The great job of the historian is to enable people to understand how things were and why they happened so in a time and at a place that are gone forever. Somehow he has to reach the irrecoverable past. Living in one era, he must work in another, trying his best to lay his hands on something that is forever beyond his grasp, to hear voices that have been stilled for generations and to interpret the aspirations and motivations of minds and hearts that returned to their elements long since in the mists beyond the Jordan. The job can never be done fully, and no one knows this better than the historian himself. He would sell his hope of salvation (provided such hope remains to him after years of the kind of toil and frustration that is apt to warp the soul) if only, just once, he could actually go to the era he has been studying so hard and see just what the men of that day were up against.

This is a vain hope, to be sure. And yet little bridges to the past can be built, if a man has the imagination to see the possibility and the driving determination to make something of it. As witness the case of the late Samuel Eliot Morison.

At the time of his death last spring Morison was pretty generally recognized as America’s greatest living historian. He earned that distinction in the traditional way—by an immense capacity for hard work, by an unswerving honesty of purpose that led him to follow where the verifiable facts took him, and by steady exercise of a native ability to express himself in clear, understandable English prose. He had also, of course, what every good historian has—the burning desire to go there and see for himself. Unlike most of his confreres, Morison found that if a man builds the right kind of bridge he can come close to gratifying that desire.

Morison had written a good deal about various aspects of maritime history. He had also become a skilled and ardent yachtsman. And when he undertook, somewhere around 1940, to write a biography of Christopher Columbus, he faced the riddle all biographers of that great sailor have faced: could Columbus, with the charts, navigation aids, and general knowledge of sea and weather available to him in 1492, have sailed the courses and made the miles he said he had done? Was his record to be accepted as evidence, or had there been short cuts, improvisations, and borrowings somewhere along the line?

Morison wanted to know, so he went and found out; which is to say that he got his sailboat, went to Palos with a copy of Columbus’ log, and sailed over Columbus’ track, following the great sailor’s courses, making his mileage—and coming, at last, to Columbus’ astounding, world-changing landfall. He verified Columbus’ story in the simplest and most conclusive way imaginable. He had the sailor’s