Ships Under Sail

With Seafaring America by Alexander Laing, American Heritage maintains its high benchmark in the tide of pictorial books directed to a wide readership. Richly embellished volumes with distilled texts can, if like Professor Laing their authors are well salted, serve general readers with enough but not too much about any one subject.

The illustrations, many of them in color drawn from an array of sources, are clustered around eight essays: The Colonial Seafarer, The Revolution at Sea, The World Traders, The Age of Combat Sail, Whaling, The Years of Primacy, Clipper Ships, and The Persistence of Sail. They begin with Vikings, the Eskimos, and Algonkians, trace the Renaissance explorers on their three-masters, follow New England Seafarers on their cod schooners and stubby whalers and infamous entrepreneurs into the dark waters of the slave trade.

The mixture of continental, state, and private vessels that barely assured national survival until France entered the Revolution, and the valiant stirrings of the U.S. Navy on Lakes Champlain and Erie scuttled the landlubber policy of the government, and during the mid-nineteenth century we became, commercially at least, a sea power to be reckoned with. By telling Robert Morris of Philadelphia that skins of the sea beaver or otter were selling in Canton for $100 each, John Ledyard, Dartmouth's famous renegade and world traveler, emerges as a key figure in the China trade.

It is to be expected that Professor Laing would advise the reader in his foreword that "the principal emphasis throughout has been held to a relationship between man and the wind through the technology of sail," and he makes the most of the clippers in their brief moment of remarkable beauty and prestige.

It is almost incumbent upon a reviewer to enter some minor caveat. Although Laing dutifully records Americans' contributions to steam afloat: Fitch and Fulton, the early Atlantic sidewheelers, and the ironclads, he could have given the steamship era considerably more emphasis. But then, one writes where one's heart is and that is why Seafaring America is a good book.

SEAFARING AMERICA. ByAlexander Laing '25, Professor ofBelles Lettres, Emeritus. AmericanHeritage Publishing Co., 1974. 344pp. $25. Deluxe edition, $30.

Author of many books, Mr. Hill edited The College on the Hill, A Dartmouth Chronicle.