review -- Agrapinna: The Most Extraordinary Woman of the Roman World

Since her death in 59 CE, historians have not rushed to praise the empress Agrappina. Her promiscuity, often used as leverage for power, as well as her penchant for incest, first with her brother, then her brother-in-law, possibly a ménage with her two sisters and brother and the brother’s friend, then sex with her uncle, then sex with her son, alone would have made most commentators hesitate; but in the end no one dared to portray her sympathetically because of her ten (or so) murders. Thus, for two thousand years she has been universally depicted as a monster, degenerate, ambitious, cold-hearted, cruel, the ultimate femme fatale who made legendary figures like Salome, Clytemnestra, and Lady Macbeth seem small-minded.

Character aside, her life was remarkably eventful: by the age of 44 she had been, in turn, sister, niece, wife, and mother of Roman emperors. Born with a distinguished pedigree, daughter of the  wildly popular Roman general, Germanicus, descendant of Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus, thus in Roman eyes a descendent of Aeneas and Venus, Agrapinna’s fate was always to be near the centre of power and to know in her bones, virtually from birth, both the opportunities and dangers of her position. While she was only four, the emperor Tiberius murdered her father. This sparked a feud his widow, Agrapinna’s mother, who Tiberius had imprisoned and beaten, after which she starved herself to death. Agrapinna’s grandmother was also killed by Tiberius, as were two of her brothers. All this by her sixteenth year. When Tiberius finally died, Agrapinna’s one remaining brother, Caligula, became emperor. At the time Agrapinna had a son, Nero, to whose advancement she was fiercely dedicated. Plotting with her brother-in-law —who was also her lover — to murder Caligula, she was caught but only exiled, saved by her pedigree. However, within a few years Caligula was murdered (not by Agrapinna), and her uncle Claudius inherited the throne. After the death of her first husband, Agrapinna tried to seduce the future emperor Galba. Unsuccessful there, she married a rich man whom she soon poisoned. After seducing a freed slave who served as an adviser to the emperor Claudius, she advanced to a sexual relationship with the emperor himself, her uncle (who once referred to her as "my daughter and foster child, born and bred, in my lap, so to speak"). With the laws against incest altered for the occasion, they married and Agrapinna became empress. A rival for Claudius’s affections appeared, and Agrapinna ordered her to commit suicide. For several years she co-ruled the empire with Claudius, all the while scheming to make Nero seem the inevitable successor. Then she killed Claudius with a poisoned mushroom, and Nero became emperor. But the teenage Nero bridled at his mother telling him she didn’t like his mistresses, and at her uppity behavior, acting as if she were his equal (“I gave you the empire!” she cried). After a year or two of their being at loggerheads, he had her killed.

In Agrapinna: The Most Extraordinary Woman of the Roman World Emma Southon drastically downplays Agrapinna’s  lasciviousness (she showed “agency,” “took proactive action,” was “taking control of her own body”) and her murders (“I don’t want her to be a woman who murdered her husband”), focusing instead on her achieving power. She revels in Agrapinna’s victories, her appearance on coins, her image on a single relief sculpture found in Turkey showing her crowning Nero emperor, the founding of a city in her honour (now Cologne), her sitting on a dais next to and on a level with Claudius’s, receiving the title Augusta, parading through the streets on a litter with a gaudy retinue, her appearance at a public spectacle wearing a cloak of gold thread, “grandeur leaking out of her every pore.”

Even more, Southon reveals an Agrapinna who does not show up, at least not directly, in any of the Latin sources. Neither Tacitus, Suetonius, nor Cassius Dio noticed the “amazing diplomat and negotiator,” the “incredibly hardworking” woman, the master administrator who effectively ran the empire not only during Claudius’s reign but for a time under Nero. And far from being the wicked stepmother depicted by historians, when her stepson inadvertently used a name that slighted Nero, she didn’t even have him executed. Seen in the right light, her murders paving the way for Nero’s ascent were simply a dutiful Roman mother looking out for her son. Or they were deeds done for the good of the empire. Selfish interests, we are assured, played no part in them.

How did writers over two millennia miss this admirable side of Agrapinna? According to Southon, they failed to question the misogyny of the Roman sources. Romans were adamant that women belonged in the home; they found a woman exercising power abhorrent, and for them a woman aggressively seeking power could only be a monster. On Agripinna, therefore, they heaped all the easy, negative, female stereotypes. It never occurred to Roman historians to portray her as a person in her own right, as proud, competent, powerful, and sympathetic.

Southon constantly undercuts and argues with her sources, so much that she has to admit, “This story is as much mine as it is Agrippina's.” What Gibbon in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire put into an elegant, ironic footnote, Southon places front and centre, at length, in the text. This often obscures the thread of the biography, but overall the effect is offset by the author’s zest for her material. The book reads as a recording of a light-hearted, free-spirited university lecturer who embroiders her narrative with opinions, speculation, flights of fancy, and expostulations, often using the language of her students. In the first chapter, for example, she makes much of Agrapinna’s mother becoming pregnant nine times, referring again and again to the parents’ “bonking” and “shagging” (“they were constantly at it”). She finds her Latin sources so full of contradictions and biases that they are “a pissing nightmare.” Agrapinna “got shit done,” her mother “had no time for gendered bullshit,” the family of Claudius’s first wife was “a horrible clusterfuck,” she “fucked up really badly,” and many Roman men were “dicks.” It’s entertaining, if a little exploitive, but while some readers may squirm at times, others will find it a hoot.

review -- Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write Shakespeare? by Robin Williams

For 250 years no one doubted that William Shakespeare wrote the plays and sonnets published under his name, until a controversy about the Bible in 1848 changed everything. Incensed at the attacks on scripture made by disciples of the “Higher Criticism” and, most egregious of all, the suggestion that Jesus might not have been a historical personage, Samuel Mosheim Schmucker of Philadelphia, Lutheran minister turned popular biographer, decided to set the world straight. His 500-page Historic Doubts Respecting Shakespeare, Illustrating Infidel Objections Against the Bible was, he believed, a work of such withering satire that the infidels would never dare raise their heads again. How horrified he must have been to see the Bible ignored, his “absurdities” against Shakespeare taken seriously, and an entire anti-Shakespeare industry arise from what he thought were the ashes of his pyre.

To date eighty-seven names have been proposed as the true author of the Shakespearean canon. Some have not met the highest standards of plausibility: Anne Hathaway, Queen Elizabeth I, King Edward VI, King James VI, Mary Queen of Scots, and the Rosicrucians have been suggested — even Cervantes was proposed by Carlos Fuentes. The candidates with the strongest support have been Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and the Earl of Oxford, but there are very few writers — one might almost say very few prominent people — of the Elizabethan era whose names have not been added to the list at one time or another.

Today a party of anti-Shakespeareans are gathering in support of Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. As countess and sister of the glittering courtier and writer, Philip Sidney, she certainly had the social credentials to know what the plays reveal about the royal court. As poet and translator, and as leader of the Wilton Circle, a group of writers dedicated to raising the level of English literature to that of Italy and France, her literary credentials were excellent. And it’s entirely reasonable to believe that, as a woman of the aristocracy, in order to make her contribution in the male-only, rather disreputable area of playwriting — especially bawdy, anti-establishment plays — she might publish under the name of someone else, perhaps a member of an acting company.

In Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write Shakespeare? Robin Williams presents the case against William Shakespeare and for Mary Sidney. Typically, much of the anti-Shakespeare argument is based on the social class of the bumpkin from Stratford. How could the son of a mere glove maker, who might or might not have attended the local grammar school, know so much about matters far above his station, such as court life, diplomacy, medicine, Greek and Roman literature? And isn’t it mysterious that there is so little documentation about his life, only the smallest scraps that by no means establish him as the writer of the sonnets and plays? In fact, those scraps taken on their own, according to Williams, reveal a cad who abandoned his wife and children, a shady businessman who hoarded grain during a shortage, a tax cheat, a thug who threatened someone with death, possibly a criminal who became rich by mysterious means, and an undistinguished actor, quite possibly illiterate.

Mary Sidney, on the other hand, was a paragon of Renaissance virtue. Fluent in languages modern and ancient, she wrote, translated, and at her country estate gave direction to other distinguished writers of the Wilton Circle. She was wealthy, well connected, well travelled, and had once been a lady-in-waiting at Elizabeth’s court — in short, the perfect fit for the author of Shakespeare’s plays.

Bursting at the seams with arguments on behalf of Mary, the book offers every conceivable bit of evidence, both strong and otherwise: telling details (there are many), suggestions, hints,  coincidences, interpretation, speculation, innuendo, rhetorical questions — every possible connection that can be yanked into service. The quantity of material is overwhelming, but that superabundance cuts two ways. For scholars and conspiracy buffs Williams offers a lifetime of clues to chase down and disputes to settle; the general reader, though, is more likely to find the truly cogent points near-buried under such a mountain of implausibilities, assorted maybes and what-ifs, that they may be inclined just to abandon the effort to reach a considered judgement and simply accept or reject the Mary Sidney thesis holus-bolus. There is undoubtedly a great deal to be said for Mary Sidney, but not so much as Ms. Williams thinks.

(Incidentally, as reported in a recent article in The Atlantic, Mary is not alone. Waiting in the wings is another female Elizabethan proposed as the real Shakespeare, also a well educated writer with an intriguing biography, one Emilia Bassano.)

One major objection to the book’s thesis remains hard to explain: How could this momentous secret be kept so airtight by so many people in the literary community, in the theatrical community, in the public, perhaps even at court, with not a word ever appearing in any book, any poem, nothing in letters, diaries, or family papers? It would have taken a very effective conspiracy to enable Mary Sidney to publish as William Shakspeare.

An especially interesting chapter of Sweet Swan of Avon discusses the sonnets. Passionately addressed to a younger man, they have long been problematic, for, while they appear to be an early, shocking example of gay literature, they are hardly erotic, and many of them are concerned solely with urging the young man to get married and have children — not the usual tack of a lover. However, when Mary Sidney is posited as the author, anomalies disappear. Her older brother, Philip, filled the role precisely of the handsome fellow of sonnets nearing the end of his youth without marrying. Nothing could be more natural than for his adoring younger sister to nag him to marry. And the “Dark Lady” sonnets align even better with Mary Sidney's biography. Like the writer, Mary was in love with a younger man and was deeply hurt and jealous when she believed (mistakenly) that he had fallen in love with her younger, dark-eyed, dark-haired niece.

One way to assess the claims for Mary’s authorship is to search through her published works — or indeed the works of any other candidate — looking for passages that match Shakespeare’s genius, the denseness of imagery, the ceaseless wordplay, the natural, instinctive way with metaphorical language, the breathtakingly original way of wrenching together divergent experiences, not to mention characters wonderfully drawn from life and superb dramatic skills.  But you always search in vain. If someone other than the man from Stratford wrote the works of Shakespeare, he or she did so after undergoing a truly miraculous transformation.

Review -- The Burning Sky and the Untold Story of the Cold War Nuclear Tests in Outer Space

On October 4, 1957 the little beep-beep-beep of Sputnik 1announced the opening of the space era and put the Soviets undeniably ahead of the U.S. in the race. Only a month later Sputnik 2 carried a dog named Laika into orbit. Caught flat-footed, the U.S. responded with several attempted launches that either exploded on the launch pad or fizzled after lift-off. Finally, on January 31, 1958 the first American satellite, Explorer I, went into orbit, carrying a small, three-pound package of scientific instruments designed and built by James Van Allen. Explorer II followed two months later. Although the American satellites were belated and small, they yielded serious scientific data. They revealed a new phenomenon, the existence of radiation trapped high above the Earth forming what were sometimes described as bands (sometimes as belts or shells) following the lines of Earth’s magnetic fields. “Van Allen belts” immediately became common parlance and opened entirely new fields of research for the scientists around the world who were currently participating in the International Geophysical Year (IGY), a concerted, global effort to expand knowledge in a wide range of earth sciences.

But the dawn of the space era was not greeted with cheers and applause by everyone. Sputnik 1 showed that the Soviets had advanced technologically far beyond what anyone had suspected; Sputnik 2 showed that they could launch car-sized payloads, which implied that they would soon be capable of launching missiles carrying nuclear weapons. The American military went into a panic, desperately looking for protection. One suggested countermeasure came from a scientist named Nicholas Christofilos, a brilliant but eccentric character who, after being trained as an engineer, worked as an elevator repairman in Athens. In his spare time he taught himself state of the art physics until, after much effort, he earned recognition among more conventional scientists — “the mad Greek,” they called him — and found a position in an American research lab. His life story makes a fascinating chapter in The Burning Sky. According to Christofilos’s calculations, it should be possible to create an artificial band of radiation that could interfere with the electronics of missiles, disrupting or destroying them in mid-flight. All that had to be done was to release a massive quantity of charged particles several hundreds of miles above the Earth. Following the Earth’s magnetic lines, the particles should quickly race north and south of the equator, all the while shifting eastward until they create a shell around the globe. Releasing the particles was easy — you simply detonated a small (1-2 kiloton) nuclear bomb high in the atmosphere. Would it work? Would the belt form? Would the radiation be strong enough to destroy missiles? Would it also destroy satellites? Would it kill humans who might be in orbit? Would it interfere with communication and radar signals? How long would it last? Could the planet’s natural radiation belts be altered or destroyed inadvertently? Could the planet as a whole be damaged? Years later one scientist marveled, “Imagine suggesting something like that today!” But it was the Cold War, and nothing was considered off-limits when thinking about a possible nuclear strike.

In deepest secrecy and with no outside consultation, a small circle of U.S. decision-makers approved Christofilo’s proposal, and the planning of Operation Argus was immediately begun. Described later as the largest scientific project in history, it now seems certainly the most hubristic. To keep its military aspects secret, it was billed simply as geophysical research, an accurate description as far as it went, and perfectly in keeping with IGY.

Everything proceeded under intense pressure. Not only did secrecy have to be maintained, despite its involving many thousands of people in dozens of public and private institutions, but what would normally take several years of preparation and execution had to be done in a matter of months, before IGY came to a close at the end of 1958. Politics added even more time pressure, as world leaders were beginning to grope their way toward a moratorium on atmospheric nuclear testing and eventually a (limited) nuclear test ban treaty.

Three nuclear weapons would be launched from the back of a ship — the first time this had ever been attempted — in a remote part of the South Atlantic near the British-owned island of Tristan da Cunha. The X-17a was selected as the right missile, and testing began off California. Half of the four tests failed; however, after the fourth engineers believed they had fixed the problem. Everyone hoped they were right, because the warheads would be detonated automatically by an onboard timer with no kill switch. A failed launch could wipe out the entire flotilla, which consisted of 4,500 personnel on nine Navy ships, including an aircraft carrier. Unaware of their peril, sailors trained rigorously during transit, practising launch procedures over and over. Because winter in the South Atlantic was notorious for bad weather, drills and test launches received top priority on the coldest and stormiest days. It was decided that launches could be successfully completed in winds up to 74 km/hr and swells up to 5 meters. The practice missiles, unfortunately, were not X-17a’s.

In the end, the mission was successful, and important conclusions were reached. The “Christofolis effect” or “Argus effect” was not, after all, strong enough to serve as an anti-missile shield. Also, it was short-lived, lasting only a few weeks. On a more positive note, it would not kill cosmonauts or astronauts. Positive, too, were the esthetics: where the magnetic lines bent close to the Earth, beautiful auroral displays appeared. As for disrupting radar and communication signals, that question was settled shortly before Argus when in Operation Hardtack 75 km above Johnston Island in the South Pacific several H-bombs were exploded. One of the Hardtack shots knocked out most radio communications across the Pacific, cutting off Hawaii, 1,300 km away, for two hours and Australia, over 7,000 km away, for nine hours. The seriousness of EMPs (electromagnetic pulses) was also a significant discovery.

All of this makes for an exciting story, and science writer Wolverton tells it well. Many passages read with the drama and vividness of a novel. Strictly speaking it is not an “untold” story as the subtitle claims, since the New York Times broke the story in April of 1958 and it stayed in the headlines for some time afterward. But Burning the Sky is certainly the fullest, most accessible version of what happened. As a fascinating supplement to the book, one might check the U.S. military’s official 45-minute film report, available on YouTube. The official written report of the operation is also available online.

review -- The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick by Jessica Riskin

In The Restless Clock Stanford Professor of History Jessica Riskin suggests there might be a flaw in how explanations are done in the life sciences, perhaps even in all the sciences. The current model, which she finds incomplete, treats all of nature as a machine whose parts are made of passive, inert matter, moving only when set in motion by external forces. Natural entities are themselves viewed as empty of any active power of their own, of any force, will, purpose, self-direction, self-organization, any trace of what she calls in general “agency.” In order to challenge this paradigm, which she characterizes as "brute mechanistic" or "passive mechanistic," she reviews the history of modern science since the seventeenth century, showing how this dominant view has always been shadowed by alternate views explaining nature in terms that do include agency.

The passive mechanistic model was established during the seventeenth century, but not only as a foundation for purely rational, mechanistic explanations of the world. There was also a religious dimension to regarding nature as a machine, a gigantic clockwork. To the thinkers of that time the wondrous complexity of nature and the marvelous fitness of all its parts required a Great Designer existing outside nature — thus, the Argument from Design. Also, if there was no force within nature responsible for its motion and organization, the force must be outside, in other words, a God winding up the great clock of the universe. Riskin believes that science today, secular and at the same time denying agency in nature, is failing to explain the origin of motion and organization in nature.

As a prime example of an early attempt at describing nature as containing its own agency (which she calls "active mechanism"), she offers a quote from Leibniz. He reinterpreted the idea of a clock as something more than a passive device deriving its activity solely from outside forces, and he provided her the title for her book. “In German,“ Leibniz wrote, “the name for the balance of a clock is Unruhe—that is to say disquiet. One could say that it is the same thing with our body, which can never be perfectly at ease: because, if it were, a new impression of objects, a little change in the organs, in the vessels and viscera, would change the balance and make these parts exert some small effort to get back to the best state possible; which produces a perpetual conflict that is, so to speak, the disquiet of our Clock.” Leibniz's clock is a mechanism, explainable in terms of its component parts, but self-organizing under the power of its own balance, a mechanism with agency, a restless clock.

The Restless Clock gives a detailed discussion of the interaction of theories of passive and active mechanism over a period of more than three hundred years. An astonishing number of cases are covered, from Descartes, Leibniz, and Lamarck to John von Neumann, Stephen Jay Gould and Ray Kurzweil, with dozens more in between. The issue shows up not fully resolved even in the chapter on Darwin who, while usually adamant in rejecting agency in nature, nevertheless lapsed occasionally, admitting the existence of natural powers such as “tendencies” or the innate power to vary.

What would it mean to include agency in scientific explanations? Riskin offers only a few suggestions, such as a heliotropic plant following the path of the sun or electrons moving to conserve charge. But she points out that, in fact, even now scientists often use language that suggests agency: they speak of cells wanting to move toward a wound, proteins regulating cell divisions, or genes dictating the production of enzymes. Scientists insist that such phrases are mere figures of speech, shorthand taking the place of a complete, rigorous, passive-mechanistic description. If that rigorous explanation is not known today, they maintain, it will be found in the future. That hope, according to Riskin, is an article of faith, not of science. She suggests, instead, that agency be given a place in scientific explanations as “a primitive feature of the natural world like force or matter, an aspect of the very stuff of nature’s machinery, and especially its living machinery.” 

The final chapter focuses on an influential treatise by Erwin Schrödinger, a founder of quantum physics. In “What Is Life?” he argued, first, that a living creature is a machine by definition in that it produces and maintains order. “Schrödinger explained that molecules were configurations of atoms occupying their lowest energy level. In order to change configurations, they needed to receive at least a minimum quantum of energy. The stability of a molecule could perhaps account for the order-producing capacity of genes, responsible for maintaining the structure of living organisms both within individuals and across generations.” But Schrödinger goes on to claim that a living creature is more than a machine; it is essentially an agent because, by means of its action of eating, drinking, breathing, photosynthesizing, and so forth, it resists entropy — it avoids decaying into equilibrium. A living creature is thus a clock — but a restless one, a machine with agency.

Despite its detailed scholarship — or perhaps because of it — The Restless Clock is unlikely to win many overnight converts. It winds its way through innumerable theories, debates, and descriptions, through many people, a great deal of biographical material, but with little effort made to tie the pieces together, to summarize, to reveal an overall pattern. The impression is often of a catalogue rather than an argument.

However, if nothing else, as theory piles upon theory, and one debate shades into another, the book certainly illustrates how terribly difficult it has been for civilization to sort out such a jumble of ideas and arrive at the understanding of the world we now have. And along the way it unearths a truly astonishing collection of historical curiosities.

It even has moments of comedy, as when it describes many elaborate mechanical systems that royalty and other high-ranking Europeans constructed on their grounds in the late medieval and early Renaissance periods. These perceiving and responsive machines were able to sense the presence of people and react to them, for example, tempting visitors to pause before a beautiful scene, then bombarding them with a cloud of flour or spraying them with water from hidden pipes, or luring them to sit on a bench, then soaking their bottoms. It was comedy, but it also marked the beginning of machines exhibiting humanlike capabilities.

Review -- Sea Stories: True Adventures of Great Lakes Freighter Captain, Richard Metz, by Richard Metz

Toronto may be a port city on one of the greatest waterways in the world, thousands of ships may pass it by every year, hundreds may turn into its harbour, including cruise ships and ocean-going vessels from as far away as Brazil, Turkey, Germany, Australia, and Japan; it may host thousands of debarking passengers and crew; yet the port leaves barely a ripple in the consciousness of Torontonians. Unlike some of the other ports on the Great Lakes, Toronto does not consider it important to mark the opening of shipping season with any fanfare, apart from a small ceremony on the bridge of the first salt-water ship of the year, where the captain is presented with a top hat made of beaver (the media have other things to do). Torontonians think of shipping about as much as they think of their own heartbeats. Some of this is understandable: with an economy as large and diverse as Toronto’s, shipping is not prized here as it is in places like Thunder Bay and Duluth; our docks, located in remote areas, hidden behind fences and closely guarded, are virtually invisible to the public; and the shipping lanes on Lake Ontario tend to the far side of the lake. But perhaps it’s a latent awareness of our maritime situation that makes the memoirs of a Great Lakes ship captain like Sea Stories: True Adventures of Great Lakes Freighter Captain, Richard Metz not only interesting but also strangely relevant.

The stories Captain Metz wants to tell are of bad weather, drunken crews, failing engines, anchors that drop without warning, narrow locks, lift bridges that might or might not knock off the top of the ship, and near collisions. They are good tales. But at least as interesting for nonsailors is the mental stretching one has to do to remap a familiar region on the imagination. Thunder Bay is no longer on the Trans-Canada Highway a day’s drive beyond Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie; it is a harbour past the Soo Locks and Whitefish Point, past Rock of Ages Lighthouse, on the other side of Isle Royale, tucked in behind Pie Island where you can shelter when southwest gales are blowing. Owen Sound is not a vacation and recreational town; it is a place where you may tie up for the winter. Big urban centres like Toronto, Chicago, and Detroit get little mention by Metz, because he is usually heading to or from smaller places, places that only locals and seamen will have heard of — Burns Harbor, Copper Harbor, Houghton, Lorain, Port Stanley. Movement, rather than mindlessly following roads, requires setting a course over open water, an acute awareness of weather, scrupulously up-to-date charts, a constant monitoring of traffic on all sides, and extremely delicate handling of the ship through locks and canals — the locks at Snell and Eisenhower, the Beauharnois Canal and the South Shore Canal and, of course, the Welland Canal and Soo Locks.

Having Google Maps at the ready adds to the pleasure to reading Sea Stories, since Metz often defines his locations nautically. It was while closing in on Fawn Island in the St. Clair River that a wheelsman horrified the captain by failing to respond an order to turn to port, casually explaining that the wheel had come off in his hand (he was fired). The fog was impenetrable while rounding Mission Point, when a mate raised an alarm to report that an upbound ship was coming their way, underlining the danger by adding, “And it’s Canadian!” (Americans in the 1960s thought Canadians were poor sailors, drunk most of the time. Later Metz worked for many years with a Canadian company and came to believe Canadian sailors were among the finest ship handlers in the world.) We read how Metz hopes to get to Passage Island before a storm hits, how he will have to face a mean Nor’easter close to Angus Island, how when he reaches Battle Island Light he will have to turn and expose his port side to the elements. For sailors the positions would probably come loaded with meaning and memories, but even for general readers the stories light up when we are able to pinpoint the locations on a map.

As background to Metz’s adventures, we learn a lot about life on a Great Lakes ship, the cargo, the missions, the many uses of the anchor, the duties of all the ranks from deckhand to captain, their qualifications, the hiring and firing, Christmas away from home, the respect a great cook enjoys. For those of us impressed with what it takes to earn a PhD, the road to a captaincy may come as a shock. Many years of working as deckhand through first mate are required before one can qualify to take the written captain’s exam. Then come the orals. A PhD candidate endures a measly three or four hours. In Thunder Bay Metz began sitting with his examiner at 8:30, took a short lunch break, then continued to 4:30. That was Day One, and it was followed by two more like it. It was grueling and almost inconceivably thorough.

Now retired, Metz lives on Lake Superior, where he still watches the ships and uses his marine radio to talk to those he is familiar with. He notes that there are fewer ships on the lakes now, at least partly because of the decline of the steel industry. New ships can now be over 300 m long, while in his early days a large ship was only half that size. Despite the increase in size, a typical crew today is 12, down from the 34 of his day. The day will come, he believes, when ships will sail without a crew. Metz’s book may thus represent one of the later documents of an era that could be entering its sunset years.

review -- Threads in the Sash: The Story of the Métis People by Fred Shore

Every Canadian knows one thing about the Métis, that they are descended from the union of French fur traders and Indigenous women. That bare little fact usually snoozes in the Canadian mind for a lifetime, perhaps alongside a hazy image of Louis Riel and the factoid of his hanging. But the Métis story deserves a fuller fleshing out, not only because the details are interesting and, in this era of reconciliation, highly relevant, but also because something remarkable, something uncommon, lies at the heart of the Métis story. In the space of only two centuries, a new people was born, a new nation, a unified society with its own language, economy and culture. Between the early 1600s and 1800s the Métis developed from non-existence to a golden age.

For many years no one quite understood what was happening. Children who were born to French fur traders and Indigenous women were regarded simply as French or Indigenous, depending on where they lived. Those who were sent away to be raised in French settlements were accepted there as fully French, with no special meaning attaching to their parentage. Those who stayed with their parents in Indigenous communities were accepted as fully Indigenous. The idea of Métis did not exist.

However, as the fur trading system expanded further and further into the Great Lakes region, the great distances became problematic for the fur companies. A single season was no longer adequate to ship trade goods from headquarters in Quebec City, Montreal and Trois-Rivières to the French and First Nations trappers. As a result, the companies set up depots to store supplies over the winter and staffed them with fur traders and their Indigenous wives and families. Those families living in small, secluded depots, separated from both French and First Nations communities, quietly, unwittingly, laid the foundations of the future Métis nation. A new culture began to take shape, unique to the depots, primarily a blend of French and Indigenous cultures but with the addition of distinctive new practices. Interestingly, the depot people still did not see themselves as having their own identity.

When the French trading system reached beyond the Great Lakes in the late 1700s, into what was then known as Rupert’s Land, the isolation ended and the Métis nation was born. In the open lands of the west the depot people gathered and realized their commonality. Rupert’s Land was English, under the governance of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Métis stood out distinctly because of their language, their Catholicism, virtually every part of their culture. Their self-awakening had begun.

By about 1820 they began a period of rapid self-development and growing self-confidence, an era they later came to regard as their golden age. Recognizing the vast demand for pemmican to supply the hundreds of canoe brigades fanning out across the enormous distances of western and northern Canada, the Métis seized the opportunity and created a powerful new economy based on the buffalo hunt. The effort of organizing hunts on a massive scale inspired them to develop organizational skills to a high level and to institute rules and practices that were later transferred successfully to the military and political spheres. After a hunt, the meat was processed into pemmican, which the Métis sold, insisting always on cash. By refusing to accept the traditional HBC scrip, they freed themselves from the HBC monopoly and were able to buy their trade goods more cheaply south of the border. In an effort to protect their monopoly, the HBC issued laws and regulations, but it had no effect on the Métis, who continued to operate as they liked, whether as trappers, farmers or hunters. Their best years, these years of prosperity and self-assertion, lasted until the process of Confederation began.

The rest of Métis history is much less upbeat. As Confederation approached, English newcomers from Ontario arrived, greedy for land and power, hostile to the Métis, openly racist, and ready to use fraud and violence to achieve their ends. They were largely supported by John A. Macdonald and the central Canadian government. In less than a generation the Métis lost their economic base and were driven off their lands around the forks of the Red River into the outer fringes of the west. They were hardly alone in suffering and being dispossessed during the expansion of Canada. All Indigenous people suffered. As the “taming” of the West continued, many of the smaller, marginalized groups, those without a clear national identity, such as “non-status Indians,” were eventually absorbed into the Métis nation.

The largest of these other groups were the descendants of HBC employees, some of whom had, like French fur traders, married Indigenous women. However, their experience was very different from the French. Because the HBC system focused everything on the fort — trappers came to the fort rather than the company going out to the trappers — Indigenous women had to live in the fort with their husbands, and children were raised in the fort, where they were given a British upbringing. But the HBC officials brought deep-seated racist attitudes from Britain, and although the children lived in British settlements and were raised in British ways, they were never accepted in society, always cruelly stigmatized as “half-breeds”. Instead of recognizing their potential and recruiting them to be valuable employees, the HBC exploited them only as cheap labour. As their numbers grew, they moved out of the forts and took up farming in the areas surrounding the forts, rejected, yet always thinking of themselves as British. Thus they were never able to develop an independent sense of identity. Eventually, however, their position as permanent exiles became untenable, and they too merged into the Métis nation.

The final chapters of Fred Shore’s Threads in the Sash spell out the details of the promises made to the Métis, the promises broken, the treaties ignored, the abuses perpetrated, the theft of land and rights, all aimed at crushing a proud and enterprising people. It also presents the current legal and moral case against the Canadian government and the grounds the Métis have for seeking compensation. Starting in the late 1960s, a century after their dispossession at the Red River, the Métis have re-awakened as a people, regrouped, reorganized, and determined a way forward that they hope will lead to a restoration of some of their former independence. As the largest of Canada’s Indigenous groups, numbering almost half a million, one-third of all the Indigenous people of Canada, the Métis must arrive at a satisfactory settlement with the rest of Canada, if Canada’s ambitious reconciliation process is to have any chance of success.

review -- The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought

The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought

by Dennis G Rasmussen

For historical writers, a feud is a gift—lurid attacks, entertaining insults, factions, court cases—all guarantee drama. Love affairs are even easier with ecstasies, cries de coeur, torrents of letters, the language heated and glowing, rising sometimes into poetry. But friendship, what is there to write about in a friendship? What will the emotional highlight be, a letter of congratulation, a heartfelt testimonial? The author can note the times and places of their meeting, but even if Boswell were on the sideline recording every word, it would likely consist of little more than good-humoured banter mixed with shop talk. In The Infidel and the Professor political science professor Dennis C. Rasmussen tries, quite successfully, to bring to life the friendship between the two premier figures of the eighteenth century Scottish Enlightenment: David Hume, about whom Isaiah Berlin wrote “no man has influenced the history of philosophical thought to a deeper and more disturbing degree,” the infidel, the great skeptic, whose far-reaching doubts unnerved the religious establishment; and Adam Smith, the professor, the placater of the establishment, author of The Wealth of Nations, which has been described precisely as “the one book between Newton’s Principia and Darwin’s The Origin of Species that actually, substantially, and almost immediately started improving the quality of human life and thought” and extravagantly as “probably the most important book that has ever been written.”

Hume, twelve years senior to Smith, is remembered today for his philosophical works, with John Locke and George Berkeley as a founder of British empiricism, for his famous analysis of causality as merely the “constant conjunction” of events, and for his skeptical examination of arguments for religion. But in his essays and in his six-volume History of England he wrote about much more than philosophy, including political economy, where Smith would make his mark. Rasmussen spends a good deal of time tracing—with a light touch, thankfully—the pervasive intellectual influence Hume exerted on Smith, presenting the first of Smith’s two books, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, as a quiet dialogue with Hume. Even The Wealth of Nations, Smith’s magnum opus, his most original work, was influenced in critical ways by Hume’s writings.

 Intellectual influences aside, however, depicting the friendship remains problematic. Because Hume was a regular letter writer, Rasmussen does what he can by quoting Hume’s invitations to Smith to join him in Edinburgh or meet him in London or Paris. And he reveals in detail their itineraries as they move about, even from house to house, showing how their paths crossed, or might have crossed, even when he can offer nothing about whether they did in fact meet or what happened if they met. He quotes their expressions of esteem and describes the small favours they did for each other in the business of publishing and book promotion. It is all gentle and civilized, entirely fitting for major thinkers of the Enlightenment. But it does not stir the blood.

 To add pizzazz to the book, Rasmussen makes set pieces of the few incidents which were dramatic(-ish). The oft-told story of Hume’s encounter with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, gets its own chapter. Rousseau, fleeing arrest warrants in France and Switzerland for his radical ideas, and frightened by the mobs that had stoned his house, accepted an offer from Hume to help get him out of France and find him shelter in England. Friends of Hume warned “you are warming a viper in your bosom,” and, sure enough, the edifying spectacle of a great, disruptive writer coming to the aid of a fellow great, disruptive writer soon fell to pieces. Rousseau, unstable and delusional, accused Hume of leading a conspiracy to silence him and bury him in obscurity. Upon Rousseau’s returning to France incognito, Hume published documentation of the affair and, in his private correspondence, made several waspish comments about Rousseau, probably, given his genial personality, the only remarks of that nature he ever made in his life.

 For twenty years after finishing his History of England, Hume stopped publishing. “Too old, too fat, too lazy, and too rich,” he explained to friends. “When I see my bulk on a shelf, as well as when I see it in a glass, I would fain prevent my growing more corpulent either way.” It was during and after his final illness that Smith’s part in the friendship was put to the test. Hume asked Smith to oversee the publication of his yet-unpublished Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. It would be his most thorough (and skeptical, of course) discussion of the rational arguments for religion. Despite their many years of friendship and despite the poignant timing of the request, Smith refused. Although Smith was probably a Deist, if not an atheist, almost certainly not a Christian, he had lived his whole life hiding his true beliefs to avoid the hornet’s nest of the religious establishment. Hume did not press him and found another acquaintance to take on the job. In the end, however, Smith redeemed himself somewhat and was roundly condemned as a result. While the establishment eagerly waited to hear of Hume’s deathbed conversion to Christianity or, just as good, of his dying in spiritual agony, Smith published a tribute that described Hume dying serenely and concluded with a sentence that caused an uproar: “Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.” It generated the eighteenth century equivalent of a Twitterstorm.

 The Infidel and the Professor may offer no new revelations or overturn big theories, but it makes for a thoroughly enjoyable read. Rasmussen’s prose is transparent and easy, free of the usual academic clunkiness. And, luckily for the reader, we hear much more from witty and good-humoured Hume than from serious and reserved Smith, giving us, for example, this account of Hume’s visit to Maria Theresa, the Holy Roman Empress: “After we had a little conversation with her Imperial Majesty, we were to walk backwards, through a very long room, curtseying all the way. And there was very great danger of falling foul of each other, as well as of tumbling topsy-turvy. She saw the difficulty we were in and immediately called to us, Allez, allez, messieurs, sans ceremonies. Vous n’etes pas accoutumés a ce movemen et le plancher est glissant. ("Go on, go on, sirs, without ceremony. You are not accustomed to this movement and the floor is slippery.") We esteemed ourselves very much obliged to her for this attention, especially my companions, who were desperately afraid of my falling on them and crushing them.”