Prologue

Abstract Roswell Hawks Lamson was a child of the frontier. Like so many American naval officers in World War II who came from the Midwest, Lamson spent his early years far from salt water. But perhaps the sea was in his blood. His father Jeremiah Lamson was born in Massachusetts, the descendant of a long line of New England Yankees, some of them seafarers, whose progenitor William Lamson settled at Ipswich in 1634. Roswell’s mother, nee Helen Maria Hawks, was the daughter of Presbyterian clergyman Roswell Hawks. Young Roswell Lamson probably acquired his love of books and learning from his mother and from his maternal grandfather, who helped found Mount Holyoke College. Two of his grand-uncles were, respectively, president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton) and Williams College.