The Editars' Mailbag

Pre-Dates

erdahl

cause the Kon Tiki drift of Heyerdahl and his boys across Pacific from South America to ti captured the public imag on, millions now believe the rdahl theory that Polynesians aated in South America. e Heyerdahl best seller Aku -explaining the mysteries of ;r Island —has got, likewise, the treatment; The Master has it, it must be right. ; don’t think Capt. Brett Hilder disciple of Heyerdahl or be -5 all his theories, but in March he said, in referring to the D-rongo boards of Easter Island “thanks to the clues found hor Heyerdahl . . . the mean of these pictograms may be d.” w Mr, R. P. Gilson, an Ameri with a research Fellowship at School of Pacific Studies, Aus ,n National University, cuts Mr. rdahl down to size and brings iin Hilder up to date on the ct. Says Mr. Gilson; would be more fitting, I think, he recognition were given las Barthel, cryptographer and ier of anthropology in the Uni :y of Hamburg, who deciphered symbols without relying upon aiting for Aku Aku. irthel’s results, which are be ublished by his University, are larised in Scientific American une, 1958. They show that the ng boards’ contain true writ nainly in mnemonic form but some rudimentary phonetic aits. The subject matter is irily of a religious nature, con g, for example, of eulogies to :ods.”

e Entries in

Oil Stakes

. J. Nixonwestwood, whose Dries about old Papua go too far to be comfortable, has d things to say about the dis y of oil in Papua before the World War—a subject upon i the oil experts were wrangling ‘PIM’s” of December and tary. is he: 3 real discoverers of oil in the were Garent Wolsely Thomas Lewis Lett —with Thomas as ctual person to locate it.

Dmas was originally a coal r in Wales and toured Aus , with a Welsh Choir before

going to Papua in early 1910 for some company.

Lett had gone to Papua as Chief Engineer of the SS Bentinck, the vessel which the British New Guinea Development Co. took to Papua from the UK full of all sorts of merchan dise —some valuable, but a lot more of it worthless. Lett and his wife went down to Vilirupu, one of the estates taken over by the company.

After Lett and Thomas found the oil, they took several bottles of it back with them to Moresby and sent it to the Department of Mines in Sydney. The reports were good —but nothing of a tangible nature lesulted. The discovery appeared to have been shelved.

As far as I know, Lett is still alive —he later became well known for books he wrote about the Terri tory; but Thomas died in Sydney following two attacks of blackwater fever. After the first attack he was sent to Sydney and told not to come back to the tropics, but he went only as far as Cairns and was back in Papua within three months, looking fit and well. But he was soon down with blackwater again, recovered again, and was sent to Sydney again. This time he stayed there permanently. One day he col lapsed and died in Lower George Street.

The claims made by McGowan and Swanson to having found the Opa gas shows (G. A. V. Stanley, p. 59, February PIM) were never checked and substantiated.

Do You Know the

Hagen Monument?

“Can any of your readers tell me whether the Hagen monument still stands at Bogadjim, on the north coast of New Guinea, near Madang?” writes a retired Territorian, now living in Queensland. “I have not heard it mentioned, for years.

“Count von Hagen, I think, was manager of the New Guinea Com pany, in either the late ’Eighties or early ’Nineties. He was well known—Mount Hagen was named after him.

“He had occasion to punish severely a Buka police boy, and the boy shot and killed him.

“His family prepared the monu ment, which showed a bronze bust on a marble pedestal, and sent it out to New Guinea, and it was erected at the place where he was buried, at Bogadjim.

“That must have been fairly early in the German period, before the German Government took over from the New Guinea Company. The Company’s headquarters had been at Finschhaven, but they later were moved to Bogadjim, and later, when the Germans were driven out of there by the fevers, they trans ferred their capital to Kokopo.

“Incidentally, that was how Madang got its name. Madang was the name of the little island at Finschhaven, and Madang came to mean NG Co. headquarters. When they moved round to the north coast they took the name with them; and gradually the port which they used, near Bogadjim (or Stephansort), which then was unnamed and un inhabited, came to be known as Madang.

Those Mystic Isles

Of the South Seas

Elsewhere in this issue we tell y<pu how you don’t have to go to Tahiti —you can have all the Polynesian fun you want in the Mediterranean.

Now it seems you can have all the Polynesian food you can eat—right in Philadelphia, USA.

During the month, on a letter head that said “Langerman’s Luau (all the lobster tails you can eat every Tuesday nite)”, Mr. H.S.

Langerman wrote for subscription rates and said: “We operate a Polynesian South Sea Island type restaurant in Suburban Philadelphia. We have a huge bulletin board whereon we like to post photos and news of life in the Islands, for our patrons to enjoy.”