Richard Rohmer

Leave it to a government report to make a fascinating story boring.

This isn't actually a government report, but I'd guess the volume is at least 50% reprints of government memos, letters, feasibility studies, and the like. Dull enough at the best of times, but when they're reproduced in low-quality facsimiles on a reduced scale, they quickly cease being merely unreadable and become truly illegible. And they generally aren't labelled well enough for readers to know what they have to decipher and what they can pass over. Ideally, the text of the book would make up for the difficulty of reading all the reproductions, but there just isn't enough text.

Which is too bad, because the story tells us a lot about the Royal Navy, the politics of the years after World War I, the weather in Labrador, and even the culture of the area (which, at that time, was not part of Canada). The H.M.S. Raleigh was a member of the Hawkins class, the prototype, in a way, for what eventually became heavy cruisers. After the Great War, she and a small squadron of other lesser cruisers were sent to patrol and show the flag in the western North Atlantic -- a pretty useless role, at the time, but the British had to do something with the ships that were somewhat white-elephant-like (the design, with all the guns in single mountings, was pretty useless). Steaming around between Newfoundland and Labrador in August 1922, she ran into a fog. (More or less to be expected, in that area; clear days were more the exception than the rule.) The captain was not feeling well, and left it to the navigator to guide the ship through the channel. The navigator was probably over-confident; he kept the ship going at cruising speed -- and missed his harbour by several hundred yards and ran the ship aground on the coast. Her hull was badly damaged, and the captain eventually ordered her to be abandoned. The damage was severe enough that the ship could not simply be re-floated. Had she been near a decent port, she probably could have been brought home and repaired, but she was at Point Amour, Labrador. A name which translates roughly as "the back end of nowhere." Even if someone had managed to float the ship, they'd still have to manage to get her through the fog-soaked, rocky channel to some place that could repair the largest ship that ever sailed in the area. Plus the locals, who lived in a constant state of near-starvation on their poor land, had a tradition of, shall we say, slightly pre-emptive salvage; the wreck was a once-in-a-lifetime boost to their income. The British gave up, court-martialed the captain and navigator, drummed them out of the service, and started thinking about ways to reduce their navy even further.

Until 1926, anyway. The number of people who saw the wreck in the Strait of Belle Isle can't have been many, but the British still felt embarrassed about this ship that looked as if it had been dropped on the Labrador coast by some naughty child-god who couldn't be bothered to clean up his toys. Having taken off the big guns, they ordered that the ship be demolished, which was done by cutting holes in the deck and dropping depth charges down them. It ruined the ship, so she no longer looked so much like someone had forgotten she existed and left her there, but she left a lot of life ammo and pollutants around that would continue to wash up over the years; at least one person died from playing with a salvaged shell. In the 1990s, this became an environmental issue, and this book concludes with a discussion of the efforts to truly get the wreck cleaned up.

The story of the Raleigh is genuinely intriguing, since it combines history, politics, engineering, and the environment. I wish it had had a better telling than this. But there is no better telling. So you might want the book even though it's indigestible enough enough to give you a stomach-ache of the brain.… (mais)