Schindler deserves much credit for doing well a job that has needed doing for some time. T. Y. B o o t h , Utah State University Reviews 75 The Life and Voyages of Captain George Vancouver: Surveyor of the Sea. By Bern Anderson. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1960. Republished as WP-17, 1966. 274 pages, $2.95.) On almost any day, I can see Bellingham Bay, three-quarters of a mile distant, from my window. On a clear day, and after a walk around the hill, I can see Mount Baker. On an even clearer day, I can see the mountains of Vancouver Island. Off to the north in Canada is Burrard Inlet, to the south in the U.S. is Whidbey Island. All these, and hundreds of other islands, inlets, harbors, passages, straits, points, mountains, and ordinary rocks along the Pacific Coast share in one thing: they were named after British seamen by one rather short, fattish, hyperthyroidic English sailor called George Vancouver. Vancouver was a great explorer; more important, he was a great surveyor, the man who, during 1792-1794, first mapped the west coast of North America from just above San Francisco to the Gulf of Alaska (if he missed the Columbia, he cannot be faulted, for it is almost invisible from the sea; and if he had been first to sight it, history might well be different and I would be sitting in Canada.) Vancouver, then, named our landscape — and, in a sense, shaped it. But he is almost unknown, unheard of, by most people who live on the shores of the great inland bodies of water, Puget Sound and the Straits of Georgia, that he was, if not exactly first to see, at least the first to truly explore. Vancouver’s life lacks obvious glamour; he was a workman, a man with a special job to do. He did it thoroughly, brilliantly (if nothing else, he laid the ghost of the Northwest Passage). But workmen do not attract press agents. Nevertheless, Vancouver’s story has its fascinations. And, at last, it is easily available in this republication in paperback of the late Bern Anderson’s biography — with its emphasis on the great exploring voyage of 1791-1795. Admiral Anderson’s book is a workman’s product too: clear, to the point, and with all the facts carefully examined and laid out. If it -smacks stylistically of the dissertation it originally was and if George Vancouver does not quite come alive, we can still be grateful. It is Anderson who tells me what Vancouver did; and everywhere I look I see a world that Vancouver has identified for me. One owes both of them thanks. L. L. Lee, Western Washington State College ...