Customer Reviews

Lifeboat

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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.

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.

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.