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 History
in the Media
 History
in the Media
Film and Television

Robert Niemi

ABC-CLIO
Santa Barbara, California • Denver, Colorado • Oxford, England
Copyright 2006 by ABC-CLIO

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in
a review, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Niemi, Robert.
History in the media : film and television history in the media /
Robert Niemi.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-57607-952-X (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-57607-953-8
(ebook) 1. Historical films—History and criticism. 2. Historical
television programs—History and criticism. 3. Biographical
films—History and criticism. 4. Biographical television
programs—History and criticism. I. Title.

PN1995.9.H5N54 2006
791.43'658—dc22
2006007457

This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit abc-clio.com for
details.

Acquisitions Editor: Jim Ciment

Production Editor: Laura Esterman
Associate Production Editor: Cisca Schreefel
Media Editor: Giulia Rossi
Production Manager: Don Schmidt
Manufacturing Coordinator: George Smyser

ABC-CLIO, Inc.
130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911
Santa Barbara, California 93116–1911

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Manufactured in the United States of America
 To the memory of my father
Alfred Antii Niemi
March 7, 1915–April 7, 2005
“Ei ole koiraa karvoihin katsominen”
 Contents

Acknowledgments, xix
Introduction, xxi

1 Military History on Film and Television:

Wallace’s Rising to the Boer War, 1
Wallace’s Rising (1297–1304), 2
Braveheart (1995), 2
The Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, 4
Culloden (1964), 4
The Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815), 5
Kolberg (also known as Burning Hearts) (1945), 5
The Battle of Austerlitz (1960), 7
Waterloo (1970), 7
The Texas Revolution (1835–1836), 9
Davy Crockett and The Last Command (1955), 10
The Alamo (1960), 11
Viva Max! (1970), 13
The Alamo: Thirteen Days to Glory (1987), 13
The Alamo (2004), 14
The Crimean War (1854–1856), 16
The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), 16
The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), 17
The American Civil War (1861–1865), 19
The Andersonville Trial (1970), 19
Glory (1989), 20
The Civil War (1990), 21
The Battle of Gettysburg (1955), 23
Gettysburg (1993), 24
Pharoah’s Army (1995), 25
Andersonville (1996), 25
Gods and Generals (2003), 26
Custer and the Indian Wars, 27
They Died with Their Boots On (1942), 27

vii
viii Contents

Sitting Bull (1954) and Custer of the West (1967), 28

Son of the Morning Star (1991), 29
Geronimo Fights Back, 30
Geronimo and the Apache Resistance, 1851–1886 (1988), 30
Geronimo and Geronimo: An American Legend (1993), 30
British Colonial Wars in Africa, 32
Zulu (1964), 34
Khartoum (1966), 35
Zulu Dawn (1979), 37
The Spanish-American War and the Philippine Revolution (1898–1901), 37
Rough Riders (1997), 38
The Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), 41
“Breaker” Morant (1980), 41

2 Military History on Film and Television:

World War I, 45
Filming the Front Lines, 45
The Battle of the Somme (1916), 45
The Lost Battalion (1919), 46
Films in the Time between the World Wars, 47
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), 47
The Fighting 69th (1940), 49
Sergeant York (1941), 50
World War I Filmed in Hindsight, 52
Paths of Glory (1957), 52
Lawrence of Arabia (1962), 54
World War One (1964–1965), 57
Johnny Got His Gun (1971), 58
Gallipoli (1981), 59
Anzacs (1985), 61
The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century (1996), 62
The Lost Battalion (2001), 64
Shattered City: The Halifax Explosion (2003), 64

3 Military History on Film and Television:

World War II, 67
Contemporaneous World War II History Films, 68
Wake Island (1942), 68
In Which We Serve (1942), 70
“Why We Fight” Film Series, 71
December 7, 1941 (1943), 73
Bataan (1943), 73
Guadalcanal Diary (1943), 75
The Sullivans (1944), 75
 Contents ix

The Purple Heart and Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944), 77

The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944), 79
The True Glory (1945), 79
The Battle of San Pietro (1944), 80
The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), 81
They Were Expendable (1945), 83
Your Job in Germany (1945), 84
Our Job in Japan (1946), 84
World War II History Films of the Cold War Era, 84
Design for Death (1947), 84
Battleground (1949), 85
The Wooden Horse (1950), 85
The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel (1951), 86
Victory at Sea (1952–1953), 87
The Dam Busters (1954), 88
To Hell and Back (1955), 90
The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955), 91
Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) (1955), 92
British World War II Exploits in Film, 94
The Colditz Story (1955), 94
The Battle of the River Plate (1956), 95
The Man Who Never Was (1956), 95
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), 96
I Was Monty’s Double (1958), 98
Dunkirk (1958), 98
Sink the Bismarck! (1960), 99
Films of Wartime Events, 100
Hell to Eternity (1960), 100
The Diary of Anne Frank (1960), 101
Judgment at Nuremberg (1962), 104
The Longest Day (1962), 105
The Great Escape (1963), 106
P.T. 109 (1963), 108
Battle of the Bulge (1965), 109
Anzio (1965), 110
Battle of Britain (1969), 111
Le Chagrin et la pitié: Chronique d’une ville Française
sous l’occupation (The Sorrow and the Pity: Chronicle
of a French City under Occupation) (1969), 111
Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), 113
Patton (1970), 114
The World at War (1973–1974), 117
World War II History Films of the Post-Vietnam Era, 117
The Execution of Private Slovik (1974), 117
Midway (1976), 119
A Bridge Too Far (1977), 119
x Contents

Ike (1979), 121

Playing for Time (1980), 122
Let There Be Light (1946; 1981), 123
Oppenheimer (1980), 123
Das Boot (1981), 125
Empire of the Sun (1987), 127
Fat Man and Little Boy (1989), 129
July 20th and The Plot to Kill Hitler (1990), 129
Tragedy at Sea and Mission of the Shark: The Saga of the
U.S.S. Indianapolis (1991), 130
Stalingrad (1993), 132
Schindler’s List (1993), 133
Tuskegee Airmen (1995), 135
Paradise Road (1997), 135
Saving Private Ryan (1998), 136
The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It (2000), 138
Nuremburg (2000), 139
To End All Wars (2001), 140
Pearl Harbor (2001), 140
Enemy at the Gates (2001), 141
Band of Brothers (2001), 142
The Pianist (2002), 143
Blind Spot (2002) and The Downfall (2004), 144

4 Military History on Film and Television:

Korean War to Bosnia, 147
The Korean War, 147
The McConnell Story (1955), 147
Pork Chop Hill (1959), 149
MacArthur (1977), 150
Inchon (1981), 151
The Korean War on Television, 152
The Vietnam War, 152
The Mills of the Gods: Viet Nam (1965), 152
Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam) (1967), 153
The Anderson Platoon (1967), 153
In the Year of the Pig (1968), 154
The Selling of the Pentagon (1971) and Hearts and Minds (1974), 155
Vietnam: A Television History (1983), 156
The Killing Fields (1984), 158
Hamburger Hill (1987), 159
Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), 161
Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam (1988), 162
Born on the Fourth of July (1989), 162
Heaven and Earth (1993), 163
 Contents xi

Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision (1994), 164

Return with Honor (1998), 165
Regret to Inform (1998), 166
A Bright Shining Lie (1998), 166
We Were Soldiers (2002), 167
United States’s Somalia Engagement, 170
Black Hawk Down (2001), 171
The Intervention of the United States in Bosnia, 172
Behind Enemy Lines (2001), 173

5 Sports History on Film and Television, 175

Baseball, 176
The Pride of the Yankees (1942), 176
The Babe Ruth Story (1948), 177
The Stratton Story (1949), 177
The Jackie Robinson Story (1950), 178
The Pride of St. Louis (1952), 179
Fear Strikes Out (1957), 179
It’s Good to Be Alive: The Roy Campanella Story (1974), 180
One in a Million: The Ron LeFlore Story (1978), 181
Don’t Look Back: The Story of Leroy “Satchel” Paige (1981), 182
New York Yankees (The Movie) (1987), 182
Still We Believe: The Boston Red Sox Movie (2004), 183
Eight Men Out (1988), 183
The Babe (1992), 184
Baseball (1994), 185
Cobb (1994), 185
Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream (1995), 187
Soul of the Game (1996), 187
The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (1998), 188
Babe Ruth (1998), 188
61* (2001), 189
Boxing, 189
The Leonard-Cushing Fight (1894), 189
The Corbett-Courtney Fight (1894), 189
The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (1897), 190
Jeffries-Sharkey Contest (1899), 191
The Johnson-Jeffries Fight (1910), 192
Gentleman Jim (1942), 193
The Great John L. (1945), 193
Day of the Fight (1951), 194
The Joe Louis Story (1953), 195
The Harder They Fall (1956), 196
Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), 197
Legendary Champions (1968), 198
xii Contents

The Great White Hope (1970), 198

Mohammed Ali Films, 199
Post-Vietnam-Era Boxing Films, 202
Football, 210
Knute Rockne All American (1940), 210
Jim Thorpe—All-American (1951), 211
Crazylegs (1953), 212
Brian’s Song (1971), 213
Friday Night Lights (2004), 213
Basketball, 214
Hoosiers (1986), 214
Hoop Dreams (1994), 216
Olympics Films, 217
Olympia (Olympiad) (1938), 217
The Bob Mathias Story (1954), 218
Tokyo orimpikku (Tokyo Olympiad) (1965), 218
Chariots of Fire (1981), 219
The Jesse Owens Story (1984), 221
Fists of Freedom: The Story of the ’68 Summer Games (1999), 222
Prefontaine (1997) and Without Limits (1998), 222
Do You Believe in Miracles? The Story of the 1980
U.S. Hockey Team (2001) and Miracle (2004), 223
Mountaineering Films, 224
Climbing Mount Everest (1922) and Epic of Everest (1924), 224
The Conquest of Everest (1953), 225
Americans on Everest (1963), 225
Everest Unmasked (1978), 226
Into Thin Air: Death on Everest (1997), 226
Touching the Void (2003), 227
Contemporary Sports History on Film, 228
Surfing, 229
Bodybuilding, 230
Professional Wrestling, 231
Skateboarding , 232
A Return to Period Topics, 234

6 Music History on Film and Television, 237

Jazz, Blues, Gospel, Motown, and the Swing Era, 238
Young Man with a Horn (1950), 238
The Glenn Miller Story (1953), 238
St. Louis Blues (1958), 240
Wattstax (1973), 240
Bix: Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet (1981), 241
Say Amen, Somebody (1982), 242
Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got (1985), 242
 Contents xiii

Louie Bluie (1986) and Sweet Old Song (2002), 243

Let’s Get Lost (1988), 244
Bird (1988), 244
Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1989), 245
A Great Day in Harlem (1994), 246
The Genius of Lenny Breau (1995), 247
Wild Man Blues (1996), 247
Charles Mingus: Triumph of the Underdog (1997), 248
Buena Vista Social Club (1999), 248
“Jazz” (2001), 250
Strange Fruit (2002), 251
Standing in the Shadows of Motown (2002), 251
Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues—A Musical Journey (2003), 252
You’re the Top: The Cole Porter Story (1990), 254
Night and Day (1946), 255
De-Lovely (2004), 255
Rock, 256
Don’t Look Back (1967), 256
Monterey Pop (1969), 257
Woodstock (1970), 258
Gimme Shelter (1970), 260
Cocksucker Blues (1972), 261
Jimi Hendrix (1973) and Janis (1974), 262
Renaldo and Clara (1978), 264
The Last Waltz (1978), 265
The Kids Are Alright (1979), 265
History of Rock ‘N’ Roll (1995), 266
Festival Express (2003), 267
Punk (and Grunge) Rock, 268
The Punk Rock Movie (1978), 268
D.O.A. (1980) and The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle (1980), 269
The Decline of Western Civilization (1981), 269
Another State of Mind (1983), 270
Sid and Nancy (1986), 270
Kurt and Courtney (1998), 272
Born to Lose: The Last Rock and Roll Movie (1999), 273
The Filth and the Fury (2000), 273
Hype! (1996), 274
Songs for Cassavetes (2001), 274
Between Resistance and Community: The Long Island
Do It Yourself Punk Scene (2002), 275
End of the Century—The Story of the Ramones (2003), 275
Pop Singer Biopics, 276
The Jolson Story (1946), 276
The Helen Morgan Story (1957), 277
Lady Sings the Blues (1972), 277
xiv Contents

The Buddy Holly Story (1978), 278

La Bamba (1987), 278
Great Balls of Fire! (1989), 279
Truth or Dare (1991), 279
The Doors (1991), 280
What’s Love Got to Do with It (1993), 281
Selena (1997), 282
The Cream Will Rise (1998), 282
Beyond the Sea (2004), 283
Ray (2004), 284
Folk Music, 285
Bound for Glory (1976), 285
Leadbelly (1976), 285
The Weavers: Wasn’t That a Time (1982), 286
The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack (2000), 286
Country and Western, 288
Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), 288
Sweet Dreams (1985), 289
Classical Music, 289
Lisztomania (1975), 289
Amadeus (1984), 290
Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould (1993), 290
Immortal Beloved (1994), 291
Shine (1996), 291
Hilary and Jackie (1998), 293

7 Art History on Film and Television, 295

Lust for Life (1956), 295
The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), 296
Civilisation (1969), 297
Ciao! Manhattan (1972), 298
Caravaggio (1986), 299
Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh (1987), 299
Camille Claudel (1988), 300
Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol (1990), 301
Vincent & Theo (1990), 301
Crumb (1994), 302
I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), 304
Basquiat (1996), 305
The Line King: The Al Hirschfeld Story (1996), 306
Surviving Picasso (1996), 306
Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998), 307
Pollock (2000), 308
Frida (2002), 309
American Splendor (2003), 311
 Contents xv

8 Labor, Business, and Political History on

Film and Television, 313
The Forties, 313
Citizen Kane (1941), 313
Give Us This Day (1949), 316
The Fifties, 317
Salt of the Earth (1954), 317
On the Waterfront (1954), 320
The Sixties, 323
Harvest of Shame (1960), 323
The Seventies, 324
The Molly Maguires (1970), 324
Joe Hill (1971), 326
Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976), 327
All the President’s Men (1976), 328
Union Maids (1976), 330
Norma Rae (1979), 331
The Eighties, 332
Reds (1981), 332
Missing (1982), 333
Silkwood (1983), 335
Matewan (1987), 337
Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), 338
Roger & Me (1989), 339
The Nineties, 342
American Dream (1991), 342
JFK (1991), 343
F.I.S.T. (1978) and Hoffa (1992), 345
Cradle Will Rock (1999), 348
The New Millenium, 350
Erin Brockovich (2000), 350
The Weather Underground (2002), 352
Howard Hughes, 353
Good Night, And Good Luck (2005), 358

9 History of U.S. Race Relations on

Film and Television, 361
Films Made before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 361
Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963), 361
Black Like Me (1964), 362
Films Made after the Civil Rights Act, 364
King: A Filmed Record . . . Montgomery to Memphis (1970), 364
Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys (1976), 365
King (1978), 365
Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1987), 366
xvi Contents

Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1954–1965) (1987), 367
Mississippi Burning (1988), 368
Malcolm X (1992), 369
Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), 372
Amistad (1997), 373
Rosewood (1997), 375
4 Little Girls (1997), 376
Africans in America: America’s Journey through Slavery (1998), 377
Antwone Fisher (2002), 378
With All Deliberate Speed (2004), 380

10 History of Crime on Film and Television, 381

The Thirties, 381
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), 381
The Forties, 383
Rope (1948), 383
The Fifties, 385
A Place in the Sun (1951), 385
I Want to Live! (1958), 386
Compulsion (1959), 387
The Sixties, 388
Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), 388
Bonnie & Clyde (1967), 389
In Cold Blood (1967), 392
The Boston Strangler (1968), 394
The Seventies, 395
Bloody Mama (1970), 395
The Honeymoon Killers (1970), 396
Manson (1973), 398
Badlands (1973), 398
Dillinger (1945) and Dillinger (1973), 400
Serpico (1973), 401
Dog Day Afternoon (1975), The Third Memory (2000), and
Based on a True Story (2005), 402
Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), 404
The Onion Field (1979), 405
The Eighties, 406
Brubaker (1980), 406
Prince of the City (1981), 407
The Executioner’s Song (1982), 408
Shot in the Heart (2001), 409
The Killing of America (1982), 409
Star 80 (1983), 410
Fatal Vision (1984), 411
The Deliberate Stranger (1986), 412
 Contents xvii

The Thin Blue Line (1988), 413

The Accused (1988), 415
The Nineties, 416
Goodfellas (1990), 416
The Krays (1990), 418
Reversal of Fortune (1990), 419
Brother’s Keeper (1992), 420
Swoon (1992), 421
To Die For (1995), 422
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996), 423
Killer: A Journal of Murder (1996), 424
Donnie Brasco (1997), 425
The Brandon Teena Story (1998) and Boys Don’t Cry (1999), 426
The Hurricane (1999), 427
The New Millenium, 431
Blow (2001), 431
Bully (2001), 432
Auto Focus (2002), 433
Aileen Wuornos on Film, 433
Capote (2005), 435

Bibliography, 437
Index, 449
About the Author, 501
 Acknowledgments

F
irst of all, I offer special thanks to my friend, Alan Harris Stein, oral historian
and archivist extraordinaire, for facilitating this project. Thanks to my editors,
Jim Ciment and Laura Esterman, for their expert advice, good cheer, and
patience. Thanks to my colleagues in the English Department and other departments
at St. Michael’s College: Mike Arena, Jeff Ayres, Nick Clary, Carrie Kaplan, Bill Grover,
Nat Lewis, Jack MacDonald, Will Marquis, Susan Ouellette, Christina Root, Kerry Shea,
Lorrie Smith, and Erin Stehmeyer. Thanks to Laurence Suid and Jim Leger who read
and commented on portions of the manuscript in progress. I owe a heartfelt thanks to
Don and Lynn Feeser for all their help and support and also acknowledge Paul Mal-
one, Richard Davis, Mick, Cindy, Alex, Andy, Buzz, Karen, my mom, my brothers Tom
and Al, my sister, Karen, my daughter, Elena, foster son, Dima, and my good friends
Mark Madigan and Steve Soitos for many years of loyalty. Finally, I owe my continuing
spiritual well-being to my wife, best friend, and life partner, Gretchen.

xix
 Introduction

F
rom 1981 to 2005, thirteen of the twenty-five Oscar winners for Best Picture
have been movies based in history. Over the same period, 32 of the 100 films
nominated for Best Picture have had their basis in historical events. Both sta-
tistics testify to the continuing power and prestige of history as source material in the
film business. Likewise, when members of a viewing audience see the familiar phrase,
“based on a true story,” flash on the screen during the opening credit sequence, they
tend to assume, rightly or wrongly, that the movie they are about to watch will deliver
more significance than a pure fiction and will therefore require a heightened level of
attentive engagement and respect. The irony is rich: in a constantly accelerating cul-
ture of consumption that fosters short attention spans and shorter memories, histori-
cal subject matter somehow continues to hold strong sway over filmmakers and
moviegoers.
Perhaps much of the appeal of history films has to do with an unsatisfied popu-
lar hunger for some sort of grounding in “truth” and “reality.” As postmodern business
civilization becomes more standardized, authoritarian, and alienating, its culture
industries have had to aspire to new depths of insipidity and escapism to mask and
compensate for the real, and really depressing, social conditions that prevail. Though
never of great quality, a preponderance of contemporary movie and television fare is
weird, puerile, banal, and slyly contemptuous of its audience. Sizable fractions of the
populace are quite aware that products of corporate media do not emanate from, or
reflect, any reality they know. In a world of simulacra and contrivance, people want
some recognizable token of life on planet Earth before “Commodity” became a raven-
ous god.
As a field of study, film and history have undergone a tremendous upsurge in
interest in recent years that is commensurate with the growing public appetite for his-
torical representations on film and television. First-rate history-film reference guides,
essay anthologies, and critical-theoretical works are now being published on a regular
basis (see the Bibliography at the end of this volume). Typically a “history film” is
defined, in very broad and loose terms, as either a “true story” or simply a period piece
that conjures a bygone era (e.g., All Quiet on the Western Front or The Searchers). The

xxi
xxii Introduction

theory goes that, even if the narrative and characters are largely fictional, the set-
ting is real and evocative enough to qualify the film as “historical.” There is noth-
ing wrong with this idea; historical fiction films can be profitably “read” as both
reflective and productive of the ideological temperament that informed the time
in which they were made, as well as the time they purport to represent. Indeed,
virtually any film can be analyzed as a revealing “historical” document.
To stake out new and exclusive ground, the present study applies a some-
what more rigorous litmus test: the film in question needs to be firmly “based on
a true story,” that is, it has to deal with an actual, documented historical incident.
The movie can contain fictional elements—every history film does—but must
describe a once real moment in a real place involving real people. Consequently
I have sidestepped the enormous repertoire of historical fiction films that most
other film-history studies treat as their bread and butter. I have also avoided
films dealing with ancient history topics because the existing documentation to
support the film’s veracity is often weak. Finally I have to confess to being much
more interested in films engaging modern history because the political and ide-
ological ramifications hit much closer to home.
As for theoretical presuppositions, while I have narrowed the definition of
what I consider to be a true “history” film, I have expanded the notion of what
constitutes “history” beyond the conventionally dominant categories of military,
social, and political history. Half the book treats these standard categories but
the other half examines films dealing with the history of sports, music, art, race
relations, and crime—types of human endeavor not necessarily tied up with
shaping and reshaping nation-states but important nonetheless as specimens of
ideology and psychohistory. Furthermore, I have opted to treat the films under
consideration not as discreet artifacts but as events—an axiom that precludes an
alphabetical, encyclopedic arrangement. Instead the ten chapters herein are gen-
erally laid out in uninterrupted chronological sequences to delineate patterns of
stylistic and ideological development that may arise from or reflect changes in
political temperament over periods of time. Treating a film as an event also
means dealing with the aesthetic, personal, and political character of the people
who conceived it, the historical moment in which it was spawned, the film’s
genre kin and immediate antecedents, the resources the filmmaker had at hand,
the commercial requisites that shape tone and narrative structure, the concrete
circumstances of the film’s production, and the sort of critical and popular recep-
tion it received. All these factors make up the gestalt of the film as representa-
tive of history, as an historical event in its own right, and as part of a larger his-
torical mosaic formed by the entire body of films on the subject.
As for conclusions arrived at after intensively researching, studying, and
analyzing some 375 history films, a few things come to the fore. Because it focuses
 Introduction xxiii

exclusively on the “true story,” this book deals with two types of history film: the
docudrama and the documentary. Docudramas invariably streamline, distill, and
radically simplify historical events. In keeping with the Anglo-American ideology
of heroic hyperindividualism, docudrama narratives have room for one or two
protagonists but no more than that. Consequently, docudramas routinely create
composite characters or erase important participants in the real event altogether
because the requisites of economical storytelling dictate as much. Docudramas
also tend toward melodrama as they exaggerate internal and interpersonal con-
flicts and emotional Sturm und Drang. In a similarly reductive way, they posit
Manichaean moral schemes with clearly recognizable heroes and villains, jump to
arbitrary conclusions when the evidence is incongruous, and structure the histor-
ical incident into a classic three-act drama that ends with the requisite satisfactory
closure. These common narrative tropes militate against the ambiguity and com-
plexity that naturally inheres in any real event. Docudramas also get lots of great
and small details wrong, either deliberately—to argue a partisan political point or
drum up sympathy or antipathy for a particular person—or inadvertently, due to
poor research or fallacious assumptions. Ultimately historical accuracy is a func-
tion of the filmmakers’ political and intellectual integrity and varies wildly depend-
ing on the persons involved and the lasting ideological significance of the histori-
cal event being depicted.
The popular perception is that a documentary film is far more objective
and reliable a source of historical truth than a docudrama. This is, of course, not
true. Documentaries are susceptible to the same sorts of narrative distortions
that characterize docudramas and are even more dangerously seductive because
they appear to adhere to a higher standard of epistemological neutrality by typ-
ically showcasing authoritative and explanatory voice-overs; interviews with
experts and other real people in the know; and obviously genuine archival
footage, maps, still photographs, and other sorts of visually compelling graphic
evidence to prove their cases. The source materials are all real enough and the
interviewees supposedly sincere. The documentary filmmaker manipulates in a
more subtle way, through what he or she inserts or omits and how the film’s
materials are edited. Finally both docudrama and documentary filmmakers tend
to skew history by offering a partisan interpretation, or perhaps two simple,
opposing interpretations, of an historical event when the event calls for many
more points of view to do justice to its mysterious aspects, insoluble contradic-
tions, and complexities. In sum, a history film of any sort might be emotionally
compelling, intellectually persuasive, and an artistic triumph but none of these
apparent strengths mean that it is good history—buyer beware.
 1
Military History on Film
and Television: Wallace’s
Rising to the Boer War

A
t the outset of this chapter, a crucial distinction needs to be drawn
between the vast war film genre and a subset of the war film: the mili-
tary history film. The Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com)
lists over 4,500 war films. Of that number, less than 150 (or about 3 percent) qual-
ify as films that more or less accurately deal with authentic episodes in military
history. The remaining 4,350 war movies have to be classified as war fiction
films—that is, films that superimpose largely or entirely fictional narratives onto
war history settings. As is true of all genre classifications, there are a number of
gray areas here. For example, films like Gallipoli and Das Boot involve fictional
characters, but the settings and war action depicted are so specific and realistic
as to qualify them as military history films. Conversely, even a fastidiously accu-
rate military history film like Gettysburg will inevitably fabricate much of its dia-
logue; historical sources can only supply so much. Genre conventions, narrative
requisites, and ideological imperatives also introduce distortions into otherwise
credible renditions of military history. Still, all caveats aside, the distinction
between the war history and the war (fiction) film is clear enough to allow mean-
ingful classification. Military history on film essentially represents actual inci-
dents involving real persons. A war film may, in many ways, be a fairly accurate
pictorial representation of a particular conflict and may allegorize its salient
political, psychological, and moral issues brilliantly (for example, The Deer
Hunter) but it is still a fiction; the events depicted never happened. Quite a num-
ber of books have concerned themselves with ideological analyses of war films
per se. What is offered in what follows is a focused ideological-historicist read-
ing of military history on film.

1
2 History in the Media: Film and Television

Wallace’s Rising (1297–1304)

Braveheart (1995)

The moment of inspiration for Braveheart, Mel Gibson’s 1995 biopic about Scot-
land’s greatest hero, Sir William Wallace (1272?–1305), apparently occurred some-
time in 1983 when the film’s screenwriter, Randall Wallace, came across a statue
of William Wallace outside of Edinburgh Castle while he was researching his
family genealogy. (An alternate version of the story is that Randall Wallace hap-
pened on a plaque in a wall of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital near London’s Smith-
field Market commemorating the site of William Wallace’s execution.) Whatever
the exact impetus, an intrigued Randall Wallace began to research and write a
screenplay based on the life of his legendary namesake. At least eight biogra-
phies of Wallace had been published between 1830 and 1983, but all had their ori-
gins in a single, highly speculative, source: The Actes and Deidis of the Illustre
and Vallyeant Campioun Schir William Wallace (circa 1477), an epic poem by
Scottish poet, Henry the Minstrel (aka, “Blind Harry,” circa 1440–1493) (Mackay
1995). Written 172 years after Wallace’s death, Henry’s poem drew on the stories
passed down over the generations; it was adulatory and patriotic but of very
dubious accuracy. No matter, Randall Wallace was not overly concerned with
historical exactitude; as an American of Scottish ancestry, his aim was to write
an exciting swashbuckler of epic proportions that would captivate audiences
and pay homage to his courageous ancestors.
In broad terms, the story Braveheart tells is true enough. William Wallace
(Mel Gibson) did, indeed, rebel against King Edward I (1239–1307) “Longshanks”
(Patrick McGoohan); he handily defeated the English in battle at Loudon Hill,
Ayr, Scone, and, most notably, Stirling Bridge (after which he was knighted and
appointed Guardian of Scotland by Robert the Bruce); behind the scenes, the
Scottish nobles likely sold out the popular revolt against the English; Wallace’s
forces lost the Battle of Falkirk (June 1298); stripped of his prestige after Falkirk,
Wallace went into hiding but was eventually captured, tried, and executed for
treason. It also appears to be true that Edward’s son and heir apparent, the
Prince of Wales (Peter Hanly), was effeminate, probably homosexual, and neg-
lectful of his wife, Princess Isabelle (Sophie Marceau). The film’s falsifications
and distortions are equally significant, however. Wallace did not swear eternal
enmity against the Crown for the murder of his young wife—the alleged murder
never happened. (One source suggests that Wallace became an outlaw in a much
more prosaic manner—after a deadly quarrel with British soldiers over some fish
he had caught.) In the film, King Edward I is portrayed as a sinister, devious char-
acter but was, in fact, a strong and well-respected king; the real Wallace did not
A scene still of actor and director Mel Gibson from Braveheart. (Icon/Ladd Co/Para-
mount/The Kobal Collection)
4 History in the Media: Film and Television

have an affair with Princess Isabelle; the English did not take heavy losses at
Falkirk; the film’s depiction of the Scottish warriors in blue face paint and kilts
is anachronistic; the historical William Wallace was a giant of a man (6 feet, 7
inches tall) whereas Mel Gibson is of average height (5 feet, 11 inches).
Whatever its failings as history, Braveheart certainly has epic grandeur and
plenty of bloody, frenetic battle sequences, romance, and high-minded senti-
ment. Shot in Ireland and Scotland, Braveheart used 1,700 Irish army troops as
extras for its battle scenes and cost a hefty $70–$80 million to make
(http://www.imdb.com). But Gibson’s gamble paid off handsomely. A huge inter-
national hit, Braveheart received rave reviews, generated revenues in excess of
$200 million, was nominated for ten Oscars, and won five (including two for Gib-
son, for Best Director and Best Picture). On a more ominous note, filmmaker
(Hoop Dreams) Steve James saw Braveheart’s celebration of Anglo-Saxon chau-
vinism as playing to crypto-fascist elements in American society: “It is apparent
that sections of the US far right . . . find a mythical version of Scottish history
useful for their present political purposes. This fabricated Scotland closely
echoes contemporary rhetoric. This nation of ‘Bravehearts’ has no social classes,
only Scots. It devotes itself to defending ‘ancient freedoms’—that are thankfully
bound up with land, property and religion—against a foreign threat, both exter-
nal and internal” (James 1999).

The Jacobite Rebellion of 1745

Culloden (1964)

Radical media critic and filmmaker Peter Watkins started out in the mid-1950s, in
Britain, making short amateur (8mm) films. Two of his films—Diary of an
Unknown Soldier (1959) and The Forgotten Faces (1960)—won “Ten Best”
awards (the equivalent of the Oscar for amateur films in the UK) and were
screened at the London National Film Theatre. Impressed by his work, Huw
Wheldon, head of BBC-TV’s Documentary Film Department, hired Watkins as an
assistant film producer in 1962. In 1964 Watkins was granted a small budget to
make a film version of John Prebble’s Culloden (London: Secker & Warburg,
1961), a best-selling historical account of the British army’s destruction of Bonnie
Prince Charlie’s Scots Jacobin forces at Culloden Moor on April 16, 1746, the last
battle fought on British soil. Filming at Inverness, Scotland, with an all-amateur
cast in August 1964, Peter Watkins eschewed the conventional historical docu-
drama in favor of a cleverly mounted faux cinema verité approach that employed
 Military History on Film and Television: The Boer War 5

handheld cameras and direct-to-camera address of battle participants that quite

deliberately imitated contemporary television news coverage of the unfolding
war in Vietnam. Screened on BBC-TV on December 15, 1964 (exactly four months
after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution), Culloden presented “you are there” coverage
of a battle that had occurred 218 years before: a surreal Brechtian gambit that
proved to be a major success with critics and the viewing public and set the tone
and style for much of Watkins’ later work.

The Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815)

Kolberg (also known as Burning Hearts) (1945)

After the envelopment and destruction of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad in
the winter of 1942–1943, it became obvious that Hitler’s war with the Soviet
Union was going to be a protracted and exceedingly difficult struggle that Ger-
many might well lose. On June 1, 1943, convinced that the German people needed
a great inspirational film to galvanize their fighting spirit, Propaganda Minister
Josef Goebbels commissioned Kolberg [also known as Burning Hearts] (1945),
a period epic directed by Veit Harlan (Jud Süss) about a small Baltic port’s stub-
born fight against Napoleon’s army. Written by Harlan in close collaboration with
Goebbels, Kolberg actually conflates two distinct events: the resistance of the cit-
izens of Kolberg to French invasion in 1806–1807 and an insurrection against
French occupation forces led by Prussian Lt. Ferdinand Baptist von Schill’s
Freikorps in the Hanseatic city of Stralsund in 1809. The historical reality is as
follows. Under the military command of Prussian Field Marshal Neidhardt von
Gneisenau (1760–1831), Kolberg became famous for its long and spirited resist-
ance to capture by the French after the larger fortresses in the area had surren-
dered. The Stralsund story was quite different. After three quick victories against
the French and their allies, Schill (Gustav Diessl in the film) led his rebel solders
to the seaport of Stralsund to seek support from English warships harbored
there. Unfortunately, the English had already departed by the time Schill arrived.
Unable to stir a wider rebellion in Pomerania, Schill and his men (about 2,000
Prussians and Swedes) fortified Stralsund against the inevitable counterattack. It
came on May 31, 1809, when 5,000 mostly Dutch and Danish troops stormed the
town and overwhelmed Schill’s men in heavy fighting. In Stralsund’s market
square Dutch soldiers dragged Lieutenant Schill from his horse, bayoneted him,
stripped him of his uniform, and cut off his head, which was preserved and put
on display in a Dutch army museum until 1839. The French executed Schill’s
6 History in the Media: Film and Television

fellow officers by firing squad and sent his surviving soldiers into forced labor at
Brest and Cherbourg.
For Harlan and Goebbels, Kolberg’s staunch resistance to Napoleon’s
armies served as an allegorical example of what could be accomplished by a
patriotic people united at home and on the battlefront, despite the defeatism of
the generals. But eventually Kolberg did fall to the French, a historical fact omit-
ted from the Harlan-Goebbels version for obvious reasons. Likewise, the real
fate of the charismatic Lieutenant Schill—an allegorical stand-in for Hitler—was
elided from the movie. Though they played fast and loose with the historical
facts, Harlan and Goebbels made sure that Kolberg would rival Gone With the
Wind (1939) for pageantry and epic scope. Shot near Potsdam under constant
threat of air raids, Kolberg took two years to make, cost 8.5 million Reich marks,
and involved elaborate sets, 10,000 specially made uniforms, and trainloads of
salt for artificial snow. The film also used thousands of soldiers—Harlan makes
the unlikely claim of 185,000 in his memoir (Harlan 1966)—and 4,000 sailors as
extras at a time when the Third Reich needed every available combatant at the
front.
Kolberg’s public premier was one of the strangest in cinematic history. A
print of the film was parachuted into the besieged U-boat base garrison at La
Rochelle, France, and shown on January 30, 1945, the twelfth anniversary of
Hitler’s takeover, to exhort the surrounded troops to hold out—which they did
until a general surrender on May 9. Still, the overall propaganda effectiveness of
Kolberg was negligible and the yawning gap between Goebbels’ wish-fulfillment
fantasy and the war’s reality was manifest when the real Kolberg fell to advanc-
ing Soviet forces in early February 1945. Heinrich George, the actor who played
Joachim Nettelbeck (1738–1834), Kolberg’s heroic mayor, died of starvation in a
Soviet concentration camp in 1946. Twenty years after its initial release, Kolberg
was rereleased in West Germany as 30. Januar 1945, with an accompanying
documentary that corrected Kolberg’s many misrepresentations.
The reputation of French writer-director Abel Gance (1889–1981) rests pri-
marily on his 1927 silent masterpiece, Napoléon, a stirring and technically inno-
vative 4-hour epic that depicts Napoleon’s early life up to the beginning of his
military career. In 1981 director and film historian Kevin Brownlow released a
restored version with a new music score by Carmine Coppola. Gance had
intended to cover the remainder of Napoleon’s saga with another five films, but
when Napoléon proved to be a financial disaster, he had to abandon his ambi-
tious plan. Gance’s fascination with Napoleon never waned, however. In 1934
Gance released Napoléon Bonaparte, a reedited 2-hour, 20-minute version of
Napoléon with sound effects and dubbed dialogue added. Gance also released a
third reedited version, Bonaparte et la Révolution, in 1971.
 Military History on Film and Television: The Boer War 7

The Battle of Austerlitz (1960)

Toward the end of his career, an aging Abel Gance hoped to revive his standing
in world cinema with a rewritten version of what would have been the third part
of his Napoleon project: The Battle of Austerlitz (1960). Financed by French,
Italian, Yugoslavian, and Liechtensteinian interests, Austerlitz likewise featured
an international cast: Pierre Mondy as Napoleon (1769–1821), Claudia Cardinale
as Pauline Bonaparte (1780–1825), Martine Carol as Joséphine de Beauharnais
(1763–1814), Leslie Caron as Mlle. de Vaudey, Orson Welles as American inven-
tor Robert Fulton (1765–1815), Jack Palance as Russian General Weirother, and
Vittorio De Sica as Pope Pius VII (1740–1823). Fastidious to a fault about histor-
ical accuracy, Abel Gance and cowriters Nelly Kaplan and Roger Richebé wrote
a screenplay that lays out the complex political situation in 1804, exhaustively
examines the strategic decisions made by Napoleon and his Russian and Aus-
trian adversaries as they maneuvered their forces into battle, and presents the
battle itself in great tactical detail. Unfortunately, such detailed exposition nec-
essarily involves copious amounts of dialogue, which makes for a very slow film.
Combine poor pacing with choppy editing (especially in the first hour), laugh-
ably bad dubbing in the English-language version, hammy acting (especially by
the bombastic Jack Palance), and Gance’s failure to adequately orient the viewer
as to the basic geography of the sprawling battlefield, and the final result is a film
that falls far short of its epic aspirations.

Waterloo (1970)

The subject of a number of silent films and short documentaries over the years,
Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo (June 12–15, 1815) received its definitive filmic
treatment with Sergei Bondarchuk’s eponymous epic, Waterloo (1970). Through
most of the 1960s, Bondarchuk (1920–1994) poured his heart and soul into his
masterpiece, Vojna i Mir (War and Peace), a 7-hour adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s
great novel that was released in four parts between 1965 and 1967 and in its
entirety in 1968. At the height of the Cold War, when American and Soviet mili-
tary, geopolitical, economic, and cultural competition were at fever pitch, the
Soviets spared no resources in assuring that War and Peace would be the most
lavishly mounted and, consequently, the most expensive film ever made (ulti-
mately costing the equivalent of about US$540 million in 2005). The film
deservedly won the 1969 Oscar for Best Foreign Film, advanced Russia’s inter-
national prestige, and prompted film producer Dino De Laurentiis to throw in his
lot with Bondarchuk and the Soviet-state studio, Mosfilm, in the making of
8 History in the Media: Film and Television

Waterloo, a joint Russo-Italian project that would further mine the grand cine-
matic potential of the Napoleonic Wars. Shot mostly in Russia using tens of thou-
sands of Soviet troops (as did War and Peace), Waterloo cast prominent British
and American actors to maximize its appeal to Western audiences: recent Oscar
winner Rod Stieger as Napoleon; Christopher Plummer as Arthur Wellesley,
Duke of Wellington, also known as the “Iron Duke” (1769–1852); Orson Welles in
a cameo as King Louis XVIII (1755–1824); Michael Wilding as Sir William Pon-
sonby (1772–1815); Jack Hawkins as Lt. Gen. Sir Thomas Picton (1758–1815);
and Dan O’Herlihy as Marshall Michel Ney (1769–1815). Originally released in a
4.5-hour version (shortened by half for video release), Waterloo bifurcates into
two parts. The first, much shorter, part chronicles Napoleon’s exile on Elba, his
escape and march on Paris, Ney’s defection to Napoleon, the overthrow of Louis
XVIII, and the formation of the “Seventh Coalition” between Britain, Austria,
Prussia, and Russia to oppose Napoleon’s return to power. The second part of
the film accurately chronicles the decisive 9-hour battle: Napoleon’s main force
of 70,000 conducting a series of furious assaults on Wellington’s lines, which
nonetheless hold; Blücher’s Prussian army evading Grouchy’s army and linking
up with Wellington in the late afternoon; and the combined British and Prussian
armies counterattacking the French on two sides, overpowering and ultimately
routing Napoleon’s exhausted and outnumbered main force. Authentic looking
except for the appearance of bolt-action rifles, which did not yet exist, Waterloo
combined the lavish use of battlefield extras with brilliant cinematography and
the inclusion of much actual dialogue from historical sources to create a scrupu-
lously accurate depiction of the era and the battle. The effectiveness of the film
was also aided by the relative tactical simplicity of the battle itself; unlike Auster-
litz, the Battle of Waterloo did not involve especially complex deployments and
maneuvers. All its considerable strengths notwithstanding, Waterloo was a box
office flop, returning a small fraction of the $25 million it cost to make and scar-
ing the living daylights out of MGM executives, who backed away from financing
a proposed Stanley Kubrick film on Napoleon (which, unfortunately, was never
made, despite extensive research and a finished script). The commercial failure
of Waterloo had nothing to do with its inherent qualities and everything to do
with the moment of its release. In 1970 the international counterculture, then at
its apogee, valorized personal liberation, contemporary relevance, iconoclasm,
and revisionist attitudes toward history. A conventional historical epic centering
on an early nineteenth-century battle did not stand a chance in such a cultural
climate.
 Military History on Film and Television: The Boer War 9

The Texas Revolution (1835–1836)

The thirteen-day defense of the Alamo in February–March 1836 by a small band
of Texians (U.S.-born Texans) and Tejanos (Mexican-born Texans) against Santa
Ana’s Mexican army stands as the central mythic event in the history of Texas.
The Alamo is, by extension, a quintessential American myth, putatively illustrat-
ing courage, idealism, and steadfastness in the face of overwhelming odds and
near-certain doom. In a darker vein, one could argue that sanctifying the slaugh-
ter at the Alamo valorizes righteous vengeance against a foreign foe as a prime
engine of historical destiny. The Alamo myth also intervenes in the history of the
European conquest of the Americas by selectively fixating on one of those rarer
instances when the Anglo settler was the one outnumbered, outgunned, and
strictly on the defensive—ergo, a perfectly innocent victim.
As film critic J. Hoberman has noted (2004), “Each epoch gets its Alamo”—
that is, the evolving Alamo film subgenre has functioned as a kind of mirror
reflecting changing cultural attitudes toward patriotism and Manifest Destiny.
The first film version, William Haddock’s Immortal Alamo (also known as Fall of
the Alamo), now lost, appeared in 1911. A second silent film version, Christy
Cabanne’s Martyrs of the Alamo (1914; rereleased in 1921 as The Birth of Texas
and released on video in 2000), unself-consciously expressed the jingoistic, white
supremacist tenor of its era by positing the racist notion that the Texian revolu-
tion was a reaction to Mexicans lusting after American women. A. D. Sears, the

The Texans are overrun by the Mexican army at the Alamo on March 6, 1836, during
the Texas Revolution. (Library of Congress)
10 History in the Media: Film and Television

actor who plays Davy Crockett, had just played a Klansman in D. W. Griffiths’ infa-
mous Birth of a Nation. A third (mostly lost) silent film version, Robert N. Brad-
bury’s [With] Davy Crockett at the Fall of the Alamo, appeared in 1926. During the
centennial year of the Alamo, Dallas theater owner and film producer Anthony J.
Xydias made the first “talkie” Alamo movie: Heroes of the Alamo (1937; rereleased
by Columbia Pictures in 1938), a patriotic Depression-era morale booster.
Early in his long career John Wayne (real name: Marion Michael Morrison,
1907–1979) became obsessed with the idea of someday making his own movie
about the Alamo. An actor since 1926 and a well-known Western star since 1930,
Wayne came to epitomize the American masculine ideal, that is, tough, solitary,
independent, taciturn, fearless, and combative. (As most things Hollywood, the
image was a fanciful one; Wayne, who was dominated by a judgmental mother,
avoided service in the military and never worked as a real cowboy.)
From 1949 to 1953, at the height of the Red Scare, Wayne headed the
Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA), an ultra-
Right Hollywood group formed in 1944 that blacklisted suspected Communists
and sympathizers, reported their names to the FBI, and pressured Congress to
open the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings
in 1947. That same year Wayne began producing films and a few years later tried
his hand at some uncredited second-unit directing on John Ford’s The Quiet Man
(1952) and William Wellman’s Blood Alley (1955).

Davy Crockett and The Last Command (1955)

Circa 1948 Wayne engaged his favorite screenwriter, James Earl “Jimmy” Grant,
to write an Alamo script, and in 1951 Wayne approached Republic Pictures exec-
utive Herbert Yates with an ambitious Alamo project proposal. Unwilling to risk
a large investment on a movie in which all the heroes are killed, Yates turned
Wayne down. Three years later, to promote the Frontierland section of his new
Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California, fellow MPA alumnus Walt Disney
aired Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, starring former Texas football
star Fess Parker as Crockett. A multipart television series (1954) converted to a
theatrical release (1955), Davy Crockett was a puerile, highly romanticized ren-
dition of the Crockett-Alamo myth that touched off an astonishing $100 million
Crockett outfit and coonskin cap craze among American schoolboys that lasted
throughout 1955. Encouraged by Disney’s success and bent on punishing Wayne
for leaving Republic Pictures after a fifteen-year association, Yates went ahead
with his own Alamo movie: Frank Lloyd’s The Last Command (1955), a modestly
budgeted but realistic quickie starring Sterling Hayden as Jim Bowie, Richard
 Military History on Film and Television: The Boer War 11

Carlson as Travis, and Arthur Hunnicutt as Davy Crockett that—thanks to the

Davy Crockett fad—just broke even at the box office.

The Alamo (1960)

Unfazed by Herbert Yates’s attempt to steal his thunder, Wayne went ahead with
his own Alamo project and, in 1956, finally secured a deal with United Artists.
Wayne put in his own money and acquired additional funding from several right-
wing Texas oil millionaires. Though he initially planned to film in Mexico to keep
down production costs, Wayne was persuaded that, given its superpatriotic ideo-
logical aims, the movie had best be shot in Texas. The Daughters of the Republic
of Texas, custodians of the real Alamo in downtown San Antonio, would not allow
filming there so Wayne decided to build an Alamo set at James T. “Happy” Sha-
han’s 30-square-mile ranch outside of Brackettville, Texas, 125 miles west of San
Antonio. Ironically dozens of Mexican craftsmen labored two years to construct
a meticulously authentic adobe facsimile of the Alamo and a twenty-building
replica of the adjacent town of San Antonio de Béxar (pronounced Bayhar) on
Shahan’s ranch. “Alamo Village,” as it came to be called, cost $1.5 million to build
and is still in use as a movie set and tourist attraction.
The casting of The Alamo (1960) proved as problematic as the location of
the shooting. Originally John Wayne wanted to cast Richard Widmark as Col.
Davy Crockett (1786–1836) and himself in the lesser role of Sam Houston
(1793–1863) so that he could concentrate on directing the film. However, United
Artists insisted that he maximize his star power by playing Crockett to help
ensure the movie’s commercial success. Wayne obliged, but his iconic status as
the archetypal American cowboy hero had the unintended effect of seriously
compromising any suspension of disbelief; the viewing public tended to forget
about the character he was playing and simply saw and heard the always impos-
ing John Wayne playing himself in a funny-looking coonskin cap. It hardly mat-
tered that Richard Boone played Sam Houston; Widmark played Col. James
Bowie (1796–1836); and British actor Laurence Harvey played Col. William B.
Travis (1809–1836). Though all solid actors in their own right, their job was to
play second fiddle to John Wayne’s frontier superhero. Indeed, the film’s elitist
“great man” orientation tends to work against its primary ideological aim, which
is to affirm American nation-building within widely accepted populist traditions:
a fundamental contradiction that has always vexed American conservatism as a
political philosophy.
In broad outline James Earl Grant’s script was a fairly accurate rendition of
the historical facts. As the film depicts, the thirteen-day fight at the Alamo was a
12 History in the Media: Film and Television

holding action by fewer than 200 irregulars against 4,000 Mexican troops under
General Antonio López de Santa Ana (1794–1876). The defense of the Alamo was
only meant to gain time for Sam Houston to assemble an insurgent army of Tex-
ans further to the east. Though the physical structures, uniforms, weapons, and
personages involved stay close to reality, The Alamo is marred by slow pacing,
Western genre clichés, Wayne’s clumsy direction of his actors—despite some
uncredited and unsolicited help from Wayne’s old mentor, John Ford—and a
number of fallacious representations that distort history and damage the film’s
credibility. For example, Wayne locates the Alamo on the Rio Grande when it is
150 miles distant. Wayne’s Davy Crockett is always dressed in fabled buckskin
and raccoon cap but the real Crockett rarely wore such an outfit. Jim Bowie
receives a letter at the Alamo informing him that his wife and children have died
of cholera, an event that actually took place four years earlier. Bowie is depicted
as bedridden after being wounded in an explosion during the siege but in reality
was sick in bed from the outset. Davy Crockett is shown being killed in battle but
historical evidence indicates that he surrendered and was subsequently exe-
cuted. The Mexican army is shown to have something like 100 cannons when, in
fact, they only had about 15. Though portrayed as zealous pro-annexation (and
proto-American) patriots, many of the 186 defenders of the Alamo were actually
hired mercenaries fighting for a promised reward of free land and cash. In point
of fact, most Texans did not want independence from Mexico; they merely
wanted (1) Texas to be its own state within Mexico and (2) the restoration of the
Mexican constitution, which had been abrogated by the dictatorial Santa Ana.
Taken together, all of these distortions oversimplify history while emphasizing
the righteousness of the cause and the heroism of the defenders.
When The Alamo was released on October 24, 1960, two weeks before the
presidential election, John Wayne, who had just joined the John Birch Society,
hoped that his film’s fiery celebration of American patriotism would help elect
Republican candidate Richard Nixon. Having put his heart, money, and reputa-
tion on the line, Wayne desperately wanted The Alamo to be a hit, win the acco-
lades of critics and colleagues, and make him a politically powerful Hollywood
producer-director. None of these hopes were realized. Nixon lost a closely con-
tested election to John Kennedy, and film critics politely damned The Alamo
with faint praise. In deference to Wayne’s stature in the industry, the Academy
disingenuously nominated the movie for seven Academy Awards, including Best
Picture. Despite, or because of, shamelessly hyperbolic patriotic hype by
Wayne’s publicist, Russell Birdwell, The Alamo won only one Oscar for Best
Sound and did poorly at the box office, initially recouping only about a tenth of
its record-setting cost of $12 million (US$76 million in 2005).
 Military History on Film and Television: The Boer War 13

The Alamo’s disappointing performance was partly the result of its inher-
ent mediocrity and partly the result of bad timing. Hatched during the height of
the Red Scare, The Alamo became something of an anachronism in the decade it
took John Wayne to bring the movie to fruition. By 1960 the national mood had
changed sufficiently for anticommunist hysteria to lose much of its force. Part
and parcel of a more politically paranoid and jingoistic time, John Wayne would
find himself increasingly out of step with the chaotic and conflicted culture of
the 1960s, a state of affairs made embarrassingly evident by Wayne’s dim-witted
and justly reviled pro-Vietnam War movie, The Green Berets (1968).

Viva Max! (1970)

Dallas newspaper journalist (and future PBS NewsHour anchorman) Jim Lehrer
undoubtedly had John Wayne in mind when he wrote his first novel, Viva Max!
(New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1966), a satire of nationalism and militarism
featuring a modern, deranged Mexican general who decides to recapture the
Alamo. Ely Landau and Oliver A. Unger (cofounders, with Harold Goldman, of
National TelaFilm Associates) bought the film rights to Lehrer’s book and hired
Elliott Baker to adapt it to the screen, Mark Carliner to produce, and television
veteran Jerry Paris to direct. With exteriors shot at the real Alamo and interiors
shot on a set in Rome, Viva Max! (1970) boasted a stellar cast of politically lib-
eral comedic actors headed by Peter Ustinov as General Maximilian Rodrigues
de Santos; Pamela Tiffin as Max’s girlfriend; Jonathan Winters as General Billy
Joe Hallson of the Texas National Guard; John Astin as Sgt. Valdez; Keenan Wynn
as General Lacomber; and Harry Morgan as Chief of Police Sylvester. Coming at
the height of the Vietnam War protests and on the heels of John Wayne’s afore-
mentioned Green Berets, Viva Max! was quite clearly meant to serve as a liberal
rejoinder to Wayne’s reactionary politics. Indeed, the film shows a painting of
Wayne as Davy Crockett defending the Alamo and includes the following dis-
claimer: “All characters depicted in this motion picture except John Wayne are
fictitious . . .”

The Alamo: Thirteen Days to Glory (1987)

At the end of the Reagan era and the twilight of the Cold War, John Wayne pro-
tégé James Arness of Gunsmoke fame brought out a made-for-television movie,
The Alamo: Thirteen Days to Glory (1987), based on Lon Tinkle’s straightforward
14 History in the Media: Film and Television

historical account, 13 Days to Glory (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958). In adapting

his book to the screen, writers Clyde Ware and Norman Morrill followed Tinkle’s
lead by eschewing myth and emphasizing the flawed humanity of the main per-
sonages. Unfortunately, Arness’s version was hamstrung by a very limited budget
and generally poor casting choices. Though the then twenty-eight-year-old Alec
Baldwin made a fitting William B. Travis (twenty-seven years old at the Alamo),
and the prodigiously talented Raul Julia delivered a memorable rendition of Gen-
eral Santa Ana, the rest of Arness’s ensemble was embarrassingly miscast. At
sixty-four the 6-foot, 7-inch Arness was too old and too big to play Jim Bowie, who
was forty years of age and a lanky 6 feet tall; sixty-six-year-old Brian Keith made
an absurd Davy Crockett, who was only forty-nine; and Lorne Green, at sixty-
eight, was twenty-five years older than his character, Sam Houston. Lacking suf-
ficient funds for the necessary extras to fill out Santa Ana’s army, director Burt
Kennedy resorted to using battle footage from 1955’s The Last Command, which
was shot at a set built on Hobbs Ranch in Brackettville, not at the nearby Alamo
Village, where 13 Days was mostly shot. The resulting mismatches made the
film’s shoddy production values look even shoddier. Suffice it to say, 13 Days to
Glory is the weakest of the modern Alamo movies.

The Alamo (2004)

In May 2002 Disney CEO Michael Eisner announced that Disney subsidiary,
Touchstone Pictures, would make a new movie about the Alamo that would
“capture the post-September 11th surge in patriotism” (Barra 2002). Eisner also
noted that the film would not stint on the Mexican side of the story, prompting
the press to speculate that a “politically correct” (that is, revisionist) version of
events was in the works. Ron Howard was slated to produce and direct the film
and Russell Crowe was to star as General Sam Houston, with Ethan Hawke play-
ing the part of William Barrett Travis. Intent on historical accuracy, Howard
teamed up with leftist writer/director John Sayles (Eight Men Out; Matewan) to
write a script that would avoid the pat mythologizing that Disney had been guilty
of in the 1950s. But patriotism, political correctness, and money considerations
are uneasy bedfellows, and Disney’s new Alamo project soon ran into trouble.
The epic that Howard, Sayles, and script polisher Stephen Gaghan (Traffic)
envisaged was dark and bloody and would require an R rating. Furthermore,
Howard and his producing partner, Brian Glazer, were asking $10 million and
superstar Russell Crowe’s fee was $20 million, bringing the total cost of the film
to about $125 million. Michael Eisner balked at the downbeat script, the R rat-
ing, which would narrow its box office potential, and the enormous budget,
 Military History on Film and Television: The Boer War 15

prompting Ron Howard to quit as director in July 2002. Crowe and Hawke also
dropped out. At this point Disney scaled down the scope of the project to a pro-
jected $75 million and brought in Leslie Bohem (Dante’s Peak) to help make
script revisions that would render the desired PG-13 rating. Texas native John
Lee Hancock (The Rookie) replaced Howard as director (who nonetheless
stayed on as coproducer with Mark Johnson); Dennis Quaid replaced Russell
Crowe; Patrick Wilson replaced Ethan Hawke; Emilio Echevarría was hired to
play General Santa Ana; Jason Patric took on the role of Jim Bowie; and Billy
Bob Thornton signed on to play Davy Crockett in what proved to be the film’s
best casting choice. Opting not to use John Wayne’s forty-three-year-old Alamo
Village in Brackettville, Disney built an elaborate and incredibly expensive 51-
acre set on Reimer’s Ranch in Dripping Springs outside of Austin, Texas—the
largest movie set ever built in North America.
As Roger Ebert noted in his review, “The arc of the Alamo story is a daunt-
ing one for any filmmaker: long days and nights of waiting, followed by a mas-
sacre” (Ebert 2004). In the early twenty-first century the filmmakers’ task was
made even more difficult by a confluence of new factors: (1) the perceived need
to meet higher standards of historical accuracy (that is, given enlightened atti-
tudes and more sophisticated research, a new Alamo film had to be more bal-
anced and realistic than previous versions); (2) the need to not offend America’s
substantial Hispanic population; (3) the urgent need, post 9/11, to affirm patriot-
ism; and (4) the usual imperative that the film be entertaining and, therefore,
make money. All of these somewhat contradictory requisites would have been
difficult enough to negotiate but Disney also wanted to hedge its bets by serving
up a happy ending! Struggling mightily to fashion a script that covered all the
bases, The Alamo’s various screenwriters and script doctors came up with a
story line that borrowed the old film noir device of putting the aftermath at the
beginning, then flashing back to the events leading up to the final battle, which
is then shown in detail. The happy ending requirement is addressed by devoting
the last part of the movie to the Battle of San Jacinto (April 21, 1836), when Sam
Houston’s army utterly routed Santa Ana’s forces in a mere 18 minutes and won
independence for Texas, thus compensating for the defeat at the Alamo.
Scheduled for release just before Christmas 2003, The Alamo was resched-
uled for Easter 2004 release after negative test screenings in November prompted
massive cuts, rewrites, and reshooting. Particularly irksome to test audiences was
the film’s depiction of Davy Crockett cravenly begging for his life at the feet of
Santa Ana. What was originally a 3-hour film was reduced to a more digestible 2
hours and 15 minutes. However, the four-month delay needed to revamp The
Alamo ultimately pushed its price tag to $107 million (or $32 million over budget),
garnered bad advance publicity, and forfeited untold tens of millions of dollars by
16 History in the Media: Film and Television

missing the peak Christmas season. But Hancock and Disney were between a
rock and a hard place. In its original, more politically correct form, the film would
have failed. In its revised form, The Alamo was perhaps more (white) audience-
friendly, but excessive tinkering had compromised any dramatic focus it might
have had, and the film’s best showcasing opportunity had been irrevocably lost.
Most critics found the film visually impressive and historically accurate but dra-
matically diffuse and rather dull. Soon after The Alamo made its April 11, 2004,
national premier on some 2,600 screens, it was painfully apparent to Disney exec-
utives that they had a major bomb on their hands. The film ultimately earned
about $24 million at the box office: less than a fourth of what it cost to make and
market. Despite international and future rental business, The Alamo is unlikely to
ever turn a profit: a sign perhaps that the American culture wars have reached
such a state of bitter divisiveness that any ideologically charged historical epic
seeking a broad audience is now simply an impossible proposition.

The Crimean War (1854–1856)

The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936)

Following sound marketing practice, Warner Brothers made Michael Curtiz’s The
Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) to capitalize on the box office success of
Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), a Paramount action-adventure film about the
British imperialist experience in India. Furthermore, Warner Bros. deemed The
Charge a perfect vehicle for its new action star, Tasmania-born Errol Flynn, who
had just won fame playing the highly idealized, heroic, and impeccably British
title character in Michael Curtiz’s hit film, Captain Blood (1935). As originally
conceived, the script called for the events leading up to the famous Charge of the
Light Brigade to have their basis in the siege and annihilation of the British gar-
rison at Cawnpore during the Sepoy (sepáhi) Rebellion, a widespread mutiny of
Indian soldiers in the British colonial army. When some astute observer pointed
out that the Sepoy Rebellion actually took place in 1857, three years after Bala-
clava, Warner Bros. hurriedly changed the fort’s name to Chukoti and its attack-
ers became mythical “Suristani” hill tribesmen led by an equally mythical and
suitably diabolical potentate named Surat Khan, perhaps a conflation of the
Sepoy Mutiny leaders Hajimullah Khan and Nana Sahib.
One might well ask what colonial hostilities in India have to do with the
Crimean War. Not a thing, but the film needed to link these two distinct crises of
Victorian imperialism for reasons both logistical and ideological. First, screen-
writers Michel Jacoby and Roland Leigh had to supply a noble and plausible rea-
 Military History on Film and Television: The Boer War 17

son for the suicidal and otherwise inexplicable Charge of the Light Brigade at
Balaclava that would also square with Errol Flynn’s emerging star persona as a
dashing, high-minded figure. In his famous poem, Alfred Lord Tennyson had sim-
ply noted, “someone had blundered.” The elaborate plot Jacoby and Leigh
devised has Surat Khan’s minions slaughtering British women and children after
the fall of the fort at Chukoti: an atrocity that cries for British vengeance. Trans-
ferred to the Crimea after service in India against the Suristanis, the fictional
Geoffrey Vickers (Errol Flynn) learns that Surat Khan (stock villain C. Henry
Gordon) has allied himself with the Russians. Quite predictably, Vickers forges
orders for an attack of the 27th Lancers on the Russian batteries at Balaclava
Heights to exact personal revenge on the Khan. The Light Brigade is butchered
but British honor is restored when Vickers manages to kill Surat Khan before
succumbing to his own wounds. Faring worse in reality were some 200 horses
deliberately tripped and killed during the filming of the cavalry charge scene: an
atrocity that prompted tighter controls on the use of animals in motion pictures.

The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968)

While Michael Curtiz’s Charge of the Light Brigade reflected the romantic-
escapist tendencies of 1930s Hollywood and its none-too-discriminating audi-
ence, Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) bespoke a
starkly different time, place, and cultural sensibility. One of Britain’s “angry
young men” and a leading figure in British cinema’s iconoclastic New Wave in the
late 1950s and early 1960s, Richardson (Look Back in Anger; Tom Jones) was a
major antiestablishment figure, as were Richardson’s screenwriters, noted play-
wright John Osborne (Look Back in Anger) and Charles Wood (who cowrote
Richard Lester’s Help! and How I Won the War and revised Osborne’s screen-
play). Like most of their peers in mid-1960s London, Richardson, Osborne, and
Wood were staunchly opposed to the ongoing Vietnam War, to war in general,
and to the authoritarian, sclerotic bureaucracies that promoted war and all man-
ner of oppression. Knowing something of their own country’s history, Richard-
son and his cohorts were well aware that Michael Curtiz’s 1936 version of events
was a preposterous fabrication. In point of fact, the Crimean War was a farcical
masterpiece of incompetent leadership for which, as usual, the rank and file had
to pay dearly.
Working with a substantial budget (the equivalent of US$43.3 million in
2003), Richardson and producer Neil Hartley secured a superb cast: Trevor
Howard as Lord Cardigan (1797–1868); John Geilgud as Lord Raglan (1788–1855);
Harry Andrews as Lord Lucan (1800–1888); David Hemmings as Captain Louis
18 History in the Media: Film and Television

Edward Nolan (1818–1854); Richardson’s wife, Vanessa Redgrave, as Mrs. Clarissa

Morris; and John Osborne’s wife, Jill Bennett, as Mrs. Frances “Fanny” Duberly.
For their main source, Osborne and Wood relied on Cecil Woodham-Smith’s
scathing exposé of the Balaclava fiasco, The Reason Why: The Fatal Charge of the
Light Brigade (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954). According to Woodham-Smith the
slaughter of the Light Brigade chiefly owed to Lord Raglan’s tendency to extem-
porize and issue vague orders. Indeed, an ambiguously worded order caused the
Light Brigade to charge into the wrong valley where they encounter the Russian
artillery batteries head-on. Another error on Raglan’s part was his placing Lord
Cardigan under the command of Cardigan’s brother-in-law, Lord Lucan. The two
men loathed each other and carried on a steadily escalating feud that made their
respective commands incapable of working together. In a more general sense, the
gross mismanagement of the Crimean War stemmed from the absurdities of the
British class system. Though it had its share of able soldiers, a good part of the
British army’s senior officer corps in the early Victorian era was comprised of
aged veterans of Waterloo and wealthy gentry who had simply purchased their
commands when the war started: a dubious practice that ensured the placement
of inexperienced and inept amateurs leading professional soldiers into battle.
An officer of the latter category, James Thomas Brudenell, the 7th Earl of
Cardigan and commander of the Light Brigade, was an insufferably petulant mar-
tinet who flew into childish rages at the smallest annoyances. His hated brother-
in-law, George Charles Bingham, the 3rd Earl of Lucan and overall commander
of the cavalry, was a hot-tempered, pompous peer of the realm promoted over
better officers because of his connections and high social standing. Richardson’s
Charge does not need to exaggerate the deficiencies of Cardigan and Lucan; both
men were detestable upper-class twits and incompetent commanders. Overall
commander of British forces in the Crimea, Fitzroy James Henry Somerset (Lord
Raglan), a sixty-five-year-old, one-armed Waterloo veteran, was well intentioned
but woefully ineffectual. John Geilgud’s amusing rendition of Lord Raglan as
nearly senile is exaggerated, but not by much.
In partial contrast to the privileged ninnies who run the show, the film
posits Captain Louis Nolan (David Hemmings), a strident but combat-tested offi-
cer who quite rightfully despises Cardigan, Lucan, and Raglan—who respond in
kind. Indeed, as regards Capt. Nolan, Raglan utters one of the film’s more mem-
orable lines: “It will be a sad day for England when her armies are led by men
who know too well what they are doing—it smacks of murder.” To further
emphasize the characteristic 1960s theme of enlightened youth versus
benighted, hidebound middle age, Richardson pairs Hemmings with Vanessa
Redgrave, the wife of his friend, Capt. Morris (Mark Burns), whose amorous
 Military History on Film and Television: The Boer War 19

advances he piously spurns. As the two had already starred opposite each other
in Michelangelo Antonioni’s ultrahip mystery-thriller, Blowup (1966), contempo-
rary audiences were meant to see them as iconic representatives of the rebel-
lious youth culture. Finally, in marked contrast to the glorious charge visualized
by Michael Curtiz, Richardson shoots his version of the event with a certain
gritty realism. The culminating image—a freeze-frame shot of a dead horse—
nicely encapsulates the sense of slaughter, waste, and futility as the command-
ing officers try to lay blame on each other for the fiasco. Though a sometimes
effective satire of Victorian hubris, Richardson’s Charge lacks overall dramatic
cohesion, nor does it present a protagonist with whom the audience can identify.
Richard Williams’ Monty Python–like animated linking sequences inspired by
Crimean War–era Punch magazine cartoons are witty but shatter the carefully
cultivated verisimilitude of the film proper and date the movie as quintessentially
1960s in style and temperament.

The American Civil War (1861–1865)

The Andersonville Trial (1970)

Early in 1864 the Confederacy, struggling to cope with a massive influx of Union
prisoners of war, built Camp Sumter near Andersonville, Georgia, where some
43,000 POWs were interned in a camp designed for 8,000. Over the next fourteen
months, 12,912 of those men (30 percent) died of starvation, disease, and expo-
sure: a humanitarian tragedy of horrifying proportions. After the war, the victo-
rious Federals put the camp commandant, Capt. Henry Wirz (1822–1865), on trial
for the hideous conditions at Andersonville, found him guilty of war crimes, and
had him hanged. Almost a century later (on December 29, 1959, to be exact) The
Andersonville Trial, a play by war correspondent, Pulitzer Prize–winning jour-
nalist, and ex-Communist Saul Levitt, premiered on Broadway and was a great
success. Based on the actual court-martial transcripts, The Andersonville Trial
starring George C. Scott as Capt. Wirz was a dramatic tour de force that posed
troubling questions about authority and moral responsibility. Sounding very
much like the Nazis who stood trial at Nuremberg after World War II, the arro-
gant, unrepentant Wirz protested that he was only following orders. In May 1970
the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) released a 2-hour, 30-minute telecast of
Levitt’s play, The Andersonville Trial, directed by George C. Scott and starring
Richard Basehart as Henry Wirz, Cameron Mitchell as Advocate General Lew
Wallace (1827–1905), and William Shatner as Lt. Col. Norton Parker Chipman
20 History in the Media: Film and Television

(1836–1924), the army’s chief prosecutor. True to the facts and brilliantly acted,
The Andersonville Trial was nominated for five Emmys and won three (for best
drama, camera work, and writing). Released just six months after New York
Times correspondent Seymour Hersh first broke the shocking story of the mas-
sacre of over 500 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai on March 16, 1968, the film also
carried renewed and enormous political resonance.

Glory (1989)

Edward Zwick’s Glory (1989) pursues an ideological agenda that differs

markedly from that of The Andersonville Trial. Basing his screenplay on Peter
Burchard’s One Gallant Rush (New York: St. Martin’s, 1965), Lincoln Kirstein’s
Lay This Laurel: An Album on the Saint-Gaudens Memorial on Boston Com-
mon Honoring Black and White Men Together Who Served the Union Cause
with Robert Gould Shaw and Died with Him July 18, 1863 (New York: Eakins
Press, 1973), and the letters of Robert Gould Shaw, writer Kevin Jarre (Rambo:
First Blood Part II) recounts the story of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, one
of the first black units assembled during the Civil War. On July 18, 1863—just two
weeks after Gettysburg—the 54th led eleven other Union regiments in an unsuc-
cessful assault on Fort Wagner, near Charlestown, South Carolina, and pre-
dictably sustained the heaviest casualties: 256 dead or wounded out of 600 men.
Among the dead was Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (1837–1863), the regiment’s
white commander from a prominent Boston abolitionist family. Though the
attack was disastrous, the 54th proved its fighting mettle and paved the way for
the eventual recruitment of another 180,000 African Americans into the Union
army (10 percent of their total number): a development that helped turn the tide
of the Civil War in favor of the North.
The story that Glory tells is an exceptionally important one but the film
itself is less than great. Among its weaknesses: a tendency toward bombastic dia-
logue and, especially, the casting of the cherubic-faced Matthew Broderick as
Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. Primarily a comic actor, Broderick lacked the grav-
ity needed to deliver a convincing depiction of Col. Shaw. Likewise, the supposed
glory of being slaughtered in a suicidal frontal assault on a well-defended enemy
fortress is a dubious proposition that unavoidably casts the larger significance of
the event into doubt. As Robert Burgoyne (Film Studies, Wayne State University)
argues, “In the shots of the mass burial of the soldiers of the 54th that end the film,
the national narrative is hauntingly evoked not as a triumphal story of social
progress, but as a collective narrative of social loss” (Burgoyne 1997, 37).
 Military History on Film and Television: The Boer War 21

The Civil War (1990)

In 1984 fledgling documentarian Ken Burns read Michael Shaara’s The Killer
Angels (New York: McKay, 1974), a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel about the Battle
of Gettysburg. Inspired by Shaara’s book, Burns undertook a massive documen-
tary about the Civil War. Scouring dozens of libraries and museums, Burns and
his team filmed 16,000 photographs, paintings, and newspapers from the period,
recruited an impressive contingent of commentators for interviews and actors
for dramatic recitations, and proceeded to make The Civil War, a nine-part (11-
hour) PBS film series narrated by David McCullough. On the PBS website
devoted to the film, Burns grandiloquently describes his filmmaking style (which
had been evolving since his first film, Brooklyn Bridge, in 1981) as “the careful
use of archival photographs, live modern cinematography, music, narration, and
a chorus of first-person voices that together did more than merely recount a his-
torical story. It was something that also became a kind of ‘emotional archaeol-
ogy,’ trying to unearth the very heart of the American experience; listening to the
ghosts and echoes of an almost inexpressibly wise past” (http://www.pbs.org).
Episode One of The Civil War, The Cause (1861), introduces the major fig-
ures of the era and details the signal events leading up to the firing on Fort
Sumter: the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1850;
the pro-slavery Dred Scott Decision of 1857; John Brown’s failed raid at Harpers
Ferry in 1859; and the controversial election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. The
episode culminates with General McClellan’s crushing defeat at Mannasas, Vir-
ginia (First Battle of Bull Run). Episode Two, A Very Bloody Affair (1982),
recounts the revolutionary use of “ironclad” ships on both sides and contrasts
the inaction of McClellan on the Virginia peninsula with the able leadership of
Ulysses S. Grant, whose Union forces prevail at the extremely bloody Battle of
Shiloh (Tennessee). Episode Three, Forever Free (1862), focuses on Lincoln’s
firing of McClellan, followed by reinstatement after McClellan’s replacement,
General John Pope, is defeated at the Second Battle of Bull Run, followed by
McClellan’s permanent ouster after his indecisive performance against Robert E.
Lee’s forces at Antietam (Sharpsburg, Maryland), September 16–18, 1862.
Episode Three also traces Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, from idea to
actuality, made politically possible by the Union victory at Antietam. In Episode
Four, Simply Murder (1863), Union forces under General Ambrose Burnside
suffer another withering defeat at Fredericksburg, Virginia (December 1862);
Lincoln replaces Burnside with Joseph Hooker but the Union army sustains
another trouncing by Lee’s forces at Chancellorsville, Virginia (April–May, 1863);
General Grant lays siege to Vicksburg. Episode Five, The Universe of Battle
22 History in the Media: Film and Television

(1863), deals primarily with Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania, culminat-

ing in General George Meade’s decisive victory over Lee’s army at Gettysburg
(July 1–3, 1863), a battle that resulted in over 50,000 total casualties. Episode Six,
Valley of the Shadow of Death (1864), examines the backgrounds of Generals
Grant and Lee and then chronicles Grant’s Overland Campaign (May–June 1864),
an incredibly bloody offensive against Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia that
resulted in stalemate outside of Petersburg, Virginia. Episode Seven, Most Hal-
lowed Ground (1864), focuses on the presidential election of 1864, when Abra-
ham Lincoln handily defeated the Democratic candidate, his former army com-
mander, George McClellan, after Union victories at Mobile Bay, Atlanta, and the
Shenandoah Valley renewed the North’s faith in eventual victory. Episode Eight,
War Is All Hell (1865), begins with General William T. Sherman’s devastating
march to the sea, covers Lincoln’s second inauguration, recounts the fall of
Petersburg and Richmond, and culminates with Lee’s surrender to Grant at
Appomattox. Episode Nine, The Better Angels of Our Nature (1865), concludes
the series with Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865, just five days after Lee’s
surrender, and ruminates on the meaning and consequences of the Civil War.
When it aired in the fall of 1990, after almost six years of painstaking
research and production, The Civil War won two Emmys, broke all ratings
records for public television, and instigated a passionate national dialogue on the
Civil War 135 years after the war ended. In part, the astonishing cultural impact
of Burns’s achievement can be gauged in dollars and cents. A companion book,
priced at $50, sold 700,000 copies, and gross revenues associated with the film
eventually topped $100 million: an amazing performance for a documentary
series. While it is difficult to pinpoint the reasons for The Civil War’s tremendous
success, a number of factors probably came into play: nostalgia for a simpler,
more idealistic—and astonishingly more literate—time; the war’s enduring fas-
cination for hundreds of thousands of Americans; Burns’s considerable narrative
gifts and a multifaceted expositional approach that made for compelling viewing;
the film’s intellectually middlebrow and politically centrist orientation that
refused to take sides (except to unequivocally condemn slavery), that is, a stance
that guaranteed the widest possible audience. No doubt The Civil War was also
a triumph of style. Its stately pace, reverential tone, epic scope, and richness of
detail practically demanded a respectful, attentive reception.
But was it good history? Historians are divided on the question. In 1996
Oxford University Press published Ken Burns’s ‘The Civil War’: Historians
Respond, a collection of critical essays edited by film historian Robert Brent
Toplin (University of North Carolina at Wilmington) that also featured strident
rebuttals by Ken Burns and Geoffrey C. Ward (Civil War cowriter with Burns
and Burns’s brother, Ric). Toplin and C. Vann Woodward (retired Johns Hopkins
 Military History on Film and Television: The Boer War 23

history professor who served as a consultant to Burns) praise the film; Gabor S.
Boritt (director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg) and Gary W. Gallagher
(professor of the history of the American Civil War at the University of Virginia)
give it mixed reviews; Catherine Clinton (expert on nineteenth-century gender
issues), Leon F. Litwack (University of California at Berkeley; expert on African
American history), and Eric Foner (Columbia University; expert on slavery and
the Reconstruction era) find it wanting in its coverage of women, blacks, and the
Reconstruction, respectively. Responding to his detractors, Burns has argued
that contemporary academic history, with its arcane specializations, abstract dis-
course, and emphasis on social structure and ideology, make history not only
boring but virtually unintelligible to the layperson. For Burns, the historical doc-
umentary calls for orderly, audience-friendly storytelling that assiduously avoids
current academic debates about competing research methodologies and repre-
sentational modes and the ideological biases that inform them. Some academics,
usually on the radical Left, counter that Burns would do well to present oppos-
ing interpretations rather than a homogenized version of American history that
tends to repress darker truths (that is, exploitation, inequality, imperialism) by
submersing them in a sea of wholesome period detail. In Ken Burns’s favor, it
must be noted that he has been instrumental in bringing reasonably accurate
treatments of historical subjects to millions of Americans who would not other-
wise seek such knowledge. An unintended consequence of The Civil War series
was that it brought the sorry state of contemporary political discourse into sharp
relief by reminding Americans they once had a president of very high moral and
intellectual stature.

The Battle of Gettysburg (1955)

As the battle that arguably sealed the doom of the Confederacy, Gettysburg is far
and away the most famous engagement of the Civil War. At least five films were
made about the Battle of Gettysburg (or Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address) during
the silent film era. In 1955, at the nadir of the Cold War, Dore Schary, the politi-
cally liberal CEO of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, wrote and produced The Battle of
Gettysburg, a patriotic 30-minute color documentary shot on location at Gettys-
burg National Military Park. Voice-over narrator Leslie Nielsen (ironically, a
Canadian by birth) recounts the battle, his commentary accompanied by battle
sounds, period music, and shots of the numerous memorials and empty fields
where the carnage took place ninety years before. There are no reenactments. In
1956 The Battle of Gettysburg was nominated for two Oscars (Best Documen-
tary, Short Subject, and Best Short Subject, Two Reel).
24 History in the Media: Film and Television

Gettysburg (1993)

In 1978, when he was just starting out as a film director, Ronald F. Maxwell read
Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels. As deeply moved by the book as Ken Burns
would be a few years later, Maxwell resolved to make a film version of The Killer
Angels, but it would take nearly fifteen years before he could obtain sufficient
financing. Ironically, the release of Burns’s The Civil War did the trick. Encour-
aged by the series’ tremendous success, Atlanta media mogul Ted Turner con-
tracted with Maxwell to make Gettysburg, a 6-hour Turner Network Television
(TNT) miniseries. Once filming began, Ted Turner was so impressed by the qual-
ity of the evolving project that he became convinced it could be his entrée into
major feature film production. Accordingly, Turner approved a 4-hour version for
theatrical release that was budgeted at $25 million: a considerable sum but still
modest for a movie of such epic proportions.
A faithful adaptation of Michael Shaara’s historically accurate novel, Get-
tysburg (1993) starred Martin Sheen as Robert E. Lee (1807–1872); Tom
Berenger as Lt. Gen. James Longstreet (1821–1904); Stephen Lang as Major Gen-
eral George E. Pickett (1825–1875); Richard Jordan as Brigadier General Lewis
A. Armistead (1817–1863); Jeff Daniels as Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamber-
lain (1828–1914), and, literally, a cast of thousands of unpaid Civil War reenac-
tors who provided their own, scrupulously authentic, uniforms and equipment: a
key ingredient that kept the film realistic and the production affordable. With its
final cut coming in at some 4 hours and 20 minutes, Gettysburg was an exhila-
rating experience for Civil War fanatics—an overwhelmingly white, male, South-
ern demographic—but a tad slow and ponderous for most laypersons, who
stayed away in droves. The film lost about $14 million. A lugubrious score by
Randy Edelman (Last of the Mohicans) protested too much the film’s mythic
pretensions, as did pompously noble speeches by the principal actors, some of
whom were accoutred in outsized false beards that bordered on the uninten-
tionally funny. To his credit, Ken Burns tried to be as inclusive as his own biases
allowed, examining the Civil War from social, cultural, military, and personal per-
spectives. Made during and released after the unambiguous triumph of the first
Gulf War, Ron Maxwell’s Gettysburg is a portentous military docudrama that rev-
els in the supposed glory of the clash of arms. As with most conventional war
movies, there is a great deal of spectacular simulated killing and dying but the
film does not dwell on the general squalor and gore, the pitiful screams of the
wounded, the fields strewn with bloated corpses, or the hundreds of grisly ampu-
tations that were as integral to the battle as Pickett’s Charge.
 Military History on Film and Television: The Boer War 25

Pharoah’s Army (1995)

Diametrically opposite to Gettysburg in scope, tone, and ideological valance is

Robby Henson’s Pharoah’s Army (1995), a low-budget independent production
that accomplishes much more with much less. In 1941 an elderly mountaineer
returned to a remote sinkhole outside the now defunct hamlet of Meschack’s
Creek, Kentucky, where seventy-nine years earlier he had secretly buried a
Union soldier he had killed during the Civil War. Noted Appalachian folklorist-
writer-activist Harry M. Caudill (1922–1990) recorded the mountaineer’s story
and Robby Henson adapted it to the screen with stunning results.
In 1862 a small party of Union cavalry, sent out to forage for provisions in
the Cumberland Gap region of south-central Kentucky, is forced to linger at a
Confederate partisan’s farm after one of their number (Huckleberry Fox) is
injured in a fall. The farm’s beautiful mistress, Sarah Anders (Patricia Clarkson)
and her young son (Will Lucas)—who will become the elderly narrator recalling
the events—despise the Federals for trespassing and stealing their food but are
forced to tolerate them. What ensues is a battle of nerves and emotions between
the soldiers and their reluctant hosts. The leader of the Union detachment,
recent widower Captain John Hull Abston (Chris Cooper), is a decent, compas-
sionate man caught between duty, romantic attraction to Sarah Anders (whose
husband is off fighting with the Confederate army), and the often deeply per-
sonal hatred that prevails between the North and South. A farmer himself,
Abston plows the woman’s field and chops her wood—signs of kindness one of
his embittered soldiers chooses to interpret as weakness. After a tumultuous
stay, the men are departing the farm when Sarah’s idealistic young son shoots
and kills the injured soldier: an act that enrages Captain Abston, who nonethe-
less chooses not to punish his “enemies.” In marked contrast to the epic-heroic
pretensions of Gettysburg, Pharoah’s Army presents the Civil War in intimate
terms: as a Faulknerian story about individuals struggling to morally navigate the
inevitable brutalities, injustices, and conflicted loyalties that marked the war.
Despite the superb performance of Chris Cooper and a small but notable part
played by Kris Kristoffersen (as a hard-hearted Southern preacher), Pharoah’s
Army received very limited distribution and publicity—a sad irony given the
film’s clear superiority to most films about the Civil War.

Andersonville (1996)

Not long after Gettysburg, Ted Turner bankrolled another Civil War project: John
Frankenheimer’s Andersonville (1996), a two-part miniseries for TNT that
26 History in the Media: Film and Television

sought to capture the horrors of the Civil War’s most notorious prison camp.
Written by David W. Rintels, Andersonville presented two story lines: (1) the
prisoners’ battle against the “Raiders,” that is, renegade Union soldiers who prey
on their comrades and (2) an escape attempt by tunnel. An overlong but better-
than-average television film, Andersonville was nominated for seven Emmys and
won one (for Frankenheimer’s direction). Andersonville should not, however, be
confused with The Andersonville Trial. Made during the politically charged era
of the Vietnam War, The Andersonville Trial was implicitly antiwar and specifi-
cally aimed at evoking moral questions surrounding the My Lai Massacre. Ander-
sonville’s politics are, by contrast, decidedly conservative. Made well after
Ronald Reagan orchestrated national amnesia about Vietnam, Andersonville and
to a lesser extent, its predecessor, Gettysburg reflected the manful, right-wing
Southern populism of its backer, Ted Turner, and was geared toward military
enthusiasts, Civil War buffs, and reenactors, not for those interested in ponder-
ing the philosophical and moral vagaries of war.

Gods and Generals (2003)

During his long quest to make Gettysburg, Ronald Maxwell became close
friends with Michael Shaara and Shaara’s son, Jeff. After Gettysburg appeared,
Maxwell suggested to Jeff that someone should be commissioned to write the
prequel and sequel to The Killer Angels that his father had planned to write
before he died of a heart attack in 1988. Taking up Maxwell’s suggestion himself,
Jeff Shaara quit the antique business and proceeded to write his first book, Gods
and Generals (New York: Ballantine, 1996), the Killer Angels prequel that
focuses on the military career and personality of legendary Confederate General
Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson (1824–1863; killed at the Battle of Chancellorsville,
two months before Gettysburg). Though primarily a hagiography about Jackson,
the novel also deals with Robert E. Lee and Union officers Winfield Scott Han-
cock (1824–1886) and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Much to Shaara’s sur-
prise, Gods and Generals garnered strong reviews and resided on the New York
Times bestseller list for fifteen weeks; the nation’s Civil War flame, never dead
but fanned into a major conflagration by Ken Burns six years earlier, apparently
still burned bright.
As was always his intention, Ron Maxwell bought the rights to Gods and
Generals, wrote a screen adaptation, and once again received the personal back-
ing of Ted Turner to the tune of $56 million to make the film version (another $24
million would be spent on marketing). Released in February 2003, Gods and
Generals starred Gettysburg veteran Stephen Lang as “Stonewall” Jackson; Jeff
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
 In the same hemisphere, far, far removed from the Falkland group,
the Auckland Islands lie in the boisterous ocean south of New
Zealand. They are covered with dense and all but impenetrable
thickets of stunted trees, or rather shrubs, about 20 or 30 feet high,
gnarled by gales from a stormy sea. There is nothing analogous to
these shrubs in the northern hemisphere; but the Veronica elliptica,
a native of Tierra del Fuego and New Zealand, is one of them.
Fifteen species of ferns find shelter under these trees, and their
fallen trunks are covered with mosses and lichens. Eighty flowering
plants were found during the stay of the discovery ships, of which 56
are new; and half of the whole number are peculiar to this group
and to Campbell’s Island. Some of the most beautiful flowers grow
on the mountains, others are mixed with the ferns in the forests. A
beautiful plant was discovered, like a purple aster, a Veronica, with
large spikes of ultramarine colour; a white one, with a perfume like
jessamine; a sweet-smelling alpine Hierochloe; and in some of the
valleys the fragrant and bright-yellow blossoms of a species of
asphodel were so abundant that the ground looked like a carpet of
gold. A singular plant grows on the sea-shore, having bunches of
green waxy blossoms the size of a child’s head. There are also
antarctic species of European genera, as beautiful red and white
gentians, geraniums, &c. The vegetation is characterized by an
exuberance of the finer flowering plants, and an absence of grasses
and sedges; but the landscape, though picturesque, has a sombre
aspect, from the prevalence of brownish-leaved plants of the myrtle
tribe.
Campbell’s Island lies 120 miles to the south of the Auckland
group, and is much smaller, but from the more varied form of its
surface it is supposed to produce as many species of plants. During
the two days the discovery ships, under the command of Sir James
Ross, remained there, between 200 and 300 were collected, of
which 66 were flowering plants, 14 of which were peculiar to the
country. Many of the Auckland Island plants were found here, yet a
great change had taken place; 34 species had disappeared and were
replaced by 20 new, all peculiar to Campbell’s Island alone, and
some were found that hitherto had been supposed to belong to
Antarctic America only. In the Auckland group only one-seventh of
the plants are common to other Antarctic lands, whilst in Campbell’s
Island a fourth are natives of other longitudes in the Antarctic
Ocean. The flora of Campbell’s Island and the Auckland group is so
intimately allied to that of New Zealand, that it may be regarded as
the continuation of the latter, under an Antarctic character, though
destitute of the beech and pine trees. There is a considerable
number of Fuegian plants in the islands under consideration, though
4000 miles distant; and whenever their flora differs in the smaller
plants from that of New Zealand, it approximates to that of Antarctic
America: but the trees and shrubs are entirely dissimilar. The relation
between this vegetation and that of the northern regions is but
slight. The Auckland group and Campbell’s Island are in a latitude
corresponding to that of England, yet only three indigenous plants of
our island have been found in them, namely, the Cardamine hirsuta,
Montia, and Callitriche. This is the utmost southern limit of tree-
ferns.
Perhaps no spot in either hemisphere, at the same distance from
the pole, is more barren than Kerguelen Islands, lying in a remote
part of the south polar ocean. Only 18 species of flowering plants
were found there, which is less than the number in Melville Island, in
the Arctic Seas, and three times less than the number even in
Spitzbergen. The whole known vegetation of these islands only
amounts to 150, including sea-weeds. The Pringlea, a kind of
cabbage, acceptable to those who have been long at sea, is peculiar
to the island, and grass, together with a plant similar to the Bolax of
the Falkland Islands, covers large tracts. About 20 mosses, lichens,
&c., are only found in these islands, but many of the others are also
native in the European Alps and north polar regions. It is a very
remarkable circumstance in the distribution of plants, that there
should be so much analogy between the floras of places so far apart
as Kerguelen Islands, the groups south from New Zealand, the
Falkland Islands, South Georgia, and Tierra del Fuego.
 ORIGIN AND DISTRIBUTION OF CEREALIA.
The plants which the earth produces spontaneously are thus
confined within certain districts, and few of them would survive a
change of circumstances; nevertheless, Providence has endowed
those most essential to man with a greater flexibility of structure, so
that the limits of their production can be extended by culture beyond
what have been assigned to them by nature. The grasses yielding
the grains are especially favoured in this respect, though their
extension depends upon the knowledge and industry of man; no
grain will be cultivated where it can be procured from a foreign
market at less expense; so that with regard to useful plants there is
an artificial as well as a natural boundary. The cultivation of plants in
gardens and hot-houses is entirely artificial, and depends on luxury
and fashion.
Tartary and Persia are presumed to have been the original
countries of wheat, rye, and oats; but these grains have been so
long in use that it is impossible to trace their origin with certainty.
Barley grows spontaneously in Tartary and Sicily, probably of
different species. Those plants which produce the grains must have
had a more extended location than any other, and they can endure
the greatest extremes of heat and cold. In high northern latitudes
wheat is protected from the inclemency of winter by sowing it in
spring, or if sown in autumn a coating of snow defends it: the polar
limit is the isothermal line of 57° 2ʹ, and wheat will not form seed
within less than 20° or 23° of the equator. In America the northern
limit is unknown, the country being uninhabited; but at Cumberland
House, in the very middle of the continent, one of the stations of the
Hudson’s Bay Company, in 54° N. lat., there are fields of wheat,
barley, and maize. Wheat thrives luxuriantly in Chile and Rio de la
Plata, and at elevations of 8500 and 10,000 feet above the sea. It
even produces grain on the banks of the Lake Titicaca in the Peru-
Bolivian Andes at the absolute height of 12,795 feet in sheltered
situations, and good crops of barley are raised in that elevated
region.
Barley bears cold better than any of the grains, yet neither it nor
any other will grow in Iceland. It is successfully cultivated in the
Feroe Islands, near Cape North, the extreme point of Norway, near
Archangel on the White Sea, and in Central Siberia to between 58°
and 59° N. lat.
Rye is only cultivated where the soil is very poor, and agriculture
little understood, yet a third of the population of Europe lives on rye-
bread, chiefly inhabitants of the middle and especially of the
northern parts; its limit is about the 67th parallel of N. latitude.
Oats are scarcely known in middle and southern Europe; in the
north they are extensively cultivated to the 65th degree of N.
latitude.
Rice is the food of a greater number of human beings than any
other grain; it has been cultivated from such high antiquity that all
traces of its origin are lost. It contains a greater proportion of
nutritious matter than any of the Cerealia, but, since it requires
excessive moisture, and a temperature of 73° 4ʹ at least, its
cultivation is limited to countries between the equator and the 45th
parallel.
Indian corn and millet are much cultivated in Europe south of the
45th and 47th parallels, and form an important article of food in
France, Italy, Africa, India, and America. Buck-wheat is extensively
cultivated in northern Europe and Siberia and the table-lands of
central Asia; it is a native of Asia, from whence it was brought into
Europe in the 15th century.
The cerealia afford one of the most remarkable examples of
numberless varieties arising from the seed of one species. In Ceylon
alone there are 160 varieties of rice, and at least 30 of Panicum. The
endless varieties which may be raised from the seed of one plant is
most conspicuous in the flower-garden: the rose affords above 1400;
the varieties of the pansy, calceolaria, tulip, auricula, and primrose
are without end, and often differ so much from the parent plant that
it seems almost impossible they should have had a common origin: it
seems difficult to believe that red cabbage, cauliflower, and many
others, should have sprung from the sea-kale or Brassica oleracea,
so totally dissimilar from any of them, with its bitter sea-green curly
leaves. Fashion changes so much with regard to plants that it is
scarcely possible to form even an approximation to the number
known to be in cultivation; new plants are introduced from a foreign
country, and are apt to take the place of some of the older, which
are neglected and sometimes lost; of 120,000 plants which are
known to exist on the earth, not more than 15,000 are believed to
be in cultivation.
It is supposed that plants capable of bearing a great range of
temperature would exist through longer geological periods than
those more limited in their endurance of vicissitudes of temperature,
and it appears that in many instances at least the existence of
varieties depends on the life of the plant from whence they
originated; the actual duration of individuals is a subject which has
not been sufficiently studied, though the progress of physiological
botany has given the means of doing so without destroying the
plant.
Since forest-trees increase by coatings from without, the growth of
each year forming a concentric circle of wood round the pith or
centre of the stem, the age of a tree may be ascertained by counting
the number of rings in a transverse section of the trunk, each ring
representing a year. Moreover, the progress of the growth is known
by comparing the breadth of the rings, which are broader in a
favourable than in an unfavourable season, though this may depend
also, in some measure, on the quality of the soil which the roots
have come to in their downward growth. If the number of concentric
rings in a transverse section has shown the age of a tree, and its
girth has been ascertained by measurement, an approximation to
the age of any other tree of the same kind still growing, under
similar circumstances, maybe determined by comparison. In this way
the age of many remarkable trees has been ascertained. The yew
attains a greater age than any other tree in Europe. According to M.
De Candolle this tree increases in girth the twelfth part of an inch in
a year during the first 150 years, and rather less in the next
hundred, the increase probably decreasing progressively. By that
estimate a yew at Fountaine Abbey was reckoned by Pennant to be
1214 years old; one at Crowhurst, in Surrey, was 1400 years old
when measured by Evelyn; it has been shown by the same method
that a yew at Fotherngill, in Scotland, was between 2500 and 2800
years old; and one at Braburn, in Kent, must have been 3000 years
old: these are the veterans of European vegetation.
The cypress rivals the yew in longevity, and may perhaps surpass
it. There is a cypress in the palace garden at Grenada which had
been celebrated in the time of the Moors, and was still known in the
year 1776, as Cipres della Regina Sultana, because a sultana met
with Abencerrages under its shade. Oaks come next in order: they
are supposed to live 1500 or 1600 years. One in Welbec Lane,
mentioned by Evelyn, was computated to be 1400 years old.
Chestnut-trees are known to live 900 years; lime-trees have attained
500 or 600 years in France; and birches are supposed to be equally
durable. Some of the smaller and less conspicuous European plants
perhaps rival these giants of the forest in age: heaths, and the
alpine willow, which covers the ground with its leaves, although it is
really a subterranean tree spreading to a vast distance, are long
lived. Ivy is another example of this: there is one near Montpellier,
six feet in girth, which must be 485 years old. A lichen was watched
for forty years without the appearance of change.
The antiquity of these European vegetables sinks into
insignificance when compared with the celebrated baobab, or
Adansonia digitata, in Senegal: taking as a measure the number of
concentric rings counted on a transverse incision made for the
purpose in the trunk of that enormous tree, it was proved to be
5150 years old; yet Baron Humboldt considers a cypress in the
garden of Chapultepec to be still older; it had already reached a
great age when Montezuma was on the throne of Mexico, in 1520.
These two trees are probably the most aged organized beings on the
face of the earth. Eight olive-trees on the Mount of Olives are
supposed to be 800 years old; it is at least certain that they existed
prior to the taking of Jerusalem by the Turks. There is some doubt
as to the age of the largest cedar on Lebanon; it is nine feet in
diameter, and has probably existed 800 or 900 years. There are two
cedar-trees in the Botanic Garden at Chelsea which were mentioned
600 years ago.
The age of palms and other monocotyledonous plants is
ascertained by a comparison of their height with the time which
each kind takes to grow. M. De Candolle thus estimates that the
Cocos oleracea, or cabbage-palms, may live 600 or 700 years, while
the cocoa-nut palm lives from 80 to 330 years.
Mr. Babbage has made an approximation to the age of peat-
mosses from the concentric rings of the trees found in them.
 MARINE VEGETATION.
A vegetable world lies hid beneath the surface of the ocean,
altogether unlike that on land, and existing under circumstances
totally different with regard to light, heat, and pressure, yet
sustained by the same means. Carbonic acid and ammonia are as
essential, and metallic oxides are as indispensable, to marine
vegetation as they are to land-plants. Sea-water contains ammonia,
and something more than a twelve-thousandth part of its weight of
carbonate of lime, yet that minute portion is sufficient to supply all
the shell-fish and coral-insects in the sea with materials for their
habitations, as well as food for vegetation. Marine plants are more
expert chemists than we are, for the water of the ocean contains
rather less than a millionth part of its weight of iodine, which they
collect in quantities impossible for us to obtain otherwise than from
their ashes.
Sea-weeds fix their roots to anything—to stone, wood, and to
other sea-weeds: they must, therefore, derive all their nourishment
from the water, and the air it contains; and the vital force or
chemical energy by which they decompose and assimilate the
substances fit for their maintenance is the sun’s light.
Marine plants, which are very numerous, consist of two groups—a
jointed kind, which include the Confervæ, or plants having a thread-
like form; and a jointless kind, to which belong dulse, laver, the kinds
used for making kelp, vegetable glue, iodine, that in the Indian
Archipelago, of which the sea-swallows make their edible nests, and
all the gigantic species which grow in submarine forests, or float like
green meadows in the open sea. Flower-bearing sea-weeds are very
limited in their range, which depends upon the depth of water and
the nature of the coasts; but the cryptogamic kinds are widely
dispersed, some species are even found in every climate from pole
to pole. No doubt the polar currents at the surface, and the stratum
of uniform temperature lower down, are the highways by which
these cosmopolites travel.[170]
There are fewer vegetable provinces in the seas than on land,
because the temperature is more uniform, and the dispersion of the
plants is not so much interfered with by the various causes which
disturb it on land.[171]
Marine vegetation varies both horizontally and vertically with the
depth, and it seems to be a general law throughout the ocean that
the light of the sun and vegetation end together; it consequently
depends on the power of the sun and the transparency of the water;
so different kinds of sea-weeds affect different depths, where the
weight of the water, the quantity of light and heat, suit them best.
One great marine zone lies between the high and low water marks,
and varies in species with the nature of the coasts, but exhibits
similar phenomena throughout the northern hemisphere. In the
British seas, where, with two exceptions, the whole flora is
cryptogamic,[172] this zone does not extend deeper than 30 fathoms,
but is divided into two distinct provinces, one to the south and
another to the north. The former includes the southern and eastern
coasts of England, the southern and western coasts of Ireland, and
both the channels; while the northern flora is confined to the
Scottish seas and the adjacent coasts of England and Ireland. The
second British zone begins at low-water mark, and extends below it
to a depth from 7 to 15 fathoms. It contains the great tangle sea-
weeds, growing in miniature forests, mixed with fuci, and is the
abode of a host of animals. A coral-like sea-weed is the last plant of
this zone, and the lowest in these seas, where it does not extend
below the depth of 60 fathoms, but in the Mediterranean it is found
at 70 or 80 fathoms, and is the lowest plant in that sea. The same
law prevails in the Bay of Biscay, where one set of sea-weeds is
never found lower than 20 feet below the surface; another only in
the zone between the depths of 5 and 30 feet; and another between
15 and 35 feet. In these two last zones they are most numerous; at
a greater depth the kinds continue to vary, but their numbers
decrease. The seeds of each kind float at the depth most genial to
the future plant; they must therefore be of different weights. The
distribution in the Egean Sea was found by Professor E. Forbes to be
perfectly similar, only that the vegetation is different, and extends to
a greater depth in the Mediterranean than in more northern seas.[173]
He also observed that sea-weeds growing near the surface are more
limited in their distribution than those that grow lower down, and
that with regard to vegetation depth corresponds with latitude, as
height does on land. Thus, the flora at great depths, in warm seas,
is represented by kindred forms in higher latitudes. There is every
reason to believe that the same laws of distribution prevail
throughout the ocean and every sea.
Sea-weeds adhere firmly to the rocks before their fructification,
but they are easily detached afterwards, which accounts for some of
the vast fields of floating weeds; but others, of gigantic size and
wide distribution, are supposed to grow unattached in the water
itself. There are permanent bands of sea-weed in our British Channel
and in the North Sea, of the kind called Fucus Filum, which grow
abundantly on the western coasts of the Channel, and they lie in the
direction of the currents, in beds 15 or 20 miles long, and not more
than 600 feet wide. These bands must oscillate with the tides
between two corresponding zones of rest, one at the turn of the
flood, and the other at the turn of the ebb. It is doubtful whether
the Fucus natans or Sargassum bacciferum grows on rocks at the
bottom of the Atlantic, between the parallels of 40° north and south
of the equator, and, when detached, is drifted uniformly to particular
spots which never vary, or whether it is propagated and grows in the
water; but the mass of that plant, west of the Azores, occupies an
area equal to that of France, and has not changed its place since the
time of Columbus. Fields of the same kind cover the sea at the
Bahama Islands and other places, and two new species of it were
discovered in the Antarctic seas.
The Macrocystis pyrifera and the Laminaria radiata are the most
remarkable of marine plants for their gigantic size and the extent of
their range. They were met with on the Antarctic coasts two degrees
nearer the south pole than any other vegetable production, forming,
with one remarkable exception, the utmost limit of vegetable life in
the south polar seas. The Macrocystis pyrifera exists in vast
detached masses, like green meadows, in every latitude from the
south polar ocean to the 45th degree N. lat. in the Atlantic, and to
the shores of California in the Pacific, where there are fields of it so
impenetrable, that it has saved vessels driven by the heavy swell
towards that shore from shipwreck. It is never seen where the
temperature of the water is at the freezing point, and is the largest
of the vegetable tribe, being occasionally 300 or 400 feet long. The
Laminaria abounds off the Cape of Good Hope and in the Antarctic
Ocean. These two species form great part of a band of sea-weed
that girds Kerguelen Islands so densely, that a boat can scarcely be
pulled through it; and they are found in great abundance on the
coasts of the Falkland group, and also in vast fields in the open sea,
hundreds of miles from any land: had it ever grown on the distant
shores, it must have taken ages to travel so far, drifted by the wind,
currents, and the sand of the seas. The red, green, and purple lavers
of Great Britain are found on the coasts of the Falkland Islands; and,
though some of the northern weeds are not found in the intervening
warm seas, they reappear here. The Lessonia is the most
remarkable marine plant in this group of islands. Its stems, much
thicker than a man’s leg, and from 8 to 10 feet long, fix themselves
by clasping fibres to the rocks beyond the high-water mark. Many
branches shoot upwards from these stems, from which long leaves
droop into the water like willows. There are immense submarine
forests off Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, attached to the rocks at
the bottom. These plants are so strong and buoyant, that they bring
up large masses of stone; and, as they grow slanting, and stretch
along the surface of the sea, they are sometimes 300 feet long. The
quantity of living creatures which inhabit these marine forests and
the parasitical weeds attached to them is inconceivable, they
absolutely teem with life. Of the species of marine plants which are
strictly antarctic, including those in the seas of Van Diemen’s Land
and New Zealand, Dr. Hooker has identified one-fifth with the British
Algæ.
 The high latitudes of the Antarctic Ocean are not so destitute of
vegetation as was at first believed. Most minute objects, altogether
invisible to the naked eye, except in mass, and which were taken for
siliceous shelled animalcules of the infusoria kind, prove to be
vegetable. They are a species of the Diatomaceæ, which, from their
multitudes, give the sea a pale ochreous brown colour. They increase
in numbers with the latitude, up to the highest point yet attained by
man, and, no doubt, afford the supply of food to many of the minute
animals in the antarctic seas. Genera and species of this plant exist
in every sea from Victoria Land to Spitzbergen. It is one of the
remarkable instances of a great end being effected by small means;
for the death of this antarctic vegetation is forming a submarine
bank between the 76th and 78th parallels of south latitude, and
from the 165th to the 160th western meridian.
Great patches of Confervæ are occasionally met with in the high
seas. Bands several miles long, of a reddish-brown species, like
chopped hay, occur off Bahia, on the coast of Brazil; the same plant
is said to have given the name to the Red Sea; and different species
are common in the Australian seas.
 CHAPTER XXVIII.

Distribution of Insects.

Three hundred thousand insects are known: some with wings, others
without; some are aquatic, others are aquatic only in the first stage
of their existence, and many are parasitical. Some land insects are
carnivorous, others feed on vegetables; some of the carnivorous
tribe live on dead, others on living animals, but they are not half so
numerous as those that live on vegetables. Some change as they are
developed; in their first stage they eat animal food, and vegetables
when they come to maturity.
Insects maintain the balance among the species of the vegetable
creation by preventing the tendency that plants have to encroach on
one another. The stronger would extirpate the weaker, and the larger
would destroy the smaller, were it not checked by insects which live
on vegetables. On the other hand, many plants would be extirpated
by insects were these not devoured by other insects and spiders.
Of the 8000 or 9000 British insects the greatest part are
carnivorous, and therefore keep the others within due bounds.
Insects increase in kinds and in numbers from the poles to the
equator: in a residence of 11 months in Melville Island, Sir Edward
Parry found only 6 species, because lichens and mosses do not
afford nourishment for the insect tribes, though it is probable that
every other kind of plant gives food and shelter to more than one
species; it is even said that 40 different insects are quartered upon
the common nettle.
 The increase of insects from the poles to the equator does not
take place at the same time everywhere. The polar regions and New
Holland have very few specifically and individually; they are more
abundant in Northern Africa, Chile, and in the plains west of the
Brazils; North America has fewer species than Europe in the same
latitude, and Asia has few varieties of species in proportion to its
size; Caffraria, the African and Indian islands, possess nearly the
same number of species; but by far the richest of all, both in species
and numbers, are central and intertropical America. Beetles are an
exception to the law of increase towards the equator, as they are
infinitely more numerous in species in the temperate regions of the
northern hemisphere than in equatorial countries. The location of
insects depends upon that of the plants which yield their food; and,
as almost each plant is peopled with inhabitants peculiar to itself,
insects are distributed over the earth in the same manner as
vegetables; the groups, consequently, are often confined within
narrow limits, and it is extraordinary that, notwithstanding their
powers of locomotion, they often remain within a particular
compass, though the plants, and all other circumstances in their
immediate vicinity, appear equally favourable for their habitation.
The insects of eastern Asia and China are different from those in
Europe and Africa; those in the United States differ specifically from
the British, though they often approach very near; and in South
America the equinoctial districts of New Grenada and Peru have
distinct groups from those in Guiana.
Though insects are distributed in certain limited groups, yet most
of the families have representatives in all the great regions of the
globe, and some identical species are inhabitants of countries far
from one another. The Vanessa Cardui, or “Painted Lady Butterfly,” is
found in all the four quarters of the globe and in Australia; and one,
which never could have been conveyed by man, is native in southern
Europe, the coast of Barbary, and Chile. It is evident from these
circumstances that not only each group, but also each particular
species, must have been originally created in the places they now
inhabit.
 Mountain-chains are a complete barrier to insects, even more so
than rivers: not only lofty mountains like the Andes divide the kinds,
but they are even different on the two sides of the Col de Tende in
the Alps. Each soil has kinds peculiar to itself, whether dry or moist,
cultivated or wild, meadow or forest. Stagnant water and marshes
are generally full of them; some live in water, some run on its
surface, and every water-plant affords food and shelter to many
different kinds. The east wind seems to have considerable effect in
bringing the insect or in developing the eggs of certain species; for
example, the aphis, known as the blight in our country, lodges in
myriads on plants, and shrivels up their leaves after a continued east
wind. They are almost as destructive as the locust, and sometimes
darken the air by their numbers. Caterpillars are also very
destructive; the caterpillar of the Y moth would soon ruin the
vegetation of a country were it not a prey to some other. Insects
sometimes multiply suddenly to an enormous extent, and decrease
as rapidly and as unaccountably.
Temperature, by its influence on vegetation, has an indirect effect
on the insects that are to feed upon plants, and extremes of heat
and cold have more influence on their locality than the mean annual
temperature. Thus, in the polar regions the mosquito tribes are more
numerous and more annoying than in temperate countries, because
they pass their early stages of existence in water, which shelters
them, and the short but hot summer is genial to their brief span of
life.
In some instances height corresponds with latitude. The
Parnassius Apollo, a butterfly native in the plains of Sweden, is also
found in the Alps, the Pyrenees, and a closely-allied species in the
Himalaya. The Parnassius Smyntheus, true to the habitat of the
genus, has recently been found on the Rocky Mountains of North
America. Some insects require several years to arrive at their perfect
state; they lie buried in the ground in the form of grubs: the cock-
chafer comes to maturity in 3 years, and some American species
require a much longer time.
 Insects do not attain their perfect state till the plants they are to
feed upon are ready for them. Hence, in cold and temperate
climates their appearance is simultaneous with vegetation; and as
the rainy and dry seasons within the tropics correspond to our winter
and summer, insects appear there after the rains, and vanish in the
heat: the rains, if too violent, destroy them; and in countries where
that occurs, there are two periods in the year in which they are most
abundant—one before and one after the rains. It is also observed in
Europe that insects decrease in the heat of summer, and become
more numerous in autumn: the heat is thought to throw some into a
state of torpor, but the greater number perish.
It is not known that any insect depends entirely upon only one
species of plant for its existence, or whether it may not have
recourse to congeners should its habitual plant perish. When
particular species of plants of the same family occur in places widely
apart, insects of the same genus will be found on them, so that the
existence of the plant may often be inferred from that of the insect,
and, in several instances, the converse.
When a plant is taken from one country to another in which it has
no congeners, it is not attacked by the insects of the country: thus,
our cabbages and carrots in Cayenne are not injured by the insects
of that country, and the tulip-tree and other magnolias are not
molested by our insects; but if a plant has congeners in its new
country, the inhabitants will soon find their way to the stranger.
The common fly is one of the most universal of insects, yet it was
unknown in some of the South Sea islands till it was carried there by
ships from Europe, and it has now become a plague.
The mosquito and culex are spread over the world more generally
than any other tribe; they are the torment of men and animals from
the poles to the equator by night and by day: the species are
numerous, and their location partial. In the Arctic regions the Culex
Pipiens, which passes two-thirds of its existence in water, swarms in
summer in myriads: the lake Myvatr, in Iceland, has its name from
the legions of these tormentors that cover its surface. They are less
numerous in central Europe, though one species of mosquito, the
Simulium columbaschense, which is very small, appears in such
clouds in parts of Hungary, especially the Bannat of Temeswar, that
it is not possible to breathe without swallowing many: even cattle
and children have died from them. In Lapland there is a plague of
the same kind. Of all places on earth the Orinoco and other great
rivers of tropical America are the most obnoxious to this plague. The
account given by Baron Humboldt is really fearful: at no season of
the year, at no hour of the day or night, can rest be found; whole
districts in the upper Orinoco are deserted on account of these
insects. Different species follow one another with such precision,
that the time of day or night may be known accurately from their
humming noise, and from the different sensations of pain which the
different poisons produce. The only respite is the interval of a few
minutes between the departure of one gang and the arrival of their
successors, for the species do not mix. On some parts of the Orinoco
the air is one dense cloud of poisonous insects to the height of 20
feet. It is singular that they do not infest rivers that have black
water, and each white stream is peopled with its own kinds; though
ravenous for blood, they can live without it, as they are found where
no animals exist.
In Brazil the quantity of insects is so great in the woods, that their
noise is heard in a ship at anchor some distance from the shore.
Various genera of butterflies and moths are very limited in their
habitations, others are dispersed over the world, but the species are
almost always different. Bees and wasps are equally universal, yet
each country has its own. The common honey-bee is the only
European insect directly useful to man; it was introduced into North
America not many years ago, and is now spread over the continent:
it is now naturalized in Van Diemen’s Land and New Zealand.
European bees, of which there are many species, generally have
stings; the Australian bee, like a black fly, is without a sting; and in
Brazil there are 30 species of stingless bees.
Fire-flies are mostly tropical, yet there are four species in Europe;
in South America there are three species, and so brilliant that their
pale green light is seen at the distance of 200 paces.
 The silkworm comes from China, and the cochineal insect is a
native of tropical America: there are many species of it in other
countries. The Coccus Lacca is Indian, the Coccus Ilicis lives in Italy,
and there is one in Poland, but neither of these have been
cultivated.
Scorpions under various forms are in all warm climates; 2 or 3
species are peculiar to Europe, but they are small in comparison with
those in tropical countries: one in Brazil is six inches long. As in
mosquitos, the poison of the same species is more active in some
situations than in others. At Cumana the sting of the scorpion is little
feared, while that of the same species in Carthagena causes loss of
speech for many days.
Ants, Formicidæ (Hymenoptera), are universally distributed, but of
different kinds. Near great rivers they build their nests above the line
of the annual inundations. The insects called white ants, belonging
to a different genus and family Termitidæ (Neuroptera), are so
destructive in South America, that Baron Humboldt says there is not
a manuscript in that country a hundred years old.
There are upwards of 1200 species of spiders and their allies
known; each country has its own, varying in size, colour, and habits,
from the huge bird-catching spider of South America, to the almost
invisible European gossamer floating in the air on its silvery thread.
Many of this ferocious family are aquatic; and spiders, with some
other insects, are said to be the first inhabitants of new islands.
The migration of insects is one of the most curious circumstances
relating to them: they sometimes appear in great flights in places
where they never were seen before, and they continue their course
with perseverance which nothing can check. This has been observed
in the migration of crawling insects: caterpillars have attempted to
cross a stream. Countries near deserts are most exposed to the
invasion of locusts, which deposit their eggs in the sand, and, when
the young are hatched by the sun’s heat, they emerge from the
ground without wings; but as soon as they attain maturity, they
obey the impulse of the first wind, and fly, under the guidance of a
leader, in a mass, whose front keeps a straight line, so dense that it
forms a cloud in the air, and the sound of their wings is like the
murmur of the distant sea. They take immense flights, crossing the
Mozambique Channel from Africa to Madagascar, which is 120 miles
broad: they come from Barbary to Italy, and a few have been seen
in Scotland. Even the wandering tribes of locusts differ in species in
different deserts, following the universal law of organized nature.
Insects, not habitually migratory, sometimes migrate in great flocks.
In 1847 lady-birds or coccinellæ and the bean aphis arrived in
immense multitudes at Ramsgate and Margate from the continent, in
fine calm weather, and a mass of the Vanessa cardui flew over a
district in a column from 10 to 15 yards wide, for 2 hours
successively. Why these butterflies should simultaneously take wing
in a flock is unaccountable, for had it been for want of food they
would probably have separated in quest of it. In 1847 the cabbage
butterfly came in a mass from the coast of France to England.
Dragon-flies migrate in a similar manner. Professor Ehrenberg has
discovered a new world of creatures in the Infusoria, so minute that
they are invisible to the naked eye. He found them in fog, rain, and
snow, in the ocean, in stagnant water, in animal and vegetable
juices, in volcanic ashes and pumice, in opal, in the dusty air that
sometimes falls on the ocean; and he detected 18 species 20 feet
below the surface of the ground in peat-earth, which was full of
microscopic live animals: they exist in ice, and are not killed by
boiling water. This lowest order of animal life is much more abundant
than any other, and new species are found every day. Magnified,
some of them seem to consist of a transparent vesicle, and some
have a tail: they move with great alacrity, and show intelligence by
avoiding obstacles in their course: others have siliceous shells.
Language, and even imagination, fails in the attempt to describe the
inconceivable myriads of these invisible inhabitants of the ocean, the
air, and the earth: they no doubt become the prey of larger
creatures, and perhaps bloodsucking insects may have recourse to
them when other prey is wanting.
 CHAPTER XXIX.

Distribution of Marine Animals in general—Fishes—the Marine

Mammalia—Phocæ, Dolphins, and Whales.

Before Sir James Ross’s voyage to the Antarctic regions, the profound
and dark abysses of the ocean were supposed to be entirely
destitute of animal life; now it may be presumed that no part of it is
uninhabited, since during that expedition live creatures were fished
up from a depth of 6000 feet. But as most of the larger fish usually
frequent shallow water near the coasts, deep seas must form
barriers as impassable to the greater number of them as mountains
do to land animals. The polar, the equatorial ocean, and the inland
seas, have each their own particular inhabitants; almost all the
species and some of the genera of the marine creation are different
in the two hemispheres, and even in each particular sea; and under
similar circumstances the species are for the most part
representative, though not the same. Identity of species, however,
does occur, even at the two extremities of the globe, for living
animals were brought up from the profound depths of the Antarctic
Ocean which Sir James Ross recognized to be the very same species
which he had often met with in the Arctic seas. “The only way they
could have got from the one pole to the other must have been
through the tropics; but the temperature of the sea in these regions
is such that they could not exist in it unless at a depth of nearly
2000 fathoms. At that depth they might pass from the Arctic to the
Antarctic Ocean without a variation of 5 degrees of temperature;
whilst any land animal, at the most favourable season, must
experience a difference of 50 degrees, and, if in winter, no less than
150 degrees of Fahrenheit’s thermometer;”—a strong presumption
that marine creatures can exist at the depth and under the
enormous pressure of 12,000 feet of water. The stratum of constant
temperature in the ocean may indeed afford the means of migration
from pole to pole to those which live in shallower water, as they
would only have to descend to a depth of 7200 feet at the equator.
The great currents, no doubt, offer paths for fish without any
sudden change of temperature: the inhabitants of the Antarctic Sea
may come to the coasts of Chile and Peru by the cold stream that
flows along them from the south polar ocean, and, on the contrary,
tropical fish may travel by the Gulf-stream to the middle and high
latitudes in the Atlantic, but few will leave either one or other to
inhabit the adjacent seas, on account of the difference of heat.
Nevertheless, quantities of medusæ or sea-nettles are brought by
the Gulf-stream to feed the whales at the Azores, though the whales
themselves never enter the stream, on account of its warmth.
The form and nature of the coasts have great influence on the
distribution of fishes; when they are uniformly of the same
geological structure, so as to afford the same food and shelter, the
fish are similar. Their distribution is also determined by climate, the
depth of the sea, the nature of the bottom, and the influx of fresh
water.
The ocean, the most varied and most wonderful part of the
creation, absolutely teems with life: “things innumerable, both great
and small, are there.” The forms are not to be numbered even of
those within our reach; yet, numerous as they are, few have been
found exempt from the laws of geographical distribution.
The discoloured portions of the ocean generally owe the tints they
assume to myriads of insects. In the Arctic seas, where the water is
pure transparent ultramarine colour, parts of 20 or 30 square miles,
1500 feet deep, are green and turbid from the quantity of minute
animalcules. Captain Scoresby calculated that it would require
80,000 persons, working unceasingly from the creation of man to
the present day, to count the number of insects contained in 2 miles
of the green water. What, then, must be the amount of animal life in
the polar regions, where one-fourth part of the Greenland Sea, for
10 degrees of latitude, consists of that water! These animalcules are
of the medusa tribe, mixed with others that are moniliform. Some
medusæ are very large, floating like jelly; and although apparently
carried at random by the waves, each species has its definite
location, and even organs of locomotion. One species comes in
spring from the Greenland seas to the coast of Holland; and Baron
Humboldt met with an immense shoal of them in the Atlantic,
migrating at a rapid rate.
Dr. Pœppig mentions a stratum of red water near Cape Pilares, 24
miles long and 7 broad, which, seen from the mast-head, appeared
dark-red, but on proceeding it became a brilliant purple, and the
wake of the vessel was rose-colour. The water was perfectly
transparent, but small red dots could be discerned moving in spiral
lines. The vermilion sea off California is no doubt owing to a similar
cause, as Mr. Darwin found red and chocolate-coloured water on the
coast of Chile over spaces of several square miles full of microscopic
animalcules, darting about in every direction, and sometimes
exploding. Infusoria are not confined to fresh water; the bottom of
the sea swarms with them. Siliceous-coated infusoria are found in
the mud of the coral islands under the equator; and 68 species were
discovered in the mud in Erebus Bay, near the Antarctic pole. These
minute forms of organized being, invisible to the naked eye, are
intensely and extensively developed in both of the polar oceans, and
serve for food to the higher orders of fish in latitudes beyond the
limits of the larger vegetation, though they themselves probably live
on the microscopic plant already mentioned, which abounds in all
seas. Some are peculiar to each of the polar seas, some are
common to both, and a few are distributed extensively throughout
the ocean.
The enormous prodigality of animal life supplies the place of
vegetation, so scanty in the ocean in comparison with that which
clothes the land, and which probably would be insufficient for the
supply of the marine creation, were the deficiency not made up by
the superabundant land vegetation and insects carried to the sea by
rivers. The fish that live on sea-weed must bear a smaller proportion
to those that are predacious than the herbivorous land animals do to
the carnivorous. Fish certainly are most voracious; none are without
their enemies; they prey and are preyed upon; and there are two
which devour even the live coral, hard as its coating is; nor does the
coat of mail of shell-fish protect them. Whatever the proportion may
be which predatory fish bear to herbivorous, the quantity of both
must be enormous, for, besides the infusoria, the great forests of
fuci and sea-weed are everywhere a mass of infinitely varied forms
of being, either parasitical, feeding on them, seeking shelter among
them, or in pursuit of others.
The observations of Professor E. Forbes in the Egean Sea show
that depth has great influence in the geographical distribution of
marine animals. From the surface to the depth of 230 fathoms there
are eight distinct regions in that sea, each of which has its own
vegetation and inhabitants. The number of shell-fish and other
marine animals is greater specifically and individually between the
surface and the depth of 2 fathoms than in all the regions below
taken together, and both decrease downwards to the depth of 105
fathoms; between which and the depth of 230 only eight shells were
found; and animal life ceases in that part of the Mediterranean at
300 fathoms. The changes in the different zones are not abrupt;
some of the creatures of an under region always appear before
those of the region above vanish; and although there are a few
species the same in some of the eight zones, only two are common
to all. Those near the surface have forms and colours belonging to
the inhabitants of southern latitudes, while those lower down are
analogous to the animals of northern seas; so that in the sea depth
corresponds with latitude, as height does on land. Moreover, the
extent of the geographical distribution of any species is proportional
to the depth at which it lives; consequently, those living near the
surface are less widely dispersed than those inhabiting deep water.
Professor Forbes also discovered several shells living in the
Mediterranean that have hitherto only been known as fossils of the
tertiary strata; and also that the species least abundant as fossils are
most numerous alive, and the converse; hence, the former are near
their maximum, while the latter are approaching to extinction. These
very important experiments, it is true, were confined to the
Mediterranean; but analogous results have been obtained in the Bay
of Biscay and in the British seas. There are four zones of depth in
our seas, each of which has its own inhabitants, consisting of shell-
fish, crustaceæ, corallines and other marine creatures. The first zone
lies between high and low-water marks, consequently it is shallow in
some places and 30 feet deep in others. In all parts of the northern
hemisphere it presents the same phenomena; but the animals vary
with the nature of the coast, according as it is of rock, gravel, sand,
or mud. In the British seas the animals of this littoral or coast zone
are distributed in three groups that differ decidedly from one
another, though many are common to all. One occupies the seas on
the southern shores of our islands and both channels; a middle
group has its centre in the Irish seas; and the third is confined to the
Scottish seas, and the adjacent coasts of England and Ireland. The
second zone extends from the low-water mark to a depth below it of
from 7 to 15 fathoms, and is crowded with animals living on and
among the sea-weeds, as radiated animals, shell-fish, and many
zoophites. In the third zone, which is below that of vegetable life,
marine animals are more numerous and of greater variety than in
any other. It is particularly distinguished by arborescent creatures,
that seem to take the place of plants, carnivorous mollusca, together
with large and peculiar radiata. It ranges from the depth of 15 to 50
fathoms. The last zone is the region of stronger corals, peculiar
mollusca, and of others that only inhabit deep water. This zone
extends to the depth of 100 fathoms or more.
Except in the Antarctic seas, the superior zone of shell-fish is the
only one of which anything is known in the great oceans, which have
numerous special provinces. Many, like the harp, are tropical; others,
as the nautilus and the pearl-oyster, are nearly so; the latter
abounds throughout the Persian Gulf and on the coasts of Borneo
and Ceylon, which are thought to produce the finest pearls. There
are many also in the Caribbean Sea, and in the Pacific, and
especially in the Bay of Panama, but whether the species are
different is not known. Some shells are exceedingly limited in their
distribution, as the Haliotis gigantea, which is peculiar to the sea of
Van Diemen’s Land.
According to Sir Charles Lyell, nearly all the species of molluscous
animals in the seas of the two temperate zones are distinct, yet the
whole species in one bears a strong analogy to that in the other;
both differ widely from those in the tropical and arctic oceans; and,
under the same latitude, species vary with the longitude. The east
and west coasts of tropical America have only one shell-fish in
common; and those of both differ from the shell-fish in the islands of
the Pacific and the Galapagos Archipelago, which forms a distinct
region. Notwithstanding the many definite marine provinces, the
same species are occasionally found in regions widely separated. A
few of the shell-fish of the Galapagos Archipelago are the same with
those of the Philippine islands, though so far apart. The east coast of
America, which is poor in shell-fish, has a considerable number in
common with the coasts of Europe.
The Cypræa moneta lives in the Mediterranean, the seas of South
Africa, the Mauritius, the East Indies, China, and the South Seas
even to Otaheite; and the Janthina frangilis, the animal of which is
of a beautiful violet-colour, floats on the surface in every tropical and
temperate sea. Mollusca have a greater power of locomotion than is
generally believed. Some migrate in their larva state, being furnished
with lobes which enable them to swim freely. The larva of the scalop
is capable of migrating to distant regions; the argonauta spreads its
sail and swims along the surface.
The numerous species of Zoophytes which construct the extensive
coral banks and atolls are chiefly confined to the tropical seas of
Polynesia, the East and West Indies: the family is represented by a
very few species in our seas, and in the Mediterranean they are
smaller and different, generally, from those in the torrid zone.
The larger and more active inhabitants of the waters obey the
same laws with the rest of the creation, though the provinces are in
some instances very extensive. Dr. Richardson observes that there is
one vast province in the Pacific, extending 42 degrees on each side
of the equator, between the meridians including Australia, New
Zealand, the Malay Archipelago, China, and Japan, in which the
genera are the same; but at its extremities the Arctic and Antarctic
genera are mingled with the tropical forms. Many species, however,
which abound in the Indian Ocean range as far north as Japan, from
which circumstance it is presumed that a current sets in that
direction. The middle portion of this province is vastly extended in
longitude, for very many species of the Red Sea, the eastern coast
of Africa, and the Mauritius range to the Indian and China Seas, to
those of northern Australia and all Polynesia; so in this immense
belt, which embraces three-fourths of the circumference of the
globe, and 60 degrees of latitude, the fish are very nearly alike, the
continuous chains of islands in the Pacific being favourable to their
dispersion. Few of the Pacific fish enter the Atlantic;[174] and from the
depth and want of islands in it the great bulk of species is different
on its two sides. North of the 44th parallel, however, the number
common to both shores increases. The salmon of America is
identical with that of the British isles, the coasts of Norway and
Sweden; the cod-fish is the same, as well as several others of the
cod family. The Cottus or bullhead tribe are also the same on both
sides of the North Atlantic, and they increase in numbers and variety
on approaching the Arctic seas. The same occurs in the northern
Pacific, though the generic forms differ from those in the Atlantic.
From the near approach of the American and Asiatic coasts at
Behring’s Straits, the fish on both sides are nearly alike, down to the
Sea of Okhotsk on one side and to Admiralty Inlet on the other. The
Japan Sea and the neighbouring coasts of China are frequented by
fish having northern forms, which are there mingled with many
species common to the temperate and warm parts of the ocean.
Species of the genus Gadus or Cod reappear in the southern seas
very like those of the northern; and two very remarkable Greenland
genera, which inhabit deeper water, and are seldom taken except
when thrown up by a storm, have been discovered on the coasts of
New Zealand and South Australia, where the fish differ but little from
those in the seas of Van Diemen’s Land. Several genera are peculiar
to the southern hemisphere, and range throughout the whole circle
of the high latitudes. The sharks of the China seas are, for the most
part, identical with those of Australia: the cartilaginous fish to which
they belong have a much wider range than those which have been
under consideration.
The British islands lie between two great provinces of fishes—one
to the south, the other to the north—from each of which we have
occasionally visitors. The centre of the first is on the coasts of the
Spanish peninsula, extending into the Mediterranean; that on the
north has its centre about the Shetland Islands; but the group
peculiarly British, and found nowhere else, has its focus in the Irish
Sea. It is, however, mixed with fish from the seas bounding the
western shores of central Europe, which form a distinct group.
The Prince of Canino has shown that there are 853 species of
European fish, of which 210 live in fresh water, 643 are marine, and
60 of these go up rivers to spawn. 444 of the marine fish inhabit the
Mediterranean, 216 are British, and 171 are peculiar to the
Scandinavian seas; so that the Mediterranean is richest in variety of
species. In it there are peculiar sharks, sword-fish, dolphins,
anchovies, and six species of scomber or tunny, one of the largest of
edible fish, for which fisheries are established on the southern coasts
of France, in Sardinia, Elba, the Straits of Messina, and the Adriatic.
Four of the species are found nowhere else but in the
Mediterranean. Rays of numerous species are particularly
characteristic of the Mediterranean, especially the two torpedos,
which have the power of giving an electric shock, and even the
electric spark. The Mediterranean has two or three American
species, 41 fish in common with Madeira, one in common with the
Red Sea, and a very few seem to be Indian. Some of these fish must
have entered the Mediterranean before it was separated from the
Red Sea by the Isthmus of Suez; but geological changes have had
very great influence on the distribution of fishes everywhere. Taking
salt and fresh-water fish together, there are 100 species common to
Italy and Britain; and although the communication with the Black
Sea is so direct, there are only 27 fish common to it and the
Mediterranean; but the Black Sea forms a district by itself, having its
own peculiar fish; and those in the Caspian Sea differ entirely from
those in every other part of the globe. The island of Madeira, solitary
amid a great expanse of ocean, has many species. They amount in
number to half of those in Britain; and nearly as many are common
to Britain and Madeira as to that island and the Mediterranean; so
that many of our fish have a wide range in the Atlantic. The
Mediterranean certainly surpasses the British and Scandinavian seas
in variety, though it is far inferior to either in the quantity or quality
of useful fish. Cod, turbot, haddock, tusk, ling, herring, and many
more, are better in northern seas than elsewhere, and several exist
there only.
The greater number of fish used by man as food frequent shoal
water. The coast of Holland, our own shores, and other parts of the
North Sea where the water is shallow, teem with a never-ending
supply of excellent fish of many kinds.
Vast numbers are gregarious and migratory. Cod arrive in the
shallow parts of the coast of Norway in February, in shoals many
yards deep, and so closely crowded together that the sounding-lead
can hardly pass between them: 16,000,000 have been caught in one
place in a few weeks. In April they return to the ocean. Herrings
come in astonishing quantities in winter.
The principal cod fisheries are on the banks of Newfoundland and
the Dogger-bank. They, like all animals, frequent the places to which
they have been accustomed. Herrings come to the same places for a
series of years, and then desert them, perhaps from having
exhausted the food. Pilchards, mackerel, and many others, may be
mentioned among the gregarious and migratory fish.
Sharks like deep water. They are found of different species in all
tropical and temperate seas; and, although always dangerous, they
are more ferocious in some places than in others, even of the same
species.
 Most lakes have fish of peculiar species, as the lake Baikal. The
fishes of the great interalpine Lake of Titicaca amount to 7 or 8
species, and belong to genera only found in the higher regions of
the Andes. In the North American lakes there is a thick-scaled fish,
analogous to those of the early geological eras; and the gillaroo
trout, which is remarkable in having a gizzard, is found in Ireland
only. Pike and salmon are the only species of fresh-water fish
common to Europe and North America; the pike is, however,
unknown west of the Rocky Mountains. The common salmon does
not exist beyond 45° of N. lat. on the eastern coast of America, and
it is probably confined within similar limits on the eastern coast of
Asia. It is said to be an inhabitant of all the northern parts of the old
world from the entrance of the Bay of Biscay to North Cape, and
along the arctic shores of Asia and Kamtchatka to the Sea of
Okhotsk, including the Baltic, White Sea, Gulf of Kara, and other
inlets. Other kinds of the Salmon tribe are plentiful in the estuaries
of Kamtchatka and on the opposite coast of America down to
Oregon, but apparently they do not extend to China. Salmon go up
rivers to spawn, and make extraordinary leaps over impediments of
rocks or walls, in order to reach the suitable places for depositing
their eggs. Forty-four fish inhabit the British lakes and rivers, and 50
those of Scandinavia, of the very best kinds. The fresh-water fish of
northern climates are better than those of the southern.
Each tropical river has its own species of fish. The fresh-water fish
of China agree with those of India in generic forms, but not in
species;[175] and those of the Cape of Good Hope and South America
differ from those in India and China. Sea-fish, in immense quantities,
frequent the estuaries of rivers everywhere. The mouth of the
Mississippi is full of fish; and the quantity at the mouth of the Don,
in the Sea of Azof, is prodigious.
There are some singular analogies between the inhabitants of the
sea and those of the land. Many of the medusæ, two corallines, the
Physalia, or Portuguese man-of-war, of sailors, and some others,
sting like a nettle when touched. A cuttle-fish, at the Cape de Verde
islands, changes colour like the chameleon, assuming the tint of the
ground under it. Herrings, pilchards, and many other fish, as well as
sea insects, are luminous. The medusa tribe, the species of which
are numerous, have the faculty of shedding light in the highest
degree. In warm climates, especially, the sea seems to be on fire,
and the wake of a ship is like a vivid flame. Probably fish that go
below the depths to which the light of the sun penetrates are
endowed with this faculty; and shoals of luminous insects have been
seen at a considerable depth below the surface of the water. The
glow-worm, some beetles, and fire-flies, shine with the same pale-
green light. But among the terrestrial inhabitants there is nothing
analogous to the property of the Gymnotus electricus of South
America, the trembler, or Silurus electricus, of the African rivers, and
the different species of the torpedo of the Mediterranean, which
possess the faculty of giving the electric shock.
The marine mammalia, which, as their name indicates, suckle
their young, form two distinct families—the Phocæ or seals, and the
Cetacea or whales, and porpoises: whilst fish breathe by means of
gills, which separate the air dissolved in the water, the marine
mammalia possess lungs and breathe as the terrestrial quadrupeds;
they are obliged to come to the surface from time to time,
consequently, to inhale the air.
The first family consists of the seal tribe, and is most abundant in
the polar regions; they live exclusively on fish, are carnivorous, and
are seldom found at a great distance from the land or ice islands. To
this division belong the common seal and the walrus in our northern
hemisphere; whilst the genus Otaria or sea-lion, with different forms
and characters, and which attains in general a greater size, is only
found in high southern latitudes.
The family of Cetacea consists of three great genera: the manati
and dugong, which live in or near the estuaries of tropical rivers, are
herbivorous; the dolphins or porpoises, which are carnivorous,
provided with long jaws and numerous teeth, and are found in
almost every latitude and in every sea; and the whales, which,
unprovided with cutting teeth, are furnished with whalebone
inserted in the upper jaw, the extreme filaments of which are
destined as a kind of net to catch the minute marine animals which
form their food. The marine Cetacea breathe by an opening in the
centre of the head, called, in whales, the blower, corresponding to
the nose of terrestrial quadrupeds, and which also serves to expel
the water taken into the mouth with the food, in the form of jets,
which, in the whale tribe, varies in height and form according to the
species.
The favorite haunts of the seal tribe are the polar oceans and
desert islands in high latitudes, where they bask in hundreds on the
sunny shores during the brief summer of these inhospitable regions,
and become an easy prey to man, who has nearly extirpated the
race in many places. A million are annually killed in the South
Atlantic alone. Seven species are natives of the Arctic, Atlantic, and
Polar Oceans; the Greenland seal, the bearded or great seal, and the
Phoca leporina are found also in the high latitudes of the Northern
Pacific. The Phoca oceanica is only in the White Sea and the sea at
Nova Zembla, and the Phoca sagura on the coast of Newfoundland.
The sea-lion is to be found on all the coasts of the South Pacific, but
their principal gathering is on the island of St. George, one of the
Pruibiloff group, in lat. 56° N. The common seal is 6 or 7 feet long,
with a face like that of a dog, and a large intelligent eye. It is easily
tamed, and in the Orkney island it is so much domesticated that it
follows its master, and helps him to catch fish. This seal migrates in
herds from Greenland twice in the year, and returns again to its
former haunts; they probably come to the coasts of Europe and the
British islands at the time of their migrations, but the Phoca vitulina
is a constant inhabitant of our shores. Some of the seal tribe have a
very wide range, as the fur species, Arctocephalus ursinus, of the
Falkland islands, which at one time frequented the southern coasts
of New Holland in multitudes, but they and three other species have
now become scarce, from the indiscriminate slaughter of old and
young. Sir James Ross found some of the islands in the Antarctic
seas overrun with the sea-elephant, Phoca elephantina, and they
captured a new species of seal without external ears. The Walrus, a
grim-looking creature, with tusks 2 feet long, bent downwards, and
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