January 2011

Everyone in love with the ocean and America’s marine heritage had to be delighted with your special section. For me there were two extra pleasures. First, I had purchased an Antonio Jacobsen painting about a year ago. So “A Painter of Floating Property” told me more about him than I had known before.

Then turning to “The Great North Sea Mine Barrage,” I was amazed to find that my painting (done in 1912) of the Old Dominion Line’s S.S. Jefferson was the same ship that became the Navy’s Quinnebaug , Admiral Mannix’s ship in the story.

Your marvelous account of “The Great North Sea Mine Barrage” (April/May 1983) rang a bell in my memory. One morning in the spring of 1965 a small freighter was plodding up the English Channel when a lookout spotted a large black object in the water. The freighter sheered off and radioed Dover, which sent a patrol boat to investigate.

The black object was gingerly hauled in and identified as a mine from the old North Sea barrage. It had apparently ripped loose in a storm at the end of 1918 and drifted round and round the British Isles with the currents for fortysix years, incredibly without hitting anything. Its three hundred pounds of TNT were still deadly too.

The First World War mine barrage also led to strained relations with Norway, as the port of Stavanger was virtually cut off. To compensate for this, together with payment for Norwegian ships requisitioned in American ports, the United States paid Norway $11 million dollars in 1919.

IN COMMON with all good jungle fighters, the Moros liked to work close up. During the nightmarish warfare that marked the Philippine Insurrection of 1899, a favorite tactic of Moro fanatics was to work themselves up into a religious frenzy, get within twenty yards of an American unit, and then rush in brandishing double-edged swords and bolos. A soldier had only a few seconds to stop his onrushing attacker or be killed. The scene described in after-action reports to Manila and Washington was often the same. Two corpses lying near each other—a Moro with six bullets in his chest and a mutilated trooper still holding an empty .38 service revolver. Not for the first time nor for the last, soldiers from an industrialized nation went to war in a primitive country and found that their sophisticated weaponry was inadequate.

CROUCHED IN an L-shaped pit, a foot below the surface of the forest floor, John Ehrenhard, an archaeologist with the National Park Service, is contemplating a piece of charred wood. The sandy soil around the base of what appears to have once been a post has been carefully scraped away, and Ehrenhard, a small, lithe man wearing a colorful bandanna over his longish hair, seems ready to pounce. In the autumn sunlight filtering through a canopy of loblolly pines and live oaks hung with Spanish moss, he casts an ephemeral shadow on the ground. Not far away, just beyond the trees but obscured from view, is the beach where, nearly four hundred years ago, the first English settlers of the New World came ashore.

Ouija Seance Information, Please Outdoor Priority Spelling Counts Jacobsen’s Quinnebaug Mine Aftermaths

THE CONDUCT of American foreign policy has changed radically since the days when President Franklin D. Roosevelt was essentially his own Secretary of State. AMERICAN HERITAGE believes it is a matter of importance to examine those changes through the eyes of an expert. Few people, we think, better qualify as such than Henry A. Kissinger, who not only had a hand in those changes but who probably exercised greater power than any Secretary of State in this century. Dr. Kissinger was interviewed in the New York office where he conducts a fraction of his still feverish schedule of activities. The understanding was that he would be questioned not on the substance of the foreign policies he carried out under Presidents Nixon and Ford but rather on the evolving ways of American diplomacy in the past few decades of this country’s history.

In your February/March issue James P. Johnson mentioned Mrs. Pearl Curran in connection with the Ouija board craze. Through her board she had made contact with one Patience Worth, a “creature” from some earlier time who often couched messages in Elizabethan idioms. When these messages came through with increasing speed, Mrs. Curran abandoned her board and learned to type to keep pace with her novel amanuensis.

Fifty-three years ago, in August 1930, I spent a jolly evening with Mrs. Curran and some acquaintances in the library of Gordon Ray Young, who was then, I believe, book review editor of the Los Angeles Times . Although unseen, Patience was the guest of honor and made her presence felt in a very lively manner.

I am currently doing research for a nonf iction book about the Ouija board. It is to be a balanced discussion of Ouija-board theory and phenomena. I would like to hear from anyone who has knowledge about the board’s origins or history. Please write to: Ouija—Box 109, Barnes & Noble Books, Harper & Row Publishing Co., Inc., 10 East Fifty-third Street, New York, NY 10022.

Andrew Piotrowski

I enjoyed Walter Karp’s “Henry Francis du Pont and the Invention of Winterthur” in the April/May issue, but I want to challenge some of his statements about Mr. du Font’s gardening activities.

A GREAT MANY people have, at one time or another, happened to drive past a curious, eightsided house. And most who come across such a building believe it to be unique, the inexplicable architectural whim of a long-dead local. But in fact there are hundreds of these “unique” houses still standing, all of them testament to a vigorous, nationwide vogue that sprang up on the eve of the Civil War.

The builders of these houses, most of them upper-middle-class men, were intensely individualistic, dogmatic, even exhibitionistic. They drew the inspiration for their homes—and in many cases their plans—from a single remarkable book: A Home for All , first published in 1848 by a former theology student named Orson Squire Fowler.