Let the sea make a rude noise

It's not hard to find history books on how trade, fishing and exploration of the Atlantic Ocean transformed Europe from a Dark Age backwater into a proper hub of civilization. Less easy to find are non-specialist histories of the North Pacific (itself bigger than the Atlantic ) that delve into the shorter (in terms of written records), but no less complex story of how such an initially unknown...and frequently unknowable...quarter of the planet held in thrall the hopes and dreams of many countries. Walter McDougall's Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific from Magellan to MacArthur addresses that shortfall in a quirky, if ultimately compelling, way.

This is an unusual book in several respects. Firstly, it covers the history of a part of the planet most people would consider more or less a void: the North Pacific. Secondly, it convincingly demonstrates that the various cultures and peoples both within and on the periphery of that vast oceanic expanse all had dreams of empire that saw the North Pacific as key not only to securing uncountable riches but permanent advantages over their rivals in the empire-building trade. Lastly, this book uses...mostly successfully, I think, a fictional chorus of long-dead historical figures to exemplify their respective cultural viewpoints and to critique subsequent events.

It is this last device of the author's that many will find either delightful or distracting, intriguing or too cute by half. Certainly, the endless machinations of the British, Americans, Russians, and Japanese in the 19th and 20th centuries to secure, populate and exploit the shores and islands of the North Pacific, and to extract commercial concessions from conflict-wracked...but still too large to dominate or colonize...China, could make for confusing reading were it not for a bickering set of kibbitzers to pass judgment on events and policies which, in life, they would have had no knowledge.

These characters do not simplify the historical record as related on the pages of what is, after all, a doorstopper of a book that covers over 400 years and a dozen countries: They do, however, provide a context and certain points of view that, like those of Queen Ka'ahumanu of Kaua'i, that can only be imagined in the context of rapid cultural change.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the book is the depth of the racism prevalent in the societies of all of the "major players" in the 19th and 20th centuries (or at least, until the close of the Second World War). The racist assumptions of superiority of the colonizing powers over any and all "natives" are generally well-known, but the appalling opinions of the Americans and the Japanese over what each regarded as its "inherited fitness to rule" over others are like reflections in a funhouse mirror, and a case can be made that one of the reasons a fanatical and nationalistic clique of military leaders essentially "undemocratized" Japan in the lead up to World War II is that a significant portion of Japanese society got tired at the gall of the so-called Western powers at denying Japan its own empire in China when the rest of the world had been so readily carved up by Caucasian colonizers. That and the near-constant visceral fear and hatred expressed by many of those same Westerners (and including their political class) for any emigration from Japan to the so-called "Anglo-Saxon democracies". More than once, I stopped and shook my head as yet one more citation of almost casual and even quasi-scientific racism appeared, to linger like a fart in an elevator heading for the basement of subsequent events.

I mean, it's one thing to suspect how prone people of three to five generations ago were to jingoism and racism, but it's quite another to see how large a role poorly construed racial assumptions about other nationalities played in diplomacy and government policy. Even those who were less ignorant of "the other" tended to cave in to the baying hounds of an incited public led by crass appeals to baser instincts from the press of the day.

Maybe not that much has changed after all.

Anyway, McDougall's book, while tiring on the arms (consider NOT reading this in bed), is an excellent exercise for the mind, and gives me plenty of context for visiting, as I hope to do, the North Pacific by sailboat sometime in the future.

Pride goeth before the wind

Pride of the Sea is a compelling account of the intersection between civic boosterism, marketing, boat design and nature, and how the needs and contingencies inherent in each interest can skew, in this case with deadly consequences, what might have been remedied or avoided entirely.

Baltimore-based author Tom Waldron relates in a simple way a complex story of how a replica of a circa-1812 Baltimore Clipper went from one man's pitch to a 1970s-era civic government eager to promote a failing small city to an actual and (as it turns out) all-too-authentic sailing vessel.

Pride of Baltimore was originally conceived as a static display to lure tourists to the decaying Baltimore harbour. Designed to be much as the original fast, heavily canvased schooners of 200 years past as possible, despite the poverty of blueprints or other design elements that would show how such boats were actually constructed, Pride would be ineligible for U.S. Coast Guard certification, lacking the water-tight bulkheads or stability aspects that make even the most delicate-seeming of today's sailboats inherently more seaworthy than almost all "historical tall ship" designs.

Nonetheless, Pride plied the seas as a sort of floating goodwill ambassador for Baltimore, manned by a hired, if ill-paid, crew who moved about the international fraternity of tall-ship sailors. This fraternity had, rightly as it turned out, reservations about the safety of Pride, which had for all its apparently excellent sailing qualities that mimicked, as close as could be evaluated, the original "clipper" experience, and yet also was a noticeably "tender" ship that had given in its nine years of operation signs that a strong if not excessive wind could send her over, not to come back again. Even her skipper, a cautious and observant sailor, to judge by the letters quoted here, would challenge the assumptions made by the civic managers of Pride and by her designer as to her ultimate suitability as an ocean-going boat.

I needn't foreshadow anymore...you can guess what happened. Tall ships with internal ballast and massive pyramids of sails have beauty but not always physics on their sides, and as the less-tragic if no less dramatic sinking of the modern-designed Canadian sail training ship Concordia earlier this year indicates, they can be sunk, and quickly, in rare adverse weather conditions. It was a suspected microburst that doomed Concordia, and a similar event is suspected to have doomed Pride: Whether different design or ballasting or operational choices would have prevented these sinking remains an open question.

"Tall ships", whether saved from the breakers or built with modern ideas and materials, continue to exert a romantic fascination with the general public and with recreational sailors alike. I myself stood upon the deck of Pride of Baltimore II this summer; I like tall ships and I like the idea of young people sail training at sea. A book like this, however, reminds us that the sailors of the past worked in conditions and on craft far more dangerous than we are prepared to tolerate today, leading to some hard questions about the feasibility of having such ships ply the waters of the world on behalf of tourism and marketing when the sea, as ever, remains capable of swatting them beneath the waves in a matter of seconds.