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January 2011
With this account of the Great Queen and her captains and their struggle to master a great prize—the New World—we commence a series of articles specially prepared for AMERICAN HERITAGE by A. L. Rowse, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and author of many distinguished books, among them The England of Elizabeth. The series is based on Dr. Rowse’s recent George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures, given at Cambridge University and named for the dean of British historians. The second article, on Virginia, will appear in June.
A new talent burst on the art world a few months ago, a talent which lies somewhere between Jackson Pollock and Gluyas Williams and within shouting distance of Maxfield Parrish. His name is simply Mr. Otis, and he comes from Portland. Oregon. His work is painted laboriously, by hand, with real oil. He was sprung on an unsuspecting public by the Macmillan Company in a book called Mr. Otis. The author of the book, which is both a biography of the artist and a fine satire on modern art, is a steady contributor to AMERICAN HERITAGE, Stewart H. Holbrook, author of a variety of books, from The of Age of the Moguls to Lost Men of American History. Since Mr. Holbrook also lives in Portland and has as great a corner on Otises as Jay Gould once had on the Erie, there is good reason to believe, if not assert, that this is more than a Gertrude Stein-Alice B. Toklas relationship, and that Otis is in fact Holbrook.
Deeply embedded in the history of America there is a strange quality of expectancy. We have somehow inherited a sense of wonder, a feeling that our strange progress toward the future is a fantastic and incomprehensible adventure that moves constantly past the bounds of imagination. We are permanently oriented, so to speak, in the direction of the improbable, and the fact that we do not always know what to do when the improbable turns out to be real makes very little difference. From the moment of our beginning we have been looking for something on the far side of the horizon—from which it follows that we are never convinced that any horizon is ever final.
Between Columbus sailing west to see what might lie beyond an unknown sea, and a late-nineteenthcentury sea captain who, lacking gainful employment, went cruising aimlessly and alone all around a world whose last shores had been mapped and claimed, there is an immense gap. Yet it is by no means absurd to mention Joshua Slocum on the same page with Columbus, because all true voyages of discovery are basically alike. The voyager is concerned first of all with something in himself, if it is nothing more than the conviction that if he searches long enough he can make the world give him something he has not yet had.
To complete the story, one more famous ship, and a famous voyage: the U.S.S. Indianapolis , an eight-inch-gun cruiser of the vintage of the early 1930’s, which sailed from San Francisco in the summer of 1945, carrying a cargo which made her one of the ships that change history, and then went on to a resting place two miles under the surface of the Pacific, a tragic ship whose end was mystery and a dark portent. The Indianapolis was a ship which crossed the border between yesterday and tomorrow. She died because of a thousand-to-one chance that went wrong, and her end was dark tragedy for hundreds of American families, and a plaguy problem for the United States Navy. The tragedy went unalleviated, and the problem, Heaven knows, went completely unsolved; but the ship itself went on to become one of the great, portentous vessels in the American story. In Abandon Ship! Richard F. Newcomb, an excellent war correspondent for the Associated Press, tells her story in first-rate style.
Late in July, 1777, the British general John Burgoyne found himself trapped by a colonial army in the upper reaches of the Hudson; he was about to lose the Battle of Saratoga. In desperation he wrote to Sir Henry Clinton in New York, asking for reinforcements. But the only available troops, under Sir William Howe, were off in Maryland. Clinton’s discouraging answer was a letter which had no apparent meaning until Burgoyne’s staff fitted a prearranged dumbbell-shaped mask over it. A replica of that letter and the superimposed mask (treated as if it were semitransparent) are shown below; they will soon appear in John Bakeless” Spies of the American Revolution , to be published by The J. B. Lippincott Company.