Not with a Bang but a Whimper

When an empire falls apart the cracks usually can be seen ahead of time. There may never be an actual crash—a moment of final disaster of which, long afterward, men can say definitely: Here is where it all ended. Instead there is likely to be a long period in which things just don’t seem to go right. We may not see the fabric coming unstitched, but we do begin to notice that a good many big jobs are held by rather small men. There is a failure here, a piece of bad luck there, a cumulative deterioration in the way society works. It may not seem like much at the time, but afterward it is clear that what we thought was just a shutter banging in the wind was the noise of the house coming down.

Not without reason, this sort of thing tends to have a morbid fascination nowadays; and an excellent case history on the clinical symptoms which a dying empire can display is provided in James Duffy’s compact little book, Shipwreck and Empire.

Mr. Duffy threads together a string of unfortunate accidents which befell the Portuguese sea-carrying trade in the century beginning around 1550, shows how and why these marine disasters took place, and presently demonstrates that they were not simply an unrelated set of tragedies. They were the fatal symptoms of the slow death of Portugal’s great maritime empire, they took place because the spirit was leaving that empire, and what everybody took for no more than a run of bad luck was actually the process of decay and dissolution.

Portugal had been a great seafaring nation. Her navigators explored the eastern Atlantic, prowled far down the African coast, and at last doubled the Cape of Good Hope; they went on, over seas of wonder and peril, to open the fabled islands of the Far East, and they won for Portugal a maritime empire of remarkable wealth and solidity. The empire was based on places whose very names have magic: Goa, and Macao, the coast of Malabar, Calicut and Mozambique and—a name for the book, if ever there was one—Ormuz. By the middle of the Sixteenth Century this was one of the great empires of the world.

This empire had a glitter and a ring to it, and it had been built by hardy soldiers and by sailors of almost fantastic daring and endurance; but at bottom it was a commercial empire, the merchant followed the explorer—in the very next ship, usually—and the tiny kingdom of Portugal suddenly found itself right in the middle of a rich new trade that was expanding beyond anything men had ever dreamed of. There was gold from Africa, cotton from India, pepper and ginger and cinnamon and the other spices from the coasts beyond the sunrise, the rich fabricated goods of China and all the Orient, pouring wealth into a small country that was almost totally unprepared to handle it. Commerce was not in style, in Portugal. Nobility and bourgeois alike felt above mere trade. The administrative ability required to conduct such a far-ranging empire was lacking; a chronicler of those days, remarking on the enormous distances that separated Portugal from its farthest outposts, remarked that the cities and possessions of empire “are such scattered pieces of the world that the face of the sun would not shine upon them all if it did not travel so many thousands of leagues in its circular journey.”

So while it still seemed most imposing and wealthy, this sea empire began to come apart. The first ominous sign, as Mr. Duffy points out, was in the series of disasters that came upon its carrying trade.

More and more, there were shipwrecks. A tall, fullbreasted ship would clear from some Oriental port, so deeply laden with goods that crates and bales would lie on the open deck, listing crazily as likely as not because the urge to stuff all possible merchandise into the hold had prevented proper stowage. It would drop down across the Indian Ocean, come up to the stormzone around the southern tip of Africa, and then would run into trouble, with a crash landing on the east African coast as a probable climax. Ship and cargo would be lost, and after weeks or months a few survivors would come straggling back to some lonely African seaport to await passage home, telling a tale not merely of tragedy but of the collapse of seamanship, of morale and of society itself.

For in these shipwrecks the naked law of survival for the strongest prevailed. The captain was rarely the last man to leave the sinking ship; as likely as not he was the very first, accompanied by his officers and the most important passengers. Sailors and slaves and ordinary seafarers might drown by the score and the hundred, but the powerful and well-armed would somehow get ashore. A ship carrying hundreds of people might have just one lifeboat; when wreck occurred the officers and the most favored passengers would get in it and go away, tossing overboard any lesser mortals who encumbered the craft, fighting for self-preservation with a ruthlessness that defied all of the great traditions of the sea. Once ashore, with a jungle march of hundreds of miles lying ahead, the weak would simply be discarded. Men who could buy or fight their way through might survive; the others would die, and no one gave them a second thought.

Mostly, these shipwrecks were avoidable. The Portuguese knew how to build fine ships for overseas voyages, and they had good men to sail them; the trouble was that unseaworthy oversized vessels (hastily built, and hence poorly built, because time meant a great deal of money) were preferred because more cargo could be crammed into them. The homeland kingdom was so over-extended that its stock of good seamen was running thin. The skipper had little to say about how his ship was loaded or when it should sail. Laws intended to make navigation safer were gaily disregarded. The individual merchant was all-powerful; nothing mattered but his desire to have a ship carry the last ounce of cargo that could be got aboard, even if part of it (as very often happened) had to be tossed overboard in the first mild gale of wind.

So there developed a sad history of shipwrecks, and a whole Portuguese literature dealing with them, and it is with these stories that Mr. Duffy is concerned. He tells some fine tales of marine disaster here, but he is not primarily out to spin a set of hair-raising tales. He is actually tracing the decline of an empire. This sea trade fell into tragedy, he remarks, because of the extent to which “the moral stamina of the Portuguese had diminished. Shipwreck was one dramatic manifestation of a general decline.” The great sea empire was coming apart, even while it seemed to be at its zenith. There was no sudden crash; just a chain of accidents, with greed and recklessness replacing the great skill and daring of the old days. All anyone could see was a series of shipwrecks, but a society was in decay. The world does sometimes end, not with a bang but a whimper.

Shipwreck and Empire, by James Duffy. Harvard University Press. 198 pp. $4.

The Unpronounceable Man

Somebody once called Ulysses S. Grant “the unpronounceable man,” and the phrase will do until a better one comes along. This little chap was a man you couldn’t quite figure, somehow—seemingly uninspired, ordinary as an old shoe, a straightaway plodder who undeniably liked to drink more than was good for him . . . and yet, at the same time, a fascinating and complex person with flashes of genuine brilliance, who belongs finally, faults and all, in the gallery of great Americans.

Earl Schenck Miers examines six months of Grant’s career in an uncommonly rewarding book, The Web of Victory, which is a detailed study of Grant’s Vicksburg campaign.

Miers presents Grant at the beginning of 1863, when he came shambling unobtrusively off of a transport a few miles above Vicksburg to take charge of a campaign that by all indications was headed for failure. A few G.I.’s saw him, were highly unimpressed, and muttered: “Hell—he’s no soldier.” He sat in his tent and chewed half-length cigars, while people denounced him as a drunken failure and his soldiers complained about the army, about life on a flooded Mississippi levee, and about the general idea of having a war at all. Then, at last, U. S. Grant made up his mind.

What followed was one of the most “brilliant” campaigns of the entire war. The story has been told a good many times: how Grant went downstream, bypassing the Vicksburg batteries, marched inland to the capital of Mississippi, kept Confederates Joe Johnston and John Pemberton from combining against him, forced Pemberton to take his army back into the Vicksburg lines, and wound up by capturing city, general and army en bloc—a stroke which, more than any other single thing, determined how the war was going to go. But if this is a familiar story, it has never (in this writer’s opinion) been told better than Mr. Miers tells it here.

For Mr. Miers has done two excellent things. For one, he has kept the ordinary soldier in the forefront of his narratives. His wearing marches and desperate battles are not mere exercises out of a textbook, in which inanimate inked blocks move here and there across a bloodless map. They are things that involved living, breathing men, and the price which the marches and battles exacted of those men is never lost to sight. In addition, he has shown this campaign, not as a freakish bit of brilliance incomprehensibly emanating from a dull and essentially uninteresting general, but as something that came naturally out of the person Grant was. This, in other words, was not just Grant on one of his good days: this was Grant. This bold and dazzling achievement flowed out of the little man who was a great deal bigger than he seemed to be, and perhaps the legends about Grant need a lot of revision.

He drank too much? To be sure: but, somehow, not when the chips were down. He was more of a person, in fact, than people figured, then or now, a warm and immensely interesting man who is well worth knowing. Mr. Miers has written a wholly charming and readable book about a most remarkable American.

The Web of Victory, by Earl Schenck Miers. Alfred A. Knopf. 320 pp. $5.

Current Books in Brief

The Great Reconnaissance, by Edward S. Wallace. Little, Brown & Co. 288 pp. $5.

This book is principally a retelling of the exploratory expeditions made in the Far West by that nowvanished organization, the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers. The work began with a lengthy survey of the U.S.-Mexican border as it was established by the war with Mexico, continued on with various attempts to chart routes for transcontinental railroads, included the first surveys of the Grand Canyon region, and wound up with the entertaining and potentially valuable attempt to make the camel a beast of burden on the southwestern deserts. Altogether, these explorations were done competently and with a minimum of the kind of accidents that make headlines, and Mr. Wallace has provided a readable account of an interesting and little-known chapter in American history.

Humboldt: The Life and Times of Alexander von Humboldt, by Helmut de Terra. Alfred A. Knopf. 386 pp. $5.75.

Baron von Humboldt was a fantastic character—a scientist whose range went from geology through meteorology and botany to ethnology, terrestrial magnetism and archaeology—and in the first half of the Nineteenth Century he made himself one of the world’s best-known and must useful citizens. Since he concerned himself with almost everything, roamed from Peru to Tibet and wrote voluminously about his travels, his studies and his casual thoughts, this attempt to get all of the man into one volume occasionally makes him sound like a dilettante. But as a one-man academy of science he had genuine stature, he sparked the imagination of men like Darwin and Jefferson, and he deserved the title Emerson bestowed on him—a “wonder of the world.” This volume offers a compact and exceedingly readable introduction to one of the most influential characters of the Nineteenth Century.

The Assassins, by Robert J. Donovan. Harper & Brothers. 300 pp. $4.

In this book a competent newspaperman considers the seven occasions on which men have either killed or have tried to kill a President of the United States. (The list includes one attack on an ex-President, Theodore Roosevelt, and one on a President-elect, Franklin Roosevelt.) The result is an instructive book, which makes it clear that the Secret Service is fully justified in the elaborate safeguards it throws around our Presidents. It is clear, likewise, that the threat to a President’s life usually comes from lone-wolf crackpots rather than from political conspirators. The Booth conspiracy (itself an addle-brained plot if there ever was one) and the effort of the Puerto Rican terrorists to kill President Truman appear to have been the only cases with real political motivation; the real danger usually comes from the deranged fancies of some individual.

Wilderness Messiah: The Story of Hiawatha and the Iroquois, by Thomas R. Henry. William Sloane Associates, Inc. 274 pp. $4.

A veteran newspaperman and Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Mr. Henry here turns his attention to the remarkable people who made up the famous Iroquois federation and produces a highly informative and interesting book for the general reader. He gives these Indians substantially higher marks for cultural attainments and general behavior than tradition usually gives them, considers that their amazing confederation actually had substantial influence on the men who devised the Constitution of the United States, and paints a highly sympathetic picture of them. The aboriginal Iroquois must have made highly uncomfortable neighbors, but they rank among the most fascinating of all the Indian tribes and Mr. Henry has written a solid, readable book about them.

The Indian and the Horse, by Frank Gilbert Roe. The University of Oklahoma Press. 434 pp. $5.

In this volume, directed at the student rather than at the general reader, Dr. Roe conducts an exhaustive examination of the relationship between horse and Indian, particularly on the Western Plains, with especial attention to the questions: When and how did the Indians acquire horses, and what did that acquisition do to them? They got them, of course, from the stocks the Spaniards brought over early in the Sixteenth Century; Indians in New Mexico had them by 1600 or thereabouts, and tribes in the Dakotas, Montana and Canada appear to have obtained them before 1750. Dr. Roe dissents vigorously from certain accepted theories about the results of this development. The horse, he insists, did not make nomads out of the Plains Indians; they were nomads to begin with, and the horse merely extended their range. Nor did the horse, in his opinion, cause the inter-tribal wars that marked plains life; like the habit of wandering, the habit of raiding one’s neighbor and contesting for good hunting grounds was already in existence, and possession of the horse merely stepped up a practice of long standing.

The Great Crash: 1929, by John Kenneth Galbraith. Houghton Mifflin Company. 212 pp. $3.

In this sprightly re-examination of the great 1929 crash, Mr. Galbraith conducts a study of the speculative mania which from time to time takes possession of human society, and while he does put Wall Street under the microscope he is not hunting for any particular villain or set of villains who led America astray. As he remarks, the world is inhabited, “not by people who have to be persuaded to believe, but by people who want an excuse to believe.” In 1929 and the years just before, general economic conditions provided the excuse. There was a solid industrial boom; and, as Mr. Galbraith notes, “at some point in the growth of a boom all aspects of property ownership become irrelevant except the prospect for an early rise in price.” So the speculative mania ran wild, there was a market crash, and—as the author insists—it took place in an economy which was fundamentally unsound, and hence was vulnerable to sudden shocks. The great depression was a logical result.

The Parkman Reader, selected and edited, with an introduction and notes, by Samuel Eliot Morison. Little, Brown & Co. 532 pp. $6.

Francis Parkman was perhaps the greatest historian America has produced. In this book Dr. Morison has selected chapters from his books, given them unobtrusive editing and annotation, and presented them so that the general reader may get a solid and cohesive sampling of the man’s work. The result is a book of very substantial value and interest, not the least appealing portion of which is Dr. Morison’s introduction, which sketches in Parkman’s career and provides a brief critique of his writings. Plagued with frail health and extremely defective eyesight, and (by his own statement) loathing “the drudgery of historical research,” Parkman traveled the West at a time when such a trip was arduous, uncomfortable and not altogether safe, burrowed relentlessly into his sources, and came up with a marvelous account of the early American Indian tribes and the struggle between the French and British for North America—an account which is still authoritative and which present-day readers will find eminently readable.

Doc Holliday, by John Myers Myers. Little, Brown & Co. 287 pp. $4.50.

The western gunman was undoubtedly one of those American creations whose entertainment value increases with the distance. Seen at close range, he must have been a highly difficult person to get along with; a generation or two removed, however, he appears as an amusing and glamorous fellow, a fit subject for novels, moving pictures and straight biographies. Here is one of the gaudiest of the lot—Doc Holliday, the wispy and consumptive little dentist who went west when the West was really wild, turned from dentistry to gambling, and became one of the most accomplished killers of an era that boasted some real artists in that line. He was equally at home with the revolver, sawed-off shotgun and bowie knife, he was vaguely on the side of the law in some of his more startling adventures, and in the end he died quietly in beddowning a water glass full of whiskey, smiling, remarking “This is funny,” and then passing on in peace. Whatever his contemporaries may have thought of him, from this distance he seems to have been an engaging sort of killer.