THE SEA JOURNAL
Seafarer’s Sketchbooks
By Huw Lewis-Jones
Illustrated. 304 pp. Chronicle. $40.
“From the earliest voyages,” the British historian Lewis-Jones writes, “ships’ officers were encouraged to make careful records. ‘Take with you paper and ynke,’ instructed a well-educated mariner in the 1850s, ‘and keepe a continual journal … that may be shewed and read at your return.” Sailors documented weather and navigational details, sketched whales and shorelines, and wrote about illnesses, injuries and wrecks. “A journal could combat loneliness, fear, frustration, even mutiny,” Lewis-Jones says. For the writers it was a way of “locating themselves emotionally in a world turned upside-down.”
Lewis-Jones has plucked dozens of such high-drama logs from museums, libraries, universities, archives and historical societies. Some of them are by familiar adventurers — Francis Drake, William Bligh — whose journeys fill history books, but most of the people included will be new to readers. There’s Henry Walsh Mahon, an 18th-century Irish ship doctor who sketched not just flora and fauna but scurvy-riddled limbs; Joseph Gilbert, a sailor on James Cook’s second voyage who produced stunning, finely detailed drawings from the Pacific and Southern Oceans; and Konrad Grünenberg, a 15th-century German knight who created a vibrant chronicle of his 1486 journey to the Middle East.
Women are represented, too, including Rose de Freycinet, who disguised herself as a man to go on a French scientific voyage in 1817 and wrote vivid letters describing pirates, storms and bouts of malaria.
Lewis-Jones has grouped the material thematically (“Unlikely Voyages,” “Farthest South,” etc.), which can be confusing; it would have made more sense for “The Sea Journal” to be divided either geographically or chronologically. That’s a small quibble, though, in an otherwise fascinating chronicle of discovery.
AN UNDERGROUND GUIDE TO SEWERS
Or: Down, Through and Out in
Paris, London, New York &c.
By Stephen Halliday
Illustrated. 256 pp. MIT. $34.95.
If you think an exploration of excrement disposal doesn’t sound like fun, think again. This highly entertaining, dare we say absorbing, book is “a sort of ‘Around the World in Eighty Toilets,’” as Sir Peter Bazalgette — whose great-great-grandfather designed the London sewer system — proclaims in his foreword. Halliday, a historian, begins by surveying the simple but effective methods of waste disposal in the ancient world — Mesopotamia, India, Greece and Rome. By the time of the Roman Empire, he writes, “a model had been established for the handling of human waste” that lasted for thousands of years. The cesspools and open sewers of medieval Europe, it seems, were not so different from those in China, sixth century B.C.
The most fascinating part of the book is when Halliday — using maps, blueprints, diagrams and scores of old photographs — shows how the massive subterranean sewers and pumping stations of Paris, London and other cities were constructed. The 19th-century Paris sewers even became an unlikely tourist attraction, with visitors guided through the canals in carpeted, cushioned boats. “Ladies need have no hesitation in taking part,” one guidebook promised. In other words: They wouldn’t see anything too disgusting.
The same is true of this book. There’s only one truly unappetizing photo in it, a close-up of the infamous 130-ton “fatberg” discovered in the London sewer system in 2017. Seeing it, though, does help you to understand why Halliday keeps stressing the need for waste removal innovation. No matter how sophisticated our society becomes, he writes, “one fact remains the same: the need for good sewers.”
EXPEDITIONS UNPACKED
What the Great Explorers Took Into the Unknown
By Ed Stafford
Illustrated. 239 pp. White Lion Publishing. $45.
It’s no surprise that Roald Amundsen, on his 1910-12 journey to the South Pole, packed snow knives, a sledge meter, snowshoes, mittens, skis and pemmican. But did you also know he stashed a mandolin, a piano, books and a gramophone onboard his ship?
The filmmaker and adventurer Stafford believes that seeing what Amundsen, Amelia Earhart and 23 others packed for their journeys gives us “insight into the explorer and how they think. How meticulous were they? How experienced? How amusingly blasé?” (For her 1932 trans-Atlantic trip Earhart pared her kit to the bone, with nary an extra ounce — except, that is, for her bottle of Dr. C. H. Berry’s Freckle Ointment.)
Stafford gives each explorer a somewhat humdrum bio and brief write-up of his or her expedition, but balances that sketchiness with some remarkable photos and the full page he devotes to each person’s personal supplies for the journey. The book is arranged chronologically by expedition date, which is fortunate, since the gear taken on older expeditions is far more interesting; recent entries seem to be little more than catalogs of dehydrated meals, Leatherman tools, satellite phones and the like.
Occasionally I wanted a bit more analysis. Why did Sir Edmund Hillary pack mint cake for his first Everest ascent in 1953? But mostly I was happy to immerse myself in the odd details: Nellie Bly, the journalist who attempted to break the round-the-world record in 1889-90, managed to pack both champagne and cold cream in her tiny, purse-size valise; Clärenore Stinnes, the first person to circumnavigate the globe by car, in 1927-29, stuffed three evening dresses and 128 hard-boiled eggs into her bags along with her Mauser pistols and snow chains; and Thor Heyerdahl took a Spanish-speaking parrot named Lolita on his famous Kon-Tiki sea voyage.
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