The Contributors' Column

‘FROM MED to MUM,’ by James Norman Hall, is not only an adventure of his own, but, vicariously, an adventure of the Atlantic’ s as well. After completing Mutiny on the Bounty and its sequel, Men Against the Sea, Hall and his collaborator, Charles Nordhoff, still had a third of their epic ahead of them. The extraordinary exploits of the mutineers and the history of the colony on Pitcairn Island remained to be told. Pitcairn rears its rocky head from the thundering surf of the midPacific, and on it to this day live the descendants of the Bounty’s mutineers—one really ought to go there and look the place over before writing about it. So thought Hall, and last August be bade farewell to Nordhoff at Tahiti and set sail for the strangest island in the world, expecting to be gone only a month.

Time passed, the month was up, Hall did not appear. More days went by, then a week, and Nordhoff wrote us a letter. Hall was overdue and no word had come from him; the boat to which be had entrusted his life was a leaky old tub; anything might have happened, and Nordhoff was anxious. So were we. No news may be good news, but at such a time silence is ominous.

The days grew into weeks, the weeks into a month — two months — and still there was no word. Finally, in late November, came a second report, from Nordhoff. Several garbled radio messages had been picked up at Tahiti; Hall’s ship was wrecked on an uninhabited atoll and one life lost; it appeared that Hall was safe, but the messages were so confused that it was hard to make out just what had occurred. Relief . . . then new uncertainties and anxiety . . . hope.

Shortly thereafter a hastily penned note from Hall himself put an end to our fears: —

When I left for Pitcairn Island on August 17, I thought I should beat Tahiti again by September 20 at the latest. But there seems to be a fatality connected with the Bounty that carries over even to the year 1933. The Pro Patria, the schooner on which I was traveling, was wrecked at three o’clock in the morning, September 15, on an uninhabited coral island called Timor, 300 miles from Pitcairn and 900 from Tahiti. It was a memorable experience and I have no desire to go through another like it. Then we had some openboat voyaging of our own to do.

I have just arrived at home at 9.30 this evening after a 500-mile voyage from the island of Hao, in the Low Islands, eighteen of us in a six-ton cutter boat. I have had very little sleep this past week, and am now ready for bed. But I wanted to send you a brief note first, for I find that the northbound mail boat is in and due to leave at six to-morrow morning.

Fortunately the shipwreck occurred after we had been at Pitcairn. I had two full days and one night ashore there, and the experience was well worth being shipwrecked for. I met all the ghosts of the Bounty’s company. I can’t go into the details now, but will give you the full account next month.

And so he did and here it is — to be published in full in this and succeeding issues of the Atlantic.

Nickerson Southward (‘This Question of Salary’) is the pen name of a business man who has been engaged in competitive industry, both in manufacturing and in commerce, and has also had important connections in the utility field. Louise Crothers (‘Charles W. Eliot’) is the widow of the late Dr. Samuel McChord Crothers, who, remembered by Atlantic readers as an essayist of I lie first water, was pastor of the Unitarian church in Cambridge where Dr. Eliot was invariably to be seen on Sunday mornings. Δ Unique has been the career of Margaret Dana: she is a specialist in the merchandising problems of Main Street. She owned several shops in small towns and was so successful with them that she began to offer a merchandising service to country storekeepers, which included instruction in styling, buying, advertising, window dressing, and salesmanship. In the course of this work she had the ‘good luck,’ as she calls it, to save many small stores from threatened ruin, and became so interested in their problems that she chose a section of the country as a living laboratory and has spent the past two and a half years getting at the bottom of their troubles. ‘Elegy of the Country Storekeeper’ summarizes some of the results of her study. Curtis Billings (‘Are You Safe to Drive?‘) is a member of the staff of the Public Safety Division of the National Safety Council. Δ In the Graduate School of Columbia University there is now enrolled a Chinese student named P. K. Mok, who is preparing to return to his native land to teach comparative literature and to engage in editing. Though young, he has already taken part in exciting and dangerous events. In 1927, when he lived in Canton, he was able to watch from two strategic points the gathering clouds of civil unrest which he has so graphically described in ‘Red Storm.’ As a neighbor of Odenov, he knew well that fomenter of discord; in fact, the agitator lived in a house belonging to Mr. Mok’s family, and it was the young man’s delicate duty to call once a month and collect the rent from the Communist who was even then plotting to abolish all private property. At the same time, he frequently ate with the coolies and dock hands at Old Sam’s restaurant, where he cracked jokes with Gold-Tooth Four and. as he puts it, ‘let them divide my property — tobacco— without their discovering that I did not belong.’ Δ ‘ Diversities of Gifts’ is another of F. Lyman Windolph’s portraits of King Street, the thoroughfare in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on which he has his law office. Charlotte Kellogg (‘Countersign’), energetic in humanitarian enterprise, is a poet and biographer. Her most recent book, Jadwiga, Poland’s Great Queen, has gone through three editions. She is the wife of Vernon Kellogg, the well-known zoologist.

George A. Sloan (‘First Flight of the Blue Eagle’) is president of the Cotton-Textile Institute, and chairman of the code authority for the cotton textile industry. Δ ‘ People Who Have Crossed Our Threshold’ is hut one segment lifted from the kaleidoscope of Lillian D. Wald’s forty years as head of New York’s Henry Street Settlement. The whole of it is contained in her volume, Windows on Henry Street, to be published early in March by the Atlantic Monthly Press. Roderick Lull (‘The Death of Mr. Barker’) is a young man who knew how to apply the advice of Horace Greeley in reverse. Born in California and now living in Portland, Oregon, he sent his story East for his first signal recognition. Δ

Such a monument to exacting scholarship is the Oxford English Dictionary, recently completed with the publication of the Supplement, that one is able to understand the modesty of Ernest Weekley when he characterizes his ‘Words, Words, Words’ as no more than ‘random nibbles’ at it. Head of the Modern Language Department at University College, Nottingham, Professor Weekley has published a dozen authoritative volumes on philology and linguistics. Δ The author of ’When the World Crashes’ is a Presbyterian minister who for obvious reasons prefers to remain anonymous. Josephine W . Johnson (‘Under the Sound of Vaices’) is a young American writer who, whether she composes in prose or verse, is always the poet.

The Atlantic does not attempt to report ‘spot news,’ but when some event, of international significance occurs the editors consider it their function to help readers to an understanding of the background. As with the Kreuger case, the Atlantic cabled to an experienced European Observer and is glad to be able to present the first detailed and authoritative account of ‘The Stavisky Scandal’ which at this very moment is rocking France. To catch up with the rush of events it was necessary to tear the issue apart, but voila! here it is. Eustace Seligman (‘Amend the Securities Act’) has practised at the bar for twenty years and is a member of the New York law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. He is the son of Professor Edwin R. A. Seligman, emeritus professor of economics at Columbia University. He is one of the two directors representing the public interest of the Federal Home Loan Bank for his district, as well as a director of various other corporations. His interests include a trusteeship of the Foreign Policy Association and membership on the advisory council of the American Labor Legislation Association.

From the depths.

Dear Atlantic, —
With heartfelt gratitude and blessings I write this note of thanks for Father Wilbur’s ‘Preface to Catholicism’ in your November issue.
Years ago I was well trained by the sisters, but arrived at no understanding. I had not the depth to ‘see’ beyond church rules and laws. It was just a show , without meaning to me. I went my own restless, wayward way, piling up difficulties for myself. Divorce and remarriage before I was twenty-six put me entirely away from the Church and my own people.
The years brought babies and tears and struggles and heartaches. Only my God and myself know the bitter seeking and trying and failing, the despair, the trying again, the almost quitting. Now, watching alone through the night with a dying baby in my arms, I quote what I understand from Father Wilbur’s piece: ’When those who have practically sunk themselves deep in the mystery of suffering experience with ineffable joy that somehow a Strange Presence or Otherness comes in the depths of their hearts to suffer in them, with them, and somehow instead of them . . . they identify this Mysterious Stranger.’
This is what I wanted to know twenty years ago, but did not understand.
Do you mind if I do not sign my name? I am the ‘respected’ wife of a noble man and mother of four noble children in our small community.
A READER

An ex-soldier’s point of view.

Dear Atlantic, —
I have followed with interest Mr. Burlingame’s series of articles entitled ‘The Embattled Veterans.’ 1 am a veteran of the Spanish-American War and of the World War. In the first I was just a buck, in the latter an officer in the 32nd Division.
I think it is fair to point out that the soldier of the Spanish-American War served at a time when the pension policy of the United States had been fixed by years of law and regulation worked out for the veterans of the Civil War and of earlier wars. At the outset of the World War the government announced a change in policy by which disabilities incurred in service would be compensated according to degree. Every man who served on the Border in 1916 knows that the pay of a private. was $15 a month, and every man who served in 1917 knows it was $30 with 10 per cent increase for overseas.
For the veteran of 1898 there was no doubling of pay, no War Risk Insurance, no federal bonus on discharge, no state bonus, no adjusted compensation certificate, no anti-typhoid shots. There was not even a promise of an adequate monthly allowance in the event a soldier was disabled in the service. The men of the SpanishAmerican War never even thought of such things. They did believe that they would be treated like the Civil War veterans and that in their old age they might have help from the pension bureau instead of going on poor relief.
In 1918, I looked upon the faces of men who died carrying out my orders. It was not pleasant. In 1898, I was one of an army of 2500 typhoid patients in the 2nd Division hospital of the 7th Army Corps at Jacksonville, Florida. In that hospital boys too weak to help themselves lay with flies upon their lips, teeth, and tongue. There were no trained nurses, not even tents, cots, and bedding ready when I was admitted. That was not a pleasant experience, either. If there had been such things as honor rolls back in 1898, my company could have shown almost as many gold stars as its home town displayed after 1918 with six times as many men in service. A great typhoid epidemic can kill and disable as surely as shot and shell.
The men I saw upon the battlefields of France and the men I saw neglected in the hospitals in 1898 surely have a preferred claim upon this nation that cannot be discharged by telling them to go to the poor officers of their towns and cities. No such treatment will be acceptable, and no leader ever has had or ever will have any authority to pledge the service men’s support to such a proposition.
G. W. GARLOCK West Salem, Wisconsin

Plus ça change, plus c’esl la même chose.

Dear Atlantic, —
I am one of those retiring, silent readers who seldom, if ever, write a letter to the editor. I am breaking that precedent now simply to pay a compliment and to make a plea.
I have been a subscriber to the Atlantic for many years, and I like it because, having reached a high state of perfection, it needs not and does not change, fundamentally, though it may and does continue to improve.
Time and again I have had the disconcerting experience of having some magazine to which I had become attached blazon out suddenly with 1he screaming announcement of a change a change of style, a change of cover, of type, of characteristic features, of editors, of publishers, of what not. Aral in nearly every instance the change has been decidedly for the worse.
Don’t try to paint a lily. Therefore, my plea: Do not change the Atlantic.
ROBERT L. NOURSE, M.D.
Boise, Idaho

Omission.

Dear Atlantic, —
In my article, ‘The Fight on the Securities Act,’ published in your issue for February, in the second paragraph of the second column on page 236, I overlooked mentioning the Banking and Currency Committee of the Senate, and I want to take the opportunity of saying that this committee held hearings over a period of weeks on the bill and passed it. ft differed from the House hill, and a conferees’ bill was adopted in both houses without dissent. I should have stated that both the Senate and the House devoted weeks of study to the bill.
BERNARD FLEXNER
New York City