Superior: Under the Shadow of the Gods

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

Like the work of the Greek historian Herodotus, Superior extracts a
jumble of curiosities from a selection of commentaries, compendiums, and
chronicles, as well as from the mouths of living witnesses. While
Herodotus polished his stories for personal presentation in the
concourse, these travelers have created a video (not reviewed) to
accompany their volume. It’s been said that the essence of
Herodotus’s genius was his ability to take his listeners by the hand
and turn hearing into sight. How successful are these late 20th-century
adventurers at storytelling, that ancient mode of wringing a living from
the often difficult word?

As a tourist’s guide to the natural and human curiosities of Lake
Superior’s eastern and northern shores, it comes off rather well. Many
of the vignettes are little gems. Anyone who has groped, by water or by
land, through one of the lake’s near-impenetrable fogs will, for a
moment, enter the skin of the crewman aboard the Horsford who watched,
transfixed, as his anchored vessel was T-boned by that “great black
ship coming toward us with deadly, irresistible momentum.” Then the
reader will hold his breath as the authors catch, in a few taut,
well-crafted sentences, the ensuing drama of master and crew racing to
beach a vessel marked for destruction.

On the other hand, as history, the book is a failure. It knows neither
chronology nor pattern. The trivial and the momentous are scrambled
together. To read more than a few pages consecutively is to be battered
by flurries of fragments, rather like being caught in a series of the
lake’s punishing line squalls.