Submarine History

Heather Cox Richardson

This infographic from the BBC is just too good to pass up.

It’s fun for a Friday, in any case, just to take a look at ocean life at different depths. But the historians out there—especially the historians of science—will want to scroll all the way down to the bottom, where there is an interview with Don Walsh, one of the two men ever to travel to the bottom of the deepest place in the world: the Mariana Trench.

The US Navy bathyscaphe Trieste descended to the bottom of the Trench on January 23, 1960, making the deepest dive of Project Nekton, a project designed to launch careful study of the deep sea. Those plans ran aground, though, as the U.S. looked toward space exploration, rather than oceanic studies. Other countries have continued to invest heavily in ocean research—Denmark’s Galathea 3 Project drew international attention in 2006-2007, for example—but the focus of American popular interest has drifted elsewhere.

While Walsh notes that there has never been another manned expedition to the Trench, there are at least three plans underway right now to send crews to the deepest part of the ocean.

None of the groups planning the descents are scientific crews: they are a marine consulting company, a company that makes private submarines, and Richard Branson’s Virgin Oceanic group, which plans to offer undersea adventures.

A Plea for Maritime History

Heather Cox Richardson

“Difficulty between the United States and Great Britain about Wild Pigs.”

How can anyone not love a title like that? It’s from the New York Times, May 23, 1854, p. 4. The story explains that American whalemen had killed a few wild pigs on one of the Falkland Islands and that England and America were at a diplomatic breaking point over the incident. According to the article, American fishermen had stocked the islands with hogs thirty years before, and hunted them for food when they were fishing in the area. The French had introduced cattle to one of the islands with the same purpose. The problem now arose because the British crown now claimed possession of the Falklands, and all the animals on them.

In February 1854, the commander of the H. M. S. Express arrested the captains of two American vessels for the crime of killing thirty wild pigs the previous year. He took the captured fishing schooners to Port William, where apparently the ships were to be sold for the value of the pigs and to pay the fine for the crime of killing the animals. The effort was a fiasco, it seems. The American consul at Port William called over a warship from the coast of Brazil; the trial revealed that no one really knew who was where, when, and what laws applied anyway (the only longstanding rule on the books was against killing “cattle, &c.,” forcing the prosecutors to try to argue that a “wild pig” fell under the “&c.” part of that rule). It wasn’t even clear how many pigs had been killed. Ultimately, one of the American captains was fined, a cost he paid under protest.

The message of the crisis was clear to the newspaper reporter, though:

The English are trying to do here what they attempt everywhere they get an opportunity. They bluster and bully, and claim what they please to, and if their claim is admitted very well—they will then negotiate, and let you, for a handsome consideration, enjoy what was your own before.

The message of the crisis is also clear to this historian: Why on earth isn’t maritime history more popular? Admittedly, the death of a few wild pigs might be of enormous historical significance itself, but looking into it does suggest that there is a whole world of history out there that isn’t getting the attention it deserves. The crisis over the pigs illuminates on ongoing contest between the claims of landholders and fishermen to resources, a contest that stretched throughout the nineteenth century and that was key both to the construction of nations and to their interactions with other countries. The Falkland Islands, for example, changed hands so many times in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that when I looked up their history I stopped trying to keep track. And a leading American newspaper highlighted the story of the wild pigs and interpreted it as a major development in the nation’s relationship with England.

Politics and economics only begin to dip into what we can seine from maritime history. What about the environment? Wild pigs do enormous damage to the land, as scientists in Hawaii have documented. How did whalemen change local environments by turning them into commissaries? What about communication networks? The same page of the newspaper that yielded the pig story has long columns listing all the ships that had sailed, been seen, or been contacted in the previous two months, their port of call, what they carried, and where they were at the time. It also mentioned collisions and damage to ships. A scholar using GIS could recreate these voyages, and with them the world of maritime trade.

It seems to me likely that interest in maritime history took a dive when the turn-of-the-century expansionism and nationalism of Alfred T. Mahan fell into disfavor. But the fact that early practitioners took their studies in a direction that is no longer popular is no reason to ignore the history of human interaction with what amounts to about seventy percent of the earth’s surface.

An Ode to Cora F. Cressy and Her Sisters

Heather Cox Richardson

The recent effort to legalize and regulate the sale of marijuana has brought to light a number of new studies of Prohibition. They have some fascinating information in them—like the fact that booze runners started the car racing industry (a theme later picked up in The Dukes of Hazzard).

Who knew?

Another thing many of the blogs mention is equally surprising. During Prohibition, entrepreneurs outfitted ships as nightclubs and towed them three miles offshore into international waters where they could legally serve liquor. In the early morning, they towed the floating bars back to port.

While this is interesting from many perspectives, it is of interest to economic historians and those involved in maritime history because it reflected the destruction of the New England sailing fleet at the beginning of the twentieth century. Those huge wooden schooners had owned the oceans for the decades spanning the turn of the century, carrying grain to Asia, guano to Europe, and manufactured goods everywhere. By 1900, though, they had been overtaken by metal steamers and spent their last days limping to their final resting places.

One of these schooners was the Cora F. Cressy, and her story illustrates this dramatic economic change.

The Cora Cressy was built in 1902 at the Percy & Small shipyard in Bath, Maine (now home to the wonderful Maine Maritime Museum, which has an exhibit of some of the Cora Cressy’s fittings). She was a five-masted schooner, 273 feet long and 2499 tons: a fast sailor that could carry 4000 tons of coal. She was like other schooners at the time, cheaper to replace than to repair. Owners deferred maintenance and ran her until she took great damage in a 1928 storm.

In 1929, the Cora Cressy’s owners sold her to become a Prohibition nightclub off the coast of New England, a role she held into the 1930s.

The end of Prohibition left the Cory Cressy without a career. The owner of a lobster pound in Medomak, Maine, bought her as a storage tank for lobsters, but found the old Percy & Small workers had built her too well—it was impossible to drill enough holes in her hull to enable water to circulate. She became a hulk of a breakwater, half buried in the mud, barnacles, and mussels that grew up around her. Well into the 1980s, you could peek through the Cora Cressy’s broken timbers to see the tattered maroon curtains from her nightclub days.

And there her remains sit today, a testimony to the fall of New England’s sailing fleet from economic powerhouse, to Prohibition speakeasy, to wreckage.

Interview with Donald Yerxa on Historically Speaking

Randall Stephens

Johns Hopkins University Press is now in the business of podcasts. You can listen to my interview with Historically Speaking senior editor Donald Yerxa here. (That page also includes interviews with Adeed Dawisha, Journal of Democracy, and Michael D. Wiatrowski and Jack A. Goldstone, Journal of Democracy.)

In the interview, I talk to Yerxa about our recent neglected fields forums, and the September naval history forum in particular. Yerxa also describes some of the ways that Historically Speaking has changed since he and senior editor Joseph Lucas came on board in fall 2001. HS aims for the general, educated reader, and tries to avoid jargon or the insider language of subfields, says Yerxa. He reflects on the niche the magazine fills and offers some examples of its success.

September issue of Historically Speaking

Randall Stephens

The September issue of Historically Speaking will be posted on Project Muse around the 15th. Before then, I thought readers might like to have a heads up on the content. This issue contains a forum on the neglected field of naval history; interviews with historians on psychology, military, and political topics; reviews essays; and articles on the South in recent history, Australian hucksters in the 19th century, and more.

I will be posting some excerpts from the September issue in the coming weeks. (Links to the full essays will be provided.)

Historically Speaking 11:4 (September 2006)

A Swindler’s Guide to the British Empire
Kirsten McKenzie

The Necessary South
James Cobb

The Neglected Field of Naval History? A Forum

Naval History: Division or Dialogue?
Andrew D. Lambert

The State of Naval History
John Beeler

Response to Andrew Lambert
Barry Strauss

The State of American Naval History in 2010
John B. Hattendorf

Reflections
Andrew D. Lambert

Remembering Nelson: A Review Essay
Donald A. Yerxa

Montesquieu, the Modern West, and Democracy’s Drift: An Interview with Paul A. Rahe
Conducted by Joseph S. Lucas

A Review of Paul A. Rahe’s Against Throne and Altar
John Dunn

Revisiting World War I: The Last Day of the Somme
William Philpott

Bloody Victory at the Somme: An Interview with William Philpott
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

The Myths of Gallipoli
Robin Prior

The Fall of 1941: A Meditation on History
Manfred Weidhorn

Erich Fromm and the Public Intellectual in Recent American History: An Interview with Larry Friedman
Conducted by Randall Stephens

From Custer’s Last Stand to Wounded Knee: A Review Essay
Paul Harvey