This marvelous new book presents the history, evolution, and prodigious productivity of the Vancouver firm of Robert Alan Ltd (RAL), widely recognized as the world's foremost designer of tugs. Over the last two decades, the name Robert Allan has become synonymous with tug design, but the path was not direct, nor even particularly pre-ordained. This book does an outstanding job of charting the evolution of RAL, and illustrating by turns, the role of talent, hard work, perseverance, opportunity, team-building and even, occasionally, luck in forging an international success story.

There are many different and intertwined stories in the almost 600 pages of this beautifully produced volume: the story of resolute and committed emigration, the story of dogged determination in establishing and sustaining an independent design house through trying times; the story of design evolution and innovation; and the story of recruiting, developing, and retaining the talent to continue to be at the forefront of the industry providing workboats for the world.

The RAL story is, for its first eighty-eight years from 1928 to 2006, a dynastic story. Through three generations of Robert Allans (grandfather, father and son, carefully distinguished as Robert, Bob, and Rob) the firm has grown and expanded in ways that might never have been foreseen by its founder. The first Robert Allan graduated as a naval architect from the University of Glasgow in 1907, working at Fairfields, Cammell Laird, and Yarrows before immigrating to Canada in 1919, working first at Coughlin's Shipyard before joining Wallace Shipyards in North Vancouver (from 1921 known as Burrard Drydock Company Ltd.) with a commission to design Princess Louise for the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company. In 1927 he struck out on his own, establishing a design partnership named Allan & Stackhouse, then independently as Robert Allan in 1928. The initial years were very lean.

Bob Allan (the son) studied naval architecture as an engineering student at the University of British Columbia from 1934-36 but had to withdraw from the program due to serious illness. Fortunately, he had been well tutored by his father (including developing considerable ship-modelling skills in his teens) and obtained work in Burrard Drydock Company during the war, including serving as project manager for the conversion of the passenger-cargo ship HMCS Prince Rupert into an armed merchant cruiser. The end of the war saw a formal teaming of father and son in the home basement office, developing construction drawings for a series of colliers for France as part of war-recovery efforts.

Rob Allan (the grandson) duly followed in his father's and grandfather's footsteps when, after a couple of years at the University of British Columbia, he entered his grandfather's alma mater, the University of Glasgow, to study for a naval architecture degree. This was followed by a couple of years in England working for Burness, Corlett & Partners, the leading tug design consultants of the day. In the light of subsequent developments in Robert Allan Ltd., this was indeed a fortuitous experience. He returned to Canada in 1973 to join the family business, succeeding to the leadership of the firm following the tragically early loss of both parents to cancer.

Today the name Robert Allan Ltd. is almost synonymous with tugs, but as this history makes clear, that journey was neither direct nor self-evident. The path of growth of the company business was more a case of being in the right place at the right time, prepared with the skills and spirit of innovation to respond to emerging market demands for specialized vessels. The various chapters chart the wide menu of designs produced, from fishing vessels, to coastal patrol vessels, mission boats, ferries, workboats of every variety, research vessels, flreboats and, of course, tugs.

Early on, the company's small craft credentials were established by yacht work and the reconstruction of the British Columbia seiner fleet in the years from 1942 to 1944. Already imbued with the urge to innovate, RAL designed their first steel fishing vessel in 1958, and developed a line of beach seiners, fast, shallow-draft vessels designed to access the limited short-term fishery openings.

The growth of the tug business and expertise was driven by the demand for escort tugs following the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989, but also enabled by RAL's embrace of computer-aided design (CAD) in 1985 and azimuthing drives for tugs in the late 1980s. It is impossible to do justice to the variety of tug designs that RAL have produced to serve a wide spectrum of missions, but a third of the book elaborates that story very well, supported by a wonderful collection of photographs and plentiful drawings (mostly inboard/

outboard profiles and plan views). There is one sole body plan showing the hull lines of RAL's signature RA star escort tug; it would have been of interest to see more lines plans included, but even with that minor quibble, the book is exceptionally well-illustrated.

Throughout the book the clear story that emerges is of success built on a firm philosophical foundation of design serving the requirement. This has extended to significant effort in influencing the regulatory rules governing design requirements. Among all his other accomplishments and accolades, Rob Allan considers his effective efforts to harmonize regulations for the design and construction of tugboats to be one of his most significant career accomplishments.

Finally, there is a substantial people story here. The collective RAL success is evident in chapters twenty-three and twenty-five, with the generous acknowledgement of individual contributions, and acknowledgment from within of the inspiring and enabling

work environment that made it possible. With Rob's retirement signaling the end of the naval architectural dynasty, it is a particularly fitting segue that the company has transitioned to employee-ownership.

In sum, this is a beautifully produced and well-written book that will appeal very much to all who admire tugs and desire to learn more of the process that shapes them.

The Midway-class carriers arrived just a bit too late to participate in the closing stages of World War II in the Pacific, not being commissioned until September of 1945. Enthusiasts of alternate history possibilities have imagined them, loaded down with F8F Bearcats and F4U-4 Corsairs to fend off the expected hordes of kamikazes that would have come from the Japanese home islands in the event of a conventional invasion in 1946.

Fortunately, that event never happened, and the Midways entered a fleet engaged in peacetime conversion, becoming the newest, biggest, and baddest carriers out there, with huge 130-plane air groups (at least until the advent of larger jet aircraft brought those numbers back down). Franklin D. Roosevelt in fact, conducted the first jet aircraft trials aboard an American aircraft carrier.

Three ships, Midway, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Coral Sea were actually completed of the six planned vessels, with the remainder being canceled at the end of the war. All three remained with the active fleet after the war, serving long into the Cold War and Vietnam eras, and later, through major modifications and ever-changing air groups. Both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Coral Sea were eventually scrapped, but Midwaydecommissioned in 1992, and remains as a museum ship to this day in San Diego. Interestingly, the book notes that she is the largest museum ship in the world.

Stille’s book starts with a general introduction to the class. The remainder is arranged in two main parts, an overview of the design and eventual modernization, and individual histories of the ships themselves, followed by a final analysis and conclusions. The book speaks heavily on configuration, weapon and equipment changes, along with the changing political landscape that influenced such developments.

Stille does not shy away from places where the Navy “got it wrong” with this class when it came to modifications, citing engineering miscalculations along the way. The Midways certainly were in no way perfect, but Stille describes well how they filled the transition role between the old Essexes and the following Forrestal-class supercarriers. His final conclusion describes them as a successful class, with ample modernization and expansion capabilities which made them useful combat-capable carriers for many years after their initial launching, despite their design limitations, and the difficulties of keeping up with ever-changing military technology.

The book is illustrated with many overall shots of the ships, but not a whole lot of close-up detail. I would have liked to have seen some shots of the interior of the hangar deck, but as seems to be the case with many books of this subject, there are none. It seems to be geared more for the naval historian than the ship modeler, as most of the photographs are small, and black-and-white. There are also some nice color profiles, showing the ships in different configurations as time progressed, and a color photograph or two sprinkled in here and there.

At 47 pages in a soft-cover volume, it is not a long read. There are no exciting fire-and-steam combat stories, but it is an enjoyable and interesting look at the United States Navy carrier fleet in transition from steam to nuclear power. If you are a fan of the Midways, this book certainly belongs in your library. Recommended for the naval historian.

At first look, to designate Trumper Smith’s life as extraordinary might seem like a bit of hyperbole; but it is not. Smith saw combat off Norway, in the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Solomon Islands and off Thailand, Malaya, Korea, and Vietnam. During World War II he survived the sinking of three ships and won an unprecedented number of awards. Along the way he demonstrated leadership of the highest order, all without fanfare. It is a wonder we Americans have not heard much of him until Graeme Lunn wrote this book.

Admiral Sir Victor Alfred Trumper Smith, AC KBE CB DSC MiD RAN, was active in both the Australian Navy and the British Royal Navy for forty-nine years. In that time, he rose from cadet through wartime service afloat culminating his career with five years as chairman of the Australian Chiefs of Staff Committee. Along the way he battled the Germans, the Vichy French, the Italians, and the Japanese. He waged combat in airplanes and from ships. He was shot down and rescued twice and survived the sinking of three different ships. It may well be that his combat biography is unmatched by any other navy person anywhere in the world.

Graduated in December 1930 from the Royal Australian Naval College at the age of seventeen, when he retired he was the head of all the Australian armed forces. As the subtitle of this book has it, “…an extraordinary life indeed.”

Of particular note are his experiences while flying in a Swordfish against the German battleship Scharnhorst off Norway. Later, in the Solomon Islands, embarked in HMAS Canberra, in a hot surface action known as the Battle of Savo Island, Canberra was sunk and VAT once again became a battle survivor. Few descriptions of the Battle of Savo Island are as descriptive as this one. For an un-prejudiced non-American view of the battle this part of Admiral VAT Smith is highly recommended.

The description of his time in HMAS Tracker, a 14,000 ton escort carrier employed battling German U-boats in the North Atlantic war is of itself worth the read, but especially riveting is the story of the battle between Tracker’s aircraft and a surfaced German U-boat. The book describes Tracker in detail, detail which makes the twenty-first-century reader marvel: a wooden flight deck 442 long and 80 feet wide, a single shaft producing a maximum speed of 17 knots, nine wires, two elevators, one catapult, an embarked capacity of twenty aircraft, and a crew of 646 officers and men.

There is much more, including time in the Mediterranean, which including another swim when the carrier Ark Royal went down, and a period ashore in Normandy just after the landings where VAT was involved in maintaining liaison between air and naval forces; once again in the thick of the action.

Not described above, but in the book, are his time in Task force 95 in the Yellow Sea off Korea, efforts in Vietnam, and his time as Chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee. That one man did so much for such an extended period is indeed extraordinary.

The book is quite well done and replete with appropriate photography. It is highly recommended for anyone with an interest in history and especially anyone interested in leadership, leadership of the first order as demonstrated in the person of Trumper Smith.

Any serious yachtsman and many model ship and boat builders are familiar with the story of the schooner America. She was created in 1851 by fabled marine designer George Steers and Manhattan shipbuilder William H. Brown for industrialist John Cox Stevens and his partners, members of the New York Yacht Club. Her design was influenced by Steers’ experience designing fast and hardy pilot boats, but she also carried in her genes the raked masts and long, low lines of the legendary Baltimore clippers.

Schooner America represented something new in racing yacht design. Built not just for speed, she was made strong to cross the perilous North Atlantic and go head-to-head against England’s best racing yachts.

Without paper drawings, America’s final form emerged from Steers’s hull model and constant presence, from Stevens’s regular input, and from Brown’s considerable expertise. Launched on May 3, 1851, she was described by the New York Daily Tribune as “beautifully modeled.” The New York Herald said her cabin was “fitted up quite handsomely” as befitted her well-heeled owners.

In mid-June, she set sail for England, the first yacht in history to cross the ocean specifically for competition. She was a radical, unproven schooner challenging the very cream of the British racing fleet, and her innovative design inspired both hopes and doubts. On August 22, 1851, in a 53-mile race, she bested the best fourteen of England’s racing yachts, her triumph a blend of sound design and construction, advanced sailmaking, clever rigging, and flawless seamanship.

Like most racing yachts, America was not built for longevity. After a racing season or two, most were converted, scrapped, or left to rot, pushed aside by newer, faster designs. But schooner America broke that mold as well, surviving, more or less, for more than ninety years.

David Gendell’s new book, The Last Days of the Schooner America, chronicles the yacht’s long life and her sad end at the Annapolis Yacht Yard, a short row across Spa Creek from the United States Naval Academy. Preserved by the Navy as a potential training ship, America floated for decades and finally sank at the Academy’s pier. In the summer of 1940, the Annapolis Yacht Yard became the custodian of her remains, with the goal of restoring her – eventually.

World War II intervened, and the Annapolis Yacht Yard retooled to produce wooden warships -- submarine-chasers, Vosper motor torpedo boats (MTBs), and American Navy patrol torpedo (PT) boats. By war’s end, the yard had become one of the Eastern seaboard’s most experienced and capable wooden ship builders.

As the yacht yard shifted to warships, Gendell’s narrative shifts to a detailed and fascinating account of the daily life of a busy wartime boatbuilder. Without detailed plans, the yard’s designers and builders experimented, reverse-engineered, developed production methods, and overcame wartime shortages of materials and labor. Woven through this account is the story of America’s remains – mostly high hopes and neglect. Not even the support of President Franklin Roosevelt could move the Navy to divert men and materials from wartime production to restore the schooner.

In the end, little more than America’s keel remained salvageable. That she survived “in any form, into the 1940s was, itself, remarkable,” Gendell writes. “America was built for the moment,” for the 1851 racing season. She lives on only in salvaged bits and bobs in museums, yacht clubs, and private hands, and in the timeless legend of her triumph.

Author David Gendell is a sailor and racer, a former boating magazine editor, and a frequent speaker on sailing and history. He is also an excellent storyteller. Reading The Last Days of the Schooner America should please anyone with an interest in shipbuilding and in this iconic racing yacht.

Stone considers the conception, construction, and subsequent history of the Mayflower II replica in the context of its time and particularly in the context of the Anglo-American world of the mid- to late twentieth century, especially the relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States. While the author does pay sufficient attention to the vessel itself for his purposes, there is more emphasis on the people involved in the project, their personalities and agendas—and the conflicts between those.

For Nautical Research Guild members, it is worth pointing out that, for those interested in a more technical focus on the design choices made by Mayflower II’s designer and builder, and in the history of our attempt to learn how seventeenth-century ships were designed, which is an important story in ship history and the history of technology, this is not that book. Stone does mention the initial-stability problem apparent upon launching the vessel, but does not then delve into the design choices behind that, and why they were made, and what subsequent investigations and discoveries have taught us about that. This replica, and the first set of Jamestown replicas, were part of a renewed interest in colonial North American history widespread at the time, to which Stone alludes but, again, that is not a focus of his book.

The book was inspired by the author’s learning of the role that the project’s prime mover, Warwick Charlton, had played in its conception and realization. Charlton, and his partner, John Lowe, were to some extent sidelined at, and after, the point at which the replica successfully made it to the United States in 1957, and Stone takes up the task of relating how they managed to realize the project despite significant odds. Those odds included the challenges facing the Anglo-American relationship at the time, as well as those facing a financially-strapped United Kingdom, all of which were suddenly exacerbated and strained by the Suez Crisis and the formation of the European Economic Community—which excluded the United Kingdom. For this reviewer, the most interesting thread in the book is that which ties these world-events to the fate and role of Mayflower II, which became both a diplomatic asset and liability, as Stone explains. As it was published this year, the book does treat the major restoration of the replica completed in 2019, and points out that the replica had, since its launch and restoration, become a historic vessel in its own right, as acknowledged by its designation in the National Register of Historic Places.

Stone is a veteran journalist who is personally involved with the Mayflower II. His book is pitched to a general readership, with no maritime technical knowledge. Its most obvious audience would be those with an existing interest in the replica, which has long been a cultural institution in New England, and those interested in the development of “heritage” for public consumption, with its uneasy relationship between commerce, education, and politics.

Piracy has captivated audiences for hundreds of years, predominantly from the activities surrounding what has been dubbed the Golden Age of Piracy. While difficult to define, the Golden Age of Piracy typically refers to the decade between 1714 and 1724. However, the piracy that birthed this era spanned several decades. This period has been the subject of many authors, including Angus Konstam, a long-time maritime historian. Konstam’s latest book, The Pirate Menace: Uncovering the Golden Age of Piracy, explores the intricate web of piracy, politics, and trade of the early eighteenth-century colonial Americas and Africa.

Konstam weaves an elaborate tale of the lives and deaths of the pirates of the Caribbean. Using various primary sources, Konstam brings readers into the early eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Konstam uses several chapters to set the stage. These chapters take place before the defined Golden Age but is necessary to understand how piracy became rampant several decades later. These chapters also discuss the establishment of several pirate havens, including Nassau and its relationship to Henry Jennings and Benjamin Hornigold, men who would mentor many of the Golden Age pirates and then hunt them down. This beginning allows Konstam to draw connections between these men and their mentees, the major pirates of the Golden Age, including Edward Teach and Charles Vane, and more opportunistic pirates, such as Sam Bellamy. Konstam effortlessly uses primary sources to show the complex web that formed between the pirates, the pirate hunters, the pirate sympathizers, and the colonial world. In doing so, Konstam uncovers the world of the Golden Age of Piracy and the intricate political and economic situations that precipitated the rise and fall of piracy within the Atlantic world.

Much of the work reads like a perfectly crafted story rather than a well-cited historical non-fiction. This writing style makes the work accessible to a general audience and researchers alike. However, Konstam moves from this illustrative narrative style to a more traditional historical discussion in some sections. For example, when discussing Stede Bonnet, Konstam relies heavily on the work of Captain Johnson, a contemporary writer of the Golden Age, and breaks his storytelling style to reference the uncertainty in Bonnet’s story. In contrast, when discussing Edward Teach, Henry Jennings, and Bartholemew Roberts, the storytelling is more definitive toward their actions and the efforts to bring them down. While this does not detract from Konstam's work or extensive research, it does show the difficulties in tracing piracy within the colonial world, where sources of the people living at the edges of society are limited.

The Pirate Menace's masterful storytelling continues the tradition of presenting piracy to the public, which began with The General History of the Pyrates from the Golden Age itself. Compared to other works, it effortlessly weaves the stories of the most famous pirates of the Golden Age with the men who fought them, including their own, and the complex political world in which they operated. This book should be required reading for all pirate scholars and interested parties.

Even in the requisite subdued light, Will Andrews’ fishing schooner models in the Cape Ann Museum drew my attention and admiration during a 2019 visit. Thankfully, Linda Andrews wisely encouraged her husband to gather and publish his research about the shipbuilding and deep-sea fishing communities of Cape Ann and the maritime, historical, societal, and economic, context of these iconic vessels produced and worked from about 1847-1930.

The waterborne heroines of this story are Essex- and Gloucester-built, Gloucester-outfitted and operated, two-masted, gaff-rigged, fishing schooners. Each selected as an exemplar of the uneven evolution in form and function of their sisters. Their quintessentially American story includes the all too frequent devastating losses of life and property on the North Atlantic, and how they heavily influenced purpose-built vessel development. Improvements, sadly not introduced proactively in most cases, but as belated reactions to the sea having claimed so many loved ones.

The physical appearance of each chosen schooner is memorialized in 1:48-scale model form, the meticulous products of Will’s relentless research and uncompromising craftsmanship. With each, he accomplishes the goal of every serious marine model artist “to create a compelling impression of the original vessel.” (Napier).

The author and the content of this volume—graciously dedicated to Erik A.R. Ronnberg, Jr., absolutely deserve a place in the pantheon of devoted historians and works, listed in the Bibliography. And I commend Andrews for your consideration.

If you aspire to build models of any of the selected schooners, may I suggest you also have Howard Irving Chapelle’s The American Fishing Schooners ~ 1825-1930 close at hand. The drawings in there—lines plans, and of the rather unique fittings and machinery of Gloucestermen, are laudably clear. They provide a sort of visual glossary, and thereby excellent complements to Andrews’ illuminating definition of each, which includes the answer to “How was this used?” (Weinstein). Moreover, the index speeds finding items of your interest.

The photographs of Andrews’ models are worthy of careful study. The lack of captions or interpretive text placed nearby each photograph may encourage a bit of bookmarking in the section about the namesake vessel and the corresponding photograph pages, to move more easily and confidently back and forth. One is inclined to create one’s own customized index, just for the schooner of interest.

The last chapters of Will’s well-told story are forthright but bittersweet. The “War to end all wars” had just been won. The International Fishermen’s Races with Canadian designers, and the seaborne steeds they bred, and campaigned, celebrated a return to normalcy. But the victory, not unlike that global conflict, was short lived. Flyers that attained the pinnacle as inspiring functional works of art in wood, were replaced by transitional utilitarian draggers, and combustion engine-powered, steel, “Ugly Ducklings”.

Civilization is driven by commerce and technology. One feeds the other. Historically, much of that commerce has moved by sea. In turn, ships moving cargoes are influenced by their times’ technology. Historian Fernand Braudel called the sea “the greatest document of its past existence.”

A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks, by David Gibbins, shows how through marine archaeology the sea allows the world’s history to be read. He uses twelve wrecks as a springboard for looking at the state of the world when the ships sank.

He starts in prehistory examining a second-millennium BC Bronze Age vessel. He finishes four thousand years later, looking at a twentieth-century steamer torpedoed and sunk during World War II. Along the way he stops at ten different places: Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, Byzantium, Tang China, the Viking era, King Henry VIII’s England, the Dutch Golden Age, eighteenth-century piracy, and nineteenth-century exploration.

Each chapter uses a period wreck to examine the ship and the times which created it. Every shipwreck is a time capsule, preserving the history of the period it was built. It reveals goods traded, existing inventions, how people lived and their interests. Diet, living standards, education levels and religious beliefs are preserved in part by the sea, waiting to be uncovered.

This book is also a history of marine archaeology, a discipline which emerged in the last half of the twentieth century. Gibbins explains how technologies like the aqualung and remote operating vehicles offered access to previously inaccessible wrecks starting in the 1960s. He describes the growth of underwater archaeology and the increasing sophistication of the technologies used to find and preserve artifacts on the sea bottom.

He also shows how and why wrecks offer special access to history. They sharply define a point in time and reveal the lives of the individuals involved from a merchant in Tutankhamun’s time to a survivor of a torpedoed ship in the Atlantic.

For Gibbins, a renowned underwater archaeologist, this is intensely personal story. He participated in many of the expeditions to the wrecks highlighted in this book. He helped making the discoveries and interpreting results. The twelve wrecks explored are highlights of his career.

A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks is at once a history and an adventure tale. It brings the realities of the past to life, while illustrating the excitement resulting from uncovering it.

A very interesting and extremely well researched reference book concerning the loss of Royal Navy and other Commonwealth naval ships from 1920 through to the Falklands War. Each entry provides the ship's details, date of loss, commanding officer, and a narrative detailing how the vessel was lost.

World War II losses make up the bulk of the book and describe the campaigns fought such as Norway, Dunkirk, and the Atlantic through to the final fighting in the Pacific in 1945. Some entries are quite lengthy, others less so. While many losses were from enemy action, rock, tempest, and fire also took its toll as well as the foe. In some cases, blue-on-blue actions occurred, such as the first Royal Navy loss of the war, on 10 September 1939, when the submarine Oxley, operating on the surface, was mistaken for a German U-boat by the submarine Triton and torpedoed with the loss of fifty-two of the ship's company.

The well-known losses such as Hood, Repulse, Prince of Wales, and other capital ships are covered, but so are the small trawlers, motor torpedo boats, and mine-sweepers. The losses of the minor landing craft, known only by their number, during actions such as the Dieppe raid, Operation Torch in North Africa and D-Day, are also included, but with less detail about how they were lost and personnel killed or missing. The sheer number of landing craft lost on D-Day is quite sobering.

The pre-war period, 1920-1939, had, as would be expected, far fewer losses but of the thirty-eight vessels lost, ten were submarines. Post-World War II losses were also minimal, with less than a hundred vessels lost due to various reasons. Again, submarine incidents took their toll, as did bad weather. Training incidents also saw several losses, most notably that of the Australian destroyer Voyager, sunk by a collision with the aircraft carrier Melbourne during nighttime flying exercises in February 1964 with the loss of eighty-two of the ship's company.

The book ends with the analysis of the Royal Navy losses in the 1982 Falklands War: two destroyers, two frigates, a landing ship, and a landing craft medium in this short but sharp conflict. Several other RN ships were damaged in this short war.

Overall, this is an excellent reference book for the naval historian and those with an interest in the war at sea during World War II. Highly Recommended.

Eber Brock Ward was raised in modest circumstances, but at twenty-one, was taken into his uncle's thriving shipping business, becoming the principal heir of what was reaching towards a million-dollar business. From this foundation, Ward invested in some of the earliest iron-making businesses in the Great Lakes region, along with acquiring railroad, mining, and lumber properties. A late venture into glass-making rounded out his portfolio. The connections between the resource extraction, transportation, and industrial production leads the author on more than one occasion to argue that Ward should be considered among the pioneers of vertical integration in the United States.

A businessman first and always, Ward had supported the Whigs early and by the 1850s was a committed Republican. Among his closest friends politically was Republican Senator, B. F. Wade. Among the things that united the two men was their unwavering opposition to slavery, which included orders to Ward's captains to assist escaping slaves across the border to Canada.

The loss of Ward’s steamer Atlantic provides some valuable insights into how Ward conducted business in the years following his uncle's death. While Nagle supplies a narrative focused on the newspaper reporting of the incident, the case law reports make interesting reading on their own. The initial trial between Ward and the owners of Ogdensburgh placed all the blame and liability on Ward's vessel. He fought that decision all the way to the United States Supreme Court to ensure that liability was divided evenly. Given the disparity in the value of the two vessels, the owners of the much less valuable Ogdensburgh were then required to pay Ward over $40,000 for the loss of Atlantic. Efforts to collect this brought Ward back to the Supreme Court two more times to extract the maximum recompense from his soon-bankrupted rivals. There are a number of references to Ward as a robber baron; the label is a good fit.

Nagle questions why Ward is not well remembered as an industrialist and then provides the answer. Ward's investments were in individual, albeit complementary, enterprises and his will largely required those investments to be liquidated. Whatever vertical integration there was quickly disintegrated. His timber holdings were passed intact and free of debt to his young, second wife, whose brothers made another fortune buying up Ward's debts at a discount. A few years later, she married a Canadian and moved to Toronto.

Nagle's volume depends on a dispersed collection of Ward papers, along with a wide range of primary printed sources to bring this narrative together. If there is more to be said, especially regarding Samuel Ward's efforts to actually create the fortune to which E.B. Ward contributed and succeeded, this remains a foundational work on one of the key figures in the history of nineteenth-century business in the Great Lakes region. Eber Brock Ward may be the forgotten iron king, but in the history of Great Lakes shipping, his name certainly has not been forgotten and will be even more prominent in the studies that build on Nagle's work.