SHALLOW STREAM

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 743, 9 October 1953, Page 13

SHALLOW STREAM

THE OCEs IVE t st f the Guilt Smithy} iy sad Walton ‘ Gollancz. "Binglish Price, 16 -. ‘HE recent popularity of books about tne? ‘ean, the winds and the tides has ‘thrown this book on our shores. But it falls far short of recent treatises which have understandably fanned interest in ) subjects. About a third of it account of the evolution of 3 which reads rather like the* earlier parts of H. G. Wells's Outline of History, Considerable space is then eiven to the discovery and colonisation of the eastern seaboard of North and South America. It is all. however, at oncé diffuse and fragmentary. The American authors allow the Spanish to do ‘nothing right. A _ slight acquaintance on their part with, for ingtance, some of the recent works of Salvador de Madariaga would have given them a little more sense of proportion. The Spanish American Empire

lasted in extraordinaty vigour and fertility for 300 years, Little ever seems to get written in English to enable us to understand better the 150 million Spanish and Portuguese speaking peoples who are our (distant) neighbours. The policy of ~the Elizabethan and some subsequent British governments in promoting piracy afd the slave trade in the West Indies is treated indulgently; but the enthusiasm of the authors for British enterprise and naval! supremacy becomes noticeably cooler as the date of the Declaration of Independence approaches. Finally they see clearly that British policy in Church and State was no good at all. They dip into the Gulf Stream here and there in the course of it, but the Governor of North Carolina would have cause to complain to the Governor of» South Carolina about ‘the length of the intervals. Indeed. the total information about the Gulf Stream could be condensed into a magazine article. The famous pilot and cartographer of Columbus, Juan de la Cosa, is separately introduced two or three times as if a different person were referred to. Sometimes he is "la Cosa" and finally "Jean de la Cosa." They accuse him of deserting the wrecked ship of which he was pilot, the Santa Maria. but they neglect to draw attention to the evidence in his favour, or. to the fact that he was sole owner of the ship. Why they say Christopher Columbus backed up Galileo in action concerning the sroundness of the earth, is a mystery. Galileo was not born until 58 years after the death of Columbus. Toilers of the Deep, by Hall Caine. is referred to as a fictional account of the giant devilfish or octopus. This doesn’t occur -in Hal] Caine’s titles. Probably they intend Victor Hugo's Toilers of the Sea. "Immigration" is used where "emigration" is meant, and "creditable" for "credible." and so on. The last section is a sort of philoso Dhical discussion on the rise of world powers, after (but a long way after) After reading it one cannot help agreeing with "~ i," "Happy is the country that has no geography."

F. J.

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