January 2011

The Nancy-Libri-Phillipps-Beinecke-Yale manuscript of Pigafetta’s narrative is being published at this time by the Yale University Press, under the title Magellan’s Voyage , in two volumes at $75 the boxed set. One volume is a facsimile of the manuscript, with initial illuminations and maps in full color. The other consists of a fully annotated English translation by R. A. Skelton, former Keeper of Maps in the British Museum, and an introduction, also by Mr. Skelton, from which the above excerpt is taken. —The Editors

A century ago South Street was world famous. It was the “Street of Ships,” a destination scrawled on cargo from a hundred foreign ports. For millions of immigrants in search of opportunity, South Street was a point of debarkation, a beginning of hope. From the end of the American Revolution until the post-Civil War replacement of sail by steam, the street functioned as the commercial nerve center of a young nation with international aspirations.

Few people have had so productive, so passionate, or so reckless a relationship with the land as we Americans. And we are what we are in good part because of that experience.

In the beginning the land was about all we had. It tested our courage and endurance, and gave scale to our ambitions. For a long time it provided nearly everyone with what used to be called elbow room, and men are alive still who remember when there were blank places on the map, spaces marked “unexplored.” What that meant in terms of the human spirit on this continent we may never fully appreciate.

But the land has also housed us, clothed us, and fed us better than any people in history. And it has given us power. If at times we fell to thinking of ourselves as a people specially blessed, perhaps we were not being altogether unrealistic, when one considers the natural heritage we had to work with.

The division of Germany after World War II into four occupation zones, with Berlin buried deep within the Russian sector, was not a happy one. The Soviets harassed the supply routes to Berlin at every opportunity, and it became painfully obvious that they intended to do everything they could to bring the capital under their full control. By the spring of 1948 the situation had reached the showdown point: on March 20 the Russians stalked out of a meeting of the Allied Control Authority and subsequently demanded the immediate removal of the troops of Britain, France, and the United States from the city. On June 25 it was announced that “the Soviet administration is compelled to halt all passenger and freight traffic to and from Berlin tomorrow at 0600 because of technical difficulties.”

West Berliners watch as a Douglas C-54 Skymaster delivers supplies to Tempelhof Airport. (1948)

One of the glories of the United States is the fact that when the established churches and monolithic governments of Europe forced out the sects that they believed threatened the closed pattern of their world, this country welcomed them. Their names are precious in the litany of our heritage—the Moravians, the Mennonites, the Amana Society, the Owenites. They came into our still open society, settled on the land, worked and worshipped in their own manner, and then (like the Owenites of New Harmony, Indiana) dissolved or (like the Amana Society of Iowa) continued in the ways of their fathers. We know of most of these pioneering communities through letters, the accounts of visitors, the writings of their founders. But among them, one, the Swedish Jansonist settlement at Bishop Hill, Illinois, had the good fortune to have its life captured forever by an artist.

Probably because there was so much disagreement at the Constitutional Convention on matters of detail, the Constitution there established was little more than a skeleton. How the government would function in a thousand different particulars remained to be worked out at its beginning.

Only general directions were, for instance, charted for the boundaries between the three great divisions: executive, legislative, and judicial. The government could have ended up, not in its present form, but much closer to the British parliamentary system, with the executive departments subservient to the legislature. Or, had Washington been a different man, the legislative could have become subservient to the executive.

The first session of the new government was thus almost as important to the American future as the Constitutional Convention had been. The Congress and President Washington needed to determine their respective pulls and invent their harnesses while at the same time dragging along the coach of state.

In the winter of 1778–79 General George Washington, in Philadelphia, reviewed the military situation. The American army numbered about 15,000 Continentals, enlisted for the duration; the fickle militiamen were uncountable and unaccountable. The British sat secure in New York City and at Newport, Rhode Island; the Americans watched them from equal security at West Point and in the Hudson highlands. Washington wrote to the Congressional Committee of Conference, on January 13, 1779, that an attack on New York would be too costly to be ventured. But hope glimmered afar. France, having come to the aid of the Republic, promised a fleet and an army. Meanwhile an aggressive enemy move was unlikely, for Britain, at war with France, could ill spare reinforcements and supplies for its troops in the American colonies. Hence a deadlock prevailed, but a deadlock that, as Washington foresaw, would eventually be broken to the advantage of the Americans.

Almost everyone remembers the picture of a midget sitting on J. P. Morgan’s knee, but few recall, or ever knew, the end of that story. It is nearly unbearably sad. The thing happened in the Senate Caucus Room on the morning of June I, 1933, while Morgan, surrounded by a cortege of partners and lawyers and assistants, was sitting in a leather-upholstered chair waiting to testify before the Senate Banking and Currency Committee. Reporters, photographers, and spectators were milling around. Suddenly, in the confusion, too quickly for official intervention, a press agent for the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus, apparently with the connivance of a Scripps-Howard reporter named Ray Tucker, popped the midget, a member of the circus troupe, into Morgan’s lap. Instantly the photographers were climbing onto chairs and pushing people aside to get into position for pictures.

In a democracy, one should scrupulously avoid using influence except when it is needed. I have noticed that people who are called upon rather like it. The head of the Pullman Company once got me a bedroom to Los Angeles at the end of the war. (I was then at Fortune .) When I thanked him, he said with feeling: “Doctor, I hope I never live to see the day when special privilege is abolished from our democracy.”

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No sane man should ever take a staff position as distinct from some line responsibility in Washington. One should get his power not from the man above but from the job below. One should be not one of the people the President wants to see but one that he must see.

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The State Department has a sense of tradition. It believes that because we had a poor foreign policy under Truman and Eisenhower, we should have a poor one under Kennedy. No one can complain about that.

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