Quote of the Day (Kenneth Roberts, on a Colonial Action Hero)

“The man himself was thick That was my first impression, one of solid thickness: not mental thickness, but physical — a kind of physical unkillableness, it might be called.

“His lips were thick, and so was his long, straight nose. His hands, clasped before him on the table, were enormous and muscular; and their fingers, pallid by comparison with the brown of his face and hands, looked parboiled, as though left overlong in water. Beneath his large eyes the flesh was puffy; and his shoulders, sloping down from a bull-like neck, filled his buckskin hunting shirt so solidly that the leather might have been shrunk to fit them. The breadth of his chest and upper arms gave him the look of holding a deep breath….

“Yet when he spoke, his manner was genial, as though he addressed an equal — which was contrary to the attitude of important military men, according to my understanding. When he smiled, it was hard to tell the meaning of his smile. It might have been considered admonitory, or kindly, or even as sheepish, depending on the state of mind of the person to whom he spoke; but to me it seemed to indicate that he was, at heart, a good-natured man.”—American novelist Kenneth Roberts (1885-1957), Northwest Passage (1937)

For about two decades in the last century, Kenneth Roberts was a perennial presence on bestseller lists with his sprawling works of historical fiction. More than 40 years ago, when I was a student assistant at my local library, his novels could still be found on shelves. But when I went looking for a copy of Northwest Passage, perhaps his most famous one, I couldn’t get my hands on it, so I ordered it through Amazon.

I doubt that you’ll find many college English classes that will cite Roberts as a creator of an innovative or dazzling style, the way they might with Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway. But as the above passage shows, he could write vividly.

You can practically see in your mind’s eye the historical figure he was describing: Major Robert Rogers, a colonial military leader in the French and Indian Wars whose unconventional tactics foreshadowed the modern “Special Forces.” (I briefly described his life in this blog post from four years ago.)

Once they bought this novel and dreamed of adapting it for film, executives at MGM must surely have had one of their studio actors in mind for the role: Spencer Tracy. The two-time Oscar winner might not have possessed the matinee-idol looks of Clark Gable. 

But his bulk (solid at this time in his late 30s, overweight as he aged) strongly suggested Rogers, and his naturalistic style of acting gave him an everyman quality seen more recently in the likes of Gene Hackman, Brian Dennehy and Ed Harris.

I remember as a child seeing Tracy in the 1940 movie made from Roberts’ novel. (Well, it turned out only to be the first half of it, but that’s a story for another day.) I couldn’t imagine anyone better able to lead a group of men through all manner of perils than the Major Rogers he created onscreen, including the memorable “human-chain” scene across a treacherous river.

Not unlike Tracy himself, Rogers— at least as imagined by Roberts—could find something within himself to win the respect of all kinds of men. But at bottom, his appeal may have rested—as suggested by Tracy’s smile in the accompanying picture here—on the fact that he was “a good-natured man.”

This Day in Military History (Robert Rogers, Special Ops Pioneer, Dies)

May 18, 1795—Major Robert Rogers, a New Hampshire soldier whose tactics and leadership of an elite unit of unconventional warriors in the French and Indian War foreshadowed the modern “Special Forces,” died alone and impoverished at age 63 in London, far removed from the brilliant exploits in the North American wilderness that made him famous throughout the 13 American colonies.

If you are wondering what a picture of buckskin-clad Spencer Tracy is doing in a post about an 18^th-century military commander, it is because the great actor spurred my interest in this legendary but flawed soldier by playing him, with his usual intensity and conviction, in Northwest Passage, King Vidor’s 1940 adaptation of the bestselling novel by Kenneth Roberts. 

I can still remember being enthralled as a child by numerous scenes in this epic Technicolor tale of daring and survival—notably, a “human chain” that enables “Rogers’ Rangers” to cross a torrential river.

With America more than a year away from entering World War II, Rogers’ exploits showed how America, with little of the intense training that characterized Continental soldiers, could still revolutionize warfare by teaching a motley force unconventional new tactics. 

“Rogers’ Rangers” represented a sharp break with the English tradition of military service, where commissions were bought and common soldiers were drilled to march in strict formation. In contrast, the soldiers that Rogers molded were woodsmen, provincials, farmers, and Indian scouts, all ready to follow their charismatic leader in asymmetrical warfare where traditional methods could not find traction.

The film ended in triumph for Rogers and his soldiers. MGM had originally subtitled their feature “Book One: Rogers’ Rangers,” in the hope that its success would convince the studio’s most acclaimed male star that he should come back for the second half of the Roberts novel. 

But Tracy, exhausted by its arduous on-location filming, saw the downbeat second half of the book as a reason why it should not be filmed. “I’ll play him [Rogers] up to the point where he has achieved his objective, but I’ll be damned if I’ll play him when he becomes a drunkard. Audiences won’t want to see him in that stage of life.”

Offhand, I can think of only two epic films that challenged audiences with second halves that saw their real-life heroes suffer the kind of shattering disillusionment and death that Tracy saw as box-office poison: Lawrence of Arabia and Reds, about the American journalist who served as an eyewitness-participant in the Russian Revolution, John Reed. Northwest Passage, about an American further removed in time, would have been an even harder sell in tracing how its hero subsequently failed at politics, business, and marriage. 

The great 19^th-century historian of the colonial conflict between England and France, Francis Parkman, summed up Rogers’ opposing tendencies in Montcalm and Wolfe: 

“He had passed his boyhood in the rough surroundings of a frontier village. Growing to manhood, he engaged in some occupation which, he says, led him to frequent journeyings in the wilderness between the French and English settlements...He does not disclose the nature of this mysterious employment; but there can be little doubt that it was a smuggling trade with Canada. His character leaves much to be desired. He had been charged with forgery, or complicity in it, seems to have had no scruple in matters of business, and after the war was accused of treasonable dealings with the French and Spaniards in the west. He was ambitious and violent, yet able in more ways than one, by no means uneducated, and so skilled in woodcraft, so energetic and resolute, that his services were invaluable.”

A few of Rogers’ exploits were especially noteworthy, not only for the way he employed speed and surprise against the French and their Native American allies but also for the hardships endured by him and his men:

*The St. Francois Raid, the climax of a 150-mile march, much of it through marshy bog, that ended in the destruction of an Indian village that had served as the launching pad for several deadly raids into the northern colonies; 

*The Second Battle of the Snowshoes, in which, after attempting to ambush the French, Rogers’ men had the tables turned on them—surviving by the skin of their teeth (including, a possibly apocryphal tale claims, by sliding 400 feet down a sheer cliff to a frozen Lake George; and 

*The 1760 capture of Fort Detroit and other French outposts, secured after Rogers and the Rangers marched west—through enemy forests not even charted by the English.

Rogers’ career after the end of the French and Indian Wars marked a tragic fall from grace. He had made an enemy of General Thomas Gage, a rival of Rogers’ commander and mentor, British General Jeffrey Amherst. Gage, as Parkman indicated in the passage I quoted earlier, brought charges of treason against Rogers and had him hauled to Detroit in chains.

Rogers was acquitted following a trial. But, at the start of the American Revolution, he made a worse enemy in George Washington, who, because of the major’s extensive travels in the colonies as unrest spread against English rule, suspected that Rogers was a Loyalist spy. 

Forced to choose side, Rogers elected to fight against the New Englanders he grew up with, even playing a role in one of the earliest English intelligence coups of the war: the capture of Nathan Hale. But he was removed from a leadership role of “The Queen’s Rangers,” and his drinking and indebtedness mounted until he faded into obscurity far from home. 

Nevertheless, his contribution to American warfare remains. It not only was maintained through his aide John Stark, who would win the Battle of Bennington for the colonials in the American Revolution, but through his “Rules of Ranging,” a set of guidelines for guerrilla warfare that is still distributed by the U.S. Army Ranger School.

This Day in Exploration History (Hudson Marooned by Mutineers)

June 23, 1611—Having gotten his ship and crew intact through an icebound winter in desolate, then-unknown reaches of Canada, Henry Hudson was heading home when his men, embittered and hungry, mutinied. The 46-year-old English seaman, together with his 17-year-old son and seven supporters, was set adrift in a small, open boat. Neither Hudson nor the others in his small boat ever made it home to complete his fourth voyage in search of the Northwest Passage to Asia.


Early in the 20th century, in tones reminiscent of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses” (not surprising, as the British poet laureate was one of the three people that, he admitted, influenced him the most), Henry Van Dyke evoked the bravery of the embattled explorer in “Hudson’s Last Voyage”:




“For, mark me well, the honour of our life
Derives from this: to have a certain aim
Before us always, which our will must seek
Amid the peril of uncertain ways.
Then, though we miss the goal, our search is crowned
With courage, and we find along our path
A rich reward of unexpected things.
Press towards the aim: take fortune as it fares!”



Van Dyke’s attitude is no longer so widely shared. Like other explorers once lionized—Columbus, Magellan, James Cook, and Robert Scott—Hudson has come in for historical revisionism. Visionary, the Englishman might have been, the argument now goes, but the mutiny that blasted his hopes did not come out of nowhere. Hudson was at least partially responsible for his own misfortune.

On his prior voyage, Hudson--for the only time in his four voyages, in the service of Holland--broke his agreement with the Dutch East India Company return to Holland if his northeast voyage proved unsuccessful. Instead, he crossed the Atlantic, where, he had heard, a strait might take him through the American land mass to Asia. The voyage of the Half Moon is best known to us now because he explored the New York river now named for him. (Indeed, F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his rhapsodic ending to The Great Gatsby, alludes to “the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes-a fresh, green breast of the new world.”)

It would have been interesting to see what the Dutch East India Company would have done if Hudson made it back. But he and his crew were intercepted when they stopped in England, where, they were told, they could no longer enter the service of foreign powers. For his next voyage, then, Hudson would be back in the employ of the company that financed his first two trips.

As before, Hudson made great discoveries, including, between Greenland and Labrador, two bodies of water later named for him: Hudson Strait and Hudson Bay. But things came a cropper for him in the James Bay. He spent three months in the eastern part of the bay--an oddity, given that the object of his trip was to find a passage to the west. He continued there until well past the point when it was clear it offered no passage to the Pacific. Then, in November, his ship--the hopefully Discovery--became trapped in the winter ice.

Given that the boat lacked food and supplies, it was a miracle that all hands didn’t die over the next seven months they were trapped. But the crew suffered enough, and toward the end of that period, hunger combined with resentment got the better of the men.

Most of his men didn’t like what had been happening at all:

* In September, when they had a chance at an ample supply of food, Hudson disregarded his crew‘s pleas and pressed on.

* Hudson set anchor in the James instead of heading home when he could.

* Hudson gave one crew member, Henry Green, a gray gown, then took it back when Green displeased him.

* Many in the crew suspected their captain of hoarding food and doling it out to favorites.

* Hudson decided to demote captain’s mate Robert Juet and a boatswain. Why Hudson decided to act mid-voyage instead of at the end of his last one, when Juet had mutinied already on the trip to the northeast, is mysterious. But it left him with an enemy in his midst.

* Hudson promoted a carpenter who happened to be illiterate, leading the crew to believe “the Master and his ignorant Mate would carry the Ship whither the Master pleased.”

Once the mutiny unfolded, the captain was cast into the boat with a few supporters, a couple of crew members judged to be too old and infirm to last on the return voyage, and Hudson’s 17-year-old son John. (The famous image accompanying this post, by John Colliers, appears to lower the age of the teenager considerably. It heightens the pathos of the son—young Hudson even clings in fear to his father—but by taking some creative license with the facts.)

For awhile, Hudson’s tiny shallop attempted to keep pace with the larger ship, but once the Discovery hoisted another sail, the mother ship swiftly left its former captain and his small band to their own devices. They were never heard from again, and the only clue to their fate was discovered 20 years later, when another explorer came across the remains of a shelter, possibly erected by the castaways.

On the way home, Juet and Green were killed in an attack by Eskimos. This proved extremely convenient for the other mutineers, who could place most of the onus for the mutiny on their slain comrades.

Surprisingly, the Discovery survivors were prosecuted not for mutiny—of which they were manifestly guilty—but rather for murder, a far more difficult charge to prove. (After all, where were the bodies?) Naturally, they were acquitted of the latter charge. The unlikely prosecution strategy might have resulted from the need of the British East India Company and the Muscovy Company, the backers of the voyage, for seasoned hands who could continue to look for the Northwest Passage. By this reasoning, mutiny had to appear to be punished, but with no reasonable outlook for success.

It would take nearly three centuries and more tragedies (notably, the failure of Sir John Franklin’s 1845-47 expedition in the Arctic) before Scandinavian explorer Roald Amundsen made the full transit by sea and reached the long-unattainable goal of the Northwest Passage.
Ironically, global climate change has sparked speculation that melting icecaps in the North might make it easier for ships to traverse the routes that defeated Hudson, Franklin and many others.