Lifeboat [Paperback]

John R. Stilgoe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 22, 2007

The fire extinguisher; the airline safety card; the lifeboat. Until September 11, 2001, most Americans paid homage to these appurtenances of disaster with a sidelong glance, if at all. But John Stilgoe has been thinking about lifeboats ever since he listened with his father as the kitchen radio announced that the liner Lakonia had caught fire and sunk in the Atlantic. It was Christmas 1963, and airline travel and Cold War paranoia had made the images of an ocean liner's distress -- the air force dropping supplies in the dark, a freighter collecting survivors from lifeboats -- seem like echoes of a bygone era.

But Stilgoe, already a passionate reader and an aficionado of small-boat navigation, began to delve into accounts of other disasters at sea. What he found was a trunkful of hair-raising stories -- of shipwreck, salvation, seamanship brilliant and inept, noble sacrifice, insanity, cannibalism, courage and cravenness, even scandal. In nonfiction accounts and in the works of Conrad, Melville, and Tomlinson, fear and survival animate and degrade human nature, in the microcosm of an open boat as in society at large.

How lifeboats are made, rigged, and captained, Stilgoe discovered, and how accounts of their use or misuse are put down, says much about the culture and circumstances from which they are launched. In the hands of a skillful historian such as Stilgoe, the lifeboat becomes a symbol of human optimism, of engineering ingenuity, of bureaucratic regulation, of fear and frailty. Woven through Lifeboat are good old-fashioned yarns, thrilling tales of adventure that will quicken the pulse of readers who have enjoyed the novels of Patrick O'Brian, Crabwalk by Günter Grass, or works of nonfiction such as The Perfect Storm and In the Heart of the Sea. But Stilgoe, whose other works have plumbed suburban culture, locomotives, and the shore, is ultimately after bigger fish. Through the humble, much-ignored lifeboat, its design and navigation and the stories of its ultimate purpose, he has found a peculiar lens on roughly the past two centuries of human history, particularly the war-tossed, technology-driven history of man and the sea.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Women and children first" is the phrase that enters many readers' minds when thinking of lifeboats and sinking ships. It is also one of the first myths author Stilgoe handily punctures in this sobering, nitpicky history. Falling somewhere between a social history of a ubiquitous yet often misunderstood piece of equipment and a rambling, rumination on a personal obsession, the book takes on many sacred cows and societal illusions. Stilgoe, a Harvard history professor and author of Alongshore and other books, combs through centuries' worth of lifeboat accounts and comes up with a relatively low number of examples of steadfast sailors trying to save their passengers (or of sailors ganging up against passengers when the going gets tough) and each other. He saves his admiration for sailboat-trained seamen-already a disappearing species by the early 20th century-who, time after time, steered their tiny boats of starving, sunburned survivors hundreds or thousands of miles across empty ocean to safety. Stilgoe also rhapsodizes over the lifeboat itself, a rugged contraption standardized by the British Board of Trade in the 19th century, which consistently proved its ability to stay afloat in gales that swamped larger vessels. Titanic looms large here, naturally, and Stilgoe has a good time deflating some of the shipwreck tales that the film propagated. B&w illus.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

With a voice that is knowing and nautical, John Stilgoe leads readers along a salt-encrusted time line of the evolution of lifeboats. Lifeboat is a fascinating and meticulously researched work to be enjoyed by seafarers and history buffs alike.

(Linda Greenlaw, author of The Lobster Chronicles and The Hungry Ocean )

As with Mark Kurlansky's Cod or Charles Corn's Scents of Eden, in the right hands a thing, trade, or practice traced through a century or two provides another window on history, small but very clear, and from an angle just enough to one side to bring other events into a new perspective. The lifeboat is the MacGuffin for Stilgoe's plot, and it brings a great deal into view.... Lifeboat is a majestic, prodigious, mighty book.

(John CaseyNational Book Award--winning, author of Spartina )

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press (August 22, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813926939
• ISBN-13: 978-0813926933
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,748,739 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not a Voyage, but a Passage, August 16, 2009

By 

Barron Brown - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lifeboat (Paperback)

As John R. Stilgoe explains, a voyage is a journey by sea in which a passenger returns to the point of departure. If a passenger departs from one place, and arrives at another, this is a passage. Lifeboats make passages. In reading a book as masterful and comprehensive as Lifeboat, so does the reader.
The theme of Lifeboat transcends its title. The book has a lot to say about lifeboats, but most of all it chronicles a loss of wisdom: wisdom bought, often at a dear ransom, by direct observation of sea and sky, and mostly squandered since sail gave way to steam. Stilgoe's motif, in apparent continuity with his other works, is how social and economic forces under the umbrella of "industrialization" conspire to destroy precious human knowledge of centuries, knowledge that made us who we are-- or were.
A lifeboat may be a metaphor, but foremost it is a material vehicle for the saving of lives. In Stilgoe's hands, a lifeboat is a powerful focusing lens, a window into undiscovered history. He stunned me repeatedly with tales of horrific 20th Century shipwrecks now wholly forgotten. His account of the Lusitania disaster turns the tidy propaganda tale on its head. Likewise, his account of WWII U-boat activities in the North Atlantic gives the lie to the simple moral equation favored by the Allies. Were you aware that WWII U-boats ravaged American merchant vessels along the Eastern Seaboard? That the US Government struggled mightily to cover this up? That government refusal to acknowledge what many knew to be true bred public cynicism toward official war accounts? Any lessons for today?
Exploring the history of the lifeboat, Stilgoe retrieves the ancient wisdom cast off in the transition from sail to steam. He cites Joseph Conrad and others who stood astride this great transformation and saw how steamer travel, by making wind and current appear irrelevant, made lesser persons of officers and seamen alike. Too often no one knew what wisdom they lacked until disaster struck. The captain who cultivated a resourceful crew, the able seaman who could steer an open boat in a following sea; Stilgoe mourns that these people and their skills have become anachronisms, and laments the narrow expertise and broad incompetence that industrial specialization has wrought. The implications for contemporary society are clear.
Stilgoe comprehends the magnitude of this historical tide, supporting his opinions with detailed scholarly research. His is a remarkably sober take on the scourge of industrialism. He does more than mourn helplessly for a lost and irretrievable past. Like a seaman from the age of sail, he points the way forward.

3.0 out of 5 stars Passionate, but Frustrating, November 10, 2009

By 

Rodney Meek (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Lifeboat (Hardcover)

This is an extremely copiously researched book that draws on an astonishing breadth of resources, both fictional and factual, and which is influenced by the author's own personal competency in restoring and handling an actual lifeboat of the classic Board of Trade style. Stilgoe brings a clear passion to his topic, yet that same passion all too often comes across as cranky hectoring.

Seemingly the entire first half of the book is devoted to slamming a single point into the heads of dim-witted landlubbering readers: seamen from the age of sail were true masters of nautical lore, but their successors on steamships are ignorant clodpates trained to push buttons and read dials and who are consequently almost completely helpless when their mighty mechanical marvels founder. Certainly, it's interesting to see how basic maritime skills have degraded since the days of the clipper ships and how few today can navigate without a handheld GPS device, but Stilgoe is relentless in driving this theme home on virtually every single page of the first few chapters. His unceasing criticisms of modern crews eventually become counter-productive, as they soon become reminiscent of the rantings of old codgers warning the drivers of Model Ts that they'll be helpless when they run out of gas and that they should stick with a horse instead. I mean, I was almost ashamed to be living in 2009 in comparative luxury, and almost threw away my calculator in favor of a slide rule, because after all, what would happen if my batteries died? Where would I be then? How would I calculate logarithmic functions without a complete mastery of being able to do it by hand, blindfolded and underwater?

However, Stilgoe eventually exhausts his fervor on this topic and gets around to what many readers probably picked up this book for: not a meditation on the passing of a way of life and the loss of a body of practical knowledge, but rather tales of maritime disasters and the ensuing lifeboat experiences. Here his focus is primarily on sinkings in WWI and WWII, and he considers issues of basic lifeboat design, training in small-boat handling, navigation, provisioning, leadership and morale, cannibalism, and even the effects of propaganda, fiction, and films on the public's expectations of the survival experience. There is a great deal of fascinating material here, especially the depictions of the huge difficulties most crews experienced in simply lowering the boats in the first place.

Some quibbles: I am not as certain as Stilgoe is that the sinking of Lusitania was a deliberate British maneuver to trick the U.S. into declaring war on Germany. Also, the Donner Party was stranded in the Sierra Nevada, not the Rockies as he mentions in passing during the cannibalism discussion. Finally, the book would've benefited enormously from the inclusion of diagrams and schematics of various lifeboat types, and more detailed explanations of various types of sailing rigs.

I wanted to like this book much more than I did. I admire the amount of research that went into it, but far too many pages are devoted to reiterating again and again that old-time sailors had massive skills and today's mariners have few. A little of that goes a long way, and cutting back on this pointlessly repeated argument would've streamlined the book and eliminated a lot of the chop encountered in the first half. Still, if nothing else, "Lifeboat" serves as an excellent guide to further reading on the topic.

4 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Seeing for the first time, October 17, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Lifeboat (Hardcover)

Lifeboat, like anything by John Stilgoe, will make you re-examine your views of the past, present, and perhaps even everyday sights and sites you pass routinely without regard.