COOK WITH HIS OFFICERS AND MEN
A. C. and N. C. BEGG
This is the first of three articles specially written for the bi-centenary of Captain 
Cook's first voyage to New Zealand. Cook has a specially important place in our 
history. His rediscovery of these islands led to the colonisation of New Zealand.
In 1968 and 1969 many countries, including Great Britain, Australia, Canada, America 
and New Zealand, will be celebrating Cook's greatness as a discoverer and navigator.
Further information on Cook will be found in a series of articles in the Part 3 
journal, and in the bulletin, Cook's First Voyage to New Zealand.
There are many landmarks on the New Zealand coast which were named by Captain James 
Cook during his voyages to this country. Not far from Auckland, Cape Colville marks 
the northern tip of the Coromandel peninsula. Cape Palliser, near Wellington, stands 
at the eastern entrance to Cook Strait, and Cape Saunders juts into the sea from the 
Otago peninsula. These three capes tell a story about the young James Cook when he was 
training to become one of the greatest navigators of history.
Even in his youth there was something about Cook which marked him out from those 
around him, and gave special promise for the future. He was solidly built and stood 
over six feet in height. He had a long straight nose, a wide good-natured mouth and a 
strong determined jaw. But perhaps it was his deep-set intelligent eyes, so well shown 
in a portrait by William Hodges*, which made people notice him. Whatever it was, James 
Cook was helped by a number of kindly and important people who recognised great 
ability in him.
For instance, Mr Skottowe saw something in this farmer's boy which caused him to 
provide generously for his schooling. As a result, young James had the chance to study 
hard and get a grounding in mathematics which was to be extremely useful to him for 
the rest of his life. Then there were the Walker brothers   

*The artist on Cook's second voyage
Captain James Cook

of Whitby who became Cook's life-long friends. These Quaker shipowners also saw 
something in him 
which made them give him the chance he wanted to learn the skills of the seaman in the
stout little colliers which sailed between the northern coal ports and London. Here he 
studied his 
trade in the dangerous waters of the North Sea, on a coast well-known for its 
treacherous shoals
and sandbanks.
In the winter months the Walkers employed him in building and rigging the coal ships 
until he knew 
every plank and every rope. He respected these sturdy little vessels so much that he 
chose one
to take him on his first voyage to the Pacific and round the world.
In the colliers he often visited the Thames, where he saw the great merchantmen of the 
East India 
Company, and admired the trim ships of the line which made up the British Navy. The 
world was
opening before him, and in 1755, at the age of 27, he signed on as an ordinary seaman 
of the Royal Navy.

Sir Hugh Palliser 
Palliser's memorial to Captain Cook

Captain Hugh Palliser commanded HMS Eagle in many fights with the French. In his crew 
James Cook 
showed such skill and bravery that within a few months Palliser promoted him to 
Master's
mate. A little later he made him boatswain* and gave him his first command. This ship 
was a little 
40-ton sloop which could sail closer to the French coast than could the larger Eagle. 
Palliser
watched Cook's powers of leadership develop. He was so impressed that he promoted Cook 
to the warrant 
rank of Master after two and a half years of service - though, according to 
regulations,
he should have had at least six years' naval experience. Captain Hugh Palliser never 
lost his 
admiration for Cook, and much later built a memorial to him at Chalfont St Giles. On 
it he simply
stated what was in those days an extraordinary 

*Officer in charge of the anchors, ropes and rigging 
Admiral Sir Charles Saunders

fact. James Cook "raised himself solely by his merit from a very obscure birth to the 
rank 
of Post Captain  in the Royal Navy".
Now the scene changes from the Old World to the New. As Master of HMS Pembroke Cook 
sailed to Canada, 
where the British were waging a rather unsuccessful land war against the French.
Because of this and the unusual nature of the fighting,the British formed and trained 
a commando unit which consisted of men from many nations. Two 
officers of this unit, Des Barres, who was Swiss, and Samuel Holland, a Dutchman, were 
to play
important parts in Cook's career. Both were surveyors as well as officers, and their 
skill in making 
and reading charts immediately won Cook's respect. Sir Charles Saunders was his 
admiral and
he encouraged Cook to take every opportunity to learn the art of mapping.
Nearly every evening the great cabin of the Pembroke became the scene of activity. 
Holland, Des 
Barres and Cook would sit crouched over the plane table for hours, taking angles, 
plotting

View of Quebec in 1761

features, marking soundings and discussing every aspect of charting. Sir Charles 
Saunders had every reason to be pleased, for James Cook charted the St Lawrence River 
with such skill that the ships of the Navy were able to take soldiers right up to the 
citadel of Quebec. Before this time, nobody had thought that ships could 
sail up this part of
the river. General Wolfe, the British military commander, was able to capture Quebec 
because of the 
surprise gained
by Cook's superb seamanship.
Cook's work also impressed Lord Colville, who was Commander-in-Chief of the American 
Station. At once 
He transferred Cook to his own flagship, HMS Northumberland, where the whole fleet 
would benefit from 
his charting and
pilotage. James Cook was now the Navy's foremost pilot and master of navigation in 
shallow waters. He 
was named
"King's Surveyor" and given command of HMS Grenville with instructions to map the 
dangerous coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland.
His superior officers, Palliser, Saunders and Colville, all played important parts in 
Cook's career, 
for they provided him
with rich opportunities for learning more about navigation and leadership. Cook 
himself never forgot the kindliness and helpfulness of these naval officers. Two 
centuries after their deaths their names still live in the New Zealand capes which 
Cook discovered and named after them.

Cook's Map of New Zealand

The men who served under Cook were even more impressed by him than were his superior 
officers. Lord 
Cobham
wrote of Cook in 1966: ". . . his kindliness and humanity led, as history proves it 
always does, to 
splendid loyalty and
efficiency in those who served under him." The little Whitby colliers which carried 
Cook and his crew 
around the world
were each little worlds of their own. Each ship needed order and efficiency. With so 
many 

Expedition setting out to explore the Endeavour River, while the Endeavour is being 
refitted.

men living cheek-by-jowl in confined quarters kindliness was needed as well as 
discipline - and these were qualities which Cook possessed. These were also the 
qualities he demanded from his
officers and men. Perhaps his success in this is best described by John Elliott, a 
young midshipman 
who sailed with Cook on his second voyage. After his return to England he wrote: "I 
will here do them the justice to say that No Men could behave better, under every 
circumstance than they did, 
the same must be said of the officers; and I will add that I believe that there never 
was a
Ship, where for so long a period, under such circumstances, more happiness, order, and 
obedience was 
enjoyed. "
Not only did Cook hand on the qualities of leadership and seamanship to the men who 
sailed with him, 
but he also showed them the importance of navigation and mapping. His accuracy 

Map of part of the coast of Queensland, showing the Endeavour River

remained with his pupils and influenced the Navy's charts for a hundred years. In each 
of his ships 
he formed a school of surveyors among the junior officers, many of whom continued his 
work
after his death.
On his own ship Cook was absolute master. He demanded and got complete obedience. To 
achieve this he 
had to cut himself off from the warmth of companionship so as to remain a stern and
lonely leader, carrying all responsibility on his own shoulders. Usually he was calm 
and quiet and 
compelling, but when it was necessary he could rant and roar and drive his men with 
the utmost
ferocity. One such occasion was recorded by Anders Sparrman, the gentle Swedish 
botanist, during the 
second voyage. It seemed that the Resolution was heading for certain shipwreck on an
unknown coral reef. "None but a seaman can realise how terrible was the sound of the 
waves breaking on the coral reef so near to us, mingled with the 
shouting of orders and the noise of the [men as they rushed about their work]. But 
even in my anxiety,
I [was most impressed by] the rapidity and lack of confusion with which each command 
was executed to 
save the ship. No one seemed to be aware that he had been working for hours under a
burning sun, the thermometer being 90' in the shade. . . . I should have preferred, 
however, to hear 
fewer 'Goddams' from the officers and particularly the Captain who, while the danger 
lasted,
stamped about the deck and grew hoarse with shouting." It is not hard to imagine the 
enormous strain 
that must have been placed on Cook by such emergencies.
Cook was a man of strong feelings, but he usually controlled his temper, and he always 
tried to avoid 
brutality and bloodshed. However, after ten years of exploration, at the age of 48, 
the strain of
command began to show. In the final parts of the third voyage he sometimes lost 
control of himself. 
He was then often beside himself with rage at the endless petty thieving of the 
natives, and
went as far as punishing them by shooting them or burning down their homes. He was 
also dismayed by 
his own crew. The men whom he usually liked and respected, he described as "mutinous", 
and he punished even their petty misbehaviour with harshness. He ordered two dozen 
lashes 
to be given to a gunman's mate, and on three days in a row he had a sentry flogged.
At this stage of the voyage three things added to Cook's bad temper: the winds were 
against him; his 
men were spreading diseases amongst the natives; and, as the last straw, the 
Resolution
had been shoddily repaired in the English Navy dockyards and now began to show 
dangerous weaknesses. 
Sometimes he dressed down his officers and men, by shouting and cursing and
stamping his feet on the quarter deck. The midshipmen described these sessions as 
"heivas" - a noisy 
Polynesian dance and they began to occur more and more often. Perhaps, if he had not 
lost
his temper in Hawaii and shot at one of the natives who were provoking him, he might 
have returned 
safely to England. For that shot may have caused the natives to turn against him and 
bring
about his tragic death.
But what is truly amazing is that he did not lose control of himself sooner. 
Throughout his voyages 
his life must have been a lonely one. It was only during the ship's rest periods that 
he let himself
relax at all. At Dusky Bay, for instance, Cook and his men enjoyed five long weeks of 
glorious rest 
after long and bitter hardships in the southern seas. Here, Cook fished for blue cod, 
shot the
wildfowl and rowed into all the many coves and harbours of that beautiful sound. Here, 
he talked and 
laughed with his officers and men, and even enjoyed a camping trip with them. It was 
the same
at Nootka Sound in western Canada. A young midshipman, James Trevenen, wrote about an 
expedition to 
the head of the sound: "I with several other of us Midshipmen attended Captain Cook in
this expedition, in which we rowed him not less than 30 miles during the day. . . . 
Capt. Cook also 
on these occasions would sometimes relax . . . and [talk] familiarly with us. But it 
was only for
the time, as soon as we entered the ships he became again the despot. " The midshipmen 
would have 
been about fifteen years of age, and it is likely that Captain Cook enjoyed the outing 
with
these youngsters as much as they did.
As well as the many dangers of the sea, the sailors of the eighteenth century faced 
the dangers of 
disease. Scurvy carried off many, and diseases like tuberculosis carried off many 
more. James
Cook introduced new methods of fighting disease, some of which were very effective 
indeed. He kept 
his ships spotlessly clean and well-aired, and he went to great trouble to supply his 
men with
fresh foods. He always set an example by taking the spruce beer* and celery grass 
himself. Because he 
had been an ordinary seaman he knew too much for those clever fellows who thought they
might avoid his strict regulations. Cook was outstandingly successful in proving that 
scurvy could be 
beaten, and for his report on his methods of keeping his seamen in good health, he 
received
the Copley Gold Medal. He, himself, regarded his defeat of scurvy as more valuable 
than his 
discoveries.
Indeed, the health and lives of his men were of great importance to Cook. This may 
help to explain 
why he thought so highly of William Anderson, a young Scottish doctor who sailed with 
him

*Cook made spruce beer from the leaves and bark of the rimu tree. If it was too bitter 
he added to it the bark of the manuka or tea tree. Spruce beer had a reputation for 
curing scurvy.

on the second and third voyages. He was closer to Cook than the other officers, 
perhaps because he 
shared Cook's interest in the health and welfare of the men, or perhaps because it was 
easier
for a captain to be friendly with the doctor rather than his officers. In any case, 
when Dr Anderson 
died of tuberculosis in August 1778, Cook wrote what was, for him, unusually warm 
praise. "He was a sensible young man, an agreeable companion, well skilled in his own 
profession. . . . Soon 
after he had breathed his last, land was seen to the Westward, twelve leagues distant. 
It was
supposed to be an island; and, to perpetuate the memory of the deceased, for whom I 
had a great 
regard, I named it Anderson's Island."
We know so much of what Cook did. He made three remarkable voyages in his tiny ships 
to the utmost 
ends of the world. It may seem surprising that we know so little of James Cook 
himself. He
wrote thousands of words in his logs and records, but he wrote nothing about himself. 
He named 
islands, capes and harbours after his friends, his officers and men, but hardly ever 
used his own
name. Perhaps the best way to learn something of this man is to see the effect he had 
on the people 
around him. In this short study we have seen how his superior officers recognised the 
genius
and promise of the young James Cook, and how the men who sailed with him recognised 
his greatness as 
a leader, a navigator and a man.

Franklin Shortens a Sentence
A hatter, opening a business in Philadelphia, took the following sentence, which he 
thought of painting on his signboard, to the famous Benjamin Franklin: John Thomson, 
hatter, makes and sells
hats for ready money. A painting of a hat was also to go on the signboard. "Friend," 
said he to Franklin, "can you amend my sign in any way?"
"Why,yes," said Franklin. "Firstly, you may leave out the word 'hatter' seeing that it 
is followed 
by the words 'makes hats'. Secondly, drop the word 'makes' for your customers will not 
care who
makes the hats. If they are good, they will buy. If not, no sign will persuade them to 
do so. 
Thirdly, why have the phrase 'for ready money'? No one here buys or sells on credit. 
Fourthly, I would
leave out the words 'and sells' for none will expect you to give your hats away. 
Lastly, why have the 
word 'hats', seeing that you also have a painting of one?"
The sign thus shortened was put up with the name, John Thomson, and the painting on 
it, and the 
hatter found that this was all that was needed.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) was an American writer, scientist and emissary to Europe. 
He invented the lightning conductor.

FIGHTERS FOR FREEDOM
 by BARRY FAVILLE
 1. SOCRATES
This is the first of a series of articles on some great men whose lives still
inspire us today. The hero of it is Socrates who lived and died so that
his countrymen might have freedom of thought.
Socrates* was an ugly man. He was short, but very strong, and he
had a large, craggy head. His eyebrows were bushy, almost like
fur, and his eyes were sunk deep beneath an overhanging forehead.
A wispy beard covered his chin. He was not handsome, but he was
one of the kindest and most clever men who has ever lived.
Socrates was a Greek - an Athenian. He was born nearly 2,500 years ago; and he lived 
at a time when the city states of Greece 

Socrates Sculpture in the Farnese Collection

were at their strongest. The most important of them was Athens.
Socrates lived in Athens all his life. He loved the city, its people, buildings and 
way of life, and he never had any desire to leave. He even refused to escape when he 
was sentenced to death, and about to be executed.
Socrates was born in 469 B.C. His father was a stonemason who probably helped to shape 
the blocks of marble that were used to build the Parthenon, or some of the other 
magnificent temples that crowned the hills of Athens. Socrates was not a nobleman, and 
if he had been like other young men he would probably have learned his father's trade 
and become a master craftsman too - but he was not an ordinary man.
He wandered through the streets, asking people what they thought about. We will watch 
him in action.
He is walking through a market. Merchants are selling olive
oil, fish, meat, pots; they are calling out their wares in raucous voices. A few young 
men are lounging about, talking. Socrates appears, exchanges a few words with the fish 
merchant, and then walks up to a man who is always making eloquent speeches about 
justice and law in the assembly.
"Good morning, Thrasymachus*," says Socrates, "I heard you speak the other day."
Thrasymachus smiles contentedly. "It was a good speech. I'm glad you enjoyed it."
"There were just one or two things I wasn't clear about,"
says Socrates, drawing his robe about 
him. A few 
young men walk
over and sit down. They enjoy listening 
to Socrates. 
"You talk a
great deal about law and justice. What do you mean by law and justice?"
"Why, Socrates, I should have thought someone as clever as
 you would know that," says Thrasymachus.
"I have never said I knew 
everything."
"But you have a clever tongue, 
Socrates. Everyone 
says that."
"A clever tongue? I simply ask 
questions to find 
out what I do not know. I come to you to find out about law and justice

*Pronunciation: SOC-rat-eez  
*Pronunciation: Thraz-EE-mackus 

because you seem to know a lot about it, but if you'd rather not tell me . . ."
"Of course I'll tell you, Socrates," says Thrasymachus quickly. "Nothing could be 
simpler. Law and 
justice mean that
we must do as the Government commands."
"In other words, you say that obedience to the Government is right and just?"
"That's correct," says Thrasymachus.
"But why must we obey?"
"Because the leaders of the Government are strong and powerful-otherwise they wouldn't 
be leaders. 
Therefore they're
in the best position to know what laws the people should have. "
"I see," says Socrates. "So we must obey the Government at all times?"
"That's right.
"Now, tell me, do governments ever make mistakes?"
"Well, I suppose we're all liable to make mistakes sometimes," says Thrasymachus.
"So they could make bad laws which might harm their country and themselves?"
It might happen," Thrasymachus says doubtfully.
"In other words, according to you the people might have to obey laws which are wrong, 
and if that is 
so, law and
justice must mean something more than obeying the Government."
Thrasymachus loses his temper. "The trouble with you Socrates, is that you're always 
pulling other 
people's
arguments to pieces, but you never tell us what you think. " He walks away, and 
Socrates continues 
talking to his
friends.
Socrates had lived this life for many years, stinging the citizens of Athens like a 
troublesome 
mosquito, when he
became even more famous. A friend of his went to Delphi and asked the priestess: "Who 
is the wisest 
man in
Greece?" The priestess's answers to questions were usually hard to understand, but the 
answer she 
gave now could
not have been more clear: "The wisest man in Greece is Socrates." This surprised 
Socrates. He meant 
what he said
when he claimed to know very little; it was not just a funny remark to amuse his 
friends. He puzzled over the problem. He thought of all the clever people he had 
talked with, and he 
remembered that there
was an important difference between them and himself. They claimed to know what they 
were talking 
about, but he
did not. Socrates decided that if he were the wisest man in Greece it must be because 
he knew that he 
knew very
little. His fellow citizens knew no more, but they thought they did. This was the 
turning point in 
Socrates life.
All this affected the citizens of Athens in different ways. The young men who liked 
listening to 
Socrates were
delighted. They enjoyed seeing the dignitaries of the city being shown up. But they 
soon realised 
that Socrates'
method of questioning people was not just an enjoyable game. It had a purpose. 
Although Socrates was 
popular with
the young men, others were suspicious of him, and some hated him.
Socrates even criticised the system of democracy. The Athenians were proud of their 
form of 
government in which the
citizens voted for what they wanted and were not ordered about by some tyrant or 
dictator. What they 
did not realise
was that the people, acting together, could just as easily be a dictator as one man. 
Socrates took 
the example of a
trial. In Athenian trials the decision as to whether the prisoner was guilty or 
innocent was made by 
a panel of five
hundred judges. They were ordinary citizens, chosen by ballot, and they had no legal 
training. The 
man who brought
the charge against the prisoner would explain to them what the crime was, and then the 
prisoner was 
allowed to
defend himself.
This, said Socrates, might seem a fair way to decide whether a man was guilty or 
innocent. After all, 
with such a
large number of people to decide, a wrong decision would be most unlikely. But what 
might happen if 
the prisoner
were an unpopular man? A wealthy man might be accused of some crime and be faced with 
paying a heavy 
fine. If he
were unpopular the judges might decide to find him guilty, whether he was or not, just 
for the 
pleasure of seeing him
pay out some money. It was usually the man who pleaded and gained the sympathy of the 
crowd who came 
out best.
The prisoner tried to convince his judges that he was a good man who always looked 
after his family; he would describe how he paid his debts, and how he had fought 
bravely in the 
army.
All this might have very little to do with his crime, but it was the way to sway the 
crowd.
But, as Socrates pointed out, it was wrong. The purpose of a trial was to find the 
truth. Did the prisoner commit the crime, 
or did he
not, no matter whether he was popular or unpopular, rich or poor? Socrates had no time 
for trials where the verdict depended 
on how
well the prisoner could talk about what a wonderful man he was - by appealing to the 
judges' feelings instead of their reason.
This and many other things were discussed by Socrates during

Market place in Athens at the time of Socrates

the thirty years after the Oracle of Delphi had proclaimed him the wisest man in 
Greece. He was not the only man who taught 
and
argued in the streets of Athens. Teachers of all kinds were very popular. But whereas 
most of the others tried to impress 
people with
their knowledge, and so make themselves seem more important, Socrates wandered about 
discovering how much people really
knew, regardless of what they thought of him.
Then in 399 B.C., when
he was seventy years old, Socrates was put on trial for his life. Three men accused 
him of being a menace to the city; he 
was, they
claimed, a dangerous man. According to them, the young people were no longer proud to 
be citizens of Athens, and they no 
longer
respected the gods, or modelled their behaviour on the old heroes of the epic poems. 
The reason was the influence of the 
teachers who
talked and argued in the city streets. Socrates was by far the best known of them, and 
he had to be 
removed before
he could poison the minds of more people. At this time Athens was going through 
difficult times. She 
had just been
defeated by Sparta in a long and costly war, and it was said that these difficulties 
were a 
punishment by the gods for
allowing such men as Socrates to spread their evil ideas.
That was roughly what the accusers said to the five hundred judges. They had a lot of 
support, 
especially as there
were some important citizens among the judges who bore a grudge against Socrates for 
showing them up 
in
argument. The trial followed the usual pattern until Socrates rose to defend himself. 
He did not 
prepare any defence of
the usual kind. He could have begged for mercy by saying that he was an old man and 
that he realised 
he had been
mistaken. This would have been an easy way out, and would probably have been 
successful because 
Socrates'
enemies would have liked nothing better than to have him admit before the people of 
Athens that he 
was wrong.
But Socrates did not beg for mercy. He realised that only by being prepared to die 
could he show the 
people that he
valued his beliefs above everything else. So when he stood to speak, he began by 
saying that, unlike 
his accusers,
he would tell the truth in plain straightforward language. He explained why he was 
unpopular. 
Whenever he proved that
someone was wrong, many people assumed that Socrates knew all the answers himself; 
they thought him 
something
of a know-all. But he had always said that he knew nothing: "The truth is, that real 
wisdom belongs 
to the gods, and
what the Oracle at Delphi was really saying was that the wisest men are those who have 
realised, like 
me, that they
know very little." Socrates told the Athenians what he thought of them. There were 
shouts as they 
tried to interrupt
and argue with him, and some implored him to stop annoying the judges with his 
honesty. But Socrates 
had no
intention of pulling any punches. "The gods have given me to you to make you better 
people," he said. "If you kill me, you won't easily find someone to replace me."
Then it was time to vote on the verdict. Socrates was found guilty by a majority of 
sixty-one votes. 
It was not a large
majority and it showed that many of the judges were uneasy in the face of Socrates' 
honesty and 
courage. The next
step was to decide on a punishment. Although the death penalty had been demanded, it 
was the custom 
in Athenian
trials for the accusers to suggest one punishment, and for the prisoner to propose a 
lighter one, 
which he thought
would fit his crime. His enemies were not completely determined to kill him, and if 
Socrates had 
suggested
banishment to a neighbouring city or country, that would have been accepted - as long 
as he did not 
come back.
Unfortunately for them, Socrates did not want to leave Athens. When he stood up to 
suggest another 
punishment, he
took their breaths away by saying: "I would say the only just thing would be for 
Athens to provide me 
with free food
and clothing, and a free house for the rest of my life! " The point was that by 
suggesting any kind 
of real punishment,
Socrates would be admitting that he was guilty of the charges made against him-and 
this he would 
never do. The
judges were furious at Socrates' flippant suggestion. When the vote was taken, almost 
all the five 
hundred voted for
the death penalty.
After the sentence had been pronounced, Socrates made a last short speech. He was not 
a man to give 
up. He
warned the judges that they would not be achieving anything by killing him. "If you 
expect to stop 
criticism of your
wrong way of life by putting people to death, there's something wrong with your 
reasoning." He said 
that far from
criticisms ending, they would increase after his death. Socrates was right. No 
powerful body of 
people, whether it be
the government of a city or a large country, can stop criticism by destroying the 
critics. It is not 
the critics who are
important, but what they say, and Socrates' words have lived on. The example he set 
became famous. 
When other
men found themselves having to defend the same right of freedom of speech, they found 
their own 
trials easier to face
through knowing how courageously Socrates had faced his accusers. After his trial, 
Socrates was taken to a cell to await his death. He was allowed to receive visitors 
and he passed the
time talking
with his friends. He showed no fear of death, and even refused to attempt an escape. 
He said that to flee now would
make him a criminal; the threat of death was no reason to give up his beliefs.
At last Socrates was told that he was to die at sunset, and he spent his last hours 
saying goodbye to his wife and
children. He encouraged his friends, who were in despair at the thought of losing 
their master. The sun sank lower.
The Athenians executed their prisoners by making them drink a cup of poison hemlock. 
It was getting dark. Socrates
called the jailer and asked him what he must do.
"Just drink it," the jailer said, "and then walk about until you feel a weight in your 
legs, and then lie down. The poison
will act. You won't feel anything."
He gave the cup to Socrates who took it and drained the liquid in one breath. He 
walked about the room, pacing up
and down, and rebuking his friends for looking so mournful. Presently, he said his 
legs felt heavy and he lay down on
the couch. He noticed that his feet felt numb and cold. The coldness soon crept up his 
legs to his waist, and then
Socrates died.
It is easy to say that the Athenians were wrong to execute Socrates. But if he were 
alive in New Zealand today what
do you think we would say about him?
The next article will be about the great Italian scientist, Galileo, and his fight for 
the right to extend the boundaries of
science and knowledge, without hindrance.

VOLCANOES
by C. W. MAUGHAN
Night view of Mt. Paricutin in Mexico. Glowing lava is shooting up and
flowing down its slope, 1 August 1943.
Eruption of Mt. Pelee
Sixty years ago on the island of Martinique in the West Indies there was a beautiful 
city called St 
Pierre. It was a rich
and prosperous city set out on the shore of the island at the foot of a range of 
green-clad hills. 
One of these hills,
about five miles to the north of the city, had a bald spot near its summit and because 
of this it was 
called Mt. Pelee -
the Bald Mountain. Pelee, everyone knew, was an old volcano, because many years before 
it had smoked 
a little and
thrown up some ash in a harmless eruption. Nobody worried about this, and people used 
to like going 
for picnics on
the summit of the hill among the trees and grass that grew in the valley that had once 
been the crater of the volcano.
But in April 1902 the people of St Pierre woke up one morning to find a cloud of steam 
rising from 
Mt. Pelee, and
many of them climbed up to see what was happening. They found that their favourite 
valley was now 
filled by a lake
and only the tops of the trees showed above the water. Out of the middle of the lake 
rose a small 
cone of cinders with
an open hole, or vent, in the top from which all the steam was coming. They still did 
not worry about 
this, but during
May they started to change their minds.
On the nights of 5 and 6 May several explosions were heard. One of these blew a gap in 
the side of 
the valley, and all
the water in the lake rushed out down the side of the mountain towards the sea. It 
carried away 
several houses and a
sugar mill that were in its path, and 25 people in the buildings were swept away and 
drowned.
From then on the eruption became more violent. For the next two days and nights flows 
of mud 
overwhelmed villages
to the west of the mountain. Light grey dust fell everywhere and at night the sky 
above the mountain 
was lit up by a
violet-red glow. The explosions became more and more violent, and glowing rocks were 
blasted into the 
sky. People
who lived on the slopes of Pelee, fled to St Pierre for safety - for where else, they 
asked themselves, 
could they be
safer than in St Pierre?
On the morning of 8 May the ship Roraina, her decks covered with grey ashes, came into 
the port of St 
Pierre and
tied up alongside the 17 other ships that were in the harbour. An hour later only two 
of these ships, 
both badly
damaged, were still afloat and the whole city of St Pierre was destroyed, together 
with its 30,000 
inhabitants. For, at
7.50 a.m., Pelee, exploded with four deafening reports, and a great reddish-black 
cloud of steam and 
powdered rock
was fired out of the side of the volcano like a shell from a gun. This burning cloud 
took less than 
two minutes to cover
the five miles to St Pierre, and after it had flashed across St Pierre the city and 
its inhabitants 
no longer existed. Only
a few walls were left standing in the whole city and, apart from two persons, every 
man, woman and child had been suffocated or burnt to death.
The destruction of St Pierre in 1902 was one of the worst recorded disasters caused by 
a volcano, and 
most people
think of volcanoes and disasters together. After all, here in New Zealand, eighty 
years ago a chain 
of craters was
blasted across Mt. Tarawera and Lake Rotomahana in a violent eruption that killed many 
people, while 
the Tangiwai
rail crash on Christmas Eve 1953 was indirectly caused by the volcano, Mt. Ruapehu. 
The crater lake 
of Ruapehu had
overflowed and plunged into the Whangaehu valley, carrying away a bridge on the main 
railway line.

The great crater of Mt. Tarawera, formed in the 1886 eruption.

What is a Volcano?
But volcanoes are more than just a violent companion to disasters; they are one of the 
ways in which the surface of the earth is changed slowly but surely over millions of 
years.
What are volcanoes? Why do they appear in some places in the world and not in others? 
What causes them? How do they work?
Volcanoes are really little more than vents or cracks in the earth's surface, through 
which hot matter of various kinds can emerge from the depths of the earth. Sometimes 
they look like mountains because they have built a cone around themselves. At other 
times they appear in the form of a deep crack that may be many miles long. The ones 
that look
like mountains are the most common.
In order to understand why cracks or holes should appear in the earth's surface you 
will have to 
remember that the
earth has a thin skin, or crust, on the outside. Below it, is a thick layer called the 
mantle, and in 
the centre is the
core.
The crust of the earth is made of solid rock which is quite thick on the continents, 
and thinner 
under the oceans. The
rocks of the crust are of three main kinds, but only one need concern us here. These 
are the rocks 
that have cooled
and hardened from a molten, liquid state. They are called igneous rocks - and anything 
to do with the formation of
igneous rocks concerns volcanoes and volcanology (the study of volcanoes).
Underneath this crust lies the thick mantle of the earth, which is made of molten 
rock, or magma (a 
Greek word
which means "dough"). Now you would expect this magma to be a liquid, but in fact 
there is so much 
pressure
exerted on it by the weight of the material above it, that it is virtually solid and 
acts in many 
ways like a solid. This
idea of a liquid solid is very hard to grasp, but you would understand it better if 
you were to look 
through an old
window pane, preferably from an angle. You would probably notice that what you see is 
a little 
distorted. Now this
distortion is caused by the flow of the glass - a movement so slow that you cannot see 
it. Magma can 
be compared
with that glass. It, too, moves at an extremely slow rate (only not nearly as slow as 
glass). Magma is like 
glass in another
important way: it can be broken.
In the centre of the earth is the core, about which almost nothing is known except 
that it is 
probably a liquid,
consisting mainly of molten iron. But this need not concern us, as volcanoes have 
their origin in the 
crust and the
mantle, beginning mainly from movements in the mantle. This may seem a long way from 
explaining how 
the cracks
in the crust are formed, but there is just one more thing to explain before we finally 
get to them.
Because the mantle is in some ways like a liquid, it is possible for something called 
convection 
currents to start in it.
These sound
very complicated, but they are really quite simple, and you will all have seen them in 
action when 
you watched boiling
water in motion. Water moves round because hot water is lighter than cold water; and 
so the hot water 
at the bottom
of a pan tends to rise to the top. The colder heavier water sinks to the bottom, and 
in turn is 
heated and rises to the
top. This constant circular movement is called a convection current. Convection 
currents, like those in boiling water, are moving the magma in the mantle all the 
time. They cause some of it 
to rise (the very
hot magma from close to the core) and some of it to fall (the cooler heavier magma 
from near the 
earth's crust).
Throughout the mantle there are many of these convection currents, some moving 
clockwise and some 
anti-clockwise. Where a clockwise current meets an anti-clockwise current enormous 
pressures start to 
build up,
particularly in the thin earth's crust above the meeting point. These enormous 
pressures start to 
buckle and weaken
the crust and, where this happens, the crust becomes distorted. At these points on the 
earth's crust 
you will find the
great ocean depths, the high mountain ranges, the arcs of islands rising from the sea 
and, of course, 
the volcanoes.
The volcanoes mark the spot where the pressure exerted by the meeting of the 
convection currents has 
cracked the
crust. As soon as this happens, the pressure that keeps the magma solid is released, 
and the magma 
can begin to
force its way to the surface. But, as it is forced up the volcanic vent, it undergoes 
many changes.

This experiment shows how a flow of magma under pressure may raise the surface of the 
earth. (The boy is blowing up a balloon covered by dirt.)

Firstly, it acts rather like a bottle of lemonade which has been shaken up and opened. 
All the gases in the magma, especially hydrogen and oxygen, are released and rush 
upwards, carrying the magma with them at a greater and greater speed. Secondly, the 
effect of the oxygen from the air outside allows the magma to heat up still more and 
the gases to burn. Now that the magma has been really heated up and the pressure 
released, it becomes truly liquid and is known as lava. When the gases, still being
 released from the magma below, force the lava out of the top of
the volcano, an eruption has started.

Mt. Paricutin sending up dense clouds of smoke. Lava flow has dammed the valley to 
form the small lake in the foreground.

Although this is the way in which all eruptions start, they sometimes 
appear to be very different. Some volcanoes, like
Pelee, explode really violently, and, before the magma can be properly 
converted to lava, the volcano and its magma
are blown to pieces by an explosion and spread around in the form of dust, pumice 
stone and ash. Other volcanoes
do not explode, but their magma turns easily into lava and pours out of the 
volcano like a slow-moving river.
Whether a volcano explodes, or erupts quietly, depends on the type of lava 
it produces. There are two types of lava:
the basic lavas which contain much iron, and the acidic lavas which contain 
much silica or quartz. The basic lavas
melt more easily and stay molten much longer than the acidic lavas. They 
flow quietly from the vent of the volcano
without blocking it
The acidic lavas, on the other hand, become solid almost as soon as they 
are formed and turn into rocks that block
the vent. At the same time the gases being released from the magma are 
building up pressure. They have to escape
somehow, so they either blow the vent clear or blow out the side of the 
mountain, shattering the lava and magma into
dust and pumice stone.
These are the two extremes of volcanic behaviour, and most volcanoes erupt 
in a manner somewhere in between
them. Each volcano tends to have its own way of erupting, but it is 
convenient to think of them in six main types.
Types of Volcanoes
Icelandic
First of all there are the Icelandic volcanoes where a big fissure or crack 
appears in the earth and great masses of
highly mobile lava spill over the side. The lava is so mobile that the 
volcano never has time to make a large cone, but just pours out the lava all over the 
countryside, filling deep valleys and burying
small hills. The huge flat plains that are formed in this way are called
lava plateaux. Probably the biggest lava plateau in the world was made in 
America thousands of years ago and covers
most of the
states of Washington and Oregon. There is another huge but ancient plateau in India; 
but, despite this, fissure eruptions are called Icelandic because the only 
one that has been observed in historic times was in Iceland at a
place called the Laku fissure. This happened 200 years ago, and the amount of lava 
that came out of 
the fissure was so great that it filled valleys 600 feet deep
right up to the top, and in one place stretched for forty miles.
ICELANDIC
Hawaiian
The second type of volcano is called a Hawaiian, or shield, volcano, because the 
island of Hawaii 
looks like a shield and is the biggest volcano of this type. Here
the lava is also very mobile and can flow  freely; but instead of spreading out across 
a flat plain 
it slowly builds up round the main vents, making a gently sloping
mountain. If the fissure, or vent, opens up at the bottom of the sea, the volcano will 
build a huge 
mountain underwater, which finally becomes an island. Hawaii is
just such an island. Over millions of years, volcanoes have built up the island of 
Hawaii from the 
sea bed. If you could stand on the sea bed and look up to the
summit of the highest mountain in Hawaii (Mauna Kea), you would see a mountain higher 
than Mt. 
Everest; and that would have been built up by thousands of lava
flows pouring out of vents and fissures.
HAWAIIAN
Strombolian
In the third type of volcano the lava is not quite so mobile, and sometimes a skin 
forms over it, 
which is cleared away by a little explosion. The lava can then flow
freely again. This is called Strombolian, after a volcano in the Mediterranean sea 
which is erupting 
all the time, but not very violently. Because of this it is called the
lighthouse of the Mediterranean.
The cone of a Strombolian volcano is therefore partly made of lava flows and partly of 
cinders and 
ash. The cinders and ash are really the bits and pieces of lava
that are blown into the air by the explosions.
STROMBOLIAN
Vulcanian
The lava of the fourth type of volcano is not nearly so mobile, so the vent sometimes 
becomes 
blocked, and the volcano clears it by blowing out rocks and ash until
the lava can flow properly. This type is called Vulcanian after Vulcano, another 
island in the 
Mediterranean sea. This has given us the name "volcano". The ancient
Romans believed that Vulcan was the blacksmith of the gods, and that he hammered away 
at his forge 
underneath the island of Vulcano, making sparks fly out of
the chimney.
VULCANIAN
Plinian
The fifth type is called Plinian, because about two thousand years ago a young Roman 
called Pliny wrote a famous
description of an eruption of this type. In this volcano the lava is highly viscous 
(or sticky) and clogs up the main vent
well and truly. The main vent is finally blown open by a colossal explosion which 
shatters all the lava and magma into
dust, pumice, stone and ashes. One of the biggest volcanic explosions like this was at 
Krakatoa, a volcano between
Java and Sumatra in Indonesia, a hundred years ago.
The bang of the explosion was so loud that people heard it in Australia, thousands of 
miles away. The ash cloud
travelled right round the world. When a volcano explodes in this way, so much magma 
and lava is forced out at one
time that a big hole is left underneath the volcano, and the cone collapses into it 
forming a huge hole, called a caldera
(Portuguese for "cauldron").
Pelean
The last type of all is the Pelean which you have already read about
at the beginning of this article. Here, the main vent is so completely blocked by 
solidified lava that not even a gigantic
explosion so can clear it. Instead, the explosion blows out the side of the volcano. 
This type of explosion means that a volcano is
getting very old and beginning to seal itself up completely with a cap (or dome) of 
lava.
PELEAN
White Island, an active volcano in the Bay of Plenty
What to Look for
If you want to know where to find the different types of volcanoes, remember about 
signs of weakness in the earth's crust and look for the big mountain ranges, the ocean 
depths, the strings of islands shaped like an arc. Not far away you will usually find 
the volcanoes. Here are some of the areas where volcanoes are found.
1.	Africa, where the continent is gradually being split by a deep valley called 
the Rift Valley.
2.	The Mediterranean Sea, not far from the high Alps. (Strangely enough, there are 
no volcanoes near the Himalayas, and I do not think anyone quite knows why.)
3.	The great mountain ranges round the pacific, such as the Andes and the Rockies.
4.	The arcs of islands round the Pacific, such as the Aleutians, Japan and 
Indonesia.
Most of the volcanoes are round the Pacific ocean in a great circle called the "ring 
of fire". You live on this ring of fire, so you ought to be interested in volcanoes.
Some Things to Do
1.	Find out as much as possible about the New Zealand volcanoes: White Island, 
Tarawera, Ngauruhoe, Ruapehu. Describe them and their eruptions. Try to 
classify them. Some of them fall in more than one of the categories. For 
example, Tarawera was partly a fissure eruption and partly Plinian.
2.	Find out where the Kermadec-Tonga trench is and how it is placed in relation to 
New Zealand's volcanic belt and the Alpine fault. What other volcanoes are near 
this trench?
3. Get a piece of pumice and, if possible, a piece of obsidian (volcanic glass). If 
you can't get any 
obsidian get a photograph of some. One is soft and powdery and floats in water.
The other is one of the hardest materials known. They are actually the same material 
that has 
undergone different processes. Find out why they look so different.

Mexican church half-submerged in lava from Mt. Paricutin, 25 January 1945
Steam rising above the snow-covered slopes of Mt. Ngauruhoe
River of fire from Mauna Loa, largest of the Hawaiian volcanoes, photographed at 
night. The whole landscape is lit up eerily by the hissing, frothing lava which has 
consumed every living thing before it.

FURTHER READING
Restless Earth, by Rose Wyler and Gerald Ames. (Abelard-Schuman) Earth's Crust, by 
Keith Clayton. (Aldous Books, London) 
Tarawera Eruption, by R. F. Kean. (R. F. Kean, Auckland) 
VolcanicWonderland, by R. F. Kean. (R. F. Kean, Auckland)
FILMSTRIPS
67/180 Col. Work of Internal Forces
61/127 B. & W. Birth of a Volcano
53/158 B. & W.  Volcanoes in New Zealand
FILMS
B2042 B2220 C816 A817
Earthquakes and Volcanoes (14 mins) Birth and Death of Mountains (12 mins) Eruption of 
Kilauea (27 mins) Volcanoes in Action (11 mins)
A1944 N.Z. Mirror No. 3 and R211 National Film Unit Weekly Review both have the same 
item of the 1945 eruption of Ruapehu.

Birth Of a volcano. A dense cloud of steam pours from the crater of Didicas, north of 
Luzon Island in the Philippines, during March 1952.

THE HERMIT OF WANKIE
by FRANK B. FULLER
Have you ever heard of a man who thatched his car when the roof wore out? This was the 
habit of Mr 
Herbert George Robins, the explorer-scientist-prospector who founded in Rhodesia the
important Wankie Game Reserve, which many people think the world's greatest animal 
sanctuary. But 
then Robins was a most unusual person in several ways.
Sometimes called "The Hermit of Wankie", George Robins was a short, slightly-built man 
with a huge, 
white, forked beard flowing down to his waist. In his home in the bush, he wore a 
white
nightcap with a long pointed end, though for special occasions he kept an old sombrero 
with a ragged 
brim filled with holes. Instead of a shirt, he wore a striped pyjama jacket tucked 
into khaki
trousers which, in their turn, were thrust into mosquito boots. And round his waist he 
clasped a wide 
leather belt holding a revolver, an ammunition holster and a hunting knife.
I first heard ' of the Hermit when travelling southwards from Lusaka, the capital of 
Zambia. Robins, 
I was told, had done a great work towards saving Africa's big game. This was important 
because
the animals are gradually being driven from their age-old homes as roads and 
settlements push deeper 
into the wilds. I was interested and made up my mind to stop at Wankie.
The Reserve lies off the Bulawayo-Livingstone road. This means that you go through it 
on the way to 
Victoria Falls. Here, the bush is still just as it was in the days when the district 
was part of the
area called "Darkest Africa".
You have heard, I feel sure, of the Kruger National Park in South Africa. Well, the 
Wankie Game 
Reserve is much harder to reach. And when you arrive you find sand and earth tracks 
instead of
properly made roads. But these are two of the reasons why Wankie is the more 
interesting sanctuary; 
it is wilder and so there are many more animals about. One comparison will show its 
importance. The world-famous Yellowstone National Park, the largest of the American 
Reserves, is 
3,500 square miles in area; the Wankie Game Reserve covers 5,000 square miles, though 
it did
not begin in so big a way.
You should not think of an enclosed district. The Wankie boundary, like the Equator, 
is an imaginary 
line. Just think of a vast natural zoo consisting of savage, dusty bush and holding 
about 50,000
head of game, including perhaps as many as 5,000 elephants. There is not a yard of 
wire to confine 
the animals, which move in and out as they please.
Robins was born in England and was given an expensive education which would have 
fitted him to fill 
an important scientific post. But as soon as he came of age he threw away the 
advantages his
parents had provided and went to Australia. With a swag on his back, he tramped off to 
become a 
prospector.
His wanderings took him to the Gulf Country and for a short time he joined the North 
Queensland 
Police. But, as the Australians say, he had itchy feet. He threw up his police work to 
sail for
South Africa. He worked for a time on the alluvial diamond diggings at Kimberley. But 
all the while 
he hankered for Central Africa. So one day he crossed the Limpopo - a wide, crocodile-
infested
river -and travelled northwards until he reached the Congo.
He had many adventures in Central Africa, including brushes with slave-raiders and 
cannibals, and one 
or two near escapes from savage elephants. When, at last, he tired of prospecting he 
took a
roving commission in Government service, fighting sleeping-sickness. But during all 
these years of 
wandering he kept up his contacts with scientific bodies in Britain. He made regular 
reports and,
from time to time, would write an article for some learned society. So it happened 
that by the time 
he settled at Wankie he could, when he chose, claim fellowship of a number of famous 
societies.
Robins laid out three farms at Wankie. To these properties he gave quaint names - Big 
Tom's, Little Tom's, and Tom's Extension. At first he put up just a few rough huts, 
and strong stockades to
keep out elephant, lion, wild pig, and other game. Next, he hired native herd boys and 
soon had about 
1,700 head of cattle divided between the farms. Then he set to work on the 
improvements.
If you were to visit Big Tom's today you would have a great surprise. Coming along a 
narrow, sandy 
track with many sharp turns, you would see a solid, three-storied brick tower with a 
white-painted penthouse on its flat roof. Drawing nearer, you would see some large 
brick huts, and a rough 
shed or two made out of poles and mud baked hard in the sun, and, stretching widely 
about
tower and huts, an elephant stockade. You would find that the stockade is made of tall 
stakes, as 
thick as medium-sized trees, and heavy wire.

Big Tom's. Note the elephant stockade. On top of the tower is the "observatory" where 
the telescope is kept.

Robins made the penthouse with a sliding glass roof so that a large telescope he kept 
there could be 
raised and pointed skywards. For he was a trained astronomer and often studied the 
stars.
Sometimes, in the daytime, he would roll a second and smaller telescope out on to the 
balcony and 
study the animals in the bush about his homestead.
He would spend many hours a week watching the animals through his telescope and making 
notes. In this 
way, he added to his already wide knowledge of the habits of wild life, and most of 
what
he learned he wrote into articles for specialist papers in Britain and the United 
States. He kept 
several expensive cameras which he used to illustrate these articles. One camera had 
been adapted
to take pictures of the stars.
On the walls of his study downstairs hung some of the best of his pictures. But most 
of the space was 
taken up by bookshelves which reached from floor to ceiling. And these shelves held 
books
of a kind which most people would have been astonished to find in so wild a place. 
There were works 
on astronomy, geology, medicine, metallurgy, and many other subjects.
In one hut at Big Tom's Robins kept his cameras and a large supply of photographic 
equipment. In 
another were two microscopes, each costing £500. A third was fitted up as a dark-room. 
He
spent most of his spare time either in the penthouse with his telescopes, or in one or 
other of these 
huts. He had a collection of some 4,000 photographs - a record of his adventures in 
various part
of Australia and Africa.
But, when Robins had all his farms running well, suddenly the bottom fell out of the 
cattle market. 
The little hermit never had much patience when things went wrong. He made up his mind 
that he
was tired of ranching. He would retire from business, sell his cattle, and turn his 
lands into a game reserve. And this is what he did.
By now, many of the wild animals knew that Big Tom's and the other homesteads might be 
approached 
safely. Robins had never shot at them. And now that he turned himself into a game
warden, the learned old man began to defend the game fiercely against the guns of 
hunters whom he 
described contemptuously as "free shooters". He put up huge notice boards round the 
edge of his property, warning strangers that 
hunting was forbidden and that anyone disobeying this order would be taken to the 
police. And, to
make the warning doubly clear, red flags were put up at intervals between the boards.
One evening, two strangers of the "free shooting" sort arrived outside the stockade at 
Big Tom's. 
They had with them the body of a buck they had just shot. Great Danes, kept by Robins 
as watch
dogs, began barking furiously. Presently Robins came out of the tower and saw the dead 
buck. 
Silently, he glared at the visitors through the bars of the gate.
 "Good evening," said one of the hunters, and added unwisely, "we hope to get some 
really good 
heads on your place - lion especially." Apparently, he had not taken the warning on 
the boards
seriously, or else supposed that permission to shoot was merely a matter of payment.
"Is that so?" barked Robins, and did not open the gate.
"Yes, and elephant, too, " put in the second man, who was as slow on the uptake as his 
companion.
Then Robins roared like any lion. "Get out, the pair of you! Get out and read my 
boards. "
"But where are we to sleep?" asked the first stranger. He was not a professional 
hunter, merely a 
traveller wanting "trophies".
"Sleep!" bellowed Robins. "What do I care where people like you sleep? I'm interested 
only in seeing 
the last of you. Now get moving-before I loose the dogs." And, crestfallen, but wiser, 
the
strangers left.
The dogs were a feature of Big Tom's. Because of them, even an authorised arrival was 
a noisy matter. 
Immediately you entered the clearing about the homestead the dogs would spring out 
from
hut or kennel and start to bay. Some were Great Danes, a few were Ridgebacks. But all 
were fierce and 
would have torn to pieces anyone, European or African, who tried to break in.
Usually, when Robins caught a hunter on his property he would demand the man's name 
and report him to 
the police. But people who disobeyed one of the many minor rules he dealt with himself 
-- and always most effectively.

George Robins and some of his African workers, with the fierce watch-dogs that patrol 
Big Tom's.

One day, a driver stopped on a track by a small stream to fill the radiator of his 
car. Now it 
happened that just then Robins was watching the bush through his telescope and saw 
what was
happening. Quickly, he ran down the tower steps and out to his car. Then, calling 
several native 
"boys" to give him a push - the car never started otherwise - he raced off through the 
bush to the
place where the man had stopped.
"No business getting out of your car on my ground!" he roared as he pulled up.
"But I needed water for the radiator," replied the stranger, who, having filled up the 
car, had sat 
down with a packet of sandwiches.
"Should have seen to that before starting. I won't have people out of their cars when 
I can't trust 
them not to shoot. Now be off with you. And don't come back till you've learned the 
rules."
These rules were very strict, and everybody arriving in the Reserve was directed to go 
first to Big 
Tom's and sign them in a special guest book. Amongst other things, the stranger had to 
promise
to obey the orders of the African "boy" who accompanied him; to stop the car whenever 
elephant were 
seen on the track ahead; to keep the engine running at all times; never to halt in one 
place
for more than a minute at a time, except when elephant barred the way; never in any 
circumstances to 
get out of the car. These instructions, of course, were given as much for the sake of 
the
visitor as the game. Wild animals are always dangerous in Africa, especially the 
elephant.
However, the most important of the rules was that every car using the tracks of the 
Reserve must be 
in perfect condition. And in this matter it cannot be said that George Robins lived up 
to his own
orders. His car was a miracle of survival - an old "bomb" with a vengeance. It was a 
model of 1918, or thereabouts. Its starting handle had been lost. So, as already 
mentioned, a strong push was
needed to get it going. It would start with a rattle and a tremendous jerk. And since 
one gear 
only - the top - worked properly, the speed kept up on many sharp bends on the sandy 
bush trails was
terrific. But Robins knew every twist and turn and could judge the curves exactly. How 
the old man, 
when sitting in this car, had the nerve to accuse others of coming in inefficient 
vehicles is
difficult to understand. But you must remember that Robins, besides being the boss of 
Tom's farms, 
could be very fierce indeed. So far as I know, nobody ever answered him back twice.
For reasons which I cannot explain, the Big Tom's car never broke down. It ought not 
to have run a 
mile without trouble, but actually it was always ready in the emergencies which quite 
often
happened. For instance, one day an African stole some explosive, thinking he would 
make bullets. He 
blew one hand off. Then he ran to Robins, who clapped on a tourniquet and pushed him 
into
the back of the car. They drove many miles-jolting, rattling
and skidding round corners - to the police camp where a doctor treated the injury.
An elephant, a lion, a buffalo, or a rhinoceros will occasionally charge a man, but, 
usually, they 
leave cars alone. But there are times when an elephant will attack even a car, rolling 
it over and
kneeling on it. A friend of mine has a picture of a lion actually crouching on the 
bonnet of a car 
and looking in through the windscreen. Rhinos have very poor sight and charge by 
scent. But if a car
happens to be in the way it's just too bad - for the car.
In his ranching days, George Robins had always kept the tracks on his property in good 
repair. But 
when he started to preserve game he neglected them deliberately. "I'll not keep good 
tracks

Elephants in the Wankie Game Reserve

for a pack of rubbernecks and 'free shooters' to race about my property and kill my 
game," he once 
told a friend of mine. "No one who doesn't like my conditions need come; he'll not he 
missed."
One day an African boy was scared nearly out of his wits by what he considered were 
his master's 
uncanny powers. The little fellow had gone with his father some distance into the 
bush. Then,
while the man cut wood, the boy caught a bird and killed it in a cruel way. Later, he 
was called by 
Robins, told in detail just what he had done wrong and then punished. For long 
afterwards, he
was sure that his master could see him anywhere. He was not to know that Robins had 
watched him 
through his telescope.
You would have laughed at many of the Hermit's ways. For instance, he used in his 
study a remarkable 
chair which he himself had designed. This chair was huge and was one of the sights of 
Big
Tom's. A complicated set of levers, working on a ratchet, operated its various parts 
as required. So, 
at one time it might be just a straight-backed chair. But at another it would be an 
easy-chair, a
table, a desk, a small book-case, a book-rest. It might even be adjusted to make a 
bed. Of course, it 
was a great joke amongst the old man's few friends. But none of them dared laugh at it 
in front
of him.
Robins was a great tea drinker. But he took almost as much sugar as tea, for he would 
add spoon after 
spoon from the sugar-bowl until the liquid was nearly stiff enough for the spoon to 
stand
upright. Some people used to say jokingly that he lived on sugar alone. And, 
certainly, he had the 
most odd hours for meals. Sometimes, he would seem to go without food for days, and 
then
suddenly decide to have a meal at 4 o'clock in the morning. It was his custom to say 
to anyone who 
came to stay with him:
"Look here, I don't eat. So whenever you feel hungry you just tell my cook boy what to 
get ready."
Usually, on the first occasion the visitor would nearly starve, feeling too 
embarrassed to give 
orders on his own account to the cook. But a second visit would cure him of feelings 
of that kind and
then he would get guineafowl and all kinds of good things to eat.
The Hermit's method of brewing tea was unusual. He would keep a huge tea-pot on the 
table section of 
the chair and from this he would help himself until it was dry. Then he would expand 
his
lungs and yell "boy" in a tremendous voice surprising in so slight a man. At once, an 
African would 
come trotting in, grinning all over his round, shining face.
"Ya, baas! Coming, baas!" he would shout equally loudly, and wave a kettle in his 
right hand and a 
cup in his left. Then he would empty half a cup of fresh tea into the tea-pot and fill 
up with
scalding water.
Not even for a visitor was fresh tea made. The pot just stewed again and again until 
it became so 
full that 
it had to be emptied; and the procedure would begin all over again. But whatever the 
time of day or night, tea was always waiting for the 
stranger able to face the strength of the brew.
I think George Robins was pleased to be known as a "character".
He never really minded if people laughed at him, though on rare occasions when they 
did to his face 
he might bellow at them in his deep voice. One of his titles was "Father Christmas of 
the
Elephants". He was given it partly because he looked like a miniature
shabby Father Christmas, partly because the elephant was his favourite beast.
While year by year the Hermit built up his private game sanctuary far away in 
Salisbury - the capital 
of Rhodesia - people began to feel that the country should have a National Game 
Reserve.
Rumours of what had happened at Wankie reached the city and more and more people began 
to talk. Then, 
one day a member of parliament, introduced a motion in the House. This
motion read: "That the Government take into consideration at the earliest possible 
date the advisability of proclaiming a game reserve." So began the second stage in the
making of the huge animal sanctuary.
The Wankie district was the most suitable area to choose. To begin with there were 
great numbers of 
animals in that part of the country. Then, it was an area unlikely to be wanted for 
town
development. Finally, it seemed sensible to extend what Robins had started. So the 
Wankie Game 
Reserve was opened. And then side by side, there existed an official and a private 
animal
sanctuary.
Some years later, George Robins did a typically generous thing. He gave all his Tom's 
Farms property 
to the State, provided that the Government should agree to keep the land as an animal
sanctuary for all time.
George Robins is dead now. But if you were to stay in the big rest camp which the 
Government has placed in the heart of the Reserve you would still hear dozens of 
stories about the kindly,

George Robins in the clothes he kept for special occasions.


strange old man who drank unbelievably strong tea by the bucketful. The camp is an 
interesting place 
to stay in. At night, as you boil your billy over a small fire, out of the darkness 
comes the
angry squeal of an elephant, or perhaps the deep roar of a lion. Then comes a 
whispering, stealthy 
kind of silence, presently broken by more savage sounds from the surrounding bush. 
Elephant
sounds are always a little frightening, because the elephant is a tricky beast. That 
is why I am a 
little doubtful about one story of Robins you would be almost sure to hear. Someone 
would tell you
that the Hermit used to scatter a herd of elephants merely by waving his sombrero at 
them as he approached on foot. Well, I do not think that that is at all likely.
The rest camp is not far from Big Tom's, the heart of the Reserve. And some people who 
know the 
sanctuary very well believe that the Robins Camp --- or Tom's Farm area - is still the 
most thickly
populated with game. I can't say that I noticed very much difference.  The animals are 
in numbers 
everywhere. All the same, if the experts are right in what they say, that, surely, is 
how it
should be.
Photographs supplied by the author

Zeno
Zeno, a noted philosopher of ancient Greece, was one day teaching a class of young 
men. One pupil had 
overmuch to say.
"Young man," said the philosopher, "the gods have given us only one tongue, but two 
ears, in 
order that we may listen just twice as much as we speak."

Puns
A young, soldier, who had lost his right arm, said to his friend that his enemies 
would not be very 
much afraid of him now. "No," replied his friend, "you will now always be considered 
an (h)armless
fellow. "
A joke of this kind is called a pun. A pun is the humorous use of a word to suggest 
different 
meanings. We say that the man who in answer to the serious question, "Is life worth 
living?" said, 
"That
all depends upon the liver," made a pun. So did the newspaper editor who got a letter 
from a 
subscriber saying, "I don't want your paper any longer." He wrote back: "I wouldn't 
make it any 
longer
if you did. Its present length suits me very well."
A man who was always making puns was once challenged to make one on the spur of the 
moment. "Upon 
what subject," he asked. "Upon the King," said somebody. "Oh," he replied, "the King
is no subject."
Punning has been sometimes called the lowest form of wit. When this remark was made to 
a well-known 
punster, he replied, "Of course it is, because it is the foundation of wit. Therefore 
it must be the lowest."

COOK AND THE NEW SCIENCE
by A. C. and N. C. BEGG
In the eighteenth century, people began to examine the world around them in a new way. 
Naturalists 
collected plants and animals, geologists began to study the earth's crust, and 
chemists
discovered the nature of water and air. Even King George III took up botany. Many of 
these men, like 
Joseph Banks, were amateurs, but they helped to lay the foundations upon which modern
science has been built.
As new lands were explored, thousands of animals and plants were discovered, and it 
became an urgent 
problem to classify them. The first person to do so successfully was a Swedish doctor,
Carl Linnaeus, who became Professor of Botany at Uppsala in 1742. He collected 12,100 
kinds of 
living things, which he identified according to the genus (the family name) and their 
species (the
individual name). His pupils roamed the world searching for botanical
specimens and seeds which they sent back to Sweden to their master. His favourite 
student was Dr 
Daniel Carlsson Solander, who sailed round the world as botanist on the Endeavour.
Great strides were being made in the study of medicine. In the English-speaking world, 
scientific 
medical teaching began in Scotland with the founding of the Edinburgh Medical School. 
One of its
pupils was James Lind, who improved sanitation in the Navy, and showed how scurvy 
might be overcome 
by the use of fresh fruit or lemon juice. (You can read more about him in the School
journal, Part Three, Number Two, 1969.)
Improved sanitary methods were also tried in the towns and cities. They were so 
successful that the number of people who died from such diseases as typhus was greatly 
reduced. In the last half of the
eighteenth century, the population of England and Wales rose
from 6 1/2 to 9 million persons. This was an increase five times as great as that of 
50 years before.

ABOVE. Carl Linnaeus
BELOW. Daniel Carlsson Solander (a contemporary silhouette)

At sea, however, there were still many problems of navigation to be solved. The 
greatest problem was 
how to measure longitude with accuracy. The position of a ship is found from her 
latitude (the
distance north or south of the Equator) and longitude (the distance east or west of a 
given meridian).

Lines of latitude and longitude
Spanish astrolabe of the late sixteenth century

The great Portuguese and Spanish navigators of the fifteenth century
were able to calculate their latitude with some accuracy 
by using a cross-staff or astrolabe to measure the height of a heavenly body above the 
horizon. But 
they could not accurately measure longitude, because they had no time-keeper more 
accurate
than an hour-glass, and no log with which they could calculate the distances their 
ships had sailed. This was the reason why Columbus thought he had sailed further west 
than he had. He
thought he had reached the East Indies, and died without knowing that they lay 8,000 
miles further west, across an ocean he knew nothing about, the Pacific.

1. The working out of longitude is linked with the rotation of the earth, and thus 
with the measurement of local time.

Great Britain played an important part in solving this problem. On 22 June 1675, 
Charles II formed 
the Royal Greenwich
for finding out the longitude of places. He also appointed an Astronomer Royal to map 
the heavens as 
a help to navigators. But progress was slow, and ships kept getting wrecked because of 
poor
navigation. And so, in 1714, the Board of Longitude was set up by Parliament, and a 
prize of £20,000 
was offered for any method of working out a ship's longitude to within 30 miles of its 
true position.
Pendulum clocks were in existence, but they were useless at sea. John Harrison, a 
young Yorkshire 
carpenter realised this, and so began work on the first of his marine time-keepers in 
1715.
After a life time of devoted and careful work, he finished his fourth time-keeper in 
1759. It was a 
beautiful spring-driven silver watch, only five inches in diameter, and, on test 
voyages to the West
Indies, it worked out longitude to within 18 miles.
A method using observation of the moon (lunar observation) was discovered in 1764. The 
sextant was 
used to measure angles between the horizon and the heavenly bodies. Special tables 
were
then studied, and the ship's longitude was worked out. The trouble with this method 
was that the 
calculations took as long as four hours.

18. A Theodolite, with a level, and a Gunter's Chain, made by the same.
19. An Apparatus for trying the heat of the sea-water at different depths.
20. Two Time-keepers, one made by Mr. Larcum Kendall, on Mr. Harrison's principles, 
and the other by Mr. John Arnold.
ABOVE. Part of the list of instruments used on Cook's second voyage for astronomical 
observation.
LEFT. Time-keeper used by second and third voyages. It was Larcum Kendall's copy of 
Harrison's time-keeper.

Cook tested both these methods for the Admiralty. On his first voyage round the world, 
in the 
Endeavour, he navigated by lunar observation, helped by an astronomer of the Board of 
Longitude. On
his second voyage, in the Resolution, he had a copy of John Harrison's fourth time-
keeper. He was 
therefore able to compare the accuracy of the two methods. The watch proved to be a 
great
success, and on his return to England in 1775 Cook reported to the Admiralty that the 
"watch has 
exceeded the expectations of its keenest supporter, and by being now and then 
corrected by
lunar observations it has been our faithful guide through all the different changes of 
climates".
John Harrison lived long enough to receive his prize in 1773, and to learn of the 
success of his 
instrument, which was to change completely navigation at sea.
The accuracy of Cook's navigation can compare with that of today, and his skill as a 
marine surveyor 
was no less excellent. First in Newfoundland, and later in the Pacific, he laid the 
foundation of
scientific hydrology and oceanography. He well understood that it was essential, for 
the sake of 
those who followed him, to make accurate and reliable maps. He wrote: "The world will 
hardly
forgive a man for not surveying a coast he has discovered."
Cook's survey of New Zealand in 1769-70, covering 2,400 miles and made in six months, 
greatly 
impressed Admiral Wharton, the first editor of Cook's journal. Wharton was a marine 
surveyor. He
wrote that "the astonishing accuracy of his outline of New Zealand must be the 
admiration of all who 
understand the difficulties of charting a coast".   
It is interesting to note that some of Cook's charts are still in use today. For 
example, the Admiralty Chart No. 2589 for Pickersgill Harbour in Dusky Sound still 
bears the words "from Captain
Cook's voyage of 1773". By such extraordinary performances

1. The science which treats of water, its properties and laws, its distribution over 
the earth's surface, etc. (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.)
2. That branch of physical geography which treats of the ocean, its forms, physical 
features and phenomena. (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.)

LEFT, One of Cook's charts which is still in use is Admiralty Chart No. 2589 for 
Pickersgill Harbour in Dusky Sound.
RIGHT. New Zealand flax, engraved from a drawing by one of Banks's draughtsmen on the 
first voyage.

James Cook drew the modern map of the Pacific Ocean, and, when his voyages were 
completed, only a 
handful of Polynesian islands remained to be discovered.
It was mainly due to Joseph Banks that the voyage of the Endeavour was the first well-
equipped 
expedition of scientific exploration. Fortunately, in spite of differences in their 
ages and the lives
they had lived, Cook and Banks took an instant liking to each other. Cook learned much 
from Banks. At first he was doubtful of the value of natural history, but he soon 
became interested in the botanical collections and the artists' drawings.
Sometimes he accompanied the naturalists on their expeditions,
as he did at Thames on 21 November 1769. Afterwards he wrote: 
"We found a tree that was 19 feet 8 inches in circumference 6 feet above the ground. 
Having a quadrant with me I found its length  from the root to the first branch to be 
89 feet. It was as

Sir Joseph Banks, a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds

straight as an arrow and tapered very little to that point . . . We brought away a few 
specimens, and at 3 o'clock we embarked in order to return on board with 
the turn of the tide. "
The collections of biological material were far larger than any previously brought 
back to Europe, 
but unfortunately, despite the pleadings of Linnaeus, the botanical results have never 
yet been
published. Cook's journals, on the other hand, proved a real treasure house of 
observations regarding 
the culture and the way of life of the people he met on all his voyages. They are 
still used by
people who study the Pacific peoples.
But it was his contribution to medicine that gave Captain Cook his greatest 
satisfaction. Having 
served his time before the mast, he always kept a high regard for the ordinary sailor 
and understood
his thoughts and feelings. In the article mentioned earlier you will read how Cook 
defeated scurvy, 
the most dreaded disease of life at sea. In recognition of this tremendous achievement 
Cook was elected a Fellow of the Royal 
Society and presented with the Copley Gold Medal, its highest scientific award.
Immanuel Kant, one of the great philosophers of the eighteenth century, stressed the 
need to 
investigate the natural world by the methods of science. "Dare to know! Have the 
courage to use your
own intelligence!" No greater illustration of this ideal can be found than the life of 
James Cook, 
whose contributions in many fields were the result of his natural genius and inquiring 
mind, careful
planning, and sheer hard work.
The extracts quoted in this article have been simplified.

Captain James Cook, a portrait by John Webber, artist on the third voyage

ABOVE. Bearded penguin on an ice floe. Water-colour by George Forster, a naturalist on 
the second voyage
LEFT. Piece of Indian quill work, from the east coast of Canada
BELOW. Feathered helmet, worn by Hawaiian chiefs on important occasions, given to Cook 
on his third voyage.
LEFT. John Harrison's first marine chronometer, 1735
RIGHT. Sextant by Jesse Ramsden, aboutn1780, of the type used by Cook on his second 
voyage. 
RIGHT. Azimuth compass, of the type used by Cook on his second and third voyages.
Chart showing the tracks and discoveries of Cook and Clerke in the Resolution and 
Discovery during the third voyage. Clerke commanded the Discovery.

SNAKE-BITE DRILL
by PHYLLIS GANT
I went to school in some remote country districts in Victoria, Australia, and one of 
the first things 
the teacher made
sure that you knew was snake-bite drill. And every so often we had a practice - with 
certain important 
omissions! - to
see that everyone remembered properly.
If you are bitten by a venomous snake you have two little puncture marks at the point 
of entry. These 
marks are made
by the snake's fangs - grooved teeth - and not by the forked tongue, as many people 
suppose.
The venom runs along a duct which opens over the beginning of a groove at the base of 
each fang. The 
duct goes
back to a venom sac near the muscles that open and close the snake's jaws and, when it 
bites, the venom is forced along the duct.

Venom sac
Tongue

Well, you don't have long to think about what to do. You have to get to work at once, 
because most of 
the venoms act
very quickly indeed - a matter of two or three minutes. And the first thing to do is 
to apply a 
tourniquet. This is
anything you can tie around the bitten limb, between the bite and the heart of the 
patient, and twist 
tightly to stop the
flow of poisoned blood from reaching the heart. A big handkerchief, the sleeve of a 
shirt, rubber 
tubing, a shoe lace or
a piece of cord will do. If there is someone by, he can get a doctor, if one is 
available. You 
haven't time.
You put a stick or something similar in the tourniquet and twist it, to keep it tight. 
After about 
half an hour you can ease it off for a moment, then tighten it again, repeating this 
every ten minutes. I used to wonder how you would 
get on if you
were bitten on the head, neck, or trunk . . .
Of course you can - and must - carry out the next steps, where-ever the bite may be. 
You wash off any 
poison that might
be on the skin. Then comes something that was called "scarifying the wounds" - I 
suppose it still is. 
This part always
struck me as being pretty horrible, but if you had to do it, you had to, and that was 
all there was 
to it. It consists of
making a series of cuts down and across through the bite to get it bleeding freely, 
and so carry the 
poison out of the
patient's body. Or, if you don't have anything to cut with, you suck the bite - and 
spit out, of course 
But on no account must you suck the wound if you have a sore or a cut on your mouth, 
or holes in your teeth. 
When you've
done all you can, you can see about getting your patient to a doctor.
We used to be told to wash out the wound with permanganate of potash - and I suppose 
you'd be pretty 
lucky to
have any of it by, in the circumstances, though it was kept in the first-aid

Tiger snake

kit at school, and most homes kept some - but I have since read that it is not much 
use, and is not now recommended.
Similarly, we were told we must not on any account let the patient go to sleep; but 
now he may sleep 
if he wants to.
It is very important to reassure the patient. He is very easily influenced by your 
attitude, and if 
you appear confident
that he will survive, this is an important step towards his recovery.
Snakes are shy, as a rule, and keep out of people's way as much as possible. But the 
tiger snake can 
be very
aggressive, as my father found out when he was chased by one - and uphill, at that! 
(There are tall stories told about
the speed of snakes; but though they strike exceedingly quickly, they don't travel 
very fast. A man 
can easily outpace
a snake.) Lying on the ground at some distance was a small, rotting bough, blown down 
in a storm. My 
father ran for
that and, though it broke in his hands as he hit the snake, he succeeded in injuring 
it sufficiently 
to stop its pursuit,
and made his way back to where he had left his shovel standing in some reeds by a 
trickle of a stream.
He soon killed the snake with the shovel, and continued with his work of clearing the 
stream of 
debris. Presently he
discovered halfway up the dry bank the reason for the snake's aggressiveness - a nest 
of eleven young! 
I'm afraid it was
necessary to kill them, too.
 I've read that tiger snakes don't grow longer than five feet;
but my father measured this one and it was seven feet long. He
kept away from that spot for a week or two because there's a
saying that if you kill one of a pair of snakes, its mate will hunt
you seeking revenge. My father believed it, and the country
people I knew believed it; but it's supposed to be a superstition.
I was told to walk around any snakes I might come across, and not to provoke them in 
any way. And 
though I
carried a "snake stick" I was to use it as a last resort. This was well beyond the 
black stump, 
remember! You could
live in a town or city all your life and never see a snake, except at the zoo.
Another superstition was that every part of a snake was poisonous. Perhaps this had to 
do with some 
of the explorers
getting very sick (and some dying) as a result of eating snake, as the blacks did.
Yet another story was that even if you chopped a snake up into small pieces, it was 
never really dead 
till sunset. And
this may have originated in the snake's writhing and twitching, which goes on for 
quite a while after 
it is dead. If you
handled the head, you could easily be bitten by a reflex action. Or you could get some 
venom in a 
cut, perhaps, from
the ruptured sac.
Sometimes I would stand, too terrified to go on, waiting for a snake on the track to 
go away. (They were mostly copperheads.)

Copperhead

Black snake

But if it was sleepy and basking in the sun, it was in no hurry to move. 
Sometimes, though, it would slither off silently into the bush,
leaving ridged undulations in the loose, sandy soil.
But when a snake stayed put, I was sometimes late for school. I'd wait 
and then at last creep around it, at a distance, on tiptoe (the
snake not moving a muscle), then go for my life. But sometimes the snake 
did move a muscle - one or two or three! - and I'd bolt, panic-stricken.
I had what I called my "snake-scaring song", and I'd sing it at the top 
of my voice, in hopes of frightening all the snakes away from the
track.
At the same time I was very interested in them, and would squat at a bit 
of distance from a snake, staring back at its hard eyes, to see
whether I was being "mesmerised" or not, and giving myself awful frights; 
but at last deciding for myself that that was another fairy story.
Once I watched a very drowsy black snake which was bulging with the 
clearly defined shape of a young rabbit it had just swallowed.
And once when I put the milk out for the cats, a black snake came, moving 
its head from side to side, looking about it cautiously, its forked
tongue flicking, to drink from the saucer, My father grabbed the 
snake-stick, but the snake was away, on to the rotting lid of the well, down
through a crack and into the water, where we watched it swimming strongly. 
(All snakes are good swimmers.)
The water was low and the well sides smooth. We watched it till it was too 
dark to see it any more as it swam round and round and across
and around the well. We could use the well water only for the garden then.
So you see it was important - and I expect in such places still is - to know 
your snake-bite drill. But in these places, I never met anyone who
had been bitten by a snake. Which is not to say, of course, that it doesn't 
happen; but it rarely happens.
And when you consider that there are about a hundred species of venomous 
snake in Australia (though not all of these, by any means, are
deadly), you can see that snakes very much prefer to keep to themselves.
Perhaps you may know D. H. Lawrence's poem, "Snake" ? In this poem 
Lawrence very effectively describes the feeling many of us have
about killing something that is dangerous, untamed and beautiful.
illustrated by EILEEN MAYO

TIDES
High Tide at Fleetwood
by C. W. MAUGHAN
I used to go to school near a place called Fleetwood; which is a small fishing port in 
Lancashire, on 
the west coast of England. Much of the country round it is below sea level, protected 
from
the sea by concrete walls and dykes which are more than 80 yards thick in places. Each 
day the sea 
rose and fell with the tides, and at some times of the year you could go up to the sea
wall in the morning and find the sea breaking right over it. Yet, later in the 
afternoon the sea 
would have withdrawn two or three miles from the wall - so far away sometimes, that 
you could hardly
see it. All you could see were miles and miles of sandbanks and mudflats.
Fleetwood itself was at the mouth of a river, and to cross it

ABOVE. High tide at Oriental Bay, Wellington
LEFT. Low tide at Oriental Bay, Wellington

there was a small steam ferryboat. If you caught the ferry at high tide when the sea 
was right up to the top of the sea wall, all you had to do was step straight off a 
wooden jetty on to the boat.
But coming back at low tide, when the sea had withdrawn, you had to walk right 
underneath the wooden jetty, down flight after flight of dripping concrete steps, past 
the slimy green piles of the jetty, until you were 30 or 40 feet below the top of the 
jetty. As the ferry crossed the river you couldn't see anything except huge walls of 
sand and mud. It was like sailing through a brown and grey canyon whose sides were as 
high as a three- or four-storey building.
These enormous differences of 30 or 40 feet did not occur often; the usual difference 
in height was 15 or 20 feet.
As New Zealanders you may hardly believe that the sea level could change 
with the tides as much as I have described, since the usual
difference between high and low tide in New Zealand is only from 3 to 4 
feet.
Why is it that in one part of the world the tides are enormous, and yet 
in other parts, like New Zealand, the tides are much smaller? Why
are the tides different in height at different periods of the year in the 
same place? In fact, what is the cause of tides, and why do they
behave as they do?
The Cause of Tides
If you want to understand the causes of the tides, you have to begin by 
thinking about the moon and the sun, and about the force of
gravity. The sun is the centre of our solar system and the earth goes 
round it in a rough circle, or orbit, once a year. In just the same way, the moon 
revolves round the earth about once a month.

Moon Sun While the earth is going  round the sun, the moon is  going round the earth.

I said above that the earth goes round the sun in a rough circle. In 
actual fact it revolves round the sun in a path that looks more like a
rugby football than a circle. This shape is called an ellipse. The moon's 
path round the earth is even more of an ellipse, and the important
thing to realise about this is that at some times of the month the moon 
is much further away from the earth than at other times.

OPPOSITE. Nets set at low tide in the Bay of Fundy catch fish on the high tide. These 
are collected, as shown here, at the next low tide.
The Bay of Fundy is in New Brunswick, Canada.

Gravity
Sometimes the sun, the moon and the earth are in a straight line, and sometimes the 
moon is at right 
angles to the sun and the earth, and there are many stages in between. All these
combinations have different effects on tidal movements. The reason for this is a 
natural force known 
as gravity.
The real importance of all these movements is that the earth and the moon are changing 
positions in 
relation to each other and in relation to the sun.
In its simplest form gravity is a force which attracts one object to another. It is 
like the force in 
a magnet which causes certain metals to be attracted to the magnet. The force of 
gravity works on
every particle of matter in the universe. Everything is attracted to everything else, 
although the 
strength of the attraction depends on the size of the particles and their nearness. 
The moon attracts
the earth, but the earth also attracts the moon; the sun attracts them both, and they 
both attract 
the sun.
Centrifugal Force
Now, obviously, if there weren't some kind of balancing force in existence, everything 
in the 
universe would tend to go towards the heaviest object in the universe. This would mean 
that in our own
solar system all the planets would be drawn into the sun. However, this hasn't 
happened, so there 
must be a balancing force.
Because the planets are all continually going around the sun, they develop what is 
called centrifugal 
force, which makes them tend to fly outwards, like a ball when it is whirled round on 
the end of
a string. This is the balancing force.
Let me explain it in this way. Try to think of two forces, one pulling inwards 
(gravity) and the 
other pulling outwards (centrifugal force). What has really happened within our own 
solar system is that all the planets have arrived in positions where the two forces 
exactly balance each other. The sun 
cannot attract the earth any closer, because the force of gravity is not strong enough 
to overcome
the centrifugal force of the earth. We say that the forces are in equilibrium.
Although, in general, the solar system is in equilibrium, it is

fairly obvious-from what I said before about the changing positions of the earth and 
the moon in 
relation to each other and the sun that there are going to be some changes throughout 
the year in
the balance of forces. When the sun and the moon are in a straight line with the earth 
there will be 
a much stronger force acting on the earth than when the sun and moon form a right 
angle with it.
(You will notice that I have referred only to the sun and moon as attractive forces 
(forces that 
attract). This is because they are the only two bodies which really influence the 
tides on the earth.
The moon influences the tides much more than the sun, even though the sun is much 
bigger, and this is 
because the moon is much closer to the earth.)
Centrifugal Force and Gravity Cause Tides
You now know that forces from space are acting on the earth and that the strength of 
the forces is 
changing with the changing positions of the earth, the moon and the sun. We can now 
almost
begin to talk about the tides themselves. Imagine these forces acting on one part of 
the world, and 
imagine that all the world is covered with water. What do you think would happen? You 
probably
think that the forces would pull the water away from the earth. I know I used to think 
that they did. But this is not what
 
When the sun and moon are in a straight line with the earth, they cause very high 
tides (H1 and H2) and very low tides (L1 and L2 ).
 When the sun and the moon form a right angle with the earth, they cause moderately 
high tides (H1 and H2 ) and moderately low tides (L1 and L2).

happens. Remember that the nearness of an object is mainly what decides the strength 
of the pull of gravity. For example, 
because of its nearness, the moon affects our tides more than does the
sun. Now, if the earth were covered entirely with water, then no amount of force 
exerted by the sun or moon could shift the 
water directly. The earth with its own force of gravity, would hug the water
to it, so that it would be evenly spread all round it.
What really happens when the forces of the sun and the moon concentrate on one 
particular side of the earth is that some of 
the water moves round to that side, where it piles up. In other words, the
attraction of the sun and the moon is acting indirectly (by pulling the water across 
the earth's surface) not directly. This 
force, which is working along the surface of the earth (horizontally) and not
straight from out of space (vertically), is called the tractive force. It is this 
force which makes all the water gather in 
one place, and it accounts for the real cause of high tides.

Arrows indicate the tractive forces built up by the sun and moon (right) and by 
centrifugal force (left).

On this imaginary earth covered with water, if all the water is being gathered in one 
place, what do you think happens 
elsewhere? Again, what you may think happens doesn't happen at all. The level
of the water is not low all over the rest of the world. Strangely enough, it is also 
high on the opposite side of the world.
To understand this fully you will have to think of what you have already learnt about 
the balancing forces of gravity and 
centrifugal force. On the side where the sun and moon are concentrating all their 
attraction (indirectly), the attractive force (gravity) is greater than the balancing 
force (centrifugal force). But on 
the other side of the world, the centrifugal force, which wants to pull the earth away 
from the sun and the moon, is stronger
than the attractive force (gravity). This is because that side is much further away 
from the moon and the sun; and distance, 
as I have said, is a very important thing to take into account when
considering the force of gravity.
Consequently, the centrifugal force acts (again indirectly) on the opposite side of 
the world and builds up another set of 
tractive (horizontal) forces which pile up another "high tide". At all the points in 
between these two "high tides" there are "low tides", since the extra water has to 
come from somewhere.

At all the points between the two high tides (H1 and H2), there are low tides (L 1 and 
L2 ).

Different Oceans, Different Tides
You now know how the force of gravity and centrifugal force cause the water of the 
oceans to move across the earth's surface 
in tides. But there is a further question which you may go into if you
wish, although it is more difficult than the others that have been so far discussed. 
The question is: why is there a much 
greater movement of tides in the Bay of Fundy than in, say, Wellington
Harbour?
Of course, the whole earth isn't covered with water and the whole effect gets a lot 
more complicated when we look at the real 
earth, but, still, just keep in mind the forces that are working on the
oceans of the world. When these forces strike the oceans they have different effects, 
because all the oceans are different 
sizes and depths. All of you must have seen at some time the effect that in
produced by rocking a bowl or a tank of water. The water slops around from end to end 
of the tank, and when it is high at one 
end it is low at the other. At a point in the middle, it is level. This level
point in the middle is known as the nodal line. You will also know that by 
experimenting with this tank of water you can get 
the water to slop very easily by giving the tank a push at just the right time (not 
too soon or not too late).

Low tide and high tide in the Bay of Fundy, where the water often rises as much as 40 
feet in 6 hours, and then falls as much in the following 6 hours. During spring tides 
(the highest tides) the water rises as much as 50 feet.

Low and high tide at Oriental Bay, Wellington, where the difference between the tides 
is only about 3 1/2 feet. There is hardly any difference between spring tides and neap 
tides.

Well, the oceans of the world can be thought of as a series of tanks. In some places 
the attractive and centrifugal forces give just the right push to an ocean to get the 
maximum "slop". At other places the forces are all out of timing and the effect is 
very little. This is one of the main reasons why in some places, like New Zealand, the 
tides are not very high, while in other places, like the Bay of Fundy, they are very 
high.

Diagram of an ocean basin, showing the nodal line, N. This is
the point that remains level, while the rest of the ocean rises or falls with the 
tides. AB represents the surface of the ocean, with high
tide at A and low tide at B. DC represents the same surface six hours later (which is 
the period between the tides) with high tide now at C and low tide now at D.

Rotation of the Earth 
There is only one other major force affecting the tides that I haven't 
mentioned. This force is caused by the earth's rotation (or spinning). In its simplest 
form, it 
causes waves
in each of the ocean basins, which move through the water round a central point. (It 
is important to 
realise that the water itself does not move.) This usually happens twice in every 
period of 24
hours and 50 minutes.  To understand clearly what effect this has, think back to the 
slopping tank of 
water which had a level line (nodal line) across the middle of the water's surface. If 
all the
water in the tank were revolving round the exact centre of the tank at the same time 
as being slopped up and down, the nodal line would disappear, as the water was whirled 
round; and the 
only level point left in the tank would be at the centre of the tank, which would be 
the midpoint
of the old nodal line. This level point is known as an amphidromic point.
 
Map of the North Sea basin, showing three amphidromic points. The spinning of the 
earth causes waves to move round these points, instead of about a nodal line. The 
dotted lines join places where the time of high or low tide is the same. The unbroken 
lines join places which have the same tidal range. All along the top line, for 
instance, there is a difference of 4 feet between low tide and high tide.

This whirling around of the waves occurs in each of the ocean basins and at different 
places within 
the basins, since different areas of water even in the same ocean have different 
resonances.
With all these forces acting on the tides, not to mention complications caused by wind 
and weather, 
you can see that trying to predict tidal movements can be very complicated indeed.
Obviously they are going to be different all over the world, and even at one point in 
the world the 
variation will differ from day to day. (Incidentally, when the tidal forces exert 
their maximum
influence on a tide, then the tide is called a spring, or springing, tide; and when 
the forces are at 
their lowest the tide is called a neap tide.)
However, predictions of tides are made, partly by observation and partly by 
calculation of the 
forces; and you can see why it is important that they should be made when you consider 
that an extra
foot or two of water at high tide can mean the difference between bringing a ship into 
port or 
running it aground.
Because of their effects on shipping, tides are of immense importance in some areas of 
the world, 
such as England, and even though you may not see much tidal movement in New Zealand 
you should know about them as one of the natural 
forces that affects the world wound you.
Some Things to Do 
1.	Experiment with a tank of water. See if you can find the resonance of the tank 
by pushing the tank and slopping the water. 
2.	Centrifugal force may be demonstrated in this way. Ask two children, evenly 
matched in weight, to hold hands and to run round each other. You will find 
they will tend to fly apart. 
3. Find out what you can about tidal movements in your nearest
port. Look up tomorrow's tides in your newspaper. 
4. Where is the Bay of Fundy, and why is it famous 
for its tidal movements? 
5. Find out if tides can be put to any practical use.

Te Whanganui-a-Tara ("The Great Bay of Tara") or Wellington Harbour

MAORI PLACE-NAMES

The Maoris were great name-givers. As a writer says, "Every peak, 
saddle, knoll, and spur; every bend, rapid, and pool in a stream; every
creek, bay, beach, and headland had its name, as well as every mountain 
range, river and sea." Villages, camping-places, kumara
patches had their own particular names, while fishing-grounds, 
landing-places and battlefields were all well known by name.
Commonest names
Of Maori words used in place-names the commonest is wai (water), and this 
is not surprising, considering the number of bays and inlets
and creeks, streams and rivers in New Zealand, and the importance the 
Maoris laid on them as sources of fish foods.
The famous limestone caves 14 miles from Te Kuiti are named Waitomo. Wai is 
water; tomo means "to pass in". The stream runs
underground into the caves.
Wai is most commonly used in the names of rivers, for example, Waimakariri 
(cold river); Wainui (large river); Waikawa (river A bitter waters);
Waiharuru (roaring river).
Many rivers are named after persons; for example, Wainuiomata (Wai-nui-o-Mata), which 
means the "great river of Mata". Another common
name for a river, especially the branch of a river or stream, is manga. It 
is found in Mangakino (dangerous river).
When naming bays and lagoons, the Maoris used the word whanga, which is 
"bay''. It is found in such place names as Whanganui, commonly written 
"Wanganui"(large bay); Whangaroa (long bay); Te 
Whanganui-a-Tara ("the great bay of Tara" - Wellington Harbour);
Whangaparaoa (bay of the sperm whale).
The name for lake is roto, and it is found in such names as Rotorua (second lake); 
Rotoiti (small lake); Rotomahana (warm lake). Some lakes
were called moana, which means "sea", for example, Waikaremoana (sea of 
rippling waters).
Another word much used is awa, which is a relation of wai, and may mean a 
river, river gorge, or valley. It appears in such names as Awaiti
(small creek); Awamangu (black stream); Awakanae (kanae, mullet); Awanui 
(large river); Awakino (dangerous river); Awatere (swift river).
Names from fish
Like all Pacific Islanders, the Maoris were fish-eaters, and they were thus 
cunning fishermen, using lines and nets of flax, and hooks of bone,
wood, paua shell and greenstone. The most cunning of all fishermen was 
Maui, who was supposed to have fished up the North Island. For
this reason the Maoris called it Te Ika-a-Maui ("the fish of Maui'').
The Maoris had names for every kind of fish. Some of the names we still 
use - for example, kahawai. Others are found in the names of places
around our coasts, and near inland lakes and streams
where fish were plentiful. For instance, Hapuku, a river a little to the north of 
Kaikoura, is named 
after the fish, hapuku, which we call groper.
Inangahua, the name of a tributary of the Grey River and also of a township, contains 
the Maori word 
for whitebait (inanga), which for years have been netted in the stream.
Have you ever cooked and eaten pipis? The Maoris are very fond of them. It is easy to 
know when you 
have come across an ancient Maori camping-place by the heaps of pipi shells nearby. 
You
will find pipi in a number of place-names - for example, Waipipi (in Manakau Harbour); 
Pipitea (in 
Wellington Harbour); Kaipipi (an inlet in Stewart Island).
Names from trees and plants
A great many of the names that the Maoris gave to rivers, valleys, hills, and so 
forth, contained the 
names of plants that grew in the neighbourhood. Here are some:
Karakariki (karaka, tree; riki, small). This is the name of a Maori village on the 
Waipa River a few 
miles south of Ngaruawahia. Motukauri (motu, island; kauri, tree) is in the Bay of 
Islands. It is
generally known as Bateman Island. Pukekohe (puke, hill; kohe, tree of the cedar 
family) is in the 
Auckland district. Kowhaitahi (kowhai, tree; tahi, one or single) is a small stream in 
North
Auckland. The one kowhai tree from which it takes its name has long disappeared.
The Pakeha also has used many Maori tree-names in his name-giving. The following words 
are some that 
have been used in the names of towns, suburbs and streets: kamahi, karakal kauri,
kowhai, mahoe, ngaio, puriri, matai, tawa.
Here are a number of Maori place-names that contain the names of plants. Do you know 
where the places 
are? Kaipara (kai, food; para, horseshoe fern). Arapohue (ara, a path; pohue,
convolvulus) - the name is thought to mean "path through the convolvulus". Pongaroa 
(ponga, silver 
tree-fern; roa, long or tall). Papatoetoe (papa, flat stretch of ground; toetoe, 
plume-grass).
Orakau (o, place of; rakau, tree or trees).
Names that have changed
Many names have in the passing years been forgotten; some have been moved from their 
rightful places; 
and others again have been so altered by Pakeha tongues that it is hard to know what 
the
correct name was. Two good examples of this are found in the South Island. A dozen 
miles to the north 
of Timaru is the small town of Temuka. Temuka is the Pakeha way of getting the tongue
round Te umu-kaka, which means "the fiercely-heated (kaka) oven (umu)". Farther south, 
in Otago, is 
the township of Tapanui, which is the shortened form of the correct Maori Te tapuae-o-
Uenuku
meaning "the footprint of Uenuku".
Names from history
There are many names that have remained unaltered, and it is interesting to trace 
their meanings and 
thus to understand why they were given. Names such as Kaikoura are straight forward
enough. It was named by an old-timer explorer, Tamatea, because it was the place where 
he enjoyed a 
meal (kai) of crayfish (koura). But we need a really good knowledge of Maori history 
to
discover how the Kaingaroa Plain, for example, gained its name. Kaingaroa means "long 
feeding". It 
seems that long ago a party of Maori travellers was delayed at this place by one of 
their
number, a woman, taking a long time over her breakfast.
Some of the place-names were brought from the ancient homeland of Hawaiki. They 
include Hikurangi (no 
one is sure of its exact meaning) and Hokianga, which is short for Te Hokianga-Kupe
("the place from which Kupe returned from his voyage of discovery to New Zealand'). 
Some place-names 
have their origins in mythology, as shown by the following story:
Long ago, the Maoris say, war parties of tattooed fighting men came raiding into the 
Wairarapa 
district from the north. They took by surprise the Maoris living there and slaughtered 
them almost to
the last man. In fact, only one person, a chief named Rai, escaped their spears and 
meres.
Alone and helpless, Rai called on his atua, or god, for aid; and the atua came down to 
earth and bade 
Rai mount on his shoulders.
Then up into the air he soared, turning northwards. From time to time as they glided 
along, the atua 
became weary and had to alight on the ground to rest. At last, after a long flight, he 
brought Rai
safely to earth on a hilltop; and after another rest he carried him across the 
Manawatu River to a 
place where he would be quite safe from his enemies. The hilltop where they rested for 
a time is
still known as Pahiatua, "the resting-place of the atua''. The name has also been 
given to a large 
township that has grown up nearby.
Another story tells of Kahu, a chief, who was on his way to what is now Auckland. 
Tired and hungry, 
he rested while his followers cooked some food. They were so slow over the cooking 
that
Kahu, out of all patience, scolded them angrily. He named the place Mangere, which 
means "laziness". 
Today it is the name of a thriving district with one of the busiest airports in New 
Zealand.
In this article we have discussed mostly the more common words that the Maoris used in 
making up 
place-names. There are certain to be Maori place-names in your district. Can you find 
out the "story" behind them?

by BARRY FAVILLE
3. SIR THOMAS MORE
Sir Thomas More (1478 - 1535), a portrait by Hans Holbein
In the story of Galileo we saw an Italian scientist striving for freedom to tell other 
people about his discoveries. Galileo lost
his argument and he was punished. The story of Sir Thomas More is also 
about a kind of struggle that involved the
Church, but this time it took place in England, and a King -Henry VIII - held the 
upper hand.
Thomas More was born in 1478, the son of a well-known lawyer, and he was to 
become one of the most important men in
England. He showed how clever he was when he was quite young. Thomas More 
went to St. Anthony's school in London.
The main subject was Latin, the language of the Church and of scholars all 
over Europe. Most of the lessons had to be
memorised because the printing of books by machine was only just beginning. 
The discipline was very severe; if a boy
was disobedient or forgot his lessons he was thrashed. Thomas More was not 
beaten very often. He was very clever and,
when he was about twelve years old, the headmaster of St. Anthony's 
suggested to his friend John Morton, Archbishop of
Canterbury, that he take Thomas into his household as a page.
The Archbishop of Canterbury was one of the most important men in the 
kingdom. He not only looked after religious matters and led
services on Sunday, but he was one of the King's most influential 
advisers. As the Church owned huge areas of land he was also a very
rich man. So, as his page, Thomas More served and waited on some of the 
most important men of that time – scholars, nobles and churchmen,
as well as diplomats from foreign countries. As he listened to their 
conversation, he was all the time improving his education, and this, of
course, was why he had been sent there. It was almost the same as going 
to secondary school.
After two years, Thomas More went to Oxford University (the same year in which 
Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic Ocean).
His father was not able to give him much money, and the life at Oxford in those days 
was hard. The working day began at five o'clock in
the morning with prayers, and studies began

School scene in 1592

New College, Oxford University, in the fourteenth century

at six. The students had their first meal at ten o'clock in the morning and the second 
at five in the afternoon - and they were not very
nourishing, but Thomas More enjoyed learning. It looked as though he 
might become a scholar for the rest of his life. He also thought
seriously of becoming a priest, as did most of his friends and teachers. 
But More's father brought Thomas home to London to become a
lawyer.
More learned law as easily as he had Latin and Greek, and by the time he 
was a qualified lawyer he was teaching students himself. But
he was going through a worrying time - he could not decide how he wanted to 
live his life. With the idea of joining the Church, he began
preaching in one of London's great churches. Then he decided to test 
himself by entering a monastery and living as a monk. The order of
monks he chose to live amongst had very strict vows, which meant long 
hours of prayer and hard work. More was given a bare room with
stone walls and a straw mattress on the floor. He wore a shirt made from 
hair next to his skin, under his clothes. The hair shirt chafed and
rubbed, often drawing blood, and it was worn as a reminder that the love 
of God was more important than wealth and riches on earth.
But after three years he left the monastery. He was about 24 years old at 
 the time, and he was married soon afterwards. More had
decided that he was not the kind of person who could withdraw
into a stone-walled monastery, and cut himself off, from everyday life. 
But that did not mean that he had pushed God aside. The Church
remained as important to him as anything else. In fact he kept wearing the 
hair shirt to remind him of his duty to his Church.
 Thomas More first established himself as a lawyer, and he was soon earning enough to 
make him a very wealthy man. Then he was
appointed Under-Sheriff of London, a kind of judge. He held his court every 
Thursday morning and became very popular with the people of
London, because of his wisdom in settling arguments. They came to love 
him even more a few years later at the time of the May Day riots
in  1517 - it came to be known as "Evil May Day".
May Day was a holiday when everyone thronged in the streets and had a good time, 
as we do on New Year's Eve. But in this

Earliest existing view of London, 1543, showing the old London with its 
row of buildings, and a monastery in the foreground.

particular year there was danger in the air. Many foreigners lived in 
London - merchants and craftsmen of all kinds - and
the Londoners did not like them. They said the foreigners were taking 
their jobs and earning money that should have
gone into the pockets of Englishmen. It looked as though there might be 
fighting and violence, so it was ordered that
everyone should stay at home on the night of the May Day holiday. It was as though 
someone had banned school holidays.
The London workmen not only disobeyed the order and poured out into the 
streets, but they started burning houses
and shops, and even broke into a prison and freed the convicts.
The King ordered troops to march into the city to break up the mobs, but 
the violence ended before they could get
there. The Under-Sheriff of the city, Thomas More, had walked round the 
dark streets, calming down the ringleaders
and persuading people to go home. He told them that burning and looting 
would only bring further trouble upon them,
and he was proved right. Next day, after the riot was over, thirteen 
people were seized by the King's troops and they
were hung, drawn and quartered. It was mainly More's pleading with the 
King which stopped the execution of about
four hundred other prisoners. The people of London always remembered how 
he had helped them.
But More's life was to be bound up closely with the King's affairs from 
now on. King Henry VIII of England saw that
More was a brave and honest man, and he persuaded him to join his council 
of advisers as a full-time official of the
Royal Court. He was knighted, he made several visits to France and 
Holland on the King's business, and he held
important posts in the government. But beneath his fine clothes he still 
wore the hair shirt, chafing his skin. The only
other person who knew about the shirt was More's daughter, Margaret.
Margaret was More's eldest child. He had four children. Their mother died 
when they were young, but More was
married again soon afterwards to a widow, Mistress Alice. He built a 
house at Chelsea alongside the River Thames,
near London. It was a very happy house. The children grew up under the 
care of a wise and kindly father, and the
household was run by the blunt and

Sir Thomas More and his family in their house at Chelsea. More is fifth 
from the left; his wife, Alice, is on the far right,with Margaret beside her. A 
drawing by Holbein.

down-to-earth Alice. There were many visitors, including a large number 
from Europe, because More was as well-known as a scholar and writer in other countries 
as he was in England. 
Even the King came to talk about a problem
which was troubling him. It was this problem which was to cause the death 
of Sir Thomas More. King Henry wanted a
son. Queen Catherine his wife had given birth to a daughter, but there 
were no more children. As the years passed, the
King began to think of divorcing Catherine and marrying
Anne Boleyn, a lady of the court. If there were no prince to succeed
him as King  when he died, he thought there might be an outbreak

Henry VIII(1491 – 1547)
Cardinal Wolsey (1475-1530)

of civil war in England. Some of the English nobles had their eye on the throne, and 
they would have 
taken the first chance to seize it by force. But the Pope did not wish to grant King 
Henry his
divorce, mainly because it was against the laws of the Church. Even kings had to obey 
the Pope on 
religious matters. This annoyed Henry, and he began to ask himself why he, a king, 
should
bow to the wishes of the Pope in Rome. "Who rules England?" he asked himself, "the 
King or the 
Pope?" He commanded the Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, to try to persuade the Pope 
to change his mind.
Cardinal Wolsey was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Government, and he 
was the King's 
chief adviser. He was the most powerful man in England after the King himself, and he 
was
also an important official of the Church. But he found the task of dealing with the 
Pope too much for 
him. Wolsey did his best. The discussions dragged on month after month, but the Pope 
refused
to give a firm answer, and King Henry brooded

Catherine of Aragon (1485-1536)
Anne Boleyn (1507-1536)

and waited. Finally Wolsey persuaded the Pope to send a representative to London to 
set up a Church court which would decide whether Henry's marriage should be ended. The 
court sat for several months without anything being decided, and finally the Pope's 
representative returned to Rome.
King Henry was furious, and he turned his anger on to Cardinal Wolsey. He dismissed 
him from his post 
as Lord Chancellor. Wolsey was also going to be brought to trial for treason, but he 
died
before it could begin. Who was to be the new Lord Chancellor? Henry did not want 
another Church 
official as his chief adviser. He chose the famous lawyer and scholar, known 
throughout England
and Europe, who had served him well already - Sir Thomas More. In October 1529, More 
received the Great 
Seal which made him Lord Chancellor of England.
For a time Henry's quarrel with the Church went no further. More looked after the 
country's affairs 
wisely and well, and he continued to be popular with the people. But he knew that if 
the King's quarrel with the Pope flared up again he would have to say firmly and 
clearly whose side 
he was on. Whom should he serve first, his God or his King? Perhaps it would be 
possible to
serve both. His conscience would tell him, and he spoke to no one of the dilemma he 
was in, not even 
to his daughter Margaret.
The crisis was not far away. Henry decided that if the Pope would not grant his 
divorce the 
leadership of the Church in England would have to change. The priests, bishops and 
archbishops of
England were persuaded or forced to say that the King, and not the Pope, was the head 
of the Church 
of England. They signed a document giving their allegiance to King Henry VIII, and on 
15
May 1532, the Archbishop of Canterbury presented it to the King. On the following day 
Sir Thomas More 
resigned as Lord Chancellor and left the court, his career finished. More would have 
been
quite prepared to swear his loyalty both to Henry as his King and to the Pope as the 
leader of his 
Church; this was the way it had always been. But Henry would not accept this.
In 1533 he married Anne Boleyn. His divorce from Catherine was granted by the new 
Church of England; 
there was no longer any need to worry about the Pope. Although many people were sorry
for Catherine and her sudden fall, few of them cared to say so too loudly; they were 
afraid of the 
King.
Sir Thomas More, however, refused to attend Anne Boleyn's coronation as Queen. The 
King sent two 
bishops to invite him, but he said that now he was no longer Lord Chancellor he was 
too poor
to afford the ceremonial gown. They offered to buy one for him, but again he refused. 
He disagreed 
with what was happening, and he wanted to be free to be left in peace with his own 
opinions. But
Henry could not afford to leave More alone. He was a popular man, and even if he kept 
out of the way 
for the rest of his life there was a danger that others might be influenced by what he 
thought.
The King's next move forced More into a corner. Laws were made which said that the 
King's first marriage was ended, that the children of his second marriage would be the 
ones to succeed him on the throne, and that the King was the supreme head of the 
Church of England. All the King's most important subjects were to swear
an oath saying that they agreed with these laws, or else they would be executed. In 
others words, no 
one could keep silent any longer - the King wanted to know who was for him, and who 
against. 
More was asked to appear before the officials who were hearing the swearing of this 
oath. He said 
goodbye to his family before he left his home at Chelsea, because he knew he would not 
be
returning there. The officials were waiting at Lambeth Palace, the home of  Archbishop 
of Canterbury 
and the place where More had spent part of his boyhood as a page. He read the wording 
of the
new laws very carefully and said he would swear his agreement with  first two, but he 
would not swear to 
follow King Henry as the leader of the Church. The officials tried to persuade More to 
change his mind. They
knew him well and felt uncomfortable at having to begin the persecution of such a 
well-loved and important man. He was told the names of all the nobles and bishops who 
had already
 sworn the oath - many of them his friends but it made no difference.
 They asked him to walk in the garden for a few hours and think
 the matter over while they put the oath to others, but
 afterwards he still refused.
 He was then taken to the Tower. The Tower of London was a prison
 in those days, and More was led in through the Traitors'
 Gate and locked in a cell. He stayed there for several months
 while Court officials tried to persuade him to change his mind.
 Members of his family were allowed to visit him occasionally.
 His wife, Alice, came once and she spoke bluntly to him. She said
 that she thought him very foolish to lie in a filthy prison among
 mice and rats when he might be free and well thought of by the
 King, like all the bishops and nobles who had already sworn the oath.
 "What's the point of behaving like this," she said, "when
 you have at Chelsea a right fair home, your library, your books,
 your gallery, your garden, your orchard?"
 "I pray thee, good Mistress Alice," said More, "tell me one thing."
"What is it?"
"Is not this house as near Heaven as my own?"
Shee gave an impatient reply and went 
away, not able to understand
her husband; but she kept on trying to have him released.

The Tower of London, 1647

She did not succeed, and, as the months wore on, the imprisonment became 
more harsh. He was no longer able to
take a daily walk outside his cell. Pen and paper were taken away, and he 
had to use pieces of charcoal and any
scrap of paper he could find to write letters and smuggle them out to his 
family.
He was brought to trial in July 1535, and found guilty of treason. He was 
sentenced to death by being hanged, drawn
and quartered - a very brutal and agonising way to die. When the trial at Westminister 
Hall was over he was marched
back to the Tower by an escort. More's family was waiting near the prison 
and his daughter Margaret burst through
the guards and threw her arms around her father's neck in full view of the 
soldiers. He comforted her and blessed her
before he disappeared within the dark stone walls of the Tower.
Inside his cell he prepared himself for death. He was told that because he 
had been Lord Chancellor, the sentence
had been changed
by the King to a mere beheading. More smiled and said he hoped none of his 
friends would ever have to enjoy similar
mercy from the King. With a piece of coal he wrote a last letter to 
Margaret, telling her what to do with some of his
belongings, and urging her to keep her spirits up: "Farewell, my dear 
child, and pray for me, and I shall for you, and
all your friends, that we may merrily meet in heaven." With this last 
letter he also sent Margaret the hair shirt he had
worn for most of his life, and which only she had known about.
The following day he was taken from his cell and a procession set
out for the execution place. More looked worn and thin. His beard was long and 
bedraggled and he carried a red cross in his
hands.
There were many people along the way, and a large crowd had gathered round the 
scaffold where the block had been set up.
More was weak from his long imprisonment and he had difficulty climbing the 
steps to the platform. He turned to his
guard: "See me safe up, and as for my coming down let me shift myself."
He spoke only a few words to the huge crowd that had assembled to
watch him die, because he had agreed to a request from the King that his last 
speech should be short. He remained loyal
to Henry, as his King, right to the end, but his closing words showed the whole point 
of his death: "I die the King's good servant, but God's  first."
He remained calm during the last few seconds, and even kept his
sense of humour. He laid himself face down on the block and exposed his neck. Then 
at the last moment he pushed his long beard out of the way saying that it did not 
deserve to suffer, as it had never committed any crime. And then the executioner 
lifted his axe and ended his life.

Arrival of the Resolution and the Discovery at Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii. From a drawing 
by John Webber artist on the third voyage.
COOK AND THE PACIFIC PEOPLES
by A. C. AND N. C. BEGG

The success of Captain Cook's three great voyages to the Pacific Ocean depended 
largely on the help 
and co-operation of the native peoples who lived there. The voyages lasted more than 
ten
years altogether, and during that time Cook visited many of the countries around the 
Pacific Ocean 
and most of the island groups within it. Living here were many different races, with 
their own
distinctive customs and languages. Some of them had been visited earlier by sailors 
from European 
countries; and they understood methods of barter and trade. Others, however, had never
before met anyone from a country outside their own. To obtain the friendship and help 
of these 
different races was a task that would have discouraged a lesser man than Cook. It 
required
understanding, firmness, tact and endless patience.
When James Cook set sail from Plymouth in the Endeavour on 26 August 1768, on his 
first voyage, he carried with him secret
instructions from the Admiralty concerning the aims of the expedition. But he also had 
a document 
containing hints on how to treat native peoples. It was written by Lord Morton, who 
was
President of the Royal Society.
Lord Morton suggested that the officers and gentlemen should treat the natives with 
the utmost 
patience, and prevent the reckless use of firearms by the sailors. He pointed out that 
it was just
and natural for the native peoples to try to stop strangers from landing on their 
shores. Therefore 
all efforts should be made to avoid shedding their blood.
If, for some reason, the natives had to be convinced that the Europeans were more 
powerful than they 
were, it was better to show this by shooting a bird or an animal, rather than a man. 
Lord
Morton also suggested that the explorers were more likely to win the confidence of the 
natives by 
giving them presents and treating them kindly than by rough treatment.

Cook at Nomuka in the Tongan Islands. Engraved from a drawing by John Webber.

And so, with all this good advice, Cook sailed south for Cape Horn to 
enter the Pacific from the east by the route
taken by earlier European seamen on their voyages round the world.
First contact with native people was made in the Bay of Good Success in 
Tierra del Fuego on 15 January 1769. Cook rowed ashore with his scientists and met a 
group of about forty natives 
who had collected on the beach. Cook made
signs of friendship, and handed out presents of beads and ribbons. 
Afterwards, three of them went aboard the
Endeavour without hesitation. These hardy people seemed to have met 
Europeans before, as they had beads, canvas
and buttons. They also understood the use of firearms, for they made 
signs to Joseph Banks to shoot a seal which
was swimming after the boat. Although they seemed contented with their 
harsh way of life, Cook concluded that "they are perhaps as miserable a set of people 
as are this day upon earth. " Cook took aboard 
water and firewood, and then set sail for
Tahiti to set up his observatory at Matavai Bay.
Europeans were well known to the Tahitians, because of the recent visits of Wallis in 
the Dolphin and Bougainville in the Boudeuse. Beads and nails were soon exchanged for 
coconuts, bread 
fruit, fish and pigs. But, before the men
went ashore, Cook wisely laid down rules that all members of the crew had to follow. 
They were modelled on Lord
Morton's hints. They were to make friends with the natives by treating them "with all 
imaginable humanity"; one
person would be appointed to trade with the natives (Cook appointed Banks); 
anyone losing his firearms or working
tools on shore or trading with any part of the ship's stores would be 
severely punished; and no iron or cloth was to be
exchanged for anything other than provisions. In addition, Cook took care to make 
friends with Borea, the Queen, and with other local chiefs.

Several natives were killed and two of Cook's men were wounded during a 
skirmish at Eromanga in the New Hebrides.
Engraved from a painting by William Hodges, artist on the second voyage.

The Tahitians turned out to be expert thieves, and
on one occasion a man was shot dead after stealing a musket. But, for 
most of the time, Cook's firm control of his
own men and his fair dealing with the natives made the three months' 
visit a happy one. Trading was as orderly as in
the "best regulated market in Europe", and there was no difficulty in 
obtaining fresh food for the next part of the
voyage. Realising that an interpreter would be useful, Cook allowed 
Tupaia, a local chief, and his servant to join
Banks' staff.
When the observations of Venus had been concluded, Cook turned the 
Endeavour south and west towards New
Zealand, which was sighted on Saturday, 7 October 1769. As he approached 
the shore, he remembered Tasman's
story of the hostile reception he had been given by the warlike inhabitants.
At first, Cook failed to make friends with the Maoris, in spite of the 
help of Tupaia, whom they could understand. He
could not scare them by warning shots, and he was forced to kill two of 
them in self-defence. Later, he discovered
that firing a warning shot over a canoe made the Maoris so angry that 
they attacked him. Again he was forced to fire
at them, killing four. Three others, who had jumped into the sea, were 
captured. On the Endeavour they were treated
with "all imaginable kindness" and soon became happy and cheerful.
Here, for the first time, Cook was dealing with a proud people justly 
trying to repel intruders. He found that Morton's
advice was difficult to carry out, and no one was more sorry about this 
than he. Banks expressed what Cook must
have felt, when he wrote in his journal, "Thus ended the most 
disagreeable day my life has yet seen."
But Cook, unlike Tasman, did not give up; and a fortnight later he was 
able to collect water, wood and "scurvy grass"
in a friendly atmosphere. The Maoris were beginning to respect the power 
of the musket and the four-pound cannon;
but, more important, they had learned through Tupaia that Cook wished for 
peace and was anxious to obtain food for
a fair exchange of goods. When they realised that Cook was a fair and 
just man, their hostility gradually melted away.
Six months later, having proved that New Zealand was not part of the 
"Southern Continent", Cook sailed west to begin
the long journey home. On 29 April 1770, he first met the natives of 
Australia at Botany Bay. When he approached a
group on the shore Cook found them to be timid; only two remained to 
repel the intruder. Tupaia could not make
himself understood, as their language was strange to him; and they did 
not respond to presents of nails and beads.
The two men tried bravely to repel a landing with darts, but Cook's 
musket fire of small shot scared them, and they
fled into the bush. Although he tried many times, Cook was never really 
able to make friends with these shy and
primitive natives - the Australian Aborigines.
The Endeavour sailed north again and was beached on 18 June 1770, after a miraculous 
escape from shipwreck on the jagged coral ledges of the Great Barrier Reef. 
While repairs
were being made, small parties  of natives were encouraged by presents to visit the 
ship. Some of 
them set fire to the
grass near the camp, and had to be scared off by small shot before they returned to 
being peaceful 
once more.
Cook believed that these nomadic people were happy in their simple way, although he 
had no way of 
understanding
their speech. Later, Cook was to write to his friend John Walker of Whitby:
"These people are naked and are not ashamed. They live mainly on fish and wild fowl 
and the natural 
products of the
land, for they do not cultivate one foot of it."
As soon as repairs were completed, Cook continued his voyage, reaching England on 13 
July 1771, after a voyage lasting nearly three years.

Making friends with the Indians of Nootka Sound, in what is now Vancouver Island, 
Canada. From a drawing by Webber
Cook's men watching natives dancing at night at Ha'apai in the Tongan Islands. From a 
drawing by Webber.

He had achieved more than any previous voyage of discovery, and this was partly due to 
the help and co-operation he was able to get from the native peoples he met on the 
way. 
He had also learned much which would be of value in the future. On the whole, Lord 
Morton's 
suggestions had been
carried out successfully. Little blood had been shed.
 Cook's success in winning the confidence and support of the
native peoples became evident during his next two voyages. Whenever he returned to  
his old anchorages he was greeted with delighted
enthusiasm. William Wales, the astronomer, described the arrival
of the Resolution in Tahiti on 22 April 1774: "A little after 9
o'clock we came to anchor in 71 fathoms, but, before the anchors
were down, the ship was crowded with our old friends, who 
showed, by their expressions, they were extremely pleased to see us."
Captain Cook's gift for gaining the goodwill of the natives is well 
illustrated by his meeting with a lonely Maori family at
Dusky Bay on 6 April 1773. George Forster, a naturalist who was present at the time, 
accurately described the
scene. "As we were returning home, we heard a loud hallooing on the rocky 
point of an island. As we approached the
shore, we saw who was making this noise. It was one of the natives. He 
stood with a club or battle-axe in his hand on
a jutting rock. Behind him, at the edge of the wood, we saw two women, each 
of them having a long spear. When our
boat came to the foot of the rock, we called to him in the language of 
Tahiti: 'Friend, come here.' He did not, however,
stir from his position, but he leaned on his club and made a long speech.

Maori family at Dusky Bay. From a drawing by Hodges.

Sometimes he talked very excitedly, and then he would swing his club 
about. Captain Cook went to the head of the
boat and called to him in a friendly manner. He threw him his own and 
some other handkerchiefs, but the native would
not pick them up. The captain then took some sheets of white paper in his 
hand, landed on the rock unarmed, and
held the paper out to the native. The man started to tremble and looked 
frightened, but he took the paper. Then
Captain Cook came up to him, took hold of his hand, and embraced him, 
touching the man's nose with his own,
which is how these people greet each other. At once he lost his fear; he called to the 
two women, who came and
joined him, while several of us landed to keep the captain company."
Cook did not always treat the native peoples with such tact and patience. 
As you read in the last article, the strain of
three long voyages and the continued thieving of the natives sometimes 
caused him to lose control of himself and act harshly towards them.
It is one of the ironic twists of history that one so generous in his 
treatment of the native peoples should eventually die
at their hands. Captain Cook was killed at Kealakekua Bay in the Hawaiian Islands on 
14 February 1779. A simple plaque now marks the site of this tragedy.
The extracts quoted in this article have been simplified.

HELP! I'M LOST! WHAT NOW?
by TONY NOLAN photographs by HELEN BUTTFIELD

Many people lose their lives each year in the mountains of New Zealand, 
and many more would die were it not for the work done by the Search and Rescue teams. 
Fear and bad weather can decide a man's fate before a search is fully under way. In 
this article Tony Nolan tells what a lost person can do in order to survive.

Whenever I read in the paper, or hear on the news, that somebody's lost 
in the bush, I give a bit of a shiver and
think, "Thank goodness it isn't me!"
I imagine, myself out there in his place, lonely, and with night coming 
on. The trees all look the same - like walls,
crowding around, and moving as you move so that you seem to be getting 
nowhere. Then there are the noises, and
the things that brush against you in the dark -- queer shapes that seem 
to move, and what seem to be eyes that
stare at you out of the shadows.
I wonder whether the lost person had felt like that when somebody else 
got lost, or whether he didn't give it a
thought, because he felt it couldn't happen to him anyway. Perhaps he 
never went near the bush, until he followed a
cow that got through the fence, or a friend talked him into going on a 
shooting or fishing trip. Perhaps he was just a
boy who didn't know better, or a man who stopped his car to look for a 
spot for a picnic.
I know he will be pretty scared and I wonder how he is coping with his 
fear. Maybe it's a bit silly, but I try to send
him little thought messages, saying, "Fight it, boy. Fight it!" Because 
I know that if he can only beat his fear he has
got a good chance of seeing home again.
Fear is the biggest killer. Of course, there's good fear-the sort that 
warns us, and stops us doing silly things. The sort I mean is bad fear - panic - the 
kind of stupid superstitious fear that should 
have gone out with the goblins..
Take the man who goes missing and the searchers find him lying in the 
river. The coroner says, "Drowned while trying
to find his way home." Well, perhaps he did drown, but what really killed 
him was fear.
You can be sure that in his normal state he would never have risked a 
crossing at such a crazy spot. But all worked
up with the fear of being lost, and the disgrace, and the loneliness, and 
what his folks would go through if he didn't
turn up - in he went and was drowned.
Take the girl who gets separated from her schoolmates - the usual story of getting 
left behind or trying to catch up with
someone in front. She is pretty game and does all the right things - tries to find her 
way back; tries to remember things
she passed. When it gets dark she makes a bed of fern under a bit of a log 
and lies down, planning what she is going
to do in the morning. Then the noises start, and the loneliness gets at 
her, then a pig snorts or an opossum scuffles - and blindly she rushes off into the 
dark. The verdict when they find her is 
"exposure". Exposure? That poor girl died of
fright.
You have got to beat fear, and to beat it you must think about it 
beforehand. You have to know what is likely to worry
you, and then how silly it is to let it worry you.
Just after one Easter I was camping by myself up the Mokihinui, a big river 
on the West Coast. Now I am supposed
to be an adult, but it was a lonely place and I was tired out. I was in 
that state where you begin to imagine things.
As I settled down for the night three stags started to roar-"Rrrrrrr-yeeow-rrrrrr. " 
They were all around me and very
close. Then a woodhen called right next to my ear, "Kooweee. Kooweeee. 
Kooweeee." It was so loud that it didn't
sound like a woodhen; the grunt part nearly rattled my billy. Then an owl 
joined in: "M'rrrreeeeek." Just as my nerves
were settling down - I was sure those stags were closing in on me, growling 
like lions - an opossum let out a screech
that set my hair on end: "Aaaaaaaaaark-ha-ha-ha! " It sounded just like the 
cracked voice of a crazy old man.
"Crikey!" I thought, switching on my torch in a hurry. "It's just like sleeping in a 
zoo! " Then I yelled back at them and they shut up 
for a while.
The point is that I knew what the noises were, and I knew that if I yelled 
the animals would be a lot more scared
than I was. But what if I had been a lost child? I began thinking that it 
was time a lot of other people, and their
children, knew something about the bush inhabitants and the noises they 
make, particularly at night.
Many children are still scared stiff of wetas, moths, and other bugs. I 
don't like them crawling on me either, but I have
never heard of anyone being bitten to death by them. Children should be 
taught that.
One thing that worries many people is fear of starvation. Some people 
really panic when they miss one meal. Well,
plenty of folk have lasted a fortnight
 or more on nothing but fresh air and hope. I've done a seven-day starve 
myself. A Chinese seaman during the war
survived for about 114 days without food. There are plenty of people in the 
world today who do hard manual labour on
what we would give the canary.
The first three days are the worst. But hunger isn't starvation. If you 
can't still do a good day's hike after a week
without food, then it isn't your stomach that is at fault!
Exposure is another thing. I have known strong men to panic at the thought 
of one night out in the bush without a
bed. They seem to think that exposure will get them. Well, exposure is 
caused by a combination of things - wind, rain, low temperature, and low morale. Beat 
one, and you will beat the lot.
Wind is the worst. It sucks the warmth out of your body. I have seen men at 
the Antarctic walking around outside with
the temperature at 40 degrees below zero with no gloves, and in clothes 
such as you would wear in the bush in New
Zealand. Then comes a puff of wind, and they hurry indoors.
Perhaps you can't always get out of the rain - though there are not many patches of 
bush that haven't an overhanging
bank or a rock or a log you can crawl under. But if you can't get yourself 
out of the worst of the wind then you are not
trying very hard. All you need is a bed of fern leaves, bracken or beech 
twigs under an overhanging log, with more
branches or wood on the upwind side; or a wind-shelter log with a lean-to of branches 
and ferns; or even a big 
heap of punga leaves or bracken you can
crawl into. Naturally you will shiver a bit in your wet clothes and you 
may have to sing or talk to yourself to keep your
spirits up, but you will be alive and kicking in the morning.
I have been on a few rescues and seen lost souls who seemed to be 
suffering from exposure. We treated them for
that, but from the way they perked up within a few hours it was obvious 
that their main trouble was loneliness,
tiredness and worry. It is not the bush you have got to beat, it is 
yourself.
Hunger gets your morale unless you watch it. Yet I don't know that it 
helps much to go scouring the bush for things
to eat. If you are stuck by a river, or have broken your legs or feet and 
can't travel, then you might as well spend the
time looking for berries, eels, woodhens and so on. It pays to know what 
is edible in the bush, and how to make
snares. If you have a rifle, a good feed of opossum or goat or deer is a 
great morale builder. But still, in the main, I
think the first day or so is best spent finding the way home, while you 
are still in top condition.
How to find your way home depends on the circumstances. I can tell you a few basic 
rules.
First, do not panic. Try to get rid of fear - fear of loneliness, fear of the dark, 
fear of hunger and exposure, fear of what
your friends will say, or how your parents will be worrying. Let your 
parents worry: that is their job. Your job is to stay
alive and get yourself found again.
The next thing is to sit down and think over how, when, and why you got 
lost. That should give you a good lead. It is
no use running blindly around. You have got to have a plan. Apart from, 
anything else, a plan will give you confidence,
steady you down, help you to remember things, because then you are doing 
something definite.
When you have decided what you are going to do, take it gently; don't try 
to rush. A lot of the people who never came
back fell over cliffs, or broke legs, or wore themselves out, or got 
washed away in rivers - all through trying to rush
things. It is the old enemy fear again.
Generally it is better to try to find your way back, rather than go 
forward. Even if you are on your way home it is
usually worth going back a bit to look for the track - and better to stick 
to the long way and not take short cuts. As you
work your way slowly back, stop, and try to remember things you saw on 
the way in - things, such as a twisted tree, a
branch you had to crawl under, a sticky patch of supplejack, an outcrop 
of rock. Perhaps you will be lucky enough to
see a footprint at a muddy bit.
Sometimes, it might pay to climb a hillside, or a tree, and look at the 
country. But do this only if you are sure both
you and the tree are in a fit condition. A broken leg won't help you get home.
If you have no compass, and providing it is not overcast, the sun will 
give you your bearings. You will know, for
instance, where west is, because that is where the sun sets.
In the long run you may have to follow water. Creeks run into streams, and 
streams into rivers, and rivers run out to
settled land or the coast. But take it easy. A long slow climb over a bluff 
is better than a river crossing you can't
manage. And if you have to spend another night out stop early enough to 
make yourself comfortable. People don't
mind searching if they think you are trying to do the right thing. A few 
arrows scratched in the ground, or made with
sticks, obvious foot-prints, and things like that, are a big help to them.
If somebody knows you are overdue, then sooner or later the searchers will 
come out. They get much satisfaction
from finding you, so think out every way you can help them. Nowadays 
aeroplanes or helicopters take part in rescue
work, so think how you can help them find you.
The big thing is not to get lost in the first place. The usual cause is 
separating from the others who know the way - often their fault as much as yours. 
Making vague plans is another cause. 
"You take this spur and I'll take the next
and I'll wait for you at the top."
Such an arrangement is useless when the spurs do not meet at the top, or 
one man turns back, and the other waits
patiently until it is dark and then loses himself on the way down, 
finishing up miles away.
Being in too big a hurry is, I suppose, the worst of the lot. You don't 
take the simple precautions of watching where
you are going and stopping from time to time to have a good hard look back. 
It is surprising how different things can
look when you are going the other way. That look back from time to time is 
important. Try to remember little land-marks, and putting signs of some sort at the 
junctions of tracks and creeks 
and ridges.
The bush is one of our greatest heritages - but short of chopping down 
every tree there will always be the possibility of
someone getting into trouble. Then perhaps we may never feel welling up 
inside us that terrifying cry, "Help! I'm lost!"

FINDING OUT ABOUT WORDS
by PHYLLIS GANT

When I was very young I used to pester my mother and father to let me go to school. At 
last they went to see the headmaster to find out if I might start before I had reached 
proper school age.
I wanted to know about words. There they were, all around me, and I 
couldn't read them! And I wanted to be able to
write down things for myself, too.
So it was fascinating to watch the teacher writing words up on the 
blackboard, to see them grow, letter by letter, and
try to guess what they would be.
One of my favourites was "together". It had a happy meaning,
and there was such a lot to it. You could break it up into three little 
words so that instead of just one word, you nearly
had a story. And that made it easy to spell. Then came "altogether". It 
looked a hard word. I was scared when the
teacher asked me to spell it. But I told myself a little story (only I 
had to remember to leave off one of the "ls"), and
it was all right.
I loved the way some words looked and sounded like the things they stood 
for: words like smooth, quick, cheer,
balloon, gently, anger, happy, slowly, jump, thunder, hiss, egg, 
butterfly, extraordinary, ache, hippopotamus, willow, broad.
Then there were things called sayings, which I heard mostly at home
"What does that mean, Mum?" I would ask.
And my mother would answer, "Oh, it's a saying, that's all."
"She was singing Annie Laurie and she broke down."
"Broke down?" All her bones broke and she fell? Something inside her 
broke? Was it because she sang too high?
Her voice wouldn't go any higher and she-just sort of shattered? "He was killed in 
cold blood."
They all looked very solemn, as well they might. It was just so horrible! 
Where did they get the blood from? Then,
waiting for it to go cold. . . . How did they kill him-in cold blood?
No, it didn't bear thinking about. I hastily found something else to ponder 
over.
"There's not enough room to swing a cat."
What a terrible thing to do! Who would want to, anyway? Why is it important 
to have enough room to swing a cat? In
case one day you might need to? But why?
"Uncle Bert has got a face as long as a fiddle.
Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle - yes, I knew what a fiddle looked 
like. But, I thought, Uncle Bert's face
doesn't look like that.
And I thought and thought, to discover what sayings could possibly mean. I 
would save them up until I went to bed,
then try to puzzle out their meanings.
"She was green with envy."
Goodness, do people turn green when they're envious? (I knew that that 
meant wanting something that someone
else had, and being unpleasant about it.) I would have to be very careful 
about that. Perhaps my mother had already
noticed it at some time? I hadn't, though! I would just have to be very 
careful, that's all.
"She died of a broken heart."
I supposed it simply fell in pieces, and there you were, dead. Maybe it was 
something like having a floating rib. But
you didn't die of that, though. Aunty Effie had a floating rib, and she was 
all right. Where does it float? How far does it
go? What does it float on? How do they get it back? Can they get it back?
I wanted to ask Aunty Effie, but I felt too shy. She might think me silly, 
since everyone else seemed to know what it
meant.
"It's like getting blood out of a stone," said my mother. Stones don't 
have blood; you could squeeze and - 
Suddenly I knew. That was just it! You couldn't get blood out of a stone. 
So you couldn't get whatever it was she was
talking about not being able to get. A saying was a different way of saying 
something. And it was an interesting way.
So that began a new and exciting thinking game.
There were wonderful sentences, too, to say over and over, like singing 
little songs.
"Come here, lass, while I iron your plaits."
"She let them look as long as they liked, for green is good for the eyes."
"There she sat, as still as a mouse, holding her precious burden."
"And, as he looked, she grew taller and fairer than all women."
"And the wind in the sheoaks wavered, and the honeysuckle stirred."
I would whisper these and other sentences to myself. I loved the sound of 
them. I expect this is why I remember
them so well, though it is a long time since I discovered their magic.
Magic? Oh, yes! Somewhere, I believed, there was a magic word, just one 
really magic and marvellously powerful
word. It was there somewhere among all the words I said and read and heard. 
What was it? Would I know it when I
found it? Or would it be said, and just go away for ever, all unknown?
But if I found it, I would have a talisman.
I used to think that perhaps that remarkable word was the very one. Who 
knows?

FIGHTERS FOR FREEDOM
2. GALILEO
by Barry Faville
You take a cricket ball in one hand and a dried pea in the other, stand on a chair or 
table, and let 
them drop from the
same height at the same time. Which will reach the ground first? If we had to decide 
without trying 
it, I think most of
us would say the cricket ball would win the race, because it is larger and heavier 
than the dried 
pea. But why should
we try to answer the problem without trying it? That is what Galileo would have said. 
If you stand on 
a chair and carry
out the test, you will find that the cricket ball and the dried pea reach the ground 
together. It is 
one of the laws of
nature that objects of different weights fall at the same speed. This law was 
discovered only about 
500 years ago,
simply because no one before that time had thought of experimenting to discover the 
truth.
People then were suspicious of anything which did not appear to be true, and they were 
reluctant to 
give up old
beliefs. Then a new group of scholars started to change this attitude - men who 
experimented and tried things out. The
Italian scientist and scholar, Galileo, was one of them. He spent his life, as 
Socrates did, trying 
to discover the truth
and fighting to have it accepted. But whereas Socrates was concerned with the way men 
should live and 
govern
themselves, Galileo was interested in the laws of nature. He was one of the men who 
helped develop 
modern
science.
Galileo was born in Italy in 1564, and to understand the struggles and arguments he 
became mixed up 
in, you should
know a little about Italy and Europe as it was in his lifetime. One of the most 
important men in 
Europe was the Pope,
the head of the Church. He lived in Rome, at the Vatican, but his power and the power 
of the Church 
was very strong
throughout the whole of Europe. For several hundred years the only places in Europe 
where people 
could learn to read
and write, or study anything at all, were the monasteries and Church schools. Almost 
all the scholars 
and learned
men were taught by monks, and even most of the university teachers were connected with 
the Church in some way.

Galileo (1564 - 1642)

This meant that almost everyone was taught the same ideas, handed
down over the centuries, with very little difference from country to country. It was 
thought, for example, that the earth was the centre of the universe, and that the sun 
and stars moved around it.
Pisa, where Galileo was born, was in Tuscany. When he was young, his family moved to 
nearby Florence, 
a city
which was famous for its writers, painters, sculptors and musicians. Galileo grew into 
a short, 
well-built boy, with a
mop of red hair. He had a very inquisitive mind, and his parents must have found his 
ceaseless 
questions very trying.
But he soon developed the habit of finding things out for himself. He invented clever 
toy machines 
for his younger
brothers and sisters; he learnt to play the lute, and enjoyed painting pictures. 
Galileo was very 
clever, and his father
decided that he should become a doctor; doctors were well paid and highly respected. 
So when he was 
seventeen
Galileo was sent back to Pisa, to study medicine at the university.

The cathedral and the leaning tower at Pisa

He had been learning about it only a few months when he lost interest. 
The lectures made him sleepy and he could
not be bothered memorising names of parts of the human body. One day he 
overheard a teacher of mathematics and
science talking to his students, and that for Galileo was the end of 
medicine; he went to lectures in science instead.
His curiosity was aroused by the interesting problems of the subject, not by its 
teachers.
Over the next few years Galileo became a first-class mathematician, 
largely through his own efforts, and at last
became a teacher himself. A few important men could see already that this 
talkative young man was going to push
science in an entirely new direction. One of Galileo's discoveries at 
Pisa was the law about the speed of falling
objects, which we have mentioned already. There is a story that he proved 
it by dropping cannon balls of varying sizes
from the leaning tower of Pisa. Historians today do not think this story 
is true, but Galileo certainly staged some kind
of demonstration in public.
He did not make himself more popular through experiments such as these. 
His opponents accused him of behaving
like a sideshow entertainer, and not caring enough about the dignity of 
his job. Galileo himself did not help matters. If
he thought someone was a fool, he told him so. As he thought most of his fellow-
teachers were fools, 
he had few friends. He was a fighter and
cared little for other people's feelings. Eventually Galileo became so 
unpopular that he had to leave Pisa for Padua,
near Venice, where he was made Professor of Mathematics.
Galileo was sorry to leave his home country, but there would be more 
freedom at Padua, and a much higher salary as
well. He was a great success in his new post. The students flocked to hear his 
lectures, overflowing the largest hall in
the university. Galileo taught them that scientists must solve problems not by reading 
ancient books, but by testing
and experimenting. He had someone climb a nearby mountain and fire pistols. 
By counting the seconds between the
flash and the bang, and measuring the distance to the mountain, he was able to show 
that the speed of sound could be worked out.

The market square at Padua

 (Can you see how this could be done?) He proved that girders 
need not be solid to be strong; they could
be hollow, like the bones of animals. He was constantly producing new and 
exciting ideas, and writing and talking
about them. When he was almost forty Galileo's mind turned in yet another 
direction - towards the moon, the planets and the stars.
People have always been interested in the night sky. Astronomers in all the 
ancient civilisations had known a great
deal about the paths of the stars and the planets, but no one had ever been 
able to explain why they move about the
sky as they do. In Galileo's time most people still believed that the earth 
was placed in the centre of the universe and
that the sun and the stars moved around it in circles. It was not really 
surprising that they should think in this way.
The sun appears to move from one side of the sky to the other each day; the stars seem 
to move across the sky at night.

Ptolemy's scheme of the planets' movements. Ptolemy was a Greek astronomer of the 2nd 
century  A.D.

We cannot feel the movement of the earth, nor can we see it.
Several years before Galileo was born, a Polish astronomer, called 
Copernicus, had written a book describing a new
idea about the shape of the universe. He said that the earth was just one 
of a number of planets which moved around
the sun. Most scholars and teachers laughed at Copernicus, but after his 
death his influence began to spread, until
there was a small group of thinkers who believed him. Galileo was one of 
this small group.
Galileo had collected many arguments to show that Copernicus was right, but 
he was afraid to print them. He had
good reason to be afraid of speaking out too strongly. Only a few years 
before, a teacher had been burnt at the stake
for teaching his students about Copernicus. This had been done with the 
approval of the Church.
A great change occurred in Galileo's life after he had heard of an amazing 
new invention, the work of a Dutchman. It
was a spyglass which made distant objects appear close when you looked 
through it - the instrument which later came
to be called the telescope. Galileo obtained a description of how it worked and made 
one himself, a simple tube with a lens at each end. He made several more telescopes, 
each an improvement on the last, and then he put the valuable new instrument to work. 
He pointed it at the moon.

One of Galileo's telescopes

He studied the moon night after night and saw what no human eye could 
possibly see unaided. He gazed in wonder
at mountains and valleys, round craters, shadows cast by the sun, and high 
shining peaks with their bases hidden in
shadows - the landscape of the moon which we know today from close-up photographs. He 
made mistakes 
too. He thought the large, dark
patches on the moon were seas, whereas they are really vast plains or 
deserts blotted out in shadow by high
mountains. The error is easily remembered because these moon deserts are 
still called "seas".

LEFT. A drawing of the moon by Galileo as he saw it through his telescope. 
RIGHT. A recent photograph of the same part of the moon's surface made at the Yerkes 
Observatory of the University of Chicago.

Galileo did more than look at the moon. He swept the skies with his 
telescope and saw more stars than anyone had
imagined could exist. He found that the strange Milky Way which stretched 
across the sky was not a mist, as people
believed, but a huge belt of stars, so close together they looked like a 
veil. Then one night he pointed his telescope at
the planet Jupiter and noticed three small stars in a line near the planet, 
two to the left and one to the right like this:
He looked again on the following night, 8 January. Again he saw three small 
stars near Jupiter, but they had changed
position.
Galileo was amazed, because according to the old ideas, stars always moved 
along known paths. But these stars
around Jupiter seemed to be appearing and disappearing at will. The next 
night was cloudy and the stars were
hidden, but on 10 January he again looked at Jupiter. This time there were 
only two stars.
Where was the third? It was then that Galileo began to suspect what these 
"stars" really were. Three nights later he
saw not three, but four "stars" grouped near Jupiter.
There was only one explanation for this strange sight. The "stars" must be 
four moons whirling round Jupiter, as our
moon circles the earth, but at far greater speed. This would explain why 
they were in different positions every time
Galileo observed them, and why sometimes one or two could not be seen at 
all; they were making their way round
behind the planet. In fact, one night he saw one of the moons coming into 
view as it emerged from the dark side of
Jupiter.
This discovery excited Galileo, not only because he had found something 
new, but because Jupiter and its moons
were exactly like the shape of the solar system which Copernicus had 
described - the large sun in the middle, with the smaller planets moving around it.

An astronomer at the time of Galileo

Here was proof that such a system existed in the universe. Galileo discovered many 
other things that nobody had seen 
before, such as the dark spots on the sun,
and the way in which the planet Venus has phases like our moon.
For night after night Galileo studied the sky, and in 1610 he wrote 
a book describing his discoveries which made
him famous all over Europe. Orders poured in, and it was difficult to 
print enough copies. In the same year Galileo
returned to Florence, to the countryside he had always loved. He had 
spent eighteen years in Padua where he had
become famous.
For a time Galileo enjoyed himself in Florence. People listened to him 
with respect now, even if they did not agree
with him.
But  although  the  number  of scholars   who  sided  with Galileo 
was growing, there were many who were
suspicious of him. There were even some who refused to look through the 
"godless magic tube". They thought the
telescope was an invention of the devil. Rumours started spreading that 
Galileo was trying to overthrow the teachings
of the Bible and the Church. A close friend of Galileo reminded him that the power of 
the Church was much stronger in Florence 
than it was in Padua. He warned him to be
careful. Then one Sunday a monk preached an angry sermon in a church in 
Florence condemning all those who
taught the ideas of Copernicus. Anyone who did so was breaking the laws of 
the Church and should be done away
with. Fortunately he was in no position to carry out his threats, but soon 
everyone was talking about the argument.
Arguments of this kind --- over whether someone was disobeying the teaching 
of the Church - were settled by a special
court called the Inquisition. When Galileo heard that his enemies were 
asking the Inquisition to investigate his
activities he was furious, and he decided to go to Rome himself and put his 
case before the Pope and his advisers.
This visit to Rome in 1616 marked the beginning of a long, nerve-wearing 
struggle for Galileo which lasted 17 years.
The quarrel was between the famous scientist and a few high officials of 
the Church and those scholars who clung
grimly to the old ideas.
It is difficult to describe this quarrel briefly, so we will have to leave 
out many details. But the opening round was a
pleasant surprise for Galileo. He found that he had a great deal of 
sympathy and support in Rome from several leading
scholars and churchmen. Then came the shock. An important member of the 
Inquisition, Cardinal Bellarmine, told
him bluntly that the ideas of Copernicus were mistaken. They were against 
the teaching of the Church, and Galileo
was not to have anything further to do with them.
Galileo was in a terrible dilemma. His whole life was built around science, 
and his stubbornness and conscience
would not allow him to lay aside his telescope. On the other hand, he loved 
his Church, and he did not want to
disobey its rulings and become an outcast. He returned to Florence and for 
eight years little was heard from him,
though he continued to work quietly without drawing attention to himself. 
Then in 1623 a new Pope was elected – Urban VIII. As a cardinal he had been a good 
friend of Galileo's, and the aging 
scientist hurried to Rome, hoping to persuade
the new Pope to lift the ban on the teaching of Copernicus's ideas. To his 
dismay, the Pope refused, but he did
suggest that Galileo could describe all the ideas about the universe then 
existing without suggesting that Copernicus
was right.
The next five years were spent in writing his great book, Dialogue 
Concerning the Great World Systems. He followed
the Pope's suggestion, but he could not help making it clear that he 
himself was a staunch follower of Copernicus.
For example, several of his arguments to prove the earth moved round the 
sun came from the discoveries that he had
made with his telescope. Somehow, the Church official who checked the 
manuscript did not realise this and, to
Galileo's delight, permission was given to print it.
When the book went on sale the uproar began, and Galileo's war with the 
Church neared its climax.
The Pope soon realised that the official who had read the manuscript had 
not done a very thorough job. 

Pope Urban VIII

Sales of the book were stopped and Galileo was ordered to Rome. He was now 68, and a 
sick man. Then a written record of his
conversation with Cardinal Bellarmine many years before was produced. It said that 
Galileo had promised "never to
hold, teach, or defend the ideas of Copernicus in any way whatever". 
Galileo was convicted of disobeying the Church
before the Inquisition on 21 June 1633, and on the following day the old 
man knelt before the court and in a slow
stammering voice confessed that he was wrong in teaching that the earth 
moved around the sun. In fact, of course, as
he spoke the building in which he knelt, its foundations fixed firmly in the 
earth, was doing the very thing that Galileo was
painfully denying.
Galileo was subdued and silenced, and until his death in 1642 he was 
confined to his house in Florence by order of
the Church. In his last years he returned to the work he had been 
interested in before the days of the telescope.
In the first two articles, we have looked at men who fought for similar 
kinds of freedom - the right to speak and think
freely, and the right to extend the boundaries of science and knowledge. 
The third article will tell the story of Sir
Thomas More who believed in another important freedom - the freedom of 
conscience.

EARTHQUAKES
BY C. W. MAUGHAN

The Lisbon Earthquake
In the late morning and all afternoon on 1 November 1755 strange things were seen 
happening in 
countries round the
shores of the Atlantic Ocean. On the coasts of England and the West Indies several 
times the sea 
suddenly rose 12
feet, and then returned to its normal level. In Spain a young man was walking along 
the narrow strip 
of land joining the
city of Cadiz to the mainland when a gigantic wave swept over the land and drowned 
him. In the 
highlands of Scotland
and all over the countries of Europe lakes suddenly started slopping around like bowls 
of water 
jerked from side to
side. In Toplitz in Bohemia - a village famous for its mineral springs - the springs 
suddenly began throwing up vast
quantities of yellow brown water.
All of these strange and frightening events had the same cause. The enormous sudden 
movements of the 
sea were
caused by tsunamis (a Japanese word used to describe the huge waves started by 
earthquakes). The 
movements in
the lakes (or seiches, as they are called) and the sudden ejection of ground water at 
the mineral 
springs were caused
by the same earthquake.
Although it was not known for some days, the centre of the earthquake was near Lisbon 
in Portugal; 
and it is perhaps
the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in man's history.
Portugal in 1755 was no longer the great sea-going nation that she used to be, 
although Lisbon on the 
river Tagus was
still one of the main ports of call for the ships from South America. It was a country 
of very poor 
people, many of
whom lived by begging, and a much smaller number of very rich people - church people, 
nobles and merchants – whose wealth came from South America.
On the morning of 1 November, the whole city of Lisbon had just begun to celebrate All 
Saints' Day. 
All the finery of
the church had been taken out for the occasion. Both rich and poor had crowded into 
the churches for 
morning mass.
It happened without warning while the choir of one of Lisbon's main churches were 
singing the hymn, "Let us rejoice in the Lord".

The Lisbon earthquake of 1755. A big earthquake feels like this, but this drawing is 
not an accurate record of what happens in an actual earthquake. Compare this picture 
with the photographs at the end of the article.

All of a sudden the grey marble walls began to rock and sway like an
unsteady ship at sea. The time was 9.45 a.m., and within three minutes the greater 
part of the city 
of Lisbon had
been destroyed. What was not destroyed in the first shock was either flattened by the 
series of 
violent aftershocks
that followed throughout the day, or smashed by a great tsunami that swept up the 
river Tagus, or 
burnt in fires that
broke out in the ruins.
Somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand people were killed, many of them as they 
prayed in the 
churches.
The whole of Europe was profoundly shocked by the disaster. Those who considered the 
world to be 
ordered by God
could not understand the violence that had hurled down one of the most religious 
cities in Europe.
People not only felt confused, but also helpless and ignorant. They were 
helpless in the face of the destructive powers
of earthquakes and ignorant of their causes. Today, through the study of earthquakes 
and earthquake waves (called seismology), we know more about the causes of earthquakes 
and how to reduce the amount of damage they do by better planning, but our knowledge 
is still far from complete. What are earthquakes? How are they caused, and how
do we measure them?

RIGHT, An aerial view of the fault on the western side of Wellington 
Harbour and the Hutt Valley. Although it is the result of big movements in the past, 
no one has ever seen it move, even in the big earthquake of 1I855.
 
Since Europeans have been in New Zealand, there have been sixteen big 
earthquakes with magnitudes of seven or more, shown by the big circles with the dates. 
The smaller black circles show the shocks of magnitudes six and over since 1940.
The epicentre of the 1855 earthquake was not at Wellington, and 
seismologists call it the Wairarapa Earthquake.

What is an earthquake?
Most New Zealanders know what an earthquake feels like. Even if you have 
not felt the ground shaking and watched
buildings rocking about, you will have read of the Murchison earthquake of 
1929, the Napier earthquake of1931, or
the great Wellington earthquake of 1855. More recently, you will have read 
of the earthquake at Inangahua junction on
the West Coast.
To talk of the shaking of an earthquake is to describe not the earthquake 
itself, but one of its effects. What then is
causing the buildings to shake? As far as anyone knows at present, the 
shaking is being caused by the sudden
release of energy which has built up in a portion of the earth over a very 
long time.
We are still not sure exactly what happens at the source of an earthquake. 
The biggest earthquakes are often
accompanied by breaks in the earth's surface, called faults. Many 
seismologists believe that the movement of the
fault causes the vibrations that we feel as an earthquake. But others think that the 
earthquake is caused by 
a sudden change in the structure of the
rock deep in the earth - rather like water suddenly freezing in a pipe, and bursting 
it when it expands. These scientists
think that the cracks in the surface of the earth are like cracks in a 
pipe, and are one of the effects of the earthquake,
just as the shaking is. The sudden change in rock structure is called a 
phase change.
The other theory that earthquakes are caused by a fault is known as the 
elastic rebound theory. To understand it,
imagine a piece of land half of which tends to go one way and the other 
half tending to stay still, or move in the
opposite direction. Up to a point the rock will give, but in doing so it 
becomes strained and starts to act like a spring
in a clockwork motor when it is being wound up. This is called the storing 
up of elastic energy. However, if the forces
continue long enough, the strain in the rock becomes so great that it snaps 
along its weakest line. This weak line is
the fault. When the rock snaps, one whole block of land, which may be 
large or small, suddenly goes to a new
position where there is less strain. In doing so it releases most of the energy it has 
stored up, causing that energy to
travel through the ground as earthquake waves.

In some faults the movement is vertical (left) and in others the movement is 
horizontal (below, and on page 78.

1. Faults are found all over the world. The most famous is the San Andreas fault in 
California, which is visible for more than 600 miles. Another very large one runs 
through much of the South Island of New Zealand, but very few earthquakes seem to 
occur near it.

Each time there is a really big earthquake, it is likely that it will be 
followed over a period of weeks by a number of
smaller ones, or aftershocks. The reason is that, when the first earthquake 
occurs, not all the energy is released. If
you were to take a bale of wool and squeeze it with a huge hydraulic press, 
you would reduce it to a certain size
quite quickly. After that, the movement would gradually slow down, because 
the smaller the bale becomes, the harder
it is to make it still smaller. If you were now suddenly to release the 
hydraulic press, the bale would go back to its old
size, but not in one movement. It would go quickly back to a certain size, 
and then gradually return to normal. This is
exactly what is happening with an earthquake and its aftershocks. First, 
there is the big movement - the main
earthquake - and this is followed by the slow return to normal, which is the 
cause of all the aftershocks.
You can imagine the enormous destruction that can be caused if an 
earthquake takes place near a populated area.
Even if it happens at the bottom of the sea, it can still cause tremendous destruction 
by 
setting off a tsunami. Tsunamis are like the
ripples caused by throwing a stone into a pond, except that they are on a huge scale, 
and can cross an ocean at speeds of 500 m.p.h. or more. If you were at sea you would 
hardly feel or see them as they would not be very high,
but, as they approach the land and the water becomes shallower, all their 
energy changes from length to height, and
they can build up to quiet terrifying heights, especially in narrow inlets. 
The highest ever recorded was one that
crashed on the Kamchatka Peninsula at Cape Lopatka in 1737. it was 210 feet 
high, or as high as a seventeen-storey
building.
How is an earthquake caused?
Knowing about elastic rebound, faults, elastic creep, and phase changes 
still does not tell us what causes energy to
build up in the rocks. There seem to be several reasons for this. One of 
the reasons is probably the convection
currents in the mantle of the Earth, which I described in the article on 
volcanoes. Another reason is probably the
whole process of mountain building, and a process, connected with it, known 
as isostasy. Briefly speaking, isostasy
is the tendency of huge blocks of the Earth's crust to float on the mantle 
of the earth at their right levels. To
understand what I mean more clearly, think of two blocks of wood, one very 
light (like balsa wood) and one very
heavy (like teak or mahogany).
If you were to float these in water, the teak would hardly show above the 
surface, and the balsa wood would hardly go
under the water at all. If you were then to push down the piece of balsa wood until it 
was level with the piece of teak it would stay there only as long as you held it down.

1. Part of Russia, north of Japan, by the Bering Sea.

As soon as you lifted your hand, it would bob back to its normal level. Well, the 
Earth's crust is just like this. Some parts of it are out
of place, and they are on the move to regain their correct levels. For 
instance, in a place where an ancient ice-cap
has vanished the land may be starting to rise. This is actually happening 
in the lands round the Baltic Sea, which
have risen as much as 20 feet in the last 1,000 years.
As well as this, mountain ranges are being formed all the time, and the way in which 
this happens is odd. A big basin in the land, or a shallow sea, becomes filled with 
silt (sediment) which may have come down from an even older, weathered range of 
mountains.

A tsunami engulfs the British Steamship La Plata off the Virgin Isles, West Indies, in 
I867.

This basin is known as a geosyncline. As more and more sediment gathers, its weight 
presses the land down and weakens the bottom of the geosyncline causing it to 
collapse. The two sides of the geosyncline then spring together, like the jaws of a 
trap, squeezing the sediment up into a mountain range.
All of these movements, including convection currents and mountain 
building, occur over long periods of time, but
they can cause the tensions in rocks that lead to earthquakes. These are 
the true causes of earthquakes. It is also
interesting to note that, although volcanoes and earthquakes occur in 
much the same parts of the world, volcanoes do
not usually cause earthquakes nor do earthquakes usually set off 
volcanoes.

The dots represent places where earthquakes have happened. The great 
ocean basins and the centres of the continents are almost free of them.

The first earthquake detector was invented by Chang Heng in China about 
132 A.D. In an earthquake the jar moved while the movement of the heavy pendant inside 
lagged behind, releasing balls held between the jaws of the ornamental dragon heads. 

Measuring earthquakes
How do we know so much about earthquakes? From the observations that have 
been made of the behaviour of
earthquakes and earthquake waves. One of the simplest forms of 
measurement is to observe what happens when an
earthquake occurs. Does the force of the shock knock down ornaments off 
shelves? Does it crack buildings, or can it be
felt only bye people at the top of tall buildings? Of course the answer to 
many of these questions depends upon how close
the observer is to the epicentre of the earthquake. (An epicentre is the 
point of the ground exactly above where the
earthquake starts. The area in the ground where it starts is called the 
focus.) It is possible to get from dozens of different
people, their own descriptions of the damage they saw, or the movement 
they felt. These are graded according to
intensity; that is, according to the amount of damage, or the amount of 
movement that people observed. Intensities are
arranged on a numbered scale, a higher number being given to one that 
brought the chimney down than to one that merely
made the house creak and woke the cat. There are many such scales, and 
the one used in New Zealand is called the
Modified Mercalli scale. By using this scale it is possible to get a very 
rough idea of the epicentre of an earthquake. and
some idea of the intensity of the earthquake at different points in the 
country.
However, because this method depends on rough observations and opinions, 
and because the composition of the earth is
not the same everywhere, the method is not nearly accurate enough for 
scientific observation. For this reason more
accurate machines have been invented for recording earthquakes. These are 
called seismographs.
Seismographs
Recording the movement of the ground in an earthquake is not easy. The 
difficulty is that there is no stable place to
rest a machine when an earthquake is occurring. Scientists have overcome 
this problem by inventing an instrument
called the seismograph, which draws a kind of picture on a graph when a 
earthquake occurs. From this "Picture" we
can learn the magnitude of an earthquake. Earlier, I talked about the 
intensities of an earthquake. It is important to
remember that one earthquake can have as many intensities as there are 
observers, but it can have only one
magnitude.
The smallest earthquakes that can be felt have a magnitude of about 2, and 
the biggest ever recorded had a
magnitude of 8.9. Newspapers sometimes write about a "force 5" or a "force 
7" earthquake. "Force" is a bad word to
use in this way, for it is not clear whether "magnitude" or "intensity" is 
meant.
The other thing we can learn from seismographs is where an earthquake 
occurs. This is much more complicated to
do than it seems, as one earthquake sets many different types of waves 
travelling through the Earth, and the records
of their arrival at the seismograph are hard to interpret. It would be too 
difficult to tell you about all the different types
of waves, but you should know that the two main types are P waves and S 
waves. P waves move through the Earth
by knocking particles of rock against each other in the direction the wave 
is travelling - rather like a shunting engine
banging into a line of railway trucks. (You can remember these by thinking of them as 
Push waves.) S waves travel just like 
a sea wave, or like a rope when you give
one end of it a flick. (You could think of these as Snake waves, see below.)

Place four coins touching each other on a smooth surface. Hold three of 
them down firmly and flick another coin
against them, as shown in the diagram; the coin at the end of the row 
will move away from the others. P waves pass
through the earth in a similar way.

S waves and P waves travel at different speeds, and by recording their 
times of arrival at the seismograph, and
measuring the differences in times of arrival, we can find out how far 
away the earthquake occurred.
This still does not tell us the direction in which it occurred. (Some of these waves 
travel right through the earth, and make the records very complicated.) However, if we 
take three or four seismograph records from different places in the world and draw 
circles on a map, with the positions of the seismographs as the centres of the circles 
and the distances to the earthquakes as the radii, 
you can tell where the earthquake happened by seeing where all the circles cross at 
one point.

Here a shock is located near Wanganui, using records made at Cobb River, Wellington 
and New Plymouth.

None of this helps you to know when an earthquake will take place. There will be a 
fortune waiting for the person who
can find out how to predict an earthquake, but at present we do not know. 
All we can do is to build our houses
sensibly and hope for the best. Whenever possible we should build on rock, 
and not on loose alluvial soil, unless very
special floating foundations have been prepared. The buildings should be 
able to move on their foundations and are
best made of wood or reinforced concrete for this reason. Open fireplaces 
and chimneys are dangerous, as the fires
can spread if a big earthquake destroys a town, and chimneys often fall 
down. If all our buildings are built sensibly we
can avoid the worst destruction in an earthquake, even though it may still 
be very frightening.
Earthquakes can happen almost anywhere in the world (they have even 
happened in London), but they tend to happen
most often in much the same areas of the world as volcanoes, and this 
means that all of you are living in an
earthquake area.
FUTURE WORK  
1. Find out all you can about the Murchison earthquake in 1929,  the Napier earthquake 
in 1931, and Inangahua Junction  earthquake in 1968. You will get much information 
from  old newspaper files in public libraries. 
2. Find out where deep earthquakes occur most often. 3. Find out what to do in an 
earthquake. 4. Learn about isostasy by floating in water blocks of wood of  different 
weights.
FILMSTRIPS
Earthquakes 52/137 Work of Internal Forces (related to the topic) 67/180
Records of two earthquakes in the Kermadec Islands made on a seismograph at 
Wellington.

RIGHT. The top of the old tower at Nelson College came down in the 1929 
Murchison earthquake. It is safer to stay inside until the shaking stops than to rush 
outside and get hit by falling bricks and tiles.

An intensity map of Inangahua Earthquake of 23 May 1968. The shock had a magnitude of 
seven. Each Roman number gives the intensity of the shock in the area enclosed by the 
line.

When an earthquake wave reaches a seismograph, the frame of the instrument moves with 
the ground, but the heavy weight on the spring lags behind and writes a record on the 
revolving drum.

Wooden houses usually suffer less damage than brick ones, but although these houses at 
Inangahua are badly shattered, their occupants were not injured.

No house can be safer than the ground it is built on. These houses at Anchorage, 
Alaska, are sound enough, but they should never have been built on such weak ground.

Chimneys are the weakest part of New Zealand houses. This picture was taken near 
Kaitaia in 1963. Earthquakes are not common in this part of New Zealand, but we still 
have to prepare for them.

Poorly compacted road embankments and bridge approaches often fare badly in 
earthquakes. Access for relief workers is hampered by the sort of thing that happened 
near Inangahua. 

During the Hawkes Bay earthquake in 1931, movement on a fault near Poukawa offset this 
road by more than six feet. Movements like this could tear apart anything built across 
them, but there is no reason to think that shaking is particularly severe close to 
faults.


