Book Review

Canada and the United States

This notable book tackles a big subject on a big scale. Six main authors and several other contributors deployed nearly seven hundred pages in a large format to provide a synoptic history of every sort of maritime and waterborne activity conducted within what is now the United States' or by Americans elsewhere. For the period of the first European exploration and settlement, they effectively treat North America as a whole, so the Vikings in Greenland and Newfoundland, the Basques in Labrador, the French in Canada, and various Europeans in the Caribbean are invoked to provide the context for the first English and Dutch settlements. Thereafter the contributors proceed in a broadly chronological fashion to the end of the twentieth century, dealing with all sorts of merchant shipping, fishing, and sea-fighting as well as with shipbuilding and ship ownership. They cover the rivers, canals, and lakes of America, the coastal waters, and every ocean of the world on which American ships have sailed. They deal extensively with the people of the sea, giving considerable coverage to the once-neglected figures of Indians, blacks, and women. They explore private firms, labor unions, and national policies. They devote much coverage to the U.S. Navy, the Coast Guard, and other public bodies afloat. They do not neglect navigation, pilotage, lighthouses, or lifesaving. They survey the literature and art of the sea, including films. Short vignettes of a page or two allow a variety of minor but interesting subjects to be treated without breaking the flow of the main narrative. (They also allow some subjects, such as the life of John Paul Jones, to be treated twice.) Printed on art paper throughout, the book is lavishly illustrated with contemporary prints, photographs and paintings, many of them in color, and all of them with lengthy and informative captions, which add very much to the value as well as the attraction of the volume. One of its more extravagant features is the way in which particular illustrations figure twice or even thrice; a luxury that might have been sacrificed in favor of more maps. As it is, the book assumes a very high standard of geography teaching in American schools.

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