No American ever stands very far from the sea. Back of every one of us there is a long ocean voyage. Except for full-blooded Indians, all of us came here by ship. No matter how far inland we may go or how long we may live there, we carry with us a racial memory of the wonder and peril of the empty sea—the feeling that all certitude has been left behind, and that what lies ahead is incredible wonder and the bright chance of a new world. Probably no single thing in the American consciousness lies deeper than this.
So there is in our heritage—as there is in the heritage of no other people on earth except the Australians, who are quite a bit like us in many ways—a sharp dividing line, a point at which the men and women whose blood we carry cut themselves off from all of the old ways and went west to take a long chance.
On some of the oldest charts of the medieval geographers there are shadowy fabled islands in the western Atlantic, on which are sketched statues with minatory arms raised to bar the way, with the inscription: “Beyond these statues is the vile sea which sailors cannot navigate.”
Well, the vile sea was finally navigated, and that old sense of great mystery and profound danger is gone forever; except that we do have memories that go deeper than we suppose, so that the thought of men sailing west on an unknown sea can still quicken the pulse and set dreams moving. Our own people may have come over in the Mayflower or in a Black Ball packet, in the steerage of a North German Lloyd liner or in the fetid hold of a Yankee slaver. No matter: ahead, for each one, lay something unpredictable, a life that would be lived on a new basis and in a new way, an inner sense of going beyond the unconquerable sea to a world where, in one way or another, a fresh start could be made.
So the story of Christopher Columbus is one of the great legends we live by, a story that is always new and fresh even though we grew up with it in grade school. And the dim hints that drop down from the past, of sailors who made the trip long before Columbus, carry with them a sense of magic, and go to something that lies at the very foundation of our lives as Americans.
It is rather more than a hint that is contained in an important new book, The Nautical Chart of 1424, by Armando Cortesão, published by the University of Coimbra, in Portugal. For Professor Cortesão asserts flatly that Portuguese sailors reached at least the island fringe of the New World, and possibly the mainland itself, a couple of generations before Columbus, and that there is an authentic cartographic record of their voyagings.
Professor Cortesão devotes his book to an old Venetian chart which came to light recently in the vast collection amassed by Sir Thomas Phillipps, wealthy English scholar and book collector, who died in 1872 and whose enormous library is still yielding rich finds to modern researchers. This chart appears to have been drawn in 1424 by an Italian cartographer, one Zuane Pizigano, and far west in the Atlantic, beyond the Azores and the Canaries and Madeira, it shows a large island and three satellites to which are given the name “Antilia.”
“Antilia,” of course, is the parent name for the Antilles, the great islands of the West Indies. It appears in this chart, apparently, for the first time; and Professor Cortesão is convinced that it represents neither myth nor legend but an authentic discovery—of Haiti, or Cuba, or Jamaica, or perhaps even of the Florida coast. Here, he says, for the first time, is a cartographical representation of the forefront of eastern America, put on parchment nearly seventy years before Columbus made his first voyage.
Medieval legend tells of seven Portuguese bishops who, fleeing from the Moors, took ship and sailed west, to settle their peoples on seven mysterious islands off beyond the sunset. The legend persisted; in 1475 King Alfonso V of Portugal issued letters patent to one venturer, granting these islands to him if he could just rediscover them; Columbus knew of the legend, and indeed throughout the Fifteenth Century Portuguese navigators and geographers knew dimly of the existence of huge land masses far to the west.
And why should they not know? asks Professor Cortesão. Early in the Fifteenth Century, the Portuguese seafarers knew about the Sargasso Sea, whose existence they would not even have suspected if they had not sailed west far beyond the Azores. Prevailing winds and ocean currents, almost certainly, would have carried some venturers even farther, into the Caribbean or up to the American seaboard itself.
Furthermore there is good reason to think that the same thing may have happened two thousand years earlier. The ancient world was full of legends of fortunate isles off beyond the sunset—legends written down by writers ranging all the way from Plato and Aristotle to Seneca and Pliny. These legends, Professor Cortesão believes, stem from actual voyages made by the Phoenicians—who, he remarks, were not merely bold and able sailors but also possessed a genuine science of navigation. The poetry which came down from Greece and Rome describing marvelous lands in the western Atlantic, he thinks, “did not merely see beyond present reality; it was influenced by lingering though vague geographical knowledge.”
He goes on to add:
“History cannot be written in the presence of documents alone. The role of the historian is less to discover and catalog documents than to interpret and explain them; he must try to fill in the gaps left by missing links in the chain of documentary evidence. In order to do this the historian has to seek the help of the study of the natural sciences and the historical sciences as well as that of the study of the history of science itself… We know that there have been many historical events about which no documents are known to exist. Nevertheless, the historian cannot ignore such events; he has to study and interpret them, and this can only be done on the basis of other historical evidence and scientific analysis.”
Such “other historical evidence,” Professor Cortesão believes, exists to buttress his claim that mariners sailed to the New World long before Columbus. It goes far to justify the boast of the Fifteenth Century Portuguese cosmographer, who cried—in words that have an Elizabethan lilt to them, a century and a half before the age of Elizabeth:
“The Portuguese dared to attack the great Ocean sea. They entered it without fear. They discovered new islands, new lands, new seas, new peoples; and furthermore, new skies and new stars. And they so completely lost their fear of it, that neither the great heat of the torrid zone, nor even the terrific cold of the extreme southern parts, with which the writers of yore used to frighten us, could deter them.”
The Nautical Chart of 1424and the early Discovery and Cartographical Representation of America, by Armando Cortesão. With color plates and maps. 123 pp. The University of Coimbra, Portugal.
Fantastic Tragedy
By Bruce Catton
The essence of an historic tragedy is that although we can see it coming we know that nothing can possibly be done to avert it. It is the result of a whole chain of events, and the chain can be extremely loose; it could be broken anywhere—by sheer accident, by the action of someone possessing just a little foresight, by any one of a dozen things which could so easily happen but somehow do not. In the end the tragedy occurs, in spite of logic and probability. We know it is going to happen, but until the moment of catastrophe we hope, in spite of what we know, that the story will turn toward a happy ending. It never does—and history goes on to some other tale.
It is this built-in quality of suspense and growing doom that lends a peculiar flavor of excitement to Jim Bishop’s excellent new book, The Day Lincoln Was Shot.
Mr. Bishop has taken the final 24 hours of Lincoln’s life and he has presented them on an hour-by-hour schedule, showing what each participant in the tragedy was doing—at dawn, in mid-afternoon, at dusk, early in the evening, and so on—up to the moment when Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton bowed his head over the deathbed and remarked, grandiloquently: “Now he belongs to the ages.” And although the events of that day have been told and retold over and over again, there is a cumulative tension arising from the pages of this book that makes the narrative seem fresh, moving and almost unendurably shocking.
Perhaps it is the sheer flimsiness of the whole conspiracy—the rattle-brained incompetence of John Wilkes Booth and his incredible fellow-plotters, the utter improbability that any concerted action they might dream up could possibly come to anything—that provides the authentic horror to this tale. Surely, no conspiracy that changed the course of history was ever handled as amateurishly as this one. A group of mentally retarded juvenile delinquents planning to swipe trinkets from a neighborhood five-and-ten-cent store would have planned and acted with more sense than the Booth conspirators ever displayed. The thing could not possibly have worked, in a world where sane adults were dominant; could not have worked, but somehow did work, and brought about the greatest single disaster in American history.
Booth was an actor, playing in a drama written and produced by himself. The plot was sheer fantasy, and the supporting cast was inept beyond belief. The one member of the cast who was at least a killer by nature—big-boned Lewis Paine, a deserter from the Confederate army—was so stupid that he could not find his way about Washington without help. David Herold was a moon-struck youngster capable of doing no more than ride aimlessly at Booth’s heels after the murder. George Atzerodt, a timid jellyfish who could not have carried out an assignment to drown a sick kitten, was given—and here improbability reaches its climax—the task of killing Vice-President Andrew Johnson, who was tough enough to scare a Cicero gangster. Naturally, Atzerodt never got within a block of him.
These men, their plot leaking at every seam, undertook to operate in a capital city which had been scenting out treason and conspiracy through four years of war. The place fairly crawled with detectives, counterespionage agents and armed guards. Secretary Stanton, the most alert and suspicious Secretary of War who ever lived, had been unraveling Confederate plots with eager zest for years. And that, oddly enough, was what gave the tragedy its final, grimmest twist.
For Stanton, once the murder had been committed, leaped to the conclusion that it was the work of the Richmond government, and set in motion the publicity machinery which conditioned Northern hearts and minds to turn away from Lincoln’s plan for a peace of reconciliation. And Mr. Bishop points out that it was not sheer native malice which led Stanton to do that. In its own inept and stage-struck way, the Richmond government for a year had been fumbling with a gaudy and impractical fifth column conspiracy in the North. (There had been, for instance, the previous fall, an attempt to burn the city of New York.) Stanton was familiar with that conspiracy; all things considered, it was perfectly natural for him to suppose that Booth’s act was a piece of it. At the moment, the thing seemed to fit.
So the final act of the Civil War ran true to type. For the entire war, from Fort Sumter to Ford’s Theater, was essentially a stagy over-acted melodrama, conceived among improbabilities, taking on reality simply because everybody concerned was using live ammunition. The whole business should never have happened. Booth’s insane plot simply capped the climax—a final bit of fantasy, after years in which men behaved by fevered emotion rather than by logic.
The Day Lincoln Was Shot, by Jim Bishop. 308 pp. Harper & Brothers.
The Story of the Piano
By Bruce Catton
What is history, anyway—a sober recital of names and dates, with weighty analyses of economic forces and political trends woven in, or a simple attempt to introduce the past to the present in understandable human terms? The answer, probably, is that it is both; but it must be remarked that the professionals have left the second field wide open and that the amateurs occasionally come in and do a job that might otherwise be ignored altogether.
Thus we have Arthur Loesser, a first-rate concert pianist by trade, who doubles in brass (so to speak) as music critic for the Cleveland Press, writing Men, Women and Pianos, with so much wit, perception and general clarity that the result is a genuinely first-rate examination of the habits, customs and emotional and industrial development of European and American society over the last two centuries.
The very invention of the piano, Mr. Loesser says, occurred because late in the Eighteenth Century men wanted an instrument that could be played “with feeling,” which was impossible with the piano’s parent instrument, the harpsichord—and the mere existence of that demand reflects the rising romanticism of an age that was breaking out of the rigid formalism of earlier years. Similarly, the piano was presently being made cheaply and in quantity, because factory methods were displacing handicraft producers. In turn, the best piano manufacturers were presently to be found in those least musical of nations, England and America, simply because those two countries first mastered the techniques of mass production.
In other words, Mr. Loesser has done a great deal more than merely write a history of the piano. He has written the best kind of social history and he has done it extremely well. Men, Women and Pianos is not only entertaining reading; it helps one to understand many of the profound changes in the economic and social climate of western Europe and America in the last 200 years.
Men, Women and Pianos:a Social History, by Arthur Loesser, with a preface by Jacques Barzun. 654 pp. Simon and Schuster.
Of Barns and Bridges
By Bruce Catton
The first American was, above anything else, a worker in wood. Wood was his only raw material of any consequence, but it was extremely abundant, and the early American knew how to use the ax and the adz, the whipsaw and the drawknife. So he set to work to build the structures that he needed in his daily life—houses, barns, fences, sheds, bridges and whatnot—and in the process of doing it he developed a pleasing and distinctive architecture which gives its own flavor to the American landscape.
This architecture gets intelligent and understanding treatment in Eric Sloane’s new book, American Barns and Covered Bridges, which is one of the most completely delightful evocations of the American past to appear in a long time. Mr. Sloane writes about American wooden structures and the men who built them, and he sketches them as well, and he does both jobs with uncommon skill.
Urban Americans, prowling the countryside by auto on week ends, have long since put the covered bridge in the “Oh how quaint!” category. Mr. Sloane would like to rescue the covered bridge from quaintness. The covered bridge, he remarks, was essentially a barn, built across a running stream by carpenters who had no technical training whatever but who did know their jobs and the various kinds of wood available; and the barn, in turn, was a completely utilitarian structure, put up by home-bred craftsmen who would have been dumbfounded if anyone had told them they were creating an architectural style but who did know that they had to build something weather-proof and lasting to protect livestock and harvested crops. So they built simply—and very well.
For these early builders were essentially farmers who were also woodsmen. They could cut seasoned timber from standing trees and, with tools forged by themselves, build houses of genuine distinction. They had a few “how to do it” books—there was, for instance, William Peale’s Carpenter’s Pocket Manual with Compleat Directions for Building a Barn, published in the 1700’s—but for the most part they were jacks-of-all-trades, and although they operated in fields as different as New England, Pennsylvania and Virginia, their barns all had something in common and looked as if they had been designed by the same architect.
Mr. Sloane knows how to write about these old buildings. As, for instance:
“Whether you like it for its structural beauty or have just enough of the poet in you to see it as a symbol of pioneer man, an old farm building is the past as well as the present; vanished generations have built themselves into it. It may have outlived its usefulness as modern farming goes, but like an old apple tree that is too far gone to bear perfect fruit, its value as beauty and symbol remains.”
The early barn, he continues, had dynamic symmetry because it came from the simplest sort of planning, for the early builder had no implements but the square, the compass, and the straightedge. But out of this came a design that was aesthetically pleasing, and from it came patterns for farm homes and school buildings. There was always a harmony of line, arising chiefly because sound craftsmen were trying to build things in the simplest possible way, making them enduring enough for lifelong use.
Perhaps the best way to give the real flavor of Mr. Sloane’s altogether delightful book is to reproduce some of the sketches that he has put in it. That is done here, on the opposite page, in the hope that a great many readers may thus be led to go farther and learn by actual possession of the book how much pleasure and enlightenment it can give to anyone who is interested in our common American background.
American Barns and Covered Bridges, by Eric Sloane. Illustrated by the author. 112 pp. Wilfred Funk, Inc.
Current Books in Brief
By Bruce Catton
The Lowering Clouds: the Secret Diary of Harold Ickes. Simon and Schuster. 695 pp.
This third volume of the seemingly interminable Ickes diary makes clear a couple of things which were dimly visible earlier—that Ickes had a high opinion of his own capacities, and that one of his dominant motivations was an insatiable desire for power. The man was an extremely able administrator and a devoted and incorruptible public servant, whose work as Secretary of the Interior left the national domain better than it was before, yet the picture that emerges from this volume is not precisely pleasant. For his fellow Cabinet members—especially those who seemed to be rising in public favor and presidential influence—there is hardly a pleasant word. For his own endless struggle to get more authority centered in his own department, there are pages and pages and pages. The steady retreat of the New Deal from its old liberal principles in the face of the threat of war is clearly indicated, but the story is told very largely in terms of Ickes’ own frustrations. All in all, it is a strange book, more revealing than the author probably intended.
The Dalton Brothers and Their Astounding Career of Crime, by an Eye Witness; introduction by Burton Rascoe. Frederick Fell, Inc. 251 pp.
Here we have a reprint of an old yellow-back, originally printed in 1892, describing the brief career and disastrous end of a once-famous gang of western bank and train robbers. The anonymous writer seems to have made a scrupulous effort to get his facts straight, and—for whatever it may be worth—this account of the Dalton boys’ exploits is, as Mr. Rascoe points out, about as close to the real truth as we are ever likely to get. The Daltons appear to have been long on muscle but very short on brains. As a gang they lasted less than two years, and when they tried to take two banks on the same day in Coffeyville, Kansas, an impromptu posse of angry citizens shot them all to pieces. The amateur of frontier crime will find this a well-flavored account, properly keyed to a “crime does not pay” motif.
Down on the Farm: a Picture Treasury of Country Life in America in the Good Old Days. Commentary by Stewart H. Holbrook. Pictures assembled and collated by Milton Rugoff. Crown Publishers, Inc. 188 pp.
We are an urbanized, highly industrialized nation nowadays, but somehow the old-time farm seems to have its claim on all of us, and this gently nostalgic book will make the claim stronger. “Our memory,” says Mr. Holbrook, “is of a day when the world was young, the sky was blue and, despite its tribulations, the most wonderful place on earth was down on the farm. That is what the many pictures in this book are about.” Taken together, the pictures and text go far to recreate the haunting memory Mr. Holbrook is talking about.
The American Rebellion: Sir Henry Clinton’s Narrative of His Campaigns, 1775-1782, with an Appendix of Original Documents. Edited by William B. Willcox. Yale University Press. 658 pp.
This book might well be subtitled, “How Great Britain lost the war for American Independence.” It is composed of the labored self-justificatory narrative and letters written by Sir Henry Clinton, who commanded the British forces in America from 1778 to 1782, and it makes clear that ineptitude in command cost the British a war which they might well have won. Much of this ineptitude belonged to Sir Henry himself. As the editor points out in his admirable introduction, Clinton had an excellent grasp of strategy and made a number of first-rate plans; his chief trouble was that he was quite incapable of carrying them out, and temperamentally unable to get along with the naval officers and junior generals with whom he had to work. He was, in short, quite typical of the generalship Britain was producing at the time, and his ingrained reluctance to accept responsibility and take the initiative seems to have been partly personal and partly a product of the military system that produced him.
Stephen R. Mallory: Confederate Navy Chief, by Joseph T. Durkin, S.J. The University of North Carolina Press. 446 pp.
Mallory was one of the two men appointed to the Confederate Cabinet in 1861 who still held their jobs when the curtain came down in 1865, yet he tends to be one of the forgotten men of the Confederacy. Actually, as Father Durkin demonstrates in this solid biography, he was one of Jefferson Davis’ ablest co-adjutors. As Secretary of the Navy, he accomplished a great deal more than his contemporaries were ready to admit, particularly in view of the fact that most of the time he was obliged to make bricks without straw. Under his regime the Confederacy built formidable iron-clad ships, made very effective use of mines, and brought forth the first submarine to sink an enemy ship in action. If the famous commerce raiders failed to win the war, they did represent a gambit worth accepting, and the ultimate Confederate naval failure was due to the force of circumstances rather than to any failure on Mallory’s part.
Black Cotton Stockings, by Ron Ryder and Jim Fynmore, foreword by Walter D. Edmonds. Country Books.
This unpretentious book is made up of pictures and text depicting the good old days (and a certain number of more modern ones) in the upstate town of Boonville, N. Y., and it turns out to be a very pleasing job. If the authors slightly overwork the “cotton stockings” motif occasionally, they keep their attention fixed for the most part on the attempt to evoke the feeling and the flavor of the American small town in the pre-automobile age, and by and large their attempt is successful.
Grierson’s Raid, by D. Alexander Brown. The University of Illinois Press. 261 pp.
On April 17, 1863, Colonel Benjamin Henry Grierson led 1,700 Federal cavalrymen out of the Federal base at La Grange, Tennessee, on a raid that ended more than a fortnight later in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 600 miles to the south. The raid was a spectacular affair, with Colonel Grierson consistently outsmarting the Confederate columns that set out to catch him, and it had considerable strategic importance in that it diverted the Confederates’ attention from Grant just at the moment when that officer was launching his eminently successful final thrust against Vicksburg. Mr. Brown has gone to unpublished diaries and letters for material from which he has written a graphic and entertaining story.
A Long Line of Ships: Mare Island’s Century of Naval Activity in California, by Arnold S. Lott, Lieutenant Commander, U.S.N. United States Naval Institute. 268 pp.
In the fall of 1854 Commander David Glasgow Farragut (who was a decade away from his “damn the torpedoes” fame) strolled across the windy wastes of Mare Island at the upper end of San Francisco Bay and set about the business of creating the U.S. Navy’s first permanent base on the Pacific Ocean. It was a long job, and there were years when it looked as if the project would die of sheer inanition, but in the end the yard was established—and became one of the world’s great naval bases. Commander Lott has told the story entertainingly, and there is a wealth of pictures.
The Self-Made Man in America: the Myth of Rags to Riches, by Irvin G. Wyllie. Rutgers University Press. 210 pp.
At the heart of the American creed there has always been the faith that the able and ambitious young man could rise to the very top of the business world even if he had to start at the very bottom. In this book Professor Wyllie examines this cherished article of belief, traces its ups and downs over the years, and concludes that in spite of many changes it still has wide acceptance. The changes, to be sure, have been curious. A century ago “the top” meant ownership of one’s own business; by the 1920’s it had come to mean occupancy of a high place in someone else’s business. In the 1860’s and 1870’s college training was held nonessential if not actually detrimental; half a century later the ambitious youth was urged to get educated as fast as possible and at any cost. The era of the muckrakers dimmed the credo somewhat, and the 1929 depression dimmed it even more, but it survives to this day—perhaps because, as the author concludes, “faith is simply the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
The Face of New York: The City as it Was and Is. Photographs by Andreas Feininger, text by Susan E. Lyman. Crown Publishers, Inc.
Combining the resources of an excellent picture collection at the Museum of the City of New York and the translation of many of the same scenes of the city by photographer Andreas Feininger, this book is bound to interest both the “native” and those who find New York a nice place to visit but nothing they would care for permanently. Feininger is a very special interpreter of New York. He likes to photograph it from miles away on a hill in New Jersey, through the cables of bridges spanning its rivers, out of skyscrapers’ windows—giving a breathless sense of the city’s immensity—and then to shoot it from behind a broad-beamed window-shopper’s back, from under a theater marquee, in the aisle of a department store—which forces an awareness of the stifling closeness of its polyglot peoples.
To those who undertook the massive Columbia Historical Portrait of New York, this book may be a little late and a little thin. But its price is more modest and its format concise; and the talent of the photographer fairly leaps from its pages.
Pictorial History of the Wild West, by James D. Horan and Paul Sann. Crown Publishers, Inc. 254 pp.
The word to be emphasized in describing this book is wild, for it is less a history of the West than of the outlaws, desperadoes, cattle rustlers and bank robbers, and of the men who fought them to bring order out of lawlessness. The subject matter is pretty sure-fire. All the bad old familiar faces are here—Jesse James, Billy the Kid, the Dalton Brothers—and a large group of lesser-known charmers who notched their guns with equal regularity. There is a wealth of pictorial material, including a fine old rogues’ gallery from the archives of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which is printed here for the first time. Unfortunately, the reproduction of the pictures is uniformly wretched.
American Science and Invention: A Pictorial History, by Mitchell Wilson. Simon and Schuster. 437 pp.
The scope of this hefty volume is awe-inspiring, for it translates into words and pictures 175 years of American science and invention, from Ben Franklin down to the atomic physicists. Mitchell Wilson is qualified for this ambitious undertaking both as a novelist (Live With Lightning) who can make the men behind the inexorable progress exciting and human, and as a physicist (he was an assistant to the late Enrico Fermi) who knows his subject well. He calls his book “a collaboration between my two professional selves,” and the collaboration seems to have gone very nicely. More than a thousand drawings, engravings, photographs and paintings accompany the text. Paul Jensen, the layout editor, has done a masterful job.
