Voyages: To the New World and Beyond by Gordon Miller

Abstract

 Reviews British Columbia did not then have a dental school. She cites Inazo Nitobe as the author of an 1891 study on the relationship between Japan and the United States but does not otherwise identify him. A Japanese nationalist and international diplomat, he was educated in the United States, married an American woman, worked to build diplomatic bridges across the Pacific, and his photograph appears on ¥5000 notes. Nevertheless, this splendid work in transnational history adds to Japanese, American, and Canadian history, should stimulate new looks at the experiences of the Japanese in NorthAmerica,and serves as a model for those studying other immigrant societies. Patricia E. Roy University of Victoria Voyages: To the New World and Beyond by Gordon Miller University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2011. Illustrations, maps. 200 pages. $55.00 cloth. Gordon Miller’s book, Voyages: To the New World and Beyond, provides an enjoyable visual overview of the early mariners and vessels used to explore the New World, in particular the Pacific Coast. Working from historical accounts, the author has detailed events from this fertile period of development in the understanding of the scope of the world. Anyone who desires to know more about the maritime history of the West Coast and the men and ships that first ventured here will find this book rewarding. The book begins with a brief discussion of navigators’ tools and the development of the instruments and vessels that made possible the early voyages of discovery and exploration of the New World. In the second chapter, Miller takes readers on a journey through the Age of Exploration alongside Leif Ericsson, Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, Giovanni da Verrazzano, and Jacques Cartier. Miller’s nearly 100 paintings do a remarkable job of capturing moments in time and instilling viewers with a sense of what it might have been like to be aboard a historic vessel. An example of this appears on page 43, where Sir Francis Drake’s Golden Hinde is shown laboring in the southern ocean, an area now known as Drake Passage. Readers see and feel the isolation and despair of a solitary and comparatively tiny vessel on an angry sea, buffeted about by wind and waves. One cannot help but come away with a renewed respect for the accomplishments of the intrepid mariners and the vessels they sailed. Those early encounters with the New World are followed in the third chapter with the subsequent voyages of discovery and colonization, including those of the Dutch, French, and English. Miller includes a succinct one-page account (along with one of his captivating illustrations) of the travels of the Mayflower and explains that the wealth of information available about the vessel makes it worthy as an example of the type of merchant ship used in the early seventeenth century. The fourth chapter considers the dominant question in the minds of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century geographers and cartographers : whether the immense southern continent of Terra Australis Incognita actually existed.Because much of the northern latitudes had been well explored and charted by that time, geographers believed that an equivalent land mass had to exist in the southern latitudes to balance the earth on its axis. The voyages of Dutch, French, Spanish, and English sailors detail the discovery of the lands in the southern ocean, with an exclamation point added by Captain James Cook,“the consummate seaman and explorer”(p. 98). The last and largest chapter covers the exploration of the North Pacific Coast, a subject of particular interest to the author. Here,  OHQ vol. 113, no. 4 too, Miller as artist is most prolific, gracing every other page with illustrations of moments from the historical records of those voyages of exploration and trade. The Spanish presence in the North Pacific is well presented, and the illustration showing the Santiago on the Columbia River Bar is especially poignant to this reader, imagining the frustration Bruno de Heceta must have felt knowing he had identified a great river but could not investigate further because his crew was too ill with scurvy. The stiff competition for the China trade between the major European and American concerns is well described and depicted.Several pages are devoted to the...