CAPTAIN MAHAN'S REMINISCENCES.*

IN his preface to this book of reminiscences Captain Mahan tells us how, as a boy, be used to pore over back numbers of Colburn's United Service Magazine, and bow his fancy was caught by the yarns spun by writers who called them- selves Flexible Grommet and Jonathan Oldjunk. Those pseudonyms suggest informality; and Captain Mahan goes on to praise the nuggets of information—the undesigned evidences and unaffected realiam—which lie concealed in such papers as Grommet and Oldjunk wrote. As he says, if the Greeks had bad a Colburn's after the Peloponnesian War, we should have a more valuable clue to the reconstruction of the trireme, and probably could deduce with some accuracy even the routine, jokes, and squabbles of the officers and crews. Captain Mahan does not overrate the value of gossip in the historian's researches ; and we are particularly grateful to Grommet and Oldjunk because their example put into Captain Mahan's head the thought of writing these memoirs in the "go-as-you please" manner, which we can honestly * .Froin Bait to Steam

By Captain •. T. Niihau. London: Harper sad

testify is a charming success. The author has, indeed, " let himself go," which must have been a very pleasant change from his usual austerity of construction and argument, and the reader shares the delights of the escapade. The mixture of autobiography, anecdote, and essay is only less casual than the autobiography Mark Twain is publishing, in

which he writes things down as they come into his head without any attempt at chronological or other arrange-

ment.

That boyish interest in old technical naval reviews was only a symptom of the impulses which, we venture to think, were bound to take Mahan into the Navy. He himself modestly suggests that his true line lay elsewhere :—

"My entrance into the navy was greatly against my father's wish. I do not remember all his arguments, but he told me ho thought me much less'fit for a military than for a civil profession, having watched me carefully. I think myself now that he was right ; for, though I have no cause to complain of =success, I believe I should have done better elsewhere. While thus more than dissenting from my choice, he held that a child should not be peremptorily- thwarted in his scheme of life. Consequently, while he would not actively help me in the doubtful undertaking of obtaining an appointment, which depended then as now upon the representative from the congressional district, he gave me the means to go to Washington, and also two or three letters to personal friends ; among them Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War, and James Watson Webb, a prominent character in New York journalism and in politics, both state and national."

At all events we are very glad that Captain Mahan did make a mistake, if mistake it was, for without the special bias which his naval life gave to his curious and analytic mind

the world certainly would not have had The Influence of Sea- Power upon History. Of course we may allow that the

reflective habit of Captain Mahan's mind may easily have crowded out some of those other qualities which are in- valuable in the sailor for their particular purposes, and yet are not common companions with philosophical interests. Marryat said that he had seldom known an officer who prided himself on his "practical" knowledge who was a good navigator. Such men " lower the respect due to them by assuming the Jack Tar." That comment was a boomerang, for Captain Mahan tells us how a distinguished British Admiral spoke of Marryat, whom he had known personally,

us " an excellent seaman, but not much of an officer." On the same subject we must quote a story which Captain Mahan

tells of the time when he was a Midshipman :-

" I recall the fine scorn with which one of our professors, Chauvenet, a man of great and acknowledged ability, practical and other, used to speak of `practical men.' Now, young gentle- men, in adjusting your theodolites in the field, remember not to bear too hard on the screws. Don't put them down with main force, as though the one object was never to unscrew them. If you do, you indent the plate, and it will soon be quite impossible to level the instrument properly. That,' he would continue, ' is the way with your practical men. There, for instance, is Mr. --- ," naming an assistant in another department, known to the midshipmen as Bull-pup, who I suppose •had been a practical surveyor.; `that is what he does.' I presume the denunciation was due to B. P. having at one time borrowed an instrument from the department, and returned it thus maltreated. But ' practical,' so misapplied—action without thought—was Chauvenet's red rag.,.

Finally, to confute Captain Mahan's suggestion that be might have done better outside the Navy, we will only quote two sentences in which he writes of the old days of sails and spars :—

" The exercises of sails and spars, under the varying exigencies of service, bewildering as they may have seemed to the uninitiated, to the appreciative possessed fascination, and were their own sufficient reward for the care lavished upon them. In their mute -yet exact response was some compensation for external neglect ; they were, so to say, the testimony of a good conscience ; the assurance of professional merit, and of work well done, if scantily recognized."

There speaks the true sailor—" a sailor of the world," as Goldsmith might have said—and the services he has done us all as naval historian transcend all questions of the propriety of his employment in his own count'''.

Captain Malian defends Courts-Martial against a general charge of severity. We cannot say what may be the truth about the Courts at any special period of American history, but we cordially agree with all that he says in principle. In no country that we know of is the tendency to-day towards cruel penalties. In considering naval penal codes, as in all like eases, the public must mike up their minds whether they approve of the principle of protecting the community against the individual. If they do—and who does not P—they will find that undue kindness to the individual is in the long run cruelty to the majority, because it relaxes the protection pro- vided for them. The extraordinary ease with which sympathy is worked up for the recipient of every severe sentence is a clear proof that the public are not accustomed to put to themselves this very elementary question. If leniency is not a practice in American Courts-Martial, it used to be so, at all events in naval examinations :—

" Talking of examinations, a comical incident came under my notice immediately after the War of Secession, when there wore still employed a large number of those volunteer officers 'who had honorably and usefully filled up the depleted ranks of the regular service—an accession of strength imperatively needed. There were among them, naturally, inefficients as well as efficients. Ono had applied for promotion, and a board of three, among them myself, was assembled to examine. Several commonplace ques- tions in seamanship were put to him, of which I now remember only that he had no conception of the difference between a ship moored, and one lying at single anchor—a subject as pertinent to-day as a hundred years ago. After failing to explain this, he expressed his wish not to go further ; whereupon one of the board asked why, if ignorant of these simple matters, he had applied for examination. His answer was, 'I did not apply for examination, I applied for promotion.' Even in this case, when the applicant had left the room, the president of the board, then a somewhat notorious survival of the =fittest, long since departed this life, asked whether we refused to pass him. The third member, himself a volunteer officer, and .myself, said we did. Well,' he rejoined, you know this man may get a chance at eau some day.' This prudent consideration, however, did not save him."

For the greater part of the Civil War Captain Mahan served in the Pocahontas,' making the blockade of the Confederate coasts. Blockade-running is as exciting as one could wish, no doubt, but blockading is desperately tedious work. The largest reservoir of anecdotes runs -dry, and Captain 'Mahan speaks of two notorious tellers of stories who were pitted against one another for an evening's amusement, and one was at last reduced "to recounting that Mary had a little lamb."

We advise the reader who loves to be told how distinguished men came to do what brought them distinction to turn to Captain Mahan's account of his beginnings as an historian. He began late in life, but his tardy preparation was never- theless resolute, thorough, and courageous. We note from his discussion of his literary style that he judges himself by the severest standards. There is no rule of literary purists Which he has not tried to :put into effect. Some of the rules which he observes, on the other hand, are not those of purists, and would, we think, have been better left alone. Generally we should not trouble to challenge sentences which are clear enough in sense, but Captain Mahan tells us that he is so profoundly concerned about the technical rightness of his English that he will perhaps be surprised to learn that some of his sentences disregard well-known rules. Take, for example, a sentence to which we have already• referred :-

"Oddly enough, lunchine.' once with an old and distinguished British admiral, who had been a midshipman while Marryat still lived, he told me that he remembered him well; his repu- tation, he added, was that of 'an excellent seaman, but not much of an officer,' an expressive phrase, current in our own service, and which doubtless has its equivalent in all maritime languages."

Here the participle is most loosely related, and the relative in the last line has the common superfluous " and,"—superfluous because the other relative, though it is implied, does not exist. We must leave this most entertaining book with one more quotation :—

" Perhaps it is only a subtle form of egotism, but as a condition of my life experience I could wish to convey to others an apprecia- tion of my profound ignorance of both classes of history when I began, being then forty-five ; not that I mean to imply that now, or at any time since, I have deluded myself with the imagination that I have become an historian after the high modern pattern. I tackled my job much as I presume an immigrant begins a clearing in the wilderness, not troubling greatly which tree he takes first. I laid my hands on whatever came along, reading with the profound attention of one who is looking for something ; and the something was kind enough to acknowledge my devotion by shining forth in unexpected ways and places. Any line of investigation, however unsystematic in method, branches out in many directions, suggests continually new sources of information, to one interested in his work ; and I have felt constantly the force of Johnson's dictum as to the superior profit from time spent in reading what is congenial over the drudgery of con- strained application."