Seductive Sikaicma

Fighting men in the Pacific had some thing new and gay to talk about last week -- fabulous Sikaiana, the terrestrial paradise in the tiny, isolated Stewart Islands group north of the easternmost Solomons, where the South Seas really live up to their literary tradition and the native girls really look like Dorothy Lamour.

Legends piled up fast. One told of a sea-crashed pilot who was found in his little rubber boat, paddling hotly with his bare hands toward Sikaiana and fighting off rescuers. Another related that a certain patrol-plane crew, overcome by tales of beauty and hospitality, got off course somehow and had to sit down for repairs at, of all places, Sikaiana. Then airmen of a rival service learned what had happened.

Burned with envy, they glided in over the island at extreme low altitude and snapped some of the most remarkable photographs in the history of military reconnaissance.

Sikaiana stories were not harmed in the least by the fact that relatively little is known of the Stewart group. In peacetime only schooners in the copra trade call there. Sikaiana, one and a quarter miles long, is the largest of the five islands sur rounding a broad lagoon. But even its exact geographical location is disputed: A 1933 report indicated that it lies some 13 miles east of where the charts show it.

Thus a pilot good enough to find it might have difficulty explaining how he did.

Yet coldhearted skeptics who sought to debunk Sikaiana with dry research got the shock of their lives from the Navy Hydrographic Office's staid, unromantic Sailing Directions for the Pacific Islands: "The natives are Polynesians and have remarkably light colored skins. They are handsome and have a splendid physique."

One way and another, the U.S. public will probably hear more of Sikaiana.

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