I had the pleasure on Friday night to attend a lecture at Concordia College by one of my favorite authors, Nathaniel Philbrick. He was invited by the Bronxville Historical Society to deliver the 16th Annual Brendan Gill Lecture, named after the eminent New Yorker writer and ardent preservationist. Philbrick’s subjects, with the exception of his book on the Battle of the Little Big Horn, are the sea and New England. I loved his book about whaling and shipwrecks, In the Heart of the Sea; his book about naval exploration and the martinet Charles Wilkes, Sea of Glory; and The Mayflower, his eye-opening book about the Pilgrims and King Philip’s War. He spoke about his most recent book, Bunker Hill. One good anecdote: Colonel William Prescott may or may not have said “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.” In reality, all the colonial officers were telling their men to hold their fire until the British were close. Prescott may have said those words, or he may have told his men to wait until they could see the splash guards—called half-gaiters—that British soldiers wore around their calves. But as Philbrick said, “‘Don’t fire until you see the whites of their half-gaiters’ just doesn’t have the same ring.” This just goes to show the value of a good editor.
