Lurid Yarns.

London Newspaper’s Geography Gets Adrift.

THE joke of the year has come to light in a cutting from a London newspaper “The People,” describing the departure of the ill-fated “Southern Cross” from Greenwich.

Headed “Crew Doomed to Isles of Danger,” and “Cannibals Will Keep Them Busy,” the report tells a lurid story of the life the crew have to live “doomed to virtual isolation for the rest of their lives among natives, who are liable to become head-hunters and cannibals at the first beat of the war drum.”

The island of “Malay” is described as one of the danger spots of the Solomons, “where a spear or an arrow are considered the best finish to an

argument.”

To one whose geography is so adrift as to think that “Malay” is in the Solomons, the notion of being “vir tually isolated” in a modern motor vessel in the Pacific would come easily.

One imagines a member of the crew of the “Southern Cross” gently ex tending the leg of a cub reporter whose knowledge of the wide world is limited to the daily journey from a Pimlico lodging-house to his office. But he got nearer the truth when he called the “Southern Cross” the “ship that will never return.”

Rev G. Shinkfihld left Apia on January 20, for Pago Pago, where he joined the “Monterey” and proceeded to Melbourne. He arrived in Samoa in 1917 and for the past 14 years was Chairman of Apia District for the Samoa Method ist Church.