"My way of learning," quips legendary film noir detective Sam Spade, "is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery."  After that, advises Spade (a.k.a. Humphrey Bogart), you watch where the "flying pieces" go. Learning comes from studying the wreckage. "It's all right with me," he tells client Brigid O'Shaughnessy, "if you're sure none of the flying pieces will hurt you." That's the difference between active and passive learning, I suppose. You can lay back and wait for wisdom to emerge from others, or throw a wrench into entrenched orthodoxy and see where the shrapnel takes you. Which seems like a fitting way to open the International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Meeting, here in the famed private detective’s haunt of San Francisco. Hey, you take your wisdom where you find it. Let's heave away!

Here's a capsule summary of my opening-day panel. I briefed my chapter on "The State of the U.S.-China Competition," from last year's Stanford University Press volume on Competitive Strategies in the 21st Century. My overall prognosis on the competition is so-so from the American standpoint. A Spade-inspired hook for the presentation: what if they gave a competition and only one team showed up? The team that never took the field would forfeit, even if it enjoyed enough material supremacy to crush its rival. As in sports, so in geopolitics. China started competing militarily with the United States after the 1990-1991 Gulf War, stepping up its exertions following the U.S. naval deployments off Taiwan during the island's 1995-1996 election cycle. Central to the PLA's efforts was fielding inexpensive weaponry that would make another such intervention prohibitively expensive for Washington. You don't have to win outright to prevail in strategic competition. Convincing the other guy to stand down works just as well, if not better. After all, you triumph without suffering through the injuries, trash-talking, and other headaches that come with full-contact sports.

Meanwhile, the end of the Cold War had denuded the U.S. military of its strategic purpose. After the fall of the Soviet Union, no new enemy arose to focus American energies and resources. Strategic drift took hold. Few took China's military buildup seriously until recent years. Few wanted to even think about competition against Asia's traditional central power. Even today, it's far from uncommon for scholars and practitioners to hold forth grandly, proclaiming that it will be decades before China can seize Taiwan. Or they repeat factoids, pointing out for example that the U.S. defense budget exceeds the next 16 countries' combined, or that the U.S. Navy is bigger than the next 13 navies combined. That being the case, why worry?

Here's why: because the mainland can concentrate all of its military might against a fraction of U.S. strength, and it can do so in its own geographic environs -- a zone on the map where it commands superior numbers, nearby bases, intimate familiarity with the terrain, and a host of other advantages. This negates much of the U.S. advantage on paper, making for a more even contest in the waters and skies that matter. Does this mean the game is lost? Hardly. Nothing is fated. If it were, I would counsel evacuating the region and leaving allies to their own devices. China has the advantage of competing on its home field. But U.S. allies hold fixed positions on that field, known as offshore island chains and marine passages. The U.S. Navy retains sizable advantages in such domains as undersea warfare (although the submarine force could sorely use more boats, lest it find itself overmatched by dint of numbers). It should preserve and expand those advantages, making a maritime challenge unthinkable.

Not least, the character of the opposing team bestows competitive advantages on America and its friends. China comports itself like Sun Tzu's Hegemonic King, an imperious power that expects to overawe others into submission. That's a good rallying point for an alliance-builder like Washington. Few peoples relish kneeling before Zod! But U.S. leaders must take the challenge seriously, and make the conscious choice to compete in earnest. Let's hunt for low-cost ways to impose high costs on the other competitor -- and deter him from taking his game to another level.

Our church choir room is haunted. Or at least it should be. Behind the choirmaster's perch loom three stained-glass windows. The center one is a memorial to two sisters, one not quite twelve, the other not quite four, who perished on consecutive days in 1889. Sickness must've been in town. This elegy in glass, here in upscale Barrington (where, I hasten to add, the Naval Diplomat estate occupies the humble side of the tracks), reminds parishioners that pestilence, natural disasters and death respect neither youth nor affluence nor social class.

This is a perennial as lessons of history go. We navigated Peloponnesian War week with our senior students a couple of weeks back. Nature misshaped that conflict for both combatants. An earthquake demolished Sparta in the 460s B.C., felling the flower of Spartan military-age youth. Combined with ruinous demographic practices, that cataclysm set the city-state on a downward spiral that ultimately saw it succumb to a more vigorous Thebes in the 370s. A mysterious plague claimed the lives of between one-quarter and one-third of Athenians, including first citizen Pericles. Thucydides blamed the pestilence for negating Athenian self-restraint, in part by removing Pericles' calming influence on deliberations. Disease, then, helped launch the city onto a reckless course to defeat and disaster.

Now that American Civil War week is upon us, the nondiscriminatory character of natural disasters is worth remembering. Historian Garry Wills opens his moving treatise Lincoln at Gettysburg with a chapter on the "culture of death" that suffused 19th-century American society. That culture lent Abraham Lincoln's testament to the fallen its power, just as it lent Pericles' Funeral Oration -- a speech on which Lincoln consciously drew -- its power in classical antiquity. Lincoln's was an age when child mortality reached levels unthinkable to us today. One small example: there's a children's cemetery within the larger U.S. Naval Academy cemetery at Annapolis, Maryland. A children's cemetery!

But rather than foster sorrow, many landscape architects of the day designed burial grounds to encourage the living to tarry among the dead, taking a stroll or picnicking in a gorgeous setting. Even dainty Barrington has a cemetery in miniature from that tradition, perched on a bluff overlooking a backwater of the Narragansett Bay. The living consort with the dead every day, whether they realize it or not.

I believe I'm a throwback to that culture. Mount Auburn Cemetery, which dates from the 1830s, remains my favorite place in greater Boston, a metropolis boasting fine places beyond counting. There visitors encounter such notable Bostonians as Nathaniel Bowditch, the seaman whose American Practical Navigator remains in print to this day; Harvard president Edward Everett, who delivered a long-winded and, evidently, forgettable address preceding Lincoln's oratory at Gettysburg; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, my (and that half-forgotten fellow Theodore Roosevelt's) favorite poet; U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, whose Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States still mold American jurisprudence; and philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardner, the Asia aficionado whose residence now houses a vibrant art collection featuring the likes of John Singer Sargent.

That's eminent company to keep. But even in such highfalutin' surroundings, you still come across headstones commemorating Boston Brahmins of tender years. That strikes a melancholy note. Where am I going with this? I dunno. We flatter ourselves that we're masters of our own fate. To discourage hubris, it never hurts to be reminded that Black Swans are always fluttering about. That was true in classical Greece and 19th-century New England. It remains true in our contemporary world.

Between the written commentaries and a couple of radio appearances, my brief for entrusting Arctic strategy primarily to the U.S. Coast Guard and Air Force elicited some recurring questions. Some interlocutors requested specifics about hardware and organizational arrangements. Others wanted to know whence the political support for an ambitious strategy would come. Such questions are well-taken. There's no good answer to many of them this far in advance of the 2030s, when the polar ocean will open to shipping according to U.S. Navy estimates. To reply to these questions, here's one guy's list of Five Obstacles to U.S. Arctic Strategy, in descending order:

Reporters say the nicest things. One called the office on Tuesday to talk about the U.S. Coast Guard in the Arctic Ocean. This person confessed that the idea of entrusting polar waters primarily to the Coast Guard, rather than the U.S. Navy, seems really "out there." Groovy!

But naval historians might disagree. Over the centuries, seafaring states have experimented with many different ways of applying force at sea. Best known as a sea-power theorist, Sir Julian Corbett also authored an excellent series on Sir Francis Drake and the English navy under the Tudor dynasty. Corbett points out that armed merchantmen once fought off pirates -- insert obligatory "aaargh, matey" here -- and even joined the battle line when war loomed on the high seas.

Ships festooned with guns and missiles can accomplish a lot, whether their hulls are slathered in haze gray, or in white accented with blue and red stripes. Why not let the U.S. Coast Guard spearhead maritime strategy in offshore waters where it will already be performing police and disaster-response duty? The force on scene is the obvious one to manage events there, provided it's up to the task. Let's not needlessly duplicate resources and effort.

Or put a theoretical gloss on this question. The U.S. Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard now operate under a triservice Maritime Strategy. The 2007 Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower directs the services to work together, and with foreign allies and partners, to prosecute both combat and noncombat -- that is, coast-guard-like -- missions. It erects no firewall between the services or their functions. This merger of maritime forces is an extension of longstanding policy holding that that the Navy and Coast Guard comprise a joint National Fleet.

If so, how do national fleets transact business? Corbett divides any navy roughly into two fleets: the battle fleet that duels enemies for command of the sea, and the "cruiser" contingent and "flotilla" that exercise command once enemies have been subdued. The latter are light, inexpensive, and thus numerous combatants and auxiliaries, unfit for slugging it out with capital ships but capable of handling lesser threats. Such craft fan out to safeguard the sea lanes and do the host of things navies do.

If this second fleet runs into trouble, it can summon the battle fleet to come steaming to its rescue, restoring control in the face of new challenges. Indeed, Corbett depicts protecting the cruiser force and flotilla as the battle fleet's chief purpose in life. This is rather like the Navy-Coast Guard division of labor I've bruited about. The Coast Guard would assume the role of cruisers and flotilla while the Navy and Marines supply the backstop. The Coast Guard just needs enough warfighting capability to execute limited combat missions until the cavalry arrives.

That's not a far-out concept; it's classic maritime strategy. Corbett is smiling.

Editor’s Note: The Following is a guest post from Amund Lundesgaard,  a visiting fellow at the United States Naval War College and a PhD candidate at the University of Oslo.

Situated in the northernmost corner of Europe and bordering the Arctic, Norway will in the future be situated squarely between the EU and East Asia, elevating its importance to countries in these regions and providing a new and prosperous business for coastal Norway.

At least, that is the hope of Norwegian entrepreneurs and politicians with a maritime outlook. Norway is a long way from East Asia, so why the sudden optimism?

Although it is probably decades away from being a reality, climate change and a receding polar ice cap have the Norwegians hoping that the Arctic Ocean eventually will constitute a commercially viable shipping route between the north Pacific and north Atlantic. As a seafaring nation, Norway currently has interests in Asia due to its merchant fleet, and with a navigable Arctic Ocean, Norwegian interests can be tied more closely to this region.

The International Maritime Organization is currently working on making its polar code for ships mandatory, and if this succeeds, new ships will have to be ordered if shipping companies wish to transit the Arctic. The idea is that by investing in such ships, Norwegian shipping companies will profit on trans-Arctic traffic. Furthermore, the technologically advanced Norwegian shipbuilding industry will face increasing demand for its products, and additionally be much closer to important Asian markets. If these hopes materialize into actual developments, Asia’s importance to Norway will increase, and ties between Norway and countries in the region could become closer.

Furthermore, a navigable Arctic Ocean may shave transportation time and costs significantly. Given that trans-Arctic transport saves money, it is likely to bring about an increase in shipping, and ships will probably hug the Norwegian coast rather closely on their way between East Asia and the EU. Norway could then profit from servicing such trans-Arctic traffic.

The hope of politicians and business interests, predominantly in Northern Norway, is that the relatively advanced state of Norwegian infrastructure will give it a competitive edge over Russia, whose arctic infrastructure is very limited. Hence, if the International Maritime Organization makes its Polar Code mandatory, the thought is that polar equipped vessels will load and unload their Europe and Asia bound cargoes at ports in Northern Norway, while regular ships take care of the Norway-Europe leg.

A new shipping route will not only bring opportunities, however, but also many challenges. Apart from the challenges of search and rescue operations and environmental protection, Norway is weary of the great power interests such a route could attract. The Russians view the narrow waterways along its northern coast as internal waters, and therefore governed by Russian law. But this opinion is not shared by everyone, the most outspoken critic being the United States, which argues that they are international straits, and as such are governed by the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS). Disagreement, and even conflict, over such issues may directly affect the viability of this northern sea route, and it is not unlikely that East Asian powers, such as China and Japan, may disagree with Russia on this issue.

The undiscovered resources that are expected to exist in the Arctic Ocean also have the potential to cause disagreements. While the Norwegian government hopes for peaceful interaction in the region, it is nevertheless bolstering its military presence in the Arctic to exercise its jurisdiction in Norwegian waters. And if the Arctic Ocean does become a strategically important sea lane, it is likely that Asian powers such as China will increase their presence in the area. Who knows, in 30 or 40 years, Norwegian and Asian naval assets may interact on a regular basis.

This week the Naval Diplomat is taking part in a U.S. Naval Institute symposium on the memorandum from Vice Admiral Tom Copeman that calls the future of various high-profile platforms -- the latest version of the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, the Littoral Combat Ship -- into question. The editor asked me to stand into shoal water with a column on the viability and longevity of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. The punchline: the big-deck flattop may no longer be a capital ship in any strict sense. Scope it out over at USNI on Wednesday to see how I arrive at that counterintuitive finding.

Here's a teaser, and a coda. Many carrier proponents call for replacing short-legged tactical aircraft such as the F/A-18 Hornet and its successor, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, with unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs) sporting far greater ranges. The experimental X-47 UCAV, for instance, has a combat radius advertised at 2,000 nautical miles or thereabouts, well exceeding that of land-based anti-access weaponry. Embracing such airframes would confer a host of benefits, not least letting the carrier stand off out of harm's way while still getting close enough to adversary shores for the airwing to do its work.

Let's run a thought experiment. Technology is augmenting the range not just of unmanned aircraft like the X-47 but of precision weaponry of all types. Two observations, one technical and the other theoretical. First, if future combat aircraft boast ranges measured in thousands of miles, it's worth asking at what point navies can dispense with mobile airfields altogether. UCAVs could operate from strategically placed islands or landmasses abutting important theaters -- in effect converting land into an unsinkable aircraft carrier. Persuading allies to host air bases that might expose them to attack could prove tricky. Still, it's worth asking what a world without carriers would look like.

Second, we may be entering an age of land-based sea power, if indeed technology keeps extending the reach of UCAVs and other forms of long-range fire support. If so, maritime strategists should consult not just the works of Alfred Thayer Mahan and Sir Julian Corbett -- the North Star for offensively minded, bluewater seafaring states -- but also the ideas put forward by continental theorists of sea power. Thinkers from the 19th-century jeune ecole, for instance, meditated on how land powers like France could accomplish limited goals at sea in the face of globe-spanning sea powers like Great Britain. A France or Germany could deploy lesser fleets armed with niche technologies like mines and torpedoes. Such measures could hold stronger enemy navies at bay.

As technology augments the capacity of shore-based aircraft and missiles, the latter-day equivalents to the torpedo, the writings of continental theorists could find new relevance. Maybe their works belong on the shelf next to those of Mahan and Corbett.

Naval commentators are atwitter over a classified memorandum submitted by Vice Admiral Tom Copeman, the commander of U.S. Navy surface forces, to the naval establishment late last year. Among other things, Admiral Copeland reportedly proposed canceling the next variant of the workhorse Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer while pressing ahead with existing Flight IIA hulls. Also included in the memo was a recommendation to reevaluate the future of the Littoral Combat Ship program once shipbuilders have delivered the 24 craft already under contract. (The navy already shaved the LCS buy slightly, from 55 to 52 units.) Options under consideration include selecting a single design from what are really two separate ship classes; upgrading the ship's combat-systems suite while adding vertical launchers for antiship and surface-to-air missiles; or pursuing a different design entirely.

Curtailing acquisitions would start to make the LCS look like a fleet experiment -- albeit a large one, encompassing a dozen apiece of the monohull variant built by Marinette Marine and the trimarans constructed by Austal. One thing I've always admired about China's navy is its methodical approach to naval development. That comes through most clearly in Beijing's pursuit of its own DDGs. The navy built a few of several different DDGs, took them to sea to unearth their good and bad points, and incorporated their best features into future designs. Only last year did the PLA Navy settle -- apparently -- on the Type 052D DDG, touted as an Aegis equivalent, as its model for mass production. Given my druthers, the U.S. Navy will emulate this approach for the LCS program. It can exploit the vessels' forward deployment to Singapore, using it as an opportunity to vet the design and inform decisionmaking vis-à-vis future procurements.

Alas, established sea powers no longer enjoy the same leisure for fleet experimentation. Rising powers can afford to dawdle a bit. The PLA Navy could take its time because the U.S. Navy, its major competitor, remained a reliable security provider in China's maritime environs. American dominance of the Asian seas doubtless rankled with Beijing, and it prompted the leadership to postpone its aspirations along the seaward periphery. Yet U.S. maritime supremacy granted Chinese shipbuilders and navy crews time to tinker with different ship configurations. By contrast, established navies bear responsibilities. They need numbers to fill out the inventory, and they need them now. A measure of haste thus typifies fleet development. Still, using the LCS fleet's performance to shape future plans is imperative, even as the ships execute real-world missions.

Such are the burdens that befall a global sea power.

So it's Peloponnesian War week with our senior students. As always, reviewing Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and the commentaries on that long-ago conflagration sheds new light on human endeavors while raising big questions. Thucydides is truly the gift that keeps on giving. Here's a question that struck me afresh: is it more traumatic to live through a natural disaster, or through a violent upheaval like a revolution or civil war? Assume the scale of human suffering and physical devastation is comparable. Which form of cataclysm is worse?

The historian writes about them in much the same terms, implying that many classical Greeks saw war as a virtual force of nature. Sometimes the fire flickered. Major engagements during the Peloponnesian War took place in times of ostensible peace. Sometimes an inferno raged. Real tranquillity was rare.

Thucydides' major point is that civilization is a thin veneer. Death, destruction, and privation peel it away almost instantly when calamity strikes. It's no accident that he juxtaposes first citizen Pericles' eloquent Funeral Oration, lauding Athenians' democratic society and culture, against the plague that felled a quarter or more of the populace. No one knew whence the pestilence came or how it was communicated; it respected no profession or social class. Despair was among its worst effects, as was the collapse of religion. Few would bury the slain or administer funeral rites for fear of infection. In short, the plague loosened the social bonds that hold a civilization together. It's a wonder Athens rebounded.

Civil war imposed similar hardships. Later in the war the oligarchs of the island state of Corcyra (modern-day Corfu) revolted against the ruling democratic faction allied to Athens. Such turmoil, writes Thucydides, is especially cruel because it permits no one to remain neutral. Moderates swiftly perish. It pits citizen against citizen, kinsman against kinsman; old scores are settled with extreme prejudice. Indeed, a kind of Orwellian Newspeak prevails. Political factions garb themselves in lofty slogans while pursuing the basest of motives. Words mean their opposites. Prudence is cowardice, moderation effeminacy, indiscriminate violence manliness, treachery superior intelligence. Two plus two equals five!

Gruesome stuff -- but doubtless familiar to veterans of Iraq, Afghanistan, and other counterinsurgent campaigns. Ultimately, I think, civil strife wins this macabre sweepstakes. We remember a San Francisco earthquake and fire, or a Hurricane Katrina, or a tsunami and nuclear meltdown, or, more locally, a Blizzard of 2013. These are life-altering events. But no one nurses a grudge against a natural disaster, the way more benighted residents of my Southern homeland still lament -- reputedly -- the "War of Northern Aggression," or the way Chinese citizens of nationalist leanings bewail their century of humiliation.

There's no point being bitter about a tsunami or storm. It takes an enemy to envenom human affairs.

A quick follow-up on the Naval Diplomat's doomsaying vis-à-vis the future of surface battle fleets. An astute reader notes that prophets have been foretelling the downfall of surface forces since I was a kid in the Bible Belt, listening to sidewalk preachers screech that end of the world was nigh. Why, he asks, has the prophecy never come to pass despite the evidence in its favor? He forwarded a now-obscure 1971 Foreign Affairs article from Paul Cohen, titled "The Erosion of Surface Naval Power." Cohen catalogs the technological forces arrayed against surface fleets in the mid-Cold War, predicting that "large surface vessels" could never withstand "the onslaught of the submarines, surveillance systems, homing weapons, and the rest of the paraphernalia of twentieth-century military technology." They would go the way of the battleships -- formidable combatants overtaken by changes to the threat milieu.

Why have surface fleets endured?

My offhand response is that Cohen's prophecy may have been true and we didn't know for sure. Technological progress can render weaponry moot, but there's no way to tell without pitting old versus new in the closest thing there is to a laboratory environment -- namely, battle. The U.S.-Soviet maritime competition was never put to the test of combat. In Sea Power in the Machine Age, strategist Bernard Brodie points out that naval engagements take place too seldom to draw firm lessons-learned. Extrapolating from a sample size of one, or a few, is intellectually hazardous. Worse (from an analytical standpoint, anyway), there have been no fleet engagements since Leyte Gulf in 1944. We have a sample size of zero, meaning that debates over the relative merits and drawbacks of various hardware remain largely abstract.

In The Political Uses of Sea Power, published not long after Cohen's article, Edward Luttwak opined that the outcomes of peacetime maritime confrontations were decided through a kind of poll: which contender did most observers believe would have prevailed in wartime? But again, perceptions can be out of sync with harsh realities. Luttwak alluded to this, noting that relatively backward but menacing-looking Soviet men-of-war often made a more impressive sight than advanced but less imposing U.S. Navy warships. Thus the Soviet Navy might come out on top in a peacetime showdown, whatever the results of actual combat might say. Bottom line, we enter the intellectual lists armed with the best weapons available, usually technical specifications, doctrine, tactics, and the like. But definite results to tactical debates are elusive absent a real-world trial of arms.

As Clausewitz counsels, there's no escaping the guesswork quotient in military affairs. Cohen may have had it right, lo these many years ago.

Somehow Herman Melville's epic Moby-Dick, among the greatest of American novels, managed to make zero impression on me in high school. None. Maybe my teacher committed the cardinal and all-too-common sin of force-feeding the class a Cliff's Notes account of the book. It's easy to furnish generic takeaways, hard to get a bunch of sullen yoots to debate the big themes at play in great literature. Maybe it's because the world Melville presents -- ranging from 19th-century Massachusetts seaports like New Bedford and Nantucket to the vasty Pacific whaling grounds -- was too alien surly teenagers growing up alongside the Gulf of Mexico during the Carter administration to connect with.

Whatever the case, it wasn't until a few years back that I picked up a paperback copy in (if memory serves) Atlanta Airport and read it on some overseas trip or another. Some combination of age and having made a home in New England helped me grok Moby-Dick at long last. What a book!

Nor does Melville's body of work stop there. Narrower in scope but no less engrossing -- particularly for anyone with naval service -- is White-Jacket. In 1843, Melville shipped aboard a U.S. Navy frigate in the Pacific, serving a year as an ordinary seaman before leaving the service when the ship returned home. The book is a quasi-autobiographical yarn about life on board a U.S. Navy frigate during the age of sail. For example, Melville gives a dramatic account of how the fictional USS Neversink rounds Cape Horn, one of the world's more fearsome passages for sail-driven vessels.

What startled me most about White-Jacket, though, is how contemporary his descriptions of sea life sound. Many of the Neversink crewmen will be instantly familiar to anyone who's served in modern U.S. Navy surface ships, the passage of time and advances in technology notwithstanding. There's the captain, "almost supreme ... in the internal affairs of his ship." Ship captains are the last absolute monarchs this side of Pyongyang. The Neversink skipper, writes Melville, was "a Harry the Eighth afloat, bluff and hearty; and as kingly in his cabin as Harry on his throne. For a ship is a bit of terra firma cut off from the main; it is a state in itself; and the captain is its king." His realm is "almost a despotism like the Grand Turk's." There his "word is law," and "he absolutely commands as far as eye can reach. Only the moon and stars are beyond his jurisdiction. He is lord and master of the sun," with the power to determine -- for the ship's deck log, or official record, at any rate -- when noon strikes.

And there's the first lieutenant, or second in command, a personage known as the executive officer, or XO, these days. Notes Melville, the post of first lieutenant "demands a good disciplinarian, and, every way, an energetic man. By the captain he is held responsible for everything; by that magnate, indeed, he is supposed to be omnipresent; down in the hold, and up aloft, at one and the same time." He's the detail guy, the administrator, and the skipper's omnipresent hatchet man. Every American sailor has at least one blood-curdling XO tale to tell.

Melville explains disparities in temperament among the enlisted crewmen by their jobs (or "ratings"), and in particular by the part of the ship where they do those jobs. Sailors who worked aloft, handling spars, tackle, and sails, were upbeat because of the fresh air and the grand maritime vistas, and because, up in the rigging, they were physically removed from the petty rivalries and cruelties that typified life on the main and lower decks. That remains largely true of sailors who ply their trades in topside spaces. Denizens of the lower decks, such as those who maintained and fired the Neversink's great guns, exhibited more taciturn attitudes toward life for the reciprocal reasons. The gunners were like today's steam engineers, who inhabit hot spaces, work grinding hours, and seldom glimpse the light of day.

The contemporary feel to Melville's storytelling speaks volumes about why navies are the tradition-bound services they are. White-Jacket makes a great read, both for old salts indulging their nostalgia and for landlubbers who want to catch sight of life on the raging foam.