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Book Review
| Women and Children First: Nineteenth-Century Sea Narratives and American Identity. By Robin Miskolcze. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. xxiv, 220 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8032-3258-7.)The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives. By Hester Blum. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. xiv, 271 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-3169-4. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-5855-4.)
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| In 1845 the British Royal Navy commissioned a paddle-wheel frigate that, because of its iron hull, would be called HMS Vulcan, for the Roman god of metal-working. The ship never sailed under that name. The introduction of propeller-driven warships led to its reclassification as a troopship and modest renaming as Birkenhead, after its Mersey shipyard. In January 1852 the Birkenhead sailed for South Africa, carrying soldiers and some families. On February 26 the ship struck an uncharted rock just off the South African coast and joined many other sunken ships around the peninsula aptly named Danger Point. Danger Point was also the location of the first logged sighting, in 1823, of the Flying Dutchman, the ghost ship of the blaspheming Hendrick van der Decken. Now it became the site of a second tale of the sea. The lifeboats on the Birkenhead were inadequate, and the soldiers were ordered to stand fast until their families had been evacuated. All the women and children (some 20 or so) survived, but 454 of the 600 military personnel either drowned or were eaten by the great white sharks that infested the sea off Danger Point. The courage and discipline of the soldiers was celebrated by Thomas Hemy's 1892 painting The Wreck of the Birkenhead; recorded as "Birken'ead drill" in the 1896 Rudyard Kipling poem "Soldier an' Sailor Too"; and in 1917 exalted by King George V as "the splendid tradition of the Birkenhead, ever cherished in the annals of the British Army" ("The Birkenhead Tradition," London Times, March 29, 1917, p. 7). Today, the best remembered instance of that tradition is W. T. Stead, the crusading British journalist last seen placing women and children in the lifeboats of the Titanic. Stead and the Titanic remind us that tales of the sea blend morality and technology in a Promethean crucible. Or, to use the Dutch antitype: you answer foul weather with foul language at your peril. |
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