The Tragedy at Honda by Charles Lockwood and Hans Christian Adamson

The worst peacetime naval disaster in U.S. history took place in September 1923, when seven destroyers were wrecked on the coast of California, just where the coast curves to the east south of Lompoc and northwest of Santa Barbara. The coast in this area has been known as a treacherous one for centuries, with many shipwrecks from Spanish colonial times and on.

The Tragedy at Honda records in great detail the engineering run that the destroyers were making from San Francisco to San Diego. They were striving to make a specific time and were operating according to "destroyer doctrine" of the time, which was essentially to follow the lead destroyer rather than each ship making its own navigational location estimates. The ships followed in tight formation, a few hundred feet from each other, and using dead reckoning at night and in foggy conditions, they underestimated where the coast turned east into the Santa Barbara channel. They steamed directly into the coast, and almost all of them were torn up on the rocks. Some had fallen behind, and these turned west after hearing the radio traffic about the wrecks ahead.

Even after wrecking, the lead captain thought that they had grounded on rocky islands 15 miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, thinking he had overshot the channel.

Despite the magnitude of the damage, not many lives were lost. The survivors clambered onto the rocks, scaled the cliffs and used boats to rescue some people. The story of their night on the cliffs and subsequent rescue and trip to Los Angeles is interesting too. The book concludes with the naval investigations of the tragedy.

I'd never heard of this tragedy until we visited Santa Barbara in June 2013. A vendor at an art fair told me about the tragedy and I found the book. I finished it on 10/22/13 and will hang onto it until I find someone really interested in the story, then I'll probably give it to them.

A Quest for Godliness by J.I. Packer

J.I. Packer's book is a collection of essays on the Puritan views and practices of godliness. Packer starts with an overview of the Puritans and their deep and abiding desire to know Christ and to serve him faithfully. Packer does not spend much time debunking the idea that Puritans were joyless, dour, teetotaling spoilsports, probably because his audience already knows it's not the case, and the fact that the joys to be found in following Christ surpass anything forgone in the world anyway.

The book has major sections on The Puritans and the Bible, The Puritans and the Gospel, The Puritans and the Holy Spirit and The Puritan Christian Life, each with a few articles.

It includes an concluding essay on Jonathan Edwards, and quite a bit on Richard Baxter, but a large portion of the book addresses John Owen's writings and influence on Puritan thought and practice. Packer wrote in introduction to Owen's The Death of Death in the Death of Christ and his essays on Owen are each excellent.

One of the most interesting things to me was the emphasis on application in Puritan preaching. They believed that because people have minds that are affected by the Fall, they have hard time determining what to do with the preached Word. So their preaching emphasized application, and they strove to apply the teaching to the people who came to their meetings in various spiritual conditions. Some were unbelievers in need of the initial saving grace of the gospel, some were backsliding Christians, some were discouraged, some were joyful and growing, and so on. Church attendance was mandatory in England during the time of the Puritans (not their doing--it was by order of the queen) and so they had very mixed congregations.

There is some repetitiveness in the essays since it is a compilation of individual essays written for various publications, but it is not annoying.

This took me a long time to read. Since it was a collection of essays, I picked up and put it down over the course of 10 months probably. Finished it on 10/10/13.