BOOK DEPARTMENT
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PIDGIN CARGO. By Alice Tisdale Hobart. The Century Company. New York 1929. '$2.50.
Reviewed by Captain H. A. Baldridge, U. S. Navy
Here is a book that all readers of the Proceedings will read with a great deal of pleasure and, should with the author’s two previous books, be made available to the service in every naval library.
About the time of the Nanking affair in March, 1927, the reviewer, while editor of the Proceedings, came across Mrs. Hobart’s first book, By the City of the Long Sand—A Tale of New China, written at Changsha, in the interior of China, at the head of Tung Ting Lake—the home of Yale-in-China. The reviewer was so impressed by her intimate and accurate knowledge of the Chinese and of the gradual political changes that had been and were taking place all over that distracted country and of the laying aside of the older traditions and customs, that special attention to her work was considered worthy of comment in the Secretary’s Notes of the Proceedings. The first book was an interesting description of her various homes and servants covering a period of thirteen years, from the north of China to Changsha in the south.
Mrs. Hobart’s second book, Within the Walls of Nanking, appeared in 1928, and was reviewed by the present writer in the January, 1929, number of the Proceedings. In this she tells the dramatic story of the siege of her husband’s home on Socony Hill by the rioting Nationalist soldiers and of the escape of fifty-two American and British subjects through the aid of the barrage laid down by the American destroyers Noa and Preston and the British cruiser Emerald.
In the review of the above book it was said that Mrs. Hobart was well trained by travel and experience to know her subject (China) and that she was an unusually shrewd and trained observer, having gained for herself a place in literature and by new methods; that in addition to the above she has that sometimes unerring women’s intuition that so often confounds the opposite sex; and that there was just a suspicion that she sensed many of the vital changes going on around her and all over China long before they were apparent to others high in commercial, political, and diplomatic posts.
That the above appreciation of her work was not extravagant has been more than justified by the comments now coming forth upon the work of this “new interpreter of China” by writers in the New York World, the Boston Transcript, the London Times, etc. Florence Ayscough, writing in The Saturday Review of Literature, says, “I think that she is the first writer to recognize the high office, the romantic appeal of international trade.” The London Times adds: “. . . . Seldom has any writer shown such sympathetic insight into the minds of these pathetically patient, industrious Chinese.”
Pidgin Cargo, Mrs. Hobart’s third book, is a novel dealing with the pioneering of steam navigation on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River—from Ichang to Chungking—a distance of 410 miles of which about 200 miles are through the famous Gorges, the walls of which rise in places to a height 2,000 feet sheer from the water’s edge. The current at times reaches seventeen knots.
Although this book is a novel it is based upon historical facts and the main character bears the same name as the American shipper Hawley, murdered at Wanshien, in 1924. Also are the familiar names of Little, Captain Plant, U.S.S. Palos and H.M.S. Cockchafer, dealt with in a manner that shows the author’s familiarity with her subject.
The book contains a Prologue and is divided into five parts as follows: Part I—The River; Part II—Struggle; Part III—Achievement; Part IV—Banner Years; Part V1—The River. It is dedicated to a “humble and unknown one of China’s four hundred millions, My Houseboy, who at the risk of his own life rescued the manuscript of this book from under the hands of the looting soldiers in Nanking, March 24, 1927.”
In Parts I and V are vivid descriptions of the River (Yangtze) with special reference to the Upper River and one can almost see with the Chinese their mystical belief in the utter futility of offending the river dragon and of man attempting to conquer it—the River takes and the River keeps. Part I introduces the main characters, Hawley and his wife, and their faithful Chinese servant, upon their departure from Shanghai for Ichang, where Hawley against premonitions of his wife and against the advice of friends, is determined to attempt the steam navigation of the Gorges. Mrs. Hobart’s description of the home, the Hawleys’ departure, the servants left behind, and the trip to the Bund, in the victoria with the mafoo on the box, bring back lingering memories of the old Shanghai—the Paris of the Far East. One single sentence in Part I will show how familiar the author is with everything she writes even while discussing ships. In speaking of the passenger steamer after clearing Shanghai she writes that “there was about the steamer the quiet and order which comes after a ship is well under way.” How refreshing to know that one’s author can “speak the language!”
Part II deals with Hawley’s struggle to establish a line on the Upper River—his failure. He is known to the Chinese as the “Tiger.” The Chinese have four tigers in their mythology—the yellow and black tiger, the black tiger, the white tiger, and the money tiger. The tiger is something to be afraid of strong. The white tiger is bad luck and although Mrs. Hobart does not say so, perhaps the Chinese had this in mind when Hawley was dubbed the “Tiger.”
Part III tells of Hawley’s success and the birth of his son, who the father secretly plans and the mother fears, will succeed the father—and both be engulfed in the never satisfied waters of the River.
Part IV (Banner Years) is of the continuing success of the foreigners in the steam navigation of the Gorges, of the junkmen, the trackers through the Gorges, the education of the son in the States completed and of his return to Ichang.
One can see the big party of forty guests in the house at Ichang before dinner, all invited to greet the returning son and his bride. “What did you say?” shouted Eben (Hawley) to Margaret (his wife) from the depths of the pantry. “Can’t hear you while I’m shaking this cocktail. Yes, I told you once. Of course the skipper of the Palos is to sit at your right. Yes, and Eileen at my right, even if she is my own son’s wife. Who’s giving this party, anyway? For once I’m going to have it my own way.”
Part V tells of the Nationalist uprisings, of the war lords commandeering the foreign river boats, and of the tragic end of the river traffic so successfully built up through so many years of hard work.
Pidgin Cargo takes its name from the illicit opium cargo smuggled down the River from Szechwan Province in the river boats. It was a part of the “squeese” of the native deck hands and later the term was applied to any cargo that was smuggled on board that did not pay freight charges. Hence pidgin cargo is graft, corruption, dishonesty through the whole body politic.
The Navy meets American pioneers all over the world; men who go out with their wives and families to all of the out-of-the- way places—in the ports and in the interiors —that our foreign trade may ever be extended. There are plenty of Hawleys— Americans, British, Italian, French, German. It is in their blood and they can no more resist it than a bird can fly. And why not? It is life. And is life any different for the rest of us when our River takes us than it was for Hawley and the Chinese? “Strangely like The River, the yellow race who dwell upon her shores. Deep and secret flows the life of the yellow race. Un- mixable, proud, aloof. A separate and exclusive people.”
THE ORDEAL OF THIS GENERATION.—Gilbert Murray, LL.D., D. Litt., F.B.A. New York: Harper and Bros., 1929. $3.00.
Reviewed by Lieutenant M. F. Talbot, (S.C.) U. S. Navy
At a time when the question of the limitation of armaments occupies so important a place in the daily news, readers who realize the importance to our own country of developments in the international situation will welcome Professor Gilbert Murray’s collection of “Halley Stewart Lectures” recently published in the United States under the title of The Ordeal of this Generation.
For a classical scholar, whose life, to use his own words, “has been chiefly devoted to keeping alive the beauty of a great literature that might otherwise perish,” to attempt a discussion of international events might lead the reader to expect merely a repetition of familiar generalities on the ideals of brotherhood and peace. Professor Murray, however, both as a keen student of recent history and as one who has taken an active though minor part in the work of the League of Nations as a kind of intellectual ally of that most sincere of League workers, Lord Robert Cecil, writes with a thorough knowledge of the breadth and difficulties of his subject. His method of approach to the subject of war and peace is naturally predetermined by his unswerving faith in the ideas of international cooperation which center at Geneva. Though a sober discussion of international politics, the book is written with clearness and charm of style which copies in English prose the loveliness of the classics.
Professor Murray’s thesis is in brief that the international system of the nineteenth century was inherently wrong, that despite a general advance in the condition of all men towards economic freedom and personal liberty, unlimited nationalism, with its corollary that each nation is absolutely free to act in relation to every other nation as independent self-interest dictates, led inevitably to a struggle for power, to competing alliances for mutual defense, and finally to open competition in terms of armaments instantly ready for attack. But this he claims was changed in the winter of 1918-1919, the days of the “Great Repentance.” An old order passed, giving place to new. To him the world politely created at Paris, despite its acknowledged faults, is the hope of years to come. “Profound changes,” he writes, “political, social, economic, and intellectual have taken place in the environment of civilized man, and it is still doubtful whether or not he will succeed in understanding them and adapting himself to meet them. That is the ordeal…”
To clear the ground for the consideration of modern war as an instrument of policy, the author devotes an opening chapter to war in general, in which he discusses those ideas, not unknown to the “wardroom argument,” that war is the supreme manifestation, the struggle inherent in a world where all living things are constantly at strife, a point of view familiar enough to those who wish to review the German pre-war philosophy, the cult of power that found so complete an expression in the philosophy of Nietzsche, Treitschke’s history, and the military writings of Bernhardi. In contradiction to these ideas, Professor Murray asserts that despite the admitted necessity of force to assure some measure of tranquility in areas of chronic political disturbance, the struggle inherent in life, demanding equally with war man’s noblest effort, is not the conflict of man against man, nor nation against nation, but rather of civilized mankind in conflict with nature in order that he may have life and have it more abundantly.
The author then turns to a brief review of the nineteenth century, a period marked by gains in economic well-being and in individual freedom unequalled before throughout world history, yet marred by the sharp and menacing demarkation of conflicting nationalism, an age of conflicting currents, cooperation and conflict; and he asks what all who at times pause to speculate on the course of past events must ask themselves, was it inevitable that so much gain so dearly won should be swept away by war? Was there not something inherently wrong in the political system of Europe? To Professor Murray the answer is plain. The world lacked a political system which could cooperate against war. So “out of disaster rose inevitably the demand .... that the old system should be changed.”
There follows a clear description of the League of Nations, the Covenant and its three principles, conference, law, and sanctions. Free from the somewhat vague and ponderous language which usually characterizes books on international relations, he presents a discussion of the League, its history, its problems, and the measure of success and failure that have attended its efforts. Especially interesting is his frank recognition of the two great dangers to the peace with which the League is powerless to cope, civil war and communism. Morocco, Syria, and China, more than the world outside the League, are names of ill omen, for unlike the Holy Alliance, self-appointed policeman against rebellion everywhere, the League takes no hand in the internal affairs of its members. But revolutions may easily become events of international moment, as witness that part of the Monroe Doctrine which calls a halt to any further attempt on the part of Spain to reconquer her lost colonies. And, to cite a more recent example, who can foretell what international complications may arise from the continued civil war in China!
Communism likewise is a threat against which the League has and can have no other policy than watchful waiting. War can do nothing but harm. It was war that gave birth to communism and its fanatic religion of world revolution. “It is ultimately a struggle between two systems and two religions: and that one will certainly win which is found to suit people best.”
The concluding chapter on the special problems of the British Empire presents clearly the extraordinary development from Empire to the Commonwealth of Nations bound only by common allegiance to the Crown, and further brings out the dangers which confront not only the British Commonwealth, but all colonial powers as well, a war of races, a war of religions, and a war of crowded Asiatics, against those who hold vast tracts of empty land in trust for generations of white men yet unborn.
The author does not deny that force must be the final defense should a just and liberal colonial policy fail and arms be again necessary to preserve some vestige of the white man’s established rights; but force, he hopes, is to be used not as a weapon of nation against nation, but as a bulwark of civilization against whatever may threaten.
But, alas, neither Chinese Nationalist nor Hindu fanatic will willingly accept a Pax Britannica, even in the sacred name of world order.
Force, it is admitted, is still necessary, but war must be avoided. Here, it seems, is the weak point in the argument. Given force organized on national lines in support of national policies, there is still the danger of war. What seems at first an imperial or a League problem, may readily become a world problem. Should any Asiatic power press the immigration question, purely a domestic affair to Australia, it becomes a matter of grave consequence, a possible cause of war.
And yet, wars of organized nations “hold hidden and incalculable dangers for victors and vanquished alike.” No longer can they be limited to those “indecisive and temperate contests” of the eighteenth century, which the historian Gibbon saw as a harmless school for the European armies that might some day be called to defend civilization from a “savage conqueror issuing from the deserts of Tartary.” With some satisfaction military men reflect that times have not completely changed and that today armies and navies may still be envisioned, not so much as definite armaments pitted one against the other, but rather as a symbol of the power of civilized nations against world anarchy.
A book so frankly facing the dangers which confront the world can not be put aside as mere pacifist propaganda. Rather it is a scholarly and sober discussion of international events, of the temper of the times, and of the largest questions which mankind must be prepared to answer. Naturally Professor Murray answers them in terms of his own national and international prejudice. Our own country aloof from the League yet cooperating with every movement that seems to give promise of world peace, secure in its defense and alone in sacrificing the actually completed weapons of defense, has played and, we believe, will continue to play an equal part in the preservation of peace and the defense of civilization.
INVESTMENT POLICIES THAT PAY.
By Ray Vance. New York: B. C. Forbes Publishing Company, 1929. $4.00.
Reviewed by Lieutenant E. F. McCartin, U. S. Navy
We who go down to the sea in ships, and "do business in great waters,” are conceded to be rather inept when it comes to steering our frail financial barks in the shore-going waters of speculation. Perhaps it is because, associating as we do almost exclusively with our own kind, we have too great faith in human nature. Or perhaps it is because, seeing our friends on shore with apparently no greater intelligence or capacity than we possess amassing a fortune, we conclude that it is an easy and simple process. Whatever the cause, the fact remains, and there are probably very few of us who have not with a wry smile and a shrug of the shoulders charged off to experience a few hundred or perhaps a few thousand dollars painfully accumulated in long watches at sea and then hopefully sunk into a dusty oil well or a very watery stock.
To most of us, then, Investment Policies that Pay cannot fail to be interesting, and will probably be profitable. In his foreword the author says that the conclusions of the various chapters are largely individual judgments based upon personal experiences or observations. Very few of them are susceptible of demonstration by the statistical methods now so popular. The problem of investment has two sides: human beings on one side and stocks and bonds on the other. Our libraries are well filled with literature about the stocks and bonds; this book is essentially a study of the men and women who buy the securities.
This defines a purpose which is well fulfilled. Mr. Vance brings to his task the experience of years as head of a firm of investment counselors. The book is, above all, sane, and must clarify the complicated business of investment and speculation in the mind of the most casual reader.
The outstanding characteristics of the book are: the emphasis placed upon the "mission” and “general plan” of the investor as an essential of success; commonsense definitions and explanations of investment fundamentals ; the absence of sleep-producing statistics ; the absence of hard and fast rules.
The author is not writing of the prevailing trend of the stock market and readers with plans of obtaining wealth through speculation will profit little by this work, unless, as is probable, it induces them to forego speculation altogether, and to map out for themselves a sound investment policy.
COMMODORE DAVID PORTER, 17801843. By Archibald Douglas Turnbull. New York: The Century Company. 1929 $3.50.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Commander A. H. Rooks, U. S. Navy
When war was declared in 1812 the little American Navy was faced with a task which seems truly astounding in these days when we think so much of “parity,” “5-5-3” ratios, and “control of the sea.” That task was nothing less than to put to sea in the face of a British Navy consisting of 1,048 vessels aggregating 860,990 tons and 27,800 guns. Our own naval forces consisted of seven frigates and ten smaller vessels, amounting in all to 15,300 tons, with a total of 442 guns. The 5-5 ratio of today was 60-1 then. In spite of these odds we won a series of brilliant ship-against-ship victories, harried British commerce, and established even in most of our few defeats a tradition of hard fighting, boldness, and aggression which we hope our Navy will never forget. On the rolls of the service at that time were many gallant spirits who might have rivaled the feats of Blake and Nelson had the opportunity been offered them, and who deserve well of the Nation’s tributes.
Among the gallant ones was Commodore David Porter. Mr. Archibald Douglas Turnbull has successfully accomplished a worthwhile task in presenting him to us in this biography, the first since that by Porter’s son, Admiral David Dixon Porter, published in 1875. To read the life of such a man is to share in that life, to have it become a part of us, and to have in a measure personally experienced the passions and vicissitudes of the times. Thomas Carlyle once wrote: “History is the essence of Innumerable Biographies.” Ten years later, excluding the lowly, he changed it to read: “The history of the World is but the biography of great men.” I think his epigram is better in its first form. Porter was a distinguished man who accomplished much for the reputation of his country, even in losing his greatest battle. But his story would have been undistinguished without the “Innumerable Biographies” associated with it. If Porter made the crew of the Essex famous, they, no less, made him so. With sturdy American seamen he could accomplish much; without them in Mexico he failed. This is their story, then, as well as his.
Mr. Turnbull’s vivid narrative opens with Porter’s escape from the British frigate in which he had been impressed; it closes with his twelve years’ service as minister resident in Turkey. The intervening pages reveal him as a bold and daring spirit, a hard fighter, a restless seeker of hazardous enterprise, a naval officer finished in the arts of his profession by the harshest but best of schools. The publishers call him the Count Luckner of the War of 1812. He was twice impressed in British ships, and twice escaped. He was a midshipman under Truxtun when the Constellation captured L’Insurgente. He fought pirates on both sides of the Atlantic, and spent nineteen months as a prisoner after the Philadelphia grounded off Tripoli. He captured the first prize of the War of 1812. In the inadequately armed Essex he swept the Pacific, capturing enough prizes to make him the commodore of a squadron. He subdued the Marquesas Islands, and, dreaming of empire, annexed them to the United States. Off Valparaiso he lost his dismasted Essex to the Phoebe and the Cherub after a hopeless two-hour fight which his opponents declared “did honor to her brave defenders.” He was on the Board of Commissioners of the Navy with John Rodgers and Stephen Decatur. He led a squadron against the West Indian pirates, and after one of the most extraordinary courts-martial on record, was convicted of disobedience of orders for what the court said was conduct motivated by “an anxious disposition on his part to maintain the honor and advance the interest of the nation and the service.” ( !) Resigning his commission in indignation, he was for a time an admiral in the Mexican Navy. Finally, he gave the Navy its first admiral, his adopted son, David Glasgow Farragut, and its second admiral, his son, David Dixon Porter.
That fight off Valparaiso is one that should be pondered well by every man who wears the uniform. When Lawrence took the unlucky Chesapeake out to fight the Shannon, he got a very advantageous position on the enemy’s quarter. He surrendered that position to accept the Shannon’s challenge to exchange broadside for broadside, and thereby lost his ship and his life. No captain of today would be justified in such chivalrous etiquette. But how about our present notions of international etiquette? When the British ships first entered Valparaiso harbor, they stood down on the Essex giving every indication of being about to attack, with the superiority on their side, and in spite of the violation of neutrality involved. By chance the tables were turned and the ships got into such a position that Porter could have blown the Phoebe out of the water. One word of command, and the mastery of the Pacific would have been his indefinitely, and the destiny of the United States in that ocean might have been profoundly altered. Yet he held his fire. The decision had to be made instantly. In the conflict between expediency and what international law declared to be right he must instinctively have chosen the latter. Later, when the British caught him in a disadvantageous position, they destroyed him, although neutrality should have protected him. Mr. Turnbull condemns him for that decision. He says:
In the matter of personal reputation, the effect of sinking the Phoebe is no less evident. American historians would have given the question of outraging the neutrality of Chile as scant attention as it received from the British. We should have had a far different grouping of great naval names: Jones and Porter on the one hand; Hull, Bainbridge, and the rest on the other. The name of the Essex would have been cut quite as deeply as that of the Constitution, especially since the latter won her fame under more than one commander. Failing to triumph over impossible odds, the Essex did it with all the honors of war.
Commander Frost in We Build A Navy, thinks that Porter’s decision was “a correct principle of Statesmanship, except possibly in some tremendous national crisis, which no one may judge in advance.” We hope that such a crisis will never come, but if it does, it might be well to recall what happened to David Porter off Valparaiso.
Mr. Turnbull has approached his task with a thorough knowledge of the Navy and its language, customs, and moods. Altogether a very readable book, and one that should find its way on board every man-of-war in the American service.