Word: morisons
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...know, unless you're a fool, That they told you all wrong, when you studied at school!-Samuel Eliot Morison...
Like the Ancient Mariner he is, Samuel Eliot Morison stoppeth one of three-among the myths that pass for history in the European discovery of America. As a seagoing admiral, U.S.N.R. (and Harvardman), Morison gives the back of his salty hand to those modern "library navigators" (particularly Yalemen) who in 1965 swallowed whole the Vinland map story. Morison sees a fine post-1600 hand behind this document, which was dated about 1440 by its discoverers. "I have 'serious reservations,' " he writes, "the polite scholarly term for saying that you suspect fakery." Growling about "phony voyages," he swiftly slaps...
This is corrective-and finally definitive-history issued in "Now hear this" tones from one of scholarship's loftiest quarterdecks. Morison quotes the German statesman-naturalist Alexander von Humboldt: "There are three stages in the popular attitude toward a great discovery: first, men doubt its existence; next, they deny its importance; and finally they give the credit to someone else." Author of Admiral of the Ocean Sea and other books about Columbus, Morison does all an old salt can to set the log straight about those before and after his favorite explorer...
...beneath the dense set-'em-right facts, the book is a hymn to the life of the mariner. Morison has gathered together into a 1,000-year epic the sagas of all those serendipitous seamen who set sail with visions of Cathay or a Northwest Passage-or at least a new fishing ground-and instead bumped into places like Greenland, Labrador and finally the rest of North America. The familiar names are here: Leif Ericsson, discovering his mysterious Vinland around 1000 (Morison would like to believe it was Newfoundland); John Cabot, who sought a short cut to the Indies...
Somehow, between all the landfalls, mini-histories are fitted in-asides about mutinies and scholarly lectures on navigation, on fishing, on map making, on sea chanteys ("Heisa, heisa, vorsa, vorsa, wow, wow," to quote one). The sea turns Morison into a lyric poet who sometimes applies looser moral standards to seamen than to shorebound sinners...