January 2011

My home town is probably the most regressive little city in the United States. When I left it thirty-five years ago it was as typically twentieth century as any post-war Gopher Prairie on the map. Some new store fronts—the first in my lifetime—had sprung up on the main street. The old knitting mill down by the depot, long in disuse, had been turned into a smoke-belching power plant. Mr. Fred Kelley had closed out his livery stable to give full time to selling Ford automobiles, which was making him rich. There was enthusiastic talk about a new outfit called the Chamber of Commerce, which was going to do great things about holding onto the war-induced prosperity which had come to the town. My father, winding up his affairs, thought long and hard before he sold the extra lot he owned over near the insane asylum. “There’s going to be a lot of progress here one of these days,” he mused. But he sold the lot with its beat-up clapboard house —nobody knew how old it was—for $800, playing it safe.

It is as old as money, or the shortage thereof. Even the first Puritan settlers of New England were able to let their eyes stray from regarding Zion to study the money problem, which was, Heaven knows, acute in those days. Hard English coin, silver or copper, was simply not to be had for ordinary commerce. Barter was tried in some places, but it was the shell that really came to the fore, in the form of wampum. And wampum, it turned out, was subject to all the laws affecting money, including Gresham’s.

There were two kinds of wampum; the white came from the shells of large marine snails called whelk, and the black (which was actually dark blue) from the shells of the quahog, or clam. The latter was worth twice as much as the white. These shells were collected by the Indians along the shores of Long Island Sound, then cut into tiny beads which were polished to a glassy smoothness, bored, and strung on thin strips of deer sinew, usually in units of a fathom, or six feet. A fathom contained from 240 to 360 beads, and was worth from five to ten shillings if white, or ten to twenty if black.

The easygoing Hawaiian way of life encountered by the American missionaries tan be glimpsed in the earliest pictures of the Islands by an outlander. He was Louis Choris, seen above in a self-portrait, a young Russian whose artistic talent earned him the job of draftsman on a Czarist round-the-world expedition which arrived in Hawaii in 1816, four years before the Thaddeus . Once ashore and established in (he quarters of King Kamehameha I, the twenty year-old Choris began filling his sketchbooks with views of the Islands, their inhabitants, and even some of the many hundreds of carved wooden idols (left and right) in the Polynesian pantheon. The original water colors he made from the sketches were discovered’ by collector Donald Angus and are now owned by the Honolulu Academy of Arts. With the Academy’s kind permission, some of them arc reproduced on the next six pages. For assistance in locating the water colors and for information about them, we are indebted to Professor A. Grove Day of the University of Hawaii.

It is given to men, sir, to attack the rights of others, to take their property, to attempt the lives of those who defend their liberty, and to make of their virtues a crime and of their own vices a virtue; but there is one thing which is beyond the reach of perversity, and that is the tremendous verdict of history. History will judge us.

America does not greatly love nor long remember her Secretaries of State. Upon this melancholy fact William Henry Seward of New York had more reason than most to rellect. In 1860 he stood at the pinnacle of a brilliant political career, and when the Republican party gathered in Chicago early that summer to choose a candidate for President, he was not alone in believing that the choice would fall upon him. it went instead to an obscure lawyer from Illinois, and Seward, pocketing his hopes, accepted Abraham Lincoln’s offer of the top post in his Cabinet.

There he served with distinction, staying on under Andrew Johnson following Lincoln’s tragic death. Rut he became the target of bitter abuse, particularly alter helping to persuade Johnson to adopt Lincoln’s moderate Reconstruction policy. One after another, friends of long standing within Scward’s own party deserted him until, toward the end of his second term, he found himself almost alone. Even Scward, eternal optimist that he was, knew he had come to the end of the road.

When the barque Wanderer broke up on the rocks off Cuttyhunk, Massachusetts, in August of 1924, the wild Atlantic winds brought to an effective close New England’s most adventurous maritime enterprise. The Wanderer was the last square-rigged American whaler to put to sea, and her loss—even though some smaller vessels tried to carry on a few years longer—marked the authentic end of an era. With this ship’s demise an American industry that had lasted for nearly three hundred years quietly went out of existence. The day of the Yankee whaler was over.