"I wonder a lot," writes Stilgoe. "I wonder at the looks people give the boat, at the comments people make, at what a lifeboat means now."
Readers of previous Stilgoe books such as "Outside Lies Magic" and "Alongshore" know that Stilgoe, professor of the history of landscape at Harvard, does "wonder a lot" -- and that he has a gift for sharing the fruits of his wonderment (as he does regularly in the Globe's South Weekly).
Here, Stilgoe shares even more, for it is impossible to read "Lifeboat" without coming to understand and admire Stilgoe's dedication to a self-reliance grounded in knowledge. And in Stilgoe's probing account of how and why people have -- or do not have -- disasters, the lifeboat is a perfect match for that persona.
As one account of disaster and survival follows another, a reader might be tempted to think that, alas, here's just another author emptying his notebook. But these are all stories of events that Stilgoe has internalized in order to give a grounding in fact to his metaphor.
"Lifeboat" is constructed upon Joseph Conrad's novels, the US Hydrographic Office's pilot charts for the North Atlantic, and its sailing directions for "Sundra Strait and Northwest Coast of Borneo and Off-Lying Dangers," as well as upon writings whose very titles suggest disaster: "Wrecked on a Reef;" or "Twenty Months Among the Auckland Isles;" or "Madagascar via Lifeboat."
"Nasty or perverse or hard-headed in the old salt-marsh Yankee way," writes Stilgoe, all the what-if fears of the ocean traveler -- or of the person flying out of Logan Airport and circling "far into the Atlantic before heading west" -- "lie at the heart of everything that follows here."
There is the Express, torpedoed off Madagascar in 1942, whose master, a veteran of square-rigged ships and topsail schooners, "kept his lifeboat in excellent repair and knew how to sail it to reach the coast of Africa as quickly as possible."
But there is also the Dumaru, which blew up within sight of Guam in 1918 but whose poorly designed lifeboat was blown by the trade winds, carrying its crew "into a grisly horror of death by dehydration and suicide, and then cannibalism."
