Old landfalls and new

Review article: Old landfalls and new W. L. MORTON Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, {Oxford University Press, Don Mills, Ont. 1971) XVlll, 712, $15.00. Admiral Morison has aided many students of American and naval history, and charmed many - probably more - readers of history as literature from The Maritime History of Massachusetts, (first published 1921) and Builders of the Bay Colony ( 1930) to this volume published fifty years later. Now the historian-seaman has not only repeated the triumphs of those volumes and the volume on Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea; he has cheered his readers with the prospect of a companion on the southern voyages and yet another on the northern. Like one of his own voyagers, he pursues, Odysseus-like, margins of history that recede for ever and for ever as he writes. There is a Rankean texture in this spectacle of a life of scholarship moving unperturbed towards the treatment, on such a scale as the present volume, of what will be, if not a history of world discovery, still a great part of that history, the discovery of the Americas, North and South. There are, moreover, few kinds of history more difficult to write with scholarly integrity and with narrative skill. To do so at all is in fact a difficult feat of navigation; sea marks are few, and vast areas uncharted. Fogs of speculation , hidden reefs of bias, icebergs of speculation , baffle and threaten the pilot. And the historian of such themes derives little aid from the technological aids, computers and such, which may aid the worker in other fields of history, slight as they are compared with those with which science now aids the present navigator. Yet, just because this is so, much of the pleasure in reading Northern Voyages arises from the experienced skill, the deft seamanship, with which Morison bears down on heavy problem after problem 60 of earlier scholars and sails by leaving it more definite on the chart, sails clear through if in fact it was an imaginary difficulty, or comes to safe anchorage on good holding ground if indeed his skill and insight resolves what baffled his forerunners. The above exercise in mixed historical and nautical metaphor was mostly meant, of course, to pipe the Admiral aboard. But it is meant also to preface some comment on the particular canvas which Morison breaks out when he writes on a maritime theme. As readers of Admiral of the Ocean Sea will recall, he brings to his work not only intensive , usually exhaustive, scholarship and a literary flair, which if now close hauled, is the better for it, but also a knowledge of ships and a feel for the sea few scholars have possessed, or possess. This second accomplishment , adding seamanship to scholarship, does not merely double the sum of history regained; it may square it. For next to, and always with and above, learning, the historian must have insight. It is not enough to know, even completely; he must also see and understand. Morison the seaman enables Morison the historian to perceive and comprehend in ways usually denied the land lubber historian. Morison the seaman allows Morison the writer to describe what he saw and understood with an immec.iacy - a being there - and verve that the student of documents only could not, even if blessed with the gift of writing we·~I. So rare and interesting a combination, however, raises its own questions. Is it to be left to accident what equipment a historian shall carry outside that furnished by the formal training of the graduate school? For such a combination is not the result merely of personal endowment, such as makes, training being equal, one historian better than another. Seamanship is itself a result of training and experience. Are we to say, then, that the historian who writes of the government of men, must himself have governed, that who writes of kings must himself have Revue d'ett.ides canadiennes been king? Probably not; we must trust to imagination, intuition, the "feel" of the thing that even documents may give. But we may suppose that it is usually enough to be...