The History of Navigation
Dag Pike. Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword Books, 2018. 224 pp. Index. $24.95.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Commander Thomas J. Cutler, U.S. Navy (Retired)
One of the happiest times of my life was the year and a half I spent writing the 15th edition of Dutton’s Nautical Navigation (Naval Institute Press, 2004). Navigation is a challenging subject that embraces theory but is full of practicality. It relies on large measures of both art and science and is one of those subjects that is at the same time very specific and yet includes much diversity. In its simplest form, it consists of knowing where you are and where you are going. Within those apparent bounds, the subject has roots in the very ancient but thrives in the very modern. This includes simple techniques such as shooting visual bearings and taking soundings, yet ventures into the world of atomic clocks and satellites and is practiced by recreational boaters, hikers, professional mariners, jet pilots, and astronauts, to name a few.
Dag Pike—who first went to sea at the age of 16, experienced his first shipwreck two years later, has been an inspector of lifeboats and a lighthouse tender captain, and has written more than 40 books—has produced a very readable and informative history of navigation. It is an evolutionary tale that begins with hunter-gatherers using line-of-sight navigation to cross a river while relying on a sounding pole to “see” the bottom and continues through myriad inventions and mathematical advances to give us today’s Global Positioning System (GPS), which we take for granted in our automobiles and cell phones.
Readers will not find this book comprehensive but will be suitably edified and intrigued as they explore this concise treatment of a potentially broad subject. Some will see the book’s brevity as a shortcoming, while others will be grateful.
Regrettably, Pike does not include any citational support or a bibliography, either or both of which would have made the book considerably more useful and reassuring to serious students and to seasoned experts in the field.
Nonetheless, he has given us an engaging treatise on a subject near and dear—in fact, essential—to those who “go down to the sea in ships.” With chapters such as “Fixing the Position,” “Charts and Pilot Books,” “Buoys and Lighthouses,” “Collision Avoidance,” and “The New Stars in the Sky,” Pike takes the reader on a virtual journey through time and space to explain the many aspects of navigation, including its various forms of piloting, dead reckoning, and celestial and electronic navigation.
We meet the “Kelvin Sounding Machine,” the pitometer log, the octant (forerunner of the sextant), and electronic precursors to GPS, such as Racon beacons, Loran-C, and the Omega system. We see Polynesians finding their way across the vast reaches of the Pacific using discernible habits of sea life and patterns of stars overhead. We visit great lighthouses such as the Pharos of Alexandria that kept Greeks and Phoenicians and other ancient seafarers off the rocks lurking beneath the waves of the Mediterranean. And we learn the world-changing significance of the Hadley Quadrant, Lord Kelvin’s compass, and John Harrison’s chronometer, all of which served as great leaps forward in the science of navigation.
Pike explains the complexities of his subject in terms that are—in today’s vernacular—“user-friendly,” and he provides an educated guess as to the future of navigation. His discussion of GPS is a study in wondrous technology but makes clear that there are worrisome vulnerabilities and good reasons that there are competitors in development.
Both seasoned navigators and curious neophytes will find rewards for their time spent reading this book. It will not—nor should it—be the final word on the subject, but it stands as a worthwhile contribution to a somewhat obscure but unquestionably important topic.
LCDR Cutler is the Gordon England Chair of Professional Naval Literature at the U.S. Naval Institute. His many books include The Bluejacket’s Manual (Naval Institute Press), a copy of which every U.S. Navy enlistee receives.
Small Boats and Daring Men: Maritime Raiding, Irregular Warfare, and the Early American Navy
Benjamin Armstrong. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. 264 pp. Notes. Index. $34.95.
Reviewed by First Lieutenant Walker D. Mills, U.S. Marine Corps
In his new book, professor of naval history Benjamin Armstrong chronicles irregular American naval operations from 1772 to 1832 and presents strong evidence for their continued relevance. He makes compelling arguments that challenge the conventional understanding of the period and help advance contemporary naval thinking.
In the introduction, he defines guerre de razzia as “war by raiding,” splitting the conventional orthodoxy that naval warfare is divided into guerre de course and guerre d’escadre. Armstrong goes on to argue that this guerre de razzia was the dominant form of warfare by the early American Navy, but often is overlooked in favor of a hyper focus on a few, relatively inconsequential blue-water actions. This type of irregular action is distinct from guerre de course because it features irregular raids and attacks on military targets as often as on commercial ones. It was a response to the strategic and operational naval imbalance almost always faced by the early Navy.
In his first chapter, Armstrong focuses on John Paul Jones—the father of the U.S. Navy. But in Armstrong’s view, Jones is an accomplished maritime raider who led and participated in raids on a number of military and commercial targets in Canada, the Bahamas, and Britain and preferred those actions to more conventional frigate duels. In fact, Jones went so far as to propose the seizure of St. Helena in the Atlantic for use as an advanced naval base to attack British shipping along the African coast—an operational concept more than a hundred years ahead of its time.
In later chapters Armstrong covers the Quasi-War, action against the Barbary pirates, and the War of 1812, and he spends two chapters on U.S. operations in and around Sumatra in the 1830s.
Among the hundreds of histories of various obscure naval operations and periods, it can be difficult to write a book that truly stands out—but Armstrong does just that. He examines his eight case studies through a modern lens and identifies several trends. Through the chapters, he identifies enduring principles in successful irregular maritime warfare that are useful today. Aggressive junior officers who have the trust of their senior leaders is one. Almost all of the decisive action is overseen by midshipmen and lieutenants of the Navy and Marine Corps. Close coordination and partnerships is another. Here, Armstrong means interservice partnerships in which the Navy embarked Marines and soldiers for joint operations and partnerships with allies—for example, when the Mediterranean Squadron asked to borrow ships from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and requested coordination with local allies for reconnaissance and intelligence.
The book also is an exciting read. At 264 pages with notes and an index, it is not lengthy, and Armstrong’s detailed descriptions of naval combat will spark the imagination of the most terrestrial landlubber. As he shows the reader, the early American Navy was full of colorful characters and bold action.
Small Boats and Daring Men is a work that has arrived exactly on time. Littoral combat, small craft, antisurface warfare, and sea denial all are reentering naval thinking as the U.S. Navy works to adopt new concepts to challenge emerging threats such as a rising China and resurgent Russia. The Navy will always play a key part against these threats, and Armstrong’s reinterpretation of early American naval history provides much-needed case studies for those discussions.
1st LT Mills is a Marine Corps infantry officer. Currently a student at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, he holds a bachelor’s degree in history and is working on a master’s in international relations and modern war.
22 Minutes: The USS Vincennes and the Tragedy of Savo Island
Jeff Spevak. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2019. 183 pp. Index. Illus. $26.95.
Reviewed by Captain David L. Teska, U.S. Coast Guard Reserve (Retired)
History has been generous with the legacy of the Battle of Midway, in which the U.S. Navy, in quick order, unleashed major devastation on the Imperial Japanese Navy. By the time the sun set on 5 June 1942, Japan had lost four irreplaceable aircraft carriers, setting the stage for its ultimate defeat three years later.
What is less known, except by students of history and those who were there, such as U.S. Navy veteran Ernie Coleman, is the Battle of Savo Island, fought just two months later at the start of the Guadalcanal campaign in the South Pacific. In just 22 minutes, four Allied cruisers—three U.S. and one Australian—were burning and fatally damaged. Among the ships sunk on 8–9 August 1942 that now rest on Ironbottom Sound was Coleman’s ship, the USS Vincennes (CA-44). More than 1,000 Allied sailors died in that engagement, including 332 from Coleman’s ship. It was an event seared in his mind and one that would haunt him for the rest of his life, something this naturally garrulous man rarely talked about with his family or close friends.
Jeff Spevak got to know Coleman when they collaborated on a book telling Coleman’s family history, Chasing the Wind, published in 2012. A friendship developed between these two men from very different backgrounds and generations as a result of the research and writing project. Coleman had spent a lifetime on the water and had become a local sailing and racing legend on Lake Ontario.
Spevak learned of the horror Coleman had kept locked inside since his return from the war—the dark moments during the brief Battle of Savo Island and the sinking of the Vincennes—while researching Chasing the Wind. Spevak took it upon himself to learn more about what happened that dark night. The journey with Coleman led to a second book, 22 Minutes, in which Spevak delved more into the personal aspects of Coleman’s life. What remained off limits for Spevak, however, was what Coleman endured the night the Vincennes sank. The book chronicles Coleman’s story, that of a man who had gone through some of the worst and best that life could throw at him.
Coleman’s war, albeit a brief one, was clearly hell for him. The book’s title and cover photo may lead the reader to think Spevak’s book is one of war at sea and of the heroism and horror that comes with it, yet it is far from that. Still, the subject of Coleman’s war hovers throughout the pages of the book, like ghosts of the souls who fought and died on board the Vincennes. The only narrative of the Battle of Savo Island and of the Vincennes’ sinking is a third-person account Spevak does not get to until chapter 24. He then recounts how the only time Coleman told his family what happened the night the Vincennes sank he did so through tears as the family gathered for Thanksgiving in 2008. Coleman would never again speak of the subject that haunted him, to either his family or Spevak, before he died in December 2012. Coleman’s resistance in talking about it stemmed not so much from a sense of humility, although that is certainly at play, but because of the horrors those images brought to him.
Union General William Tecumseh Sherman said it best when reflecting on war and what it means to those who have experienced it firsthand: “There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.” Ernie Coleman went through hell the night his ship sank. At first, I was struck how the author wasn’t getting to the story behind the book. As I continued to read it and became absorbed by it, I came to see 22 Minutes as more than the personal war experiences of an aged sailor. Instead, I learned how Coleman came to see himself as a survivor, one who opted to live the life he had been given to fullest, a life not defined by 22 horrific minutes he endured long ago, but rather the life he lived and as a father and husband in the years that followed.
CAPT Teska retired from the Coast Guard Reserve in June 2015 after 31 years of active and reserve service In the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Army. His last assignment was as Coast Guard CG-4 liaison to the Joint Staff/J4 in the Pentagon. He now works for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in Kansas City, Missouri.