Books in Brief
Storms, Ice, and Whales: The Antarctic Adventures of a Dutch Artist on a Norwegian Whaler by Willem van der Does (Eerdmans, 391 pp., $29). Whaling, writes Willem van der Does, is “probably the most adventurous work that has ever existed,” and few readers of his account of a 1923 voyage aboard the Sir James Clark Ross would disagree. Persuasive eyewitness accounts of maritime exploration are rare (the Ross combined its whaling operations with a first mapping of the Antarctic coastline). Those who excel at polar exploration are more likely to be the Viking warrior type (with which the Ross was well supplied) than artists trained to reproduce the sublime vistas before them.
But that is what van der Does was, and if his India-ink drawings of whales, penguins, ice floes, and ship’s tackle never rise above their illustrative duty, the man’s account of workaday life aboard a twentieth-century whaler is worth a place beside such classics of the sea as Exquemelin’s “Buccaneers of America” and Melville’s “Typee.” “Moby Dick” it’s not, admittedly, but if Melville could have read it, you can be sure there would have been extensive excerpts in his front matter for that book.
Van der Does’s most singular charm is his artlessness. It is as though Billy Budd, not the world-weary Ishmael, were the narrator of “Moby Dick.” In later years van der Does would be reckoned one of Holland’s best landscapists, but the sea and the ice were clearly his muses, against whose lure the domestic hearth was powerless. Armchair voyagers who have sailed everywhere with Patrick O’Brian cannot do better than to sign on with Willem van der Does.
–Thomas M. Disch
Universal Jurisdiction: National Courts and the Prosecution of Serious Crimes Under International Law, edited by Stephen Macedo (University of Pennsylvania Press, 376 pp., $59.95). Last summer, the Belgian government was embarrassed to discover that its courts were entertaining indictments against Gen. Tommy Franks for crimes against humanity, on the basis of a statute that gave Belgian courts “universal jurisdiction”: the power to prosecute serious international crimes no matter where committed, by whom, or against whom.
The basic idea originated as a way to prosecute piracy on the high seas–a crime committed outside any jurisdiction. The modern doctrine, which now includes such crimes as genocide and torture, is articulated in the “Princeton Principles,” a fourteen-point declaration drafted by an international conference of scholars and jurists in 2001. The conference chairman, Stephen Macedo, brings the text of the Principles together with a series of articles by conference participants in “Universal Jurisdiction,” a valuable resource for any study of this somewhat outlandish area of international law.
As Belgium has learned, universal jurisdiction has a disturbing tendency to expand its own scope. In her contribution to “Universal Jurisdiction,” Anne-Marie Slaughter acknowledges the doctrine has the potential for abuse, and that it raises “the specter of a small group of nations taking it upon themselves to prosecute officials from other nations based on their particular conception of customary international law.” Indeed, the principles acknowledge few limitations. Even amnesties such as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission can be disregarded years after the fact. “Universal Jurisdiction” raises many troubling questions, but does not satisfactorily answer them. It is the product of a cloistered debate among supporters of the theory, and is more esoteric than penetrating.
The Belgians, for their part, were drawn out of cloisters last summer when Donald Rumsfeld calmly pointed out that NATO headquarters could hardly stay in a country where its commanders were subject to sham indictments. The squirming Belgians quickly repealed the statute. Within days, six human-rights groups condemned the United States for a “worldwide campaign against international justice.”
–Mario Loyola
