100 Years Ago: July 1925

[George Thomas Wilson]

100 Years Ago: July 1925

 

This is the 126^th entry in my series of abridged rewrites of National Geographic Magazines upon them reaching 100 years after being published.

 

 

The first article in this month’s issue is entitled “Rediscovering the Rhine” and was written by Melville Chater, author of “Through the Back Doors of Belgium,” “Through the Back Doors of France,” “Zigzagging Through Sicily,” etc., in the National Geographic Magazine.  The article has the internal subtitle: “A Trip by Barge from the Sea to the Headwaters of Europe’s Storied Stream.”  It contains forty-four black-and-white photographs of which nine are full-page in size.

While strolling on the Scheldt-side promenade at Antwerp, the author and his friend decided to discover the Rhine.  It seemed that, as far as they were concerned, the famous old river stood in need of rediscovery.  That afternoon, they started about it. Their first find was a Flemish barge captain lounging aboard his craft, which was named Rijn-Schelde, or Rhine-Scheldt.  They told him they wished to ascend the Rhine on a canal boat.  He was puzzled as to why they preferred that method of travel, but he took them to an inn to meet his wife.  She agreed to stay behind that trip to make room aboard for them.  That night they groped through a pitch-black labyrinth of quays, boarded the Rijn-Schelde, stumbled over her deck cargo of oil barrels, and plunged down a steep companionway into the bow cabin.  It measured four paces by three.  It contained a miniature cook stove, a table, two chairs, and a pair of built-in pews.  They were wondering where they would sleep when the captain came aboard at midnight.  He slid back two panels, thus revealing a couple of small caves, each fitted with a narrow bunk.  They undressed, then inserted themselves into the coffinlike bunks, according to sleeping-car technique. A terrific clatter of anchor chains announced that they were off on the dropping tide.  By dawn, they had gotten into their blue jeans, and were on deck to watch the barge pass through the locks that divided the maritime section of the Scheldt from the Hansweert Canal.  It was not often that one passed from one country to another through a canal lock, yet that was practically what happened as the first pair of great gates closed behind them.  A couple of rosy-cheeked Dutch customs officials came aboard, placed seals on the cargo, then retired, not knowing what to make of the two Americans.

The Hansweert Canal, though entirely in Dutch territory, was Belgium’s shortcut to Rotterdam and the Rhine.  Its five-mile length constituted a busy scene of maritime vessels and 2,000-ton barges gliding between flat shores.  High indeed were the dikes and powerful the lock of that canal, which cut across the little island of South Beveland and connected two arms of the sea.  Another pair of huge locks opened to let them pass out into the lagoon-like Eastern Scheldt.  There, the barge sped up to 15 miles an hour, as they coasted among the islands of Tholen, Schouwen, and Beyerland, low and hazy – a seascape-landscape of gentle grays.  Such was the Dutch province of Zeeland, and never was a geographical name more apt.  “Sea-land” consisted of seven islands which had been salvaged from the sea.  Small wonder that those so-called “drowned lands,” which had suffered two great inundations, took as their heraldic device a swimming lion.  Meanwhile, the skipper lit a fire in the deck stove and boiled some coffee.  The rest of their first barge breakfast was produced from his hip pocket – three feet of smoked sausage.  “No woman around to bother us!” he grinned, sawing up the sausage with a clasp knife. “Oh, we’ll have a fine trip!”  Flat Dutch landscape – green meadows, spotted cattle, and red windmills, neatly composed into ready-made pictures – accompanied them all that day.  Toward sunset, they anchored at Lobith, the last village before crossing the German frontier.  The local shops were full of barge skippers, laying in supplies for the long Rhine trip.  The skipper acquired many lengths of hard, smoked sausage.  Then all hands withdrew to a nearby café.  There, unlike the landlubbers, who were drinking drams of schnapps, the skippers yarned for an hour over glasses of beer, then returned aboard.

In bed by nine, up by five, and a day of endless work – such was the life of a barge skipper on the Rhine.  At Emmerich, where the German officials came aboard, next morning, a day’s delay enabled them to visit the source of two Rhine legends.  At nearby Cleve, they paid a homage to Lohengrin’s monument, the swan-drawn knight who rescued Elsa from Telramund, which furnished an opera libretto for Richard Wagner.  The other legend source was at the quaint little town of Xanten.  There, was the putative birthplace of Siegfried, the hero of the “Nibelungenlied” epic, and incidentally one of the first Rhine tourists.  At age 13, Siegfried got that “See-Germany-First” impulse and started upstream on his Rhine exploits.  Except for a trip to Iceland, where he captured and captivated Brunhild, all his adventures took place in the Rhineland, between Xanten and Worms, about 200 miles.  Early next morning the Rijn-Schelde was under way, headed for the Ruhr district.  All day long its proximity was evidenced by the passage of barges banked high with coal, for France and Belgium.  During that week, 444,000 tons of reparations coal moved from the mines.  They passed through much of the Ruhr after dark.  The light of the upleaping flares from its blast furnaces, from time to time, momentarily threw into relief that vast labyrinth of wharves, stacks, mills, railway tracks, and pit heads, where labored more than 2,000,000 men.  Oberhausen, Essen, Rheinhausen, Duisburg, Ruhrort, Meiderich – those industrial centers followed co closely upon each other as to produce one colossal effect.  The last three composed one community, whose combined waterfront formed what was probably the largest river harbor in the world.  The Ruhr district produced per year about 6,000,000 tons of pig iron and from 4,000,000 to 5,000,000 tons of steel.

During 1924, the Ruhr average monthly yield of coal was 8,000,000 metric tons.  The five big groups of iron and steel manufacturers employed about 1,500,000 men, while the coal workers numbered about 550,000 men.  [See: “The Story of the Ruhr,” May 1922, National Geographic Magazine.]  Quite a different spectacle awaited them farther along, where Cologne’s great cathedral spires towered over the Rhine.  Whether by reason of its superb position or its commanding loveliness, Cologne minster dominated the city almost overwhelmingly.  Radiating from the cathedral extended the tree-lined boulevards which, 50 years prior, arose out of Cologne the old, the crooked-alleyed, whose tumbled-down walls were razed to comport with the dignity of that great Rhine port.  But whatever route one took, the cathedral’s twin spires beckoned one to return.  And time and again one did return, to wander, antlike, through those great, dim spaces, where groves of columns rose through eternal twilight.  Overhead, the stained glass gleamed like a belt of sparkling jewels, while higher still were panes which let in a pale-blue light.  Surprisingly, that masterpiece of Gothic architecture was in large part modern.  It was begun in 1248 and languished for six centuries; then a fresh start was made in 1842.  It was completed in 1863.  The author’s friend asked the local archivist in Cologne whether the town was named after the perfume or vice versa.  He explained that Cologne originally meant “colony,” and that Rome made it the administrative seat of her holdings in lower Germany.  He showed them a natural elevation where the Roman legions had once been encamped.  Their general started constructing for drainage and water supply.  The city’s supply pipes followed the 77-kilometer conduit today [in 1925].

After four centuries of Roman occupation, the Germanic tribes threw off the yoke, and what had been known as the Colony gradually became known as Cologne.  By the Middle Ages, it had become the home of ecclesiastical and lay art, and by the 14^th century, it had risen to commercial prominence which had continued down to today [in 1925].  Modern Cologne was the port of registry for Rhine-to-the-sea traffic and the gateway of cargo destined for North Sea ports, the Baltic, and the Neva.  During their stay at Cologne, in September 1924, the minimum cost of living for a family of four per month was $40.  That was 130% increase from 1913.  For a day they wandered about the quaint streets of nearby Bonn, in and out of its famous university, and along its Rhine esplanade.  They separated for a while.  While apart, each was told that there was only one thing to see in Bonn.  The author was told by an anthropologist to see the Neanderthal skull in the museum, while his friend was told to see Beethoven’s death mask.  They agreed to see both.  The mask was enshrined in the little house where the great composer was born in 1770.  The death mask – a kind and noble face – was the epitome of man’s mental struggle upward.  Twenty minutes away, across town, in a museum case surrounded by an exhibit of stone axes and spearheads, laid the skull of one of the earliest known men, he of the Neander Thal near Dusseldorf.  In twenty minutes, they had spanned millenniums of human evolution, with all its mysteries.  That night they bade goodbye to Cologne’s restaurant life and returned to the Rijn-Schelde and the captain’s deck cooking.  Certainly, his was the skimpiest kitchen outfit afloat.  They suspected the madame of hiding most of her pots and pans, just to show him that getting along without a woman aboard was not easy.

The briquette industry was not far from Cologne.  An imposing amount of lignite was machine-pressed into those handy fuel balls.  The Rhineland’s 72 lignite mines and plants produced 7,000,000 tons of briquettes in 1923.  The presence of 60% of water in German lignite, and the impossibility of transporting without breaking hand-presses fuel balls held back the industry until 1870, when the invention of the pressing machine yielded cheap, firm briquettes of high heating power.  The great lignite seam southwest of Cologne measured 24 miles long by 3 miles broad, and contained three billion tons.  Throughout the Rhineland, 24,000 men worked in the lignite mines.  On leaving Cologne, they had taken aboard two kayaks and their owners.  They proposed to ascend with them as far as Bingen, then paddle downstream.  At Rolandseck, the new passengers sang a ballad at the remains of the castle where Roland died upon returning from the Crusades to find that his Hildegunde had entered the convent.  Rhine legend was like the ivy that beautified many a Rhine ruin, which, lack the legend, would often be overlooked in favor of the river’s everchanging magnificence.  For a day, the craggy heights continued.  Bend after bend, they sighted red-roofed, slope-set towns.  Each had its neat quay, its waterside inn, an ideal route for motorcar or motorboat.  A momentary flattening of the banks showed them Neuwied, the home of the Moravian Brothers’ self-governing settlement.  Then, up shot the left bank, culminating in the fortress of Ehrenbrietstein.  Opposite, wedged in at the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle, laid Coblenz.  Confluentes, the Romans called the place.  It had always been an important military stronghold, from far-ff days down to the occupation following the World War, when the Stars and Stripes flew from Ehrenbrietstein.

They docked on the Moselle frontage near a flotilla of barges loaded with locally made sparkling wine.  Then they found their way through some sleepy, old-world courtyards to the town’s center.  In the doorway of a shop stood the proprietor watching a review of French troops in an adjoining square.  He was American.  He had come with the Army of Occupation, liked the town, had stayed and married.  He complained haw things had changed since the Americans had left and the French took over.  At parting, he forced upon them cartons of American cigarettes.  Just beyond Coblenz, they visited cheery little Rhens.  With its single street of half-timbered house frontages painted over with drinking scenes, its carved gnomes and dogs upholding the door lintels, it swinging signs announcing So-and-So, the “master builder” or “master tailor.”  Rhens seemed less like a living town than like a stage setting for a market-place act of German opera.  And so, in honor of Wagner’s opera, they christened Rhens “the Hans Sachs town.”  They rejoined the Rijn-Schelde at Coblenz for another day’s ascent to the river’s magnificent, canyonlike course.  But Rhine folk did not permit scenery to interfere with the business of grape-growing.  From Bonn to Mainz, they beheld an almost continuous vista of the vine, a riverside vineyard 90 miles long.  And plentiful as grape leaves were the Rhine legends rehearsed by their two fellow voyagers.  That of the German knight who went off to the Crusades, and returned to find his love-lady dead, was the stock explanation for many supposedly haunted Rhine castle.  The legend of Rheinfels, almost opposite the Lorelei, had the departing knight plant a linden tree whose flourishing or decay magically indicated the state of his health.

During his absence, a rival for his mistress’ hand secretly replaced the growing tree with a withered one, thereby causing the lady to commit suicide.  Passing the Lorelei, their fellow travelers burst into song.  Poor Lorelei!  Her song had been supplanted by the locomotive’s shriek, and her classic rock had been tunneled by unholy railway engineers.  But no trace of the Nibelungen hoard supposed to have been sunk there, according to the legend of the “Rheingold,” had ever been found.  An American radio fan, who they meet in Mainz, proposed installing a broadcast station on top of the rock.  Nearing Bingen, they passed e little towns of Oberwesel and Bacharach, two of the quaintest old-world spots on the middle Rhine.  Each had 14^th century walls and towers, but while Oberwesel had a 12-foot cross bearing Christ’s effigy in the center of its tiny marketplace, Bacharach had an effigy of quite another kind.  Supposedly, it derived its name from Bacchus ad the towns people dressed up a straw man, throning him on a certain rock – some said it was the original Bacchic altar – and singing around it.  Ahead, amid swift rapids, rose the Mouse Tower.  They learned from their fellow travelers that Musturm meant “arsenal,” not mouse tower.  They breasted the confluence of the Nahe River with the Rhine, just outside of Bingen.  Bingen came into sight, a smallish, hill-set town, simple and sweet, in the evening glow.  Next morning, their German friends paddled off in their canoes.  A few hours later, they were anchored near the broad esplanade at Mantz.  The city was almost entirely modern, safe for the cathedral and its surrounding market place. Mantz’s two most prominent citizens were Henrich von Meissen, the poet, and Johann Gutenberg, the printer.  A century after von Meissen wrote ballads of knights came Gutenberg with his printing press.

They visited the neighborhood of Gutenberg’s alleged first printing office and studied specimens of his early work.  In 1447, Gutenberg issued an astronomical calendar for that year.  A few years later came his first important work – the Bible.  Thanks to the Rijn-Schelde’s cargo being, in part, for Frankfort, they had a day on the Main River, a day enlivened by the sight of huge, picturesque log rafts, each bearing a shack, two raftsmen, and a keg of beer.  Logging made up a large amount of the enterprises of southwestern Germany, furnishing by far the greater part of seabound Rhine traffic.  Trees were felled and barked.  The stripped logs were linked in groups of dozens.  At freshet time, those units floated down the creeks to artificial ponds, where they were reassembled in groups of 60.  Upon reaching the Main, they were reformed into small floats.  As the stream widened, those floats were attached to each other, until, at Bamberg, they had become rafts of 600 logs apiece.  Four days later, at Wurzburg, each raft was augmented to 1,000 logs.  Still lower, they were reconfigured for their long river journey, and, at Frankfort, they were put under steam tow for Rhine towns and the Netherlands.  At Frankfort, they decided to have a vacation from smoked sausage and cool coffee, so they said au revoir to the skipper and found a hotel on the Kaiserstrasse.  Frankfort was a striking instance of a fine, modern city containing a perfectly preserved medieval town.  The city’s commercial importance, dating from when it was a Roman trading post, was reflected, in 1925, in its two fine harbors, which handled 8,000 to 9,000 boats a year from the lower Rhine and 7,000,000 tons of freight for transshipment.  Parks, concerts, opera, café life, boulevard strolls – these reinforced the impression of Frankfort as a center of gay modernity.

Then, just off the beaten path, one discovered, in Goethe’s birthplace, a quaint bit of the city’s past.  A spacious and mightily dignified house it was, overlooking a staid rear garden and indicating that the poet sprang from a solid, well-to-do family.  A 10-minutw walk from the house brought one to the Romerberg, a perfect example of a medieval mart, where 16^th-century emperors were crowned while its fountains ran with red and white wine, and where Frankfort’s renowned fairs were held for 600 years.  Following the Faust trail from the Romerberg, one gained the nearby cathedral.  It was difficult to stand within the 13^th-century edifice, whose gemlike windows spectrally illuminated the surroundings, without imagining Maguerite, Goethe’s heroine, at prayer before the altar, while her Evil Spirits accused her from the surrounding shadows.  Their local guide piloted them to a monument representing Johann Gutenberg and his coworkers.  They decided to make several towns by rail and rejoin the Rijn-Schelde at Strasbourg.  Ticket-booking for Germany’s occupied zone was not easy.  First the bought tickets to the zone border, then zone-tickets, but not in marks.  They had to rush to the money-exchange window, then rush to buy the tickets, and finally, rush to catch the departing train. On board, it was equally hard finding their proper carriage.  At Worms, they had a bit of luck.  They had visited the cathedral whose site was associated with the “Nibelungenlied,” and the author’s friend was complaining that the modern city was spoiling the romance of legend, when the 20^th century came to their rescue in the form of a cinema house.  The sign read, “Siegfried and the Nibelungen Treasure – Showing To-day!”  Two hours of a highly picturesque film reproduced the Burgundian court of Worms, together with Sigfried’s exploits.

Next day, they dropped in and out of Heidelberg for a taste of that delightful, hill-surrounded, Neckar-bordering town.  During the World War, its famous university almost closed its doors, but the student body [in 1925] surpassed prewar figures, with 3,100 registrations.  Its educational tradition spoke in the provision that each state-paid professors lectured for but six hours weekly, so that he may further himself and the university by special research work.  Its fighting leg flourished [in 1925], in a minimum of eight duels a week, for the personal honor of receiving the coveted steel slash across their unprotected cheeks.  And, most picturesque survival of all, its tradition for escapades still lived in the university prison, where incarcerated students, some of them Generals in the World War, covered ceilings, walls, and windows with self-portraits, rhymes, and memorials.  The original prison dated back to the 14^th century.  From Heidelberg, they proceeded to Kehl, where they passed through French customs, then crossed the Rhine, out of Germany and into Alsace-Lorraine.  Their stroll around Strasbourg revealed, in a lagoon where three canals met, barges moving to and from such widespread points as Marseille, Paris, and Amsterdam.  Strasbourg was a plexus of waterways.  The rivers Rhine, Meuse, Marne, Seine, and Rhone all contributed segments to a great circle of canals which had Strasbourg on its eastern circumference.  That ancient Celtic town still justified its historic name of Stratisburgum, or Town-on-the-Routes.  They arrived at the cathedral in time to see the noonday functioning of its clock, with its parading effigies of the Apostles, its crowing cock, its skeleton striker of the hours, and its seven pagan deities symbolizing the days of the week.  The whole thing suggested the quaint conceits of German toymakers.

Rising like some ancient landmark between France and Germany, Strasbourg cathedral revealed art influences of both countries.  Its rich beauty was evolved throughout some 250 years by master architects from several countries.  Strasbourg came into French hands for two centuries when, in 1648, Alsace was ceded to France in recompense for protection extended to the German Protestant princes.  In 1870, the city capitulated to Germany after a seven weeks’ siege.  In November 1918, it was re-occupied by French troops.  Post-war Strasbourg contained an interesting experiment encouraging family life.  Four-room bungalows, erected in a charming suburb, were rented to young couples at 60% less than the normal rate.  The sole stipulation was that the renting couple must have young children.  France, with her low birthrate, was watching that experiment.  Strasbourg, the city of storks, had inaugurated this little Babytown-on-the-Rhine.  The last thing their local guide showed them was a square in which rose a statue of their old friend, Johann Gutenberg.  Learning that the Rijn-Schelde was due, they went down to the docks, arriving just in time to see a touching reunion.  On the quay stood the skipper’s wife.  She waved her umbrella at him, while he waved a frying pan at her.  Their ensuing reunion on the dock appeared to be highly satisfactory to both.  After a fortnight at Antwerp, she had grown restless and had come on rail to await the barge’s arrival.  She said that 12 years of barge life had ruined her for life ashore.  Then she fell to and cooked them a splendid dinner.  That caused the skipper to exclaim that a womanless barge was almost as bad as engine trouble.  A few days later they bid the couple farewell, as the Rijn-Schelde headed downstream.  Due to low water the skipper had transferred his cargo to a light-draft barge, which also took them to Basel.

Strasbourg, due to the swift current and variance in water levels beyond the city, constituted the head of Rhine navigation.  While normally it was 9 feet deep at Mulheim, 6 feet at Bingen, and 4 feet near Strasbourg, the waters often dropped or rose 3 feet in a short span of time, due to drought or Alpine snow melting.  With the outskirts of the Black Forest on their left, their small group of steam-towed barges moved slowly upstream between the walls which spoke of protection against floods from the river’s Alpine reaches.  The Strasbourg-to-Basel section of the Rhine was open for about 200 days a year.  The hard upstream pull was, in part, recompensed by the rapidity of the return trip, a fast steam barge making Strasbourg in five hours, and Rotterdam in three days.  The genius which turned obstacles into assets was evident in the bank-to-bank ferryboat which they sighted on pulling into Basel.  It turned the swift current of 5 to 9 feet per second into a force yielding a lateral direction.  A telegraph wire was strung from bank to bank.  A boat, pointed upstream, was attached to two wheels which ran along the wire.  The steersman merely jammed his rudder to deflect the boat.  The force of the river drove the boat to the other side.  The device, which was adopted 6o years prior from similar boats seen on the Moselle River, was in use at four of Basel’s ferries.  A stroll along   Basel’s tree-shaded embankments showed three countries at a glance: Switzerland at one’s feet, Germany’s Black Forest across the Rhine, and France’s outposts in the low Alsatian hills.  Basel was the gateway to the upper Rhine.  Not water traffic, but Switzerland’s “white coal,” was mainly what lied between that gateway and Lake Constance, in the shape of four great hydroelectric stations.  They drew 180,000 horsepower, with twice that still undeveloped. 

Railway power, factory power, cheap city lighting, and cheap propulsion of Basel’s ribbon machines were among Fater Rhine’s local benefactions.  The ribbon machine was largely a home institution at Basel, where from $10,000,000 to $15,000,000 worth of ribbons were produced annually.  With that, together with silk spinning and the production of coal-tar dyes, Basel was one of the wealthiest cities of its size in Europe.  With the upper Rhine’s stretch of more than 160 miles before them, they went on by train to Neuhausen, where, despite fog, the author’s friend insisted on getting off to visit the Falls of the Rhine.  The author said he would go on to Stein and bet his friend 20 francs he would not see anything.  From Schaffhausen, that afternoon, the little steamer chugged its way up a narrow and sinuous Rhine, here and there wildly wooded, with occasional stops at sylvan townlets beside an old covered bridge.  Toward sunset there loomed up a castle-topped crag.  At its foot was a river-fringed village with flower boxes begaying the windows, a gabled inn’s waterside terrace, and a red, wooden bridge across a slender Rhine.  As he wandered through Stein’s half-dozen unnamed streets, with their overhanging balconies and their house fronts painted with Medieval tableaux, the author felt he should be on a charger with a squire beside him.  The house-front picture gallery included a cardinal’s reception, ladies being burned at the stake, Androcles and the lion, boar-hunting scenes, and, on a tavern, a pelican with her brood sucking blood from her beast, the Gothic-letter caption reading: “Here you will be refreshed as generously as the pelican refreshes her young.”  That night, having been candle-lit to bed, the author pondered over Stein, that fairytale town, and its simple folk, so close to the city yet so unspoiled, until the Rhine sang him to sleep.

Next day the author’s friend turned up.  He launched into eulogies about the Falls of the Rhine, and annoyed the author by being so sympathetic over him having missed them.  Then he claimed his 20 francs.  That afternoon, a tourist whom he had picked up enroute stopped the author in the street.  He said: “Some dare-devil, that friend of yours!  Yesterday, at the Falls of the Rhine – it was so foggy you couldn’t see your hand before your face – he got a rope and made the guide lower him over the bank and through the fog to the water’s edge.  He said that he wanted to be able to say that he’d seen the Falls of the Rhine.”  Next day, while skirting Lake Constance on the way to Rorschach, through a world once more fog-muffled, the author’s friend said they would not be able to see the lake and that they should go on by rail to Chur.  The author agreed, but bet his friend that he could see the lake if they stopped.  His friend looked at him suspiciously.  Two hours beyond the head of the lake the fog’s blinding gray melted, revealing in vivid greens a crystal-clear mountain-land.  The relief was so welcome, the sun-smitten air so tonic, that at Sevelen they jumped off the train and started to walk.  They reached the farther end of a wooden bridge which straddled a very shallow and pebbly stream, hardly recognizable as the Rhine.  Ahead rose a magnificent pine-clad mountain, castle-topped, its flanks clothed with the sleepiest of old-world villages, through whose sole street great hay wains jogged and goose-girls drove their flocks.  “This is Vaduz, the capital of Liechtenstein,” a passerby informed them. “Yes, our prince allows travelers to visit the castle.”  The principality’s entire extent along the Rhine was practically visible from where they stood.  They regrated the train schedule did not allow them to visit its 65 square miles, its 10,000 inhabitants, or its castle.

An hour later, the railway brought them to Chur.  Thence, by an electrified, narrow-gauge line, they climbed onward toward Disentis, rising 16 feet a minute along the rim of a twisted gorge, at whose bottom the slim. Swift Vorder Rhine, fresh from its source among Alpine snows, ran gray green over a semiarid bed.  Still the green, scarlet-flecked mountains lifted, lifted, lifted, with shrill rivulets rushing down to add to the slow making of a great river.  And, at last, they came to the snow, blindingly white, on sheer rock profiles that cut the upper sky.  And, though the peasants were carting their winter forage and stacking their winter logs, a hot sunshine deluged the river’s wooded ravine.  At twilight, the distant snow peaks went rosy in the wake of a sunken sun.  Sleepy bell-tinklings came from homeward-driven flocks, as they left the train a Disentis, a hill-slanted village brooded over by a white, sky-shouldering alp.  “you’ll make Andermatt tomorrow,” the host at their humble inn informed them.  “That is, unless we’re snowed in overnight.  The postal wagons quit weeks ago, and any morning we may wake up to find all local communications closed till next spring.  You’re about a month out of season.”  It was not encouraging.  The went to bed worried.  Sheer apprehension woke them at sunrise.  Luck had played on their side.  By 8 o’clock they were afoot on the still snowless road to Andermatt, shivering or thawing out as the mountainous route rose into sunny heights or dropped into alleys still dark in early dawn.  At last, the sun came cleared the highest of the surrounding alps and they beheld, crowning a world that might be snowbound tomorrow, the outstretched brilliance of a perfect summer day.  Their 15-mile hike edged upon a dizzy gorge where rushed the turbulent Vorder Rhine up an enormous alp, rising like an impassable wall.

Everywhere the sound of running water haunted them, coming from countless rills on their way down into the gorge.  The whole region was contributing its moisture to the beginning of the Rhine.  For six weeks, they had followed Father Rhine’s more than 600 miles of varied life, until now he was a mere infant of the Alps, fed on melted snow.  Under the sky’s burning blue, with butterflies hovering over daisies along the roadside a-shimmer with warmth, they toiled upward by zigzag ways along the base of that great snow mountain, the Badus, to where, at 6,720 feet, they gained the summit of Oberalp Pass.  A few miles beyond and 2,000 feet below the pass laid a great green valley, the Urseren Thal, centered by the town of Andermatt.  And at the Urseren Thal’s opposite end rose another great snow mountain, facing the Badus at their end of the valley.  They felt that they were standing on the top of Europe; for they knew that from the mountain beyond the valley the beginnings of the Rhone were descending, to swell southward to the Mediterranean; and, rising out of a little green lake on the farther shoulder of the Badus, was the glistening thread that they now beheld dropping into the Vorder Rhine’s chasm, on its long journey to the North Sea.  “Listen!”  Through the intense stillness there came to them the faint, shrill sound of rushing water.  It was singing to itself in its snow cradle – the infant Rhine.

 

 

The second item listed on the cover of this month’s issue is entitled “Pages from the Floral Life of America” and has Mary E. Eaton in the byline.  It is not an article but another in a series of field guides published from time to time.  The usual introductory article is a mere two paragraphs.  The bulk of the writing is a series of fifty-five flower names, definitions, and plate numbers.  The field guide contains “55 Flower Paintings” on “Twenty-four Pages in Full-Color” with Miss Eaton being the artist.  The paintings are on plates numbered I to XXIV in Roman numerals representing pages 47 through 69 of the issue.

The 24 color plates, representing 55 flower paintings, appearing in this number of the National Geographic Magazine, are from the brush of Miss Mary E. Eaton, whose work has brought so much pleasure to the members of the National Geographic Society during the past decade.  They are reproduced from The Society’s “The Book of Wild Flowers,” recently published, and are printed in The Magazine in order that those who have saved their back numbers may have a complete collection of Miss Eaton’s paintings.  The flowers represented in this number belong to 49 different families and, together with those previously published, make a representative cross-section of the floral life of America.  (For more detailed biographies, see “The Book of Wild Flowers.”)

A list of the fifty-five flower names with the plate number upon which they are displayed is as follows:

• “Hairy Ruellia” – Plate I, left
• “Western Spiderlily” – Plate I, middle
• “Goldenclub” – Plate I, right
• “Common Amaranth” – Plate II, left
• “Pearl Everlasting” – Plate II, right
• “Downy Hawthorn” – Plate III, left
• “Beggar-Ticks” – Plate III, right
• “Skunkcabbage” – Plate IV
• “Beechdrops” – Plate V, left
• “Vipers-Bugloss” – Plate V, right
• “Glossy Blackthorn” – Plate VI, left
• “Devilsbit” – Plate VI, right
• “Arrowleaf Tear-Thumb” – Plate VII, left
• “Spiderflower” – Plate VII, right
• “Rattlesnake-Root” – Plate VIII, left
• “Orange Hawkweed” – Plate VIII, right
• “Zigzag Bladderwort” – Plate IX, left
• “Pyxie” – Plate IX, middle
• “Dandelion” – Plate IX, right
• “Flowering Dogwood” – Plate X
• “Common Sundrops” – Plate XI, left
• “Indian Paintbrush” – Plate XI, middle
• “Holms Gerardia” – Plate XI, right
• “Heartleaf Umbrella-Wort” – Plate XII, left
• “Dutchmans-Breeches” – Plate XII, middle
• “Rosegentian” – Plate XII, right
• “Dwarf Ginseng” – Plate XIII, left

• “Wax Currant” – Plate XIII, right
• “Lambs-Quarters” – Plate XIV, left
• “Mock-Cucumber” – Plate XIV, right
• “Flame Azalea” – Plate XV, left
• “Red Pinesap” – Plate XV, right
• “Horsetail” – Plate XVI, left
• “Rosebay Rhododendron” – Plate XVI, middle
• “Carolina-Jessamine” – Plate XVI, right
• “Purple Trillium” – Plate XVII, left
• “Bluets” – Plate XVII, middle
• “Common Meadowbeauty” – Plate XVII, right
• “Tuliptree” – Plate XVIII, upper
• “Fringed Polygala” – Plate XVIII, lower
• “Fourleaf Milkweed” – Plate XIX, left
• “Common Lilac” – Plate XIX, middle
• “Sensitiveplant” – Plate XIX, right
• “Common Hop” – Plate XX, left
• “Common Carrot” – Plate XX, right
• “Maypop” – Plate XXI, left
• “Hoary Tickclover” – Plate XXI, right
• “Rugels Plantain” – Plate XXII, left
• “Nuttalls Pondweed” – Plate XXII, middle
• “Great Ragweed” – Plate XXII, right
• “Common Woorush” – Plate XXIII, left
• “Coralbells” – Plate XXIII, middle
• “Partridge Pea” – Plate XXIII, right
• “Venus Flytrap” – Plate XXIV, left
• “American Lotus” – Plate XXIV, right

At the bottom of the last page of the field guide there is a notice which reads: “An early number of the National Geographic Magazine will contain 32 pages of illustrations in full color of 200 Wild Flowers of California and other Western States.”

 

 

The second article [third and last item] listed on the cover of this month’s issue is entitled “Bird Life Among Lava Rock and Coral Sand” and was written by Alexander Wetmore, Assistant Secretary, Smithsonian Institution.  The article has the internal subtitle: “The Chronicle of a Scientific Expedition to Little-known Islands of Hawaii.”  It contains thirty-six black-and-white photographs, nineteen of which are full-page in size.  Sixteen of those full-page photos are in a group (pages 87 through 102) and have every appearance of being a set of duotones, with the ink being more blueish.  These will be discussed later.  Of the remaining three full-page photos, one serves as the frontispiece for this article.  The article also contains a sketch map of the Hawaiian Islands on page 79.

Sketch Map courtesy of Philip Riviere

When the U. S. annexed Hawaii, in addition to the eight large, inhabited islands that formed the territory, a chain of islets that extended from the main group toward the northwest for more than 1,300 miles was also acquired.  [See: “The Hawaiian Islands,” February 1924, National Geographic Magazine.]  Uninhabited by man, except for a cable station at Midway, those had been little known.  In 1909, those Leeward Islands of the Hawaiian group were set aside as the Hawaiian Bird Reservation and placed under the control of the Biological Survey of the U. S. Department of Agriculture.  From time to time, parties had visited Laysan, an important bird rookery, to study its birdlife, and occasionally had landed for a few hours at one or two other points.  On the whole, however, the group, from a scientific standpoint, had been unexplored.  Early in 1923, arrangement was made with the Navy Department for transportation and other assistance, and a cooperative expedition was organized by the Biological Survey and the Bishop Museum of Honolulu, for a complete scientific exploration of those outlying islands.  On April 4, a party of 12 left Honolulu on a thousand-ton minesweeper, the U. S. S. Tanager, for a four months’ cruise.  Their party included a botanist, an entomologist, a conchologist, an ornithologist, one or more collectors of fishes, marine animals, and plants, students of ruins left by man, a topographer, and one or two general assistants.  All had cameras, and, in addition, Mr. Donald R. Dickey, an expert in motion and still photography of birds, accompanied the party to Laysan Island.  As the representative of the Biological Survey, the direction of the work of the scientific party fell to the author.  Though rough and inhospitable to the voyager, the first island in the chain, Nihos, proved of great interest.

Polynesians had a colony of several hundred persons there.  Level house platforms made of flattened stones rose one above the other in a little valley that, during rains, evidently contained water.  The steep slopes, now clothed in bushes, had been terraced with great labor to permit cultivation of the sweet potato and dry land taro, and a cave or two showed signs of ancient occupancy.  In their excursions over the slopes, they found several stone bowls fashioned from porous volcanic rock.  Small groves of a slender palm grew in some of the gulches, while a scrubby, woody-stemmed plant, akin to common lamb’s-quarters, clothes the slopes.  In those were flocks of the saucy Nihoa Finch (not a true Finch) and an occasional Millerbird (a form new to science), both species restricted in range to that barren rock, and found nowhere else in the world.  Hordes of Terns nested on the slopes, Boobies and Frigate Birds formed colonies in bushes, and snow-white Love Birds nested in pairs on tiny ledges on the huge black cliffs.  Albatrosses, found elsewhere near the sea, nested on a flat 850 feet above the waves.  On November 4, 1786, the Frenchman La Perouse sighted a rough, barren rock, west of the main Hawaiian group, which he named Necker Island. No attempt was made to land, and the journal of La Perouse commented mainly on the barrenness of the place.  From a distance, Necker, where they had proceeded after completing work on Nihoa, appeared as some misshaped, monstrous animal crouched amid the waves.  Though landing was simple, location of camp was difficult.  They found a protected shelf 40 feet from the water, while rough ledges above furnished platforms for cots and scientific instruments.  The author’s sleeping quarters were fully 70 feet above the water.

Nihoa was well known to the ancient Hawaiians, but Necker had no known native name nor did it figure in the many legends of that people.  There were found, however, on that isolated bit of rock, many signs of occupancy by ancient, primitive people.  A series of more than 40 stone temple platforms, rectangular in form, ranging from a few feet to 60 feet in length by half as wide, were found on the higher points of the island.  The floors of those ancient temples were smooth, except where a raised platform two to three feet wide had been constructed to a height of 12 or 15 inches across one long side.  At regular intervals along the back were blocks of stone a foot or more wide by three or four feet high.  That the platforms were ancient temples was shown by the discovery, 30 years prior, of crude stone idols, that laid prostrate where they had fallen from the erect border stones.  In addition to the temple ruins, small shelter caves, scattered over the sloping cliffs, were found to contain bits of stone bowls, a low retaining wall to level the floor, or the remains of a primitive fireplace.  There was on Necker no dependable water supply, nor were there food resources or space to support a permanent population.  Obviously, then, worshipers came from a distance, possibly from Nihoa. Perhaps from Kauai.  Neither here nor on Nihoa did the Tanager party discover ancient human burials whose bone might have aided in revealing who the earliest visitors to the island were.  From Necker they continued west for a brief stay among the 13 sand islands and the pinnacle rock that marked French Frigate Shoal.  Beyond lied Gardner Island, an inaccessible rock, according to the U. S. Coast Pilot.  The main rock, only 200 yards long, was composed of two peaks, the highest rising 170 feet, with a deep cleft between.  A smaller rock was separated by water.

They found only a single species of plant on that island, a fleshy-leaved form restricted to a handful of individuals, though the author saw many heavy-spined seeds of a creeper that grew commonly on low, sandy islands, probably brought by birds.  Though dropped on barren rock without sufficient soil for growth, they served to illustrate how such spiny plants were transported to lonely islands.  Terns of five species rested both on gentler slopes and on steep ledges.  Tropic Birds nested in holes below the summit, and the whole upper third of the island was given over to the Blue-faced Boobies, guarding over their well-grown young.  Those snow-white Boobies were as large as geese.  They bit savagely.  Traving west from Gardner Island, one soon came to Dowsett and Maro Reefs, named from ancient shipwrecks.  Those were mere coral rings marked by breakers and without visible land.  Then, over the horizon, came Laysan Island, 855 nautical miles from Honolulu.  Ever since its discovery, Laysan had been famed for its sea birds.  Though only a mile and three-quarters long and a mile wide, it was the most pretentious of the islets in the Leeward chain.  An elevated rim, rising somewhat abruptly from the beach line to a height of 20 to 40 feet, enclose a shallow, oblong basin, in whose center was a saline lagoon.  Evaporation had made it far saltier than the ocean.  At an early date, it was discovered that there were valuable deposits of guano on Laysan, or Moller, as it was known then, and for some years the island was of considerable commercial importance.  The 1890s marked the height of the guano industry.  A gradual decline began in 1900, and by 1908 shipments had ceased and the island was practically deserted, leaving several framed buildings, a few hundred yards of rail, and some abandoned piles of phosphatic rock.

Through all those years, Laysan had been literally covered by a myriad of sea birds, while the grasses and shrubbery that clothed the island harbored five species of land birds restricted to its least than two square miles and known nowhere else in the world in a native state.  Those included a tiny flightless rail, a species of duck, a warbler, known as the Miller-bird, the Laysan Finch, and the Laysan Honey Eater, or Redbird.  Laysan was the metropolis of the Laysan Albatross, a beautiful bird as large as a goose, with snowy breast, black wings delicately tinted bill.  With it was found the Sooty Albatross, the “Gooney,” of equal size, but with sober, sooty-gray plumage.  For a part of each year, these Albatrosses frequented the high seas, true seafarers, who saw no land even during periods of storm.  About the first of November they resort to remote, uninhabited islands where they gathered in colonies for the purpose of rearing young.  On Laysan, their return each year was an event in the life of the guano workers, heralded with much excitement.  Early visitors who came to Laysan placed the number of Albatross in the millions; actually, they ran to the many thousands.  Mated pairs of the Laysan species dotted the whole inner basin, while the Sooty Albatross colonized the barren sand beaches.  Unmolested for centuries on land, the birds of Laysan knew their only enemy in the sea, so that man on his arrival was accepted with interest, to be treated without fear.  The guano workers troubled the birds little except for the necessary infringement of their breeding areas.  When, in 1909, the entire Leeward chain, except for Midway (which was under Navy jurisdiction, was set aside as the Hawaiian Reservation, it seemed that that action would provide final protection for the sea birds nesting there.  But other forces were at work.

Fashion still demanded feathers for feminine adornment, and that trade, block within the U, S., turned to more distant fields.  Word came to Honolulu that poachers were at work to the westward, and January 1910, the revenue cutter, Thetis, under Captain W. V. E. Jacobs, surprised and apprehended 23 Japanese on Laysan and nearby Lisiansky, engaged in killing birds.  The vast rookeries had been systematically decimated by men armed with clubs.  Hand cars and the old rail line left by the guano workers had been used to bring the spoils to camp.  Prompt action had, however, saved part of the bird colonies, and, free from further attack, the Albatross and Tern were left to regain something of their former numbers.  With the danger of plume hunters eliminated, one would think that the bird colonies would flourish as in ages past, but further tribulation was in store.  Disturbances to the environment because of civilized man were often strange and unexpected.  For instance, on Laysan, tremendous damage had been wrought by the domestic rabbit, an animal considered inoffensive.  Some time in 1902, the foreman of the guano works brought to Laysan three or four pairs of rabbits, partly to amuse his children, and partly for fresh meat.  For a time, the animals were kept about the house, but gradually, a pair or two wandered away, attracted by tracts of grass and succulent herbage.  Rabbit enemies there were none, as cats and dogs were forbidden because of their damage to birds.  Albatross must have looked with tolerant curiosity at those lop-eared invaders.  With abundant food and a genial climate, bunny’s increase was incredibly rapid.  Early accounts of Laysan depicted it as a pleasant spot covered with green vegetation.  Reports of damage shrubbery had led them to expect some change but had not prepared them for the utter desolation that greeted them on landing.

On every hand extended a barren waste of sand.  Two coconut palms, a stunted hau tree, and an ironwood or two, planted by the former inhabitants, were the only green that greeted the eye.  Other vegetation had vanished.  The desolation of the scene was depressing.  From all appearances, Laysan might have been some desert, with the gleaming lake below merely a mirage.  Without the restraining influences of active enemies, the rabbits had multiplied until they had absolutely stripped the island and then had slowly starved.  Of the vast army of destroyers only a few hundred remained.  They had come prepared to eliminate the rabbits, so, with camp established, the work began at once.  The destruction of the majority was simple, but the survivors became wary and it was necessary to hunt them out one at a time.  Pursuit was relentless and effective.  A party sent to Laysan a year after their visit reported no signs of a single survivor.  Despite the rabbits, a few dozen Laysan Finches still sang their spritely songs.  Three of the little Honey Eaters remained on their arrival; those perished during a three-day gale.  The Millerbird had disappeared entirely, and of the Laysan Rail but two remained.  The duck (properly called the Laysan Teal), never numerous, had about held its own, 20 individuals being present.  The Albatross, though reduced in numbers, were still present by the thousands, and with them were many Boobies, Frigate Birds, and hosts of Shearwaters and Terns.  The Petrels were the only sea birds that seemed to have suffered.  They had almost disappeared.  Drifting sands had buried them alive in their burrows.  The party hoped for happier days when, with vegetation renewed, those birds may repopulate their former territory from colonies on nearby islands. 

The island of Lisiansky, 120 miles west of Laysan, was named in 1806, by Russian explorer, Urey Lisiansky, while enroute Fron Sitka to Canton.  For two or three days, his men had noted birds and other signs of land.  One evening, without warning, his ship grounded on a coral reef.  After two days of labor, it was salvaged and Lisiansky went ashore on the island withing the reef.  He described it as covered with creepers and other vegetation, but a desolate place, whose soil was undermined by the burrows of a dovelike bird, the Wedge-tailed Shearwater.  They sighted Lisiansky through an early morning haze but came in slowly over uncertain shoals to an anchorage, so that it was afternoon before they landed.  The island was a parallelogram a nautical mile long by slightly less than a mile wide.  A low ridge 40 feet high on the northeast marked the highest point, while the central portion formed a low basin bounded by a rim that protected it from the ocean.  Never had the author seen a more desolate spot.  Rabbits, brought from Laysan by misguided persons who thought to leave a food supply for possible castaways from shipwreck, had completely stripped the island of its vegetation and then had died of starvation.  Their bleached and weathered bones strewed the sands.  A few roots of grass and of pigweed had escaped the search of the pests and, with the disappearance of the mammals, had begun to battle back.  Insect life had also practically disappeared, and land shells, abundant on most of those islands, were extinct.  A species of rat had been reported plentiful there, but it also had vanished and no specimen of it had been preserved for science. A view of life of the surrounding sea offered a welcome contrast to the dismal aspect of the land.  They were struck by the large number of sea turtles.

Shallow coves along the beaches were filled with luxuriant growths of algae.  Amid those plants browsed dozens of turtles, at intervals thrusting their heads up for air, and then submerging to continue their feeding.  When satisfied, they crawled out on the sloping sands to lie in peaceful sleep.  Rough and stormy weather marked their stop at Pearl and Hermes Reef, where they found several low sand islands scattered over a broad lagoon.  Colonies of rare Hawaiian monk seal and many other creatures of interest were found there, and it was with regret that they terminated their brief stay and continued their journey.  The atoll known as the Midway Islands, usually abbreviated to “Midway,” was now [in 1925] under lease to a cable company which operated a relay station there on the line between Guam and Honolulu.  There resided 12 to 15 whites and an equal number of Orientals, in touch with the world only through the long undersea line thar reached both east and west.  At intervals of three months a supply boat brought mail and stores from Honolulu.  At the time of their visit, they were received with delight, as the cable boat had been out of commission and they brought the first mail that had been received in four and a half months.  The lagoon at that atoll contained two main islands, Sand, on which was located the cable station, and Eastern, a mile or more distant.  Each was perhaps a mile long and rose well above the reach of the highest seas.  The cable company had worked steadily to improve conditions on what originally was a desolate spot of glaring sand and scattered bushes.  The main buildings, four in number, were of steel and concrete, arranged at the corners of a little plaza.  Earth, brought in sacks from Honolulu, covered the barren sand near the buildings and nourished pleasant lawns, clumps of ornamental shrubs, and flowers.

The whole was surrounded by a heavy windbreak of ironwood trees between whose trunks one might catch glimpses of the clear green waters of the lagoon.  Tree-lined walks led to the wharf and to the garden, where vegetables thrived.  A few sheep and a cow or two, high windmills in the background, and the introduced vegetation gave a suggestion of some Argentine estancia.  As a unique feature of its bird life, Sand Island had a thriving colony of domestic Canaries which lived at freedom in the shrubbery.  In the mild and pleasant climate, they had increased from a few pairs to several hundred individuals.  The Laysan Finch and the little Flightless Rail had also been naturalized there, and on Eastern Island.  Though barely over the horizon from Midway, Ocean Island, the most northwestern point in the Leeward chain, was seen less often than any other atolls or islands in the entire Hawaiian group.  On older maps other islands, marked as Patrocinio, Morrel, or Byer, were shown farther west, but modern surveys had failed to establish their existence.  Ocean Island consisted of an irregular circle of coral, four miles or so in diameter, with a semicircular fragment, known as Green Island, 1,800 yards long and 300 yards wide, at its eastern side.  Green Island, only 25 feet above the sea at its highest point, was so low that the atoll was a considerable menace to navigation in those waters.  The surrounding reef had brought destruction to several ships.  The most noted shipwreck at Ocean was that of the U. S. S. Saginaw, under Lieut.-Commander Montgomery Sicard, in 1870.  The ship ran a reef near Green Island and pounded in two by the surf.  The crew remained on Green from October 1870 until January 1871, living on scant stores, birds, and seals.

Five men, in the ship’s gig, journeyed to Kauai; they made it but wrecked in the surf.  Four died but the survivor reported the location of his crewmates and they were rescues.  The ship’s gig was in the Naval Museum in Annapolis [in 1925].  So far as the author knew, Green Island had never been visited by naturalists.  A shelving beach of coral and shell sand, 50 to 80 feet wide, extended entirely around the island.  Inland they found series of low sand dunes with a peculiar shrub, Beach Magnolia.  In the center of the island, sheltered by the dunes, were irregular openings grown with grass and creepers.  Ocean Island, like Pearl and Hermes, was a stronghold of the Hawaiian monk seal that bred unmolested on the beaches.  Albatross were common, and they found the open meadows honeycombed with myriad Petrel and Shearwater burrows.  The inner meadows were death traps for many Laysan Albatross that dropped in there casually, deceived by the apparent security and protection from the wind.  A few were able to rise on the wing, but others, in running to gain momentum, tripped on the long vines and fell headlong.  Discouraged by several tries, they walked around and eventually died of starvation.  Among other creatures they found were multitudes of rats, about one-fourth the size of our gray rats and related to the Hawaiian rat.  Those rats on Ocean Island, long-tailed, brown-haired, heedless creatures, appeared at dusk in swarms.  They belonged to a group whose forms were widely scattered in the Pacific and might have been distributed from island to island as stowaways on the great sailing canoes of the Polynesians.  Their spread by that means was as logical as the known spread of the gray rat by means of the sailing ships of the Europeans.

 

 

As mentioned before, the last article in this month’s issue contains what appears to be an undocumented block of duotones embedded within it.  Duotones, formerly referred to as photogravures, are transfers which use acid-etched metal plates and a special ink.  The deeper the etch, the darker the transfer.  The ink used for these duotones have a slight bluish tinge.

Here is a list of caption headings from the sixteen suspected duotones:

• “The Spirit of Light”
• “Poised for Theft”
• “The Frigate Bird of the Sailor”
• “Getting Up Speed”
• “Ready to “Take Off””
• “The Red-footed Booby Looks Out Upon the World from a Shoe-button Eye”
• “A Young Love Tern Sits in Meditation: Laysan Island”
• “The Love Tern’s Nest”
• “A Colony of Wedge-tailed Shearwaters on the Sands of a Sheltered Cove of Laysan Island”
• “A Bird’s-eye View”
• “A Green Turtle Asleep on a Sandy Beach: Lisiansky Island
• “The Red-tailed Tropic Bird”
• “The Blue-faced Booby of Laysan Contents Itself with a Guarded Hollow in the Sand, in Which to Incubate Two Chalky Eggs”
• “The One Remaining Tenement of Laysan Island”
• “Sooty-backed Terns Facing the Northeast Trades”
• “Aloft in a Stiff Trade Breeze”

 

 

Tom Wilson