Adventurous Ambassadress

LEAVES FROM A GREENLAND DIARY-- Ruth Bryan Owen--Dodd, Mead ($2).

One of the things the present Adminis-tration may be remembered for is the books its members have written. Last week its Minister to Denmark, Ruth Bryan Owen, contributed her offering to the growing pile. Not strictly a New Dealer, the daughter of the late great William Jennings Bryan eschewed politics and economics, confined herself to weather, scenery, sights. Her little book was the record of a semi-official trip last year to Denmark's biggest colony. Greenland.

This book by Madam Minister is about the nearest most readers will ever get to Greenland, for the island is closed to tourists and traders. Traveler Owen set out from Copenhagen on her voyage feeling adventurous but game. The little 1,400-ton ship she went on had only one bathroom, but her cabin was filled with flowers. At her first sight of Greenland's icy mountains Mrs. Owen found herself "struggling with the impulse toward tears." Looking hard at the icebergs gave her strength to face things: "I know I shall fear neither death nor living so much when I know that this great beauty of mountain and sky and sea lies wrapped in eternal silence through unbroken spans of years--that across its dreaming face will be drawn veils of color, rose at dawn, gold at midday, blue at twilight, day and night, year after year, century following century."

On her triumphal progress around Greenland's coasts Minister Owen stood as godmother for an Eskimo baby (which, like all Eskimo babies, had a blue patch on its back), wore sealskin trousers (she had "to wiggle about very skillfully to get in"), hung up a world's record ("the northernmost point ever visited by a foreign diplomat"). A commemorative cairn is to be erected on the spot (Upernivik), with inscriptions in English and Eskimo. She ate whale skin ("a most toothsome delicacy") but balked at dried seal intestines. Before a U. S. Coast Guard cutter carried her to the U. S. she was given an Eskimo name, Inunguak ("real human being").

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