The settlement — soon British and eventually American — grew into a global center of commerce and the arts, boasting some of the world’s tallest buildings and richest people, and coming to symbolize the New World for the millions who came later.

That history provides the strands for a lavishly detailed fiction, “New York: The Novel,” which covers four centuries in 900 pages and took three years to research and write with help from numerous experts on New York history.

Author Edward Rutherfurd follows several families from colonial times to the present, but anchors the tale on one clan, the Masters. Common themes, relationships and objects unite a long story into a coherent whole.

Rutherfurd, a specialist in multi-generational family sagas — a genre he says was invented by James Michener — had previously covered two millennia of history in “London,” “Dublin,” and “Russka.”

He spoke with Reuters about New York, his favorite city haunts and writing very big books:

Q: A theme that unites the four centuries is money and trade. Is that something that you think defines New York City?

A: “All my books have an undertow. The thing is meant to be entertaining and full of information, but there has to be, to keep me going, some guts in there. What this book is about is freedom. That’s what New York is about. Everybody’s come to America, from the Pilgrims onwards, in search of freedom (whether) religious, economic, political or personal.”

Q: When writing about a famous subject, to what extent do you have to play to expectations?

A: “You have to hit certain marks, but you try to come in diagonally, with a little bit of a surprise. Obvious ones are 9/11, the building of the Empire State Building. With the Great Crash of 1929, what I did is talk more about the Panic of 1907, which I find very dramatic when J.P. Morgan saved the markets.

“Wall Street pretends to be one thing, but it’s really about placing bets. (After 1907) everybody talked about regulation, and it all fell apart again and gave us ’29. And guess what, do recent events seem to be about a lack of regulation? There’s this repetition in history that is fascinating and a little depressing.”

Q: Throughout the book, you foreshadow September 11th, which then dominates the final section. What was your aim?

A: “The climax had to be the mass falling of 9/11. You could have the book end on tragedy, and to me that’s not what New York is about.

“The tragedy of 9/11 is there, but it was immensely important to me that, on the one hand, the tragedy should be set in a grander historical context, and secondly there had to be an epilogue. One doesn’t need to belabor the thing. The tragedy is a multiple of tiny personal tragedies, and yet the catharsis is, as in a war, in trying to step slightly back and see it in a larger context.

“I try to make it echo back to an intimate story at the start of the book. In the epilogue, I try to convey a sense of hope and celebration that’s still in the city. “  
Q: As you walk through Manhattan now, are there favorite haunts that remind you of its history?

A: “I love to walk in Central Park. I will frequently walk 40, 50 blocks, up Park and down Fifth. I love to go to the Village, but wish I played chess better. I love water. It was great fun going out in a little launch to Ellis Island, bumping around the harbor. I love seeing cities like St. Petersburg and New York from the water. I love big rivers. When they scatter my ashes, the Hudson would do fine. I’d like to go up the river a bit. Take me up to Poughkeepsie.”

Q: To clear up a lingering question, is Edward Rutherfurd a nom-de-plume?

A: “It is a writing name. My Rutherfurd ancestors kept on marrying each other, so there was about 150 years of in-breeding. My genetic makeup has far more Rutherfurd than anything else. But my father’s family name, an old English name, is extremely difficult for people. In the U.S., people assume my name was Winthrop. It is Wintle.”

REUTERS

“Governors Island: The Jewel of New York Harbor” (Syracuse University Press, $60), by Ann L. Buttenwieser, an accomplished urban historian, is a vivid reminder of the city’s military past, and, above all, of the vast potential for this underappreciated and underutilized oasis.

“For 242 years,” Ms. Buttenwieser writes, “from the arrival of a British regiment in 1755 to the disestablishment ceremonies of the Coast Guard base there in 1997, the lifeblood of Governors Island has been the military.” Its military demands were responsible for, among other things, the nation’s biggest regimental dormitory and what was billed as the world’s shortest railroad.

While the text delves deeper into local arcana than an average reader might want to go, the book is richly adorned with evocative drawings, maps and photographs that trace the island’s life, from the Dutch landing in 1624 to its military incarnations as a fort and a prison, to its role as a site of presidential summit meetings and Coast Guard rescue base and, finally, to its transfer from the federal government to the National Park Service and New York City and State.

“The recreational legacy has finally arrived,” Ms. Buttenwieser proclaims, alluding to the island’s new and growing role as a park. But the fulfillment of that plan remains subject to the imagination and commitment of officials.

•

Ms. Buttenwieser’s book is a great guide, but too heavy for most hikers to carry. Fortunately, just in time for fall, several other informative Baedekers to the city have been published.

Naomi Fertitta’s “New York: The Big City and Its Little Neighborhoods” (Universe, $25), provides surprising, delightful and practical insights into the people, sights, food and shopping found in the city’s ethnic communities — a must read for New Yorkers and visitors alike.

“I began a journey that only required a MetroCard,” writes Ms. Fertitta. Joined by a photographer, Paul Aresu, “we discovered pockets around New York City that felt as exotic as Mumbai, Casablanca, Moscow and Mexico City.” They include Little Beirut in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and Little Senegal in Harlem.

Part of the proceeds from Ms. Fertitta’s richly illustrated book go to NYC & Company, the city’s official tourism organization.

“New York’s Unique and Unexpected Places” (Universe, $24.95), by Judith Stonehill and Alexandra Stonehill, delivers on its promise even to seasoned New Yorkers. The authors say it is for “urban ramblers” on the hunt for “secluded gardens, idiosyncratic museums, little shops here and there and the occasional well-known place with distinctive treasures.”

The text is both informative, and the photographs are inviting. The destinations include the Irish Hunger Memorial in Lower Manhattan and the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge.

For city dwellers and visitors with a darker bent, there’s “A Guide to Gangsters, Murderers and Weirdos of New York City’s Lower East Side” (History Press, $19.99), by Eric Ferrara.

Mr. Ferrara, a fourth-generation Lower East Sider, writes that his offbeat guidebook represents only a small fraction of the mayhem that defined the neighborhood and the grimmer side of immigrant life. His eclectic sites include 70 Allen Street, supposedly the birthplace of Billy the Kid, and 6 Columbia Street, once the boyhood home of the gangster Meyer Lansky.

“Some may say it is macabre to write such a book,” he writes. “I say that it is an honor to be able to memorialize the people who were victims of their times and are otherwise lost forever to history.”

Bookshelf, By SAM ROBERTS

New York Times

Down in the engine room, Jessica DuLong, a former dot-com executive, is at the controls.

With a few tough turns of large wheels, she opens four centrifugal pumps. There’s a rumble, a huge whoosh of air and 16,000 gallons of river water per minute are sent skyward through fire cannons up on deck.

DuLong’s job as engineer of a fireboat that’s been turned into a floating museum (fireboat.org) inspired her to write My River Chronicles: Rediscovering America on the Hudson (Free Press, $26, released this week).

Later, back at the dock, DuLong, 36, who also freelances for magazines (from Rolling Stone to Today’s Machining World), calls her book “a perfect merger of my two worlds: my white-collar life as a writer and my blue-collar life as a fireboat engineer.”

In the boat’s overheated, oily and rusty bowels, she can’t see the river, only the sky through portholes above her head. She wears industrial-strength ear protectors.

“It’s a weird job,” she says, “but satisfying. It uses your brains and your muscles.”

In a “bell boat” like the Harvey, the pilot can’t control the propellers. He signals to the engine room using a pointer on a “telegraph,” connected by what looks like a bicycle chain.

Below, the engineer controls the speed and direction by shifting handles on two brass dials marked Slow, Half and Full in two directions — Ahead and Astern.

At 5-foot-5, DuLong stands on a crate at a control panel designed for taller men. She’s the first woman to run the boat’s engines in its 78-year history.

In 1999, a group of old-boat enthusiasts bought it, saved it from salvage and slowly restored it.

Two years later, DuLong, a Stanford University graduate who was a director of content and website development at an online start-up in New York, joined a volunteer workday on the fireboat.

It changed her life. Two months later, she lost her job as the dot-com boom went bust, but soon found a new home on the Harvey.

Being “the only girl in a boys’ world” has its ups and downs, she says. “Everybody knows your name,” but some “assume I must be somebody’s girlfriend,” not part of the crew.

She also describes her growing appreciation for working with her hands and “the elegance of objects made with the goal of longevity and an eye for craft.”

The book also revisits 9/11, when the fireboat returned to service, providing water to rescue workers.

DuLong loves working in two worlds but worries about the fireboat’s future: “They don’t make boats like this anymore. But they also don’t know how to repair them.”

 USA Today

As Mr. Fisher reminds us, the populations on both sides of the Hudson River were heavily Irish during the waterfront’s heyday—not only thousands of longshoremen but also key power brokers, like Joseph P. “King Joe” Ryan, the president of the International Longshoreman’s Association, and William “Mr. Big” McCormack, a man who rose from the docks to become a multimillionaire owner of ­port-related ­businesses. Ryan did the bidding of McCormack and the shipping companies, providing the labor peace they craved in ­exchange for financial gain. And all the while the men in his union suffered low wages and underemployment that made them vulnerable to loan sharking and extortion from hiring bosses.

Ryan, McCormack and their underworld associates, Mr. Fisher notes, pocketed millions of dollars from bribes, protection rackets and stolen merchandise. But their rule went unchallenged for decades because the men of the waterfront held firm to an “Irish code of ­silence.” No one dared risk being labeled a “rat.” The murders of men who ran afoul of the union or mob were rarely solved since “nobody ever saw nothin’.” A related Irish code of deference to authority meant that longshoremen only occasionally showed their anger at King Joe. They never rose up to depose him.

It was into this milieu that a 35-year-old Jesuit priest arrived in 1946, setting out to liberate the waterfront’s oppressed longshoremen. Moved by the social-justice teachings of the Catholic Church, the Rev. John Corridan tried to ­inspire the men on the docks to take on the Irish kingpins who held them in grinding poverty. But the codes of the waterfront proved too tough to crack, even for a priest who swore and drank like a longshoremen. The men maintained their silence and rejected Father ­Corridan as an outsider and a meddler.

Undeterred, Father Corridan shifted his focus, ­aiming to expose the criminal waterfront to public scrutiny. He cultivated journalists and fed them vital inside information, starting with Malcolm Johnson, a New York Sun reporter who in 1948 wrote a sensational multi-part exposé, “Crime on the Waterfront.” By the early 1950s the publicizing efforts of “the ­waterfront priest” led to the creation of the New York State Crime Commission, an investigative body that gathered 30,000 pages of testimony and evidence that eventually brought down King Joe and his empire.

 .Mr. Fisher details the dockside story with admirable care, but the story he is most eager to tell is the one about the making of the movie “On the Waterfront.” In 1949, a production company bought the rights to Johnson’s exposé and hired Budd Schulberg to transform it into a screenplay. Schulberg soon befriended Father Corridan, who showed him the real waterfront. ­According to Mr. Fisher, this dynamic if unlikely partnership—between a secular Jew and a liberal Catholic priest—is the film’s essential back-story. Mr. Fisher ­argues that Schulberg was converted by Father ­Corridan, not to Catholicism but to a spiritually based understanding of social justice. As a result, Schulberg acceded to Father Corridan’s plea that he write a “Going My Way” with substance—that is, a serious drama that ­addressed themes of morality, betrayal and redemption.

After many setbacks, “On the Waterfront” found its director (Elia Kazan) and stars (Marlon Brando and Karl Malden) and began filming in late 1953. The story focused on a longshoreman and former boxer named Terry Malloy (Brando) who, under the guidance of ­Father Peter Barry (Malden), agrees to testify against the mob and thus break its waterfront grip. Opening in the summer of 1954, the film drew huge audiences and swept nearly all the major Academy Awards. Malloy’s anguished cry, “I coulda been a contender,” remains one of the most celebrated lines in cinema history.

Yet “On the Waterfront” was a controversial film. And here is where Mr. Fisher seeks to do more than tell the story behind it. The controversy stems from the fact that Schulberg and Kazan, in 1951, had testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where they both admitted to past membership in the Communist Party and offered up the names of friends who were also members at one time or another. Kazan and Schulberg’s Hollywood friends—along with Hollywood’s left-leaning community—never forgave them. Over time it became routine to interpret “On the Waterfront” as a self-serving story that, through Terry Malloy’s example, showed naming names as a virtuous act. Mr. Fisher rejects this interpretation as Cold War score-settling, noting among other things that ­Schulberg’s original draft of the screenplay was ­completed well before he testified before HUAC.

Despite the controversy, “On the Waterfront” has proved to be of enduring value. The same cannot be said of the New York waterfront. For while the Irish kingpins were trying to fend off prosecutors, they were working to stymie efforts to modernize the waterfront’s decrepit piers. With the advent of modern container ships in 1956—just two years after “On the Waterfront” opened—New York’s port lost all commercial logic and the Irish waterfront began a swift journey to extinction.

Mr. O’Donnell, an associate professor of history at the College of the Holy Cross, is the author of “Ship Ablaze: The Tragedy of the Steamboat General Slocum.”

Wall Street Journal

He was the power broker, dapper and swaggering, on the swim team at Yale and with a PhD from Oxford, who single-handedly built the New York we know today – its bridges and roadways, parks and swimming pools, Jones Beach, the UN building, Shea Stadium, and the housing towers that rose up in the era of urban renewal.

Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses battled nearly a half century ago, and while it’s tempting to view them as irreconcilable symbols of opposing approaches to city building, they both offer lessons for making the most of the metropolis. That is particularly true in Boston today, as the city attempts to preserve its unique character while at the same time keep moving ahead.

Cities have assumed their rightful place in the American agenda. About 85 percent of the population lives in metropolitan regions, and under President Obama, the first urban president in a long while, there are urban planners in the White House like Xavier de Sousa Briggs; a new Office of Urban Affairs; and collaborative initiatives involving the agencies of Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, and Energy.

Metropolitan regions are poised to benefit from a New Deal-like infusion of investment over the next year, as Congress considers reauthorization of federal transportation spending, with more of an emphasis on transit over highways, as well as climate legislation that rewards sustainable urbanism and smart growth. Cities, after all – places of density and transit and a mix of uses – are the greenest form of human settlement we can aspire to.

All of this places a premium on the American city’s ability to reinvent, revitalize, and redevelop. But that’s where the tension starts to come in. In Boston, developers of infill parcels in established neighborhoods and even reclaimed industrial waterfront property are put through the ringer – by neighbors, the regulatory process, and sometimes City Hall. The citizen engagement that is part of Jacobs’s legacy too often lapses into mere NIMBYism – not in my backyard.

The urban design and the street-level experience of these redevelopments must be right, to be sure. Gentrification remains a legitimate concern; today in Greenwich Village and SoHo the more prominent Jacobs is the fashion designer, Marc (no relation), selling handbags and shoes. There are strategies to ensure economic diversity, such as inclusionary zoning and community land trusts, which remove the cost of land from home ownership. But we need to embrace density, which increases supply to meet the great demand for living in cities, in the places where it’s appropriate and desirable.

The edges of the Rose Kennedy Greenway are a good example. Jacobs advocated low-rise streetscapes like Greenwich Village, but she was not adamant against towers, as long as the ground-floor experience was friendly for the pedestrian. She realized that density translates to activity in parks and open space and on the streets and sidewalks. There’s plenty of capacity in downtown Boston for all of this, as the city considers redevelopment proposals at the Government Center and Harbor garages.

The dynamic city also needs infrastructure, and today that means transit infrastructure – and that requires bold leadership. Mostly due to neighbors opposing the inconvenience of construction, there is little promotion of the final link of the Silver Line by the mayor and the governor, despite the boost this would provide. The Red Line-Blue Line connector is similarly virtuous, but has no champion on Beacon Hill.

Good city-building is hard work but possible. It takes vision and infrastructure, as well as civic participation and human-scaled streetscapes. As cities seize on this moment to become 21st century centers of economic activity and sustainability, there’s no point in replaying the battles of Jacobs and Moses. They should be neither demonized nor put on a pedestal, because the reality is, we need a little bit of both.

Anthony Flint, author of “Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City,’’ is at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge.
 

By Anthony Flint

Boston Globe

Reviews
“Governors Island has borne witness to the grand parade of American history, from the revolution to the Cold War. Ann Buttenwieser’s book showcases the fascinating parade of characters that built the island and called it home.”
—Robert Pirani, Executive Director, Governors Island Alliance

Description
On the southern edge of Manhattan stands a quiet piece of Americana. Governors Island, situated in New York Harbor, blends a sense of nostalgia with twenty-first-century amenities. The pristine setting showcases the island’s rich history, including the vital role it played until recently in the country’s armed forces. From its early days as the site of a British fort in the 1700s, to its longstanding role as a station for the U.S. Army and the Coast Guard, to its function as a venue for political receptions and parties, the island has hosted a dazzling parade of the brave and the dignified. But Governors Island encompasses more than military history; it offers a vivid reflection of historic events in New York City and the world at large.

Ann L. Buttenwieser brings this rich legacy to life, creating a striking portrait of the island through never-before-published photographs, blueprints, architectural plans, and interviews with former residents. Records from Castle Williams reveal an evolving national penal system, while those from the hospital tell the story of worldwide contagion and local sanitation. Accounts of the lives of the island’s female residents offer insight into ethnic assimilation and the changing roles of women in the military, and a compendium of military and civilian recreational life on the island illuminates the changing meanings of open space and recreation over time.

Lavishly illustrated and filled with fascinating vignettes of the people and events of this unique landmark, Governors Island: The Jewel of New York Harbor will captivate enthusiasts of military and New York history alike.
Author
Ann L. Buttenwieser is an urban planner and waterfront historian. She is the author of Manhattan Water-Bound: Manhattan’s Waterfront from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, Second Edition, also published by Syracuse University Press.

The Governeur  Times

The seas are full of the cast-offs of humanity, from tub toys that have fallen off container ships to boats swept away in storms to bottled messages deliberately set adrift. That flotsam has given oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer insight into marine currents and how they have influenced the course of history. I

n this excerpt from his new book with writer Eric Scigliano, Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man’s Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science, the authors explain how a vicious current has swept sailors from Japan all the way to the Americas many times over many millennia. Storied drifters float forever on the seas of legend and, lately, the Internet, whether or not they ever existed: the drift bottles Aristotle’s protégé Theophrastus supposedly tracked across the Mediterranean, Queen Elizabeth I’s [official message-in-a-bottle opener, the] “royal uncorker,” the ghost ship Octavius and the Sydney’s phantom lifebelt [which supposedly drifted from Australia all the way to France], Daisy Alexander’s [$6-million] will in a bottle, and Clyde Pangborn’s ocean-hopping plane wheel. These tales have spawned legal battles, comics-page yarns, and endless dinner-table diversion. Other transoceanic drifters have had much larger effects. Some scholars and aficionados believe that ancient drifts brought more than just timbers, nails, and other inanimate flotsam to the Americas. They maintain that sailors, fishermen, or passengers occasionally survived the drift and settled in the Americas, injecting new cultural and genetic elements into its native societies. Some, such as the British-born zoologist and amateur epigrapher Barry Fell, go further. They maintain that Old World peoples—the secretive, sea-mastering Phoenicians in particular—actually sailed to the New World to trade and left their shipwrecked traces off shores as widely scattered as Beverly, Massachusetts, and Rio de Janeiro. Unfortunately, the native peoples of the Americas did not leave records of any such early contacts, so the epigraphers rely on inscriptions and other artifacts—often controversial, if not outright fraudulent—supposedly left by the ancient visitors. It’s harder to argue that Asian voyagers likewise visited or traded with America, because distances across the Pacific are so much wider. And no flood of Asian artifacts has been reported in the Americas to match the European claims. Nevertheless, another contingent of scholars makes a compelling case for repeated wash-ups by Japanese castaways over the past six thousand years—sometimes with transformative effect on the native cultures of the Americas. The doyen of this faction is Betty Meggers, an eminent anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, who has advanced this inquiry for more than fifty years despite fierce resistance from her colleagues. In 1966, she published an authoritative account in Scientific American of how Japanese mariners drifted to Ecuador five thousand years ago. Since then she’s uncovered evidence—DNA, viruses that could only have originated in Japan, and pottery techniques found nowhere else—suggesting that ancient Japanese influence also reached Central America, California, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Well into her eighties, Betty would present her latest research on Japanese diffusion each year at the Pacific Pathways meetings in Sitka, [Alaska]. Before the sessions, we and the other Pathways participants would board a boat to remote beaches near Fred’s Creek, an hour from Sitka. Between exclamations of delight at the telltale flotsam we discovered, Betty would share more of her findings. She approached the problem as a literal jigsaw puzzle, comparing pottery shards unearthed around the Pacific. The patterns on multiple shards excavated at Valdivia, Ecuador, and on Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s main islands, matched so well, she posited that a boatload of Japan’s indigenous Jomon people made the trip some sixty-three centuries ago. Other discoveries suggest that others first made landfall in California and San Jacinto, Colombia. The impetus to this migration was one of the great cataclysms of humankind’s time on earth. Few places are so prone to natural catastrophe as Japan, an island nation floating at the intersection of three tectonic plates, the Pacific, Eurasian, and Philippine. The slow but violent collision of these three plates produces spectacular earthquakes, tsunamis, and eruptions. About sixty-three hundred years ago, a flyspeck island off southern Kyushu named Kikai exploded with a force that would dwarf all the more famous volcanoes that have since erupted around the world. Kikai weighed in at 7 on the standard volcanic explosivity index (VEI), which runs from 1 to 8, VEI 8 being reserved for the sort of mega-eruptions that cause ice ages and mass extinctions. It ejected twenty-four cubic miles of dirt, rock, and dust into the air, about nine times as much as Krakatoa in 1883, twenty-four times as much as Mount St. Helens in 1980, and forty times as much as the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum. The tsunamis triggered by Kikai obliterated coastal towns. The eruption’s spew was enough to blanket up to 18 million square miles of land and sea. Dust and ash several feet thick smothered the fertile soil, rendering southern Japan uninhabitable for two centuries. Unable to farm, the Jomon set out for other shores in what Betty Meggers calls “the Jomon Exodus.” And that was where a second mighty phenomenon came into play. The Kuroshio (“Black Current,” named after the dark color it lends the horizon when viewed from the shore) is the Pacific Ocean’s answer to the Atlantic’s Gulf Stream. More than twenty-two hundred years ago the Chinese called the Kuroshio by the prescient name Wei-Lu, the current to “a world in the east from which no man has ever returned.” Surging up from Taiwan, fat with warm tropic water, it arcs past Japan and Southeast Alaska and down the northwest coast. At the same time, cool, powerful offshore winds, the equivalent of Atlantic America’s Arctic blasts, race down from Siberia, pushing boats and other flotsam out into the Kuroshio. The fleeing Jomon were driven into the Kuroshio. So were fishermen blocked from returning home by the sea-blanketing pumice. The Black Current bore them toward America—surely not the first and far from the last unwitting emissaries to make that journey. Europeans call drifting ships “derelicts” once their crews have taken to the longboats. But the Japanese use the word hyôryô for a marine mishap in which a vessel, the hyôryô-sen, loses control and drifts without command. Traditionally its crew and passengers—hyôryô-min, drifting people—would stay aboard, awaiting their fate. In half of known hyôryô cases, at least some hyôryô-min survived to reach land. And some of those survivors dramatically affected the societies they beached upon. Around 1260 CE, a junk drifted nearly to North America, until the California Current caught it and sent it into the westbound trade winds, which deposited it near Wailuku, Maui. Six centuries later the oral history of the event had passed down to King David Kalakaua, Hawaii’s last reigning monarch. As the tale came down, Wakalana, the reigning chief of Maui’s windward side, rescued the five hyôryô-min still alive on the junk, three men and two women. One, the captain, escaped the wreck wearing his sword; hence the incident has come to be known as the tale of the iron knife. The five castaways were treated like royalty; one of the women married Wakalana himself and launched extensive family lines on Maui and Oahu. That was just the first accidental Japanese mission to Hawaii. By 1650, according to John Stokes, curator of Honolulu’s Bishop Museum, four more vessels had washed up, “their crews marrying into the Hawaiian aristocracy, leaving their imprint on the cultural development of the islands…. Hawaiian native culture, while basically Polynesian, included many features not found elsewhere in Polynesia.” The Japanese presence in Hawaii may go back much further. Hawaiian legend recounts that the first Polynesian settlers there encountered diminutive menehune (“little people”), marvelous craftsmen who still dwell in deep forests and secret valleys. At that time, the Japanese were more than a foot shorter than average Polynesians and adept at many strange technologies—from firing pottery and spinning silk to forging metal—that might indeed have seemed like marvels. Japanese influence likewise spread in mainland North America. Archaeological digs occasionally unearth traces: iron (which native Americans did not smelt) discovered in a village buried by an ancient mudslide near Lake Ozette, Washington; arrowheads hewn from Asian pottery discovered on Oregon’s coast; and, of course, the six-thousand-year-old Japanese pottery shards in Ecuador. Just as Betty Meggers found unique artifacts, viruses, and DNA markers in Ecuadoran subjects, the anthropologist Nancy Yaw Davis found telltale Japanese traits in the Zuni of northern New Mexico, distinct from all the other Pueblo peoples. Davis concluded that Japanese had landed in California in the fourteenth century, trekked inland, and helped found the Zuni Nation. All told, the University of Washington anthropologist George Quimby estimated, between 500 and 1750 CE some 187 junks drifted from Japan to the Americas. The number of drifts increased dramatically after 1603—thanks, ironically, to the efforts of a xenophobic regime to keep foreign influences out of Japan and the Japanese in. In that year the Togugawa shogun, who had united the nation after years of civil war, closed Japan to the outside world, exempting only restricted trade through the port of Nagasaki. Western ships and castaways were to be repelled. Missionaries and other foreigners who entered were to be killed—as were Japanese who left and tried to return. To ensure that Japanese mariners remained in coastal waters, the shoguns dictated that their boats have large rudders, designed to snap in high seas. Vessels blown offshore were helpless; to avoid capsizing, crews would cut down their main masts and drift, rudderless and unrigged, across the ocean. Politics conspired with geography, weather, and ocean currents to set this slow-motion, accidental armada adrift. Over the centuries, the shoguns transferred their power to Edo, now Tokyo, and demanded annual tributes of rice and other goods. But Japan’s mountainous terrain made land transport impossible, so each fall and winter, after the harvest, tribute-laden vessels sailed from Osaka and other cities in the populous south up the outer coast to Edo. To get there, they had to traverse an exposed deepwater reach called Enshu-nada, the infamous Bay of Bad water. And they had to cross just when the storms blew down from Siberia—the same weather pattern that rakes Labrador, Newfoundland, and New England and drives kayaks across the Atlantic. Of ninety drifting vessels documented by the Japanese expert Arakawa Hidetoshi, storms blew 68 percent out into the Black Current during the four months from October to January. To see where the hyôryô-min drifted, the girls of the Natural Science Club in Choshi, Japan, threw 750 bottles into the Kuroshio in October 1984 and 1985. By 1998, beachcombers had recovered 49: 7 along North America, 9 in the Hawaiian Islands, 13 in the Philippines, and 16 in the vicinity of Japan—percentages remarkably similar to those of the known hyôryô. A few swung back onto the Russian peninsula of Kamchatka, just north of Japan. Kamchatkans adopted the slang term dembei for bobbing castaways, after a Japanese fisherman named Dembei whose junk drifted there in 1697—the first known contact between Japanese and Russians. A few twentieth-century adventurers have traveled as far in open boats as the hyôryô. In 1991, Gerard d’Aboville rowed a twenty-six-foot boat solo for 134 days and 6,200 miles, from Japan to North America. In 1970, Vital Alsar and four companions sailed a balsa raft from Ecuador to Australia, covering nearly eighty-six hundred miles in six months. And in 1952, Dr. Alain Bombard set out to prove that humans could survive being lost at sea by drifting for sixty-five days across the Atlantic in a collapsible raft, catching fish and sipping seawater. But none of these daredevils came near to lasting as long at sea as the hyôryô-min, who often drifted more than 400 and once more than 540 days. Typically just three out of a dozen in a crew would survive—the fittest and most resourceful, who were best equipped to influence, even dominate, the societies they encountered. As the centuries progressed, the number of Japanese coastal vessels, hence the number of drifters, soared. By the mid-1800s an average of two Japanese derelicts appeared each year along the shipping lanes from California to Hawaii. Four showed up near Hawaii in one thirty-year period in the early nineteenth century; at least five crewmen survived. Many other junks passed unseen along less-traveled routes. During my visits to Sitka, I was afforded the privilege of interviewing many Tlingit elders. I would tell them one sea story, and they would reciprocate with an ancient tale of their own. One elder, Fred Hope, told me that every village along the West Coast has passed down a tale of a Japanese vessel drifting ashore nearby. To the south, around the storm-wracked mouth of the Columbia River, strandings were so frequent that the Chinook Indians developed a special word, tlohon-nipts, “those who drift ashore,” for the new arrivals. Then, in 1854, a very different landing took place on the other side of the ocean. Commodore Matthew Perry and his “black ships” arrived to open Japan to the world. Perry found skilled interpreters—Japanese who had never left Japan but were fluent in English—waiting to meet him. How could this be in the hermetically sealed hermit shogunate? The answer lies in the drifts along the Kuroshio. In October 1813, the junk Tokujo Maru left Tokyo, returning to Toba after delivering the shogun’s annual tribute. The nor’westers swept it out to sea and it drifted for 530 days, passing within a mile of California when offshore winds blew it out to sea. Eleven of the fourteen men aboard perished. Then, 470 miles off Mexico, an American brig hailed the hulk and rescued the three survivors. After four years away, the Tokujo Maru’s captain, Jukichi, returned to Japan. Somehow he escaped execution and secretly recorded his travels in A Captain’s Diary. Though it was officially banned, Jukichi’s Diary intrigued and influenced Japanese scholars, paving the way for Commodore Perry and for another foreign guest who arrived six years before him. “Unquestionably,” James W. Borden, the U.S. Commissioner to Hawaii, remarked in 1860, “the kindness which had been extended to shipwrecked Japanese seamen was among the most powerful reasons which finally led to the opening of that country to foreigners and foreign commerce.”

By Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano
Smithsonian.com

It was mostly abandoned and not even picturesque. As Morris pointed out at the time, it hadn’t always been the case.

The city rose to prominence on the back of its working waterfront, a blue-collar economic engine that hummed with docks, wharves, warehouses, shipwrights, markets and dry docks.

Even now, 40 years later, some of the waterfront is still in business, other sections remain semi-ruinous and neglected, and others have morphed into esplanades and parks.

But developers are beginning to see money on the water. Ten or 12 luxury high-rises are newly opened/under construction today on the East River in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Still, for all the changes in the life of the port, there’s one constant: Caddell Dry Dock. The 106-year-old West Brighton repair facility is virtually the last of its kind in the city. Forty years ago, the city had 30 marine service stations.

The Noble Maritime Collection marked the Caddell centennial with the exhibition “Caddell Dry Dock: 100 Years Harborside” and now there’s a thoroughly illustrated history under the same title written by Erin Urban, founding director of the Noble Museum.

Ms. Urban has produced a lucid family-approved-and-supported history. It starts with John Barlett Caddell (1866-1951), a Canadian who came from Maple Grove, Nova Scotia, to work in the shipyard business.

Eventually, he established his own business at the foot of Broadway on the Kill van Kull, an optimum location then and now.

Unlike many other marine industries, Caddell stayed afloat and profitable while others drowned. The firm’s winning formula, according to Ms. Urban, combines ambition, gentlemanly business practices and an immaculate record.

MIRACLE OF DRY DOCKING
“Caddell Dry Dock: 100 Years Harborside” is probably not for confirmed landlubbers. This world has its own vocabulary (“lighters” and “yards,” “careening” and “spur shores”), but the terms are often explained or at least hinted at.

The photographs are clearer. The book has several categories of images: Historical photographs, photographers taken by staff (like company president Steven Kalil) or hired freelancers, and a series shot by Michael Falco specifically for the exhibit and book.

Dramatic events are everyday occurrences, not surprising when you consider the kind of scrapes ships get into. The clientele has included celebrity clients like the Intrepid and the Half Moon (replica).

Caddell staff manhandle giant screws (propellers) and other tricky equipment. The single most amazing series is the actual step-by-step dry docking, which uses the tides and pumps to float a heavy ship into (and out of) the giant, hollow-walled cradle of the dry dock.

The future of shipping and ship maintenance is unclear. There are fewer but much but bigger ships at work today. The future of marine shipping might be unexpectedly bright.

It’s a matter of common sense, according Kalil, president of Caddell since 1989: “Somebody is going to realize that moving things by water causes much less pollution than moving things by land.”

“Caddell Dry Dock: 100 Years Harborside” is available at the Noble Maritime Collection on the grounds of the Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden, 1000 Richmond Terr., Livingston.

by Michael J. Fressola

Staten Island Advance

The History of Ellis Island

By Vincent J. Cannato

Harper. 487 pp. $27.99

Ellis Island, through which 12 million immigrants passed between 1892 and 1924, is a museum and tourist attraction now, “a success,” according to Vincent J. Cannato, “attracting some 2 million visitors a year.” A small patch of land in New York Harbor, known two centuries ago as Gibbet Island because so many pirates were hanged there, it occupies a large but somewhat ambiguous place in American history. On the one hand, it is deservedly celebrated as the country’s gateway, not the only one but the largest and most important. On the other hand, it is the place where a deep conflict in American beliefs has been played out:

“The nation’s immigration law was predicated on the idea that a self-governing people could decide who may or may not enter the country. But that idea came into conflict with other ideals such as America’s traditional history of welcoming newcomers. More importantly, it conflicted with the idea that the rights guaranteed in the Constitution were universal rights. How could the Declaration of Independence’s basic creed that all individuals were created equal mesh with the idea that some immigrants were desirable and others undesirable? That conflict between American ideals is central to an understanding of why Ellis Island was created in the first place.”

Obviously, the story of Ellis Island remains pertinent today, for the issues it raises still vex and divide us. In the early years of the 20th century, most immigrants came to the United States from Europe, and the question in the minds of many Americans was whether some of them (British, French, German) were more “desirable” than others (Eastern and Southern Europeans). Now the great wave of immigration is from Latin America, and because many of these people enter the country illegally, the question is whether this makes them “undesirable,” even though many of them work productively and contribute to the national economy.

Ellis Island was established as a “sieve” through which immigrants could be filtered, the desirable allowed to enter, the undesirable deported back to their countries of origin. But as became plain from almost the moment it opened, defining “desirable” and “undesirable” was difficult and often caused intense controversy. William Williams, director of Ellis Island for many years, was a WASP aristo who “linked undesirability to southern and eastern Europeans,” just as many Bostonians regarded the Irish as undesirable. One blue-blooded New England Yankee, discussing the ” ‘masses of peasantry’ from Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Russia in the 1890s,” didn’t beat around the bush:
“These people have no history behind them which is of a nature to give encouragement. They have none of the inherited instincts and tendencies which made it comparatively easy to deal with the immigration of olden time. They are beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence. Centuries are against them, as centuries were on the side of those who formerly came to us.”

Out of such sentiments grew the Immigration Restriction League, founded in 1894 “to advocate and work for the further judicious restriction or stricter regulation of immigration,” i.e., No Italians Need Apply. These and other efforts by Boston Brahmins and their allies stirred up noise and debate but don’t seem to have had all that much effect on the decisions made by officials at Ellis Island, who were chiefly preoccupied with questions of physical and mental health, the ability to earn a gainful wage and “moral turpitude,” a euphemism for everything from prostitution to adultery to premarital sex. During World War I “alien enemies” — “any male over the age of fourteen born in Germany, residing in the United States, and not a naturalized U.S. citizen” — found their rights sharply limited and were at risk of being arrested; after the war, fear of radicals generally, and anarchists specifically, added a new category of “undesirables.”

A “recurring theme throughout Ellis Island’s history,” Cannato writes, is “the chasm between immigration law as written and immigration law as enforced.” Or, as he puts it elsewhere, “The immigration problem was a conflict between abstract laws and the individual tragedies those laws sometimes created.” It was one thing to deny admission to the “feeble-minded,” but quite another when an entire family presented itself for admission and one child was deemed to fit that category. How were officials to respond: Deny admission to the entire family, or admit all save the offending girl? In one such case the second course was chosen, leaving the girl to live out the rest of her life — how she did so we do not know — on her own.

Generally, though, Ellis Island tended toward the permissive. Some of those who worked there were bigoted, and many, it seems, were simply incompetent, but Cannato reports numerous instances in which people who were borderline “undesirable” for one reason or another were granted admission on essentially humanitarian grounds. President William Howard Taft, making a visit to the island, found himself caught up in one such case, though his sympathetic response to the immigrant under examination ultimately was overruled by authorities directly responsible.

The immigration center was closed in 1954, by which time a quota system was in effect and overall immigration had declined sharply. Two years later the General Services Administration put the entire 27-acre island up for sale, but reaction against turning over the historic site to private interests — “the high bidder was a New York builder . . . who wanted to turn Ellis Island into Pleasure Island, a high-end resort with a convention center, marina, and recreational and cultural facilities” — was strong enough to persuade the Eisenhower Administration to take it off the market. It deteriorated until 1981, when a fund-raising program for its restoration was undertaken, eventually under the leadership of Lee Iacocca, whose parents went through Ellis Island in 1921.

Cannato, who teaches history at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, has written a popular rather than scholarly history of Ellis Island, but he resists the temptation to sentimentalize the place. He understands that, now as then, immigration is an issue that leaves Americans uncomfortable and contentious, even as it continues to bring new blood and energy into the country. Ellis Island may have been converted into something of a feel-good theme park, but the questions it raises remain unresolved.

By Jonathan Yardley

 The Washington Post