Monday, Jul. 08, 1940

Silent Sea

THE STORY OF THE PACIFIC--Hendrik Willem Van Loon--Harcourt, Brace ($3).

Hendrik Willem Van Loon is a big, cheerful, childlike Dutchman with a flair for historical baby talk. He illustrates his genial versions of the horrors of human history with squiggly, screwy pen-&-ink drawings; spices them with amiable prejudices (sample prejudices: against Bushmen, missionaries, Painter Paul Gauguin). In 1921 Author Van Loon hit his historical stride with The Story of Mankind. Last week he confined himself to The Story of the Pacific.

For readers to whom, as geography or politics, the Pacific is still a great waste of water filled with hidden reefs, treacherous winds and currents, Author Van Loon's book is no chart. His concern is with the explorers of this vast, lonely, misnamed ocean -- from prehistoric Polynesian vikings and the Bounty's Captain Bligh, of open-boat fame, to Charles Darwin, who spent four highly uncomfortable years among its atolls, pondering the theory of the survival of the fittest, between bouts of seasickness aboard H. M. S. Beagle.

Favorite Van Loon explorer is Captain James Cook, R. N. In the course of three voyages Captain Cook discovered most of the essential facts about the Pacific -- that New Zealand is two islands, that Australia is an island continent, that New Guinea is no part of it, that there is no continent between Australia and South America. He also discovered that lime or lemon juice prevents scurvy, and was so far in advance of his age that he flogged his seamen only when they preferred rum to fruit juice. In the end he fell a victim to meat eaters. On one of the islands which he had named after the inventor of the sandwich (the Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty), the proponent of lime juice was captured by cannibals. From shipboard that night his men watched the telltale barbecue fires. Next day they cowed the Kanakas into surrendering the indigestible portions that remained of the Pacific's greatest explorer--his hands, some bones from his legs, part of his scalp, part of his skull.

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