100 Years Ago: July 1926

[George Thomas Wilson]

100 Years Ago: July 1926

 

This is Number 138 in my series of abridgements/rewrites of National Geographic Magazines on the one-hundredth anniversary of their publication.

 

 

The first article in this month’s issue is entitled “Standing Iceberg Guard in the North Atlantic” and was written by Lt. Com. F. A. Zeusler, U. S. Coast Guard.  It has the internal subtitle: “International Patrol Safeguards the Lives of Thousands of Travelers and Protects Transatlantic Liners from a “Titanic” Fate.”  The article contains twenty-nine black-and-white photographs, eight of which are full-page in size.  It also contains a sketch map of the North Atlantic showing shipping routes on page 4.

Sketch Map courtesy of Philip Riviere

In the North Atlantic Ocean was one of the dreariest areas on the globe.  It was usually at the mercy of the sweeping gales or in the grip of the densest fogs.  That area, the southeastern edge of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, was where the cold Labrador Current from the Arctic breasted the greater might and greater volume of the warm Gulf Stream.  Over that scene of conflict lies a blanket of fog, present 40% of the time in winter and a full half in summer.  But through that dreary region men had projected the busiest water trade route in the world and on the Banks was located one of the most famous fishing grounds.  There, captains of passenger liners and fishing vessels alike, dared the dangers of an ugly-mooded ocean.  Until a few years ago [in1926] those shipmasters of the North Atlantic had also the added fear of an iceberg looming up in the snow, fog, or dark of night.  Sometimes, they were only a brief hundred yards away before they appeared.  It was in that area of peril that the greatest disaster ever recorded in the history of ocean travel occurred – the sinking of the Titanic on the night of April 14-15, 1912, after a collision with an iceberg, with a loss of more than 1,500 souls.  The Titanic catastrophe shocked the world, and a universal demand arose for a patrol of the ice area.  Immediately, the U. S. Navy immediately detailed two cruisers for guard duty until the last iceberg disappeared from the steamer lanes in late June.  In the spring of 1913, no Navy vessels were available, so two Revenue cutters were detailed to carry out the patrol.  During the fall of the same year, the International Conference for the Safety of Life at Sea was convened at London, to organize that patrol on an international basis, in recognition of its service to ships of all nations.

Representatives of the principal maritime nations signed the agreement on January 20, 1914, creating the International Derelict Destruction, Ice Observation, and Ice Patrol Service.  The U. S. was asked to undertake the management of that service.  We agreed to send two vessels which would patrol the danger area during the iceberg season.  Each of the contracting parties consented to bear a share of the cost in proportion to its shipping tonnage.  The U. S. Revenue Cutter Service, now [in 1926] known as the U. S. Coast Guard, was charged with the duty of maintaining the patrol.  The cutters patrolled in the name of the signers but served the shipping of the entire world.  Icebergs had always been the dread of the transatlantic navigator.  They drifted hither and yon.  They gave no warning of their presence.  They were propelled now by ocean currents, now by tides, and now by winds and waves.  Fog was their constant companion.  A vessel speeding through an area infested with moving ice, during night or in fog, played a game of chance.  Even on a starlit night a berg could not be seen beyond a half mile.  Once the berg’s position was known, the navigator could alter course to avoid it.  The ice came down every year, as it had for centuries; but, in 1926, every berg that followed the eastern edge of the Grand Banks into the steamer lanes was kept under surveillance by the International Ice Patrol.  Not a single ship had been lost through collision with an iceberg since the patrol was inaugurated, fourteen years prior.  Greenland “icy mountains” alone were the source of the icebergs that came as far south as the steamer lanes, journeying about 1,800 miles – approximately the distance from Washington D. C. to Denver – before they became “white specters” to shipping.

With the exception of a small strip of coastline, Greenland was completely covered with a vast ice cap.  Its estimated thickness was 5,000 feet.  [See: “Flying Over the Arctic,” November 1925, National Geographic Magazine.]  Always the ice mantle was moving down the slope of the land toward the sea, in great glaciers, pushing out through the valleys.  As the ice reached the sea it nosed out into the water until buoyancy lifted it up, and then the front of the glacier broke off at a weak spot.  On its long journey southward, it rode majestically, indifferent to the fact that it had set sail for oblivion.  There were eight principal berg-producing glaciers in Greenland.  The worst offenders were those of Disko Bay, Jakobshavn, Torsukatak, Karajak, and Umanak.  The tree other west coast glaciers were Upernivik, Godthaab, and Frederikshaab.  One berg-producer, the Sermilik Glacier, was on the east coast, but bergs from that coast rarely ever menaced the travel lanes.  Bergs were discharged in vast numbers from those Greenland fjords.  Yet few came south of Newfoundland.  Many were too small to last long.  Many grounded on the shores of Labrador and Newfoundland.  Others were caught in an eddy of the Gulf Stream off the southern tip of Greenland and melted away.  Only the fittest survived the buffetings of the sea, to be carried south on the flow of the Labrador Current and along the eastern edge of the Banks into the Gulf Stream, where they soon melt.  The Labrador Current, although a danger-carrier, had its usefulness.  It teemed with all kinds of marine life, affording breeding and feeding grounds for our best food fish.  The current from the Arctic did not have a year-round constant flow along the Grand Banks.  Like a river, but for different reasons, it was in flood in the spring.

Beginning in February, it picked up volume and speed, reaching a maximum toward the last of April, when it was a real power, with sufficient force to whirl ergs along at more than two miles an hour.  Then the Gulf Stream gradually spread north and pinched it off.  The berg danger period coincided with the heavy flow period of the Labrador Current each year – from March 1 to July 1.  It was during that period that the cutters patrolled the ice-endangered areas.  Two cutters, the Tampa and the Modoc, were assigned to the ice Patrol, with a third cutter, the Seneca, held in reserve.  For the season of 1925, the author was appointed oceanographer with the service.  He joined the Tampa in the Boston Navy Yard early in February.  One of his duties in 1925 was to experiment with a sonic depth-finder, so he spent five weeks preparing.  The fitting of the instrument took them past March 1, but since the previous year had little ice and the winter had been mild, they knew no early ice threatened the lanes.  It was the author’s duty to be on the Banks for the entire season.  Every two weeks one cutter relieved the other.  When the Tampa went to Halifax to refuel, the author and his two aides transferred to the Modoc, and when the Modoc in turn headed for shore, they transferred back to the Tampa.  The oceanographer was the navigating officer.  He knew his vessels position any moment day or night.  He was the Ice Patrol aide to the commanding officers of the vessels and kept a changing record of the movements of all the ships within 400 miles.  He kept tabs on all ice floating into the steamer lanes and sent radio warnings of weather, derelicts, and ice, prepared weather charts, received and answered requests from ships by radio, and was responsible for all experiments.

Two experiments carried out last season were of unusual interest.  Both were undertaken in connection with the constant search by the Ice Patrol Board for some method either of banishing the iceberg from the North Atlantic or increasing the factor of safety.  They attempted to use the sonic depth finder to locate icebergs, and while their results were mixed, they paved the way for experiments using radio waves instead of sound, which would be undertaken once the equipment was built.  Their second objective was to destroy icebergs with high explosives.  On the morning of March 21, the Tampa steamed out of Boston Harbor headed for the Grand Banks.  Like its sister ship, it was 240 feet long and 39 feet in breath – small compared to the giants it was set to watch.  Nevertheless, their ship, which was the smallest vessel that regularly sailed the North Atlantic beyond the Banks, was exceptionally seaworthy, capable of withstanding the gales and heavy seas of the North Atlantic.  The vessel was driven by electricity and was very quiet.  Everything was clean because they burned oil.  The motors propelled the ship at fifteen knots.  The berth deck s next above the engine room, eighty-four men in the aft, ten officers in the front.  The captain’s cabin and the galley were on the main deck, and above them were the radio room and navigator’s room.  Although on a peaceful mission, the Tampa was well armed.  There was a five-inch gun forward and another one aft.  Also, there were two six-pounders for saluting and a three-inch anti-aircraft gun.  Beside the radio compass, their radio equipment included three sets; a 2-kilowatt vacuum-tube, a 2-kilowatt spark set, and a 50- watt short-wave vacuum-tube set.  Their radio duty was truly international, for they spoke in code to ships of all nationalities.

Two days out from Boston they broadcast an announcement that the Ice Patrol of 1925 was started.  They asked for water temperatures and sent a query for any reports of icebergs.  A greeting was sent to the Canadian land stations at Cape Race and at Chebucto Head; to the French station at St. Pierre; and to the U. S. stations at Bar Harboe and Chatham.  Those stations answered immediately, assuring cooperation.  The cutter on duty was a busy place.  To keep track of all ice seen or reported was not an easy task.  The oceanographer’s day began before dawn to get star sightings for position if fog permitted, the first in a series to be made and checked all during the day.  At 6 a. m., the first ice broadcast went out to the ships with modern equipment.  Two southern bergs were close to the lanes.  In addition, the positions of twenty other bergs were given.  The set and drift data enabled the ships to know the position and speed of the two bergs.  Queries flooded the cutter after the broadcast.  They directed a number of ships away from dangerous ice.  On the great steamer lane between Europe and America liners, cargo carriers, and tramps passed constantly.  On what was known as the “westbound tracks” were the ships coming from Europe, and on the “eastbound tracks,” 60 miles south, were the ships going to Europe.  All vessels off the tracks were reported for violating the rules.  A vessel off the tracks was just as dangerous as an iceberg or a derelict.  The Ice Patrol stood as a traffic officer on that avenue of the sea.  If ice threatened, the cutter set the stop sign and detoured the traffic to the south.  They answered all queries.  On one day the heard from as many as 38 vessels, all within close range.  That did not account for all the ships passing, for many did not reply to their broadcasts.

Since dawn, the ship had been searching the danger areas.  If it was the last part of the season, they were at the southeast end of the Banks.  They steamed north for 30 miles, and with no fog they could see 15 miles on each side.  They turned east and sailed 30 miles, then 30 miles south and then 30 miles east, repeating the rectangular method of searching until nightfall.  The big vessels got their 6 a. m. broadcast.  It was sent by spark set to the other vessels, on a lower wavelength, at 7.  After the 7 a. m. broadcast came morning mess at 8, and with it the Ice Patrol News.  Their press news was almost as hot as their coffee, for the radio operator got it from Arlington at 1 a. m.  Baseball for the Ice Patrol News sport section was in the greatest demand so it was delivered in full.  The reports received from large and small vessels alike, scattered through the day, gave their position, direction of course, speed, weather, water temperature, and ice report, if any.  The oceanographer took those reports to the chart room to locate the vessels and determine whether their courses threatened to bring any one of them into danger.  Three separated charts were plotted recording the ship’s ice and water temperatures.  The latter was important because, by using from 900 to 1,300 messages in 15 days they could locate the “cold wall,” the line of demarcation between the warm Gulf Stream water and the cold Labrador Current water.  That line was the danger line because icebergs seldom crossed it.  The location of it at the beginning of the season was an index to the severity of conditions to be expected.  A berg that crossed the line committed quick suicide, for water at 55 to 60 degrees melted rapidly.   A big berg would disappear seven days after crossing the line.  The cold wall was also normally the southernmost fog line, another factor that made the determination doubly important.

They watched the cold wall push down until the last of April; then they recorded its recession, as the power of the Gulf Stream pushed it back north.  Twice that morning they had crossed the cold wall.  It was easy to see.  North of it the ocean was a beautiful olive green, south of it the water was indigo blue.  The higher content of microscopic marine life gave the Labrador Current its olive-green tone.  The prow of their cutter could be in green water of 40 degrees F., the stern in warm blue water that registered 60 degrees.  Since it was a beautiful day, the captain stopped the ship to grant swimming liberty to all hands.  The crew dove off the stern into tropical-temperature water, while half a mile away to the north an iceberg drifted in cold water.  Mid-afternoon they sighted an iceberg which had not been seen before.  It was a new charge so they went over and investigated.  They approached close enough to take photos and sketches from two sides.  They also determined its dimensions – length, breath, and height above water.  From those figures, they could roughly gauge the total mass, for only one-eighth of an iceberg was exposed.  Next, they took temperatures at the surface and at five different depths and got water samples for salinity determination.  Those data enabled them to predict in what direction the berg will move.  They figured also the rate of drift and the direction of movement, and that information was then transmitted in a special ice broadcast.  Since they were in need of ice for the refrigerators, the captain ordered a boat lowered and dispatched to the berg.  Ice of an iceberg was pure and fresh.  As the boat approached the floating ice island a sizzling sound became audible to the men.  Close attention showed that it was coming from a small piece of ice slipping off into the sea.  It effervesced, probable due to the ice being compacted snow.

At evening they stopped the engines and drifted, keeping the berg in sight.  Two broadcasts again went out, the first to ships with modern equipment and the second to the smaller ships, with old-style sets.  Following that, an ice message and weather report went to Washington.  The weather report furnished important data for predictions, both in North America and in Europe, since they were the only regularly reporting station in the mid-Atlantic with the exception of a French weather-reporting and training ship, which was usually stationed at 38 degrees north latitude, 57 degrees west longitude.  Thousands of Americans sailed to Europe last spring.  Few of them were aware of what precautions were being taken for their safety.  They did not know that in the radio room on their upper deck a message from one of the cutters was coming in, telling about fog and icebergs.  Nor did they realize that their liner was reporting to a Coast Guard cutter drifting on the Grand Banks, so that the officers on the cutter could check to see if the liner’s course was clear of danger.  Next day the search went on, and the next, and the next.  One morning, their course carried them through part of the French fishing fleet.  They sighted a sailing vessel and approached.  The French fishermen hosted a two-flag signal, “RZ”, requesting their position.  Drawing alongside, the cutter displays a large paper with longitude and latitude on it.  Down came the “RZ” and up went “XOR” (Thank You).  The following day, they came upon twelve French sailing vessels anchored in almost perfect formation, rolling in the choppy sea.  The cutter lowered a boat and her crewmen boarded the fleet.  How glad they were to see the cutter!  Here was an opportunity to send mail to the families in Brittany.

But they had other requests, too. One vessel wanted to trade fish for tobacco, chocolate, and fresh meat.  Another had a broken fog gun, which they repaired.  Still another French vessel needed medical assistance for a man with a broken arm and for a number of men with a blood infection from cleaning fish.  A fourth ship asked to use the radio to report back to its owner the loss of two men washed overboard.  On April 13, they had the unique experience of sailing into a field of ice where 14 large bergs were in sight at one time.  There were two easily recognizable types of icebergs – the “solid” and the “drydock.”  The distinction was important, for the different types had different histories.  The solid type was a solid block, often with the massive symmetry of a block of white marble.  It usually lied comparatively low in the water.  Its sides were rounded by the action of the water, because it had tipped this way and that.  Icebergs did not frequently tip completely over. They would tip 90 degrees one day, and the perhaps swing 80 degrees in another direction, but they seldom turn turtle.  They got to learn much about the odd habits of icebergs.  One they came upon had a regular oscillating movement.  It tipped over to one side during a period of eight minutes, and then tipped back again.  That continued for seven hours.  Then, with a tremendous crash, it fell over on its side, exposing its erstwhile keel.  The solid bergs assumed shapes of sleeping dogs or lions, King Tut in his tomb, or perfect profiles.  The drydock bergs, on the other hand, gave us towering castles and lofty pinnacles.  The drydock type, as the name implied, consisted of two high sides with a low passage in between.  Sometimes that “valley” was awash.  Those bergs did not turn over, but sailed on like a well-ballasted ship.

The pinnacles were always sharp, as if cut by some giant ax.  Drydock bergs deteriorated chiefly by ice sloughing off the steep cliffs and the warm water eating away the water line, when the lightened berg rose, leaving series of water lines circling the base.  The drydock bergs gave them the most trouble last year, probably because they were such sturdy sailing craft that the sea could not attack them as easily as their rolling brothers.  Icebergs were not all frosty white.  Scattered through most of them are strata of deep-blue ice of various widths.  The effect of indigo blue contrasted against the soft white was startling and exquisite.  Smaller berg, remnants of broken ice monarchs, were called “growlers.”  They were almost as dangerous to shipping as larger bergs.  Tongues of ice projected from the sides of most bergs.  Those projections were usually long, pointed ledges capable of mortally wounding any vessel that ran into it.  That one of those underwater daggers sent the Titanic to her doom was a tenable theory.  On April 14, the day following their sight of the berg field, memorial services were held on board the Modoc for the Titanic.  The crew was called to quarters on the quarterdeck, while the church pennant was raised on staff.  The ship’s surgeon spoke to them; the commanding officer led officers and men in prayer, and three rifle volleys barked across the water.  All across the Atlantic ships silenced their radio for five minutes, at the request of the Modoc, to honor the memory of the liner and her 1,513 victims.  A large iceberg close astern afforded fitting background for the service.  The 1925 ice patrol season saw the first serious experiments to destroy icebergs by high explosives.  Their first subject was a berg showing 10 feet above water with a length of 50 feet, an “old” berg, honeycombed by weathering.

An officer and a boat’s crew of eight planted 210 pounds of TNT under a ledge of the berg; then pulled away to a safe distance, reeling off the control cable as they went.  The officer closed a switch and a tremendous explosion shook the air and the water.  One end of the berg fell off and the sea all about was afloat with small ice.  They estimated that they cut two days off the life of that berg.  It was a different story when they tried TNT on a bigger block of sound ice.  That next specter was 300 feet long and abut 150 feet high.  From one side projected one of the long, dangerous ice tongues, covered with about 10 feet of water.  They laid mines on the shelf and set them off.  The berg shivered, a shower of loose ice tumbled off upper ledges, a geyser of water and black powder smoke went up 100 feet and came back down, and the calm of Nature settled back upon the sea and ice.  No damage.  Next, they tried a mine 75 feet below the surface of the projection.  The explosion shook the berg more, but there was no perceptible damage.  Their attempts to destroy a third iceberg were of interest, because it was the largest that came into the steamer lanes last year, and because they trailed its steps to the grave from the time it was a strapping giant of a million and a half tons until it disappeared.  They first sighted the berg May 26, well north on the edge of the Banks.  It was christened No. 14.  All bergs that were potentially dangerous were numbered.  No. 14 hugged the Banks and sailed southward at a modest rate of 21 miles per day.  After determining that there was only one more berg to the north, they steamed south and picked her up on June 2.  No. 14 was 267 feet high and both sides were 512 feet long.  The berg stood out shapely, fantastic, and enormous in size.  Closer view showed that it was drydock in shape, with two walls of uneven height.

Pages from the Diary of a big berg were as follows:

June 3 – No. 14 heading right for the tail of the Banks.  They hoped it would ground.

June 4 – 6 Heavy fog, they took position 5 miles south and radioed a warning.

June 7 – Fog lifted.  Without warning the highest wall toppled.  No. 14 had moved 60 miles.

June 8 – No. 14 was now in 42-degree water, whose warmth was undermining its constitution.

June 9 – They exploded mines on the tongue and underwater just like with the second berg, but with even less effect.  Then they dug a hole with four charges on a shelf by a cliff.  They placed a charge in the hole, covered it, and set it off.  All it did was paint a black smudge 100 feet wide, the height of the cliff.

June 10 – It was a rainy day and beautiful bridal-veil falls whisked off the cliffs of No. 14.

June 12 – There was a heavy fall of 20,000 tons of ice from the higher cliff.  No. 14 was now 180 feet high and 450 feet long.

June 14 to 16 – The berg teetered on the ‘cold wall.’  Finally, it veered northeast into colder water away from the steamer lane, which was nearby.  They kept searchlights on the berg through the night to warn ships passing as close as a mile to the south.

June 19 – A strong southerly gale hit No. 14.  Heavy seas bombarded the berg.

June 20 – The storm did more damage than their mines.  No. 14 had lost both ends and much of her superstructure.  She was now 250 feet long and 90 feet high.

June 24 – One whole wall fell off.  Her cliffs were now gone.  Her remaining side was tilted and awash.  The water was 52 degrees.

June 30 – No. 14 showed up a lump the size of two office desks.

July 1 – Six o’clock.  No. 14 had gone where all good icebergs go.  The Gulf Stream had avenged the Titanic.

 

 

The second article in this month’s issue is entitled “The World’s Greatest Waterfalls” and was written by Theodore W Noyes.  It has the internal subtitle: “Visits to Mighty Niagara, Wonderful Victoria, and Picturesque Iguazu.”  The article contains twenty-nine black-and-white photographs, of which fifteen are full-page in size.

Waterfalls achieved greatness through a maximum combination of the factors of volume, height, breadth, and picturesqueness of form, color, and environment.  One class of falls found greatness solely in the height of the descending column, like Yosemite, a creek 35 feet wide, which dropped for half a mile into Yosemite Valley.  At the other end of the line were falls like Niagara – low in height, great in breadth, vast in volume.  At Niagara, the falling water dwarfed the precipice; at Yosemite, the precipice dwarfed the waterfall.  Between the extremes of Yosemite and Niagara, many of the world’s notable falls found place.  Of the same type as Yosemite were Roraima, in British Guiana (1,500 feet); Sutherland Falls, New Zealand (1,904 feet, in three sections); and Kalambo, South Africa (1,400 feet).  In an intermediate class between Yosemite and Niagara were fine falls of impressive height and considerable but not great volume, like Kaieteur (800 feet), in British Guiana; Nevada (600 feet); Vernal (317 feet); and Gersoppa Fall (830 feet), in India.  La Guayra Falls, in Brazil, had great volume but descended in a succession of short falls separated by fierce rapids.  Many notable falls from 300 to 400 feet high and of considerable volume, were found in widely separated corners of the world: the Lower Yellowstone Fall (300 feet); Grand Falls of Labrador (316 feet); Tequandema Falls (450 feet), in Colombia; and Chamberlain Falls (300 feet) in British Guiana.  Some of the European waterfalls, noted in poetry and fiction, lacked everything save beauty of form and artistic environment.  Three waterfalls which included all of the specific factors of greatness, though in varying degrees, were entitled to be classed among the really Great Falls of the world.  These were Niagara, in North America; Iguazu, in South America, and Victoria Falls, in Africa.

The author visited Victoria Falls for one week in September 1911; Iguazu for one week in July 1924, and Niagara many times, most recently in May 1925.  Memories of each of them were deeply impressed, never to be obliterated.  In the interior of North America, between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, over a precipice bisected by the U. S.-Canadian boundary line, fell Niagara, the world’s most famous cataract.  A million springs fed half of the world’s fresh water into the basins of four great lakes which were the Niagara’s sources.  As the vast inland sea of Superior filled and overflowed its basin, the waters descended and mingled with those of Huron and Michigan, and the three lakes poured the combined flood of their overflow into Lake Erie.  The water, seeking from their elevated plateau sea level and the ocean, broke through a notch in the east rim of Erie’s basin.  In a narrow channel, contracting from over two miles to one mile in width above the Falls, and to a few hundred feet below, those waters descended leisurely and smoothly for half of their 36 miles of journey to Ontario; then rushed for a mile or two in white-capped, mountainous waves of fierce rapids; then plunged in a majestic fall into a chasm of a mile’s contour in irregular semicircle at the precipice edge; then, cramped within narrow limits by precipitous banks, they raged in whirlpool and whirlpool rapids; and finally resumed their unhurried pace for the rest of the way to Lake Ontario.  Shortly before the precipitous cliff over which Niagara hurled itself was reached, an island (Goat Island) separated the river into two channels, about 6% of the water passing to the right, over the American Fall (167 feet), in a symmetrical sheet about 1,000 feet wide, and the remaining 94% to the left, over the Horseshoe, or Canadian Fall (158 feet), in 3,000 feet of irregular, semicircular outline.

Goat Island, separating the two falls with 1,300 feet of precipice edge, completed Niagara’s mile of contour.  The best general view of both falls of Niagara from the top – the finest, fullest panoramic spectacle of descending water in the world – was, so far as the author’s observation went, enjoyed in a walk from Prospect Point, at the northern edge of the American Fall, along the brink of the cliff to the bridge between New York and Canada, across the bridge, and then southward along the brink of the Canadian precipice until Horseshoe Fall was reached.  On the American side, at Prospect Point and Hennepin Point and, best of all, between those two points, directly above the elevator to the Maid of the Mist landing, were side views of both falls of unsurpassed loveliness.  In crossing the bridge to Canada, one stopped every so often to note the changes of loveliness which accompanied successive changes in the point of view.  From every lookout along the way, one had both falls at different angles under observation.  From the Canadian side the American Fall seemed to present a continuous straight front of precipice edge for its full 1,000 feet, but closer examination showed that the face of the precipice receded by steps curves, and then curved out again.  This was due to its erosion of about an inch a year.  By comparison, the Horseshoe Fall was eroding at a rate of four to six feet a year.  The effectiveness of the American Fall, despite its insignificant volume, was due to skillful exploitation of its available water.  Horseshoe Fall was a thing of beauty as well as power.  The eye delighted in the inner curve of the horseshoe; in the clouds of transparent spray which rose above the fall; in its picturesque environment with Goat Island on one side and Victoria Park on the other, and in the varied shifting coloring of fall, rapids, and spray cloud.

In the heart of Africa, near the border between British South Africa and Belgian Congo, 1,642 miles from Cape Town, on the Cape-to-Cairo Railroad, the waters of the Zambezi River made the wonderful descent which David Livingstone, the first white man to see the fall, named Victoria in honor of England’s Queen.  As the Zambezi, grown great in its hundreds of miles of journeying from its source, majestically moved seaward with the lazy dignity that was becoming to a mile-wide tropical river, it was suddenly, without warning, hurled over and dashed to the bottom of a deep, narrow chasm, cleft at right angles to its course; and at the foot of the abyss its forward flow was checked by a basaltic precipice, which formed the opposite wall of that chasm.  The mass of falling water was driven backward and upward in clouds of spray, rising hundreds of feet in the air in ever-changing forms.  Never was there transformation more extraordinary than that here suffered by the Zambezi.  The mile-wide, comparatively shallow, river was, in the twinkling of the eye, turned edgewise into a cleft in the earth’s surface with a breadth between imprisoning walls of 200 to 300 feet and unknown depth.  From moving slowly in one direction, its waters flew and flowed with incredible velocity in every direction.  They rushed wildly from each end of the falls’ canyon, where the abyss was shallowest, toward the middle, both deep and narrow currents seeking escape from the cramping, imprisoning walls of the opposite precipice of basalt.  The two sections met and found a vent about three-fourths of the distance from the western to the eastern end of the chasm, where the raging waters force themselves through another deep crack in the earth’s surface even narrower than the falls’ canyon itself.

Down that narrow opening, at right angles to the falls’ chasm, the reunited waters of the Zambezi rushed as rapids with tremendous power and almost immediately dashed full front against another precipice of basalt, and were thrown back on themselves in furious, boiling whirlpool.  Thus, diverted from its course, the raging torrent shot off almost at right angles through another narrow gorge approximately paralleling the falls’ chasm and nearly reversing its direction of flow in that chasm.  When the river was about on a level on this course with the west end of the falls’ canyon it doubled back upon itself at an acute angle, and when almost on level with the east end, it repeated the zigzag process, with the result that the Zambezi course through the falls’ canyon and the three succeeding gorges laid out a great M, cut into the earth’s crust 400 feet deep, plus the depth of the Zambezi in the canyon.  Its fall not only altered the Zambezi’s physical appearance, but transformed it from a benefactor, bestowing blessings, into a worthless, wandering tramp.  Above the falls the Zambezi irrigated a great area, giving life, freshness, and fertility to its valley and its islands, clothing them with towering palms and with infinite variety of form and color of luxuriant tropical vegetation, and rendering them fruitfully responsive to the hands of man.  After the fall the Zambezi’s waters were buried 400 feet below the dwellers on the earth’s surface, and outside the radius of the river’s spray, that surface was arid.  For 45 miles of that low life in the canyon the fallen river was self-concentrated and useless.  The great wall of rock, extended in front of the fallen river like a huge dam across its entire width, with its summit on the same level as the surface river, and within 250 feet of the descending waters, shut out any general view of the mile-wide series of falls.

But Victoria Falls compensated for that lack of view by furnishing along it very edge a series of frontal and side views – close, intimate, and thrilling – of the various sections of the falls.  For four-fifths of the distance from the west end of the falls’ canyon to the outlet gorge the edge of the canyon was crested with trees – date palm, ferns, and tropical undergrowth – bathed in spray from the chasm.  They were considered a “Rain Forest.”  At some points, the Rain Forest crept to the very edge of the precipice.  A hard, well-made footpath traversed the forest, paralleling the fall’s canyon and only a short distance from it, and frequent branches led from the main footpath to those points at the edge from which especially fine view were obtained.  From the chasm’s west end, one looked down upon Devil’s Cataract and visioned in front the spray-filled abyss, with the precipice of Cataract Island and a section of the Main Fall on the left, and the black precipice, crowned by Rain Forest on the right.  Devil’s Cataract rushed in rapids foaming to the precipice’s edge and leapt far out into the chasm, its waters breaking into millions of white particles, sparking like diamonds in the sunlight.  The most striking Victoria view was of the Main Fall from the Rain Forest, a half-mile sheet of foaming white and green.  Next in interest was the beautiful and impressive spectacle of the hundred cascades of picturesque Rainbow Falls.  There, the canyon was deepest and narrowest, and from that point one could lean over the edge and see the bottom of the chasm.  Victoria Falls, with the Zambezi in flood, impressed the observer more deeply with the sense of tremendous power than when water was low, but viewing was poor at that time due to the tremendous spray.  On the western edge of Livingstone Island, one got a fine view of the eastern section of the Main Fall.

In the heart of South America, where Brazil and Argentina came together, with Paraguay close at hand, the Iguazu River leapt from the great Brazilian central plateau over a precipice nearly half as high again as that of Niagara.  In falling, it distributed its waters in two main falls, and at low water, a hundred cataracts, over an area more than twice that of the Niagara, including Goat Island.  With its source in the Brazilian coast mountains, only 30 miles from the Atlantic, the Iguazu traversed westward the Brazilian central plateau for 430 miles before it plunged in cataract over the plateau’s precipitous edge.  Most of the great rivers had descended from that plateau and flowed to the sea either through the Amazon or La Plata; but the descent of the Iguazu was the most spectacular of all.  The Iguazu above the falls, with the stream at low water a half mile wide, glided lazily toward the edge of the precipitous plateau, but before descending, it broadened and shallowed, and so widely distributed its waters that its half-mile width was more than doubled when it fell over the precipice; and it spread thinly and interruptedly over two miles of contour sweep, if intersecting islands were included.  A few miles above the falls, while the river was still in Brazil, the Iguazu made a sharp bend, and as it neared the precipice edge and the Argentinian boundary line, it divided into two currents; one, much deeper, hugged the Brazilian bank and rushed into the end of a deep, narrow canyon, one side of which was Brazil and the other Argentina.  The other current, and the rest of the volume of the river, rushed in a vast, irregular semicircle on the Argentinian plateau, among rocks and islets, before leaping from its precipice, in one main fall and in innumerable cataracts, in two drops, to the bottom of the canyon.

Midstream from the lip of the falls precipice a large island (San Martin) projected in long peninsular shape, descending gradually to the river level below the falls.  That island, separating the two channels, was heavily wooded, so that each section of the falls was hidden from the other, and except from airplane one could not at the same time fully see both.  The deep, narrow canyon down which the bulk of the Iguazu’s volume rushed was called Devil’s Throat.  The wide, semicircular sweep of the rest of the descending waters was called San Martin Falls.  The water from Devil’s Throat Chasm raged down one side of San Martin Island, and that from San Martin Falls down the other.  The two floods came together at the point of San Martin Island, and the reunited Iguazu rushed in deep, narrow rapids to its junction with the Parana River, 12 miles below.  On top of a precipitous eminence, facing the San Martin section of the Iguazu. Was the Argentine Hotel.  On top of a still higher hill on the Brazilian side of the river was the unfinished Brazilian Hotel.  Between the two flowed, in rapids below the falls, the reunited Iguazu, hidden from sight in dense forest.  The finest accessible views were: (1) From the Argentine Hotel hillside; (2) Of Devil’s Throat Chasm and Union Fall from the edge of the falls’ precipice in Argentina; and (3) From the Brazilian side of the Iguazu.  The hillside view of the semicircular sweep of San Martin Falls and Island, their rapids and those of Devil’s Throat, the top of Union Fall, and the cloud spray of Devil’s Throat, furnished the closest to a full panoramic view of Iguazu Falls that was possible.  A striking view of San Martin was enjoyed from the side of Bossetti Cataract.  From that viewpoint one saw the great main fall of San Martin, second in volume only to Union Fall, and glimpses of Devil’s Throat.

The most intimate and impressive view of the greatest of the Iguazu falls was from an islet on the lip of the precipice on the Argentine side, near where the Rivadavia cataract dashed over the precipice into Devil’s Throat.  Beyond Rivadavia cataract began the broad, curving, continuous band of Union Fall.  Myriads of swallows darted to and fro in the spray cloud and rainbows were almost always visible.  The best views of all the Brazilian falls were seen from that viewpoint, including a series of beautiful unnamed cataracts and impressive Floriano.  Formerly, the difficulties in seeing the falls from both the Argentine and the Brazilian sides in the same visit were so great that hardly any visitors enjoyed both viewpoints.  In 1926, except at times of high water, one could cross by boat above the falls the half mile of rapids which separated Brazil and Argentina.  In crossing they shot rapids, dodged rocks, hugged the sides of islets, and dashed for areas of safety from one to another.  From the Brazilian boat landing they climbed to the unfinished Brazilian Hotel at the top of the hill that commanded the finest, highest view in all the falls region.  From that hilltop they saw San Martin’s many cataracts and the Three Musketeers in Argentina, and from the hillside lower down they saw the falls of Devil’s Throat, both Brazilian and Argentine – Floriano, Union, Rivadavia, and Belgrano.  As the most comprehensive views of the Argentine falls were from the Brazilian side, so to the finest views of the Brazilian falls were from the Argentine side.  The author concluded that it was necessary to see the Iguazu Falls from both sides of the river to fully understand and appreciate them.  Having viewed the three mighty falls separately, the author decided to consider them together in detail, in a competitive comparison of their main elements of greatness.

Niagara’s height of fall ranged from 158 feet (Canadian) to 167 feet (American).  Victoria’s height ranged from 260 to 400 feet.  Iguazu’s maximum height was estimated from 213 to 230 feet.  Most of Iguazu’s cataracts were broken half way by a shelf of rock varying in width, which often made two cataracts out of one, each about 100 feet high.  At the lip of the precipice, Niagara (including Goat Island) had a total width of about 5,300 feet.  Victoria (including Livingstone and Cataract islands) had a total width of about 5,700 feet.  At the lip of the precipice, Iguazu (Including San Martin Island) had an estimated contour width of more than 10,000 feet, or nearly two miles.  Niagara was the outlet seaward of the four western Great Lakes, which constituted half of the fresh water in the world.  Almost unaffected by the seasons, the volume of water passing constantly over the falls in deep, broad stream was tremendous.  Niagara below Grand Island was two and a half miles wide.  In similar relation to the fall, the Zambezi in flood stage was about two miles wide.  It drained a large area, and whether at low or high water, was a great river.  For a short period, when at highest flood, it might possibly compare in volume even with the Niagara.  Iguazu carried the smallest volume of water of the three great falls.  Its stream was not so broad as that of the Zambezi and neither so deep nor so broad as that of Niagara.  It was swollen tremendously in flood, but so also was the Zambezi.  Niagara descended 52 feet in the last mile above the falls, flowing with immense velocity in powerful rapids.  Sections of the Zambezi next to the western and eastern banks descended in the swift rapids of Devil’s and Eastern cataracts shortly before taking the leap; but the great body of the river moved smoothly and slowly to the very edge of the chasm.

Iguazu’s upper rapids, narrowed to one-half mile just before swerving in course and spreading out fanlike for the drop over the precipice in the San Martin section of the falls, were more turbulent and menacing than Zambezi’s placid flow, but far less impressive than Niagara’s raging, white-capped flood.  The chasm into which Niagara dropped was 1,250 feet wide immediately at the falls, 800 feet wide two miles farther down, and at Whirlpool Rapids less than 300 feet wide.  Victoria Canyon was from 200 to 300 feet between walls, and the outlet gorges through which the Zambezi zigzagged after the fall were in many places much narrower.  The Devil’s Throat Chasm of the Iguazu was more than 200 feet deep and was short and narrow.  In the rapids below and as well as above the falls, Niagara excelled in mountainous waves of vast power in whirlpool and whirlpool rapids.  The Zambezi, after falling edgewise in its narrow cleft, gripped attention by the curiously shaped gorge through which, in deep, narrow rapids, it zigzagged like a streak of lightning backward and forward in the earth’s crust.  Iguazu’s gorge below the falls was commonplace compared with those of Niagara and Zambezi.  Niagara could be seen as a whole with fine effect from the Canadian side, and in detail from every angle, from top to bottom, and at a few points from behind, as well as in front of its descending waters.  Victoria could not be seen as a whole from any point, but could be viewed close at hand, when the sprays permitted, from the Rain Forest precipice in front of the entire length of the fall.  San Martin Island so projected itself as to shut out any view of Iguazu Falls as a whole; but the San Martin section could be seen from the precipice near the Argentine Hotel and from the Brazilian side.  The Devil’s Throat section could be seen from an islet at the edge of Devil’s Throat Chasm.

The author next took a flight of fancy, anthropomorphizing the three great falls as they each bragged about their greatness by rehashing the comparative data above.  Each great fall was, in its own way, a wonderful exhibit of power and beauty.  Each richly rewarded the observant and appreciative visitor, and each must be visited and enjoyed by everyone who would miss no atom of the inspiring thrill which came to the initiate from observation of the might and loveliness of Nature’s wonders.

 

 

The third article in this month’s issue is entitled “Streets and Palaces of Colorful India” and has Gervais Courtellemont in the byline.  He is not the author, but the photographer of the thirty-four “Illustrations from Natural-Color Photographs.”  These thirty-four photos appear on a set of twenty-four plates numbered I through XXIV in Roman numerals and represent pages 61 through 84 in the issue.  Fourteen of the photos are full-page in size and the remaining twenty are half-page photos appearing on the remaining ten plates.  The set of plates is sandwiched between the pages of a two-page editorial about India with references to the color photographs throughout. 

It was difficult for the occidental mind to gain an accurate concept of India, as there was nothing in the Western World with which to compare it.  Many thought of it as a deeply mysterious land of tigers, cobras, and cholera; others as a place of flashy jewels and colorful pageantry, liberally supplied with magnificent temples and palaces, imperious maharajas, and richly caparisoned elephants.  Each of those conceptions had some foundation in fact, yet neither of them expressed the real India.  It was hard to generalize when speaking of a country nearly two-thirds as large as the U. S. and home of a myriad races and religions; but, on the whole, India might be said to be a very hot portion of the earth’s surface where 315 million people worshipped and prayed to 330 million gods.  It was preeminently a land of amazing contrasts and flashy colors; a land where stupendous wealth and abject poverty, sublime beauty and revolting ugliness lived side by side.  For every wealthy nobleman in India, there were thousands of victims of poverty.  For every tile on a tinted roof, there were a thousand drab mud huts.  Poverty was so common that it ceased to be impressive; yet, with all the tragedy of its teeming millions, India was a colorful land.  And it was that prevalence of color that tended to lift the life of its people beyond the realm of the commonplace.  In his dress and in the decorations of his buildings, the native of India indulges his love of bright colors, and the life of his cities often comprised a mosaic of tints and shades that was startling to behold.  The western gateway to that land of color and contrast was the fine city of Bombay, aptly described as being made up of equal portions of London and the Arabian Nights.  Its skyline was as modern and imposing as that of Europe’s metropolis, yet in many ways it was as truly oriental as any place in India.

Situated on an exceptionally fine harbor, that city, which had been an important trading center for nearly three centuries, was the industrial capital of Hindustan.  Great factories surrounded it, belching soot and smoke against the clear blue sky; but they were doomed.  Hydroelectric power was fast replacing dirtier and less efficient methods of turning factory wheels.  The Parsees were the most influential native people in Bombay, many having acquired great wealth and attained high social position.  They were followers of Zoroaster, and were unwilling to pollute fire, earth, or water, by cremating, burying, or committing the dead to the waves.  They conveyed their dead to the “Towers of Silence,” one of the strangest and interesting sight in the city.  Surrounding the Towers of Silence was a beautiful garden, filled with flowers, shrubs, and cypress trees, which commanded an enchanting view of mountain and sea.  There, the relatives of the departed went to meditate.  Ahmadabad was a city where contrast of old and new was most apparent.  Founded over 500 years prior by Sultan Ahmad I, and more recently made famous as the home of Gandhi, that city was in the time of Queen Elizabeth as large as London.  It was a center where the finest artisans of India gathered, and its silks, gold brocades, and objects made of mother-of-pearl were known world over.  But cotton changed things with an army of 50,000 mill hands, who toiled at spindles, which had displaced the hand workers of another age.  The circle of smokestacks pressing in upon that stronghold of a passing art was the force which roused Gandhi to strive against the advancing tide of industrialism.  But Ahmadabad’s beauty had not been destroyed; it was one of India’s finest examples of Mohammedan strength and Jain delicacies in architecture.

The Jains, of whom there were many in Ahmadabad, were an interesting people.  One of their principal religious tenets was kindness to animals and a very high regard for all kinds of life.  Jain architecture was distinctive for its lightness and grace, and no other people had ever come so near to making lace out of marble.  The picturesque old city of Udaipur was distinguished in having as the head of its ruling house the bluest blue-blood in India.  That prince claimed direct descent from the Sun God.  The royal palace at Udaipur was an imposing mass of marble and granite on the shores of a beautiful lake.  In the court of the Maharana’s palace were several arches, under which the rulers once weighed themselves using bags of gold and silver as a balance, then distributed the coins among their subjects.  The Rose City of Jaipur was comparatively new, having been founded less than two centuries prior.  It was a well-planned, well-governed city, but the crenellated masonry walls which surrounded it were reminiscent of times when the native states were engaged in almost constant warfare.  In all of those cities the gods of Hinduism occupied a prominent place.  Those gods were numerous, but the great triumvirate were Brahma, the Disposer; Vishnu, the Preserver; and Sive, the Destroyer.  To those might be added a fourth, Ganesha, whose image was found everywhere – in temples, in homes, and by roadsides.  He was regarded as the deity of common sense.  He was supposed to be a son of Siva and Durga, and represented as a creature with the head of an elephant and an enormous infant’s body.  Cast-ridden, infested with strange deities, burdened with poverty, India nevertheless allured with mystery and its scenes of beauty; and always there was color, intensifying the highlights, brightening the shadows, and weaving its spell over all the drab and sordid elements of life.

A list of the caption titles to the Color Photographs with their associated Plate Number is as follows:

• “A young Student of Hindustan” – Plate I
• “An Equipage of Jaipur’s Aristocracy” – Plate II
• “A Kite Merchant of Bombay” – Plate II
• “The Gorgeous Second Entrance to Jaipur’s Palace” – Plate III
• “The Turban – Picturesque and Practical” – Plate IV
• “Youth and Age in India’s Queen City” – Plate IV
• “The Bombay Fruit Merchants Present Their Tempting Array” – Plate V
• “A Jeweled Ruler of a Haughty State” – Plate VI
• “The Entrance to “The City That Will Never Wake”” – Plate VI
• “One of Bombay’s Bread Merchants” – Plate VII
• “Gwalior’s Version of the Little Red School House” – Plate VIII
• “A Vista of the Maharaja’s Palace: Jaipur” – Plate IX
• “The Court of Honor in One of the Palaces of Akbar” – Plate IX
• “A Venerable Rajput Warrior of Jaipur” – Plate X
• “Followers of Vishnu, the Preserver” – Plate XI
• “A Temple of the Jain Sect at Ahmadabad” – Plate XI
• “A Fakir Beside the Soul-Cleaning Ganges: Benares” – Plate XII
• “Honeycakes Merchants of Bombay” – Plate XII
• “A High Caste Hindu of Jaipur” – Plate XIII
• “In the Costume of the Middle Ages: Gwalior” – Plate XIV
• “Praying to Ganesha at Madura” – Plate XIV
• “A Brahman of Benares Expounds His Faith” – Plate XV
• “She Dwells in the Shadow of the Taj Mahal” – Plate XVI
• “A Flower-Decked Idol in the Court of the Golden Temple, Benares” – Plate XVII
• “The Streets of Jaipur Provide a Setting for a Daily Oriental Pageant” – Plate XVII
• “The Façade of the Women’s Palace Near Jaipur” – Plate XVIII
• “The Bazaars of Jaipur Are Nearly Deserted at Midday” – Plate XIX
• “A Citizen of Madura” – Plate XX
• “A Native of Mumtaz-I-Mahal’s City” – Plate XX
• “A State Elephant in the Retinue of the Maharaja of Jaipur” – Plate XXI
• “A Singhalese Priest and His Acolyte” – Plate XXII
• “An Aristocratic Young Mendicant of Benares” – Plate XXII
• “A Brahman Temple of Udaipur” – Plate XXIII
• “Nirvana Attained” – Plate XXIV

 

 

The fourth article in this month’s issue is entitled “Pirate Rivers and Their Prizes” and was written by John Oliver La Gorce, Author of “Porto Rico, the Gate of Riches,” “Pennsylvania, the Industrial Titan of America,” “The Warfare on Our Eastern Coast,” “A Battle-Ground of Nature,” “The Fight at the Timber-line,” etc., in the National Geographic Magazine.  The article has the internal subtitle: “The Warfare of Waterways Has Sometimes Changed the Geography of Our Continents.”  It contains forty-three black-and-white photographs of which twenty are full-page in size.  Sixteen of those full-page photos are actually a block of duotones which will be discussed later. Two half-pages photos serve as the frontispiece for this article.  The article also contains a sketch map of the Rivers of New York on page 92.

Sketch Map courtesy of Philip Riviere

Nothing seemed more permanent to most people than the rivers, the rocks, and the hills of the earth.  But the lives of rivers and rocks and mountains covered no greater span of geological time than did human lives in the history of mankind.  Their vicissitudes were as many, their relationships as intricate, and their tenure of existence as short in terms of geological epochs as were ours by the yardstick of changing human events.  The biographies of rivers formed life stories of fascinating interests.  The wars they waged, the campaigns they fought, the munitions they employed, the victories they won, the defeats they suffered, and the scarred battlefields they left behind them, made their struggles against Nature and among themselves closely paralleled the often-warlike course of human affairs.  The streams had their lusty youth, flowing down steep grades with dashing, noisy, care-free abandon; their adolescence, taking on the more circumspect characteristic of grownup waterways; their maturity, in which they settled down to a quieter, more rotund existence; their rejuvenation, in which they seemed to stage a return to youth; and their old age, in which they became feeble-flowing, erosion-less liquid highways.  To measure the spoils of their warfare, visualize the largest trainload of coal you ever saw, and reflect that the Mississippi delivered an equal amount of silt, sand, and solubles into the Gulf of Mexico every eight minutes.  And consider that the great valleys of Pennsylvania and Virginia were giant trenches dug in high plateaus whose surface once was even higher than the current general level of the crests of the mountains that bordered them.  Ten of thousands of yards of sedimentary rock underlie the surface of the ground, every foot of which was composed of material torn from the surface of the primeval granite.

That primordial debris was transported as sand and silt, reincarnated as sandstone and shale, only to be re-eroded and re-transported and reincarnated repeatedly before it assumed its current form.  The forces of erosion were the munition of the rivers’ warfare; the sedimentary rock was the fruits of their carnage; the landscapes the trophies of their agelong conflicts.  Like mankind, rivers waged two kinds of warfare – their united struggle against Nature and their individual and collective conflicts against one another.  In the former category was their unending battle against mountains, plateaus, and hills.  The internal forces of the earth were forever producing inequities in the surface.  Fossil river valleys that trenched the continental shelves out to the very edge of the abysmal ocean, and the fossil marine shells that starred the soil and stone of the highest mountains, told of eras when portions of the beds of the sea were high and dry and when the summits of our mountains laid beneath the ocean’s waves.  Against those changes in level the rivers had ever set a unanimous face.  They could not stop the change, but they had labored always to obliterate them.  Geology aided the student to reconstruct the ancient landscapes and to visualize the geography of the long ago before the rivers we know took up their work.  By it we could bring back into pictured existence the imposing mountains that covered New England, of which Greylock, Mount Tom, Monadnock, and their sister sentinels of the countryside were but the vanishing remnants.  1926’s young ridges of southern Oregon afforded a picture of the landscape of New England eons ago.  Likewise, the Alps typified the New England scenery of a later epoch, when the rivers were tasting the fruits of victory over the mountains.

If the great valleys of the Delaware, the Susquehanna, and the Shenandoah were filled to the levels before the rivers attacked them, then the cities and farmland would be buried beneath from one to two thousand feet of stratified limestone.  Those fine, level mountain crests pierced by the Delaware at the Watergap represented the level of the land over which the Delaware first flowed to the sea.  For more than a thousand miles the Ohio had cut a trench, that averaged a mile wide and several hundred feet deep through strata of limestone, shale, sandstone, and conglomerate.  The strata on the two sides matched so perfectly that even the casual traveler down the Ohio could see that they were once joined and were sawed asunder by the unremitting industry of the great river.  In the Mississippi Valley from Cairo to St. Paul the Father of Waters had cut out a trench two to three times that of the Ohio, and one must travel far to discover a greater and more inspiring panorama of a master stream’s conquest than the trip from St. Paul to Cairo afforded.  Likewise, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, where the Warlord of the Arizona Plateau had built a city of temples and castles, of towers and minarets, which made the mightiest structures of man seem only small-scale and colorless models; the canyons of the Yellowstone and the Columbia; and the Castle Gate and the Royal Gorge of the Arkansas – all those proclaimed the mighty nature of the major battles the rivers had waged in the laying low of the mountains and hills.  Just as mankind’s outstanding struggle was against the forces of Nature, and his minor ones, contests between nations, communities, groups, and individuals, so rivers and creeks, brooks and rills, staged their infighting with one another for territorial conquest and drainage control.

The tale of pirates bold and buccaneers brave had ever stirred the imagination of the youth that was in us all; but the adventures of the Morgans and the Captain Kidds of human history were stories of weak and transitory exploits as compared with those of the predatory rivers of geologic time.  The people of Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee were, in 1926, arranging to dedicate to the Federal Government, for the use of the people of the U. S., as national parks, areas in the Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky Mountains which constituted the Spanish Main of the pirate rivers of North America.  Perhaps the Shenandoah ranked as the boldest buccaneer of American river history.  If you had ever motored through piedmont Virginia from Point of Rocks to Charlottesville, or up the Shenandoah Valley from Harpers Ferry to Staunton, you were probably familiar with that outstanding series of wind gaps in the Blue Ridge from Bluemont to Waynesboro.  Long ages ago, Beaverdam and Goose creeks, and the Rappahannock, Rapidan, and Rivanna rivers did not rise, as in 1926, on the Seaward slopes of the Blue Ridge, but, like the Potomac and the James, had their source in the outrider ridges of the Alleghenies.  The Shenandoah Valley, in those days, was a limestone plateau level with the crest of the Blue Ridge.  Like the present-day rivers of Norway that flowed across a high plateau and then dashed wildly down the mountainsides to the sea, the Virginia streams flowed across that plateau and down the mountainsides of the Blue Ridge, and danced merrily on to the lower Potomac and Chesapeake Bay.  But the soft and soluble limestone of the Valley area yielded faster than the harder and more resistant sandstone and heat-treated rock of the Blue Ridge.  The grade was against them – a grade they could no longer make.

As though realizing its opportunity to capture their fluvial wealth, the Shenandoah pushed its way up the deepening valley, and eventually the headwaters or all of those streams were “pieces of eight” with which the Shenandoah loaded its galleons and bought the favor of its sovereign, the Potomac.  And Rockfish Gap, Browns Gap, Swift Run Gap, Thorntons Gap, Clarks Gap, Manassas Gap, Ashby Gap, and Snickers Gap, in 1926 were eloquent, if silent, witnesses of the exploits of the pirate Shenandoah in robbing them of their liquid wealth.  The Potomac and the James, stronger rivers than their ancient corulers of the Shenandoah region, were able to hold fast to their gaps by wearing them down as fast as the valley level behind the Blue Ridge was reduced; hence, in 1926, we have at Harper’s Ferry and Balcony Falls gorges of unsurpassed beauty in the Blue Ridge.  Even the James, however, had not assurance that it would always be permitted to tenant its gap at Balcony Falls. Inch by inch the headwaters of the Shenandoah were pushing back the divide, and there were unmistakable indications that in ages yet in the far distant future the stately river with the kingly name may itself be beheaded by the Shenandoah, sharing the fate that befell its sister rivers, the Rappahannock, the Rapidan, and the Rivanna.  In the high valley between the Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky Mountains. In western North Carolina, one may inspect another of the great river battlefields of the world.  In the geological long ago a magnificent stream occupied that great, canoe-shaped structural valley that began in southwest Virginia and ended n northwestern Georgia.  One branch of that river rose in Virginia and flowed past Ashville where it joined with the other branch from the south.  Their mingled waters ran through South Carolina and into the Atlantic Ocean.

It was too fair a land to escape the attention of many great master rivers.  The distance tributaries of the Ohio, the Catawba, the Savanna, and the Tennessee rivers all relentlessly dug their way into that ancient river’s valley from all directions.  The New River dug its way through the mountains of Southwest Virginia into North Carolina, and overpowered the headwaters of the northeast fork of the ancient stream, leading them through the Kanawha into the Ohio.  Linville River crashed the Blue Ridge ramparts at Linville falls and carried off the waters in the basin headed by Linville Gap, dragging them down to the Catawba.  The Tallulah in its turn met with success in the Georgia sector.  It broke through the gorge at Pulaski, where it divided its forces inside the mountains, sending one column of water dashing westward beyond the Tallulah Mountains, and the other, the Chattooga, northward.  The six tributaries of the Tennessee were also engaged.  The southernmost, the Hiwassee, succeeded in reducing the ramparts of the Smokies at Appalachia.  The wing gaps of the Virginia Blue Ridge were memorials to steams that once flowed through them, even as the Watauga, the Nolichucky, the French Broad, the Pigeon, the Little Tennessee, and the Hiwassee cut through the Great Smokies.  In Virginia the master stream was the victor.  In North Carolina it was the vanquished.  The parceling out by rival pirate rivers of the ancient North Carolina master stream of the Blue Ridge/Great Smoky basin found a counterpart in the fate that befell the once mighty Anthracite River, which long ages ago drained the Wilkes-Barre-Scranton sector of Pennsylvania.  That river flowed to the northwest through the upper part of the State.  In its heyday the Anthracite had neighboring streams, one of those being the Susquehanna.

Step by step the Susquehanna hewed down the divide and captured first one tributary of the Anthracite and then another.  It thereby gained strength for its attack and correspondingly reduced the resistance of its victim.  Meanwhile, the Lehigh was pounding away at the eastern bulwarks of the Anthracite basin, but it found the sandstone a defense it could not penetrate, and consequently gained little ground.  The Delaware was also assailing one sector of the citadel, but likewise with little success.  The Schuylkill finally gained that part of the spoils which the stronger Susquehanna left behind.  That river alone found the vulnerable spot in the ancient stream’s breastworks.  Pushing farther and farther, age by age, it finally captured the bulk of the main flow and led its waters in triumph to the sea.  In southeastern New York the capture of one of the forks of Schoharie Creek by the Plaaterskill and the Kaaterskill was a fine example of the buccaneering operations of small streams.  In Yellowstone Park country Pacific Creek was battering down the Divide at Two Oceans Pass, and in the future probably it will capture the headwaters of Atlantic Creek and diverting them from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.  In the foregoing instances of stream stealing, the rivers and creeks that made the captures were aggressive and daring Brethren of the Main.  There were other streams, however, that had played a cannier role.  They had craftily laid low and waited until unsuspecting Nature drove the quarry into their grasp.  One of the most effective aids of those passive privateers was the great ice sheet that thousands of years ago swept down over the norther part of the U. S.  It covered Long Island, northern New Jersey, the northern corners of Pennsylvania, and then swept on westward through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and the Dakotas to the Rockies.

Prior to the ice sheet’s advance the rivers within its limit were different from what they were in 1926.  Many of them were obliterated or forced into new beds; others had their direction of flow reversed and where obliged pay tribute to stronger streams.  Rivers that had flowed northward forced to abandon their outlets; animals that lived in the north were driven southward, and whole area was transformed by the on-sweeping hand of destiny.  The Mohawk River was a classic example of how pirate streams gained rich prizes without aggression.  Before the ice invasion, the ancient Mohawk rose at the head of a divide at Little Falls and flowed westward to the preglacial St. Lawrence.  At the same time a tributary of the Hudson had worked its way up to the east side of the Little Falls divide.  In its course southward the ice blanket dammed up the St. Lawrence and the Mohawk alike, and the waters were all driven south through the Mississippi, the Ohio, the Susquehanna, and kindred streams.  Then the ice began to melt, the front gradually retreated northward.  Finally, the valley of the Mohawk was uncovered, and it received tremendous floods of glacial water which converted the valley into a lake.  Higher and higher the deluge rose, finally finding a weak spot in the shoreline at Little Falls.  Rushing through that saddle in the divide, it fell into the tributary of the Hudson, a gift from the gods.  With that vast new accretion of power, the Hudson began to tear away the divide in deadly earnest, and before the ice front had retreated far enough north to uncover the St. Lawrence, had entirely destroyed the barrier between it and the ancient Mohawk and had hoisted its flag over the territory of the latter stream.  Meanwhile the Susquehanna had pushed its headwaters within eyeshot of the Little Falls gorge.  But the Hudson carried the day.

The Ohio captured and had held streams driven into its grasp by the advancing ice.  Before the coming of the Ice Age that river had its headwaters near New Martinsville, West Virginia.  In those days all of the present drainage of that stream north of there flowed into Lake Erie through a now extinct river.  The advance of the ice sheet dammed bac those waters, which looked for a point of escape, reversed a little tributary whose headwaters were opposite those of the Ohio at New Martinville.  At the latter point they overflowed the divide and joined the Ohio.  As was the case with the tributary of the Hudson, once the Ohio had succeeded in getting control of the host of waters the ice had driven into its lair, it worked with terrific energy to hold them.  It also held possession of all the territory up to the present-day divide that lied hauntingly close to Lake Erie.  That part of the Allegheny River above Thompsons Gap was once a northward flowing stream with its headwaters on the north slope of the divide at that point.  The ice sheet that aided the Ohio sometime earlier helped the Allegheny by damming the northbound waters and forcing them across the divide into the very lap of the Allegheny.  That river accepted its prize, little knowing that in its own time it was destined to be brought under the yoke of a more powerful stream, the Ohio.  Although the Mississippi essayed the same role as the Mohawk and the Ohio, it was unable to retain the riches the ice sheet had driven into its fold.  The wealth of that water was unimaginably great.  Lake Winnipeg, in 1926, was but a feeble reminder of its once great self, Lake Agassiz, which covered 110,000 square miles and drained into the Mississippi.  Its surface was 15,000 square miles greater than the aggregate area of the Great Lakes in 1926.

The advancing ice had closed its outlet to Hudson Bay and had driven its surplus waters over the Big Stone-Lake Traverse divide into the Mississippi.  The floods which surged down the Father of Waters were unbelievably vast.  Unable, however, to plow down the preglacial divide which formerly separated the waters of the North from those of the South, the Mississippi after the retreat of the ice could no longer hold those it had temporarily acquired.  And so the Red River of the North, drowned and obliterated during the reign of ice, began to come back into its own, lengthening its length as the shores of Lake Agassiz retreated.  In 1926, Big Stone and Lake Traverse marked the place where the Mississippi lost control of the great Lake Agassiz drainage.  The present Mississippi above St. Paul was a comparatively recent stream, occupying a postglacial bed.  The trough of the Minnesota represented the Mississippi Valley of glacial times, and that of the Red River of the North was but its northern continuation.  In the Glacial Era that valley carried the flood of the Lake Winnipeg basin, while the St. Croix gave outlet to those of the Superior Basin, and the Illinois took care of those of the Michigan-Erie-Hudson basin.  But the lakes all acted as settling reservoirs and delivered so little sediment to the draining rivers that the latter were unable to tear down the divides.  When the ice drew back the channels of the draining rivers were not deep enough to hold the waters they had captured.  The Missouri River and its tributaries were forced out of much of their ancient beds by the advancing ice.  There was some evidence that they once poured their waters into Hudson Bay through the ancient Red River of the North.  Whatever the original course of the Missouri above the big bend that turned its flow from east to south in North Dakota, it did not run where it does now.

Ice and changing slopes of the earth’s crust joined forces in driving the waters of the present Great Lakes into the control of the St. Lawrence.  However, before those forces finally left the Lakes under the jurisdiction of that stream, they had dispatched their waters first one way and then another.  At one time Lake Superior’s waters were 500 feet higher than in 1926, its drainage being into the Mississippi. Likewise, the former greater Lake Michigan found an outlet at one time through the Illinois River.  With the retreat of the ice, the Lake Erie-Lake Ontario basin was divided and the Niagara River began to flow.  Its further retreat uncovered the Trent River valley, and the drainage of the upper Lakes passed directly through that to Lake Ontario, ignoring Lake Erie, and consequently reducing Niagara River to a small stream.  But then the land began to rise near the Trent outlet and the outflow went back to the Detroit, and the Niagara River came into its own again.  Then the land sank at Nipissing Pass and in the Mattawa and Ottawa River valleys, and once more the Detroit River ran dry and Niagara River grew small.  The Ottawa River carried the waters of the upper Lakes into the Gulf of St. Lawrence.  Another change in surface level brought the discharge of all the Lakes into Niagara River, which was for a time a series of three falls.  After that, the three leaps of water were consolidated into one.  For a time, the American Fall was the major section, but eventually the Canadian Fall robbed it of most of its waters.  The Canadian Fall was committing suicide as the horseshoe was slowly being carved into a “V.”  Surveys showed that the earth’s crust was tilting toward Chicago at a rate of 9 or 10 inches a century.  If that kept up, the waters of Lake Michigan will begin to spill into the Mississippi again in 600 years, and in 3,500 years Niagara will be high and dry.

The oceans were as ready as the rivers to commit passive piracy whenever the subsistence of a section of the land permitted.  A classic example was the Susquehanna.  It once flowed to the Atlantic between Capes Charles and Henry.  The land subsided, the Atlantic rushed in to claim the spoils of what was now called the Chesapeake Bay.  The buried valley of the Hudson had been traced out to the continental shelf, showing that the Atlantic had taken possession of a great area once drained by that river, because the land sank.  The process was still going on; the land near New York was sinking at a rate of two feet a century.  Geologically speaking, lakes of all sizes were short lived.  The hand of every stream was against them from the very hour of their birth.  Eventually their waters would be plundered.  No matter how successful lakes momentarily were in pirating the waters of streams, sooner or later they lose and the rivers banish them from the earth.  Earthquakes and lava flows played their part in pirating waters.  At New Madrid, in 1811-13, earthquakes built up barriers to the Mississippi River, which ruthlessly pushed them aside.  [See: “Reelfoot – an Earthquake Lake,” January 1924, National Geographic Magazine.]  So too, mighty avalanches of stones had flowed across the paths of rivers, only to be pushed aside by waters that would not accept captivity.  Lost rivers and sinking creeks might be followed into the ground and watched as they excavate stupendous caverns.  Scores of beaver dams in the U. S. played a role of Tom Thumb pirates, attacking streams and imprisoning them in Toyland ponds.  Man, himself had some piracies against rivers and creeks to answer for.  As we bid farewell to our river friends, let us remember that piracy was not their principal activity; they were sculptures of the world’s landscapes and makers of the world’s Edens.

 

 

As mentioned above, the fourth article contains a block of sixteen full-page, but undocumented, duotones.  Duotones, formerly called photogravures, are images transferred to paper using acid-etched plates and special ink.  The deeper the etch, the darker the transfer.  The ink used for these duotones has a distinctive blue tint.  The sixteen duotones appear on pages 101 through 116 in the issue.

A list of the caption title of the sixteen duotones is as follows:

• “The Needle’s Eye, in the Black Hills of South Dakota”
• “The Restful Waters of Minnehaha, Minneapolis, Minnesota”
• “Every Stratum a Page in the Book of Nature!”
• “Great Falls of the Potomac”
• “The Broad River Valley, from Chimney Rock, North Carolina”
• “Looking Down Zion Canyon from the Top of Angels Landing: Zion National Park”
• “Horseshoe Falls of Missouri River, Cascade County, Montana”
• “Lakes Ellen Wilson and Saint Mary: Glacier National Park”
• “When Pirate Waters Sleep”
• “Broad River Valley from Chimney Rock, North Carolina”
• “Little Meadow Gulch, in Zion National Park: Utah”
• “Where the Monogahela and the Allegheny Join Forces at Pittsburgh to Make the Ohio”
• ““Saint Jacob’s Well,” a Sink-hole in Clark County, Kansas”
• “Watkins Glen, One of New York State’s Most Famous Beauty Spots”
• “Rainbow Falls, on the Mill Creek Trail to Mount Le Conte, Tennessee”
• “Natural Bridge, Rockbridge County, Virginia”

 

At the bottom of the last page of the last article (page 132) there is a notice to the members which reads: Members of the National Geographic Society are again reminded that The Society employs no agents or canvassers to solicit subscriptions to its Magazine or collect the dues of its members.  Many individuals have been defrauded recently by unauthorized agents and bogus solicitors.  Remittance should be made payable and sent directly to the National Geographic Society at its headquarters in Washington, D. C.

 

 

Tom Wilson

[Scott T. Shier]

Tom, 

Shall you do a special one-off "review" of the JULY 1976 Bi-Centennial issue this month for our big 2-5-0 ? 

: - ) 

You could label it outside your current numbering system as a America's birthday write-up, he he.

- Scott

[George Thomas Wilson]

Scott,

I can barely keep up with the ones I'm doing.  Tell you what, I'll get to it in 50 years.

[Scott T. Shier]

I included the Ice Patrol article and this front cover in my personal "Titanic" book I made back in 2013. 

LINK HERE --->

my 'Titanic' NGM book ~ custom-made book covering TITANIC in NGM (1...

and here,

July 1926 cover