Word: seamens
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...secret a modern adaptation of the bow and arrow. The Air Force stamped secret on pictures of the interiors of transport planes that had been remodeled with plush lounges for the comfort of traveling brass. The Navy put a secrecy stamp on a report of attacks by sharks on seamen, even though they took place in New York Harbor (where few people swim any more) in 1916. When one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote a note to the others suggesting less top-secret classification of papers, his note was stamped top secret. Even in the Defense Department, however...
...factors that enable Japanese and Hong Kong manufacturers to push into Western markets with low-priced textiles and TV sets. Pao operates with modern equipment and has a large pool of cheap labor in Hong Kong. While his European competitors scour the Continent for anybody willing to work for seamen's wages, Pao has set up a training school for the lengthening lines of young Chinese eager to go to sea for very low pay. In addition, Pao's enormous volume of business lets him work on a profit margin much smaller than usual. As he explains...
...when William of Orange became King of England, his wife, Queen Mary, introduced the fascinating art of macramé (from the Arab rnigrarmah, meaning ornamental braid or fringe) to palace circles. The Incas and American Indians had their own versions. Sometimes widely popular, sometimes kept alive only by seamen to whom knotting was both work and diversion, macramé had been dormant in the U.S. since...
...beneath the dense set-'em-right facts, the book is a hymn to the life of the mariner. Morison has gathered together into a 1,000-year epic the sagas of all those serendipitous seamen who set sail with visions of Cathay or a Northwest Passage-or at least a new fishing ground-and instead bumped into places like Greenland, Labrador and finally the rest of North America. The familiar names are here: Leif Ericsson, discovering his mysterious Vinland around 1000 (Morison would like to believe it was Newfoundland); John Cabot, who sought a short cut to the Indies...
...between all the landfalls, mini-histories are fitted in-asides about mutinies and scholarly lectures on navigation, on fishing, on map making, on sea chanteys ("Heisa, heisa, vorsa, vorsa, wow, wow," to quote one). The sea turns Morison into a lyric poet who sometimes applies looser moral standards to seamen than to shorebound sinners...