January 2011

Three and a half centuries ago Cartagena de Indias was renowned as the richest trading center and most beautiful city on the Spanish Main. It was the principal emporium for merchandise sent from Spain to its South American colonies and the shipping point for gold, silver, emeralds, and pearls mined in Colombia and Venezuela. Between 1544 and 1741 Spain’s enemies sacked the town five times.

Built on a narrow, low strip of land between the open Caribbean Sea to the north and a huge bay behind, Cartagena was hard to defend. The marshy soil made poor footing for the heavy stone fortifications required in the tropics, and in any case there was no stone to build them with. The only harbor entrance was miles to the south.

Lack of landing beaches, heavy surf, and shallow water that kept bombarding ships at a distance combined to make the direct northern approach quite secure. The back door, however, presented problems beyond the capacities of seventeenth-century weapons and tactics. Once inside the bay an attacker could easily close in from the south.

St. Augustine, Florida, is the oldest European settlement and the only walled city in the United States; its guardian, Castillo de San Marcos, is the oldest standing fortification. Throughout most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though, few would have given a clipped doubloon for its survival. In fact, the viceroyalty of New Spain (Mexico) would gladly have ignored its existence. Mexico had to foot the bills for the upkeep of the lonely outpost, which couldn’t even feed itself.

In the early 1560s, when Adm. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés organized his system for convoying galleons loaded with New World treasure back to Spain, France planted at the mouth of the St. Johns River a colony from which privateers could sally to harass the homebound fleets as they beat up past the Bahamas.

A French officer lay in his blankets on the site of the wilderness fort he had been sent to build, listening to the soft wind in the trees and water rushing down the rapids be- tween Lakes George and Champlain. It reminded him of bells and he asked and got permission to name the new post Fort Carillon. In American history it carries a more rolling, martial title: Ticonderoga.

The spot, whose Indian name means “Place between Big Waters,” was recognized as one of the most strategic positions between New France and the British colonies long before anything was ever built there. Who held the rocky promontory controlled the easiest and most direct route between the Hudson and St. Lawrence river valleys.

At the outbreak of the French and Indian War, the French moved to secure it. Beginning in the fall of 1755 and continuing into 1758, the fort, with as many as two thousand men on the job, was rushed nearly to completion before the British marched against it.

During the summer of 1858, almost no one in the United States had even heard of dinosaurs. The term itself was only seventeen years old, having been coined by Sir Richard Owen in 1841 to describe a few scattered bones and teeth found in England some two decades before. Several colossal models had been built on the grounds of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, England, but even with Owen’s expertise they bore little resemblance to the iguanodons and megalosaurs they were supposed to portray. The problem was that remains of dinosaurs had been found in only the most fragmentary condition. And nothing approaching a dinosaur skeleton had been unearthed anywhere in the world.

The only point on which I disagree with Geoffrey Ward in “Matters of Fact” (December 1987) is in his evaluation of the Civil War historian Shelby Foote as being as good or better a writer than Bruce Catton. At best Foote is as good—and that is still a high compliment.

But both Foote and Catton, as well as Nevins, do their jobs as writers and teachers. They tell the story so well they draw you into the period, make you want to understand and to learn. They learned what more history teachers have to realize—history can be both fascinating and educational.

In reviewing Shelby Foote’s The Civil War , Geoffrey Ward has with some directness made a protest against the arrogance of the professional historiographers and proceeds to make the point that even a lowly novelist can, in fact, provide a “narrative that convinces as it compels, filled with vivid scenes.”

For the last two years I have been researching and writing on World War I, and time after time I encounter the comments of the tenured historiographers who, exactly as phrased by Mr. Ward, dismiss some great and educational books because they are based on published works rather than on paging through twenty years of some obscure journal. The impression is given that they have a great fear that some talented nonprofessional might creep unwashed and unblessed into public recognition.

As much as I enjoyed the article “101 More Things Every College Graduate Should Know about American History” (December 1987) by Professor Garraty, I was dismayed with item 93. It is a common mistake to cite Sir Alexander Fleming as the sole “inventor” of penicillin. Yes, it is true that in 1928 a penicillin mold did accidentally contaminate one of Sir Alexander’s experiments. Yes, it is true that he noted how well the penicillin mold destoyed bacteria, but Sir Alexander had no idea how important his discovery was and did not follow up the experiment.

The true “inventors” of penicillin are Sir Howard W. Florey and Ernst B. Chain. During World War II these two researched thousands of journals to find a more effective way to treat infection. They found Sir Alexander’s 1928 experiment and understood how important it was from the beginning. It is they who first used penicillin to fight infection. It is they who mobilized the chemical industry to mass-produce penicillin in the only scientific project of World War II that was comparable to the Manhattan Project.

It is about time we stopped using Victorian-era euphemisms and told the real story of how Gen. John Jacob Pershing came to be called “Blackjack” (item 41 in John A. Garraty’s article) and who gave him the nickname. It had nothing whatever to do with cadets at the U.S. Military Academy.

Second Lieutenant Pershing was first commissioned into the 10th United States Cavalry. The 10th was perhaps the fightingest outfit on the frontier, but because the rank and file were entirely black, it was also one of the two least desirable regiments (the other being the all-black 9th) for a white officer from every career point of view.

Like many Americans, Andrew Carnegie became excited when parties from the American Museum of Natural History collected the remains of large dinosaurs. Reading the New York Journal in November 1898, Carnegie came upon a headline—MOST COLOSSAL ANIMAL EVER ON EARTH JUST FOUND OUT WEST!—accompanied by a drawing of a Brontosaurus standing on its rear legs, trying “to Peep into the Eleventh Story of the New York Life Building.” Carnegie scrawled a note onto the article—“Dear Chancellor, buy this! for Pittsburgh”—and mailed it with a ten-thousand-dollar check to William J. Holland, the newly appointed director of the Carnegie Museum. The steel tycoon had become a dinosaur hunter.

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