David Haward Bain - Bitter Waters: America’s Forgotten Naval Mission to the Dead Sea

S OMETIMES BOOK IDEAS LURK IN ONES HEAD FOR YEARSEVEN, IN this case, decades.

In early 1985, I signed a preliminary contract with a publisher for Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad. As I remember it, I had three months to produce a formal proposal and bibliography, after which a full-fledged book contract would follow. I was living in Park Slope, Brooklyn, at the time; my second book, Sitting in Darkness: Americans in the Philippines, had been published three or four months before by another firm.

I spent much of that proposing period in happy study at the grand old New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Much of the scholarly research for Sitting in Darkness came out of that building; in fact, the inspiration for its past-and-present narrative form had hit me in a beam of light which struck me as I was looking at an old map at a table in the reading room. I sneezed in the light; inspiration struck; and I quickly sketched out an outline that scarcely deviated from the final narrative. Still grateful and pleased in 1985, I settled into the library yet again.

These were the days before computerized catalogs. One went upstairs to the third floor and walked into a cathedral-like, sunlit room whose walls held great banks of golden oak card-catalog drawers, tiers of them running up to balconies with circular staircases. Mysteries lurked in every drawer. The yellowed cards inside were sometimes typewritten, sometimes handwritten in spidery style, and it was a glorious tactile feeling to thumb them. One could not fail to feel a simultaneous connection with the thumbs and the quests of untold thousands of researchers, and with the patient librarians who had held books and pamphlets when they were still bright and fresh, their spines stiff, as the bibliographic data was copied off onto a three-by-five-inch piece of cardboard with a hole punched into the bottom for the brass rod of a catalog drawer.

Older researchers extracted the drawers and made a place at the great tables nearby, but I was younger then and impatient and working under a deadline. I simply stood, pulled out a drawer, thumbed, and copied down dozens of citations. I needed a place to set my notebook, however, so I pulled out nearby drawers as an impromptu work area. Writers who have labored under similar conditions in the old days like to talk about the serendipity of finding resources on cards happened upon by mistakecomputer catalogs dont allow for serendipity. As I stood one day at my post, I pulled open the adjacent drawer. Before I could cover it with my notebook the heading cards pulled me away from thought about a railroad threading across the Western plains and mountains. Exploring Expeditions, United States, 1838 1863, I think it said. These were not Army-sponsored, though, and had nothing to do with the continental United States. These were naval expeditions, and in all my years of reading history I had heard nothing about themwith the exception of Commodore Matthew C. Perrys opening of Japan in 1853 (over subsequent years all general readers and most historians I consulted were unaware also).

Just for fun, I copied down several dozen card entries of official reports and forgotten antebellum bestsellers