Brother Of Nature Man Lives

Nature Man Lives In California

In PIM for last November (p. 77), we published an article by staff writer Robert Langdon on Ernest W. Darling, a Nature Man ( i.e. sun “wor shipper” and food faddist ), who lived in Tahiti for several years before World War I.

Darling, an American and a graduate of Stanford Univer sity California, became a Nature Man after curing him self of tuberculosis by living without clothes in the open air. He migrated to Tahiti shortly after the turn of the century.

When Darling returned to the United States in 1912, an article in the San Francisco Press claimed that he was “bent upon matrimony” and that his bride would have to be “willing to dispense with raiment, except in such places as are burdened with a chief of police of conventional ideas”.

Darling, if he really was looking for such a woman, never found one; and, in 1918, at the age of 52, he moved to Fiji where he died shortly after wards of influenza.

If Darling were still alive, he would now be 98. So it was with considerable surprise re cently that we opened a letter from Newport Beach, Cali fornia, and found it was from Darling’s half-brother, Thomas H. Darling, who is still young enough to be master of a 50 ft yacht, “Courage” and to cherish ambitions of visiting the South Seas.

Mr. Darling says he has been “well rewarded” for some time by reading PIM, but that “some sort of pinnacle was reached” when he read the article on his half-brother in the November issue.

“It has been my wish for many years to visit many of the places he told me about when I was between my seventh and ninth year,” Mr. Darling says, and he adds: “There are many things 1 could add to Mr. Langdon’s story, though I would modify some of the information given by him.”