Books in Brief: The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages

The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, by Samuel Eliot Morison (Oxford University Press, 712 pp., $15). “Old men should be explorers,” wrote T. S. Eliot in The Dry Salvages. Well into his eighties, Samuel Eliot Morison has launched a promising new voyage—a voyage of rediscovery, chronicling the pre-seventeenth-century North Atlantic voyages of the navigators and adventurers who opened up North America. Even the searches for mythical island paradises and cloud kingdoms are not overlooked by the indefatigable biographer of Columbus and John Paul Jones. Admiral Morison is spirited, literate, sound on his facts and—perhaps most important of all—a sailor with a love for the sea. To read his account of Cabot, Ericsson, Gomez, Cartier and the rest is not only to retrace their steps, but to feel the pull of the sea, and the unknown that lay beyond it. The Admiral’s calm examination of documentary evidence is reinforced by his commonsense knowledge of navigation. It enables him to puncture some of the airy hypotheses of the armchair historians and ethnic exhibitionists who have hogged the forefront lately. A first-rate binding and printing job, and a good selection of contemporary documents, charts and portraits, as well as some enlightening photographs of historic sites, justify the cost of this formidable volume. At a time when some are scornful of space exploration and decry our hopelessly “sick” society, Morison poses a good question. “What if England and France had given up trying to establish colonies after the failures we are about to relate, and had become ingrown like certain other European countries, or Japan? What if they had written off North America as worthless, for want of precious metals? Where, then, would you be?” he asks. Where, indeed.

AB

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Aram Bakshian Jr.

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The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, by Samuel Eliot Morison (Oxford University Press, 712 pp., $15). “Old men should be explorers,” wrote T. S. Eliot in The Dry Salvages. Well into his eighties, Samuel Eliot Morison has launched a promising new voyage—a voyage of rediscovery, chronicling the pre-seventeenth-century North Atlantic voyages of the navigators and adventurers who opened up North America. Even the searches for mythical island paradises and cloud kingdoms are not overlooked by the indefatigable biographer of Columbus and John Paul Jones. Admiral Morison is spirited, literate, sound on his facts and—perhaps most important of all—a sailor with a love for the sea. To read his account of Cabot, Ericsson, Gomez, Cartier and the rest is not only to retrace their steps, but to feel the pull of the sea, and the unknown that lay beyond it. The Admiral’s calm examination of documentary evidence is reinforced by his commonsense knowledge of navigation. It enables him to puncture some of the airy hypotheses of the armchair historians and ethnic exhibitionists who have hogged the forefront lately. A first-rate binding and printing job, and a good selection of contemporary documents, charts and portraits, as well as some enlightening photographs of historic sites, justify the cost of this formidable volume. At a time when some are scornful of space exploration and decry our hopelessly “sick” society, Morison poses a good question. “What if England and France had given up trying to establish colonies after the failures we are about to relate, and had become ingrown like certain other European countries, or Japan? What if they had written off North America as worthless, for want of precious metals? Where, then, would you be?” he asks. Where, indeed.