The stork is called ooievaar in Dutch, an ancient word of obscure origin, but probably meaning “bringer of luck.” Little children who are acknowledged blessings to their parents know that the ooievaar brought them. But in these days of depression, children are dubious blessings, and the luck-bringing bird’s popularity has consequently suffered a decline. On the campus of Columbia University they tell a story of an instructor in the English Department who, having explained to her Oriental students the meaning of the phrase “penny-wise pound-foolish” inquired whether there was an equivalent idiom in any of the languages spoken by her students. “In my country,” said a stolid Chinese, “we say, You go to bed to save a candle, and you beget twins.” If in China the arrival of twins is deplored as the costly effect of penny-wisdom, one need not wonder that in Holland, with its high standard of living, the birth of even one child is not always a case of single blessedness.
Formerly, Dutch farmers invited a pair of storks to spend their summer honeymoon on the place by laying a cart wheel on the roof or on the top of a high pole for the ooievaars to build their nest on. These perches are becoming very rare, and a stork’s nest on a housetop is a thing of the unhygienic past. The bird still graces, in effigy, the coat-of-arms of The Hague. Until recently, its living counterpart stalked among the slithery offal of the fish market opposite the City Hall. I wonder why he was removed. Perhaps the city magistrates thought it too sad a degradation for an erstwhile accoucheur to be employed as a scavenger. Indeed, the ooievaar, who in the past was held to be the national bird of Holland, has fallen upon evil days. And what little prestige he had retained was taken from him, a few years ago, by the sudden ascent of a rival to national fame and to first place in the affection of the people.
The usurper was the pelican. There is some comfort for the stork in knowing that he was not supplanted by a worthless upstart. The pelican has an honorable record. She is that noble bird who fed her starving young with her own heart’s blood and thus became the symbol of Christ shedding His blood on the Cross to atone for the sins of mankind. In December, 1933, a “pelican” flew from its nest at Schiphol, the airport of Amsterdam, to the Netherland East Indies, carrying Christmas greetings from the motherland.
Before the year was out she was back at Schiphol with New Year messages from Java. From Amsterdam to Batavia in one hundred hours and thirty minutes, from Batavia to Amsterdam in one hundred hours and forty minutes, or twice over a distance of about 9,800 miles in less than a week’s time! In the days of the Dutch East India Company a ship that made the voyage from Amsterdam round the Cape of Good Hope to Batavia in one hundred days had an auspicious passage; voyages that took from four to six months were nothing out of the common. The Pelican, with a crew of four, reduced the one hundred days to as many hours.
The first of these flights, in the twenties, took from twelve to more than fifteen days. The men who blazed the trail were Thomassen à Thuessink van der Hoop and Van Weerden Poelman, names which, said a reporter of the London Times, “have just the swing of the opening couplet in a Bab Ballad.” They flew from Amsterdam to Batavia in a Fokker monoplane. Within three days of the start engine and radio trouble brought them down in a forced landing at Phillipolis, between Belgrade and Constantinople, where they had to wait a month for a new engine. As soon as this arrived they continued the voyage by way of Constantinople, Baghdad, Karachi, Calcutta, Rangoon, Bangkok, and Sumatra. “The net time of the whole flight,” said the London Times, “allowing for the enforced delay at Phillipolis, was less than three weeks, and as the result of its success the establishment of a regular air service between Europe and the East Indies will, in all probability, be only a matter of time.”
The Pelican, nine years later, flew to Batavia and back in less than half the time it took those two pioneers to reach Batavia. Better engines, improved landing facilities at the intermediate ports, and the accumulated experience of the intervening decade made the four days’ voyage to Java possible. The four men of the Pelican’s crew would not deny their indebtedness to the precursors who showed the way; but all honor was due them for the courage and the skill with which they beat all previous records.
The Dutch nation paid a tribute to these heroes such as few Dutchmen ever received from their countrymen. They were welcomed with an impressive outburst of national enthusiasm, and the Pelican, sharing in the honors of her masters, was proclaimed the symbol of Holland’s conquest of the air. In the early evening of December 30, 1933, when the four Flying Dutchmen were reported to be heading for Schiphol, along the narrow highway from Amsterdam to the airport thousands poured into the aerodrome. Automobiles, bicycles, pedestrians passed for hours by the quaint old farmhouses that line the winding road. The waiting crowd on the landing field clustered round huge open fire pots, and those who could not come close enough to the warming glow tried to keep circulation active by stamping a tattoo on the frozen ground.
Suddenly, at twenty minutes of ten, the ground lights flooded the field. A surge of excitement, then silence and breathless suspense, all ears on the alert to catch the first purr of the plane. There she was, not visible yet, for a fog enveloped the airport. The roar overhead dwindled down again to a distant hum. The flyers were evidently circling round to get their bearings.
The purr grew again to a roar, the Pelican suddenly pierced the fog, and settled gracefully down upon her nest. Hats flew up in the air, hands waved frantically, shouts of joy greeted the flyers, the national anthem rose above the tumult, but many, overcome with emotion, could not sing. There were speeches by Cabinet Ministers and Generals and aviation officials, and messages from all parts of the country, including one from Her Majesty Queen Wilhelmina, who conferred upon the four national heroes the cross of Chevalier in the Order of Orange-Nassau.
In days gone by Java was a place of exile to which despairing parents sent their wayward sons. If the boy made good in the service of the Dutch East India Company, so much the better; if he did not, there was hardly any chance of his ever turning up again from the other end of the world to pester his father for further support. Having seen the scapegrace off on an East Indiaman, papa washed his hands of him for good. But see what would happen nowadays.
A week after the boy’s arrival at Batavia, his employer might call the old man on the telephone to tell him that he had found the young scapegrace useless, and would send him back by the next plane; and a week later the prodigal might literally drop from the sky on the doorstep of his parents’ home. Java is no longer at the end of the world. It is, through the radiotelephone, within hearing distance of The Hague and can be reached by air in a dozen hops. A German writer of the seventeenth century called the island the dumping ground for Holland’s human garbage. That time is past. From a land of exile, Java bids fair to become a pleasure ground for holiday makers, in which to pass a delightful year-end.
Greater safety is the only condition that must be fulfilled before that pleasant prospect can be realized. The development of radio, by which the pilot remains in constant communication with the solid ground, has made flying less hazardous. But the skies have not been charted yet in the meticulous fashion by which the oceanographers have marked all the dangers and pitfalls of the seas. Two years after the epoch-making flight of the Pelican, the Douglas air liner Uiver, of the Royal Dutch Airways, came to grief in the Arabian desert. She was a good ship and had proved her mettle that same year in the race from London to Melbourne, in which she finished second.
The New York Times said editorially of the Uiver’s achievement, “The American contribution demonstrated with a commercial load that London is now but four days distant from Australia.” That sounded as if the wonderful Douglas air liner, like a robot of the skies, had itself piloted its commercial load across three continents. I yield to no one in respect for the engineers of the Douglas Aircraft Corporation, and subscribe wholeheartedly to the Times editor’s eulogy. But to represent their achievement as the decisive factor of that successful flight was going a bit too far in provincial self-applause.
The Dutch pilots who finished second in the race deserved better from America’s leading newspaper. It was the skill and endurance of K. D. Parmentier and J. J. Moll that brought demonstration of the Douglas liner’s superiority, and no praise of the shipbuilders should go forth without due mention of the crew that manned the ship. Was it confidence solely in the craft and its Wright cyclone motors that gave the three passengers courage to undertake the hazardous voyage? Or was it their trust in the two men and in their skill to ride the cyclone? “Some English editors,” said a dispatch from London, “considered the methodical flight of this plane, until almost within an hour of Melbourne, as the most sensational achievement of the whole race.” And I would ask the Times editor, Was the method the engine’s or the men’s?
Before the end of that same year the Uiver perished. The conquered element, as if whipped into fury by defeat, hurled its lightning upon the craft and left it a wreck amid a sea of sand. The story of Holland’s navigation to the Indies is a record of many such wrecks. The sea was a more treacherous enemy to sailing craft than the air is to modern aviation. But the Dutch merchant marine could not be daunted by the terrors that lay in wait along the sea route to Java, nor will the Dutch flyers give in to the terrors of the sky. The heroes who found an untimely grave in Baghdad died not in vain. Any. worthwhile victory demands its sacrifice. They paid with their lives for the triumph which by their death was brought nearer. For it spurred their comrades on to greater exertion. Each new flight across the spot where the Uiver came to grief is a salute to their memory and a vindication of their fate. The roar of the engine calls to them from above, “Rest ye in peace; we carry on.”
There is in Java a small group of educated natives-small in comparison to the sixty millions whose spokesmen they claim to be–who, fired with nationalistic fervor, are agitating for autonomy and the right of selfdetermination. They are trying to steer their people away from the contact with the Dutch and to sever the ties that bind the islands to Holland. Aviation, on the other hand, is counteracting that nationalistic movement. Three-day flights twice a week will bring the Indies so much closer to Holland that Dutchmen at home who seldom gave a thought to what was happening in Java will have East Indian affairs thrust upon their attention from day to day; and the islanders will be impressed with increasing cogency by the fact of their proximity to the motherland when newly arrived visitors can tell them that five days earlier they were walking through the snow in Amsterdam.
In the dawn of Greek civilization the people of Ephesus laid down a rope, seven furlongs in length, from their city to the temple of Ephesus, in order to place the city under the protection of the temple. It was a symbolic act which was none the less believed to be efficacious. The Ephesians mistook an imaginary for a real connection. The transatlantic cable of today seems a modern realization of that make-believe of primitive magic. But our age has found means to dispense with the tangible link without severing the connection once established. The Government at The Hague maintains by radiotelephone a daily contact with Batavia, and birdmen fly at its command along the invisible airways of the sky. Modern science has made fact of the magic by which Prospero ruled on his enchanted island.
The word wonderful is no longer adequate to express our amazement at happenings that are full of wonder. It has been used so often in praising what is merely nice, or beautiful, or interesting, that, when a wonder does happen, we must avoid the Anglo-Saxon term and resort to miraculous. Our age has need of the Latin word, for miracles do happen nowadays.
Although he knows that no supernatural agency controls them, aviation and radio are miracles to the layman, and radio is the greater miracle of the two. I base my conclusion on the imaginings of our ancient ancestors. To imitate the birds and explore the sky seemed to the early Greeks a possible achievement for man; even to imitate the fish and explore the submarine world did not seem an impossibility two thousand years ago. Alexander the Great, says the Greek legend, made a large framework of iron, like a cage, wherein he placed a thick glass vessel, and in the bottom of the vessel was a hole large enough for the hand to pass through.
This opening was closed from inside, so that when the whole apparatus was submerged, the traveler might open it quickly and, putting his hand through, draw in whatever struck his fancy. To the cage he attached a chain, two hundred cubits in length, by which this submarine chamber could be lowered from the deck of Alexander’s ship. But no fable or myth of the ancients ever imagined that man could speak to man across the seas. Only the voice of a God could accomplish that miracle.
Daedalus and Icarus are the mythical precursors of Lindbergh; Alexander of legendary lore anticipated the exploits of William Beebe. But human imagination in the remote past never fancied that wonder to be humanly possible which Marconi actually accomplished in our day. His discovery enables even the humblest layman who has no notion of how it is done to avail himself of the miracle. Man will never learn to fly with a bird’s native ease; it will remain to him a difficult art to be practiced at the danger of his life. But he can speak, as the Gods spoke of yore, from coast to distant coast across the ocean, without the need of acquiring a God-like utterance.
