"But Live Them First!"

On the eve of the big day, the famous historian inserted the following notice in the Harvard Crimson: "History 60a. 'Ship Lively' shoves off for the West Indies and parts unknown . . . at 9:15 o'clock in the morning. Crew may obtain a chart of the West Indies by calling at Widener 417." To the crew concerned, the meaning of the notice was abundantly clear. It was simply Samuel Eliot Morison's salty way of telling his students the time and place of their midyear exam.

In the decades he has taught at Harvard, thousands of students have sailed into history under Morison's command and few of them will ever forget the voyage. The waters could be rough and the weather stormy, but no one could ever say that the trip had been dull. Last week, as he got set to retire, Morison was more than merely a great historian. He was also, in the tradition of Parkman and Prescott, the eloquent champion of history as the art of adventure.

Letters in the Cellar. A grandson of Scholar Samuel Eliot, Morison had his tory virtually thrust upon him. The family house on Brimmer Street, where he still lives, was a rendezvous for Boston's great, and the family archives were a source library in themselves. At Harvard Morison fell under the spell of Charles Haskins, Edward Channing and Albert Bushnell Hart. He wrote his first book, Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, partly from the boxes of letters stored in the family wine cellar. But aside from the influence of his teachers and ancestors, there was also his love for the sea. It was almost inevitable, says one of his col leagues, that as "Parkman was the historian of the wilderness, so Morison should become the historian of the sea."

Because of this love, Morison has been able not only to record the past but also to relive it. A skilled yachtsman, he had to learn--as did the heroes of his classic The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783-1860--the beauties and perils of the Atlantic coast. For his Pulitzer Prizewinning Admiral of the Ocean Sea he sailed 10,000 miles retracing the course of Columbus, and during World War II (he retired from the Navy as a rear admiral) he collected seven battle stars while also collecting first-hand material for his monumental history of naval operations.

Whether writing of the 1490s ("It was a nervous night . . . with the dipsey lead hove every quarter-hour . . . the young and inexperienced imagining that they saw lights and heard breakers, the officers testy and irritable, and the Admiral calmly keeping vigil") or of a convoy in the 1940s ("Around the columns is thrown the screen like a loose-jointed necklace, the beads lunging to port or starboard and then snapping back . . . each destroyer nervous and questing, all eyes topside looking, ears below waterline listening, and radar antennae like cats' whiskers feeling for the enemy"), Sam Morison could write as one who was there.

Sympathy in the Library. To his students, he was every inch the admiral. He might appear in class in riding breeches or at the opera in a cape, but he always seemed the skipper just temporarily out of uniform. In his book-lined study, he could be the genial host or sympathetic adviser. But in his students and shipmates alike, the quality he liked best was boldness. "And when you go out on the tide," he once advised a fellow yachtsman who was planning a cruise, "don't bother with the channel. Go out between the two little islands. It's narrow, and there's a big rock in the middle, and it will scare hell out of you. But it's beautiful."

As a scholar, he himself carefully avoided routine channels. "A whole generation has passed," he once complained, "without producing any really great works on American history . . . none with fire in the eye, none to make a young man want to fight for his country in war or live to make it a better country in peace." To Morison, history was pre-eminently "a story that moves . . . that sings to the heart while it informs the understanding." In the front of one of his books stands a quotation that he might have written himself: "Dream dreams, then write them --aye, but live them first!"

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