January 2011

In the fall of 1937, at the entrance of almost any first- or second-class post office in the United States, one was apt to see a Navy poster that showed a fresh-faced young sailor striding up the gangplank of a battleship. Over his shoulder were slung hammock and seabag. On his face was the bright expectation of travel and adventure. And in his pocket, presumably, was the fifty-four dollars a month that a first-class seaman could make in those days.

The picture was an appealing one—but the artist could have made it even more so if he had been depicting a sailor of the United States Navy Yangtze River Patrol. Such a sailor might have been tricked out in natty English walking shorts, a pith helmet, and a full beard. The artist could have shifted the staggering load of canvas on the young man’s shoulder to the back of a Chinese coolie following a respectful distance behind. And instead of a battleship, the sailor would have been climbing aboard a gleaming white and mahogany craft nobby enough to run with the brokers’ yachts at a Harvard-Yale boat race.

“Wit stabs, begs pardon—and turns the weapon in the wound,” Ambrose Bierce once wrote, succinctly explaining his own, often black, type of humor. This American satirist originally wrote his Devil’s Dictionary in installments, as columns in various San Francisco magazines (luring the late nineteenth century. First brought together in book form in 1906, the sardonic lexicon has become an American classic. Only recently was it discovered that about half the definitions Bierce originally wrote have never been included in any edition of the book, presumably because he compiled the material, years after writing it, from incomplete files. Ernest J. Hopkins has now assembled the missing definitions, and Doubleday & Company will bring out later this month the first complete collection, to be called The Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary. AMERICAN HERITAGE, impressed with the durability of Bierce’s demonic wit, presents a sampling of the new material.

Time: Early Saturday morning, July 8, 1905
Enter a group of engine hostlers

1ST HOSTLER. Come, all you roundhousemen, I want you to hear The story told of a dumb engineer; Careless Jones was the bounder’s name, On the New York-Hartford run he rode to fame.

CHORUS. Careless Jones—dismounted from his cabin; Careless Jones—left the boiler full of steam; Careless Jones—forgot to throw the brake in, And the engine almost plunged into the flowing stream.

Exeunt omnes, steaming.

Before the days of the explorers, the Mississippi was an Indian river. Spreading in a vast belt from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico was a multitude of tribes—Fox, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Iowa, Illinois, Winnebago, Miami, Masouten, Chickasaw, Oto, Quapaw, and others. These Indians were in a constant state of turmoil, fighting one another and moving up and down the river. Even the Sioux, now associated with the Great Plains, were once a river tribe and paddled fleets of war canoes on the upper Mississippi. The aborigines used a variety of names to describe the river, but it was the Algonquian name, “Mississippi,” which finally won out. French traders heard it from the Chippewa and the other northern tribes and carried it downstream with them, until this word, variously translated as “Big Water” or “Father of Waters,” became the accepted name from Montreal to Louisiana.

Use chewing gum to mend a leaky gas line.

Carry a can of ether for winter starting.

Test for an overheated engine: Spit on it. If there is a sizzle, all is well. If steam rises, check your radiator.

Strain all gas through a chamois skin to remove water and dirt.

If the spark lever slips while you are cranking, tie it in position with a piece of string.

A box of oatmeal flakes is handy when the radiator springs a leak. Pour flakes into the water. As they swell they fill the hole. Dried horse manure is also good and, of course, always available.

To rejuvenate a worn tire, pump in a cupful of chopped-up feathers and hot molasses. Spin tire to distribute the mixture evenly and seal pores and holes. Watch out, though, if there is a blowout.

A gun is no longer needed when you visit the western states.

To clean the Celluloid windows in your side curtains, use vinegar.

To keep windshield clear on rainy days, rub sliced onion over it.

On the cover of the October, 1966, AMERICAN HERITAGE , there was a detail from a painting; bv William Rimmer showing Mrs. Leopold Bamberger about to be rescued at sea. The whole painting was reproduced on page 54 of that issue, with a caption describing the rescue vessel as a “schooner.”

Well, we haven’t received so many indignant letters since we ran an article saying that George Washington never took communion. The seagoing fraternity were thoroughly aroused, and a good many wrote in to say that that was no schooner, it was a ship . Indeed, some of them were much more precise than that, for example: “I have no means of knowing whether the real Shanunga was a schooner, catamaran, or dhow, but this I do know, that the vessel so beautifully depicted is a full-rigged ship, hove to under topsails, topgallant sails, spanker and fore-topmast staysail, with courses clewed up and royals furled. … I suggest that your nautical editor, if you have one, be hanged at the yardarm.”