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Book Reviews:

The Frigate Birds Were All at Sea

THE worth of our civilisation can be gauged only against the lengths to which men will go to prove their theories: Most new ventures seem crazy in prospect; some infinitely more crazy than others. When ventures fail, their perpetrators are written off as cranks. When they succeed—presto, they are heroes and another small step forward in human progress has been made. The Bombard Story is an example of this human cussed ness.

When a young French doctor of medicine conceived the idea that the sea contained adequate food and drink to support the ship wrecked mariner for an indefinite period, it seemed crazy enough: when he proposed to cross the Atlantic in a rubber dinghy to prove his theory, it was regarded as suicide.

Conducted by the Assistant Editor

Laboratory tests proved to the doctor that raw fish and plankton could supply him with sufficient food to keep him alive and in reasonable health. Water was an other matter, and on this he got across all the accepted seafaring tabus. He could, he believed, get sufficient fresh water from ground up fish—the percentage of water to weight of fish varies, according to variety, from about 50 per cent, to nearly 80 per cent. In addition, he believed that this fresh water could be supplemented by drinking specified amounts of salt-water.

This last idea was contrary to all the sacred beliefs of all the generations of mariners that there have ever been: drinking salt-water, it is believed, can cause anything