatra’s Barge at sea on the starboard tack, rigged as a hermaphrodite brig, and some speculative, more recent drawings of the ship’s lines by several marine architects. After this introduction Johnston gives a description of the structural remains that were found, including isolated frames impaled alongside a reef and a surprisingly substantial portion—40 feet—of the stern originally buried deep in sand. His discoveries constitute the basis of what we know of the ship’s original construction and subsequent lubberly repair.
Here again, as he did in the initial chapter, Johnston also describes how marine archaeologists deal carefully with sand overburden. The text goes on to itemize the various hull fasteners, bits of sheathing, rigging items, etc. found. These and many other discoveries are described in great detail in the fourth chapter, “The Finds,” a photo catalogue of the many artifacts uncovered and removed from their encapsulation. Read slowly or you’ll miss, for example, the gem that explains why modern gin bottles are rectangular.
The final chapter, “Shipwrecked in Paradise,” is a brief essay connecting the ship to her wreck site and to her place in Hawaiian history. If you’re interested in sailing ships and the sea, or often imagine yourself on a beach in paradise, you’ll enjoy this book.
The Big E: The Story of the USS Enterprise, Illustrated Edition
Commander Edward P. Stafford, U.S. Navy. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2015. 260 pp. Illus. Index. Biblio. $75.
Reviewed by Hill Goodspeed
When first published in 1962, Commander Edward Stafford’s The Big E drew praise for its storytelling, with one reviewer commenting that the tale of the venerable carrier “will leave its readers just a little breathless with excitement, even though they all know how it will end.” Indeed, anyone who has read the book is instantly struck by its stirring prose, which brings to life the crew and the airmen who flew from her decks. Many of the book’s readers trace lifelong interest in U.S. Navy history back to the moment they opened up a copy of The Big E.
With the recent publication of an illustrated edition of the classic work, the Naval Institute Press has added even more luster to Stafford’s enduring words. The book’s release fittingly coincides with the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. Reflecting the impact that service on board the Enterprise (CV-6) had on individuals, the book was sponsored by the family of Jack Taylor, a World War II fighter pilot who flew F6F Hellcats from the flight deck of the Big E. After the war, he applied the life lessons he learned in the Navy and started Enterprise Rent-A-Car, named after his old ship.
Stafford’s veritable ship’s biography begins in 1941 just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but the scenes captured in the book’s images commence with her construction. A full-page photograph showing the crowd gathered beneath her towering bow for her christening at the moment the champagne bottle smashed against the hull foreshadows the incredible pictorial presentation on the ensuing pages. The prewar images also include a collection of color photographs originally published in Life magazine that captures the last vestiges of peacetime operations before gleaming paint schemes on ships and airplanes gave way to wartime camouflage.
Drawing on a variety of sources—notably including the collection of former Enterprise Photographer’s Mate William Barr—the pictures perfectly complement Stafford’s text; each turn of the page reveals an image that captures some element of the Big E’s life. While some classic shots have appeared before in other published works, they collectively represent a unique assemblage that illuminates the story of the legendary ship. The editors also included images that do not necessarily focus on the Enterprise, but capture the campaigns in which she participated and the ships and personnel of the enemy she faced, placing her story in the context of the vast Pacific war.The inclusion of the work of acclaimed artists such as R. G. Smith and Tom Freeman balances out the selection of largely black-and-white photographs.
Yet these historic photographs—whether shot in battle, on liberty, or in the air—are the true treasures in this volume. A sharply focused image drawn from the collection of the National Archives captures Marines in crisp khakis firing a volley, saluting the Enterprise’s first wartime casualty. Other photos, some of them in striking color, depict battle damage to the ship and speak to the toll of war. The orchestrated choreography of flight-deck operations appears in numerous photographs of classic warbirds of the era. Of particular note are the captions for some of the images of mishaps, which are interesting in their identification of the aircrew involved and their subsequent service after the accidents. Some pages reveal unique or unusual views, including that of an OS2U Kingfisher floatplane that operated from the ship, the awarding of the Navy Cross to Third Class Cook William Pinckney, the second African-American to receive the decoration, and sailors painting the hangar-deck scoreboard recording the combat accomplishments of the ship and her air group.
While the book contains maps detailing the carrier’s actions, it was somewhat surprising that an expansive sidebar on the Yorktown-class carriers in the opening pages was not followed by similar treatments on important subjects. Additionally, some captions could have been more expansive and the editors might have taken advantage of incorporating images of artifacts related to the Enterprise that survive in the collections of museums around the United States.
However, these are minor deficiencies in a work that completes the story of the legendary carrier. Commander Stafford, who passed away in 2013 at the age of 95, breathed life into the ship after she became a victim of the scrapper’s torch. The Naval Institute Press has illuminated her glorious service even further. In this book, with the faces of a passing generation captured on film forever youthful, it is safe to say that the legacy of the legendary Big E has been preserved.
Pieces of Eight: More Archaeology of Piracy
Charles R. Ewen and Russell K. Skowronek, eds. Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2016. 318 pp. Notes. Illus. Photos. Maps. $39.95.
Reviewed by Susan B. M. Langley
While Pieces of Eight: More Archaeology of Piracy can serve as a standalone book, it often references and occasionally relies on the previous volume that Charles R. Ewen and Russell K. Skowronek edited, X Marks the Spot: The Archaeology of Piracy, and a reader would benefit from familiarity with it. Pieces of Eight also follows the question that the editors raised in their previous book: Can an archaeological site be determined to have its origin in piracy without corroborating historical documents? The answer is still no, but Ewen does conclude that some of the methods employed to study and analyze the sites offer better insights into patterns of behavior that permit developing an anthropology of piracy. From this perspective, the book is a success.
Ewen and Skowronek have written or coauthored 4 of the book’s 13 chapters, which are filled with their trademark humor and nostalgia. Pieces of Eight would have benefited from being written as a cohesive whole. As it stands, it is best described as a collection of individual papers. This results in a great deal of redundancy and uneven quality between the chapters that could have been avoided, a handful of typographical and grammatical errors, and inconsistencies between chapters using imperial measurements and those using the metric system.
If the premise of identifying pirate shipwrecks or sites solely from the archaeological remains is suspended, and the research is considered from the points of view of analyses of behavior and distribution patterns, the volume shines. Continuing studies of the vessels Queen Anne’s Revenge in North Carolina and the Ranger in Jamaica seem to prove their cases beyond doubt. Studies of the remains of William Kidd’s Quedagh Merchant in the Dominican Republic and the ground-truthing of documentary and cartographic evidence on the southwest coast of Ireland provide some of the most exciting chapters in the book. The latter could provide an interesting comparison to the work undertaken at Port Royal, Jamaica, and discussed in the earlier volume.
Efforts to identify material remains in Spanish Florida and determine which of these might have been obtained illicitly enjoy some moderate success through studying the percentages of materials across time and property owners who differed in ethnicity, economic, and social status (although smuggling and piracy are not necessarily direct correlates). The chapter explaining the various flags, pennants, ensigns, and jacks; where they would be flown on a ship; and their use as signals or symbols (and sometimes both) is extremely useful. However, the section on 18th-century piracy could be dropped without impacting the chapter, as it is covered thoroughly earlier in the volume. Likewise, the following chapter on iconography repeats much of the background of the previous chapter.
The inclusion of two chapters—one about the search for Captain Henry Morgan’s Panama Raid vessels and one addressing the return to the site of the alleged Fiery Dragon—raises some concerns. The former includes an excellent, lengthy history of Morgan’s life and activities and some extremely limited land-based archaeological research, but the divers ultimately found only a few cannon, which might have been jettisoned by his grounded ships, and an interesting but unrelated Spanish merchant vessel of the same period. It seems this chapter was included more for Morgan’s name-recognition than any success in locating submerged pirate watercraft.
The other chapter purports to provide additional evidence, based on fieldwork that occurred after the publication of the previous volume, to confirm the identification of a shipwreck off Madagascar as Christopher Condent’s ship Fiery Dragon. Diverse materials were recovered from the site, but the discussion concentrates on coins that provide dates, some religious artifacts, and Chinese ceramics. Furthermore, the vessel appears to be atop another wreck. The contributor draws no real conclusion as to how these artifacts prove the identity of the vessel, and goes on to describe the search for two wrecks believed to be sunk by pirates to block the harbor from entrance by the Royal Navy. The author stated at the Society for Historical Archaeology Conference in Washington, D.C., in January that an Asian vessel is atop, not beneath, the shipwreck he believes to be the Fiery Dragon and that she is the source of the Chinese ceramics. So while the potential for both sites remains high, further study is needed. These inconclusive chapters could have perhaps awaited publication in a future volume.
Despite the uneven character of the chapters, Pieces of Eight and its antecedent reflect the most current research into archaeological evidence for piracy. Both books outline avenues of research under exploration and ongoing efforts to derive and test scientific methodologies. These, as well as the current body of data on which to build, will enable their future application to undocumented sites to determine with greater confidence whether they are or are not connected to pirate activities. It is not surprising that an early print run sold out at the aforementioned conference. Professional archaeologists as well as anyone who wants to understand the realities of investigating shipwrecks, pirates, and the manner in which they lived and died should read Pieces of Eight as well as its precursor, X Marks the Spot.