100 Years Ago: March 1926

[George Thomas Wilson]

100 Years Ago: March 1926

 

This is the one-hundred-and-thirty-fourth entry in my series of rewrites of National Geographic Magazines as the reach the one-hundredth anniversary of their publication.

 

 

The first article in this month’s issue is entitled “Singapore, Crossroads of the East” and was written by Frederick Simpich, author of “The Geography of Our Foreign Trade,” “The Story of the Ruhr,” “A Mexican Land of Canaan,” etc., in the National Geographic Magazine.  The article has the internal subtitle: “The World’s Greatest Mart for Rubber and Tin Was in Recent Times a Pirate-haunted, Tiger-infested Jungle Isle.”  The article contains thirty-two black-and-white photographs, of which nine are full-page in size.  It also contains a sketch map of Southeast Asia with an inset closeup of Singapore on page 238.

Sketch Map courtesy of Philip Riviere

Singapore, the Lion City, Crossroads of the East!  Every time you opened a tin can or had a blow-out you made business for Singapore, for it boasted the biggest tin smelters in the world and three-fourths of all our rubber came out of Malaya.  And in all the swift, significant changes wrought by the white men in the East, no one event stood out more conspicuously than the rapid rise of Singapore.  From a jungle isle, where tigers ate men at night, to a magnificent city, tenth among ports in the world, in less than a century!  A boom-town record this might be, even in new America, but striking indeed when one thought of the remote geographic position of Singapore and the many centuries which other oriental cities had taken in the building.  Its place on the map, its strategic position here at the crossroads of the East, forced it to a growth at once unique and astonishing.  Last year (1925) nearly 10,000 ships cut the cobalt-blue seas of the Malacca Strait, tying up the trade of Singapore with Europe, Africa, and India, with Australia, China, Japan, and the Americas.  And how Singapore came to be a city was one of the latter-day romances of the Orient – a romance linked with the name of Raffles, the adventurous Englishman whose career had gone down in the annals of the East with that of Albuquerque, of Chinese Gordon, and Warren Hastings.  Before the days of Marco Polo, the Malays had founded their powerful States and set up an empire on the peninsula.  Then came the Portuguese and laid waste to the strongholds of the sultans.  After the Portuguese came the Dutch, sweeping from Malacca to Manila, only to be followed later by the British, who were there to this day [in 1926].   It was that British adventure, about a hundred years prior, that lured Stamford Raffles, born at sea, into the then unknown East.  And fate willed that he founded great Singapore.

Singapore was not conquered like Hindustan, nor acquired as a ready-made colony, like Hongkong; it was simply bought as New York was, and settled, when Sir Stamford Raffles selected it as an outpost for British traders on the China route and purchased it from the Sultan of Johore.  It was a jungle-covered island then, peopled by a few score savage Malay fisherfolk hovering along its mangrove-swamp shallows, dreading the tigers and pythons and cut off from all the outside world.  Now [in 1926] it was a wonder city, with marble bank buildings of singular beauty and great stone law courts and government edifices and Christian churches – all in striking contrast to the ornamental Malay mosques, the carved temples of the Hindus, and the fantastic joss houses of the Chinese.  Through the thick jungle, where once led only the elephant paths, wide, level roads had now been built, and motor horns had drowned out the fierce growls of the lurking tiger.  [See: “Hunting the Chaulmoogra Tree,” March 1922, National Geographic Magazine.]  Across to the Johore mainland a great granite causeway had been thrown, and up through the Malay Peninsula the railways had been driven, until now [in 1926], Bangkok, a thousand miles away in Siam, was tied up by rail with Singapore and on to the northwest the rails were stretching out to Rangoon, to India, to the Persian frontier, soon to Bagdad, perhaps, and then on to Paris – the path of flying men from London to Sydney.  [See: “From London to Australia by Aeroplane,” March 1921, National Geographic Magazine.]  Where once choking jungle crowded men back – a jungle so thick that a man swimming in a stream could hardly land because the plants hugged the water’s edge – broad fields had now been cleared, and Malaya plantations were among the richest in the world.

Forty-five years prior, a few Para rubber plants were smuggled out of Brazil fruited there.  In 1926, three-fourths of the world’s rubber came from that region.  And in that magic development Americans had played a leading role.  The Malay Peninsula, stretching hundreds of miles from the Siamese frontier down toward the Equator, formed a vast humid region of dense forests of jungle, wild elephants, snakes, and naked people, rice fields, rubber plantations, and tin mines.  Few American tourists saw it; those visiting the Orient usually turned back at Hongkong or Manila, and the average traveler from Europe went no farther than Egypt or the Holy Land.  Only the round-the-world tripper saw Malaya, and he usually only got a glimpse of Singapore or Penang during his few hours ashore while his ship was coaling.  Singapore, built on a tiny green isle of the same name, which lied just off the end of the peninsula and nearly on the Equator, was the capital of the British crown colony commonly called the Straits Settlements.  That colony embraced the Province Wellesley, the Dindings and Malacca on the Mainland, and the islands of Penang and Singapore.  The Federated Malay Stated, on the peninsula, comprised the States of Perak, Selangor, Pahang, and Negri Sembilan.  Kuala Lumpur was the capital. Just opposite Singapore, on the mainland, was the independent native State of Johore, which had its own sultan and government, but which was under British protection.  The British Governor of Singapore was also High Commissioner for the Federated Malay States and Brunei, and British Agent for North Borneo and Sarawak, thus linking up British possessions and spheres of influence in all Malaya and established close contact through one man, with the Colonial Office in London.

More than fifty steamship lines and its cable net and radio stations tied Singapore up with adjacent regions, and British Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and Siam constituted a unit in commercial geography which centered at the great port.  “The Melting Pot of Asia,” they called this prolific, potent peninsula, because of the babel of races, colors, and castes which the wealth of rubber and tin had drawn to it.  But in all that industrial army of Europeans, Chinese, Japanese, Tamils, Hindus, and assorted Pacific Islanders, the Chinese were the most numerous and powerful.  The Malay himself was too lazy even to be a good fisherman.  It was the Chinaman who was the tin miner, the farmer, shopkeeper, artisan, contractor, and financier.  The Tamil and the Hindu added to the stock of local labor and owned small farms and herds, but the many millionaires made in Malaya had mostly been Chinese.  Chinese immigration had worked a modern miracle in the reclamation of that once reeking, fever-cursed, jungle-grown wilderness.  It was the Chinese who first braved the lurking savage, tigers and reptiles, fever and dysentery, to conquer those jungles and dug the tin that put Malaya on the map of the trading world.  Here, as in other great cities of the Far East, the ‘rikisha coolie played his role.  More than 10,000 men ran the streets, pulling jinrikishas, wearing two garments – a straw hat, and a pair of knee high, blue cotton pants.  Coaling was done by coolies, with a basket swung in the middle of a long pole carried by two men.  Recently, 21,000 baskets of coal, over 1,500 tons, were put on a ship in five hours.  As your ship swung into the narrow, sixty-mile-long Singapore Roads, it was like a vision of some fabled Dream Isles of Delight.  Fairy isles they seemed, floating on a turquoise sea, jungle-grown in green, set adrift from Sumatra and Malaya.

Cruising through those straits, your ship crept so close to certain isle that you could see the natives going about their daily life.  But on certain hot, steamy days in early autumn, when no air was stirring and the tide was low, those islands were not all so charming.  The receding waters left slimy, stinking mud alive with crawling creatures.  You were glad then, when your ship had passed those reeking mud flats and you came to anchorage, tying up amid as strange a fleet as ever the sun shone on.  Boats by the hundreds, of every conceivable type and size, built anywhere from Amoy to Aden, swarmed in those straits.  Clumsy Chinese junks were there; occasionally, one of the low-built, evil-looking bugies of the Celebes, so long infamous in the slave trade, might be seen thereabouts.  Then there were the old, unwieldy but very seaworthy baggalas of the same type, known to Sindbad, coming from the Indian coast or even from Muskat.  Local Malay boats of every size and shape abounded, from a dugout catamaran with outriggers to the fancy barge with elaborate teak-finished cabins.  Swarming about your boat in their bobbing canoes, little Malat boys came to dive for nickels, for did not all Americans throw money into the sea as they approached a tropic port?  One saw some odd cargos there.  The author recalled one power schooner that came up from Borneo crowded with crates and cages – wild animals bound for a zoo in Europe.  One hundred years prior, Yankee clippers used to come there to sell cargoes of ice!  When the northeast monsoon blew, flocks of junks came down from Cochin China, bringing live pigs, sugar, and rice.  Others, beating over from Sumatra, were ladened with kerosene, while those from Johore brought tapioca, and down from Siam came great cargoes of valuable teak.

That teak, most useful of all wood, was famed for its amazing durability.  Once seasoned, it did not warp or split; nor did it decay, like oak, when in contact with nails; and termites would not eat holes in a teak beam.  On the Peninsula many plantations had been planted to produce lumber for use in railway coaches, in interior finish of steamers, in furniture, and wherever a hard, durable wood capable of taking on a brilliant polish was desired.  There, all trade was free, except for the tax on tobacco, liquors, and opium, and Singapore was the great clearinghouse for all those eastern seas.  In the heat of the commercial fray the Chinese mariner was in his glory.  His junk was a joke in other climes, but in the East the sea was his.  Those high-pooped, square-sterned junks of carved wood, with staring popeyes painted on their bows, still sailed the typhoon-tumbled seas from Amoy and Hongkong to Singapore.  No seafaring risk was too great for those ancient navigators.  Yet time and again a steamer put in and landed a crew of half-starved Chinese rescued from some waterlogged junk, helpless after a typhoon.  In the days of pirates, the Chinese trader anchored some ways from shore.  The native traders paddled out and came aboard to barter in safety on the deck of the junk.  Hunting edible birds’ nests was a thrilling feat that appealed to the adventurous Malay.  It meant descending a vine ladder down a cliff some 100 feet to get to the swallow’s nests, built on the narrow ledges.  The white man’s life in 1925 Singapore, as in other tropic parts, was easy and comfortable.  The British and American trading firms were all staffed, in the higher positions, by men from the home lands.  Servants were plentiful and cheap; office hours were fairly short.  The city enjoyed its race and athletic clubs, its amateur theatricals, and its social activities among the 3,000 to 4,000 whites.

Though a low-lying island, almost on the Equator, Singapore was not an unhealthful spot; in fact, infant mortality was so low that the town called the paradise for children.  Hounds and beagles, however, imported for hunting, did not do well, because of the heat.  Through the increase of radio and cable communications, the rise of huge industrial interests, and the phenomenal increase of wealth through rubber production, the care-free colonial life had been galvanized into swifter action.  There, as in other Eastern ports, the coming of the motor car had changed the whole aspect of life.  Good roads had been thrust around the island, and many traders had built their bungalows far from the business quarter of the port, out where, not so long before, tigers used to kill and eat the Chinese truck gardeners.  In 1925, a few deer and wild pigs were the only game animal on the island.  Yet the East met the West there in the same eternal contrast: In a Chinese theater a troupe from Canton performed, while across the street a modern movie house was packed with Malays and Tamils.  In the open street a rheumatic Hindu fakir was performing his magic; swearing ‘rikisha coolies, enraged at the invading auto, battled their way through the jostling crowd.  There, near the Equator, days and nights were about equal; toward dark the din of barter and sale subsided and the streets began to empty.  Chinese shopkeepers shuffled out to put up their shutters.  High above, the stars were hung out – the sprawling Scorpion and the majestic Southern Cross.  Long before 10 o’clock that magic, mongrel city of tin, trade, and turbulence was sound asleep.  In Singapore, as in all the East, the faint grayish light which preceded dawn saw the native early astir, shivering in the misty fog, seeking the nearest beach; his daily bath was a fixed institution.

Dawn there was strangely beautiful.  Transition from silent darkness to light – brilliant white and the murmur of awakening life – was swift and startling.  From behind the flat, oily Eastern Sea the big, round, hot sun leapt like a blazing ball.  Swiftly the fogs fled, the fresh coolness of the night departed.  The wet streets, newly sprinkled, soon were dry and dusty again, and seething, sweltering Singapore, greatest mart between Hongkong and Marseille, settled down to another sticky day of barter and trade.  Round about Singapore, on land and sea, the naturalist found a paradise.  As in all English settlements, the roads and trails were good, and it was easy to get about the island, and to visit the Chinese and Malay villages, the enchanted gardens, and even explore what was left of the jungle.  To the angler, Singapore’s noisy fish market offered not only a startling study of life in the Eastern seas, but it proved how many different types of edible fish there were in the ocean.  There, instead of wrapping paper, great green leaves were used.  The haggling and quarreling were positively picturesque.  No oriental din anywhere, not even in the Bagdad bazaars, could exceed the sunrise uproar in the Singapore fish market.  Hard by was the fruit and vegetable market, supplied by Chinese gardeners, who squatted about their stalls.  From Malaya came the famous “noisy rat,” a strange wild rodent rarely seen in captivity.  It was of a bright-chestnut color, with a big head and long, black tail, and much larger than the wharf rats of China.  Then there are the flying foxes, that hung all day body downward, holding on by their claws on the limbs of trees.  At nightfall they dropped off into the air and glided away to hunt, mingling with other bats that whirled and fluttered about at dusk.

There, too, because mosquitoes were hungry and determined, Nature was right on the job with her antidote, the aromatic citronella grass.  From it the people distilled an oil so pungent that even the hungriest of mosquito quickly quit his feeding ground.  Among the orchids were the “can plants,” with there cuplike traps, half filled with water and their lids partly raised, to trap prowling insects.  The more fragile, delicate orchids were grown under cover, otherwise the violent rains would destroy them.  The hibiscus and poinsettias could stand the hardest deluge, but many flowers lost their blossoms during torrential downpours.  Along those same waters one found that peculiar exhilarating fruit, the durian.  Strangely stimulating it was – “like a shot in the arm.”  American sailors declared – a fruit with a kick, a fruit that old Malays clamored for.  Another fruit, so very perishable that they were known only to the dwellers of the region, was the mangosteen.  In Queen Victoria’s time, rewards were offered to the navigator who successfully transported a mangosteen to London; but every effort failed.  As Shanghai had its Bubbling Well Road and Manila its Malecon, so Singapore had its famous Orchard Road, where the colony took the evening air.  And the hilly Botanical Gardens, thereabouts, afforded an incomparable study of the plant and tree families of Malaya.  Towering ferns and palms stood in giant bouquets, and in one pool floated a bed of sea roses and lotus flowers.  Among the sultans of Perak, hunting turtle eggs in the sand of river banks was an ancient enterprise.  In that sport the upper-class Malay ladies also took part.  A hundred miles up the Perak River, after the first heavy rains in December, turtles swarmed out on those sandy banks, dug nests two or three feet deep, and laid 15 to 30 eggs in each nest, leaving them to hatch on their own.

In the famous Raffles Museum at Singapore was a striking natural-history display, showing the animal, bird, and fish life of jungle and sea.  There were many specimens of the orangutan and apes of Farther India, wild buffaloes, a rhinoceros from Sumatra, tigers, leopards, Malay bears, civet cats, and a collection of strange, giant bats.  There were flocks of tropic birds, brilliant butterflies, crocodiles, and all sorts of reptiles and amphibians, together with spiders, crabs, starfish, and coral exhibits.  Probably no British institution was of more interest or value to the natives of Singapore, and on holidays the Chinese, Malays, and Tamils flocked in swarms to view those exhibits, chattering excitedly and showing far more enthusiasm than the average European visitor.  The author enjoyed a wading trip, at low tide, along one of the coral strands of Malacca Strait.  Beneath the clear, greenish sea water the coral plants displayed their form and color with a beauty which no brush or pen could every portray.  With a short pick they broke off huge pieces of coral rock.  When broken open, it revealed another phase of coral life.  Each honeycombed chunk proved the habitat of scores of small creatures: striped little fish, mollusks, slugs, and various tiny forms of marine life, to whom the crevices offered safety.  Few white men had known the real Malay.  Few spoke or wrote in the language or gain the confidence of the people.  An Englishman, Sir Frank Swettenham, described the Malay as a man deft with weapons, skillful in casting nets or handling the paddle, and with a courage and freedom from servility unusual in the East.  In playing games, he was quick and intelligent and showed good sportsmanship.  In his creed, loyalty took a high place, and to his friends he was always hospitable and generous.

It was considered bad form for a stranger to ask any Malay his name or where he was going.  But once you had his confidence, he would share his utmost secrets.  He was no money-maker.  The rush of the new era passed him by.  Rubber and tin booms in Malaya had made white men and Chinese rich, but no the Malay.  To him traders were tiresome persons, with no sense of humor or love of adventure.  Lazy as a Malay was, he could produce many beautiful and artistic things – hair ornaments, belt buckles, dagger sheaths wrought in gold and silver; scented bottles; and carvings in wood or ivory.  As warriors among themselves and ardent promoters of cock fighting, they had produced highly tempered knives and krises, and tiny but murderous spears that fit over the spurs of roosters.  They made wonderful shawls, plaited baskets, and vessels of beaten silver with trimmings of gold filigree.  But there, as elsewhere in the East, the advent of cheap European jewelry, cutlery, and cloth seemed to have diverted the native artisan from his ancient calling.  Even the striking native dress, the brilliantly figured sarong and the bright hand kerchief knotted into a head covering, was giving way to straw hats, white cotton pants, and shoes.  And instead of carrying a spear, the modern town Malay preferred an umbrella with a fancy handle.  From those Malays we borrowed the common phrase, to run amok.  When a Malay believed an injury had been done to him, an insult of dishonor which he could not live down, a fit of murderous madness seized him, and he grabbed the first weapon he saw and started killing.  Like certain Filipinos, the Malays were addicted to betel nut, which gave the lips a very reddish stain.  British officials said, however, that that practice was dying out in Malaya.

In Singapore high rent or scarcity of dwellings was felt not at all, for a Malay could build himself a suitable house in two or three days.  The Maley house was flimsily built of palm leaves or cane, usually with a split-bamboo floor, and a thatched roof.  It stood fie or six feet above the ground, on poles, leaving protection for pigs and chickens beneath.  The standard type included a tiny veranda in the front, one large room, and a kitchen shed.  Barring a few straw mats and crude kitchen utensils, there was no furniture at all.  A square hole with shutter propped open to let in light and air served as the only window.  Among the poorer classes, girls worked hard, helping with the planting and rice pounding.  Thanks to British rule, even the lower classes were able to attend school and could read and write.  Rice and orange blossoms were thrown at Malay weddings, just as they were in America.  Malay dancing girls were not recommended by the author, nor was the music, but the Malays liked it.  Malays seldom used chairs as we did; they simply knelt, then dropped back on their heels.  With the Malay, as with the Arab, Christian missionaries had made little progress.  Although the Malay was a Moslem by profession, he was very tolerant and believed that the absence of hypocrisy was the beginning of religion.  He had deep faith in God and the immortality of the soul, and his heaven was a happy land of ecstatic earthly delights.  Despite the new railways and the tin and rubber booms much of the Malay Peninsula was still unreclaimed.  Away back in Malacca dwelt the naked, primitive Sakai tribe who built rude nests in the tree tops and lived fruit and raw game, which they killed with blow-guns.  Those Sakais were so shy that they avoided all contact with other tribes, and practically nothing was known of their customs and origins.

Fanciful as it sounded, early settlers at Singapore were harassed as much from tigers from the jungle as American pioneers were by hostile Indians.  For years, hardly a week passed that someone from the colony was not killed and eaten by a tiger.  Three hundred were said to have perished in one particularly bad year.  Bounties were paid, pits were dug, and traps were baited with goats and dogs, their necks rubbed with poison.  Tigers, restless from having been hunted in Johore, had often crossed from the mainland to Singapore and had been seen swimming in the channel.  Malays believed that the tiger could change his form into that of a man, and that men with supernatural powers could take on the form of tigers.  They said, too, that big rats lived in the jungle, rats so big they could whip the panthers, and that alligators lured people to death by calling them down to the river bank, imitating the voices of friends and loved ones.  There, piracy was for generations the chief sport and main revenue of many a Malay clan.  The countless tiny islands, the bays, straits, mangrove swamps, and the many jungle-lined rivers gave perfect hiding for freebooters who preyed on the traffic through that famous trade route.  Bands of pirates actually lived in or near Singapore, where they got their powder and shot and their information on trade ship movements.  And to that port they often actually brought their booty for sale!  All through those waters the Malays still used the same type of craft built by the old pirates, and one saw the same sort of prahu in use in the southern Philippines.  It was a long, low boat, 40 or 50 feet over all, with a big, dirty mat sail and a rattan breastwork built up on each side to protect the crew of 25 to 30.  In old days, 8 or 9 sweeps were worked each side, manned sometimes by slaves, so their speed was considerable.

Those pirates wore their hair long and let it down loose around the shoulders when fighting to increase their ferocious appearance.  Many carried bamboo shields with their spears and krises, and such firearms as they could get.  They preyed chiefly on those ships which were becalmed, stranded, or otherwise disabled.  In a famous encounter, H. M. S. Albatross routed a fleet of more than 100 pirate prahus manned by 3,500 men!  In 1925, all suspected criminals were registered, and Singapore’s fingerprint system was said to be the best in the world.  The official who perfected it later went to New York on the same work.  If you went to Singapore by way of Colombo, the first land you raise was Penang Island, at the north end of the Malacca Strait.  Fringed with white sand beaches lined with palms, it lifted its wooded hills 2,500 feet above the sea, dotted with whitewashed cottages and villas, like the south coast of Portugal.  As your ship veered in from the north, the town of Penang fairly ran out to meet you.  Built, as it was, on a flat sand spit reaching out toward the Malay mainland on the east.  Penang, like Singapore, was the home of many rich, powerful Chinese.  Although lying not far from the paths of waterspouts, Indian Ocean tornados, and China Sea typhoons, Singapore itself suffered only an occasional “Sumatra,” as the sharp squalls in the strait were called.  Yet it well remembered the great volcanic disaster at Krakatoa, in the Strait of Sunda, when thousands perished and when a tidal wave 80 feet high swept the seas.  The annals of Singapore, covering a scant hundred years, were filled with events that loomed large in the modern story of the East.  During the Civil War the famous Alabama roamed the Malacca Strait, capturing and burning Union trading ships.  In those waters the German cruiser Emden sank a dozen Allies craft.

Once a British frigate hit a rock in that vicinity and sank within sight of a French gunboat.  The British admiral fired a salute to the French as his craft settled beneath the waves!  Henry M. Stanley spent some time there, the guest of an Arab sage.  The white man’s conquest of the East showed that wherever the Englishman settled he planted only as much of his own law and customs as was practicable, without arousing too much native opposition.  In Singapore, for example, polygamy among Malays and Chinese was recognized and the children of such unions were treated as legitimate.  Instead of kissing the Bible, a Malay witness might kiss the Koran.  But it was not always easy to cut off a rooster’s head, a rite insisted on by some Chinese when being sworn!  So, there in the strait, Raffles early declared that the principles of British law should be applied with patriarchal mildness and indulgent consideration for the prejudices of each tribe.  All native institutions, such as religious ceremonies, marriage, and inheritance, were respected, when not inconsistent with justice and humanity.  In that policy lied the secret of British colonizing success.

 

At the bottom of the last page of the first article in this issue (Page 269) there is a notice regarding change of address.  If a member wanted the magazine to be mailed somewhere else, the Society needed a month’s notice in advance, starting on the first of the month.  If a member wanted the April issue redirected, the Society needed to know by March first.

 

The second article listed on the cover of this month’s issue is entitled “The Land of Egypt” and was written by Alfred Pearce Dennis, Vice-Chairman, U. S. Tarriff Commission.  It has the internal subtitle: “A Narrow Green Strip of Fertility Stretching for a Thousand Miles Through Walls of Desert.”  The article contains twenty-eight black-and-white photographs, of which twelve are full-page in size.  One of those full-page photos serves as the frontispiece for this article.  The article also contains a sketch map of Egypt and Sudan on page 272.

Sketch Map courtesy of Philip Riviere

Americans who visited Egypt knew the country chiefly from the urban standpoint.  They saw through the eyes of the polite dragoman who escorted them about the streets of Cairo or Alexandria.  The man who sweat in the sun on his tiny farm was an entirely different creature.  His scale of living was of the meanest.  The peasant population huddled in villages within the confines of four mud walls, homes with no roofs – wretched cabins improvised out of Nile mud, windowless as well as roofless.  No modern pots and pans, none of the contrivances of modern times then went toward rendering life easy and comfortable.  We were accustomed to think of Egypt in terms of symbols – the Sphinx, Osiris, the Pyramids.  The country had been a happy hunting ground for the archeologists, and their revelations turned us back through the abysms of time to the contemplation of mysterious figures of the past, whether a sacred bull or King Tutankhamen.  [See: “At the Tomb of Tutankhamen,” May 1923, National Geographic Magazine.]  A country of wonders, no doubt; but to the writer’s mind the wonder of wonders was not the ancient relics dug from the earth, nor the mighty works of men’s hands erected upon its surface, but the soil itself – that longish strip of green fringing the Nile for the better part of one thousand miles.  Nature had dealt the land of Egypt a poor hand.  The country possessed no copper, no iron ore, no forests, no precious minerals, and no good steam coal.  The country lacked all the prime prerequisites of modern industrialism.  Agriculture was virtually the sole source of national wealth.  But even in that field the country was extremely limited.  Egypt was practically rainless and only one-twenty-fifth of the land was capable of cultivation.  Those fertile regions were sandwiched in between the Arabian and Libyan deserts.

While the area of Egypt, not including the Sudan, was 350,000 square miles, or about eight times the size of Pennsylvania, only a little more than 12,000 square miles were capable of cultivation.  Over that relatively small strip of habitable land the population swarmed, some 1,100 to the square mile, whereas the population of Belgium, the densest in Europe was 652 to the square mile.  Egypt was probably the most perfect and extensive farming laboratory that the world had yet seen.  From an agricultural standpoint, the country presented a spectacle of three uniformities – climate, soil, and moisture.  Except for the region near the north coast, the country was rainless and frosts were unknown.  The soil was the same, formed by the sediment from Nile water.  Uniformity was precisely the thing which the American farmer lacked.  The main factor in crop yields was the weather, and the weather was aways x, the unknown quantity.  The Egyptian solved his farming equation by knowing the value of x before he started.  With the American farmer, agriculture was more or less a gamble with Nature, whereas the Egyptian farmer bet on a certainty.  Farming in Egypt came nearer to being an exact science than in any other important country in the world.  The test of an exact science was predictability.  An eclipse of the moon was predicted to the minute many years ahead.  Given uniformity of soil, temperature, and moisture, the Egyptian farmer when he sowed his seed could predict almost with astronomical exactitude the results of his harvest overturned.  In Egyptian soil cultivation, mobility agriculture had gained through the production of raw cotton for export.  No purely farming country had ever become rich and prosperous until agriculture attained mobility.

By mobility was implied the capacity for exporting farm products in concentrated form.  The Danish farmer had grown rich and prosperous by exporting concentrated foods, such as bacon, butter, and eggs, to the British market.  [See: “Denmark and the Danes,” August 1922, National Geographic Magazine.]  Egypt, through the transition from the old basin system to the perennial system of irrigation, had become the world’s principal producer of long-staple cotton, and the export of the superior commodity had enabled two people to live in the Nile Valley where only one was able to live before.  It was a fluke of Nature that Egypt, a comparatively sterile and drought-beset country, was able to support from its soil its present population [in 1926] of nearly 14,000,000 people.  The ingenuity of man had contrived by art to supplement the gifts of Nature.  Nature ordained that the Nile should overflow once a year and flood the plains of the valley, bestowing at once the twin gifts of moisture and fertility.  When the flood had passed and the waters subsided, the farmer sowed his seed and grew his annual crop.  Traditionally and historically, it was either feast or famine in Egypt.  The ingenuity of man had harnessed the great river by holding back the flood of waters during the freshet season and doling out those supplies during the lean months of the year.  Through that device, streams of living water could be carried every month of the year to the roots of growing plants.  The great stone dam at Aswan was in reality the keystone of modern Egypt.  That huge rampart of masonry, which retained a 90-foot head of water, weighing 2,340,000 tons, was pierced at its foot by 180 sluicegates.  Those gates, kept wide open when the annual flood was coming down, late in the summer, were gradually closed when the crest of the flood had passed.

By January, the reservoir was full and remained so during February and March.  When the supply of water began to fail, in late spring and early summer, sluices were opened and stored water was added to the normal discharge.  Great barrages were thrown across the Nile farther downstream.  Those were masonry obstacles laid across the river’s course to raise the water to the level of the irrigation canals.  The Nile Barrage, a few miles below Cairo, could raise the water level for the irrigation of the entire Delta by as much as 20 feet.  Under the old system, the water had to be raised by muscular effort from the natural level of the river.  In 1925, gravity faithfully discharges a task it would require a million aching arms and backs to perform.  Perennial irrigation meant an all-year supply of water to the Egyptian farmer.  The huge volume of water required for irrigating the porous soils of the Delta under the blazing semitropical sun were about 20 tons per acre per day as a minimum.  Cotton-growing required 25 tons of water daily, while rice required 60 tons.  Man, and his works in Egypt had existed only by the grace of the river.  There had always been something mysterious about the annual rise of the Nile.  Such a seemingly slight thing as the reversal of winds that swept in summer across equatorial Africa from the Atlantic would cut off the annual flood and lay waste the richest agricultural valley in the world.  But while the annual floods had varied from time to time in volume, they had never in recorded history been entirely cut off.  The annual floods were as universally accepted as the rising and setting of the sun.  The ancient Egyptians could never explain the annual floods.  In 1925, we know the river came from two sources – the White and the Blue Nile, which met at Khartoum forming the great River Nile.

The sources of the Nile were dual – one constant, the other variable.  The White Nile found a catchment basin in a series of lakes, of which the greatest was Victoria.  That lake was some 2,500 miles by river to the Mediterranean.  The supply of water from the White Nile was fairly constant and furnished the Nile with about the volume of water at mean low ebb.  From time immemorial, prosperity depended upon the floods.  That blessed overflow was the result of other Nile sources.  The Blue Nile and the River Atbara found their catchment basins in the highlands of Abyssinia.  Late in the summer that region was drenched with torrential rains, caused by the mountains intercepting the equatorial winds off the Atlantic.  Then the Blue Nile and the Atbara rose some 25 to 30 feet, and some weeks later those freshet waters appeared in Egypt as the annual inundation of the Nile.  That so-called “red water” from the Abyssinian highlands not only supplied moisture, but also fertility to the soils of Egypt.  There were soils in Egypt that had been cropped continuously for six thousand years without need of fertilizers.  The Egyptian farmer was shifting to grow berseem, a type of clover, to maintain fertility by restoring nitrogen to the soil.  The Nile was longer than the Amazon or Mississippi.  The Nile was the only river that for more than a thousand miles had no tributaries.  The volume of water at Berber was much greater than at Cairo, 1,300 miles downstream.  In that long journey, both earth and air exacted their toll with no compensation from rain or tributary.  In 1826, the population of Egypt was 2,500,000.  By 1886 it was 6,800,000.  In 1926 it had doubled to 13,600,000.  The pressure of that rapidly expanding population upon the limited agricultural area was the most important factor in the economy of modern Egypt.

The process of land subdivision was accelerated by Mohammedan law and custom, under which no man may give real estate to any one of his children to the exclusion of the others.  No man could dispose of his estate except on the basis of equal distribution to his children.  As a consequence, the land was minutely subdivided.  Whereas twenty acres and a mule was a standard for our Southern States, two acres with no mule was a fair average for a family of Egyptian cotton growers.  About three and a half acres represented the average Egyptian farm.  Practically all the work of soil tillage was done by hand.  Something like a double fixed labor charge rested upon the land through the need for irrigation.  The Egyptian peasant lived very much like our Southern Negro of cotton plantations.  Two staple foods among the latter were corn and sweet potatoes.  That was also true for the Egyptian peasant, who could grow his corn the year around.  The Egyptian sweet potato was a gross, insipid thing and was good for filler rather than flavor.  The modern Egyptian farmer displayed a tireless capacity for muscular effort, but he hardly knew the taste of meat.  He stood, in the matter of diet and agricultural technique, about where his ancestors were in the age of the Pharaohs.  King Cheops spent 1,600 talents of silver ($1,700,000) on radishes, onions, and garlic roots for the 100,000 men who labored for three months every summer for thirty years constructing the Great Pyramid.  That product of human brawn and muscle, reared some 58 centuries prior, required about 2,300,000 separate blocks of stone averaging around 2½ tons each.  Those heavy stones were quarried, transported across the Nile Valley, heaved up into place on the edge of the plateau marking the beginning of the Libyan Desert, and laid true.

The Egyptian farmer was a conservative, both in the matter of diet and in the methods he employed for cultivating the soil.  Egypt, despite 6,000 years of civilization, had not risen from the primitive agricultural stage of society.  The age of industrialism was yet to be.  Agricultural progress lagged unbelievably.  At Sakkara was seen the excavated home of the wealthy farmer Ti, who flourished some 2,700 years before Christ.  His home was embellished with murals depicting his agricultural activities.  One showed the threshing of grain.  The job was done on a threshing floor precisely the way it was carried out in 1926.  Another scene depicted the plowing of Ti’s estate with bullock-drawn wooden implements.  Ti’s plow had two handles; the operator walking behind it, guided it true, much as the modern American steel plow.  The modern Egyptian plow was also made of wood and drawn by bullock or camel but was guided by a single wooden upright rather than by two handles, and the operator walk beside the plow rather than behind it.  It was obvious that in 46 centuries that had elapsed since the days of Ti the operation of the plowing had not only made no progress but had actually suffered retrogression.  The Egyptian stuck to what had been accepted by his forefathers in the food he ate, in the way he cultivated his land, and even in the compliments he dispensed.  Much depended upon etiquette and ceremony.  Ceremonial observances the world over were the last to change in the altered conditions of a changing world.  Despite the fact that the Egyptian farmer had little to worry about in the way of soil or climate, the author doubted that his lot was one whit easier than his ancestors, who sweated in the sun 5,000 years prior, lifting water from the River Nile.

Modern engineering had hitched up gravity to do the work of tens of thousands of water-lifters, but modern Egyptian farming pivoted around the cultivation of cotton, and making a cotton crop in the Nile Valley was no easy job.  While the cotton plant required abundant water, it was a deep-rooted plant and the water level in the porous soil could rise to high and drowned it.  Another drawback to cotton growing was a little maggot known as the pink bollworm.  Nature had produced two worms that affected silk production – the silk worm who produced it, and the pink bollworm who destroyed it.  Modern science struggled ineffectively to rid Egypt of that insect pest.  The desperate need of the Egyptian peasant for fuel had something to do with the lack of success fighting the worm.  Egypt had no forests, so the farmer used dried cotton stalks for fuel.  The hoarding of stalks carried infected bolls over from one season to the next.  And the Egyptian women, in those rustic huts improvised of Nile mud, how little we knew about them!  What was going on in their minds?  The author had never seen one smile, nor gesticulate, nor fly into a temper.  Not one in twenty could read or write.  To them, life brought nothing unexpected, the same old thing over and over again.  Five thousand years before, similar men and women performed exactly the same tasks – dull, unimaginative, uninstructive lives.  The Egyptian woman’s philosophy of life was one of resignation – It was Destiny.  It was doubtful whether all the labor-saving machinery ever invented had lightened the toil of a single man.  Modern inventions increased production and enabled more people to live. But people still lived laboriously and painfully.  It had been said that modern irrigation and the cultivation of cotton had enabled two people could live in the Nile Valley where only one could exist before.

But it was doubtful whether the modern Egyptian lived better or more comfortably than did his forefathers in the time of the Pharaohs.  Perhaps those illiterate people, who were without public diversion or amusements, would someday have a new heaven and earth opened to them through music, the universal language, or through motion pictures.  Motion pictures had already found a vogue in some of Egypt’s larger cities.  American films predominated.  Westerns thrilled the Egyptian, who was as simple as a child.  It was hardly fair to remark that the native Egyptian woman had no public amusements.  Certainly, she had one pleasure, namely, wearing jewelry.  To her, jewelry represented the ultimate power of applied wealth.  There were more jewelry shops in Cairo than any other city of its size in the world.  There were reasons outside of vanity why popular taste ran to jewelry.  The Mohammedan law forbade lending money at interest.  The peasant was suspicious of banks.  There were no industrial undertakings to attract investment.  Consequently, savings were either buried or invested in jewelry.  Land had always been favored for investment, but the price of farmlands was, in 1926, bid up above sound investment levels.  It was no uncommon to find an Egyptian heiress carrying her entire fortune displayed in the form of anklets, bracelets, and rich festoons which, when strung from neck and shoulder, descended in opulent strings upon the person.  Hard by the Mediterranean shores had dwelt old peoples, dead empires, leaving only relics behind of their bygone greatness, like the fossil remains of huge extinct animals.  The Mediterranean shores are littered with the fossil remains of swollen successes, of booms that had waxed and waned – Carthage, Tyre, Nineveh, Syracuse, Troy.

In Egypt, the symbolic figure was the man who sat.  The shopkeeper sat, the opera singer sat.  Business was done sitting in a café.  A thing had to be because of the absolute need for it.  The multitude of sitters in Egypt called for the presence of a multitude of settees.  The settee was the most indispensable, the most popular, the most widely distributed article of household furniture in all the land of the Nile.  Man, named Mohammed, took them out on afternoon to view the sights of the city.  On the way to Saladin’s Citadel, they passed a powerful-looking man sitting upon a wayside ledge of rock.  He was a holy man.  The man appeared to be a symbol of his race – of people who had sat through the centuries.  They had seen the great empires of the Greeks and Romans fall to pieces; Ninevah and Tyre wiped out, Carthage destroyed, the Jews dispersed, Babylon become a geographical name.  Those sitting people had been overrun by invaders through the centuries – the Shepherd Kings, Libyan, Ethiopian, Assyrian rulers, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, French, Turks, and, in 1926, the British.  The Egyptian sat through the storm.  The enduring quality of the man who sat!  The typical, the symbolic, ancient stone figures were those of huge sitting men – the Colossi on Memnon, the giant figures in front of the rock-hewn temple of Abu-Sibel.  It was safe to wager that these figures had a fairish longevity ahead of them and would be sitting unchanged for a long time to come.  And so, it was on the human side.  In a universe of flux and change, one of the unchanging things was the human laborer in the valley of the Nile.  Here were a people that for five thousand years had never lost its homogeneity.  Here was the undigested human atom – the half-naked peasant, sweating in the sun, attacking the soil.

It was hard for the traveler who followed the beaten paths to get away from the idea that Egypt was an outworn country, a land of dead hopes, a land of memories rather than a land with a future.  About the thin the tourist did on arrival in Cairo was to drive out to Giza, on the edge of the Libyan Desert, to see the Pyramids and the Sphinx.  Was there a scene of greater desolation in all the world?  The Pyramids themselves were colossal sepulchers.  As far as the eye could reach unfolded a panorama of dead cities, one necropolis after another stretching endlessly to the south.  On the edge of the sun-scorched sands lied all that was left of myriads of men who had loved, hated, toiled, hungered, and feasted; and who, having ended their lives on this planet, were brought here.  The despotic King Cheops reared here the most massive tomb that the world had ever seen, a stupendous safe-deposit vault for the preservation of his own precious corpse.  The tomb had been rifled of its contents.  The desert crowded to the very gate of the thousand-mile garden strip.  In a five-minute walk one passed from sun-drenched barren sand to shimmering water, waving palm trees, and growths of maize and sugar cane as luxuriant as a tropical jungle.  On the human side, fullness of life everywhere; myriads of strong, eager, half-naked toilers laboring in the sun.  Moist, fecund, flowering Mother Earth steaming in the sunshine; death, dust, and desert on either side.  Wonderful had been the place in human history of that narrow green strip of the earth’s surface; wonderful it remained in 1926 – the Land of Egypt.

 

 

The third article in this month’s is entitled “A Naturalist with MacMillan in the Arctic” and was written by Walter N. Koelz, Ph. D., Department of Zoology, University of Michigan; Staff of the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries.  The article has no illustrations listed on the cover, but it does reference the twenty-two color photographs that appear on the sixteen contiguous plates embedded within the article and listed separately on the cover.  Those color photos will be discussed later.  The natural-history specimens collected by Dr. Koelz in the Far North included 1,000 fishes of some 25 species; 800 birds, representing some 70 species; 250 collections of plants, comprising 1,000 specimens; and miscellaneous collection of invertebrates, including insects, mollusks, and echinoderms.

As the naturalist of the MacMillan Arctic Expedition of 1925, under the auspices of the National Geographic Society, it was the author’s privilege to explore perhaps the most interesting portion of the Arctic Regions – the western coast of the earth’s largest island, which extended 1,500 from north to south, with an average width of 600 miles.  Yet in all of Greenland’s area of more than 800,000 square miles there was little land!  The interior was occupied by a dome of ice the edges of which in many cases came to the ocean, and even where the land fringe was the widest there was only a strip or some 100 miles between the sea and the eternal ice-cap.  [See: “Map of the Arctic Regions,” November 1925, Supplement to the National Geographic Magazine.]  A great ice mass jutted out from the island into Melville Bay and separated the west coast into two grand areas.  To the north lived the Smith Sound Eskimos; to the south were the Danish settlements.  For more years than history recorded, the northern Eskimos had been out of contact with their relatives to the south, where the European influence had wrought many changes.  In the face of the scenic grandeur of the west coast, one forgot that Erik the Red some thousand years prior anticipated the advertising methods of modern real estate when he named the country Greenland.  But Eric’s name was not merely euphonious, for many green things grew there.  The flora of southwest Greenland was very rich, and the herbage was often luxuriant.  Some 400 species of plants, belonging to about 50 families, were found on the island.  In sheltered valleys plants were little stunted, and the willows, birches, and alders grew waist-high or taller; but where conditions were not tempered, one and all must hug the earth.  In the milder regions Orchids, Violets, Lilies, Peas, Parleys, and Conifers flourished.

Some hundred miles above the Arctic Circle, those flowers disappeared, except on Disko Island, 200 miles above the Circle, where small colonies of flowers were found.  Berries were gathered for food in Greenland as in Labrador, and all shrubby growth was collected for fuel, while turf was cut to wall the houses or to serve as roofing.  The natives had no interest in “greens” to relieve their diet of meat, and the dandelions which grew in many valleys were not gathered, but the stalk of a wild parsnip was eaten and even made into a sort of wine.  Man would be hard pressed to support himself in the Far North if it were not for the mammals of the sea.  The Eskimo turned to the sea for food for himself and his dogs.  From the Walrus he got meat and tools for the chase, from the Seal and the Bear he got meat and clothing, and from the Narwhal, or Sea Unicorn, meat and the sinew which served the women as thread.  Whale meat was much esteemed by the Eskimo.  To support those great creatures and its myriads of birds, the sea must teem with food.  Fish north of Etah were quite rare, but at Etah the Trout ran into the streams, and Sculpins and even the sluggish Shark were found.  Among the rocks at low tide, a queer, slippery little black fish, that suggested the Bullhead, was often seen.  Tiny Jellyfish clouded the waters and among them the winged Snails fanned their way.  On the bottom, near shore, Snails and Shrimp occurred, and in deeper water there were a host of Starfish, Clams, and Worms.  The Clams must in places strew the ocean floor, for on them fed the Walrus herds.  South of Melville Bay, Flounders swarmed in shallow water where the bottom was sandy.  On the banks offshore abounded the Flounder’s gigantic cousin, the Halibut.  From distant Norway came the fishermen to seek it.  The Danes also fished for Halibut.

The birds were principally of the sea, and their numbers were legion but not often were many species to be seen in one place.  Anything with feathers had potential food value to the Eskimos.  The author salvaged specimens of Gulls, Hawks, Loons and Ravens from the cooking pot.  The Eiders were of all Arctic birds the most appreciated, and so severely had the species suffered from popularity that laws had accorded them some protection.  Not only did Eider flesh, down, and eggs figure in the Greenlander’s economy, but also the skins had high value.  Exquisite Eider robes were made of those skins, which were also fashioned into useful clothing.  The flocks of graceful little Sea Swallows, or Arctic Terns, which flew along the shores and dove into the waves for their food, did not attract the hunters.  From the Arctic regions, where it bred, the bird flew to the Antarctic, where it wintered.  Its 11,000-mile migratory course was unknown.  No other migratory bird flew so far and no creature on earth saw so much daylight.  [See: “Our Greatest Travelers: Birds that Fly from Pole to Pole,” April 1911, National Geographic Magazine.]  On land the birds were few, and only four kinds, three species of Sparrows and the ominous Raven, were commonly seen.  In the interior nested the Ptarmigan, the Grouse of Greenland.  Gray or brown in the summer, it turned snowy white in winter, when it flocked to the shore.  That winter visit was often fatal, for the natives expected the birds and slaughtered what they could for food.  The Ptarmigan had another enemy in the snowy Gyrfalcon, a large, swift and fearless hawk.  Among the Ptarmigan nesting on the hills bred the little Snowflake and the Redpolls, whose brilliant songs enlivened the Arctic spring.  The Brunnich’s Murre and the Sea Pigeon were common but did not compare in numbers with the Dovekie (Little Auk).

Where Dovekies bred, north of Melville Bay, the sky was filled with the flocks going to sea to feed or coming home.  With a net on a pole the native caught those birds out of the air and stored the flesh for winter.  From the skin of the breasts his underwear was fashioned.  Melville Bay guarded the way to the Far North, and only the summer traveler might hope to pass.  The drift ice encountered to the south was often blue, but here everything was white.  Ice fields might stretch for miles ahead or fog might shut down upon struggling ships.  A snow-white bird, the Ivory Gull, flew silently through the snowy haze like the embodiment of its spirit, and over the frozen waste roamed the Polar Bear.  Ice-decked peaks at length loomed beyond the dreary stretch; then the landscape smiled again and Nature treated the traveler to the loveliest spectacle of the Arctic.  In the ocean there was no longer pack ice, but only the occasional iceberg.  Steep from the ocean rose cliffs whose rocks the spring sun clothed with plant life, causing the landscape to take on colors.  The predominant tones were brilliant orange, which shades through purple into black.  Mosaicked into that brilliant groundwork were patches of green where grass grew thick.  The summer snow took on color, too, and large patches were stained a lovely pink where hordes of microscopic plants flourished on its melting surface.  This was the “red snow” which Arctic travelers had often seen.  Back from the cliffs the land had gentler slopes, for there the ice in ages past had scoured harshly, and plants of many kinds were found.  More than a hundred species of vascular plants were found in northwest Greenland and more than half that number lived in Peary Land, the Ultima Thule of the Northern Hemisphere.  There, there was no asylum from the winter winds, and the willows kept to the ground.

Few plants had stems and the tallest summer growth hardly exceeded a foot.  Many of the flowers found in that distant land were like some the author knew from home, 3,000 miles away.  Mustards, Pinks, and Saxifrages, a dozen kinds or more of each, and Buttercups and Roses, with five or six kinds each, grew everywhere, and their pinks, whites, yellows, or purples made the landscape bright.  But the brightest spots were where the flaming Lousewort and the yellow Poppies grew.  The dandelion and the Bluebell were also common flowers, and in favorable places there were fine growths of Timothy hay.  Although the plants on Greenland were Lilliputian, there were giants in the surrounding icy waters.  The familiar Rockweed, with its juicy little bladders, was found on the bottom, and in times of famine was gathered for food.  The plant wonder of the Arctic was the Giant Kelp, which grew in beds in deep water.  Fasten by adhesive disks to some rock, its huge ribbon, 20 feet or more long, waved about in the tidal currents.  There were also Insects and Spiders, but none were ever troublesome.  Butterflies flitted about, Bumblebees droned through the air, and Gnats and Flies buzzed about, while Spiders came out of cracks to bask on leaves.  Mice and the like did not exist except in the extreme north of Greenland.  There were no Snakes or Frogs.  Foxes of the region subsisted on   nesting birds.  Hares alone were numerous.  Young Hares were gray and were not timid, and a good shot with a rifle sometimes bagged one.  The life of man in that polar land was harsh and strenuous.  The animals on which he depended for food traveled far and were often beyond his reach.  In darkness he spent the dreary winter and only for a few months did summer vary the scene of ice and snow.  Yet nowhere had Nature more honest, unselfish, or contented children.

 

At the bottom of the last page of the third article (page 318) is a notice with the heading “Index for July-December, 1925, Volume Ready”.  The one-line text of the notice states “Index for Volume XLVIII (June-December, 1925) will be mailed to members upon request.”

 

The fourth item listed on the cover of this month’s issue is entitled “The First Natural-Color Photographs from the Arctic” and has Jacob Gayer and Maynard Owen Williams in the byline.  It is not an article but “22 Autochromes” on “Sixteen Pages of Illustrations in Full Color” that are referenced by the preceding article.  These autochromes are true color photographs appearing on a set of sixteen contiguous plates numbered from I to XVI in Roman numerals and representing pages 301 through 316 in the issue.  Of the twenty-two color photos, ten are full-page in size while the remaining twelve are half-page in size appearing on the remaining six plates.

A list of Caption Titles for the color photos with their associated plate number is as follows:

• “An Iridescent Belle of Greenland” – Plate I
• “The Quiet Waters of Etah Harbor Rival the Blue of the Midsummer Arctic Skies” – Plate II
• “A Sapphire Cliff Lifts Its Head from a Cobalt Sea” – Plate III
• “Sukkertoppen, the Venice of Greenland” – Plate IV
• “Preparing Halibut for Canning” – Plate IV
• “The Arctic Dweller Delights in Vivid Colors” – Plate V
• “The Family’s Winter Supply of Meat Nailed to the House” – Plate V
• “Studying “Red Snow”” – Plate VI
• “A Relic Left by Medieval Norsemen” – Plate VI
• “Baby Rides to Church” – Plate VII
• “Shopping for Bread in Sukkertoppen” – Plate VII
• “A Colorful Greenland Glen” – Plate VIII
• “Greenland Graces” – Plate IX
• “Hillside Bowlders in North Greenland Painted with Colors of Flames by Growing Lichens” – Plate X
• “The Midnight Sun Bathes the Cliffs of an Arctic Fiord in a Glow of Bronze and Purple” – Plate XI
• “Chistina of Holstensborg” – Plate XII
• “Watching for Walrus” – Plate XIII
• “A Native Dwelling of SukkenToppen” – Plate XIII
• “Her Summer “Villa” Beside the Sea” – Plate XIV
• “Bearing a Forest on Her Back” – Plate XIV
• “The Coruscant Splendor of an Arctic Landscape” – Plate XV
• “A Bashful Bootmaker” – Plate XVI

 

 

The fourth article (fifth and last item) listen on this month’s cover is entitled “Transylvania and Its Seven Castles” and was written by J. Theodore Marriner, Ph. D., Secretary of Embassy of the U. S. of A.  The article had the internal subtitle: “A Motor Circuit Through Rumania’s New Province of Racially Complexity and Architectural Charm.”  The article contains nineteen black-and-white photographs; only one of which is full-page in size.  Among its thirty illustrations there are also sixteen full-page duotones which will be discussed later.  Lastly, the article contains a sketch map of Rumania on page 323.

Sketch Map courtesy of Philip Riviere

Rumania always was a land of contrast, geographically, socially, and historically, but since the great accretions to her territory that had come about as a result of the World War the contradictory elements within her borders were even more striking.  She contained an epitome of the history of Europe from Roman times to the present [in 1926], and people and places illustrative of each stage were found side by side within her confines.  One might see on the same day a shepherd in a long fleece cape; a fiery nomadic gypsy galloping along a dusty road; a peasant like a Roman soldier; a nobleman in his castle gazing down into a medieval Saxon village; and an oil magnet spending his money amid Bucharest’s imitative charms.  Many of those contrasts were inherent within the prewar boundaries and all of them in much enlarged postwar Rumania, due to the addition of Transylvania to the kingdom.  That was because Transylvania had been the frontier of the West against the East for centuries.  Its inhabitants had successfully maintained that border against the Turks since 1700, and its history of border wardenship had given the region its racial complexity and architectural charms.  Nowhere in Europe was the sense of pleasant remoteness more keenly felt than in that district.  Though little known to a traveling public, it was part of the stuff that all our dreams were made of, through such novels as “The Prisoner of Zenda” and “Graustark,” which were laid near one of the Seven Castles which were quartered on the arms of greater Rumania.  Those towns were Brasov, Bistrita, Cluj, Sebesul Sasesc, Sibiu, Medias, and Sighisoara.  They were settled by Germans from Franconia, who were locally called Saxons.  They maintained a close connection with their mother country and efficiently kept the Carpathian frontier.

They had the cooperation of the Szeklers, close kinsmen of Magyars who had settled along the northern portion of the mountain wall.  Back of those warders the mass of Magyar farmers and Rumanian laborers, foresters, and shepherds tilled the fertile valleys between the rolling foothills of the Carpathians.  It was that mountain wall that accounted for the history of Transylvania – a jagged, glorious barrier that dominated the landscape.  The Rumanian knew that beyond those heights the brothers of his race ruled, while the Magyar wished that they had been higher and untraversable.  Yet, had the mountains been impenetrable, Transylvania would have been neither so picturesque nor so rich.  Fear of the Turks accounted for the walled towns, fortified churches, and great castles.  Trade with the East accounted for the prosperity of the guilds in Brasov and other towns, as well as the beauty of such structures as the Black Church, with its priceless collection of prayer rugs.  All those influences on the West were exerted by the Turk through the four passes of the Carpathians at Buzau, Predeal, Bran, and the Turnu Rosiu, the first three being mountain defiles, difficult to access and easy to defend.  The last was a river valley, the principal thoroughfare since Roman days.  Transylvania, due to its geographic situation, like a natural fortress on the borders of Europe, had been semi-independent from early times, and was a grand principality under Hungary.  Since 1868, it was an integral part of Hungary.  Prior to that date, Transylvania changed hands many times, first being semi-independent portions of kingdoms, settled with Teutonic knights and Saxon colonists to keep the border against the heathen.  That situation continued for about two centuries, when it became practically autonomous under Turkish sovereignty from 1526 to 1699.

In 1699, Leopold I of Austria regained Transylvania as a part of Hungary.  In 1849, it was separated from Hungary and was an Austrian Crown land.  The province was reintegrated to Hungary in 1868.  It remained in that status until 1918.  As a result of the peace treaties following the World War, and because a large portion of the inhabitants were Rumanian in race and language, the province became part of Rumania.  The best way to fully enjoy Transylvania was to approach it from the east via the road from Bucharest to Sinaia, across the dusty plain, up the slopes of the Carpathian, past artificial folklore castles, to the ancient frontier of Transylvania, at the top of the pass at Predeal.  Emerging from the narrow valley on a high plateau, there was spread before one a view of receding foothills and expanding plain of Transylvania.  Over the brow of the hill the works of man and the aspects of Nature changed.  The macadam road, with granite retaining walls, descended in seven even hairpin turns beside a brook.  Infrequent cottages of stucco and freshly painted were passed, in contrast to the mud huts on the other side of the pass.  In about a half an hour from Predeal, the mountain gave way to the fertile plain which surrounded Brasov.  That town of some 60,000 had been suggested as a capital for the new and greater Rumania.  It had much to recommend it, being almost in the center of the country, easily defended. Having the charm of age and tradition, and room for expansion in the surrounding plain.  The city glistened in the sun as the car coasted from the Predeal Pass into the suburbs.  Wide mountainous streets were lined with neatly painted blue and yellow one-story houses.  The streets narrowed toward the center of town and led to King Ferdinand Square in which stood the Renaissance Town Hall.

In the square were held the markets, which brought together a rich variety of racial and national types.  The burghers of the town were Saxons who had been settled in the city for 600 years.  The present-day [1926] citizens looked like German university students in stiff-cut clothes, blond with blue eyes.  The prosperous farmer folk from nearby agricultural villages drove into town in springless carts, dressed in a national costume which had remained unchanged for six centuries.  The men wore full-length, flaring, single-breasted coats of dark blue, heavily braided across the chest, with a small, flat, soft hat.  The everyday attire of the women was a tight bodice of dark color, flaring skirts, and many petticoats of another dark shade braided in brilliant hue.  If married they bound their hair, concealing it in a silk handkerchief, on top of which was perched a sailor hat.  On holidays that costume was exchanged for heavy damask with a long white apron and a silver-gilt belt.  That silver-gilt work was the principal handicraft of the Saxon population, and some fine specimens could be seen in the Museum opposite the Black Church, which dominated the town.  The church got its name from the fact that it was burned in 1689 and never properly scoured since.  It was a good example of fifteenth-century Gothic, without any towers.  Even with the Reformation’s removal of all stained glass and images, it was still a colorful sight, due to the collection of oriental rugs which hug over the balconies, the back of the choir stalls, and decorated the pulpit and chancel.  There were more than 200 pieces in that collection, and most were in excellent condition.  The chancel was lined with prayer rugs with ruby-red centers.  The pulpit and pastor’s seats were backed by the same type of rug with deep-blue center panels.  That church housed one of the finest collections of rugs in the world.

The other architectural feature of the town as the castle which crowned a hill just north of center – a fortress with picturesque walls built in 1553 to defend the city.  In 1926 it was used as a military school.  The promenade along the terrace before the castle afforded a magnificent view across the Burzen plain.  With Brasov as a center, one explored the Saxon and Szekler regions at the base of the mountains.  Southward lied the Saxon town of Rasnov, over which towered the massive ruin of Burgberg.  There was no approach by road to that giant fortress, but a sharp climb brought one to what was a little city enclosed within the great walls of the castle, who’s massive keep still dominated the plain.  That once populous village was inhabited by a single farmer and his wife.  Beyond Rasnov they continued into a narrowing valley toward the pass at Bran.  Just where the mountain walls almost met, a little knoll with the river and road curving sharply at its base was topped by the castle Bran.  That, perhaps the most fairytale castle in the region, hung above the little Rumanian village, intimate yet aloof.  The castle’s five towers were grouped around a small court, in whose center a well pierced the hill for 150 feet to water.  There were no interior corridors, but carved wooden galleries clinging to the ramparts led from tower to tower on different levels.  The Queen had her apartment in one tower, while Princess Heana occupied the round tower overhanging the roadway, reminiscent of the plight of all fairytale princesses, within waving distance of the world.  The castle was furnished with copies of medieval tables and chairs.  The floors were strewn with bear-skin rugs.  As a contrast, there were occasional Persian rugs, a result of being on the trade route with the East.  Such contrast must have existed when the castle was built in the thirteenth century.

North of Brasov stretched the road to Bistrita, the second of the seen castle towns to be visited in a motor circuit of Transylvania.  First, they skirted fertile plains largely given over to wheat cultivation by Saxons and Szeklers.  One of the finest specimens of fortified church in the whole plain was found at Toarcla, where in olden days, upon hearing an alarm of a Turkish raid, the whole population could gather.  There was a well within the walls.  North from Toarcla, forests commenced again, and in the narrowing valley was an old bathing establishment at Tusnad, once well known for its curative waters.  They passed the night at a small mountain resort called Toplita, charming, but deserted.  As they started next morning for the town of Bistrita, they learned the complexities of language in Transylvania firsthand.  [See” “The Battle-line of Languages in Western Europe,” February 1923, National Geographic Magazine.]  All towns had three names – in German, in Romanian, and in Hungarian.  Depending on which language a peasant spoke, one had to use the correct name when asking directions.  Their difficulties were caused by each nationality clinging to its own version of place names.  After passing through Reghinul Sasesc, they arrived toward nightfall at Bistrita, about 200 miles from Brasov and in the middle of a mountain-girdled plain, the northernmost Saxon outpost.  It clustered about an ancient Protestant church.  This was the first stop of the caravans coming over the Buzeu Pass, and the church contained a collection of rugs similar but inferior to that at Brasov.  The ruins of the ancient castle of Hunyadi Janos crowned the hill which commanded the roadway to the pass, about three miles from the town.  Through beautiful mountain scenery the route continued via Dej 50 miles, to Cluj, stronghold of Magyar sentiment.

At Cluj, before the World War, Transylvanian aristocracy maintained palaces and held a reunion in the autumn and spring between the isolation of their remote castles and the metropolitan atmosphere of Budapest.  There, too, the best youth of the region attended the university.  It was rated second in Rumania as to facility and perhaps first in library and equipment.  Although Cluj was the shrine of Magyar-ism in Transylvania, its native hero, Matthias Corvinus, was claimed by the Rumanians as one of their own as Matieu Corvin.  Enroute south from Cluj to the fourth of seven towns, Sebesul Sasesc, they passed through its more important neighbor, Alba Iulia, whose imposing citadel the author first visited in October 1922, to attend the coronation of the King and Queen of Rumania.  The Romanesque Cathedral of St. Michael crowned the fortress hill, approached across three moats through three heavily carved archways.  The ancient church was flanked by a beautiful but incongruous coronation church in the Rumanian style.  Ther was little cause to linger at Sebesul Sasesc, except, perhaps, to taste the excellent wine from the nearby hills and to view the church, a mixture of Gothic and Romanesque.  There were few traces of the ancient fortifications, and the town was like a village asleep in a fairytale.  Thence to Sibiu was a run of about 40 miles, through a fertile and thickly settled plain, with heavy crops of wheat and maize.  Sibiu was perhaps the oldest settlement in Transylvania, being identified with Cicinium, a Roman town established in the time of Trajan, when Transylvania was Rome’s El Dorado, from which came much of its gold.  Many of the veins worked at that time still produced gold, and more than $14,000,000 was mined in Transylvania in 1921, including the pale gold from which the Queen’s crown was made.

Sibiu’s Roman ruins had been completely superseded by medieval walls, towers, and palaces.  It was a town built on a gigantic plan its wide spaces, towers, moats, squares, cathedrals, and palaces all being designed for nonexistent crowds.  Its 30,000 inhabitants could easily live in one quarter the space the town occupied.  Sibiu seemed to have been conceived as a setting for a Wagnerian opera.  In 1926, Sibiu remained more Saxon than Saxony, and neither the Hungarian culture formerly imposed, nor the Rumanian now enjoyed, seemed to have any effect on its Germanic flavor.  The cathedral, with its monumental effigies of the long-dead burghers, was well worth a visit.  An excellent collection of early Dutch and Flemish paintings in the Brunkenthal Museum, formerly the palace of the governor of Transylvania.  North from Sibiu they drove toward Medias, the sixth of the seven towns.  Enroute, they stopped at an orchard farmhouse for a glass of milk.  In lieu of payment, the old wife asked if they would give her daughter and granddaughter a ride to town.  They agreed; the shy young woman got in clutching her baby; and they started toward town.  The old city contained little of note save a fortified church and an ancient gateway, formerly part of the fortifications.  They got the girl home; as they drew up before her dwelling two of her neighbors peered from their windows, and their guest hastened her tanks for the first automobile ride in her life, to escape the prying eyes of the neighborhood gossips.  They approached the last in the circle of seven castle towns, Sighisoara, toward sunset.  Its walled citadel, battlements, and turreted clock tower were outlined against a glowing sky, while the more modern town at the foot of the hill was lost in shadows.

It was a small city which overflowed some 200 years prior from the narrow confines of the enclose citadel that still housed [in 1926] a goodly number of the 11,000 inhabitants who made all journeys on foot, as no vehicles could reach the summit.  The fifteenth century castle church crowning the hill was built for strength rather than beauty, but had attained a rugged charm, with its thick wall and slit-like Gothic windows. Sighisoara was 65 miles from Brasov, the starting point of their journey, and was perhaps the least touched by modernity of those seven cities which had played so large a part in the history of Transylvania.  For that reason, they determined to conclude their tour of the province in that city, which united the charms of all the others.

 

 

As mentioned above there is a set of sixteen full-page duotones that, while included in the count of illustrations for the last article, were not specified as duotones.  These transfers, embedded in the last article, appear on pages 333 through 348 in the issue.  Duotones, formerly called photogravures use acid-etched metal plates and special ink to imprint the image to paper.  The ink used in this batch of duotones has a strong brownish tinge.

 List of the caption titles for the sixteen duotones is as follows:

• “A Transylvanian Type of village Smithy”
• “Horns That Have Been Blown Through the Centuries”
• “Waiting for the Parade”
• “A Wagonload of Reeds for the Village Basket Weavers”
• “Pastoral Wealth in Ragmani”
• “Saxon Boys Whose Forefathers Came to Transylvania Centuries Ago”
• “A Cottage in the Carpathians”
• “The Csardas, Hungarian Folk Dance”
• “The Guest Room in a Peasant Home: Vinga, Rumania”
• “This Type of Peasant Home Was Disappearing in Transylvania and Is Being Replaced by Stucco Houses”
• “Before the Great Clay Kitchen Stove, Center of the Transylvanian Peasant Home”
• “Worthy of a Land of Castles and Romance”
• “Come Into the Kitchen”
• “Preservers of Rumanian Music and Folklore”
• “Professional Love-Makers”
• “The Fair and the Frivolous”

 

 

Tom Wilson