AMERICAN CRISIS NO. ONE

by William H. Benson

December 20, 2012

     By mid-December of 1776, George Washington was despondent. The American War for Independence was not going well. His troops were undisciplined, often bootless, lacked firearms and ammunition, had little access to food and clothing, and faced two well-equipped substantial European armies: the British red-coats, plus their mercenaries from Germany, the hated Hessians.

     William Howe, the British general, had chased Washington out of New York, had pursued him hotly across the state of New Jersey in the fall of 1776, and then forced the Virginian to hole up that winter on the west side of the Delaware River just inside Pennsylvania. Convinced that he had crushed this silly American rebellion, Howe departed the battlefield for the comforts of New York City, intending to return next spring to finish off George Washington and his pitiful army.

     It was accepted in Europe that during the winter season, generals and armies would retire. George Washington though had not received his military training in Europe.

     One soldier in Washington’s rag-tag army then was Thomas Paine, the famed writer of Common Sense. He had joined the American army in New York, at Fort Lee on the Hudson River, and had watched in dismay as Howe chased Washington across New Jersey into Pennsylvania. At night “on a drum-head by campfire” he would write down his thoughts, and in early December he left the army and returned to Philadelphia where he published his first American Crisis.

     “These are the times that try men’s souls,” Paine wrote. “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”

     Of all of Paine’s literary works, those words from his first American Crisis are his most quoted. Their imagery is enlightening: some soldiers will fight only in the summer, when the sun shines, but the fight is upon them now in the gloom of a December cold.

     Washington read Paine’s words and decided. He would not wait all winter and allow Howe to bully him next spring. He would seize the initiative now. He understood that a number of his troops were set to leave his army on December 31, their term of enlistment expiring. Tradition has it that on the afternoon of December 25, Christmas Day, Washington had his men assemble and listen as their officers read to them Paine’s powerful words.

     Feeling energized, the troops gathered up their muskets, what little ammunition they had, and followed Washington as he crossed the Delaware River, back into New Jersey, that night. The rain, sleet, and snow chilled them. A strong northeast wind cut through their coats. Some had no boots or shoes. Ice sheets and chunks of ice formed in the water. Conditions were most inhospitable.

     After a brief rest on the New Jersey shore, Washington marched his troops a dozen miles south towards Trenton where at eight o’clock in the morning, in a raging snowstorm, the Americans surrounded the Hessians. In two hours, it was all over when the surprised Hessians surrendered.

     On January 4, Washington attacked a British garrison at Princeton, New Jersey and claimed a second victory there. These two battles—at Trenton and Princeton—gave Americans the hope that they could defeat the Europeans. Washington though would need another six years before the British signed a peace treaty that recognized American independence.

     Americans recollect Washington’s daring raid on Trenton because of the impressive painting Washington Crossing the Delaware that Emanuel Leutze painted in 1850. Leutze has Washington standing up, facing the New Jersey shore. Seamen are rowing their small craft across a river filled with chunks of ice, and Lieutenant James Monroe stands behind Washington holding the American flag.

     The painting represents a historical fact that symbolizes what the historian David Hackett Fischer calls a “discovery about the human condition—that people could organize a society on the basis of liberty and freedom and actually make it work.”

     Early in the war Washington struggled to find his own leadership style, so different from that of the British or Germans. He said, “Men accustomed to unbounded freedom, and no control, cannot brook the Restraint which is indispensably necessary to the good Order and Government of an Army.” Because his troops were volunteers, he knew he could not bully them. He said, “A people unused to restraint must be led; they will not be drove.” So he stood in the boat with his troops and led them.

     Christmas is not the usual time to think of war and battling an enemy, and yet Washington, pinned down on the Delaware’s west bank, decided that he would raid Trenton on December 26. Fortunately for him and his American soldiers, his gamble succeeded.

EARTHQUAKES

by William H. Benson

December 6, 2012

     John Bradbury, a Scottish naturalist, came to the United States to float down the Mississippi River and collect botanical specimens. On December 15, 1811 he tied up his boat at Chicksaw Bluffs—the site of the the future Memphis, Tennessee—and retired for the night. At 2:15 a.m., he was awakened because the earth was shaking. Bradbury said that “All nature seemed running into chaos as wild-fowl fled, trees snapped, and river banks tumbled into the water.”

     Four aftershocks quickly followed, and then two more actual earthquakes shook the earth on January 23 and February 7, 1812. These quakes killed few, if any, mainly because of the sparse population in Arkansas and Missouri then. One can imagine the destruction if another earthquake equal in magnitude struck Memphis, Tennessee today.

     With larger human populations covering the Planet Earth, earthquakes now are deadly. Buildings collapse killing the occupants therein. Gas lines break causing fires, and if the quake occurs at sea, giant tsunami tidal waves flood the coastal lands for miles inland. 

     Japan’s recent earthquake struck on Friday, March 11, 2011. The floor of the Pacific Ocean, at a point 43 miles east of Japan’s coastline, was suddenly shoved upward, in what is called an “undersea megathrust earthquake.” With a magnitude of 9.03 it triggered a tsunami that caused immense property damage, swamped a nuclear reactor, and drowned 19,334 people.

     Haiti’s earthquake occurred on Tuesday, January 12, 2010. Its epicenter was 16 miles west of Port-au-Prince, and its magnitude was only 7.0, but it killed between 220,000 and 316,000.

     Nearly as many were killed on Sunday, December 26, 2004 when another undersea megathrust earthquake triggered a tsunami that propelled a series of waves that washed ashore in Indonesia, the Sumatra Islands, Thailand, and India. This 9.3 magnitude earthquake killed 230,000.

     Then there was the earthquake in Anchorage, Alaska on March 27, 1964 that shook buildings and homes for nearly four minutes, killing 143 people. That quake reached a magnitude of 9.2.

     The worst natural disaster in United States history occurred in San Francisco on Wednesday, April 18, 1906 at 5:12 a.m. Some 3000 people lost their lives, and the quake destroyed 80% of San Francisco’s buildings and homes. Fires turned the city into a burning inferno.

     The Lisbon earthquake struck on November 1, 1755, All Saints Day, at 9:40 a.m. Its epicenter was 200 miles west of Portugual’s coast out in the Atlantic, but the quake destroyed Lisbon, killing perhaps as many as 100,000 people.

     Then there are the natural catastrophe’s above earth’s surface. Just days ago we witnessed the incredible power that Hurricane Sandy unleashed when it struck New York and New Jersey, bringing with it high winds and floods. It is only natural that human beings crouch in terror whenever they hear of such disasters, wondering when their turn will come.

     People react differently to disasters. Some journalists will spiel off wild predictions. Last Sunday in the New York Times, James Atlas predicted, “Whether in 50 or 100 or 200 years, there is a good chance New York City will sink beneath the sea.” Really? Why make such a statement without offering proof?

     Others will blame the gods. The 1811-1812 earthquake “reinforced the evangelical religious notion that the end of the world was at hand.” Others will forecast future disasters. A character named Iben Browning predicted that another earthquake would occur on December 3, 1990 again in Arkansas and Missouri. The public was sufficiently alarmed, and so people stockpiled food, water, and batteries. Now it is called the Great Non-Event of 1990.

     The thinkers write novels. The Lisbon earthquake so disturbed the French writer, Voltaire, that he wrote Candide, or Optimism. In this rollicking satire, Voltaire has Candide’s instructor, Dr. Pangloss, teach the young Candide that “things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for as all things have been created for some end; they must necessarily be created for the best end.” Candide goes out into the real world and experiences endless misfortunes. He walks through Lisbon days after the earthquake flattened the city. Through it all, Dr. Pangloss preaches that “this is the best of all possible worlds.”   

     In Candide Voltaire is objecting to the German philosopher Liebnitz, who argued that “our universe is the best possible one that God could have created.” Voltaire knew, and we know that it is not the best possible world. Earthquakes and tsunamis kill innocent people. Bacteria and viruses kill children. Old people suffer from arthritis. Cancer strikes young and old. House flies torment us.  

     We may live on this planet, but we do not rule it. Earth moves and acts according to its own rules that are far removed from our own interests. What human beings do best is adapt to whatever Earth tosses at us. After a flood and after our house collapses, we rebuild. We kill houseflies, and we find cures for diseases. We strive to make this planet more comfortable, in spite of the earthquakes.

OBAMA VS. ROMNEY

by William H. Benson

November 22, 2012

     Although President Obama won 332 electoral votes to Romney’s 206, the popular vote was closer: 62.6 million to 59.1 million. Obama won the northeast: all the states between Minnesota and Iowa in the west to Maine in the east were blue. He won just two states in the South, Virginia and Florida, and he won the three states on the west coast, plus Hawaii. Then, in the country’s interior he won exactly three states: Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada. All others were red, for Mitt Romney.

     By now the election-shocked Republicans are facing the ugly reality that they lost an election that they were so confident they would win.

     Why did Romney lose? One pundit suggested that the Republicans and their “super PAC’s” “bet on the wrong tactic.” Those, such as Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, spent nearly $500 million on television advertisements, but “voters said they were overwhelmed by the din of ads and tuned it all out.” Voters felt that listening to Big Brother’s steady drone on television was most unsatisfactory.

     Instead, the Obama campaign focused on the swing states’ voters and urged them to get to the polls and vote, a more personal approach that proved more effective.

     Maureen Dowd, a New York Times columnist, observed that “Romney was an unpalatable candidate,” mainly because he and his party “made little effort not to alienate women.” Karen Hughes, George W. Bush’s former aide, said, “If another Republican man says anything about rape other than it is a horrific, violent crime, I want to personally cut out his tongue.” Single women voted for Obama.

     Then, last summer Romney alienated the poor when he said that “47% of the American people will vote for President Obama because they are dependent upon government, believe they are victims, and expect government to care for them.” As a life-long Republican, I was most disheartened when I heard that comment. Saying that is not how one wins an election. The young and the poor voted for Obama.

     In addition, some voters saw in Romney a return to the George W. Bush days of tax cuts for the rich, un-winnable foreign wars, excessive spending, a galloping federal deficit, and an arrogant display of unilateral power that alienated the world. They said, “Never again a GWB,” and they voted for Obama.

     Romney also failed to find an economic message that would appeal across the demographic lines. Ross Douthat, another columnist, said that “Latino voters don’t relate to the current G.O.P. fixation on upper-bracket tax cuts.” So, the Latino’s voted for Obama.

     Observing this outcome, William Falk, a columnist at The Week, said that “America’s demographics are changing, and at the same time we remain a fundamentally centrist nation.” He pointed out that the young, the single, the poor, the women, and the Hispanics are no longer the outliers, stuck on the fringe, but that, “They are the authentic face of America.” Our nation is no longer just WASP men.

     Also, the American voters are skeptical of all extreme political positions, and so they tend to vote towards the center. Falk points out that late in the election, “Romney nearly caught Obama when he ran away form the ‘severely conservative’ positions he adopted during the primaries. But it was too late.”

     What can the dazed Republicans do now to revitalize their party and look forward to 2016, when   they will not be racing against an incumbent? The Republicans have four years an appealing candidate, someone without the arrogant, white-male dominating attitude, so redolent of W and Romney.

     They might find a candidate who will extricate us from the Middle East’s wars. Iran, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Israel, and Palestine are, so said Thomas Friedman, “countries too hard to fix but too dangerous to ignore.” Such a candidate would insist that the foes and the entire region lead the way in finding solutions, and not just the United States.

     The ideal Republican candidate should urge the legislators to reform our immigration policies, discover alternatives to Obamacare, diminish the ill effects of crony capitalism, build more schools than prisons, and work towards not only balancing the budget but paying down the federal debt. This means higher taxes, less government, and entitlement reform, but those are issues we must face now or later. Now is preferable.  

     Short-term the legislators face a fiscal cliff, but long-term I think that they should climb that mountain of debt with shovels in their hands and begin digging a hole deep into it, instead of adding more to it. If any Republican would just start leveling with the American people in those kind of words, I say they would listen. They may not like it, but they would listen.

     The Republicans have four years to plan, to look deep within themselves, to re-evaluate their  conservative views, and to insist upon policies that would thwart the wild-spending legislators, that would promote family values, and that would encourage affordable education for the poor and the middle classes. It will then fall to the G.O.P. “to reform and streamline this government.”

RICHARD NIXON AND BILLY GRAHAM

by William H. Benson

November 8, 2012

     Since I am writing this on the Sunday before the Tuesday election, I do not know that election’s outcome. As to who will sit in the Oval Office for the next four years, I dare not predict, other than to say that it is difficult to beat the incumbent, who has a better field position and a head start. Yet, it has happened in recent years. Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980, after Carter served only a single term, and Bill Clinton soundly defeated the first George Bush after he won the Persian Gulf War.

     Carter and Bush I were outclassed. Walter Cronkite called Ronald Reagan “the most winsome man I ever met,” something that the American public instinctively knew and appreciated. Reagan’s jokes and affable manners were as attractive as Carter’s somber demeanor and hesitant leadership style were repellent. And Bill Clinton was a golden Wonder-boy when contrasted with the elder George Bush.

     For every election’s winner there is also a loser, and to lose an election is extraordinarily painful. George McGovern recently passed away, but in 1972 when running against Nixon, the incumbent, McGovern won only a single state, Massachusetts. Then, in 1984 Walter “Fritz” Mondale also won a single state, his native Minnesota, when running against Reagan, the incumbent then.

     After his devastating loss, Mondale called McGovern and asked him, “George, how long does it take for the hurt to wear off?” “Fritz,” said McGovern, “I’ll call you when it does.”

     The sorest loser in modern history has to be Richard Nixon. He ran for President in 1960 and lost to Kennedy, and then in 1962 he ran for California’s governor against the incumbent Edmund G. Brown and lost that race also. On November 7, 1962, the day after the election, Nixon appeared at a press conference in Los Angeles and announced that he was finished with campaigns and elections and that he was retiring from politics. The reporters looked up at him, stunned by his frankness.

     Then, Nixon spoke directly at them, saying, “just think how much you’re going to be missing. You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” This was an unfortunate choice of words, because eventually he did return to politics, did run for president six years later, and did win the 1968 election, defeating Hubert Humphrey.

     The press now had more opportunity to kick Nixon around, and kick him they did. His presidency was marked by sheer animosity for the media, and it was the media, specifically Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post, which finally did him in by exposing Nixon’s coverup on Watergate.

     Throughout his career as Congressman, Senator, and Vice-President, Nixon had befriended the Southern Baptist evangelist Billy Graham, and once Nixon was President, he invited Graham frequently into the White House, to stay in one of the bedrooms, and visit him in the Oval Office. One biographer wrote that “Richard Nixon and Billy Graham were simply two pieces cut from the same American apple pie. They were just naturally fated to gravitate together at some point in their lives.

      Graham considered Nixon his friend, and spoke up for him when his enemies spoke or wrote ill of him, but they saw in Richard Nixon what Billy Graham would or could not see. “Like some dark enchantment,” Billy “proceeded in a kind of perceptual and moral glaucoma,” dwelling in an “abiding eager innocence throughout his relationship with Nixon.”

     It was the tapes that knocked Graham’s perceptions of Nixon off kilter. Billy read the transcripts of the recorded tapes of Nixon’s conversations in the Oval Office, and was stunned. “Those tapes,” he said, “revealed a man that I never knew; I never saw that side of him.” His language was indeed foul, coarse, and vulgar, but it was the conniving, deceitful, and manipulative manner that he governed himself and the White House that struck Billy most hard.

     Watergate was Nixon’s subordinates’ attempt to ensure that he, the incumbent, won the job of President in 1972, and he did win, defeating George McGovern forty-nine states to just one. Watergate was so pointless, so needless. He would have won without his Plumbers Gang breaking into a Watergate hotel room. How foolish it was to go to such extremes to win an election already won.

     Years later, Billy admitted, “I think I always thought a great deal more of him than he thought of me.” Face it, Billy; he used you. He befriended you, for a reason: to earn political points, and so that the American public would think that he agreed with your Christian principles of decency and fair-dealing, when he did not.

     Jimmy Carter still lives and so does Bill Clinton and the two George Bush’s, but Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford are both gone as is Richard Nixon, who passed away at the age of eighty-one on April 22, 1994. As for Billy Graham, the “Preacher to the Presidents,” he celebrates his 94^th birthday on November 7, and I and the nation wish him well. Perhaps he can preach to the next President: either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. His words might help, they may not, but they could do little harm.

DETECTIVE NOVELS

by William H. Benson

October 25, 2012

     It is a winning formula. Create an appealing character, place him or her in a complex, hard-to-crack situation, and watch the plot boil. For decades, authors have written mysteries by that same formula.   

     Agatha Christie brought to life Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple and sold thousands of books. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle found fortune and fame when he described the mystery-solving talents of his pipe-smoking detective Sherlock Holmes. Earle Stanley Gardner wrote eighty-six Perry Mason mysteries. Then there is Dick Francis’s Sid Halley, Dashiell Hammet’s Phillip Marlowe, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, Robert Parker’s Spencer, and multitudes more. The suspense holds our attention because as human beings we are curious. We read because we want to know what happened.

     But we should not limit ourselves to just mysteries. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote adventures, stories of Tarzan swinging through African jungles, and of John Carter fighting the creatures that inhabit the planet Mars. Ian Fleming wrote fourteen James Bond spy novels. Then there is Fran Striker’s Lone Ranger, a detective but in a Western setting.

     Then there are the comic book superheroes, such as Superman, Batman, and Spiderman, who solve immense problems with their superior-strength, skill, and acumen. In the movies there are hundreds of larger-than-life characters. For example, Sylvester Stallone built a franchise around his fictional boxer Rocky Balboa. It is difficult to determine who is more real: Stallone or Rocky? Wherever one looks, one sees the same formula again and again: a larger-than-life character blessed with skills of perception, or strength, or endurance.

     These characters are normally on the side of “good.” Few, if any, are sewing seeds of discord and enmity, for there is nothing attractive or appealing in that. Instead, they sort out tangled webs of intrigue, and bring resolution and insight to a stack of problems. For example, the Lone Ranger offers hope and comfort to hard-up people eking a living on the western frontier, and Tarzan kills a lion, a rhinoceros, a panther and so protects Jane Porter.    

     It is human nature to allow a story to invade our thoughts and carry us into a fictional world, one where perplexing circumstances are at the last moment corrected, where the super person performs effortlessly, and where people are suddenly relieved from their tensions and burdens.

     The creator though remains hidden, screened from sight by his or her text. The author is a far less-compelling figure than the fictional created-being. Where the creation assumes a fabled existence, the author is stuck in the drab and colorless world called the present, one absent the excitement and intrigue that the creation inhabits. There is a distinction between creator and creation.

     The English majors are those best at bringing into life these wonder-filled creations. Those students are superb at reading, describing, and revealing any given character’s motivations and actions. On the other hand, the history majors are relegated to observing only real-life, actual, historical persons. Two different mindsets: the former includes intrigue, tension, superhuman capabilities, complex plots, a powerful antagonist, and admirable characteristics, whereas the latter limits him or herself to a real person and to identifying what happened and why.

      Hollywood jumps into the fictional world because it dazzles, tempts, and grabs our minds better than the historical world does. History may provide a movie its background, but the story is fictional.    

     Edgar Allan Poe wrote the first detective novel, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” featuring Dupin, a predecessor to Sherlock Holmes, but Poe downplayed what he called, “these tales of ratiocination,” because he observed that “people think them more ingenious than they are.” He asks, “where is the ingenuity in unraveling a web which you yourself have woven for the express purpose of unraveling?” The answer is that the story holds our attention and keeps our innate boredom at bay for an hour or two.

     The elections will be over in two weeks and then we will know. When we vote, we cease dwelling in the fictional world, peer at the candidates, and select one rather than another. Inevitably, the candidates fall short of fulfilling the promises they made to get our votes, dashing our expectations. We expect a super person, but we get someone human, all too human, someone much like ourselves.

      The truth is that there is no Lone Ranger who will stealthily enter into our lives and solve the problems we ourselves have created. There is no Tarzan to fight the wild animals lurking in the forests we have blindly walked into, and there is no Sherlock Holmes to sort out the crimes we and others have committed. No one among us wears a cape or a mask, or drives a Batmobile. We are too much human.

     Or as Cassius explained to Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AND HIS SHIPS

by William H. Benson

October 11, 2012

     Christopher Columbus achieved preeminence during the Age of Exploration, that most adventurous chapter in Europe’s long and troubled history. The Age had begun when Portugual’s Prince Henry the Navigator in the fifteenth century, had dispatched his vessels south along Africa’s western coast, hoping to find a route to the treasures that he knew Asia possessed.

      Eventually, it was Vasco da Gama who rounded Africa’s southern cape, sailed across the Indian Ocean and reached India. Thereafter, the Portuguese set up trading stations in India, Africa, and China.

     Because the Spanish king and queen, Ferdinand and Isabella, wanted a part in this lucrative trade, they agreed to support the Italian mariner, Christopher Columbus, who convinced them that he could sail due west and reach Asia, India and China. American history began on October 12, 1492 when Columbus landed his three Spanish caravels on an island in the Bahamas. 

     Because of Columbus’ daring, Europeans no longer considered the Atlantic Ocean a barrier, a blockade to travel. By conquering the Atlantic Ocean, he minimized the world to a navigable size. His feat was a display of human ingenuity, a confluence of skills and adaptations that men had learned over several millennium.

     Human beings are land animals, ill-equipped to survive little more than a few minutes in the water. To transport themselves to distant lands, men had to develop the means to cross the oceans and seas riding atop the water. Unlike on land, where men had harnessed a horse, mule, ox, or camel in order to carry them vast distances, men had not discovered any ocean animals that they might similarly domesticate. Whales dived too deep for men to ride on their backs.

     Men understood that they had to take land-based items with them if they were to survive when riding the waves. So, knowing that logs float on water, they chopped down trees, cut them up, and assembled them into rafts, boats, and ships. Men next wove thread made from plants into cloth that when stretched upon a mast served as a sail that harnessed the wind and propelled the ship.

     Thus, the principle was set: adapt land products in order to survive when floating atop the water. It is not a coincidence that a three-masted ship is sometimes called a “bark.”

     Some might suggest that because ship-building was so important to the English that in their language they attached it as a suffix to other words to describe an exceptional skill level, such as horsemanship, friendship, seamanship, and workmanship. Or it is more likely that the word for a floating vessel originated as watercraftsmanship or some other variation and that it was gradually shortened to just “ship.”

     Jacques Barzun, the historian and author of From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present, argued in favor of the Greek word “techne” rather than “technology” to describe an accumulation of skill. Of techne, Barzun said, “The word is short and exact; technology is neither.” The construction of ocean-going vessels in the fifteenth-century was indeed Europe’s newest techne.

     It was not enough to know how to sail a ship. It was also important that a mariner know where he was in relation to his home, and in what direction and how fast he was moving. He studied the stars and identified Polaris, the North Star that sits fixed, overhead at the North Pole, at 90º latitude, but at the equator, at 0º latitude, the star appears to sit on the northern horizon. Sailors knew with astonishing accuracy their latitude base upon Polaris’s height in the night-time sky. “I am constant, as the North Star,” wrote Shakespeare in his play Julius Caesar.

     Navigators began to make instruments to assist in determining a position at sea; Columbus took with him a compass, an astrolabe, an hourglass, the quadrant, the backstaff, and charts. The idea developed of applying to a map a grid of latitude and longitude, and so maps of useful assistance.

     Christopher Columbus’s Spanish caravels were an amazing display of human ingenuity, techne, and workmanship, involving shipwrights, astro-navigators, cartographers, and instrument makers. He sailed west across the Atlantic Ocean because of the efforts contributed by many others.

     Columbus sailed the Atlantic, but so did the Norsemen centuries before, but in a more northerly route. The Chinese circumnavigated the Indian Ocean in their “junks,” early in the fifteenth century, and so did the Arabians in their “dhows.” James Michener, in his book Hawaii, wrote that the Polynesians conquered the Pacific Ocean in crude dugout canoes seven centuries before Columbus, and that by doing so, they “accomplished miracles.”

     Men and women gaze upon their ships with fondness; this is a love affair that has never faltered. Cabins in those city-like cruise ships are normally filled, and daily those ships traverse the Atlantic, Pacific, and Mediterranean. Some sail for pleasure, to see the sights; others do so for business or trade; and not a few others, like Columbus, do so because they are greedy for gold.