Teddy Roosevelt’s battle with writers of imaginative wildlife stories (“T.R. and the ‘Nature Fakers,’” February, 1971) appears to be not quite concluded. One of the targets of the President’s verbal assaults was the Reverend William J. Long, who was convinced that birds and animals conducted schools to train their young for the hardships of life. Long, in turn, attacked Roosevelt as a senseless trophy hunter. And now, more than sixty years later, his daughter, Mrs. Lois Long Fox, of Easton, Pennsylvania, has joined the fray. The editors of the Easton Express showed her a copy of our article and asked her to comment on it. Mrs. Fox, who has been with The New Torker magazine since 1925, admitted that no one in her home ever mentioned Roosevelt’s deeds as a conservationist; on the other hand, she felt that her father’s “election” to Roosevelt’s Ananias Club was unwarranted. As Mrs. Fox put it:
… Daddy was an Irishman, with the vivid imagination and dislike of being overliteral that is peculiar to the breed. But, as to his being a liar, my family can scotch one of T.R.’s accusations. He was irked by Daddy’s contention that a woodcock, his leg broken by birdshot, would, sometimes, encase it in a plaster cast. When my father died in 1952, my brother found many woodcock skeletons in his safe, presumably sent by hunters rallying to his cause. They all bore primitive, hardened clay on one leg or another. No orthopedic surgeon would acknowledge any as his handiwork, but a broken leg is inflamed, right? And what gives more coolth than slapping on mud or, preferably, wet clay?
We spent every summer of my early life deep in Maine, north of Moosehead Lake. … Even if you are not overly patient (I am not), fascinating things go on in this solitude, with. animals and birds going about their business and disregarding you as just another bump on a log. …
It is true that wild animals seem to have a workable substitute for “rational” thinking.
Foxes, for instance, like to bedevil the pursuing hounds by taking to water (no scent). Or backtracking on their own course (confusing scent). … And why do raccoons wash everything before they eat it? They have read about germs, perhaps? And a possum does SO play dead, the sly boots. …
Casual observations, nothing like Father’s after a lifetime of study, but still my own. Try to explain these and a thousand others in human terms. Nature knows. Maybe we should get closer to her.
OLD CAMPAIGNERS
Our article in the February issue about a wounded Union soldier in the Civil War (“Asa Smith Leaves the War”) stirred the memory of Mrs. Joseph E. Danaher of North Syracuse, New York. Both her maternal great-grandfather, George Gleasman, and his brother, Godfrey, served with the 97th Regiment, New York Volunteers, although they were well over the maximum enlistment age of forty-five. Godfrey, the younger of the two, enlisted first, on November 30, 1861, giving his age as forty-four. Two weeks later George joined up; he couldn’t say he was forty-four without being a twin, and he couldn’t say he was older than Godfrey without possibly being turned down, so he said he was forty-three.
According to a history of the 97th Regiment by Isaac Hall, which was published in 1890, they were together when the Battle of Antietam was fought on September 17, 1862:
Two German brothers by the name of Gleasman from Lewis County, New York, were standing in line together, when one of them was killed by the unerring aim of a Confederate marksman who had steadied his rifle against a tree. The other, aware of the position of the man who had fired the fatal shot, said: “There is the man who killed my brother, and he is taking aim now against that tree.” An elbow was seen to protrude from a solitary oak in the enemy’s line and the next moment he lay dead beside his brother, shot by the same hand which had slain the other.
It was only after the brothers’ deaths that the truth of their ages was disclosed, for their widows had to offer proof of their marriages in applying for pension allotments. Godfrey was fifty-six years old at the time of his death; George was sixty-two.
PEARL HARBOR, 1899
The amazing predictions of Japanese strategy in World War n that were forecast in 1925 by Hector Bywater (“Japan Strikes: 1941,” December, 1970) have been topped, in part, by a discovery made by Robin Stahl Reagan, editor of the Cazenovia (New York) Republican. Reading William H. Honan’s article on Bywater brought to mind a short story that Reagan had once seen in a bound volume of Harper’s Round Table, which was a treasured memento of his father’s boyhood. The story, entitled “Sorakichi, — Prometheus,” by Rowan Stevens, predicts “Japan’s startling seizure of Honolulu and Pearl Harbor” at some unspecified time early in the twentieth century. The conquest is made possible by the cruiser Fujiyama, which is armed with “improved dynamite guns of great power,” and by the use of “air-ships.” Both have been designed by a “remarkable chemist” named Sorakichi. Fortunately, as the story goes, an odd-looking but inventive American naval officer named Thankful Adams meets the Fujiyama in battle aboard his peculiar gunboat Franklin, shoots the Fujiyama’s airships from the sky—with “controllable lightning"—and forces the Japanese warship to surrender. And then Adams, the hero of the hour, reveals that he is (or was) Sorakichi! If you don’t mind the credibility gap, and enjoy such imaginative fare, the story can be found on page 333 of the May, 1899, issue.
IT RAN IN THE FAMILY
The lithograph of the Hinkley locomotive that appeared on the cover of our December, 1970, issue elicited a response from Mrs. Gretchen R. Rändle, librarian and curator of the Newcomen Society in North America, which is situated in Downingtown, Pennsylvania. Not only does the society have a similar lithograph in its possession but also a model of an 1870 Hinkley, built for the Boston & Albany Railroad, that has an interesting history. To quote Mrs. Randle: The model was built by George EH Whitney, grandnephew of Eli Whitney and a nephew of Amos Whitney, a founder of Pratt and Whitney Company. George Eli Whitney started the model at age thirteen and completed it eight years later in 1883. He made every part himself using blueprints from the Hinkley Locomotive Works. Each part was carefully checked for tolerances and quality by his uncle Amos. The engine has been operated by live steam on five-inch gauge track.
THE LAST VOYAGE
The end of an era in United States maritime history was marked in the quiet twilight of last January 8, when the Prudential-Grace Lines ship Santa Rosa slipped from her pier in Manhattan on a cruise to the Caribbean with 187 passengers on board. She was the last regularly scheduled American-flag passenger ship to sail from an Atlantic Coast port. Her final run left only four American liners in the ocean passenger service, and they all operate from ports on the West Coast.
Most historians date the beginning of scheduled passenger service to January 5, 1818, when the packet ship James Monroe set out from New York for Liverpool. She carried mail, cargo, and eight paid fares. Thus started the first venture of the famous Black Ball Line, a shipping company founded by a group of New York merchants who hoped to provide transatlantic runs once monthly, on a fixed day, no matter what the weather, time of year, or how full the cargo holds. Until then, vessels sailed only when they were full up with freight. As the New York Gazette reported after the James Monroe set sail that auspicious day in a snowstorm: “Rich cargoes once a month, breasting the surge at all seasons of the year.”
Because the packets were primarily cargo ships, other historians say the first “real” American transatlantic liner was the Great Western, which was built in Great Britain for the Great Western Railroad. A steamer, she arrived in New York with only eight passengers but plenty of coal on April 26, 1838. Actually, she was bested by four hours by Sirius, a steamer originally intended for ferry service across the Irish Channel. Sirius carried ninety-four passengers, but her captain had been forced to burn cabin doors, furniture, and even one mast to keep her boilers going, so the Sirius could obviously not be operated by any certain timetable.
By 1855, the peak year, there were fifty lines operating in the Atlantic service, and passenger traffic continued high through the First World War. The record was reached in 1913 when both American and foreign ships carried 1,714,000 persons, many of them immigrants, across the Atlantic. The downturn set in in 1921 when a restrictive immigration law was passed. Then, inexorably, came rising labor and shipbuilding costs, and the airplane. Even so, in the 1960'$ the American flag continued to be flown with pride from such heavily subsidized ships as the Constitution and the Independence. In 1969, the superliner United States, holder of many world speed records, was forced into retirement because of operating losses amounting to more than four million dollars a year. That same year, transatlantic traffic dropped to barely over a quarter of a million passengers, aboard both domestic and foreign ships, while airlines were carrying nearly six million travellers.
You can still take a cruise or cross the Atlantic from the East Coast, but only aboard a vessel flying the flag of a nation other than the United States.
