CONTENTdm
Wooden Head
British Columbia Historical Books Collection
Staverman, F. H.
"Autobiography of a Dutchman who settled on a farm near Victoria in 1927. He became a poultry farmer and was active in the C.C.F."-- Edwards, M. H., Lort, J. C. R., & Carmichael, W. J. (1975). A bibliography of British Columbia: Years of growth, 1900-1950. Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, p. 265
199 pages ; 21 cm
application/pdf
wooden head I . THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA f.h.st aver man Wooden Head A Story of Nine Decades ri the Dutch East Indies, Holland, the United States and Canada by F. H. Staverman This is a vivid autobiographical record of an adventurous life in the Dutch East Indies and on the high seas. Wooden Head is the nickname given to the author during his boyhood days as a student at a naval college in Holland, because ". . . he could use his head to bump into an adversary with extra force without feeling any bad consequences . . ." On this jocular note begins this volume of exciting reminiscences spanning nearly a century, and four continents. As a naval college graduate at the turn of the century, he roves to many distant, exotic ports-of- call—Algiers, Batavia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Suez, Port Said . . . Typical of his adventures is his voyage aboard the Friso in 1895. The reader accompanies him into the eye of a hurricane in the southern Indian ocean. "Toward ten o'clock at night, the wind, which had been growing fiercer all day, went down until it disappeared altogether. A short time later, a wind came through from the opposite direction. The 'eye' of the storm had passed right over the ship and we were caught in its full fury . . ." Somehow, Wooden Head survives. Eventually, he settles in the Dutch East Indies, where he runs a plantation. Later, (continued on back flap) OODEN HEAD A Story of Nine Decades n the Dutch East Indies, Holland, the United States and Canada F. H* Staverman EXPOSITION PRESS • NEW YORK Exposition Press Inc., 386 Park Avenue South, New York 10016 FIRST EDITION © 1966 by F. H. Staverman. All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form, except for short quotations in critical essays and reviews. Manufactured in the United States of America. EP 44090 G. W. S. Ltngbeek, M.D. of Laag-Soeren, Heelsum and The Hague, Holland; AND TO MY FRIEND Mrs. R. Franklin of Victoria, B.C. who has given me the inspiration to write this Contents 1 September 1890 11 2 The Naval College 17 3 Around the Cape of Good Hope to Batavia and Back 4 Mediterranean Cruise 29 5 Amsterdam to Batavia Via Suez and Singapore J 6 Aboard the "Sumatra" 34 7 On a Sugar Plantation 37 8 Aboard the Guardship 39 9 Serving With the Hydrographic Survey 43 10 Commander of the "Tamiang" 49 11 Back to Holland 56 12 The Hospital Sanatorium 58 13 Marriage 63 14 Settling In, in Java 66 15 Back to Batavia 72 16 A Magnetic Trip 80 17 The Years at the Observatory 81 18 Back to Holland Once More 96 19 Wooden Head Gets an Eye-Opener 101 20 Another Tour in Batavia 105 21 California During the War 112 22 Across the Continent 123 23 At Home in Holland 125 24 Saturday, August 7, 1920—Fate Again 132 25 The Rhode Island Red Club 136 26 Off to Canada 156 27 The Years on Vancouver Island 165 Appendix Resistance Against Disease 19 WOODEN HEAD 1/ September 1890 It was not long after we met each other at the Navy College in Holland before we became more or less chummy. We were both sixteen when we entered college; going to the Navy was really not our own choice, but there was no way for us at that age to change the economic circumstances. He did not like the ultra-military atmosphere, and neither did I. His father, an officer in the Dutch East Indian Army on leave in Holland at the time, had given him the choice between the Army Military College and the Navy College as schooling for a career; he really had wanted to go to an agricultural college, but his parents, having a large family, could not afford this. Thinking that the Navy would be less militaristic than the Army, he settled for what was, in his opinion, the least unpleasant choice. Our class, thirty-two in number, quickly had any illusions shattered, cruelly and definitely. The Commander of the Naval College was a very stern man, so much so that he had earned the nickname The Mikado. I don't think that any of us will have forgotten that time. Uhlenbeck was a martinet who wielded his power like a whip, for its own sake: like many petty people, who obtain some measure of authority, the Mikado exaggerated it and himself beyond any bearable proportions. He had no scruples about inflicting arbitrary and severe punishments for minor infractions. Uhlenbeck was the military man at his worst. He was an example of the stupidity and insensate cruelty inherent in militarism. The Mikado, who strutted about like a mechanical toy, puffed up like a bloated turkey, often subjected us to unnecessary discipline, such as having us stand in the biting cold for hours while he made a minute inspection of the buildings. His greatest joy seemed to derive from depriving students of vacation leave. Naturally, he was deeply and thoroughly hated. 12 WOODEN head Between classes we often spent our free time on part of the dockyard adjoining the College, playing football. We did not adhere strictiy to the rules of the game, but we enjoyed the rough and tumble as we played. We soon found that the team which had Namrevats on its side had an advantage, since he evidentiy could use his head to bump into an adversary with extra force without feeling any bad consequences; and that is why we called him "Wooden Head" (in Dutch, Houten Kop), a name that clung to him for a long time. Namrevats was born in Bandjermasin, the capital of South-East Borneo, in the Dutch East Indies, in 1874. His father, an officer in the Dutch East Indian Army, was subject to transfer to different places in the Archipelago. His mother was born in the Dutch East Indies; her forebears had come from Nias, a sizable island off the northwest coast of Sumatra. She was the daughter of one of the justices of the Supreme Court at Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies. Wooden Head was her third child. In 1878 Mr. Namrevats took his first two-year leave in Holland. They sailed on the Noach (Noah), around the Cape of Good Hope. Wooden Head was too young at the time to remember much of that trip. In Holland, his parents settled about three miles west of Ny- megen, renting a house on a hill there. A year later, when he was five, Wooden Head went to school in Nymegen. He walked to school every morning with his older brothers, and walked back home after 4 p.m. In 1880, Wooden Head's parents had to go back to the Dutch East Indies. He and his older brothers stayed in Holland for their schooling. They lived for ten years in a small place, Vianen, about ten miles south of Utrecht, on the southern border of the Lek, one of the oudets of the Rhine. They lived there with the Mayor and his wife, with other children whose parents also were in the Dutch East Indies. At times, there were around ten of these children in that house. Vianen had been originally a fortified place with a moat—an entrance to and an exit from the town at the ends of the main street, where there was a tower above the entrance and exit. Back September 1890 13 of the house was a garden, walled in at both sides by a brick wall six feet high. A kind of brick barn with a spacious room adjoined the garden and was the summer living room. It had a concrete bath in one corner below the floor. Water for the bath was heated by a kind of furnace in the barn. The house was quite roomy, as was necessary to hold all the children and a maid, besides the Mayor and his wife. There was no city water, but there was a large concrete cellar, into which the rain water was gathered and from which the household water was pumped up by hand. On top of the water cellar was a room which the children used as a study room. In their younger years, Wooden Head, his brothers, and the other children went to a public school (there were around five thousand people in that town); when they were ten years old, they shifted to a private school that was part boarding-, part day-school, run specially for those who wanted to get into the Government Postal and Telegraph Service (this service is all government- operated in Holland). There was a teacher of Dutch Literature whom Wooden Head especially liked. Mr. Warmelink had become a specialist in the work of Douwes Dekker, who, under the name of Multatuli, wrote several books about the natives in the Dutch East Indies of around 1870 and their relationship to their own Chiefs (noblemen) and the Dutch Government. ("Multatuli" means "I have borne much.") Douwes Dekker, himself an Official Government Administrator, revealed machinations which were going on; he was thrown out of the Service by the powers that were. In his books he appealed to the King of Holland to see that justice would be done to the native population. One of his most powerful works was Het Gebed van een Onwetende ("Prayer of one who does not know"). Mr. Warmelink made Multatuli's writings come alive, and this had a profound influence on Wooden Head's character and probably helped him to develop more and more as a nonconformist—as a rebel. Several years later Wooden Head paid a visit to his former teacher, Mr. Warmelink, in a small place in the province of Overysel, where Mr. Warmelink lived after his retirement. Both 14 WOODEN HEAD enjoyed that get-together and the chance to talk about the old times and so much which had happened later. Close to the Mayor's house in Vianen lived one neighbor who was a grocer with several children, who soon became pals of Wooden Head, his brothers, and the other children in their house. Another neighbor was a Catholic priest who lived there with a housekeeper. He had many fruit trees—peach trees against the brick wall in between and an apricot tree close enough to that wall so that it was within reach from Wooden Head's side. The ripening fruit proved a constant temptation. There was not much growth in the Mayor's garden, although Wooden Head and the others tried, by and by, to make something of it. They also kept some chickens and rabbits and, later, a goat. They did not think it very fair that the priest should have all that fruit while they had none. Any fruit that was bought for that household was safely stored in the attic behind a partition of lath-work. It was, as they said in Dutch, "Je mag er naar kyken, maar aankomen niet!" ("You may have a look at it, but hands off!") So when fruit ripened along that brick wall, hands reached over and picked. The only other time the youngsters got fruit was in the fall, during Fair Week. Then, what police Vianen had were concentrated in the town. Wooden Head and the other boys went out in the country to steal what fruit the farmers had left on their trees. They all received a small allowance so that once a week they could buy something extra. But it was too small for them to be able to save any of it. To get spending money for the Fair in the beginning of October, they sold what rabbits they could spare to a man who resold them at the market in Utrecht. The Mayor and his wife had no children of their own. The man himself was rather shy, and they did not see much of him. In the summer the boys got up extra-early on Sundays and went fishing in the canal that ran south from the Lek past Vianen to Gorkum (Gorinchem) at the Maas, another outlet of the Rhine. A few of the boys nearly always had a catch, but Wooden Head himself never had much luck. What they caught and brought home, they cleaned and fried for themselves. September 1890 15 Saturday nights they often had a get-together; the bakers baked a special kind of buns. Before Sinterklaas (St. Nicholas), the fifth of December, the one general day, or rather night, which everybody in Holland acknowledges, the children each made a list of what they would like to receive as presents. The older ones would receive their gifts that night, while the youngest ones got theirs the next morning. When he was in his early teens, one Sinterklaas day, Wooden Head asked for only one thing—permission to buy himself a gun. He had saved some money from the rabbits and chickens he had raised and from a goat which later brought something in. After some hesitancy, he was given permission and bought a small gun. Sinterklaas was dressed up pretty much as he is here in America. His helper, Zwarte Piet (Black Pete), was made up as a Negro; he carried a large canvas bag, supposed to hold presents and also usable for picking up naughty children. The outstanding difference between Sinterklaas in Holland and Christmas is that Sinterklaas—whatever its origin was—has absolutely nothing to do with religious rites, with the result that everybody takes part in the festival on December fifth, while the preparations for Sinterklaas night are such that the pleasures of the night are anticipated for a long time in advance. What any family makes of it depends, of course, on economic circumstances. Though it is thirty-four years ago that Wooden Head came to Canada, Dutch Sinterklaas fives on so much in his memory that,- since a Dutch bakery sprung up a few years ago in the nearest city, where they make the typical things that are baked in Holland,, such as individual chocolate letters (initials), speculaas, and banket letters, the last few years he has sent some of those specialties to relatives—children and grandchildren—and special friends during the days that Santa is honored here. Christmas, on the other hand, in Holland is just one of those so-called religious holidays which, in my youth anyhow, had no attraction whatever—surely the result of the fact that what the propagandists called Christianity is only too often nothing else than churchianity, as it is here in Canada. The permission Wooden Head received to buy a small gun may 16 WOODEN HEAD not seem anything special over here, but it was a rarity in Holland. The gun was a great attraction to all the children around, who appreciated a chance to learn to hit a target. In 1888 Wooden Head was fourteen. There were only thirty places available in the Naval College that year and one hundred fifty contestants for them. Examinations were at The Hague, the first one in writing and a second one oral. The first time he placed fifty-sixth. A year later he tried again—there were only twenty places that year and one hundred twenty contestants. He still had no success: he placed twenty-sixth. He had the idea then that something was lacking in the training given at the school in Vianen. He heard about a private school in Utrecht, where there were special teachers in mathematics and other subjests. He started at the school in Utrecht in the new term. It was a so-called Christian School, a fact which he didn't like. He was old enough by that time—close to sixteen—to have his own idea about Christianity. He stood it for two months; then he could not stomach it any longer. He quit and returned to the school in Vianen. A few months later his father and mother and the younger children came to Holland. His father had two years' leave. They went to Ootmarsum and, for the first half-year or so, lived with Wooden Head's grandfather there. Wooden Head and his older and younger brothers stayed in Vianen for their schooling. In the meantime Wooden Head had to study hard for his last chance to get into the Naval College. The age limit for admittance was sixteen. In 1890 again there were thirty places and nearly one hundred fifty applicants. This time he succeeded, ranking third. That same summer his father and family moved to a house outside Wageningen, a place higher up on the Rhine (Lek), about eleven miles west of Arnhem. Wageningen had an agricultural college. Across the road lived another family which had been in the Dutch East Indies for quite some time. Wooden Head and his entire family became very well acquainted with them. They had only two children, a son who was studying to be a doctor and a daughter. Their father had been an officer in the Dutch East Indian Army and was on a pension. When Wooden Head's father had to leave two years later, Mr. B. became his guardian. 2/ The Naval College In September of 1890 Wooden Head entered the Naval College at Willemsoord, close to Den Helder, the northerly tip of the Province of North Holland. At the Naval College the strict military discipline affected him more than anything else had in his life up to that point. Between lessons, petty officers of the Marine Corps had to keep order, as they did during the study periods, early in the morning and at night; some of the petty officers were reasonable, but others were abominable. If the weather was not too bad, the students could walk in the open air on the dike in front of the college; in bad weather they had to stay indoors. For some time the new students had to submit to initiation by the senior midshipmen. This was the Dutch version of hazing. Some of the seniors, inspired by the Mikado's cruelty, were extreme, subjecting their victims to whippings, severe bracings, and other dangerous as well as humiliating "initiations." In that first year, the only time they were free to go into the town was Sunday afternoons, from one to five o'clock, and some parts of Den Helder were out of bounds. About every two months students had to pass an examination which fixed their standing in their class. The 1890 class, which counted thirty, was divided into two classes for the lessons. By the end of October, Wooden Head was second in his class. Once a month, on a Sunday morning, the Commandant of the College made an inspection of the buildings and of the midshipmen. While the buildings were being inspected, they had to wait in the unheated gymnasium for an hour or so before the Commandant came down to them. The only other time that they had contact with him was around midday, when all the midshipmen had to be at attention in the gymnasium, while the officer on duty read out the punishment that had been meted out to those who 18 WOODEN HEAD had somehing coming. Wooden Head never forgot one day in October, when, in all, sixty days' arrest, in their coming Christmas Holiday, were meted out to around eight or ten culprits, mostly for minor infractions. This was typical of the Mikado. Those victims had about two months to think about that holiday, more than half of which they would have to spend in arrest. From 6 until 7:30 p.m. the students were free in the recreation room (or hall). There they could buy a few light refreshments, like a cup of cocoa; with a bit of milk, a paste was made and then dissolved in boiling water. This concoction cost seven cents (in those times, this would have been nearly the equivalent of three dollar-cents). A Dutch guilder was worth forty dollar- cents. The amount used over the week was kept back on Saturday, when the allowance was paid out to everyone. The allowance climbed from thirty to sixty cents for the four years. But parents who could afford it could deposit their own allowances, which then was added weekly to the College allowance. In December, 1890, Holland's King Willem III died. The Naval College was to send the highest-ranking student from each class to the King's funeral, an honor gready prized. Those students who felt they had a chance to win this opportunity studied extra hard. Wooden Head spent hours at his books instead of talking with his classmates in the recreation hall. For him, the possibility of attending the funeral and seeing royalty was a dream almost beyond his imagination. The tension about the college increased as the competition became the paramount interest. The competing students grew taut and haggard under the strain, and Wooden Head's digestive difficulties added to his problems. Seldom did he smile now, and I worried that he would crack under the pressure. The Mikado seemed to enjoy the fierce competition, however, and did his part to build the tension to unbearable intensity. There was a short break in the solemnity of the College, however, shortly after the death of the King. The College received a large portrait of Willem III, which was hung in the refreshment hall. During the ceremony, the Commandant made the usual solemn comments, full of patriotism and devotion. Then, pointing to The Naval College 19 the painting, he announced: "I have hung the King up there." The silence that ensued was unnatural, and I noticed that Wooden Head let a smile jerk at the corners of his mouth. Just before the Christmas holiday, the results of the deciding examinations were posted. Wooden Head had placed first in his class, winning the coveted role of class representative at the funeral. He maintained this high academic position throughout the rest of his four years at college. It was assumed at the College that, as potential naval officers, the students should become inured to difficulties and tensions, both academic and disciplinary. Those who could not stand the gaff normally dropped out. This, of course, is hardly peculiar to the Dutch Naval College. We were, however, during this period, unusually burdened by the Mikado's ideas of discipline, which were in the extreme. An incident which burned into our consciousness involved an older midshipman. This young man was having trouble at home so that he was under an extra strain at the college. He found himself placed under arrest one Sunday for a minor offense, and was confined to a classroom. He asked the supervising petty officer for permission to use the bathroom. After a while the officer went to look for the young man, who had not returned. He found the missing student on the floor of the bathroom, bis poniard plunged deeply into bis breast. Stunned, the officer rushed after the College doctor, who came immediately. The doctor could not remove the poniard, so deeply had the distraught student thrust it. He sent for a powerful midshipman, who managed to extract the knife, which proved to be rusty. The wounded student was taken to the hospital, but an infection had set in. He was then sent home, where he died shortly thereafter. A pall of horror and deep shock spread over the college, and Wooden Head several times told me that he considered leaving the college. We looked for signs of mitigated discipline in view of the tragedy, but the Mikado was unrelenting. Another student of our class, also in trouble for some infraction or other, was placed under arrest. He was permitted to go outside for air near the adjoining dockyard. The whiff of fresh, free air went to his head, 20 WOODEN HEAD and he ran away. He was captured as he tried to cross a bridge out of the yard and returned to the college for even more severe punishment. Wooden Head soon learned that being number one in his class was not all "velvet." There were disturbances while one of the petty officers was in control, and this man could not lay his hands on the culprit. A general complaint was then brought in, and the result was that Wooden Head was summoned to appear before the Mikado and had to take the blame for what had happened in his class. Also, during the study periods, some of those who had had difficulty following a teacher asked for permission to confer with Wooden Head and then asked him to help them. And, quite often, after one of his class had taken up some of his study time in that way, another came, with the result that Wooden Head had littie time left for his own study. It got so bad that the petty officer who was supervising muttered, "Why do you all want to see jonker 'so and so' ?" ("Jonker" was the way they addressed the midshipmen.) Sunday mornings, for a while anyway, we had to march to church in Den Helder, though very few of our class were church- minded. But one Sunday we heard a preacher who was a guest speaker. This young man evidentiy did not care much either about what one as a rule heard in those churches; he talked sense, and although we can't quite remember what exactiy he said, one felt as if one were coming to an oasis after a long trek through the desert. When those first two years were over, Wooden Head's parents and their younger children went back to the Dutch East Indies (in 1892). Their neighbors opposite, in Wageningen, had moved to a house in the city, and that Mr. B. became Wooden Head's guardian. That same summer a great change took place at the College; the Commandant, "the Mikado," was relieved from his position there and another Captain took his place. The new Commandant was a human being in every respect. As it happened, he had known Wooden Head's grandfather, his mother's father, in Batavia, capital of the Dutch East Indies. Now and then he invited Wooden ; The Naval College 21 Head and some other midshipmen to Sunday dinner at his house. I He was a widower and had two daughters who lived with him. I The whole college seemed to blossom the day the Mikado left. Wooden Head had never been able to learn to dance properly. So, in those later years, when he could go out a few hours on Wednesday night, he arranged with the dancing teacher to take some private lessons at his house. (His guardian, Mr. B., had seen fit to give him an allowance on top of the college's weekly small allowance, and so he could pay for such lessons.) The teacher lived in a part of Den Helder which was out of bounds, but Wooden Head had no difficulty with that. He managed to learn to dance with the teacher's children, while the teacher played the violin; but i when it came to dancing at a ball, he never got very far. Toward the end of the third year, the whole class boarded a sailing ship, on which we cruised up the Zuiderzee, to get training in the handling of sails, and so on. The accommodations for a large class were rather primitive, but it was quite a nice change from all the theory we had to study at the college. Wooden Head found the sea invigorating and rewarding after being land-locked at college. However, near the end of the cruise he had the top of his right index finger crushed while he was belaying a rope; in the end the nail had to come off. It was rather a handicap for some time. That summer Mr. B., on a trip along the Rhine, met a family which lived in Den Helder, and, as it happened, a preacher with them. This man invited Wooden Head for dinner on some Sundays. A preacher was not exactly somebody who Wooden Head would have chosen as a host, but this one was evidently an exception. He did not bother him with so-called religious talk. One of the teachers of shipbuilding at the college, a Naval Officer, also invited Wooden Head to his house. So, that last year, on most of his Sundays he was invited out for dinner. The teachers at college were, of course, all different from one another. Some could communicate with the students; others ran on dully and mechanically. One of them, a Navy officer who taught torpedoes, was very much in favour. Even the lowest in the class did their best to please him. Later that year, Wooden Head had an altercation with a petty officer and he talked back—which 22 WOODEN HEAD earned him a Sunday arrest. By now his nonconformist attitudes were rapidly crystallizing, often to his embarrassment. The last year, the classes were followed up again in the summer with a cruise on a small gunboat, also on the Zuiderzee, to permit the students to get better acquainted with the machinery of the steam engine. Again Wooden Head ran into trouble, this time with the Commandant, a Naval Officer teacher, by being too outspoken! When it was all over, the holiday was welcome. All the classmen had to go to The Hague to meet the Secretary of the Navy and be installed as Midshipman First Class (the equivalent of Second Lieutenant in the Army). Wooden Head, as first in his class, received a gold watch (a chronometer) with an inscription. That same summer Mr. B went back to Java with his wife and daughter. The son stayed in Holland to study medicine. Wooden Head saw them off, accompanying them as far as Antwerp, where a large fair was going on. 3/ Around the Cape of Good Hope to Batavia and Back That fall, Wooden Head and fifteen of his classmates got a berth on the Johan Willem Friso, a frigate that was being outfitted at Den Helder for a trip to the Dutch East Indies. The other midshipmen of Wooden Head's class got a berth on the Van Spejk, which had the same destination. ("Johan Willem Friso" and "Van Spejk" were names of former Dutch admirals.) Besides the sixteen newly commissioned midshipmen, each of the two ships had eight more who were two years older. The forelongroom, their abode on board, was crowded with twenty-four occupants. They had to wash themselves there, and they sat at a table which consisted of the covers of their wash basins. Each had a small cup- Around the Cape of Good Hope to Batavia and Back 23 board against the wall of the room for his most necessary clothes, and so forth. When they were eating, they had to sit so close together, they would say, that they all had to bring their forks or spoons to their mouths at the same time; otherwise they would bump into each other! They slept in hammocks on the lower deck. There were always six or more of the men on duty, a fact which gave a bit more room. Still, the situation was unpleasant, not to say dangerous. Finally, one of the older midshipmen wrote to one of the papers about this crowded situation. The Secretary of the Navy was questioned in Parliament about this state of affairs, with the result that six of the older midshipmen were removed from each ship and sent by mailboat to the Dutch East Indies. They and the crew of the two ships and the older officers had to stay for three years in the Archipelago, while we younger midshipmen were staying on board and came back again with a new crew and older officers who had been away for three years. In the latter part of November, Wooden Head sailed for the first port of call, Bahia (now called Sao Salvador), Brazil. There was a saying in the Navy that married men, when passing the uiterton (the outmost buoy), threw their wedding rings on that buoy, to pick them up again when they returned—in this case, three years later. The crossing to South America passed without any special happenings. These ships—frigates—were equipped for sailing, with auxiliary steam power. If the wind was favourable, they sailed; if not, as in this case, in the doldrums—regions with littie wind— around the equator, they steamed, and in very bad weather they relied on steam. The crossing to Bahia gave Wooden Head and his classmates the chance to settle down on board. The small cupboard in the forelongroom allotted to each man was not large enough to hold all their clothes and other equipment, so the leftovers were packed mostly in tin boxes which they put in an adjoining compartment of the ship, to which they had access through a watertight steel door. That compartment had a ventilator on top, which produced extremely disconcerting effects, as we shall see. 24 WOODEN HEAD After five weeks, the Friso anchored off Bahia; at that time there was no wharf at Bahia for deep-sea ships. Coaling took a full week. Barges came alongside, and the coal was brought on board in small baskets—coal dust coated the vessel from stem to stern, caked our uniforms and hair, and clogged our nostrils. When off duty, Wooden Head and his classmates had a chance to go ashore and have a bit of fun! Late at night, one day, they could not find anybody to row them back to ship, so they had to look for a soft plank between the lumber on the wharf to sleep on! After New Year's, 1895, the Friso heaved anchor and started southeasterly on her trip through the southern Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The first land we saw was the island Tristan da Cunha, about twenty-five hundred miles west of Capetown; all Wooden Head remembers of this island is that it was crowded with penguins. Soon after, the steady westerly winds drove the Friso on its easterly course south of Africa into the southern Indian Ocean. To get the full benefit of those winds, we had to keep quite far south. The trouble then was that the ship approached iceberg territory. One night the lookout called, "Iceberg on starboard"; a little later he called, "Iceberg at port," and it was not long before he shrieked, "Iceberg right ahead!" It took some maneuvering to get safely out of that situation. The Captain was shaken up considerably by the narrow escape. He changed course to practically northeast to get away from those icebergs, but at the same time we lost much of the favourable wind, so that our course became a zigzag: as soon as we lost too much of the wind, we had to turn further south again. Another time, in the morning, we saw, not far away, a cloud forming at starboard. After a while the cloud dissipated, and where it had been a huge iceberg showed up, basking in a full sun; it was a splendid, awesome sight in its sMning, silent solemnity. After having sailed about halfway into the southern Indian Ocean, we changed course to a northeasterly direction, to get to the Strait Sunda, between Sumatra and Java. Before long we came into the region where we could expect cyclones. It had become March by that time. One morning the Around the Cape of Good Hope to Batavia and Back 25 barometer started falling early and dropped steadily the whole day long. Unaccountably, no measures were taken to meet the developing emergency. The Captain did not show up on deck. Toward ten o'clock at night the wind, which had been growing fiercer all day, went down until it disappeared altogether. A short time later, a wind came through from the opposite direction. The "eye" of the storm had passed right over the ship and we were caught in its full fury. The Executive Officer was in command. It took certainly a full hour before most of the sails were taken in and the ship was brought before the wind, carrying only the lower foretop sail. We logged seventeen knots, so forceful was the wind. The ship rolled heavily, nearly forty-five degrees to both sides. It was bedlam on board. We had shipped a lot of water. We lost two lifeboats, torn from their moorings by the turbulent seas. One of the two older midshipmen was so perplexed that he proceeded to drink himself into a stupor, evidently thinking that the end was close at hand and preferring to meet his Maker in a state of numbness. When day broke, the wind had eased off and we spotted the Islands of St. Paul and New Amsterdam in the southern Indian Ocean. It was a wonder we had not run ashore that night. We now had a chance to inspect all the damage done. There were some rude surprises for us. That ventilator on top of the compartment wherein we midshipmen had put our boxes with uniforms, and so forth, had disappeared. The sea and wind had got it, along with so many other things. We found that there was nearly three feet of water in the compartment Most of our boxes had broken loose, smashed open, and their valuable contents, uniforms, and the like, were one sodden mass of sea water and coal dust. Wooden Head had some luck. He had lodged his box between the side of the ship and some pipe which went farther down through the deck, and the water had not reached it. Later we heard—after arrival at Batavia—that the Van Spejk had run into the same cyclone, although we had not seen her, and had suffered even more damage than the Friso. She had also lost two boats; besides, the steambridge, in the middle of the ship, had been broken in two by the heavy seas which came over. The mid- 26 shipman on duty on that bridge fell into some water, not knowing at that moment if he was overboard or not, as there was so much water between the bulwarks. After repairing as much as possible the damage our ship had suffered, we resumed our course to Strait Sunda. After a littie over a week, we got into the tropics, with most of the bad weather behind us. After another week or so, we sighted land, the south coast of Java. When coming close by, we spotted a sailing ship at starboard, lying ashore. Not knowing what was the matter, we had to get off our course to investigate. There was no response to our signals and we could not see anyone on deck, so we assumed that the ship had been abandoned and we resumed our course to Strait Sunda. (Later, at Batavia, we learned that the ship had been lying there for six weeks.) We passed the Island of Krakatau, where in 1883, a volcanic eruption had shaken the world, and the next morning, March 23, 1895, the Friso arrived at Tandjong Priok, the harbor of Batavia, practically four months after having left Flushing in Holland. One of the first things we had to do was take care of our laundry. Since there was so little storage room aboard, we had all accumulated our dirty clothes under the cover on the floor of the forelongroom. Wooden Head's parents lived in Batavia. His father was at that time a colonel, Head of the Artillery of the Dutch East Indian Army. Therefore, Wooden Head spent most of his off-duty time at their home. In the meantime, the older officers and the crew of the Johan Willem Friso were dispersed over other ships in the Archipelago, while those who had been on duty there for three years took their places on the Friso. After the ship had taken on the necessary supplies in food, water, coal, and so forth, we left in April for the return trip to Holland. This time we set our course straight for the southern part of Africa, since we had to stop at Capetown, making a stretch of more than four thousand miles. Most of the time we had a favourable southeasterly wind, and our new Captain knew how to get the Around the Cape of Good Hope to Batavia and Back 27 most out of the ship. He was not afraid to risk an extra sail. There were many days that we did what we called in Dutch de melkmeid optuigen ("fixed the milkmaid")—set every scrap of sail we could carry. We often made twelve knots, which was a good clip under sail. It happened once in a while that one of the outer topsails blew away; no matter, another one was rigged up. We rounded the southern part of Africa and docked at the wharf in Capetown. It was a beautiful sight, with the mountains in the background. We were there about a week. Several Boers, of Dutch origin, visited the ship. Wooden Head, while on duty, showed one elderly man around. Mr. Herman invited Wooden Head to come and visit him on his day off. Mr. Herman lived in Newlands, about an hour by rail from Capetown. As I mentioned earlier, Wooden Head had wanted to go to an agricultural college, but he was constrained to go to the Naval College because his parents, having a large family, could not afford a more costly training. When Mr. Herman invited him to visit him at his farm, all kinds of thoughts sprang into Wooden Head's mind about the possibility of getting a job on this farm, even if he had to desert the Navy. Wooden Head had never resigned himself to a military life. To him, the strict discipline and uncompromising demand for obe- dence were torture. He felt it stifled so much that was essential and human in a man, eventually turning him into a mechanical being. His naturally free spirit rebelled against the confinement of the Navy. He felt again a yearning to be close to the earth, to work it and five in harmony with it. He was off on a Saturday and went on the train to Newlands. He had heard that trains over there made very short stops at stations along the road. He noticed that the floor of the carriages was flush with the station platforms and that there was no open space between the carriages and the platforms; that the names of the stations were not called, so that passengers had to look for the names on the platforms. If they had to get off, they opened the doors themselves. In this way, he found out that the train stopped only very briefly; stop time was forty seconds at one station where 28 WOODEN HEAD evidently a football game was going on and a crowd of around two hundred people got off. Arriving at Newlands, Wooden Head got off and went on his way to find Mr. Herman. He expected to find a farmhouse more or less like those he had known in Holland. But when he arrived at the spot, he saw, off the road, a mansion. He stopped short. He was essentially shy; all his high expectations vanished. He did not go in. Instead, he returned to Capetown on the next train. Often, later, he despised himself for having let this chance pass. Of course, much later, when he met other people, some of whom had a great influence on his life, he realized that he might never have met those people if he had deserted the Navy that day. Upon arriving at Capetown, our Captain found orders to proceed as fast as possible to Tangier. In that vicinity pirates were active. So as soon as our needed supplies were taken aboard, we went on northwest, steaming this time, with the island of St. Helena our first stop. We had the opportunity to go ashore, climbed seven hundred steps to get to the more level part of the island, and saw the spot where Napoleon had been imprisoned. Our second stop was the Canary Islands, Las Palmas, Santa Cruz, and then Tangier. There was no chance to go ashore there. Two other men-of-war, a Britisher and a German, were in the port. Since we were the last arrival, international custom prescribed that we had to pay our respects to the earlier arrivals. Wooden Head had been appointed an aide to the Captain, so this was one of the duties he had to perform. He found out that it is all very well to learn some foreign language at school or college, but that expressing oneself in a proper way in such a language, as in this case, is quite something else. Still, he managed to stumble through it. All we did otherwise on the roads of Tangier was to show our flag. After a few days, anchor was heaved and we started on our last lap to our home port, Den Helder. I suppose the married men on board picked up their wedding rings when we passed the outermost buoy—that is, if their rings had not fall off in those three years! 4/ Mediterranean Cruise The summer of 1895 maneuvers were held on the lakes in the northern part of the Province of South Holland. We were divided into two "fleets," equipped with steam launches, while there was a kind of mother ship which afforded sleeping and eating accommodation. The maneuvers were held during the night. Wooden Head was in charge of one of the opposing parties, while an older officer had the over-all command on board the mother ship. A small part of the Army took part, by supplying armed men who went along on the launches. The lakes were joined by canals. One night, in full moon, Wooden Head had gone out with his group's launch and managed to take a position behind some of the islands which dotted the lakes. Mamtaining strict silence, after a while they heard another launch approaching. As the tension mounted, they waited until the last moment, then opened fire with blank cartridges. After a moment the launches were lying alongside each other, and both sides were so excited that it took the officers in charge quite a while before they could stop the firing. Even blanks at so short a distance could do considerable harm. After the maneuvers ended, Wooden Head and a few of his classmates got a berth on the Bellona, an artillery instruction ship, at Dan Helder. They remained on it through the fall and part of the winter. Dining a short leave in the winter of 1895, Wooden Head visited the two sisters whom he had met earlier at The Hague. They lived with their parents in Utrecht. The younger one, Jane, was quite attractive to him. Later he went to Amsterdam, where an aunt lived (the wife of one of Wooden Head's maternal uncles). Uncle Charles was an officer in the Dutch East Indian Army and was in Java. Aunt Betsy lived in an apartment with a younger sister and her, the aunt's, two young daughters. She had a good P—^ 30 WOODEN HEAD voice, was very good-looking, and had stayed for the time being in Holland in order to be able to take singing lessons from an expert in Brussels. She went back and forth to Brussels once a week or so to take these lessons. Her goal was to prepare herself for the role of Elizabeth in the opera Tannhauser, which the Dutch Opera Company was going to present soon in Amsterdam. Wooden Head attended the premiere. He had ordered a flower-piece in the form of a boat, to be sure that his aunt would not have to go without any flowers at all. But she received plenty of other flowers. Unfortunately, the criticism of her acting and singing was not all flattering. But that did not deter her from continuing to study and practice. Later this work paid off for her. Early in February, 1896, Wooden Head and his classmates were transferred to a new ship, the Evertsen, which had been built at Flushing, Zealand; they had better accommodations there than they had had so far. They made a trip to and through the Mediterranean on board the Evertsen. ("Evertsen" was the name of another Dutch admiral.) The Bay of Biscay was quite rough, as it is so often, as the Evertsen crossed en route to Lisbon, Portugal. One night when coming off duty, Wooden Head went below deck, and as he encountered all the accumulated smells of waste, he really got sick, though otherwise he was never bothered with seasickness. Steaming up the river to Lisbon offered a splendid sight, and the few days that Wooden Head and his mates spent there gave them an advance taste of what they might expect to see and experience on their trip through the Mediterranean. There were plenty of nice-looking girls, too, in Lisbon! Next they stopped at Cadiz, in southwestern Spain. There they saw an old-fashioned bullfight. Six horses were gored by the proverbial maddened bull. The enthusiasm shown by the Spanish spectators while the toreador showed his skill in the arena was beyond description. Though Wooden Head did not exactly excel in French, he could not forget the song which he heard there in Spanish, and later, when he saw the Opera Carmen, in French: Mediterranean Cruise 31 Toreador en garde Songe en combatant, Que la gloire te regarde Et que Pamour t'attend! Ah, when you are twenty-two! At such moments Wooden Head could forget his dislike of the Navy as a career, as a way of life. After leaving Cadiz, the Evertsen passed through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean. The sight of Gibraltar on its rock is one of the landmarks on this earth which no one who has seen it will ever forget The first stop in the Mediterranean was Palma, on Mallorca, one of the Balearic Islands, east of Spain. Wooden Head and his chums tried their skill on horseback there, picked oranges from the trees, and so on. Next was Algers (Algiers). At that time it was a pleasant port of call for sailors. There was lots of entertainment, especially at night. The French girls there were a great attraction. While there, Wooden Head saw the "danse de ventre" done by a group of girls who did not wear much else besides black stockings. It was not difficult to pick out a suitable girl and have a pleasant time together. It happened that it was early morning when they returned on board, tired but quite satisfied with life as it was for them those days. They also visited a mosque, where they had to take their shoes off before they could enter. Valetta, on Malta, between Sicily and North Africa, came next. In this city the main street consisted mainly of steps winding up the rocks on which the city was built. Wooden Head had a look at the Catacombs, the habitat and burialplace of early Christians. Though the caves were fascinating, his hackles were raised at the thought of being confined within them. They saw in the drydock one of the largest British battleships. While looking the ship over, at a certain point below deck, Wooden Head did not know if he was walking crosswise or lengthwise, so big was this ship in comparison with the Evertsen. 32 WOODEN HEAD After Malta, the Evertsen sailed around Italy and through the Adriatic Sea to Pola, which now belongs to Italy but at that time was Austria's harbor on that sea. Austria's naval officers were quite congenial. Wooden Head never forgot a liqueur made from bananas, which was produced there and which had a special nice flavour. Though later on he travelled quite a bit around the world, he never came across that banana-liqueur again. A large-scale banana grower (Wooden Head himself grew bananas later in Java) could make a fortune with it, he thought, if he could get hold of the recipe which those Pola Austrians used. And this was the end of their Mediterranean trip, as far as visiting foreign harbors went. They now returned to Holland and Den Helder, and routine harbor business followed. The Executive Officer of the Evertsen, Mr. Stam, was a peculiar person. Practically everybody avoided him as much as possible. One day, seeing a sailor committing a minor infraction, he damned him to "kingdom come," so to speak. No executive officer should have descended to this level. The sailor did not take it; he damned his superior right back, compounding his situation. The next morning, the sailor had to come on parade before the Captain. He told the Captain exactly what had happened, after the executive officer had given his version of the affair. The Captain had to punish the sailor, but at the same time he could not help saying also that the executive should not have talked to him, damning him, in that way. Wooden Head himself had a run-in with Mr. Stam at one time. Besides the midshipman on duty on deck, there was another on duty below deck who had to make rounds through the ship at different times to see that everything was in order. One day, while Wooden Head had this duty, he had just made such a round and had gone back to the forelongroom when that executive came barking in, charging that Wooden Head had not done his duty properly. Wooden Head told him, of course, that he had just made a round, but that did not make it any better; the executive went on abusing him. Wooden Head did not like to take the injustice lying down, so he put in a complaint with the Captain. Next morning, Amsterdam to Batavia Via Suez and Singapore 33 on parade, after hearing both sides, the Captain was compelled to side with Wooden Head. In the beginning of the summer—it must have been June— Wooden Head and his chums got word that in July they would be sent per mail boat to the Dutch East Indies for a three-year stay. In the meantime, they got some leave. Wooden Head made the round of some relatives and friends to say good-bye. He saw Jane in Utrecht again and then went to Amsterdam, where he stayed with his Aunt Betsy until he had to board the boat of the Neder- land Steamship Company bound for Batavia. 5/ Amsterdam to Batavia Via Suez and Singapore Wooden Head and about half a dozen of his classmates sailed for their three-year turn in the Dutch East Indies on a Friday, in July, 1896. Starting a sea voyage on a Friday was in those years quite a custom, for some reason. The next day, the boat arrived at Southampton, where they stayed over the weekend. At that time Sunday laws in England were far worse than they are now; Southampton was simply dead on a Sunday. So Wooden Head and his mates took a ferry to the Isle of Wight and walked across the island from south to north, and a pleasant walk it was. About halfway across, they stopped at Newport to get something to eat. The steak they had there was tougher than any he ate in later life! And that is saying something. At that time he did not yet know how important good chewing of food (and drink) was for one's health and, so, for one's whole being. He gulped his food down as so many others did (and do yet), with all the bad consequences. Nineteen years later, in September, 1915, he discovered his mistake, as we shall see later; he started to chew properly and became another man. 34 WOODEN HEAD Algiers was not on the regular route of the Nederland line, but there was a special reason for the call there: they recalled the fascinating days and nights they had spent there earlier in the year. But this call was very short. The stay at Genoa, Italy, did not seem to have impressed Wooden Head much this time. (He was there several years later under other circumstances, as we shall see.) The stretch from Genoa to Port Said, the northern end of the Suez Canal, was remembered most for the passage through the Strait of Messina, between Sicily and the toe of Italy, and the whirlpool of Scylla and Charybdis, close by there. Port Said, the Suez Canal, came next. Halfway into the Red Sea they got into the tropics. Getting out of the Red Sea through the Strait of Babelmandeb, they soon passed Aden on the south coast of Arabia and were then on their last stretch to Singapore, through the Indian Ocean. Wooden Head's remembrance of Singapore was rather vague, too; at that time he could not foresee that, before long, he would see quite a bit of it. Two days after leaving Singapore, they arrived at Batavia and reported at the Department of the Navy there. Here they were sent to different ships in the Archipelago. 6/ Aboard the "Sumatra" Wooden Head enjoyed a short leave first. By that time his father had become a colonel, Chief of the Artillery of the Dutch Indian Army, and he and Wooden Head's mother, sisters, and younger brothers lived at Batavia. As was usual, in those times, they lived in quite a large house and had to keep nearly a dozen native servants. There was in the same yard (garden) a small house—a pavilion—in which his father had his office. Aboard the "Sumatra" 35 Wooden Head's next-older brother, Wennemar, with whom he had been in Vianen, Holland, in his youngers years, had attended the Agricultural College in Wageningen, Holland (he had been found unfit for military service, because of heart murmurs); then he had gone to Java, and in 1896 he had quite a good job as manager of a rice and coffee plantation at Tjileboet, about half an hour's buggy-ride north of Buitenzorg, where the Governor- General resided; this was less than an hour by rail south of Batavia. So Wooden Head went to see his brother there. (Buitenzorg means literally "without trouble.") Wooden Head could have gotten a berth on the Koningin Wilhelmina, one of the largest cruisers of the Dutch Navy then, which was going to make a trip to Hong Kong and other East Asian ports; in fact, he got on board, but did not get farther than Makassar, South Celebes. In half a year's time he would be twenty- three, which then was the moment that young people became of age. He decided to ask for a year's leave from the Navy then and to try to get a job in some agricultural line. He did not want to be out of the Archipelago when that time came, so at Makassar he secured a transfer to another, smaller ship, the Sumatra, which was going to stop for some time at Ambon, a small island in the Moluccas. While Wooden Head's ship was lying on the Makassar Roads, he and his ship companions quite often went swimming. It was necessary for a group to get together for this sport in order to make enough noise to keep the sharks and crocodiles away. In Makassar itself, Wooden Head found a cousin and his family, which included a nice girl; when he was off duty, he had some pleasant times there. The water around Ambon was very deep and clear; there was a good wharf there for coaling and other regular activities. Primarily, however, the work that the Sumatra had to do there concerned testing her torpedoes. Ambon had an inner bay, with a comparatively narrow entrance but plenty of room inside for this testing, and smooth water; all around were wooded hills. At one spot a creek ran into the bay, making a nice place to swim. 36 The Ambonese were Christians. The men were good fighters; they formed, at that time, an important part of the Dutch East Indian Army. One day, late in the afternoon, the Executive Officer, some of the other officers, Wooden Head, and the other midshipman (there were only two there) went ashore looking for entertainment Their quest was not quite innocent. The Dutch had been attracted to the Ambon women. They had heard of an Ambonese celebration and decided to attempt to "crash" it, in hopes of sneaking off with some of the girls. The Ambonese, however, proved to be too alert for the Navy men, and the Executive Officer's plan—to put out the lights and sneak off with some girls—was foiled. They had to be content with what entertainment was provided. Communication with the outside world was very limited in those days. Mail arrived only once a month, and where the Ambonese did not exert themselves much in the way of gardening, they were dependent for fresh supplies mostly on what the boat which brought the mail happened to bring along. There was one exception: they did grow a lot of pineapples. And they made a kind of drink using liquor from palm trees, which grew there in abundance. So the two midshipmen's fare was very simple and monotonous. One day Wooden Head went ashore with some men for target practice. One of the men had to take care of the target. This was dangerous and it was necessary to maintain constant attention. At a certain moment, he grew careless and got too close to the line of fire and was wounded. There was quite some to-do about it. When they came back on board, there was even talk of a court-martial. Fortunately, the wound proved not to be very serious, and so the accident was smoothed over. After about six months in Ambon, the Sumatra left the Moluccas and went to Soerabaja, where the main Navy establishment was located. On the way the Sumatra stopped over at the island of Lombok, east of Bali, where the year before, in 1896, there had been quite some trouble. In Soerabaja Wooden Head found the order which granted him a year's leave (he was twenty-three by On a Sugar Plantation 37 that time). It was a coincidence that the Executive Officer of the Sumatra had a contact in Soerabaja through which Wooden Head got a job on a sugar plantation, Olean, near Sitoebondo, on the east coast of Java. Wooden Head went there in May. 7/ On a Sugar Plantation The Maaltyd, the season in which the cane is cut and the sugar extracted in the mill and then further processed, had just started. It lasts about four months. Wooden Head started his work in the mill, supervising and doing some chemical work. He lived with one of the other employees in a small house close to the mill; a native cook prepared their meals. On an average it required about a full year's growth before the cane ripened, contained the highest sugar content, and, so, should be cut. The cane fields had been used for this purpose for about half a century; they were rented from the native owners and could be planted with sugar cane only once in three years. The other two years, the natives planted other crops on those fields. Where the soil had already been so used for a long time, it was pretty well petered out. This year of 1897 was practically the first time that artificial fertilizer was used on the fields in large amounts. Lack of the necessary ingredients had already resulted in disease. The roots of the cane stalks contracted a disease called donkeUan, which resulted in the cane dying before it reached full maturity. To nunimize the loss, the cut had to be made before this happened. Where it took cane a year to get ripe, the crop for the next year had to be planted at the same time. Nearly half of the Dutch employees supervised this operation in the fields, each employee had his own section. The soil, when it was taken over from the natives, had first to be prepared for the planting of the cane in such a way that it would be possible to irrigate the fields when- 38 WOODEN HEAD ever necessary. And in this part of Java, the dry season lasted nearly eight months (in that year, 1897, from before May till December). Pieces of cane with two or three buds, around six inches long, were planted. Where there were different varieties of cane, one or more new varieties were introduced from another source. Men, women, and children were employed in this work. Toward the end of this four-month season, some native might be eager to get bis field back in order to plant his own crop. To speed up the cane-cutting, the natives then caught an animal which was the tropical equivalent of a squirrel, fastened inflammable material to its tail, lighted it, and pushed the animal into the field. Everything being bone-dry by that time, the whole field was soon aflame, requiring the immediate cutting of the cane. The natives being simple, relatively vmcomplicated people, were fond of such drastic, dramatic measures. During that four-month season, work was continuous without letup. Once the season ended, the work was less strenuous. The manager then went on leave to Holland and one of the oldest employees took over for the time being. Wooden Head got one section of the cane fields to look after; this was more in his line than was the work in the mill. One of his fields ran right close up to the seashore; one day he found a huge dead crocodile there. In late October there was a big party at Bondowosso, halfway down Java from Sitoebondo, celebrating the opening of a railway between these two points. Employees of the sugar plantations joined in the fiesta on the platform of the Bondowosso Station. Dancing went on until deep in the night. Wooden Head wore his Navy uniform, and he remembers quite well how at 4:00 a.m. he helped to sweep the platform clean of the litter accumulated that night. It was quite a break in the daily routine. In December, while he was in his field-section, the weather broke. A downpour inaugurated the rainy season. Wooden Head was drenched in no time. It took him half an hour in an open buggy (he had the use of a horse of the plantation) before he got home and could put dry clothes on. When he woke the next morning, he had a severe pain in his Aboard the Guardship 39 right shoulder and arm. By the next day the pain had shifted to his left side, and, before long, it setded in his left hip. Some months later, when Wooden Head was near Batavia, he was examined by a doctor (as mentioned on page 40) who stated that he had sciatica and, in that doctor's opinion, would have it for the rest of his life. As explained later in Chapter 19, seventeen years later Wooden Head managed to get rid of the sciatica, for all practical purposes, by learning to chew his food and to drink properly, so purging his body of all the poisons which had accumulated in it through the years. When New Year's, 1898, was in the offing, several of the employees decided to visit a neighboring plantation further along the coast. Wooden Head went along with the others, using a team of horses from his plantation. They were there the greater part of the day, in the house of one of the employees there. They consumed more liquor that day than was good for them. Wooden Head remembered that it was one of the few days in his life when he was quite drunk. While his year's leave from the Navy was drawing to an end, Wooden Head had to decide what he was going to do. He discovered that his plantation, on account of the disease donkellan, had suffered a considerable loss that year. When a proper profit was made, the employees got a bonus on top of their salary, but this was out of the question in this case. And the immediate future did not look much better. So, reluctantly, Wooden Head decided to return to the Navy. 8/ Aboard the Guardship Travelling from Soerabaja to Batavia by train, Wooden Head stopped a few days in Djokjokarta; Mr. B., who had been his n Holland, lived there with his family. Before getting , Wooden Head visited his brother, the manager of a 40 WOODEN HEAD plantation at Tjileboet, north of Buitenzorg. In the meantime, his father had been pensioned off the year before, earlier than he had expected. But there was a reason. As I mentioned earlier, in 1896 there had been trouble on the island of Lombok. It reached such proportions that the Commander of the Army in the Dutch East Indies, whose headquarters were in Batavia, went there personally with reinforcements. He fell into a trap, suffering great losses. The situation deteriorated rapidly. The Dutch troops, trained primarily for more conventional "Napoleonic" warfare, were ill prepared for ruthless jungle combat; the natives, knowing the terrain, accustomed to the heat, the flora and fauna, inflicted heavy losses on the determined but beleaguered Dutch. Finally the chiefs of the different units of the Army in Batavia held a council of war to deliberate what measures could be taken to put things right on Lombok. During these deliberations, Wooden Head's father, as Chief of the Artillery, had evidentiy expressed his opinion that the Commander of the Army had been at fault and thus precipitated the disaster in Lombok, and that the measures finally taken saved the situation. When the Commander of the Army came back to Batavia, he heard, of course, about what Wooden Head's father had said about him. His father had, more or less, expected to be promoted to general from the rank of Colonel, Chief of the Artillery, but instead he was pensioned off. So, because Wooden Head's brother at Tjileboet had a large house, his father and family went to live with him, and Wooden Head found them there. His mother, especially, was glad that she could see him once more. Wooden Head had to get on to Batavia to report to the Department of the Navy. He got a berth on the guardship in the harbor at Tandjong Priok. Although he was still a midshipman, he took his turn with the older officers on board. While he was there, he went to see a young doctor, whom he had known in Holland, for a proper checkup. He was especially concerned with the pain in his left hip, which had bothered him for months. The doctor examined him and rendered his verdict: "You have sciatica, and will have it for the rest of your life." Wooden Head, being only twenty-four, laughed in the doctor's Aboard the Guardship 41 face. He would not believe it. He did not laugh about it during the next eighteen years, during which he felt every change of the weather for the worse—rain, fog, wind, snow, and what have you —from twelve to twenty-four hours ahead, with a pain in his left hip which was at times intolerable. On this guardship there were nearly a dozen officers, of all ages. Though they were entitled to regular rations, like the crew they had their own table and a steward who took care of their meals. But one of those officers had to act for all of them and plan the meals with the steward, deterrnining the cost and how much each would have to pay at the end of the month for the extras. Each had to take a turn at this job for a month. Pretty soon they saddled Wooden Head with it. He had several recipes from his mother. The steward was glad that he was allowed to make those extras, and all the officers showed that they liked this change very well also. But when the end of the month came and they had to pay more than they had been used to, some of them were quite alarmed. During this time, a court-martial case came up. A native sailor was the culprit. This boy had served on a small schooner, the Blommendal, which was doing hydrographical survey work in the Riou and Linga Archipelago between Singapore and the southeast coast of Sumatra. That ship was usually at work, away from its station, six weeks at a time; it had only limited room on board for fresh water, so this was rationed and was therefore of considerable value to everyone on board. This boy had, during a rain squall, caught some rain water in a tin. The boatswain had some arguments with the boy, got mad, and kicked the tin of rain water over. The sailor, furious at seeing the costiy fresh water wasted, grabbed a marlin-spike and threatened the boatswain. This was insubordination! The court-martial, of course, got the report from the Commandant of that schooner concerning the incident. As was the custom, Wooden Head, being the youngest member of the Court, had to express his opinion first. He had already noticed that some of the older members wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. He did not know, at that time, that before long he himself would serve on that ship, the Blommendal, but he could sympa- 42 WOODEN HEAD thize completely with the defendant, being himself rebellious and opposed to wanton, stupid miUtary behavior. He felt that the defendant had sufficient provocation for his act Wooden Head stated his opinion, and the majority of the members evidently agreed with him, for the boy got off with a light sentence. When off duty, Wooden Head often went sailing with a few crew members in and outside of the harbor. The harbor was formed between two long piers which acted as breakwater. He learned how close he could get to the piers before he had to shift his tack. On August 31, 1898, Crown Princess Wilhehnina would be eighteen and of age (as prospective Queen). A whole week of festivities had been planned for Batavia and its surroundings. Two other Dutch warships came to Tandjong Priok. The Navy decided on a sailing competition between boats of the three ships in the afternoon, with a reception later on the guardship. Wooden Head sailed the guardship's boat. He chose a high sail, as he had been accustomed to use. Further, those two other warships' upper decks were high above the water and so would intercept what wind there might be when the guardship's boat was passing them. With a high sail, there was the chance that the top of the sail would catch some wind anyway. At the start, a stay broke on Wooden Head's boat; it took a few minutes to repair this, and then all went well. He passed the other ships without difficulty, catching wind with his high sail. The other boats were heavier and had lower sails. He could skirt the piers quite closely, while the other boats had to keep on the safe side in order not to run aground; and so it took them longer to get out of the harbor. Wooden Head rounded the outside buoy first and was first back at the starting line, and so won the prize. The Commandant of the guardship had given as the prize two inlaid panels which he had brought from Japan. The reception on board the guardship was crowded; several of Wooden Head's relatives attended. Batavia had all kinds of other festivities, some of which Wooden Head attended too. When he had arrived in the Dutch East Indies two years earlier, Wooden Head had applied for a berth on a hydrographic survey ship, because he was more interested in that line of work than in Serving With the Hydrographic Survey 43 the pure military service. There was no vacancy at that time, but after four months on the guardship, he received word that a vacancy had occurred. As soon as he could, he hurried to join his new ship, the Blommendal, in Tandjong Pinang in the Riou Archipelago, close to Singapore. 9/ Serving With the Hydrographic Survey In September, 1898, Wooden Head had to catch the s which would take him to his new post on board the Blommendal. His older brother and his oldest sister, Jessica, saw him off at Tandjong Priok, the harbor of Batavia. (Several years later he had a vivid reminder of this good-bye.) The steamer ferried him to Singapore, where he boarded a small coastal steamer for Tandjong Pinang, the capital of the Riou Archipelago, where the Blommendal came about every six weeks for fresh supplies and a bit of a letup for the men after six weeks of steady work. Besides the Commandant, there were three (navigating) officers, an ad^nims- trative officer and a doctor, some Dutch petty officers, and, for the most part, a native crew. Wooden Head was the youngest of the three navigating officers. He was still a midshipman but had the same duties as the other officers. Because of his year's leave, his promotion to lieutenant had been delayed, but that came shortly after. The Blommendal was a small sailing schooner, but she carried a steam launch, which had to be used for the surveying work close to the Sumatra coast, where the water was not deep enough for the ship. To get to the terrain where most of the work had to be done, close to the Sumatra coast, several islands had to be passed. It took some time to identify these islands, specially at night. Once on 44 WOODEN HEAD that terrain, Wooden Head and the two older officers took turns going out for the whole day with the steam launch for this surveying work. They left the ship at dawn, and usually had to steam from one to one and a half hours before they reached their destination. Then they worked steadily as long as there was daylight, steaming back to the Blommendal after dark. So they came back on board at 7:00 p.m. or later; then they had their supper, often on deck, since it was so hot below deck. Often Wooden Head was so tired that he fell asleep at the supper table. The next day they put their observations on the map of the terrain. The Resident of the Riou and Linga Archipelago—"resident" was the title of the official who administered that region—lived at Tandjong Pinang with his two daughters. There was a club on the island which served as its center of gravity. Even the local preacher came there—and proved to be a congenial fellow, quite different from some of those so-called "Reverends" on this continent; at least, that was how Wooden Head sized him up. Later on, in 1899- 1900, the preacher and his wife invited a younger sister of Wooden Head to stay with them for some weeks. The nights on the water on the roads of Tandjong Pinang were peaceful. While on duty, Wooden Head heard the natives play the gamelang, a musical instrument of their making. Then- music was not gay, but it was nice, just the same—perhaps you have to be inclined that way. Wooden Head can't forget it. When off duty, the midshipmen could go for a day or so to Singapore and have some fun there—the kind they did not find at Riou. Singapore was quite interesting, as a harbor and in other ways. Coming up from the harbor, you had to pass through the native part before you got to that part where the English and other Anglo-Saxon people lived and worked. There was an esplanade where society—the female representatives, mostly—more or less paraded later in the afternoon, after the worst heat of the day had passed. At around 7 p.m. they had dinner in the hotels, all dressed up notwithstanding the hot climate. Those who could not afford a carriage of their own went mostly by rickshaw, a light, two- wheeled vehicle drawn by a coolie. Serving With the Hydrographic Survey 45 As a great trading port with all kinds of seafarers passing through, Singapore had, of course, establishments which catered to those who had been for long stretches on board, cut off from all female companionship, and so needed something to perk them up. The doctor of the Blommendal had warned the officers to beware of the European (white) professionals. The others, Japanese mostly, were regularly inspected. Japanese girls who wanted to marry but did not have the necessary money earned what they needed in this way. Wooden Head became acquainted with a nice English family which invited him to visit them, and he had some pleasant evenings there over the years. In the beginning of 1899 Wooden Head received a telegram informing him that his oldest sister had died suddenly, at Tjileboet He heard this early in the morning; since he was off duty that day, he went ashore, to be alone with his thoughts. He started walking, got out of the populated community, and, before he realized it, was a long way on a road which evidently went across the island in an easterly direction. By that time it was already noon. He was thirsty; he found some growth which looked like sugar cane, cut some of it, and chewed on it. He also found some water, running along the road, but no houses, and no people. He figured that he was already more than halfway across the island and decided that he might as well walk on till he came to the east coast, where he knew that there was a native village. Late in the afternoon he got there, exhausted, after being the whole day out in the hot sun. He got something to drink and eat and persuaded one of the natives there to take him in his canoe and paddle him around the south end of the island back to the Blommendal. That took hours, but he finally arrived after midnight. The officer on duty was glad to see him, since Wooden Head had to relieve him in the morning. Where the Blommendal had to stay for some time at Riou, Tandjong Pinang, the Commandant gave Wooden Head a short leave to go to Java to see his parents. Wooden Head had seen his sister Jessica only in his younger years, 1890-92, when his parents were on leave in Holland and he was at the Naval College, and 46 further for a short time in 1895, 1896, and 1898 when he was off duty. But he had grown very fond of her, and so the news of her sudden death was a great shock to him. She was only a few years younger than he was, and although he was naturally shy in his contacts with strangers, the days he had been home now and then he had enjoyed her company when they could talk about things they both cared for. Wooden Head gratefully prepared to leave, still deeply disturbed by his sister's untimely death. At the same time, they had already gotten word that a new ship, a steamer, the Van Gogh, specially built for this hydro-graphical survey work, was soon to come from Holland. The Navy Department at Batavia had already sent orders for the Blommendal to sail to Soerabaja, the main Navy establishment, to be taken out of commission there and for the crew to be transferred to the Van Gogh. Such a trip under sail might easily take six weeks, against the current monsoon. The Commandant asked Wooden Head to go to the Navy Department while he was in Java and point this out, and to suggest that the Van Gogh pick the Blommendal up, when coming from Holland, and tow her to Soerabaja. Wooden Head did this, the Navy Department saw the logic of the procedure, and so the order was changed. Wooden Head then went to see his parents at Tjileboet and heard the details of his sister's death. His sister had been for some time with the B. family at Djokjakarta; when she came home, she seemed to be tired out and complained of headaches. Finally it got so bad that she had to go to bed. They could not get a nurse to look after her, so her mother had to do most of this. It was rather peculiar that Wooden Head's mother, before his sister got worse, had dreamed that she could not get a nurse. Something seemed to be wrong in the brain; and within a little over a week, his sister had died. She was buried in a spot on the estate of which Wooden Head's brother Wennemar was manager. An iron fence was put up around the grave, so that it was as private as possible. When Wooden Head's brother left his position as manager there, the grave became a problem. Wooden Head returned to the Blommendal and the work near the coast of Sumatra was resumed. The doctor on the Blommendal Serving With the Hydrographic Survey 47 was quite a pleasant shipmate. He had a camera (in those times, rather an exceptional thing); he often took snapshots of interesting things. On one of the islands of the Linga group lived a family with whom the officers on board had become acquainted. One day while Wooden Head was on duty, the others were all there. The doctor took a picture of the whole group and, since Wooden Head could not be there, he took a separate shot of him and fitted that into the group picture. The Blommendal was working close to the mouth of the Djambi River. It happened to be absolute high tide when the Van Gogh picked the Blommendal up; the Commandant of the Van Gogh did not know the locality there. There was a strong current setting across the mouth of the river, and only a quite narrow channel; it was late at night and dark; before they knew what had happened, the cross current swept the Blommendal onto a sandbank, right next to that channel. The Van Gogh could not get the Blommendal off. As the tide receded, the Blommendal began hanging over one side. She had to be propped up to prevent her from falling over. In the morning you could walk around her. (The doctor took a nice snapshot of that position.) The next night the water did not get that high, so the Blommendal started to get rid of anything that might lighten the ship, while waiting for the next high tide to get it off. Life on that ship at that time was peculiar, what with the sloping deck. After quite a few days, the next high tide came in, freeing the Blommendal. The Van Gogh towed her first to Batavia—there being no telegraphic communication from Djambi—then to Soerabaja. Survey work with the Van Gogh went considerably faster than had been possible with the Blommendal, where a lot could be done with the ship itself as well as with a steam launch; and time was saved in going back and forth between the terrain near the Sumatra coast and the station at Tandjong Pinang, Riou. The two older navigation officers' time ran out, and they were replaced by one older lieutenant and one younger man who was younger than Wooden Head. Early in 1900 the Commandant fell severely sick and died sud- 48 WOODEN HEAD denly. Since they were close to Djambi, and bodies in the tropics must be buried quickly—at the latest within twenty-four hours— the Van Gogh steamed up the river to the settlement at Djambi. The burial had to be attended to just outside the settlement, where the bush—the primitive jungle—was reigning supreme. When one has seen that tropical jungle at first hand, one wonders how long it will take nature to overgrow such a spot as that grave there had to be. The Van Gogh steamed down the river, now under temporary command of the oldest navigation officer. The Commandant's death had to be reported as soon as possible to the Admiral at Batavia. Where there were only three navigation officers, the officer in temporary command had to do double duty; besides his own turn on deck twice four hours out of the twenty-four, he had to carry the responsibility of the command. As the youngest officer was still green, Wooden Head was asked to keep an eye on this younger man, when it was his turn on deck, especially where navigating had to be done among many islands, which, in the night, could easily be mistaken for one another. This made it necessary to be sure of the course to be followed between them. The result was double duty all around. After some time a new, high-ranking officer came out to take over the command of the Van Gogh. He had a higher rank than that of the former Commandant, but evidently he was the only one available trained in the hydrographical survey work. When Wooden Head returned to Java in 1899, after his sister's death, he understood that his parents intended to go to Holland in 1901. His own time in the Dutch East Indies, counting his year's leave on the sugar plantation as extra, would be up in 1900. He thought that it might be pleasant to make the trip back to Holland with his parents and brothers and sisters; so he asked for an extra year's stay in the tropics, which was granted him. Hardly had he received the extension than he heard that his parents had changed their mind and were returning to Holland in 1900. In the second part of 1900, Wooden Head was ordered to vacate his post on the Van Gogh and to proceed to Singapore Commander of the "Tamiang" 49 and take over there, temporarily, the command of the Tamiang. The Tamiang was a small backwheeler belonging to a nonmilitary Navy, which had as its main purpose the prevention of smuggling. The ship was being repaired and fitted out for hydrographical survey work on the Djambi River. 10/ Commander of the "Tamiang" Wooden Head went to Singapore on a Saturday, armed with naval books which he needed to study to be ready to assume his first command. He registered in a hotel and went to the dockyard to inspect the Tamiang around 5 p.m. The crew had just started their supper. He saw that the sailors (all natives) used different crockery from what was used in the Navy. Upon inquiring about this state of affairs, he was told: "That is the sailors' personal property." "That is a nice kettle of fish," Wooden Head said. "I expect Monday morning a crew of over forty men with a few petty officers and one officer from Soerabaja; the first thing they will want to do is eat. No crockery, no forks or spoons or knives." He hurried to the Dutch Consul at Singapore and bought, on account of the Navy Department at Batavia, the necessary equipment, at the same time sending a telegram to the Department about the business. The Navy Department replied, assuring him that proper equipment would be shipped from Soerabaja and would arrive in a fortnight; what had to be done in the meantime, they did not say. But they paid later for what Wooden Head had bought in Singapore. Monday morning came, and with it the crew from Soerabaja. The officer in charge was three years younger than Wooden Head, who had known him slightly at the Navy College. It took nearly a month for repairs to be completed. The Tami- 50 ang was built for river navigation and went only three and a half feet deep. At low tide the ship practically disappeared below the planking of the dock wharf. Then swarms of mosquitoes came on board; infecting with malaria everybody on board, including Wooden Head. Lots of quinine was swallowed by everyone in a try to keep the effects of the malaria as much as possible under control, so that the work could be done, somehow. When the repairs were finished, the Singapore dockyard was glad to get rid of the Tamiang. The job was only a small one for them; they gave Wooden Head, free, a tug to get the Tamiang out into the open sea. The crossing to the Djambi River was not exactly good for the machinery of the Tamiang. She had no condenser, so she required a lot of fuel. Her top speed was not much more than five knots. She made it to the mouth of the Djambi River without mishap. She had to go up to the settlement at Djambi and wait there for the Commandant, who was coming from the eastern part of the Archipelago. While going up, the younger officer was on duty one night. He did not know the river, and he got too close to the shore at one point and ran the signal mast into the branches of a huge tree, which hung over the river, and broke the mast; but that was only a minor thing. At Djambi, Wooden Head renewed his acquaintance with the Army doctor there and his family, whom he had met when earlier there with the Van Gogh. They were very nice people, and he often had supper there. When the Commandant arrived, he took over the command of the Tamiang from Wooden Head. The younger officer was transferred to another ship, which happened to be on the Djambi River. (Coincidentally, some years later, Wooden Head and that younger chap, when back in Holland, married two women who were sisters.) The Tamiang had to survey the river above Djambi. The sources of the river were in the mountains close to the west coast of Sumatra, not far from Padang, the largest city on the west coast. There was always a strong current in the river; how much de- Commander of the "Tamiang" 51 pended on where you were and the time of the year. The Tamiang could not carry very much fuel herself. To be able to survey the higher stretches of the river, more coal was needed, and a smaller backwheeler, the Sin Hong Bie, which was available, was rented as a coal depot and loaded to capacity. The Sin Hong Bie went only two and a half feet deep and was easier to handle than the Tamiang. The first stop was at Moeara Tambesi, where a branch river fell into the Djambi and where an army settlement had been established. Higher up, another branch river was spotted, also at the port side. A peninsula was formed there, and there the Sin Hong Bie deposited several sacks with coal, to lighten the load, the idea being to pick these up again when coming downriver some weeks later. The water was quite low at that time, the bank of the river at starboard being certainly ten or more feet high, Wooden Head says; from the Tamiang's deck, one looked up at it. Days later, they reached the higher stretches of the river. Wooden Head had to make an observation to better locate that point on the map. An expedition of the Geographical Society had been there some years earlier, but had been prevented from mapping the area by local tribal warfare. May 22, the Tamiang and Sin Hong Bie had advanced to the point where the Geographical Society had been forced to stop. The two native villages, on opposite sides of the river, now seemed quiet. Just above those, the river made a ninety-degree bend to the left, blocking the sight of the river higher up. The shores were heavily wooded. The Tamiang tried to make the bend; the point where they wanted that observation made was a little farther up, where another branch river joined the Djambi at the right. But the channel in the bend was very narrow and shallow, while logs had stuck in the river bed. She could not force her way through and had to turn back and anchor directly below the bend. Wooden Head went up with the steam launch they carried, to reconnoiter the river higher up; he had no trouble making the bend. He found a narrow channel at the starboard side, deep enough and quite close to the wooded shore there, while at port there were several sandbanks. Steaming up, he came to the branch river and the pen- r 52 WOODEN HEAD insula above it where he had to make the observation. Then he turned back to report to the Commandant of the Tamiang. They decided then that the next morning Wooden Head would go up with the Sin Hong Bie to make the observation. When the Tamiang left Djambi for this trip upriver as far as same was navigable for the ship, the Civil Administrator (Controleur) of this wide-flung district came on board, partially to act as interpreter, because he knew the native dialect and because, at the same time, it gave him an opportunity to get better acquainted with his district. An army captain with a dozen soldiers came along, in case of any trouble. So it was decided that the Controleur and the captain with his soldiers would come along on the Sin Hong Bie the next morning. Later that day, the chief of one of the villages came on board, looked around, and asked the Controleur what would be done if the Tamiang were attacked during the night! The Controleur obligingly showed him the heavy steel nets with which the whole ship could be closed off, and a few machine-guns and the rifles. Further, he said that, if the ship were attacked, both villages would be taken under fire. The night passed without any trouble. The Sing Hong Bie had the wheel in front of two small cabins. The hammocks of the crew and the soldiers, with their bedding, were stacked along the sides. The Controleur, the Captain, and the native pilot of the Sin Hong Bie joined Wooden Head on the small deck in front of the wheel, while a sailor stood outside at starboard to sound the depth. Wooden Head made the bend without difficulty, and the Sin Hong Bie disappeared out of sight of the Tamiang. They followed the channel at starboard, close to the overgrown shore, for a while. Suddenly, from somewhere in the bush, someone opened fire. A sailor was wounded in the groin. He jumped inside and wanted to tie the wound up with his black tie. Wooden Head always carried an extra clean hanky and gave him that. Then he saw that the deck was clear. Even the helmsman had gone, so there was nothing else for Wooden Head to do but to take the wheel himself. He got the ship a bit farther from shore while the soldiers and sailors returned the fire at the invisible enemy in the bush. The Commander of the "Tamiang" 53 wounded sailor and the native pilot of the Sin Hong Bie had posted themselves between the two cabins, and in that way they more or less protected Wooden Head with their fire. Fortunately, the engineer also kept his head and kept the ship going. After going on for a little while, he spotted the peninsula, but saw that it was now crowded with two hundred or three hundred people. So he turned around to communicate with the Controleur and the Army captain. The Tamiang had strict orders to avoid any animosity, so Wooden Head decided not to try going further up the river. He had to go back, but that was easier said than done. The channel was so narrow that he could not turn around in the ordinary way. He surely would have run aground on a sandbank, so he set the back of the ship into the bank of the river while a steady fire was kept up on the bush. The current then got the bow of the ship on starboard, and so he managed to turn the ship around and then went slowly down with the current. When he neared the bend, he noticed that the sandbanks, which had been bare when they went up, were now also crowded with natives who evidently expected the ship to run aground there. Wooden Head managed to make the bend and anchored below the Tamiang. The Commandant of the Tamiang had, of course, heard the shooting. He could not do much, since he could not see the Sin Hong Bie, but he made up steam, resolved to try to force the bend somehow and come to the help of the Sin Hong Bie. But when he saw her passing the bend, coming down, he opened fire on the natives on the sandbank with the machine-gun, which was mounted on a mast. That afternoon, Wooden Head made his observation on one of the sandbanks close by, while the Tamiang covered him. Later Wooden Head made his report. The helmsman, who had run away from the wheel when the firing started, should perhaps have been court-martialed. However, as he never had been under fire before, Wooden Head smoothed this part over as far as he could. The next morning the Tamiang and Sin Hong Bie went down river; but it was not all over yet. Running down before a strong current—quite a few miles in reality—was not easy for the Tamiang. In making bends, it was often necessary to give much rudder 54 WOODEN HEAD to get her to turn. This made it difficult to control the ship; and so several times the Tamiang turned a full circle before she could be brought back to her course. The Tamiang was flat-bottomed; the ship had a rectangular shape. Toward the back end, the bottom came up slanting, to make room for the back wheel and the rudder. Where the wheel was right in front of the rudder in this cutaway part, there was only little water pressure on the rudder to begin with when running with the current. Only by giving much rudder right away was it possible to get the ship to turn sufficiently, but once turning, the ship had a tendency to keep on turning. While steaming against the current, the ship listened much better to the rudder, of course. Later they heard that the natives thought that this had been done on purpose, so the ship became more or less a mystery to them. The Sin Hong Bie was much easier to handle, and this was certainly one of the reasons why she had got out of that scrap on May 23 without too much damage. After several hours, the Tamiang came to another bend which she had to round. This one was not so bad as the one higher up, but the natives had thought that there was a chance to trap the ships there. The natives had built a kind of barricade across the river just below this bend. They had put poles in the river bed— three or four in a bunch—and tied them together, evidently counting on the Tamiang not being able to pass and running aground; but in the middle of the river the current was so strong that they had to put those bunches of poles farther apart, and there the ship could just slip through them. The current being so strong, it was getting too risky to go on during the night. The Tamiang and the Sin Hong Bie therefore dropped their anchors before it got too dark. During the night the wilderness around came to life. When they returned to the spot where they had deposited the sacks of coal, they received a shock. That whole peninsula was deep under water and the river bank opposite was almost completely submerged. It was a good thing that they had enough coal left, thanks to the Sin Hong Bie, to get farther down. When they stopped at the soldier settlement at Moeara Tambesi, Commander of the "Tamiang" 55 they found that the people there already knew a lot about what had happened high up the river. Kabar Angin had done the work (kabar—news, angin—wind); sampans from higher up may have passed the Tamiang in the night, or the attackers may have used secret trails more or less along the river. The Army doctor took care of the wounded sailor. Part of his pants had got into the wound; also, the bullets which the natives used were not clean. All kinds of impurities were contained in the lead, so that wound was festering; but in the hospital the sailor got over it. It is not likely that the bullets had been specially poisoned; if that had been done, the sailor would probably have succumbed, since some days passed before he got into the doctor's hands. More than fifty years after that encounter, Wooden Head heard from this sailor, then a pensioned boatswain. Because Djambi did not yet have telegraphic communication with Batavia, the Commandant of the Tamiang decided to proceed to Palembang, further south, where the Head Administrator (Resident) lived. So the Tamiang went down the Djambi River, then southeast along the coast, and then up the Moesi River, opposite Muntok on the island of Bangka (known as a tin-producer), to Palembang, about eighty miles up the river. From here a cablegram could reach the Admiral. After he had been at Palembang a short time, Wooden Head received word that his time in the Indies was up (in all, nearly five years then). He was to be relieved (by one of bis own class) and to proceed to Java. After a short leave there, he would return to Holland. On the boat to Batavia, one of the K. P. M. (Koninklyke Paketvaart Maatschappy), he met a girl with whom he talked a lot and later visited at her parents' home. Nancy was a teacher. Wooden Head had not had much contact with girls near his own age in those last three years. In Tandjong Penang, Riou, he had enjoyed talking with Corry, the oldest daughter of the Resident there. And judging by what he happened to hear quite a few years later about her, she must have liked him quite well also. Nancy was of another make-up, also quite attractive, well- 56 WOODEN HEAD educated, and informed about things Wooden Head was interested in; so they enjoyed each other's company during those few days on the boat. Several years later, he met her again. Wooden Head visited his brother at Tjileboet, near Buitenzorg, and then went to middle and east Java; he had two younger brothers near the north coast, one working on a sugar plantation and the other on a rubber plantation. In Djokjakarta he visited the B. family. In Soerabaja he met the editor of a paper published there, who wanted to hear all about the trouble with the natives encountered on the Djambi River and the situation there. There was a private expedition in this area also, looking for oil. The Djambi district was closed for civilians, but this party evidently had a secret understanding with the Resident at Palembang; they worked for one of the oil companies, and some military men were mixed up in the venture. A few years later, the Djambi expedition started and made those rumors a reality. 11/ Back to Holland Finally Wooden Head boarded a steamer bound for Holland. After passing through the Red Sea and getting into a more moderate climate, Wooden Head felt a lot better. The malaria he had contracted in 1900 in Singapore did not bother him much any more. In Marseilles he left the ship and travelled overland to Holland. He could have stayed over some days in Paris; but he was anxious to get home, so he let the opportunity pass. His parents had settled outside of Amersfoort, northeast of Utrecht. His father preferred to live in the country; and Wooden Head had evidentiy inherited that preference. He stayed with his family for four or five months during his leave—the longest time he had ever lived with them since he had been left behind in Holland as a boy of six in 1880. Navy officers of Wooden Head's rank had to pass an examina- Back to Holland 57 tion before they could eventually be promoted to a higher rank. Wooden Head therefore used most of his time to bone up on several subjects and to get acquainted with modern, new methods, which he had had no time or chance to do when he was in active service. For some of this he had to go to Den Helder, where the main Navy establishment was, and he lived there for some time in a hotel. Wooden Head really did not have enough time to do all of this thoroughly, with the result that, when he took the required examination, he did not do as well as he had done in his years at college. This result rather irked him, but there was no help for it. In the meantime, during the latter part of October, 1901, one early morning he found out that the Queen had awarded him the Militaire Willems Orde (the Dutch equivalent of the British Victoria Cross) for his part in the encounter on the Djambi River on May 23, 1901. It was quite a pleasant surprise for him, and it proved that his last Commandant of the Tamiang had thought enough of his part that day to recommend him for this award. Shortly thereafter, the Admiral at Amsterdam presented Wooden Head officially with the medal on board the guardship. That night the Admiral gave a dinner, at which Wooden Head's father was present. The sailor who had been wounded and had helped to cover Wooden Head more or less with his fire also received the award. For one under the rank of officer, a monetary reward goes with it. After the examination, Wooden Head was posted at Den Helder, on the guardship there; but soon after, the Admiral there assigned him to a small vessel, the Zeehond, which was really a police cruiser detailed to keep an eye on the fishermen in the North Sea. Dutch and British fishermen often quarrelled in this area, mostly near Dogger Bank, a favoured fishing terrain in the North Sea. Duty in the winter on the North Sea was no pleasure. The ship was built in such a way that it behaved badly in a storm (and in winter, one ran into storms continually), so that everybody on board got seasick part of the time. Often the spray froze right on deck. Wooden Head had the worst watch there: from midnight 58 WOODEN HEAD to 4 a.m.; when he had his dinner at about 7 p.m., he knew that, before he was on duty for half an hour, that dinner would be overboard. The crew had it tough, too. There were watertight garments on board for only half the crew. The watch that came up had to put on the clothes which the off-going watch took off. After a few months of this, Wooden Head's sciatica, which had been at least bearable in the tropics, got so bad that he had to go to the Navy Hospital. 12/ The Hospital Sanatorium When Wooden Head entered the Navy Hospital at Den Helder in the spring of 1902, he did not foresee that this was the beginning of the end of his naval career. The doctors did what they could with the limited means at their disposal and, I might say, the limited knowledge of the cause of his sciatica. Wooden Head had a good-sized room at the Hospital—better accommodation than he had been used to on board, and, of course, plenty of time on his hands. He went for walks, but the dike along the sea and harbor front were about the only places where one could walk, and it began to bore him. For quite some time there had been a heated discussion about an order of the Secretary of the Navy which practically compelled everyone on board Navy vessels which were not in a harbor on Sunday to attend a so-called church service on Sunday mornings, which in reality was the reading of a treatise by the officer on duty, which treatise had been put together by some churchianity organization. Only those who objected in writing to such attendance, giving their reason, were free from the requirement of such attendance. The officer on duty had no choice. When Wooden Head served on the Van Gogh in the Dutch The Hospital Sanatorium 59 East Indies, all the officers on board had brought in objections to attendance at the Sunday services, as had been done on most other Navy vessels. The result was that the Commandants, generally, ignored the order, since they did not want to be mixed up in all kinds of arguments. The officers of the Navy had a magazine of their own, Marine- blad. In the spring of 1902, one of Wooden Head's colleagues had an article in that magazine dealing with the compulsory church service and its consequences in a general way. Wooden Head decided to contribute his own opinions concerning this order, which had been given by the Navy Secretary under pressure of a Member of Parliament. Wooden Head started to recall what Multatuli—Douwes Dekker—had written in his "Prayer of somebody who does not know." Wooden Head felt that there certainly was as much right, if not more, to force people to listen to that, as to make them hear the treatise of orthodox religion. He got hold of a copy of the Swiss Constitution, in which the absolute right of "Freedom of Religion," including the right of not wanting to have anything to do with it, was stressed even more than in the Dutch Constitution. He maintained that the Secretary of the Navy himself undermined naval discipline by violating the Constitution with this order. Wooden Head organized his ideas in an article which he sent to the editorial committee of the Navy magazine. He heard later that the majority of the committee did not want to print it—in fact, were afraid to print it—but the rninority wanted to publish it very much, and, by hook or by crook, they got it in, in June of that year. It was pretty much of a bombshell in Navy circles! Wooden Head did not hear anything officially, but the results came later. As there was not much progress in treating his sciatica, Wooden Head was sent by the Navy to a small sanatorium in Holland which was run by a Doctor L., one of the most modern doctors in Holland. There were two other Navy officers there, from the Adrninistrative Branch. One of them suffered from beri-beri. The sanatorium was in the center of the country, with woods and heather all around. There were usually fifty to sixty patients. 60 WOODEN HEAD Dr. L. in his treatment used natural methods as much as possible: water, electricity, light, and so forth; also, hypnosis in certain cases; and exercise, where possible. Water was used in hot baths, as hot as the patient could stand it; salt had been added to the bath; after fifteen to twenty minutes in that bath, Dr. L.'s assistant came along and gave the patient a cool shower and then a good rub down all over (there was a male assistant and a female assistant) . Electric currents were used, while the patient lay in a warm bath, to stimulate the blood circulation. There was also quite a large metal box, about four feet square and four feet high, in which the patient sat on a chair, naked, with his head out of the top of the box; special electric light played on the patient's body for quite some time. This treatment was rather exhausting. All the patients who could get around took part in different exercises, with Dr. L. himself leading. Another treatment, which Dr. L. did not apply this time to Wooden Head (but did thirteen years later), was to have the patient undressed and then wrapped in a bedsheet which had been soaked in warm water; then the patient was put into bed under blankets. Half an hour later, the sheet was taken off and rinsed out in clean water. The water then showed that dirt had come out of the patient's skin; in that way the skin was helped to do its share in the living process. Dr. L. may very weE have applied this treatment to those who were bedridden. Most of the patients had to take some rest—in bed, where necessary—in the early afternoon. The whole atmosphere in Dr. L.'s sanatorium was quite different from that in a military hospital. Wooden Head took long walks; he loved fruit, and, if he could get them, he took apples along. Pretty soon, if anybody wanted him, they went looking for the apple peelings that would indicate the trail he had taken. After a short time, two patients arrived who were sisters, Elizabeth and Annie; the youngest, Annie, had a partially paralyzed right hand, which she could still use a little but only with a special gadget. The other sister, Elizabeth, had something wrong with one hip; she had to use a walking stick to get around more easily. Other doctors evidenfly had not been able to help these two women; The Hospital Sanatorium 61 and so they came to Dr. L. in the hope that he could achieve some improvement. They often joined Wooden Head on his walks, especially the younger sister. They were orphans, and had an uncle as their guardian. One of the trails through the woods here was called Lover's Lane. Somewhere else was a hill, also in the woods, with a small cabin on top; this was called Hooge Hut (High Cabin). One had a nice view from there, and at the same time it was a spot where one could be alone, or with pleasant company, without much risk of being disturbed—an ideal spot for a rendezvous. On the sanatorium grounds there was also opportunity to play different games. There was a tennis court, and Dr. L.'s daughters played tennis with some of the patients; there was also table tennis. In addition, there was a billiard room, which was used frequendy, especially in rainy weather and at night. One of the guests knew an expert in graphology. This patient got a group together, each of whom gave a sample of their handwriting, preferably something they had written earlier without knowing that it would be used for this purpose. When the handwriting samples came back, the expert's opinion about Wooden Head as revealed by his handwriting was: "Does not boast, but knows his value." After some time, Dr. L. came to the conclusion that he could not improve Annie's hand. But he thought that he could help Elizabeth with her hip. So Annie went home. But in the meantime, Wooden Head and she had become more or less engaged. Wooden Head was getting considerable relief from the treatements there and from his talks with Dr. L., but after six months Dr. L. told him that he could not do anything more; and so Wooden Head went back to the Navy Hospital in Den Helder. The doctors there asked him how and in what way Dr. L. had treated him, and as far as their facilities allowed, they treated him in a similar way. Meanwhile, Wooden Head had heard that his former Commandant of the Tamiang, V.L., had returned to Holland and was going to marry. Wooden Head had a good photo of the Tamiang; an engraver made a replica from it in metal and Wooden Head gave it as a wedding present to Mr. V. L., who, with his wife, were posted in Den Helder and rented a house there. They had 62 WOODEN HEAD I heard about Wooden Head's engagement and they invited Annie to j stay with them for a while. Her guardian wanted to know more ] about Wooden Head, so he asked a recentiy retired Navy Admiral j if he could give him any information about Wooden Head. The j Admiral gave to Annie's guardian, Mr. Stork, the head of an in- j dustrial firm in Haarlem, Wooden Head's article concerning the ] Navy's compulsory rule for church attendance. Apparently that 1 gave him all the information he wanted. Since he, Mr. Stork, gave his consent to Wooden Head's engagement to Annie after reading j that article, it must have given him a sufficient insight into Wooden Head's character. While he was in hospital in 1903, Wooden Head, of course, met some of his former classmates. A few of them wanted him to ask for an audience with the Queen to thank her for the award of the Militaire Willems Orde. He refused, saying: "I deserved it or I did not; if not, it would be ridiculous to express thanks for it, while if I was entitled to it, then I see no reason why I should say 'thank you.'" Well, it was, of course, a question of "conformity" or the opposite; and Wooden Head never was a conformer and never will be. Wooden Head heard that on April 1, 1903, a new pension law for the Navy would come into force. In March he had to appear before a Medical Committee, which found him "physically unfit for further service"; he was discharged officially on April first, with a small pension. He heard from reliable sources at The Hague that the Navy Department had ordered the Committee to find him "unfit for further service," undoubtedly as a result of his article in the Navy magazine. Apparently the church had applied pressure again in retribution. Wooden Head could hardly foresee that half a century later the churchianity racketeers, helped by their henchmen in big business, would have the gall to do their utmost to indoctrinate the gullible and force them to submit to what the church hierarchy declared to be morality, which in essence is so often the opposite. Let us be thankful that the numbers of those who are thinking for themselves and who are exposing the hypocrisy of those churchianity racketeers is growing all the time. Marriage 63 While revising the manuscript of this book, I received a rather uplifting comment from an American businessman, who read [ this manuscript, which I think is worth revealing; he says, quote: "Aren't you nineteen hundred years late? or maybe six thousand years behind? When was it any different?" How true! The American Humanist Association, Yellow Springs, Ohio—and some similar, smaller organizations—are doing something about this, mainly by trying to inform the general public about this racket. A fellow member of that Humanist Association, Harold V. O'Reilly, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, had a letter in the April, 1961 issue of Liberty, published at Toronto, in which he said, "The other day a fine man here, who was in the clergy some years ago, said to me: 'After fifteen years in the pulpit, I found out that looking for God anywhere was no more rewarding than looking in a dark cellar for a black cat that wasn't there. And,' said he, 'praying is just like talking on a telephone, with no one on the other end.' " 13/ Marriage Wooden Head used the interval between his release from the hospital and April first to prepare for his marriage on the second of April, 1903. Annie was rather handicapped by that partly paralyzed right hand. But still she had already had this so long that she was capable of helping herself with practically everything; she had to write with her left hand, however. Most household work she could also do quite well. During the first half of her marriage to Wooden Head, she was good company and managed to put up with sometimes difficult happenings, as we shall later see. She had a good singing voice, and that must have been one of her attractions. She needed some- f 64 WOODEN HEAD body to accompany her on the piano. Wooden Head could not help her in that way, although he was very fond of good music. Later in their marriage, she changed. After the first year, they lived in the tropics—the Dutch East Indies—and after the first few years there it seemed that she could no longer stand the everlasting heat of that region. She may also have missed the social life she had been used to in Haarlem, Holland. We shall later see how that change developed and in the end led to a divorce. Wooden Head's small pension would not be sufficient to start a household, but his future wife had inherited from her parents certain stock in a manufacturing business—a machine factory— in which her father had been one of the directors. Wooden Head went to Ootmarsum, in Overysel Province, where his grandfather had lived and where, as a boy, he had so often spent his summer holiday. There he found a house which had been a bit modernized, with a garden at the back, which he rented. Do not be deceived by the term "modernized." In those days it did not include any of the facilities that most people on the American continent have been taking for granted for several decades. There was no indoor plumbing; water had to be pumped up by hand. There was no electricity and no easy septic tanks. But Wooden Head rigged up things in such a way as to make it possible to take a hot bath, which was more than most people could do in their homes there. Some of Wooden Head's former classmates collected quite a considerable sum to present to the newlyweds, which helped them start married life by setting up their household. Besides the small garden which went with the house, Wooden Head rented a larger outside garden, as many families in the locality did. He planted several vegetables. There was no need for irrigation. Besides getting enough produce from it for their own use, they put up around eighty liters for winter use. Through his former visits there in the summer, Wooden Head knew quite a few families and an uncle, who had been living with Wooden Head's grandfather and had married and now lived on the farm which had earlier been rented out. They started married Marriage 65 life with enough neighbors, and they also had some visitors and some guests who stayed for a while in the summer. During that time he met a cousin who had come over for a holiday from New Zealand. The cousin had emigrated in his younger years and had done quite well for himself. They talked about the possible emigration of Wooden Head and his wife to New Zealand, but this never materialized. Staying there for the coming winter did not appeal very much to Wooden Head and Annie for several reasons: heating the house sufficiently for a possibly severe winter would be a problem, physically and financially; ground water all around came up high and had already risen through the floor of the cellar and the owner refused to do anything about that. In summer it was all right there, but Annie especially had been used to better accommodation in winter; so they started looking. They found something near Brum- men, not far from Zutphen, in Gelderland. A doctor lived there in a large, older house with a large garden. He rented Wooden Head part of the house, along with part of the garden and the use of part of a large brick barn. They moved in at the beginning of the fall. But somehow Wooden Head realized that he could not stay there very long either. He had had no special ttaining in agriculture, and he had no capital to be able to start something which could be built up, so he started inquiring farther afield. Annie had a cousin in the eastern United States. From boyhood Wooden Head bad had an urgent longing to go to the States, his imagination fired by the books he had read about it So he wrote to this cousin, but the answer was not very encouraging. The cousin, Bergman, said that several months earlier a hurricane had hit his farm. Most of his fruit trees had been uprooted and they were still lying there. Manual work for a white man to make a living was really out of the question. You could not compete with colored labor. Having no other contacts there, Wooden Head had to give that idea up. Toward the end of the year, Annie went for a week or so to Haarlem, where her former guardian and her other relatives lived. While he was alone those days, Wooden Head came to a decision. 66 WOODEN HEAD Since he knew something about the Dutch East Indies and had some brothers there, he decided to go to Java. Besides his own relatives there, Annie had an uncle who was Director of the Magnetical and Meteorological Observatory at Batavia. It took a few months to make the necessary arrangements. Annie had a life insurance policy, which, if cashed, would yield enough money to pay their fare to Java. He had acquired a few Flemish giant rabbits which he wanted to take along; he had heard that in Java a good price was paid for rabbits to use for laboratory purposes. He also had a white angora doe which had won a first prize on a good show. He bought a white angora buck, so that he could breed them (he thought). He also wanted to take some purebred poultry along. So he bought six white leghorn pullets and two cockerels and six white Wyandotte pullets and two cockerels, both of a good strain. He made one transportation coop himself as a sample and then had other coops made for the poultry. 14/ Settling In, in Java In March, 1904, they boarded the Rotterdam Lloyd mailboat in Rotterdam for the trip to Batavia, second class. Wooden Head had his birds and rabbits in the coops on deck and had the use of an empty cabin for the feed he had to take along; he was going to take care of them himself. Saying good-bye to his mother in Amersfoort was rather hard. She had been sick for quite a while. The doctors described her sickness as the result of eating too many hot spices while she was in the tropics. All they could prescribe was raw meat. She could not bring herself to follow this prescription. (Wooden Head could not have eaten that, either.) Wooden Head had not much hope of ever seeing her again. Vitamins had not yet been discovered then, except those that raw meat might have supplied. When they came into the Mediterranean, the weather got warmer. In those times pullets did not start laying in the fall, as Settling In, in Java 67 now (or even the year round, when needed), but began in the spring. After they left Marseilles, the twelve pullets started laying, and in the twenty days which the trip took to Batavia they laid two hundred eggs. It was a problem how to use up all those eggs. The white angora buck died on board. All the other livestock arrived in good condition. While Wooden Head was at the railway station of Tandjong Priok, Batavia's harbor, to arrange for transportation to Tjileboet, where his brother lived, the former Executive Officer of the Sumatra happened to see him. Wooden Head got the impression that the officer found it undignified for a former Navy officer to have anything to do with rabbits and poultry! At Batavia they visited Annie's uncle, Mr. Stork, at the Observatory. They also met the subdirector. Instinctively Wooden Head disliked Mr. Van Brommelen. He felt that Van Brommelen was not to be trusted. Later his suspicion was wmfirmed. Annie was expecting, and Wooden Head had arranged with his brother to let them stay at Tjileboet for some time until they could settle down. Wennemar had by this time married Clara, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. B. of Djokjakarta. There was room enough, but of course staying there for quite some time cut into everyone's privacy. Wooden Head had taken along from Holland a small incubator, an American one, and also a bone-grinder. He had to make temporary housing for his leghorns and Wyandottes, and soon he started hatching some of their eggs. But he soon found out that the hot climate brought along difficulties in the raising of stock which he had not foreseen. He also started a garden of his own, but again, though he was only thirty by that time, he realized that he could do only such manual work early in the morning before it got too hot. Meanwhile he shopped around for a place which he might be able to buy and which he could build up in such a way that he could at least get a part living out of it. He found such a place just outside the north side of Buitenzorg, the nearest town. It comprised about thirty acres, situated between the road to Tjileboet on the east side and the Batavia-Buitenzorg railway on the west side; 68 WOODEN HEAD part of the south side of this parcel of land ran up to a crossroad; while the northern border adjoined other acres owned by a Chinaman. In the middle of the crossing of the main road and the crossroad stood a kind of obelisk, called in Dutch Witte Paal; in Malay, Paal Poetih (a white pillar). This land had mainly produced cacao, of which chocolate is made. But the trees were in bad shape; the whole place was neglected. Some coconut trees, bananas, a little pepper, and vanilla also grew on the land. Two creeks ran through it. Being neglected, it was for sale at a very reasonable price. But to be able to buy that parcel, the stock which Wooden Head's wife had in the Haarlem factory had to be used to borrow money on; besides, a house had to be built and some money was needed to improve the land. Around this time, Wooden Head got word from Holland that his mother had died. This was quite a shock, even though he had expected it more or less. In his thirty years, he had been at home only the first six years; later he had spent only a little time at home now and then during his holidays. She was only fifty three when she died. At about the same time his first child was born, a girl, at Tjileboet; they got a nurse from Buitenzorg. They called the child Jessica, after Wooden Head's oldest sister who had died so suddenly in 1899. Jessica was a normal child. She was dark blond; looked well; was a bit stubborn in the beginning (like her father, I suppose), but lost that; and was very well liked by everyone she came in contact with. The purchase went through and Wooden Head engaged a native overseer and half a dozen men to start work. He decided that the cacao trees were not worth saving; so they were cut down and the wood sold as firewood; coconuts were gathered and bananas picked and both were sold. He got in touch with an architect about building a house, but even the cheapest house would cost far more than Wooden Head had left available for that purpose. Then he heard about a German architect who had recentiy come to Buitenzorg. He talked with this man, who claimed that he could built for much less than the Dutch architect had quoted. Further, he would do the work—su- Settling In, in Java 69 pervising—for 10 per cent of the building costs. Wooden Head had not much choice, so he made the agreement. A road had to be built into the place and a wooden bridge laid over the two creeks. Material for the bridge was cut right there; and to have a place to work in, the German built a shed between the two creeks with a little office at one end. So that he could be closer to the work all the time, he built a little house with a few small rooms at the other side of the second creek and went to live there. He bought the necessary materials and used some of the trees which were growing there as building material. This proved unwise, as it was quite soft wood which did not stand up long in that climate. Wooden Head got to know a family which had a dairy farm at the other side of the city. They needed a lot of grass for their cows; there was no natural pasture there, so he made an agreement with them that he would start growing a special kind of grass, Bengal grass—plants of which he could get—cultivate it, and then have it cut daily and brought over to the dairy each day in a small cart; cart and horse were necessary anyhow for all other kinds of transportation. When the house was about half done, Wooden Head received hints that the man was cheating him with the purchase of the materials. At the same time, the amount Hartmann had estimated the house would cost had already been reached. This was November, 1904. So, when Wooden Head was quite convinced that Hartmann was cheating him, he decided to take action. On November 23 he told Hartmann that the game was up. Wooden Head went to the workshop, where the men—natives—Hartmann employed were busy, and told them, individually, to pack up their tools and leave his property. Hartmann had followed Wooden Head through the shop while he was telling the men to leave, each moment becoming angrier. They ended up together in the little office at the east end of the shop. There Hartmann attacked Wooden Head; all Wooden Head had to defend himself with was a carpenter's wooden measure with copper connections. Hartmann was nearly twice as heavy as Wooden Head. Wooden Head thrust the measure at the 70 WOODEN HEAD man's breast, but that did not do much harm. In less than no time Hartmann had Wooden Head on the concrete floor, sat upon him, and bumped his head on the floor. Wooden Head felt his left eye close and tried as best he could to protect his other eye. The natives who had been working there made enough noise to attract Hartmann's wife, who lived close by. She realized what her man had gotten himself into by losing his self-control. Finally she prevailed upon him to stop and get up. In the meantime Wooden Head's overseer had phoned his brother at Tjileboet. Wennemar jumped into a buggy, taking a gun with him—a revolver—and raced to the scene. He took Wooden Head to a doctor. Besides damage to his back, Wooden Head's left eye was in such a condition that the doctor could not find any light in it. So he advised him to go immediately to Batavia to an eye specialist. The eye specialist could not find any light either. Wooden Head stayed in Batavia with an uncle, the husband of the aunt who was an opera singer. The next morning he went to the official prosecutor and told him what had happened. When he had finished, the prosecutor was grimly satisfied. "Now I have got him in the end." He then explained to Wooden Head that Hartmann had practiced similar tricks in Batavia, but always in such a way that the law could not get him. When his reputation became known in Batavia, he moved to Buitenzorg to start all over again. Wooden Head's back injury lasted more than three weeks. According to the law, if the victim was incapacitated for more than three weeks, a far more severe penalty could be meted out than when the injury was less severe. It also took several weeks before his eye began to heal. Before all this happened, the Government had set one of the Controleurs in Java—a civil administrator—to study native poultry and possible improvements. Generally speaking, native poultry laid only few and small eggs, and then became broody. Eggs and poultry were a considerable part of the average family's diet. There were many places where no beef or similar meat was produced, and so poultry had to be used extensively. There was one district in Java where poultry in general was of better size and Settling In, in Java 71 produced some better-sized eggs. The Controleur stated his conclusions in the newspaper, asking those who had any creative suggestions to get in touch with him. Wooden Head was really a novice in poultry breeding; but he had read quite a lot in American magazines and he had some personal experience. He wrote to the Controleur and made the following suggestions: set one district in Java aside for an experiment; in that district kill every cock; import a sufficient number of males of different purebred breeds; and breed the native females to those males. Repeat this with the first cross-generation: kill (again) all the cross males and breed to cross females to purebred males, and so on. Controleur Van der Zee evidently thought this one of the best suggestions he received, and he had it printed in his official report. Wooden Head does not know whether his suggestion was ever followed: After six weeks or so, the case of Wooden Head versus Hartmann could be taken in hand. There are no juries under Dutch jurisdiction. Usually three judges handle a case. Some witnesses were called, including the doctor who had examined Wooden Head immediately after that attack. When he entered the Court, Hartmann looked confident, expecting that he could get out of it. But after hearing the witnesses and the prosecutor, you could see the change. The summing up by the prosecutor was really marvelous; he set out first how Hartmann had tricked several people in Batavia, always succeeding to keep within the law; how he had done the same thing in this case. Pointing to the accused and to Wooden Head, he indicated the great difference in their physical build, and went on to dramatize Hartmann's brutality. It did not take the judges long to reach a verdict. They sentenced Hartmann to two years in the penitentiary. There was only one place in the Dutch East Indies where sentences of such duration could be served: in Samarang, on the north coast of middle Java. His wife went there also. Later Wooden Head heard that Hartmann's wife had appealed to the Governor-General for clemency for her husband. She claimed that Wooden Head had both- 72 WOODEN HEAD ered her; Wooden Head said, "You should have seen that woman!" The Indian Society got rid of that scum by deporting them. But financially, Wooden Head had to bear the brunt. He had to borrow money—on a mortgage—to finish the house. Living there himself was out of the question; he had to rent it and find a paying job to be able to make the payments on the mortgage and to keep his overseer and a few men at work. A druggist in Buitenzorg was willing to rent a few acres between the two creeks to grow a special kind of grass from which he could extract an oil which he could use in his business; the workshop he could use as his factory. 15/ Back to Batavia Wooden Head applied for a job as teacher in mathematics at one of the high schools. He knew that a few former naval officers had such jobs. There was no vacancy at that moment. He heard from the Navy Department that at Soerabaja, the main Navy establishment, there was a job open that usually was filled by a petty officer: looking after the clocks there and keeping the available ocean maps up to date. This job paid only six guilders per day, then the equivalent of two dollars and forty cents—a guilder then being worth forty cents. It was not much, but he had no choice. He and his wife and child went early in February, 1905, to Soerabaja. They found a place where they could get room and board. The work was not unpleasant; the drawback was the low pay. After he had been there a few months, Wooden Head got word from Annie's uncle, the Director of the Observatory at Batavia, that he was going on a two years' leave to Holland in May. The subdirec- tor would become acting director for that time, and somebody else would have to be found who could fill the job of acting subdirec- tor for those two years. Was Wooden Head willing to take that job? Wooden Head did not think much of having to work with the Back to Batavia 73 subdirector; but his financial situation was so precarious that he could not refuse. Therefore, he put in an application to the Governor-General. Wooden Head got the appointment, starting May 3, the day the director would be leaving. Unfortunately, at that time the Government was trying to cut down expenses. The starting salary of a subdirector was five hundred guilders a month with one hundred fifty guilders' living allowance; but such a subdirector really had to be a university graduate. As Wooden Head was not such a graduate, his salary was put at four hundred guilders a month with one hundred guilders' allowance—one hundred and fifty guilders a month less than what he had expected. Still, it was considerably more than the six guilders a day at the Soerabaja Navy Dockyard. The director of the Dockyard, a Navy officer, was loath to let him go, but he understood, of course, that Wooden Head had to take the better position. Anyhow, it was good to learn that the director was well satisfied with the work he had done there. So, it was back to Batavia, a two-day trip by rail. They found a suitable house at a manageable rent and bought the necessary furniture. In those times, government salaries were paid in advance on the first of the month. Therefore, everybody who had a leave to go to Holland started his leave at the beginning of the month. He still received that month's salary, which was, of course, much more than the leave salary. Unfortunately, the person who took the vacated position did not get his salary before the first of the next month, a rather peculiar arrangement Wooden Head was in that position, but he got an advance to enable him to meet immediate expenses. The Observatory, adrninistratively, was under the Department of the Navy, but the work was independent. Wooden Head's particular work involved taking care of the library, which was quite extensive, since publications from practically all the observatories of the world were exchanged, besides special magazines which published articles in connection with observatory work. He was also in charge of recording rainfall over the Archi- 74 WOODEN HEAD pelago. There were several hundred stations where the rainfall was recorded with rain gauges, which the Observatory provided. The observers sent those records in every month. The results were then assembled in a rainfall volume, which was printed annually. Agriculture was the most important industry there, and it was of great value to the administrators of plantations to know the average rainfall of their locality for the different months of the year. In West Java, for instance, the dry season was from March/April to September; the wet season, from September to March. Generally, in East Java, as Wooden Head had experienced, the dry season ran from May to December, depending on the locality. Further, Wooden Head was in charge of seismology and a special project in that field. (Seismology = earthquake phenomena.) He had his share, of course, of observations that had to be done personally and of those which were recorded continuously. The other personnel consisted of a chief calculator, a former Navy petty officer of the navigation branch, a second calculator— a younger man—and about a dozen native calculator (clerk) observers; some of these were quite advanced in age, others younger; and a native boy who kept the place clean. They worked from 7:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.; the climate precluded working in the afteroon. But some of the personal observations had to be done later at night, and these Wooden Head had to do every now and then. Years earlier, when public utility transportation was going to be electrified, the advice of the Observatory director was asked in connection with the route to be followed. The Subdirector, Van Brommelen, now in May, 1905, Acting Director, was a magnetic specialist. The Director asked his advice, since electric current would influence magnetic instruments at the Observatory if the source of the current was too close. Somehow, the specialist fumbled the business. He allowed the transportation company to follow a route which passed the Observatory at a distance that proved to be too close. The magnetic instruments were badly affected, becoming unreliable during the hours that the electric trams ran. Thus the magnetic observations had to be done late at night after the tram stopped running. Back to Batavia 75 This was unsatisfactory, however, and something had to be done to get continuous registration of the magnetic forces again. Finally Wooden Head found in the library some correspondence about this subject. The specialist, Van Brommelen, did not want to acknowledge openly that he had made a mistake. After much wrangling they came to an arrangement whereby the Observatory would erect a small building at Buitenzorg, where there was no electric tram. There the recording magnetic instruments could be set up; one of the native observers was put in charge, and every day he sent the photographic records to the Observatory, where they were developed and then processed by the magnetic specialist. Occasionally something went wrong and Wooden Head had to go there by train. The recording instruments were photographic, and therefore they had to work in the dark, which made necessary adjustments more difficult. It took Wooden Head some time to get used to this new kind of work. There were other problems. One of the teachers at a Batavia high school, a former Navy officer, had to go on a year's leave to Holland. This man gave a course at night for the mates of the K.P.M. (Koninklyke Paketvaart Maatschappy), in navigation and other subjects. He had to find a replacement, and he asked Wooden Head to take the navigation course, while someone else handled the other subjects. Wooden Head had to teach several nights a week and take the lessons home to check them. This all took quite some extra time, but Wooden Head could use the hundred guilders a month, though he often had to work till midnight in spite of the fact that he had to be up at 6 a.m. He took it for granted that one hundred guilders was the same amount as this teacher received from the K. P. M.; but a little later he and the other substitute found out that that teacher was paid considerably more and was just pocketing the difference while he was on leave. They demanded that they receive full pay. Once in a while, Wooden Head went on a Sunday—his only free day—to his land at Buitenzorg, to keep in touch with his overseer and the few men who were regularly at work there. He had made an arrangement with an agent at Buitenzorg to handle the 76 WOODEN HEAD daily business. Other Sunday mornings, Wooden Head went for a long walk, taking his little girl, Jessica, with him in a small push buggy. Early in 1906, the Acting Director had to go on a trip to the East to take certain magnetic observations. While he was away, Wooden Head was in charge of the Observatory. One morning, having something to do in the darkroom, he ran into a magnetic instrument and broke the glass tube which was part of it. Although there was a replacement in stock, he could not manage to fix the thing up properly again. With the help of the chief calculator, who had been at the Observatory for several years, he fixed up a temporary contrivance, which had to do until the Acting Director returned. A little later something happened which produced quite a row. There was a large social club in Batavia, called "Concordia," with a membership of a thousand. They held concerts and other activities at a nice park near by. The editor of one of Batavia's dailies, Wybrands, had applied for membership. He had more than once criticized the Army commandant in Atjeh (Achin), the northern part of Sumatra, for his acts against the natives there. Several military higher-ups were members of the directorate of the club. They rejected Wybrands' application. Wooden Head did not know this editor personally, but he read his paper and agreed in a general way with his opinions. He considered the rejection very unfair; and so he put an ad in both Batavia papers, inviting other members who agreed with him to get in touch with him, promising that, as soon as there were sufficient objections, a dozen or so being needed, they would apply to the directorate and demand a special general meeting. Within twenty-four hours Wooden Head had enough members, some of them prominent in civilian circles, to demand the special meeting. At the same time the mail brought a letter from the Admiral of the Navy Department, addressed to the Acting Director of the Observatory, telling the Acting Subdirector (Wooden Head) that he was very much disturbed by this advertisement. Since the Acting Director was away, Wooden Head had opened the letter himself. The special meeting drew a full house. The Navy Admiral was Back to Batavia 11 there and sat, with other higher-ups, close to the directorate. A few people spoke, including Wooden Head. When the vote was announced, Wooden Head and those who were with him lost out. But, while they were leaving the hall, the public prosecutor who had handled the assault case of Hartmann a year or so earlier told Wooden Head, "We have lost, but you took the bull by the horns, and so, morally, we did win." Shortly after this, Wybrands visited Wooden Head to thank him for his efforts. They talked for quite some time, and Wybrands could not help learning that the work which Wooden Head did at the Observatory was not exactly to his liking. He offered him a job on his paper. Unfortunately, he could pay only two hundred fifty guilders a month and Wooden Head could not afford to take the post. His commitments for his land in Buitenzorg made it necessary that he keep the income he received at the Observatory. In the meantime, Wooden Head became acquainted with a man in Meester Cornells, which was pretty much a continuation of Batavia but more sparsely settled. Synja, an older man than Wooden Head, became one of his best friends. He owned a few other houses and offered to rent Wooden Head one which had quite a garden. So Wooden Head and Annie happily moved farther south, along the main road. Synja had quite some land with the house in which he lived. Wooden Head found a book describing the whole process of rubber planting—growing, till-tapping, and processing the sap (latex) into rubber. This kind of rubber was Hevea brasiliensis, which originally grew wild in Brazil; seed was exported to other tropical countries. There were some large rubber plantations in the Straits Settlements, Malacca, near Singapore. Wooden Head and Synja ordered several thousand seeds of Hevea brasiliensis and planted these in a seedbed on their land, with the intention of setting out the young trees after half a year or so. In their first year at Batavia, Annie met pleasant neighbors across the road. She had a good voice, but she could not accompany herself on the piano because of her misshapen right hand. But her neighbor played the piano, and so they established a pleasant and profitable relationship. In the fall of 1906 (one cannot really speak of a fall in the 78 WOODEN HEAD tropics, but that time of the year), Wooden Head's second child was born, a boy, Frits. Unfortunately, he had a harelip and a cleft palate. However, after a short time the harelip could be operated on, and the cleft palate did not seem to bother him very much. When he started talking later, one could note that his voice was not absolutely normal, but otherwise he was as normal as any other boy. Apart from the cleft palate, there was nothing which would make Frits seem different from other boys of his age. Since there was only two years' difference in his and his sister Jessica's ages, they played together most of the time. When Wooden Head could find the time, he took them into the garden and went on walks with them. There was a good-sized open field close by where it was safe for them to play with other children. The electric tram ran along the main road, and there was quite some traffic. As will be mentioned later, when Frits was four years old, he and his sister Jessica engaged in a kind of running-climbing contest, in which the boy won. When Wooden Head had to go to Soerabaja in the beginning of 1905, he had to give up his birds and rabbits. Most of them he sold locally, but for his white leghorns, he secured another buyer. These hens laid exceptionally large eggs, especially as compared with the eggs of native birds. His next-younger brother was at that time manager of a sugar plantation in Middle Java; he quite often had visitors, and he wanted to show them their large eggs. So he took over the Leghorns. When Wooden Head visited this brother, Karel, in 1901, before he went back to Holland, his brother was working in the laboratory of a sugar plantation on the north coast of middle Java. He had a hunch that the custom of relying on the age of the cane, about a year after planting, and assuming that the cane had its highest sugar content at that time did not click with the facts. Karel persuaded the owner to make a small replica of the inside of the mill. This was set up in the laboratory. With this small mill, he tested samples of cane for their sugar content. As long as the amount of sugar kept rising, he advised the owner not to cut the cane. As soon as the test did not show any more rise, the cane was cut In this way that particular plantation made a considerably Back to Batavia 79 higher amount of sugar during a season than it had done before. This was the main reason why Karel was now, a few years later, already manager of a plantation. As such, he started other innovations. For example, manure, which was available around a plantation, was customarily used only in a haphazard way, with the result that, before it was applied as fertilizer for the cane, a great part of the best constituents had disappeared. Therefore Karel ordered that the manure be stored carefully in ditches and covered over with palm leaves until it had to be used. As a rule, the sugar of the mills had a large syrup content, and so was brown; it was called muscovados. In 1901 Karel had a krandjang (a large bamboo basket, in which the sugar was packed for shipment) of sugar processed longer than usual, so that it was nearly white. Wooden Head took that along to Holland for his mother. When his teaching duties ended, Wooden Head usually went every Sunday to his land at Buitenzorg to keep in touch with the work there. He looked eagerly toward the day when it would yield enough to permit him to live and work there. There were other rubber trees growing there, as they are often found in the wild in that part of the tropics; this was Ficus elastica. They took longer before they produced, and the rubber was of poorer quality than that of the Hevea brasiliensis. The Ficus elastica trees have large glossy leaves. In the first half of 1907, the young rubber trees bad to be transplanted. They had done very well. Wooden Head spent several Sundays marking the spots where plant holes were to be dug. There were around twenty acres between the second creek and the railway; that was where the cacao trees had been. Three hundred trees were to be planted per acre—six thousand trees in all. In this way, they had room enough to grow until some years after they were expected to come into production. Then the center trees in a square of five would have to be cut out to give the other four more room. There were a few trees left over; Wooden Head took a few along to Batavia and planted them in front of the house he had rented there. 16/ A Magnetic Trip Wooden Head's job at the Observatory should really have been finished in May of 1907, but his wife's uncle's leave had been extended, and Wooden Head stayed another year on the job. The Acting Director wanted him to make a trip to the more eastern part of the Archipelago to take magnetic observations at several places. One of the native assistants went along with him to help with the setting up of the necessary instruments. Via Soerabaja they went first to Bandjermasin, the capital at the south coast of Borneo, where Wooden Head was born. After malting an observation there, they went up the Barito, Borneo's main river, on a small steamer. The captain and the mate of the steamer were nice fellows. They made the trip regularly and called their boat the Oriental Express. Then Wooden Head returned to Bandjermasin to wait for a steamer which would take them along the east coast of Borneo. Bandjermasin, situated at the mouth of the Barito, was very low-lying. At floodtide, the water rose so much everywhere that no bodies could be buried during those hours; it was necessary to wait for low tide to dig a grave. About halfway up the east coast, Wooden Head took an observation at Samarinda, and from there they went to the most northern point below the border of British North Borneo, Tarakan. An oil company had a settlement there. The manager of the company invited Wooden Head to have dinner with them. This locality was full of mosquitoes—they bothered Wooden Head when he was taking his observations—so a curtain of fine muslin was rigged up on the porch while they had their dinner. The same cotton is used around the beds, when it is called a klamboe in Malay. The whole atmosphere smelled of oil. From Tarakan they proceeded to Makassar, the capital of Celebes, situated at the southwest corner of the island. Wooden Head had been there eleven years earlier with the Sumatra. His relatives and cousins who had lived there then had now moved to Java. The Years at the Observatory 81 But he knew somebody else there now who was related to him: Vicki. He had known her as a girl in Holland. She had married an officer in the East Indian Army who now was governor of the Moluccas, the eastern group of islands, with headquarters at Makassar. She and her husband lived in a large house there, and they invited Wooden Head to stay with them. They were pleasant people, Governor Swart being considerably older than his wife. Vicki gave Wooden Head a sarong to take along as a present for Annie. It was made of a special material, and Vicki advised that Annie would have to wear something under it. From Makassar Wooden Head continued to the northeast part of Celebes, Menado, to take an observation. He had pleasant company on the trip, in the form of the young wife of an officer at Menado. He happened to see her again several years later in Holland, when he was on leave there. That was the last observation, and he returned to Batavia. 17/ The Years at the Observatory Transportation in the city in those years was mainly by dos-a- dos (from the French, meaning "back to back"), small horse(pony)-drawn vehicles. The native driver sat in front. There was one other seat there, while there were two seats at the back, with a kind of railing between front and back. Those who could afford it had their own smaller or larger carriage with a native coachman. The word dos-a-dos was abbreviated to sados. These vehicles stood everywhere along the roads waiting for a fare, the "taxis" of Batavia. Wooden Head had never had much luck with the franchise of a German Life Insurance Company, which he took in 1904. In 1907 he became the agent of an accident insurance company, "Fatum." He put two large signboards in front of the house and 82 WOODEN HEAD for a short time rented an office in the business district of the city, where he spent a few hours in the late afternoon, from five to seven. But he did not seem to be cut out for this kind of work. As he had no success with it, he gave it up. The previous year, in 1906, when Wooden Head had two weeks of holiday, they had gone to Sindanglaja, a resort in the mountains above Buitenzorg, near Mount Gede. There Wooden Head met the son of the (white) Rajah of Sarawak, Northwest Borneo. The son was there with an Englishman, Mr. Ellis, who was the liaison between the British Government and the Rajah of Sarawak. The three of them, Mr. Ellis, the Rajah's son, and Wooden Head, went one day up to the top of Mount Gede, negotiating the first part on horseback and the last part on foot. They stayed there overnight in order to be able to see the sunrise there the next morning: a splendid sight, as was the view all around from the top of the mountain. There were a few shacks there, and running water in a brook. Another day, Mr. Ellis and the Rajah's son had gone for a long walk. Wooden Head was talking in the garden to Mrs. Ellis when she was suddenly taken with a kind of seizure and collapsed at his feet. She was too heavy for him to hold her up, and he had to get help to lift her and put her on a couch in their cottage. Since she was so heavy, Mrs. Ellis may have succumbed to the heat, as it was close to noon when that happened. Or it may have been a small stroke. She rallied after a while and did not seem to have any aftereffects then and there. Mr. and Mrs. Ellis had been in Canada, and they told Wooden Head quite a little about the country as it was at that time. The resort at Sindanglaja was run by a Dr. Reddingius, but the doctor's prestige was quite low. His instruments were rusty; and he had at that time a bad boil in his neck. He asked Wooden Head to lance it with one of his instruments. Wooden Head did, and gave Dr. Reddingius some relief. The next year, 1907, Wooden Head and his family went for their holiday to another mountain resort, Lembang, above Bandoeng. It was not a resort really, but there were houses and cottages for rent and there was communication with Bandoeng, so The Years at the Observatory 83 that it was possible to get provisions from there. They met a Dutchman who had emigrated to Java after the Boer War in South Africa at the turn of the century, and his wife and two young boys. This former Boer, Bogaardt, tried to persuade Wooden Head to abandon his holding at Buitenzorg and start something at Lembang, close to them. They were nice people, especially the wife; the man had bad moods, quite possibly a result of his experiences in the Boer War. The bad moods occurred at times when Bogaardt showed that his mind went astray. Mrs. Bogaardt told Wooden Head that at such times her husband seemed to forget the realities of life altogether and went so far that he put her in very embarrassing positions. It was, of course, impossible for Wooden Head to give up his business at Buitenzorg. While passing through Bandoeng, at the time of his holiday in Lembang, Wooden Head ran into Dr. L., whom he would never have thought to meet in Java. Dr. L. had been in charge of the sanatorium in Gelderland. He had lost his first wife, and had remarried. He was now more or less on a honeymoon trip around part of the world. It was a pleasure for Wooden Head to see him again. Something else happened that year which was not very pleasant I have told previously about Wooden Head's older brother, Wennemar, who was manager of the coffee and rice plantation at Tjileboet, north of Buitenzorg. Besides his work there, through the years he had taken part in the founding of an industry at Batavia based on agriculture, so he came to Batavia quite often. At Buitenzorg there was a race track. He took part in the races and had acquired a good horse. Exactly what had happened Wooden Head did not know; but his brother had gotten into serious financial difficulties—so much so that he decided to leave the country. He needed additional money. He communicated with Wooden Head telling him that a certain party would deliver an amount of money to Wooden Head on a certain day, and asking him to see to it that this money reached him on board a steamer at Tandjong Priok, the harbor of Batavia. Wooden Head received the money and had to entrust it to his native "boy," or servant, who took it to Wennemar at the harbor. The boy knew that the money he 84 WOODEN HEAD was carrying was a considerable sum, especially for him. Fortunately, he proved to be absolutely trustworthy. Wennemar and his wife, the daughter of Wooden Head's former guardian, turned up later in the United States. We shall meet him again there later. This happening with his brother Wennemar was quite a shock for Wooden Head. He had had a lot of help from Wennemar and his wife, Clara, when he returned to Java in 1904. He had heard from him later about Wennemar's business interests in Batavia and had gotten the impression that things were on the up and up. He did not know exactly what had happened; but that it was serious was clear from the way they had to leave the country for a—to Wooden Head—unknown destination. Wooden Head had not had so close contact with any other of his brothers as with Wennemar; moreover, he was very fond of Clara as well. The year 1908 brought other changes. If everything had gone as was expected earlier, Wooden Head's time at the Observatory would have been up in May, 1908. But Mr. Stork did not come back from Holland, having been pensioned off. Acting Director Van Brommelen became Director of the Observatory. But he had the right to a leave in Holland a few months later; so steps were taken to get a university-trained man out for the job of Subdirector, with the understanding that, after a short time, he would become Acting Director. This man, a Dr. B., had worked under Professor H. Kamerlingh Onnes at Leyden, the discoverer of the gas helium. Though Dr. B. had had no special training in meteorology or magnetism, he was undoubtedly a well-qualified man. But Dr. B. was six years younger than Wooden Head. It rankled Wooden Head that, after three years' work at the Observatory, he would be subordinate to the newcomer. He asked for an audience with the Governor-General and went to Buitenzorg to see him; he argued his case, but, of course, did not get anywhere. Although the Governor-General normally made the appointments, in such a special case as this, where somebody had to be sent out from Holland, the case was decided there. So Wooden Head's temporary work at the Observatory as Acting Subdirector was extended again, now for a year and a half, the time the new Director would be away. The Years at the Observatory 85 Happily, Dr. B. proved to be a very reasonable man; and, as was logical, in the beginning he needed information on many things from Wooden Head and the other members of the staff. One day they had a visit from the preacher in Riou whom Wooden Head had known there. This man had come to the conclusion that he was in wrong profession; he had therefore left that and was going to study law, with the idea, of course, of becoming a practicing lawyer. There was a reasonable man. That same year of 1908, Annie became fed up with life in the tropics and wanted to go back to Holland. This would mean, of course, a considerable extra expense for the fare to Holland for her and the two children. With his commitments for the land at Buitenzorg, Tanah Sarial (tanah is Malay for "soil"), Wooden Head could not pay these travel expenses out of his salary. He had to borrow the money, and his cousin guaranteed the repayment His wife went to Haarlem, where she had lived earlier and where she had many relatives. Wooden Head had to give up the house where they had lived the last two years, and he rented a few rooms somewhere else. In the meantime work at the Observatory had grown more and more; and the result was that the staff had to be enlarged. Quite a few girls were engaged to do simple calculating and clerical work. One was a young married woman who did not show much intelligence but tried to make up for her lack by making a show of her physical features. (Wooden Head did not succumb to the temptation; because she was one of the staff he had to work with every day, he thought it wiser not to get into an affair with her.) All these girls worked in Wooden Head's departments. New work was started also; a young former naval officer who had had some teaming with balloons was added temporarily to the staff to make several experiments in connection with observations higher up in the air. After some time he went to East Java with a balloon that was to conduct a more extended experiment. But he got entangled in the heavy woods there and as a result lost his life. Wooden Head kept on going to Buitenzorg on Sundays, to visit his land there. It was a pleasure to him to see the strong 86 WOODEN HEAD growth of the rubber trees. He planted seed of leguminous plants, such as indigo, which collect nitrogen from the air and store it in nodules on the roots, in this way improving the soil. When he had time to spare, he quite often went to the Plantentuin in Buitenzorg, the botanical gardens. They were always very interesting. His friend Synja at Meester Cornells, with whom he had ordered the rubber-tree seeds in 1906, sometimes went along with Wooden Head. Synja was a friend in the real meaning of the word: always ready to help if help was needed. At this time he was not in good health, for he suffered from diabetes. After his wife and children had been in Holland about a year, Wooden Head thought that it was about time for them to be coming back to Batavia. He persuaded the Acting Director of the Observatory and the Admiral of the Navy Department to grant him a leave of three months to go to Holland and bring his wife and children back. Again he had to borrow money for the fare. His cousin again guaranteed the security of the loan. His former guardian, Mr. B., and Mr. B.'s wife had returned to Holland and lived in The Hague. He met them and heard some news about their daughter, Clara, who had married Wennemar, Wooden Head's older brother. They had gone to the United States in 1907. They had landed in San Francisco, which was still suffering from the effects of the violent, now-famous earthquake. His brother bad gotten a job there as a teamcar-driver. Later they moved to Los Angeles. Wooden Head had promised Dr. B. and his wife to visit the latter's parents and family, who lived in North Holland. He fulfilled his promise, to the delight of Mrs. B.'s parents, who were very glad to hear something about their daughter through this personal contact. After a few weeks in Holland, Wooden Head's time was up and Wooden Head, his wife, and their two children returned to Batavia. There was an organization in Batavia called De Indische Bond (The Indian League). Its purpose was to help Dutch people who could not find work to start something on a piece of land which after a while could give them a living. They had some land higher up in the mountains, not far from Buitenzorg; there were three dif- The Years at the Observatory 87 f erent people there, each of whom had a parcel of land on which, in the main, tea-bushes had been planted. Two of them were brothers; the third one was a married man who lived there with his wife, a young niece, and a child. A committee of the league formed the contact between these people and the organization. Wooden Head was asked to act on this committee. So now and then Wooden Head went up there with another member of the committee; it was not long before he found out that the two owner-brothers were not sincerely interested in working the land to produce sufficiently for their needs. On the other hand, the third man and his family worked hard to make a go of it. The committee reported the way things were to a meeting of the organization. After some years, interest in the organization started to lag, and eventually it died of indifference. When this happened, the two brothers had to look out only for themselves. The third party—man, wife, child, and niece— was another thing. Wooden Head could not help them financially, but on his land at Buitenzorg he still had the small cottage where Hartmann and his wife had lived for some time while Hartmann was building the house in front. Wooden Head let the third man and his family occupy the cottage, and at the same time this man kept an eye on things. When Wooden Head and his family came back to Batavia, they had to find another house. Synja came to his rescue again. He owned a house, not far from the one they had rented earlier, which happened to be vacant, and they rented that. The house was larger than the former one, and it also had a larger garden. Wooden Head bought a heifer which had just calved, for a reasonable price, one hundred fifty guilders. Thus, they had their own milk, and after a while they could sell milk to a few neighbors as well. In the beginning of 1910, Van Brommelen, the Director of the Observatory, returned from Holland. Wooden Head had been able to work with Dr. B. quite pleasantiy. But with Van Brommelen's return, everything changed. Without a special reason to extend his stay at the Observatory, Wooden Head's time there would have been up when Van Brommelen came back. But the work at the 88 WOODEN HEAD Observatory had been growing more and more and a definite change, involving an enlargement of the staff, was under consideration. Thus, Wooden Head was kept at the Observatory, though, of course, he was no longer Acting Subdirector. The stress of the last few years had had more and more effect upon Wooden Head. Where there had been no improvement in the working of his digestive system (nobody had ever told him, so far, what he could do to get rid of the constipation and, so, of the resultant sciatica; he learned that only years later), the stress of the Observatory work, besides his own private concern about bis business at Buitenzorg, bad forced him to use some mild medicine regularly to be sure that he would sleep sufficiendy to do his work; once a week he usually had to use something stronger, such as veronal, to get results. Though his wife had come back with him, he soon realized that she did not care for life in the tropics. This did not make it easier for him, of course. During that year, 1910, Wooden Head heard that his friend Nancy was seriously ill. She had been teaching in East Java. She was coming to Batavia to try to get special medical care for her illness, which seemed to be of a rheumatic character—in her case, affecting the muscles and joints in her legs especially. Her parents had left Batavia, and so Wooden Head invited her to stay with them for the time being. Nancy had to stay in bed, for she could not move around. When she arrived at Batavia by boat, she had to be carried from the boat on a stretcher. To alleviate the pain in her legs, hot compresses had to be used. When he was at home later in the afternoon and at night, Wooden Head mostly took care of her. His wife, Annie, did not seem inclined to do much for her, not being very well herself. So, in helping her, Wooden Head could not help seeing more of her than otherwise would have happened. She was a good-looking, attractive girl and thankful for the help she got; if she had not suffered so much pain, a more intimate situation might very well have developed. Where Annie did not mind leaving Wooden Head for a whole year, without any real necessity; and where she, after her return from Holland, showed clearly that she would like to disappear again as soon as possible, The Years at the Obse it is no wonder that the companionship which had existed in the earlier years of their marriage had pretty well gone. At that very time Nancy turned up, and her illness and the care she needed threw her and Wooden Head together for hours during the days that she was a guest in their house. They had enjoyed each other's company nine years earlier on the boat trip from Palembang to Batavia, and it was not difficult to go on from there. They did not have to grope for words; their growing closer together was natural. It was too bad that it could not last, but her condition forced her to go to a hospital. Later that year it became painfully clear that Annie wanted to go to Holland again. The situation became impossible. She had been seeing a youngish doctor, a nerve specialist. This was the same doctor that Wooden Head had seen earlier, before he went to Holland to fetch Annie and the children back; and in later years he saw him again. Wooden Head had a few weeks' holiday coining yet, and he went up in the mountains, this time with the two children, while his wife stayed at Batavia. Those who have not lived in the tropics cannot realize how beneficial and pleasant a few weeks in the mountains can be after the everlasting heat at the coast The children enjoyed it also. One morning they went for quite a walk to the Ontbytberg (Breakfast Mountain). It was really a good-sized hill. The children raced each other to the top. Frits, only four, won. Wooden Head can never forget this in connection with what happened a year later in Holland. As the household was going to be broken up soon, the cow had to be sold; she was giving at that time sixteen liters a day. The value of a milking cow in those times was set in this way: the cow itself was worth twenty-five guilders; plus the number of liters of milk she gave daily multiplied by twenty-five. Therefore, the cow brought four hundred twenty-five guilders. While Wooden Head and the children were on this holiday, Annie sold the cow for that amount. Before the end of the year she and the children left for Holland. Wooden Head found a good room and arranged for meals at the same place as well. In 1911 a new university graduate came out from Holland 90 WOODEN HEAD to enlarge the staff of the Observatory. Dr. B. had started an investigation about the possibihty of forecasting rainfall in the more immediate future. This was an important item for the agricultural industry. It involved a lot of extra work, and where Wooden Head handled rainfall records, he needed more personnel again for the extra calculations. His clerks were of varying degrees of competence. One who had been there since 1908, acting in the end more or less as his secretary, had a desk in his room, while the other girls, by that time, filled an entire large hall. In that same year, 1911, a decision was made concerning the new organization of the staff. On January 1, 1912, Wooden Head would become a definite part of the Civil Service, with the tide Scientific Assistant. The nearly seven years that he had been there temporarily counted for his service; he would then get a salary of six hundred fifty guilders a month and one hundred guilders house- rent indemnity. The native members of the staff had, long before this, found out that if they had anything to talk over or ask in connection with their position at the Observatory, their best bet was to approach Wooden Head, for they knew he would strive to be fair. In his opinion, they were considerably underpaid, although the Observatory could not have done without them. In later years, after Wooden Head left the Observatory, he heard more than once from one of the Dutch staff members how the natives regretted that Wooden Head was no longer there to look after their interests. His experience with his overseer at the rubber plantation in Buitenzorg, even with his own domestic servants, and perhaps the fact that he must have a drop of Indonesian blood in his veins, and also his former experience with natives on board Navy ships, helped him considerably to understand their problems. Before the end of 1911, fate struck. In Haarlem, where Wooden Head's wife and children were, there was a specialist who had operated on cleft palates many times with success. Annie heard about him, went to see him, and arranged for an operation for Frits, who was five. In November, Wooden Head heard through the intermediary of the nerve specialist in Batavia that his son had died in the operation. He wrote to the Haarlem specialist, who The Years at the Observatory 91 told him that he had operated a thousand times for such a case and had never had an accident. This time the operation had to be done in two parts, he wrote. The first operation went all right, but evidently the boy could not stand the second one shortly thereafter. The operation had not been a necessity at all; for five long years Frits had learned to live with his cleft palate. The little difference one heard in his speaking did not amount to much, and in other ways he was perfectiy normal. Annie had really decided on the operation on her own, and so it was no wonder that Wooden Head felt bitter about it. He could only see it as a waste of a promising life. So the gulf between Annie and Wooden Head became wider and deeper. Early in 1912, the rubber trees were five years old. Wooden Head had read up on the tapping and processing of the latex and had acquired the necessary tools and put up what machinery was needed, which was quite simple, in the little office in the workshop. Tapping was started and the sap—the latex—processed into sheets of rubber. The Batavia market bought the rubber. This was what Wooden Head had worked toward through the years. He had foreseen the future of rubber. He visualized that eventually his production would grow so that it might pay to have a spur of the railway laid into his place to facilitate shipping. But as the year 1912 rolled on, he began to realize clearly that his health was far from what it should have been for a man of thirty-eight By that time Civil Service laws which covered leaves to Holland had been changed. The tenure required, before a leave could be granted, was shortened to eight years, after which time one year's leave was given. In May, 1913, Wooden Head would be entitled to the year's leave. In the second half of the year, Wooden Head heard that his wife would be coming back from Holland with their girl, Jessica. But he also knew by that time that she wanted a divorce. She had the idea that somebody else in Batavia wanted to marry her. After what had happened during the last few years, and especially after the unnecessary operation on their boy and his resulting death, Wooden Head was not going to do anything to prevent his wife's getting a divorce. So, as soon as she arrived, Wooden Head talked 92 WOODEN HEAD it over with her. In advance, he had a partition made in the room which he had at the boardinghouse, so that they could be apart from each other while she was there. The divorce was granted without difficulties. Jessica was awarded to her father's custody. But Annie's expectation that somebody else would marry her did not materialize, and she went back to Holland. Wooden Head found a paviljoen, as most larger houses had, consisting of two or three rooms apart from the main house, with bathroom and other facilities behind those rooms and with a covered porch in front, a necessity in the rainy season. A bathroom in the tropics usually had a part, walled in with concrete, which was filled daily with water from a well; from this cistern water was taken for bathing. There was no necessity for hot water. Some people even put large pieces of ice in the water. Wooden Head and Jessica had two bedrooms and what you could call a living room. Wooden Head advertised for a housekeeper, got quite a few letters and answered them, giving the writers a certain time later in the afternoon for an interview, which in a few cases gave course to embarrassment, for one person might come a bit late and the next a bit too early. He even bad a letter from a girl in middle Java, who evidently read the Batavia paper. She looked to be the best prospect, but after he wrote this girl and suggested that she come to Batavia, she wrote him that she had got engaged and therefore could not come. So in the end he had to choose from the local applicants, and chose a girl in her late teens who might be a desirable companion to his eight-year-old daughter, Jessica. This girl remained with them some months; she was a fair housekeeper. She had been living with a married sister, and told Wooden Head that her sister and brother-in-law had only one large bed in their house and that the three of them slept there. It did not take long before that girl and Wooden Head got together and enjoyed each other's company. In December, 1912, Wooden Head had two weeks' holiday coming; he let the girl housekeeper go and went with Jessica to Lembang in the mountains above Bandoeng, where he rented a cottage. The Years at the Observatory 93 They had quite a good time there, seeing the Bogaardt family frequently. That family's two boys were playmates for Jessica. Only Wooden Head noticed that Bogaardt was going down in certain ways. He had found earlier that Bogaardt had moody periods, and his wife told Wooden Head that those bad spells were getting worse all the time. Wooden Head was sorry for her; she was a nice woman and suffered considerably from the condition of her husband. Before he went on the holiday, Wooden Head had arranged with Jane, the girl at the Observatory who more or less acted as his secretary there, and who lived with her mother and a younger sister, to take Jessica in and look after her. They lived quite close to where Wooden Head had rented their rooms, and in this way he did not need a housekeeper. With May only four months off, when he would be entitled to a year's leave in Holland, Wooden Head had to think seriously about bis plantation at Buitenzorg. He had been able to pay necessary interest and instalments on the mortgage out of his salary at the Observatory, but it would be impossible to do that out of a leave-salary, which was only about one-third of the active one. And, however much he loathed the idea of having to sell the plantation with the house, and so forth, and losing the results of nearly nine years' work there, he could not see another way out. Moreover, since their divorce, he felt more and more obliged to pay back to his former wife the money which they had borrowed in 1904 to buy the land and to start developing it. So after talking it over with his agent at Buitenzorg, he put an ad in the Batavia papers on a Saturday night in January, 1913. Monday morning following, Wooden Head received a wire from his agent at Buitenzorg saying that he had a buyer. Wooden Head had a hunch that it was the Chinaman who owned the next parcel of land on the road to Tjileboet. So he wired back to his agent that he could make the sale if the prospective buyer was a "human being." The agent understood what he meant, but he also knew that Wooden Head had to sell to be able to go on leave 94 WOODEN HEAD Wooden Head did not relish selling his property to the Chinaman for more than one reason. The way the Chinaman had taken care of his own adjoining property during the more than eight years they had been neighbors, so to say, was not very promising. People who run a business just for the financial profit they get out of it might not mind selling their business to someone who they suspect will not give it the care it should have, as long as they get the money they want from the sale. But Wooden Head had put more than money into the property; during those eight years he had given it every moment he could spare from the work he had to do for a living; and a great deal of thought had gone into it, since he hoped that the time would come when he could live there on the revenue from the property—mainly from the twenty acres in rubber. Those who have never planted a tree or a seed or seen it develop through the years, who perhaps have never done a creative thing in their life, would not understand. But in this case you might say that it broke bis heart to be forced into such a transaction—forced to do this by his declining health. Besides, the Chinaman tried to pinch on the price. That may be considered a valauble characteristic in trade, but Wooden Head was not made that way; he had set the price lower than the real value in his opinion: as long as he would pay off the mortgage, could reimburse his former wife, Annie, for the money originally borrowed on her shares, and have a little left in connection with his planned leave to Holland, he would be satisfied. He carried no grudge against a Chinaman as such; there were in those times many hard-working Chinamen in the Dutch East Indies; and there were exceptions as in any race: this man was a less pleasant exception. (Only a few months ago Wooden Head heard something about his former property—the rubber plantation especially. His oldest living daughter—from a later marriage—had married an Indonesian during the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies in the early nineteen-forties. Wooden Head's son-in-law happened to be in West Java; at Wooden Head's request he had a look there, and he wrote that the condition of the plantation was rather poor. The Years at the Observatory 95 It is, of course, impossible to say if this was the result of lack of care by the Chinaman.) So it had to happen that way. Wooden Head went to Buitenzorg to close the deal. He received twenty-five thousand guilders for the plantation; luckily, no sales tax was required there. He paid Annie around twelve thousand guilders, which had been borrowed in 1904; and nearly that much which still was outstanding on first and second mortgage; he had thirteen hundred guilders left for his work during those nine years. It was a difficult moment for him to have to say good-bye to Mas Oedin, his overseer for all those years; Mas Oedin had proved to be a real friend as well. And to say good-bye to those six thousand rubber trees and all his hopes for a good future with them was almost more than he could bear. Those trees were live things to him; but such is life. During those last few months something sad happened. His niece, Eugenie, whom he had first met in Makassar, died suddenly. He was not told precisely what had happened to her, but thinking back to his own sister who died in 1899 after a short illness, he could understand. He went to her burial and spoke a few words. Where he had some more leisure time now, he often went later in the afternoon with Jessica to a kind of park where there was entertainment for children. He had bought her a bicycle, which she liked very much. He rapidly made plans for his departure. He went to say goodbye to his friend Synja, who had helped him so often and for whom he felt a great affection. He had to sell what furniture he had and other things that he could not take along. Then, after taking leave of all his coworkers at the Observatory and the family who had taken care of Jessica the last four months, he and Jessica went on board for their trip to Holland. 18/ Back to Holland Once More They went with a boat of the Nederland company, via Singapore, Ceylon, the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, and the Mediterranean, to Genoa in northwestern Italy. After passing the Red Sea, they were finally out of the tropics. Wooden Head felt much better. In Genoa they left the ship and went by train through northern Italy, Switzerland, and Germany to Holland. In Holland they went direct to Haarlem, where Annie was living with a family she knew. Jessica visited her for a few weeks. Wooden Head stayed with another family. He saw Frits's grave and arranged with the municipality for its upkeep. He went to see his father, who had moved from Amersfoort to Baam, also in the Province of Utrecht; he had taken a housekeeper and later married her. Wooden Head's mother, who had died in 1904, was buried in Amersfoort, and Wooden Head visited her grave there. His father was not very well any more; most of the time he was in bed. Then he went house-hunting. He wanted to settle somewhere in the country. He found a good house, really larger than he needed, in a small place, Heelsum, about ten kilometers west of Arnhem, close to the north bank of the Lek, one of the outlets of the Rhine. The rent was very reasonable, and he signed a year's lease. There was quite a good-sized garden with it. It was located on the main road between Arnhem and Utrecht, with an electric team passing by. Jessica and he moved in there; Annie also moved in for the first half-year or so. This may seem rather peculiar. The main reason was to give Annie and Jessica the opportunity to see more of each other for a time than would be possible in any other way. There was no wish from either side, Annie's or Wooden Head's, to get closer again. They then had some help for the kitchen and Back to Holland Once More 97 to keep the house in shape. They rented a Pianola with music rolls; Annie could not use her right hand very much, but she could handle the Pianola. Wooden Head bought a bicycle for Jessica and one for himself. Jessica had to go to school in Renkum. She was nine then, and went on the bike; in Holland there are special bicycle paths along most of the main roads, so there was not so much danger from traffic. While it was summer, Wooden Head set to work to make something of the garden. He also bought a dozen or so laying chickens —Buff Orpingtons; he had a coop made for them and teapnested them. When Annie was in Holland with the children in 1908-9 and in 1910-12, she had often had help for the children from a girl in Haarlem about her own age, who ran a shop with her mother. This girl, Kay, had grown very fond of the children and had suffered with the others when Frits died from the operation. After half a year or so, Annie went to five by herself not far away, and Kay came from Haarlem to help with the household and to be with Jessica. She was a nice, quiet girl, and nothing was too much for her to do. Around Easter, 1914, the Meyers, friends in Haarlem, came over for a while; and a sister of Wooden Head also came. They all had bikes and used to go for long rides in the country, through Arnhem to and through the Middachter Allee, a wide road to the northeast, lined at both sides by two rows of old shade trees and one of the beauty spots of Holland. Around this time, Wooden Head had to go before a medical committee; they extended his leave for half a year. A little later Wooden Head went to Genoa, Italy, to meet Jane, who had been at the Observatory with him. She had taken leave to go to Holland, and Wooden Head had promised to meet her at Genoa so that they could travel together to Holland. They spent a day in Genoa, having a look at the surroundings; then they took a train to Basel, Switzerland, and from there a Rhine River boat to Holland. Jane rented a room in Heelsum; not long afterward, she and Wooden Head became engaged; after some time she went to The Hague, where she had some friends. 98 WOODEN HEAD Just below the house Wooden Head had rented there was quite a piece of good land running up to the main road. Wooden Head leased it for six years, with the idea that before the lease ran out he might have returned to Holland to stay there—that he might then be able to buy it and build a house on it. He planted quite a few fruit trees on this land and wanted to build a long laying house. He had bought an incubator, hatched chicks, and raised them. He had an American book about poultry and used many of the ideas described in it. He wanted to build such a laying house as the book pictured, but it was beyond his means. However, Kay promised to help him financially. On August 4 some more guests arrived and they all went on a long bicycle ride. When they came home later in the afternoon through Arnhem, they found everywhere bulletins about the war which had broken out. Soon Belgium was overrun by the Germans. Holland was officially neutral. The Dutch in general were for the Allies and against Germany. Many Belgians crossed the border and sought asylum in Holland. Everybody who could do so was asked to take a Belgian family or individual refugees into their house, giving them shelter and food. Wooden Head, with his quite large house, thought it his duty to help. He took in a man, his wife, his small boy, and a single young man. This family did not do much to help in any way to relieve the burden on the household; but the single young man did everything he could to help with the work. Work on the laying house was started in the hope of getting it finished before winter would make everything more difficult. Jane came back from The Hague and pressed Wooden Head to get on with the marriage. It was rather a peculiar situation, with the Belgians in the house. However, Wooden Head could see Jane's point of view, and they were married in November. Kay went back to Haarlem. Wooden Head's leave was extended once more with a half- year. That winter there was quite some snow. Holland was surrounded by the Germans, who had swept through Belgium to France. Food was expensive and scarce. The Suez Canal was soon blocked, and communication with the Dutch East Indies had to Back to Holland Once More 99 go around Capetown, South Africa, or via the United States and the Pacific Ocean. After some months the Belgian family found another home to shelter them. Their child was badly frightened; often there were Dutch soldiers around, and the child must have had a bad remembrance of the Germans in Belgium, for he tried to hide as soon as he saw a soldier. The young man, Hermens, stayed on for a considerably longer time. Wooden Head had bought two puppies (of a Belgian breed). They grew up to become nice small dogs. He often went for a walk up the heather with those dogs. Later in the spring of 1915, he began to realize that he could not make much progress with the poultry, since he was not sure how much longer he could continue to stay in Holland. So he divided the birds he had in several small pens and sold these publicly. During one of Jessica's vacations, the two of them went to Ootmarsum in Overysel Province, where Wooden Head had been so often in his younger years. His Uncle Hendrik still lived on the same farm and had quite a family by this time. Since they had no spare beds, Jessica and Wooden Head slept on straw in a spare room. It was pleasant to see those old surroundings again; close to that farm was the Hezenberg, not a mountain really (berg— mountain), but just a high hill, with quite a few trails; but in that flat land, a hill was something special. Wooden Head had joined a poultry organization which covered most of the country. In that way he came into contact with some of the poultry inspectors who worked for the government. One of them had quite a good place in Gelderiand, but for some reason he could not stay there and had advertised his place for sale. He had a good house, and also a smaller house and a large piece of land. Wooden Head thought of trying to buy the smaller house, with some of the land. It was going to be sold publicly by the Notary of that district. (A notary—notaris in Dutch—is different from notaries here; Holland is divided into so many districts, and each has only one notary, who has to be appointed. A young person who wants to become a notary has to train first for several years as 100 WOODEN HEAD an apprentice in some notary's office. An apprentice works with the notary who teaches him, but not independently. He can get his own business only when a notary retires or dies.) Wooden Head attended the sale and talked with the notary. He really did not have anything worthwhile in cash money; there was somebody else there, from Rotterdam, and from the way this fellow talked to the notary, Wooden Head got the impression that he was a serious prospective buyer. There were a few other people there, but they did not bid. Wooden Head wanted his friend to get as good a price as possible, so he did bid; he soon realized that the fellow from Rotterdam wanted the property, so he bid the fellow up as far as he dared. It was, of course, risky, since he did not have the money to pay up if he should get stuck with it. Finally he felt it the better part of valor to let the Rotterdam There is something about those auctions in Holland which, as far as I know, does not apply here; because Wooden Head had bid up constantiy, he got a bonus of one hundred and ten guilders. Why? The explanation must be that, if nobody bid it up, a property would have to be sold for a much lower price. Therefore, the owner (the customer) and the notary himself benefited from a second bidder. The man who bought in the end had to pay that extra money. After it was all settled, Wooden Head and his friend went and had a drink to celebrate. This friend was very thankful for what Wooden Head had done. 19/ Wooden Head Gets an Eye-Opener In September, 1915, Wooden Head got a surprise. He ran into Dr. L. The first thing Dr. L. said was, "How is your sciatica?" The answer was, "Pretty much the same, Doctor." "Come along," Dr. L. said, "I have a book for you to read." Wooden Head went along with him; Dr. L. had just bought an older house, not far away, on the main road, which he wanted to turn into a small sanatorium. The book was Die Eszsucht (The Eatmanid). It was written by Dr. Ullmen, a German naturopath. This man said: "We are all eating, drinking and breathing all day and night long all kinds of germs; when we are clean inside— like a new waterpipe—those germs can't do any harm; they pass through the body, and that is the end of it. But... if we are not clean inside, if we are constipated, we have a rotten mass in our intestines; that is the stuff on which those germs live; they throw off waste; and the waste gets into our blood as poison. If the process goes on and on, those poisons crystallize at the weakest spot, causing pain; depending upon where the pain is, the orthodox medical profession gives it a name, or different names; but the cause is the same—the constipation—and this is the result of not chewing food and drink properly. Proper chewing produces saliva; saliva makes food and drink undergo a chemical change in the mouth, preparing the same in that way for the other digestive organs (drink to be moved in the mouth with the tongue). In that way food and drink will go down of their own, without gulping; and will be digested properly." This reasoning was all new to Wooden Head, as nobody had ever told him to chew properly in the forty-one and a half years he had lived. But it sounded logical to him, although he did not know enough about the human body to be able to judge. But, he 102 WOODEN HEAD reasoned, trying to chew in that way can't do any harm. So he did, right away. To his delighted surprise, in twenty-four hours he got rid of his lifelong constipation and had a proper elimination without any trouble. He took it, from that, that he was on the right track. The only thing he had ever before heard or read about chewing was that Gladstone had advocated chewing thirty-two times. So Wooden Head started counting how many times he had to chew different foods; brown bread, as it was made in Holland at that time, took him fifty-six times; white bread (having been deprived of all live ingredients), one hundred twelve times—twice as long; and different other foods, longer than that. The highest count came with a tough piece of meat (how often do you eat a tender piece of meat?); he chewed it more than seven hundred times—just one piece of meat, one bite. After that, he eliminated properly every morning, quite often twice, and was ready for the day's work. Gradually his sciatical pains became less severe. Dr. Ullmen explained it this way: when there is no more constipation, no more poison gets into the blood; the blood gradually acquires the capability of dissolving the poison crystals; the poison will then leave the body in the natural way. That is exactly what happened to Wooden Head; it took him about a year and a half to get rid of all the poison he had accumulated during forty years of improper eating habits; then his sciatica vanished and, with it, his sensitivity to everlasting colds. (At the Naval College, he received only eight hankies, which was absolutely insufficient for him in his condition; it took him quite a while before he could persuade the "powers that were" to give him six more hankies.) The boils which had troubled him, and were simply the poison trying to get out of the body, disappeared, and likewise the headaches (migraine) and insomnia which had plagued him, especially from 1909 to 1913. His despondent nature changed for the better. He got another outlook on life. Dr. L. helped him in all kinds of ways to speed up the process. He told Wooden Head to soak a bedsheet in water and then undress altogether; to wrap the wet sheet around his body and get under the blankets. After half an hour Dr. L. came along; he took Wooden Head Gets an Eye-Opener 103 the sheet off, and rinsed it out in the bathtub, and you could see all the dirt it had extracted from the skin. The skin is one of the most important of the digestive organs. He further applied electric currents to stimulate the body. He and Wooden Head took long walks together, talking about everything under the sun. Dr. L. told Wooden Head to keep some paper next to his bed so that, if he had a dream, he could put down its main contents before he had forgotten it. Dr. L. had studied Professor Sigmund Freud's ideas about psychoanalysis and tried to find out what might be behind some of Wooden Head's idiosyncrasies. He also wanted Wooden Head to put down for him a short survey of his life so far. When he read it, he said, "I have had many patients in my life, but I never bad one, so far, who has gone through things as you have." He was really wonderful to Wooden Head—a friend as well as a doctor; and the more so, since he knew that Wooden Head did not have the money to pay him for all his work. He never sent him any bill. There are, of course, other things—secondary causes—which may influence the digestion negatively: fright, shock, having to work at a trade or profession which one is not interested in; having to work with a boss whom one can't stand; strained relations between a man and his wife who are forced to stay together even if they loathe each other; exposure to the elements without being prepared for it, and so forth. But all these are secondary; not chewing properly is the main cause. (Somebody reading what I say about being forced to live together remarked that my statement is "untrue," saying, "Divorce may be difficult to obtain, but I know of no laws in the West forcing people over twenty-one to live together." The point is this: a man and woman marry, as so often happens, not because they love each other—which should be the only reason—but because one of the parties wants to get away from intolerable conditions, while the other thinks that he can get a cheap housekeeper in that way. In case the man is or was in government service, his wife is— in most cases—entided to a widow's pension. Now they find out that they not only do not care for each other, but through the years they begin to loathe, to hate, each other. If they should manage to 104 WOODEN HEAD get a divorce—here in Canada adultery is the only recognized reason, through the pressure of the church and its henchmen, so that they have to resort to that or get a lawyer to help them to simulate adultery—then the woman in question would lose her right to a widow's pension, though she may have slaved for the man for ten, twenty, or thirty years or longer. The law should see to it that in such a case the woman gets a certain percentage of the pension, the amount to depend on the time she has lived with the man. Women's organizations should tackle this problem. It might be possible that such a woman could find somebody with whom she could lead a happy life, but the loss of what she is morally en- titied to might make this impossible.) In bis book, Dr. Ullmen mentioned the following case. A cat was in a room, at ease. An X-ray picture revealed that the digestive progress was going on normally; then a dog was brought in. This frightened the cat so much that its digestion stopped for four hours. Wooden Head himself saw in southern California in 1918 what can happen if objects which do not belong in a body get into it—what nature then does. He visited a goat ranch there; the manager there told him this. A little while ago, a doctor who lived in the desert in Arizona and who had quite a number of goats died suddenly. There was nobody there to take care of the goats; all they could find to keep alive were cacti. The executor of that doctor's estate found the goats there in miserable condition. He took the goats to the ranch, where they were fed to bring them into proper condition so that they could be sold. Wooden Head saw them there. Wooden Head saw that the thorns of the cacti which they had eaten were working out of their bodies all over. Nature forced them out. All the goats returned to good condition. There are other things which go along with good chewing. Man fives not on what he eats, but on what he digests. When one chews well, one can do with less food, which is no little item, with sky-rocketing prices. It becomes second nature; one learns to eat that food which suits one best. When Wooden Head's last teeth had to be pulled in September, 1934 (his teeth had deteriorated long before he learned to chew properly), the dentist wanted to make him an artificial set; but Wooden Head could not afford that, Another Tour in Batavia 105 so he had to do without it. After a few days on soft food, his gums were well enough healed so that he could chew in a fashion with those. Since then he has chewed with his gums. He cannot eat hard things, cannot crack nuts, and so forth, but he is alive and still can do some work. He has no special health troubles; bis practice has been to just get a checkup once a year, during the last six years or so, and his blood is as good as ever. From his experience, he feels that proper chewing would stop or prevent many illnesses and so improve the health of the nation— and of the world—considerably, thereby contributing to more happiness. A study of the digestive system should be included in the curriculum of all schools everywhere, so that small children may learn early how important good chewing is. If Wooden Head cuts himself, as can happen so often, the wound heals in less than no time, because his blood is free from poison. The demand for more doctors, more nurses, more hospitals, more drugs never stops. Wooden Head is absolutely convinced that we could do with fewer doctors, fewer nurses, fewer hospitals, fewer drugs, and so forth, if everybody had the sense to chew properly. An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. Keep clean inside, and the outside will take care of itself. 20/ Another Tour in Batavia It was September, 1915, when Dr. L. met Wooden Head again and helped to make another man of him. Before long, Wooden Head obtained his last half-year's extension of his leave. When that was over, he would have to return to Batavia, if the Medical Committee considered him to be again in sufficientiy good health, or, if not, he would have to be pensioned off. Jane was expecting by that time. His friends in Haarlem invited her to come to them. There was an excellent doctor in Haar- i 106 WOODEN HEAD j lem, and she decided to go. The child was born in February, 1916 —a girl, Rosalind. In the meantime, the war continued and more restrictions were imposed in all kinds of ways. The time came when Wooden Head had to undergo his last physical examination, and the committee evidently were of the opinion that he could go back to Batavia and the Observatory. The trip had to be made around South Africa, for the Suez Canal was blocked up. Wooden Head secured a cabin for himself and Jessica on one of the boats of the Rotterdam Lloyd line but there was no more room on that ship for his wife and Rosalind. They obtained a cabin on another ship of the same line which would leave on the same day. Because of the war, the ships had to go around the north of Scodand, to Kirkwall, in the Orkney Islands; from there the ship's papers had to be sent to London for examination before they could proceed. This stricture was imposed to make sure that there was no contraband on board which might fall into the enemy's hands. While thinking about that, Wooden Head realized that anything German might be considered contraband. He had with him a copy of Die Eszsucht. To prevent any possible embarrassment, he dropped the book overboard. While both ships were at Kirkwall, one of the passengers on board Wooden Head's ship was persuaded to exchange her cabin for Wooden Head's wife's cabin on the other ship. Thus Jane and their daughter Rosalind could travel the rest of the way on the same ship with Wooden Head and Jessica. The ship went through the Irish Sea between Ireland and England and around Spain and Portugal and West Africa to Capetown. In Capetown, Wooden Head and his family went ashore for part of a day and had a good look around. Wooden Head's thoughts went back, of course, to the Saturday in 1895 when he set out to Newlands by train to see bis Boer friend and had to go back without seeing him because he was too shy to go to the house which looked more like a mansion than a farmhouse. There was a passenger with whom Wooden Head played whist rning, afternoon, and night during most of the trip. This man 3 manager of a sugar factory in middle Java. He was too stout Another Tour in Batavia 107 for his age. About two weeks before they arrived at Batavia, Wooden Head told him what he had learned about the importance of chewing food thoroughly and how much benefit he had gotten from it. When they said good-bye at Batavia, this man said: "In these last two weeks, by trying to chew as you told me, I have already benefited; I feel much better." Later, we shall hear more about this. Another passenger, a school inspector, who travelled regularly over Java, saw this man quite a few times, and, back in Batavia, he always brought news from this man and his wife. This school inspector finally took over the renting of Wooden Head's house. After nearly two months en route, they arrived at Batavia. They had to rent anything they could get to begin with, so that Wooden Head could resume his work at the Observatory as soon as possible. There were many changes, of course, since Wooden Head had been there more than three years previous. After a short time Wooden Head found another house which he could rent which was better for their purpose. It was furnished, and he could rent it only if he took over the furniture at a price of fifteen hundred guilders. He talked this over with his friend Synja at Meester-Cornelis, and again Synja came to his rescue. At the Observatory, the work that Wooden Head now had to do was partly different from what he had done before. Gradually friction developed between himself and the Director of the Observatory. In a few months the situation had become so bad that he decided to make up a request to the Governor-General about it. He wrote out the whole history of the Observatory, as he knew it, and the part that Van Brommelen had taken in it. His request itself was short enough, but he attached an appendix of a hundred pages folio, typed, in which he explained the entire situation. He had to have that typed in the city. His petition had to go through the adrninisteative channels, and, thus, through the Admiral of the Navy Department After studying the request, the Admiral heard Wooden Head for nearly an hour, after which he issued an order. Wooden Head was to do his Observatory work at home, for the time being, until the Governor- General made a decision. The Director of the Observatory was to send Wooden Head that part of his work which he could do at home. Instead, Van Brommelen sent work which was usually done by clerks. Wooden Head took this, of course, as a personal affront. He simply could not do that work. He wrote the Admiral, but still he did not get any other work. After six months, Wooden Head received an answer from the Governor-General. Wooden Head was given six months to find another government job (of a suitable nature); if he did not find such a job within six months, he would be put on wachtgeld, meaning part-salary, until a job might be open which he could tackle. In the meantime, the war had got on. Some neutral countries had formed a League of Neutral Nations to defend their own interests, but at the same time it was plain enough that they were for the Allies and against Germany. A branch of the League was formed in the Dutch East Indies, at Batavia. Wooden Head joined. He wrote a short article entitled "Wordt Wakker" ("Wake Up"), which the Batavia papers printed. Then he collected data from different sources and, with the financial help of the League Branch, he had the material printed in book form, under the tide "Wordt Wakker." In August, 1916, thirteen countries had joined the League of Neutral Nations. One of the main causes bringing about this action was the fact that Germany had torpedoed neutral merchant vessels without any regard for the fact that these ships belonged to neutral nations; besides, a great number of the members of the crews of these vessels had perished while the German attackers had looked on without doing anything to try to save their lives. The way in which Belgium and northern France had been trampled underfoot and part of the population transported to Germany to do slave labor for the enemy was another important reason for those neutral countries to pull together to try to stop this perpetration of crimes which were absolutely a violation of international agreements. Wooden Head probably was able to get information from the Holland Branch of the League of Neutral Nations because, while he had been on leave in Holland when the war broke out in Au- Another Tour in Batavia 109 gust, 1914, he had given shelter and food to some Belgians for quite some time; and in 1915 he had joined in the protests against the incarceration of the editor of the Telegraaf, one of Holland's main newspapers in Amsterdam, after the editor had attacked the Germans for the crimes they had committed and the weak attitude of the then Dutch Government. Wooden Head had really started the formation of the Dutch East Indian Branch, and he acted as their secretary. In a short time they had hundreds of members from among the general public and also people who had important standing in the community. Some of the papers helped to make the purpose of the Branch better known, while some other papers wrote against what they called the non-neutral attitude of the Branch, though by expressing their opposition they at the same time managed to make the purpose better known. When the Germans torpedoed the Lusitania and the United States entered the war as an immediate result of that action, the Neutral Nations Branch, of course, came more into the limelight. When later in the year Wooden Head had to leave the country, his co-workers had to take over bis work; but by that time the groundwork had been done. "Right above Might" was the slogan they had adopted, and one of the members had created a cartoon which exemplified that slogan. The unpleasantness at the Observatory and its consequences had their influence upon Wooden Head's family life, and the war situation did not make matters any better. The six months' grace period in which to find another government job did not make it any easier for him to get such a job. His salary at the Observatory was six hundred fifty guilders a month plus one hundred guilders a month house-rent indemnity. Government jobs at that level were not to be found on a silver platter, so Wooden Head knew that he had to make a decision. Wachtgeld (waiting salary) would not be more than one-third of his active salary. It was impossible for a family of four, soon to be five, to live on that in the tropics. In the meantime, Annie had also come back to Batavia; why, Wooden Head did not know. As there was another bedroom available in the house, they took her in. 110 WOODEN HEAD Tony, Wooden Head's younger brother, who as a teen-age boy had gone to the United States and become an American, had also come to the Dutch East Indies about three years earlier. He did not like it there and wanted to go back to the States. The previous year Wooden Head had met somebody who had been in the eastern United States and had close relatives on a farm in New York State. Wooden Head had started corresponding with these people. Before the six months were up, Wooden Head went to see Dr. Bouwens, a specialist he had known earlier. This doctor examined Wooden Head and gave him a certificate for a year's leave to a moderate climate. He advised him never to return to a hot climate. The only way, however, to get to Holland would be via the United States, because other routes were blockaded or too risky. Wooden Head had always wanted to go to the States, and this was his chance. So he asked permission to spend the year's sick leave in the United States, and he received it. Shortly after Wooden Head came back to Batavia in 1916, he found out that his eyes were not good enough any more for some of the observations he had to take at the Observatory. So he had obtained glasses to correct this condition. For reading and writing he had to use glasses after that; for other work, he rather takes them off. By this time Wooden Head's next younger brother, Karel, had advanced considerably in his position. One of the largest agricultural corporations, which had several sugar factories and plantations in Java, had made him superintendent of all those enterprises. As such, from his salary and the bonus he received, his yearly income was larger than that of the Governor-General. Later, Wooden Head heard that bis brother had suggested a radical change in the way these enterprises were run. These changes, as Karel saw them, would benefit the owners and everyone concerned. When the directors refused to go along with the suggestion, Karel left and returned to Holland. He soon became a director himself. In the end, Wooden Head and his wife, Jane, had come to the conclusion that a divorce was the only solution to their problems. When Wooden Head sent his request to the Govemor-Gen- Another Tour in Batavia 111 era! in 1916, resulting in his performing his work at home, a difference of opinion started to creep into their relationship. And though Jane did help in the work that Wooden Head took on as secretary of the League of Neutral Nations Branch, their relationship did not get back to what it should have been. Having Annie, Jessica's mother, living for some time in the same house—partly to help her out financially but more for Jessica's sake—may have had its influence. Jane did not want to leave Java at that time; she had lived most of her life in the Dutch East Indies, having been born and grown up there. And Wooden Head had to leave. With the help and advice of friends, the terms were arranged. Jane would keep Rosalind (she expected another baby in December, 1917) and Wooden Head would pay her a certain part of his leave-salary. Jane was going to rent a smaller shelter and knew that she could get paid employment again as soon as she felt that she could take it on. About a week before he had to leave, Wooden Head received the legal decision about the divorce. In the meantime, Wooden Head's brother, Tony, had come to Batavia. He wanted to return to the United States on the same ship on which Wooden Head and Jessica would travel. Annie, who had been living with them for a while, also wanted to leave with that ship. Because of the war they needed a visa from the British Consul, the Japanese Consul, and the American Consul, for they would travel via Singapore, Hongkong, Yokohama, Honolulu, and San Francisco. They went first to the British Consul. He started talking about the war—how he had to be wary in giving visas; how Germans had tried to get a visa on a faked passport; and so forth. It was quite some time before he had a look at Wooden Head's passport. When he saw his name, he immediately changed. He recognized the name from publicity that he had seen in the papers now and then regarding the League of Neutral Nations. He gave the visa immediately then, and also those for his brother and Annie. He also phoned the Japanese and American Consuls to expedite the rest of the paper 112 WOODEN HEAD Before this, Wooden Head had corresponded with his brother in Los Angeles (the one who formerly was at Tjileboet, near Buitenzorg) and with the farmer in New York State. It was, of course, not easy for Wooden Head and Jessica to say good-bye to Rosalind and Jane, but the die was cast. They left Batavia October 23, 1917. 21/ California During the War In San Francisco they had to pass the customs. During his last year in Batavia, Wooden Head had had somebody make several signs which were connected with the war. He had taken those along. It took some explaining to get these through the customs free. The most striking of the signs was the one which gave an idea about the purpose of the League of Neutral Nations; it carried the words (in Dutch) Recht Boven Macht ("Right Above Might") and bore an illustration of a woman carrying a torch in one hand and a scale in the other. The San Francisco customs officials probably did not know anything about that League of Neutral Nations, for they were evidently suspicious. Wooden Head sent a telegram to the people on the farm in New York State, requesting them to wire him back, care of his brother in Los Angeles, if they could put them up to begin with. The farmer, whose name was Anderson, was a relative of a man in Batavia, Java, with whom Wooden Head had been associated during the previous year. Then they took a train to Los Angeles. It was quite cool when they arrived, that November day. Wooden Head's brother put them all up. His brother's wife, the former Miss B., had returned to Holland a few years earlier; she wanted to see her parents again; and, perhaps, she could not get used to the American way of life. They had no children. They were divorced in the end. Later, Wennemar remarried; his second wife already had three children, one girl a year or so older than Jessica and two smaller ones. California During the War 113 For a week or so, Wooden Head waited for an answer to his telegram. Since it had not come, he and Tony then travelled around outside Los Angeles, looking for some country place which might be suitable for them. They found a ten-acre place near Workman Station, with an older, quite roomy house, about twelve miles from Los Angeles. Wooden Head leased it for a year. When they came home at the end of the day, he found the telegram, saying that the farmer would be glad to put them up. Western Union somehow had delayed delivery of the wire. It was just one day too late for them. Wooden Head's available money was limited; he could not throw away the money he had paid for the year's lease, although it was only one hundred dollars (the place was neglected). At the Farmers' Exchange, Wooden Head bought a horse, Nelly, and a small buggy and a light wagon; later he also bought a team and a heavy wagon. He also secured the most necessary furniture, eating utensils, and tools to work the farm. Tony, who had farmed in New York, went as soon as possible to the farm with the team, to start plowing. He had to fend for himself for some days. The route from Los Angeles to the farm was twelve miles via the best road. There was a shorter route of about ten miles. But it meant crossing a nearby river—close to the farm. As long as the water was low, this was easy enough. One day, in December, Wooden Head, with Wennemar's two younger stepchildren, went to bring more furniture over the shorter route. When they came to the river, he noticed that the water had risen appreciably in the past few days. It was already too late to go back and take the longer road. So he drove into the river and made it all right for about three-quarters of the width. But at that point he found that the faster current had deepened the channel close to shore, with the result that a kind of bank had been formed which had to be crossed to reach the shore. The horse was evidently not strong enough to pull the loaded wagon over this bank. Wooden Head had no other choice than to get into the water, leaving wagon and horse and the two children in the river, and run to the farm, about a quarter of a mile away, and get his brother and the team. He led Nelly out of the river, hitched the team to 114 WOODEN HEAD the wagon, and then had no difficulty in pulling the wagon out and ; to the farm. It was nearly dark by that time. Wooden Head had no other clothes at the farm; so, after unloading the wagon, he hitched Nelly up again and returned in his soaked clothes through the upcoming fog to Los Angeles along the twelve-mile road. When he reached his brother's house and had taken care of Nelly, he took a hot bath. He suffered no aftereffects of having been outside in soaked clothing for hours in the month of December. Undoubtedly this was due to the fact that he had learned to chew properly, and so was in much better physical condition than he had been before. After a few days, they all moved to the farm—Jessica, Annie, and Wooden Head. There was nothing any more between Annie and Wooden Head, however improbable some reader may think this, nor had there been since Annie left Batavia for Holland with the two children in 1910. Wooden Head helped her when necessary simply because she was Jessica's mother. Of course, she did some work in the household, but no more than was absolutely necessary. After a while she left and lived with a family with whom she had gotten acquainted near Workman Station. She had two brothers in the States: one in Detroit, the other near New York, both married. She visited both later. At the farm there was a win<imill which pumped up water from a well. There was plenty of rain in January and February, so there was water enough in the well. There was no electricity. Groceries and supplies were delivered once a week from Downey. Jessica's school was on the road to Downey. The teacher—there was only one for the school—went to a lot of extra work to help Jessica catch up with the other children in her class. Quite often Jessica went to school riding Nelly. Cooking had to be done by coal oil; Wooden Head bought a gadget which produced a blue flame. Heating of the house was really not necessary, but now and then they made a fire in a fireplace. There was a big barn, but there was no pasture, so Wooden Head went with the team to Downey to get a load of feed, which was mostly baled straw, and, of course, some oats. There was an apple orchard, but this was badly neglected. California During the War 115 There were two good-sized apricot trees, one of which had a good crop in 1918, the fruit having a special, nice flavour, though the size was small. Then there were a few orange trees, close to the house, a fig tree, and the like. Irrigation for Wooden Head's ten acres was done by a gasoline pump which produced a stream of water ten inches across. But the pit where the gasoline engine had been set up had not been made in such a way that the engine could work steadily. It was well boarded up, but Wooden Head found out later that the irrigation water, after some time, ran back into the pit, and then the engine had to be stopped. Tony continued with his plowing, but farther to the back of the farm there was a gulch running crosswise which was overgrown with heavy couchgrass. Wooden Head had seen couchgrass in different parts of the world. In Java it was so heavy and had such tough sharp points that the roots would grow right through the roots of coconut trees. Here in Canada it is thinner, but still a pest. In the gulch near Los Angeles, it was imbedded in such a way that Tony could not plow through it with the team. He hitched Nelly up with the team, but even that extra power did not help. Tony became disgusted with the whole business and it was not long before he quit Their brother Wennemar from Los Angeles had moved to a house on the outskirts of the city, where he had some land as well. He and Tony now started a small dairy business (Wennemar was still driving for the Pacific Electric); and Tony and Wennemar's wife did the work. Wooden Head bought a rural agricultural magazine and got quite some information out of it He went to Los Angeles and bought a coulter, which he attached to the beam of the plow. With this gadget and the team, he cut through the couchgrass without any trouble. He got in touch with the County Agricultural Inspector. This office had a kind of pool of different tools, which every farmer and rancher could borrow for a few days for some extra work. Wooden Head borrowed a heavy disk. He sowed seed of legumes, which he inoculated with bacteria which would extract nitrogen from the air and settle it in nodules on the roots, in that way improving the soil. 116 WOODEN HEAD Because of the war, saving and frugality were advocated everywhere. So Wooden Head bought a young pig to feed the table scraps to. He made something of a pen in the barn to keep the pig in, but it was quite a job. He bought two goats, which gave them enough milk for the household, and, when there was enough young growth to supply feed, a young heifer. He got his leave-salary monthly through the Dutch Consul in Los Angeles and the Consul General in San Francisco. He heard from his former wife, Jane, in Batavia, that she had given birth to a boy in December, 1917. He began to study a correspondence course in poultry husbandry, which was given by a Professor T. E. Quisenberry, in Leavenworth, Kansas, where they had an experimental farm. He joined the American Goat Association and as a result got in touch with a man who had a large goat ranch in Burbank, about twenty miles northwest of his place. Annie did most of the household chores, but after some time she had had enough of it and went to board with some people close by that she had come to know. After that, Jessica and Wooden Head had to get along the best they could. When summer came, it got to be too hot in the afternoon for them to do work outside. The well of the windmill went dry, and Wooden Head had to get drinking and wash water from a tap close to the railway track at Workman Station. He would take the horses down to the river for a good drink. There was a farmer nearby who had a good stallion, so Wooden Head took the two team horses to be bred. The agreement was that he would pay when the mares got their foal; but they did not take. One day, returning from Los Angeles with the team and heavy wagon, Wooden Head passed a crew of men who had been taking an old bridge apart. Wooden Head talked to the foreman and found out that they had no more use for the timbers. Some looked quite good yet; so Wooden Head tried to load them, but found it really too heavy a job for him, singlehanded. Then he saw a man approaching, walking. He asked him to give him a hand. California During the War 111 They loaded all the discarded timbers on the wagon. Wooden Head gave the man half a dollar and a ride. Another time, he passed a large field of cauliflower, the crop from which had just been loaded on a railway car for shipment to the East. A number of cauliflowers were left, which probably did not come up to market requirements. Wooden Head took what he could use at home. On the way to Downey, he passed a five-acre farm which was all in corn. Talking to the couple who ran the farm, Wooden Head found that the farm was part of an irrigation district, in which each participant got irrigation water every nineteen days or so for eighteen hours in succession. During those eighteen hours they were on their feet to distribute that water all over their farm. They raised splendid corn, had a ready market for it in Los Angeles, and made a good living from it. One apricot tree on Wooden Head's farm grew a good crop of very good-flavoured apricots. Across the road somebody had an alfalfa farm; with irrigation the farmer cut six or seven crops per year from the field. Wooden Head swapped apricots with him for some of his alfalfa. The next ten-acre piece of the original thirty-acre farm, going toward the river, did not appear to be capable of producing much. After a while they planted tomato plants there, using a special gadget, or planter, which made a plant-hole and supplied enough water at the same time for the plant to catch. After some time, the plants produced a marvelous crop. It was pleasant to be able to pick oranges from one's own trees. However, after six or seven months Wooden Head realized that, without capital, which was his situation, it would be impossible to improve those ten acres in such a way as to make a living there. One day the owner came over. After seeing what Wooden Head had been trying to do for improvement of the soil, and the like, he asked Wooden Head to become manager of a farm in Imperial Valley, about one hundred fifty miles farther to the southeast, east of San Diego. Wooden Head knew that in Imperial Valley the climate was more tropical and that his health would not permit him to consider this offer. 118 WOODEN HEAD He started inquiring about climatic conditions in other parts of California; the information about Eureka, on the northwestern coast, he rather liked. So he started to make preparations to go there before Jessica's new school term would start. He sold the livestock and equipment and part of the furniture. He booked transportation on the Vanguard, a small steamer leaving from San Pedro, the harbor of Los Angeles, for Eureka. Before he left, Wooden Head had gone to a doctor in Los Angeles, recommended by the Dutch Consul. The doctor examined him and advocated half a year's extension of his year's leave. Wooden Head applied for the extension. In Eureka they had to store what furniture and other things they had taken along. They first found temporary shelter and ate their meals out; later they found two rooms—a bedroom and living room—and where they could make their meals. At school Jessica joined the Girl Guides there. Wooden Head looked around; he was especially interested in the redwood trees, which grew there abundantiy. The war was still going on, and there was an organization which tried to get more volunteers for the army. Wooden Head, having had some experience with artillery (on board ships), volunteered for the artillery. He knew, of course, that if he was enrolled he would have to find somebody to take care of Jessica. He wrote Annie, asking if she was willing to come and take care of Jessica in that event, but she refused. Then he wrote Jane in Batavia and offered to remarry her if she would come to the States. Jane had found regular work again and ap- parentiy already had other plans, so there was no solution there either. In the meantime Wooden Head waited for a decision about his application for half a year's extension of his leave, which would end by the end of October, now nearly at hand. Opposite Eureka, at the west side, across a stretch of water, was a big mill. Wooden Head heard that they were going to build their own railway shed and needed carpenters and other labor for this purpose. Having now and then done some carpentering on his own, he applied for a job as rough carpenter. He was accepted, California During the War 119 bought the necessary tools, and went to work. They started laying the floor for the railway shed. His job, and that of several others, was to nail the heavy boards for the floor, eight hours a day. When he came home the first night, he was exhausted. After four days or so, the floor was finished and they set him to work doing more precise carpenter work, helping with doors and windows. He was not qualified for this, so he asked for other work and was offered machine work. He never had had any training in that line, and so did not care to take it on. At the same time, his extension of leave had arrived, taking the pressure off. Before he was taken into the Army, the Armistice was signed and another problem was resolved. Meanwhile Wooden Head had read about vitamins, now a household word. The article also told how goat's milk is healthier than cow's milk and easier to digest because the fat globules are so much smaller than those in cow's milk. Another article in the magazine told of a very interesting case. A doctor in the East had gotten sick and grew increasingly worse. He went to Europe to see some specialists, but they could not help him. After corning back to the States, one of his friends, another doctor, advised him to go to California and try to live as close to nature as possible. With what money he had left—he had been forced to abandon his doctor's practice for quite some time already—he went to California, got a small place, and lived mostly on raw food and goat's milk. After some time his health improved. Eventually he was able to resume his practice. His opinion was that goat's milk has something special, a special vitamin, which gives new life. The goat ranch in Burbank had some beautiful goats which were also heavy milkers. Wooden Head paid the manager a deposit on a Toggenburg doe, which was priced at one hundred seventy-five dollars. But he never could buy that goat. With the end of the war, Wooden Head knew that he would have to go back to Holland before the expiration of his sick leave. He saw an ad in a San Francisco paper in which a small cottage was offered for rent in Kentfield, not far north of San Francisco. 120 WOODEN HEAD He inquired, feeling that it might be a good place to spend his last few months in America. So, before the end of December, Jessica and he said good-bye to Eureka and boarded the train for Kentfield. The trip took practically a whole day. When they arrived, the owners met them and took them to the cottage. There was another cottage as well, where a young widow, Mrs. H., lived with a young daughter. The cottages and the owner's place were all on a hill. Wooden Head had to go to San Francisco, via electric train and then ferry from Sausalito, to see the Dutch Consul General, who had his office there. (He lived in Santa Cruz, down the coast.) The Consul wanted Wooden Head to pack up right away and go east for his return to Holland (to get rid of him, probably); but Wooden Head saw no necessity for going east in the middle of the winter; besides, he still wanted to attend to a few things in the West. In 'Frisco he saw a huge fir tree, all decorated and illuminated for the Christmas/New Year's season. Wooden Head did not care for Christmas—and never had, as has been mentioned before. In Holland December fifth is the national day to celebrate Sinterklaas (Santa Claus); but that tree had no religious significance—it was just a nice thing to see. The cottage owners were quite nice people. They invited Wooden Head and Jessica to dinner quite a few times. Mrs. H. also was pleasant. They saw a lot of her and her young daughter, Lois. Jessica went to school with her. Kentfield's business district was quite a distance away. When Wooden Head had to go there to buy things, he had to walk. He would at the same time buy things for Mrs. H. She had a small garden, and he helped her there. When it was really winter weather and stormy, her cottage lacked sufficient protection against such weather. Wooden Head helped her fix that up better. She grew very fond of Jessica. Wooden Head had noticed of late that his eyes were not what they should be. Mrs. H. knew an eye-specialist in San Francisco, and she took him up and introduced him. The specialist examined Wooden Head's eyes and performed a minor operation. Then he gave Wooden Head a prescription for better-fitting glasses and the California During the War 121 address of a technician to put the new lenses into his frames, telling the technician not to charge more than the absolutely necessary minimum, which was two dollars. He himself did not charge Wooden Head anything. Needless to say, Wooden Head was quite grateful for Dr. Thompson's generosity. In the course in Poultry Husbandry which Wooden Head had been taking was a book, The Call of the Hen, written by Walter Hogan, of Petaluma, about twenty-five miles northwest of San Francisco. Wooden Head found the book very interesting. Hogan described how to estimate laying capacity, the most important feature used being the head of the hen. His book was full of pictures to help clarify matters. Wooden Head was so impressed by the book that he was thinking of trying to translate it into Dutch after he returned to Holland and getting it printed there. As Petaluma was not far away, he called up Walter Hogan, explained things to him, and asked if he could see him some day before he had to leave. Hogan gave him a Sunday appointment. So Wooden Head got on the train the following Sunday—the last Sunday that he would be in California. At Petaluma he learned that Hogan's farm was nearly an hour's walk from the railway station, so it was close to noon before he got there. They had lunch first Hogan told him that during the six weekdays he had a stenographer-typist to help him handle his mail. While he was there, the Sunday mail was brought in: a bunch of letters certainly a hand-width thick. Hogan said that he was paid for his writing of the book The Call of the Hen in copies of the book, which for that purpose were valued at a dollar each; and that he sold these all over the continent at two dollars a copy. He had white leghorns. Every week he put thousands of hatching eggs into a large number of small incubators. The chicks hatched were shipped every Monday and Tuesday morning. He personally supervised this part of the operation. He showed Wooden Head his order book for chicks. It was March 3 then, and the book was filled with orders until about the twentieth of April. The chicks of his best layers were sold at one dollar each. Hogan had been a textile manufacturer originally and had made quite a lot of money, but he had lost the money when he 122 WOODEN HEAD became interested in poultry breeding. He showed skeletons of chickens, especially the heads, to explain his theory of estimating laying capacity. He had three men to help him run the farm; later in the afternoon he showed Wooden Head around. The best layers had one wing dyed black, so that, in case they flew over to another pen, they could be identified right away. He agreed to have his book translated into Dutch eventually and printed abroad; but the terms would have to be arranged later. (When Wooden Head came to Holland, he found that printing the book in Dutch, with all the pictures, would run into too much money, and he had to abandon the idea.) Walter Hogan also talked about Luther Burbank, the plant wizard, who was a good friend of his, and lived in Santa Rosa, about ten miles north of Petaluma. Well, it was five o'clock in the afternoon before Wooden Head could get away to catch his train back to Kentfield. Wooden Head never saw Hogan again. The poultry expert was almost seventy then. There were only a few days left before Jessica and he had to leave. He soon found that he could not take all his belongings on the train across the continent. He had to leave behind three boxes with books, papers, tropical dothing, and the like, which he planned to have shipped to Holland later. However, the first year that Wooden Head was back in Holland, he had so much work to do before he could settle down that he did not get around to it. And when, after that first year, the accident happened which took Jessica out of his life, he could not bring himself to write this to Mrs. H., who had been so fond of her. So Wooden Head had to write off those books and papers. They said good-bye to all their friends in Kentfield, especially Mrs. H. and Lois, and went to San Francisco to spend the night in a hotel so that they could catch the early train the next morning. Before this, Wooden Head had become acquainted with a man in San Francisco who drove an electric tram for his living but who had, not far out, a small place in the country where he hoped to live after retiring. Wooden Head and Jessica went that last Across the Continent 123 night to visit him and his wife. The man had made a huge replica of his small farm, which was really wonderful and highly inter- And so, the California chapter was finished. Jessica and Wooden Head had already often talked about returning to California later and settling in Santa Cruz (Wooden Head had read about this town, about thirty-five miles south of San Francisco, on the coast, and thought it very attractive). Jessica dreamed of attending the University in Berkeley. But Fate stepped in, only 1 months later. 22/ Across the Continent Early the next morning they got on the train. The Dutch East Indian Government had to pay their fare to New York and from there to Holland, but they had to feed themselves on the way by train. Therefore, they had taken some simple necessary food along in order not to make this too expensive. They saw a nice sight, as they passed orchards in full bloom— it was early in March—as long as they were in California. Their first stop was Salt Lake City, where they spent a full day and visited the Mormon Wooden Church. This church was built in the nineteenth century, without the use of any metal. Wooden Head, Jessica, and others were standing at one end of the church while the guide, at the other end, dropped a pin into a felt hat; the sound was very distinct, so good are the acoustics in that all-wooden sftructure. Later the Mormons built a more modern temple. Wooden Head bought a copy of the Mormon book, intending to learn something more about them, but he never could find time (or energy) to read it. The railway station at Salt Lake City was outstanding as railway stations go. From there they went to Denver, Colorado, where they stayed overnight, and from Denver to Leavenworth, Kansas, where they stopped a whole day. This was 124 where the Poultry Husbandry outfit, under Professor T. E. Quisen- berry, had its experimental farm. They did not find Professor Quisenberry himself there that day; but Wooden Head talked with members of his staff. These workers arranged to ship Wooden Head a setting of Rhode Island Red hatching eggs to New York for him to take along to Holland. He had seen really good Rhode Island Reds for the first time at a show in Los Angeles and had decided then to breed these as soon as he had a chance to do so. He had joined the Rhode Island Red Club of America. From Leavenworth they went to Detroit, where a brother of his former first wife, Jessica's mother, was living. They were there part of a day, and then they went to Niagara Falls. They spent a whole day there, had a good look at the falls, bought a few specialties, and then boarded the train for the last lap to New York. Another brother of Jessica's mother, John, was in business in New York. He and his family lived in New Jersey. They invited Wooden Head and Jessica to stay with them for the week or so that they had to wait for the sailing of the New Amsterdam of the Holland-America line. John knew the Dutch Consul General quite well, and Wooden Head had business with the Consul in connection with his transportation to Holland. He had considered going second class, but, since he was entitled to first class, after talking to the Consul, he saw no reason not to travel first class. Jessica spent most of her week in New Jersey with John's family. Wooden Head saw little of New York. He had read a book about a poultry farm in New Jersey which had some interesting features, so he took the train one day to try to locate that farm and visit it. He found the location all right, but the farm's buildings had burned down, and he could not locate anybody who had been connected with the enterprise. Then, in the latter part of March, 1919, it was time to leave, and they boarded the New Amsterdam to sail for Holland. The trip was uneventful; there were a few passengers with whom Wooden Head could talk, especially one American woman. After arriving at Rotterdam, they went to The Hague. There they stayed in a hotel which Wooden Head knew. He had to talk business with some of the Government Departments, Navy and Colonial. 23/ At Home in Holland Wooden Head now went to Heelsum, where he had lived from 1913 to 1916, to seek temporary shelter. He needed somebody who had an incubator in order to hatch his Rhode Island Red eggs. He found two small bedrooms and a living room with board at a reasonable price. He also contacted a man whom he had known, who had a small incubator. Unfortunately, this experiment did not pan out, for the eggs never hatched—apparentiy, they were too old. In a copy of Physical Culture, which Wooden Head had brought along from the States, he found an article about how to gain weight through a milk cure. He had lost considerable weight during the last few years, now weighing only one hundred eighteen pounds, while his height was five feet eight. He knew a farmer, close by, from whom he could get good raw milk. He arranged with the people where they were boarding that he would eat only part of the ordinary food and drink as much milk as he could. He started at seven o'clock in the morning with a glass of rnilk, and drank a glass every half-hour till 3 p.m.; in all, about three liters. After the first day, he had trouble with his digestion. He had always been regular since he had learned to chew properly in September, 1915; fortunately, his difficulty was temporary, lasting one day. After a short time, he ate more of other food as well later in the day and drank some more milk; after six or seven weeks he had gained thirty pounds, so that he now weighed one hundred forty-eight pounds. He then stopped the milk cure. When Wooden Head leased the land in Heelsum for six years in 1914 and put so much time and work into improvements, he had in mind buying it and building a small house on it. But as things had been going since 1916, there was no question of being able to do that. Further, the man who owned it did not want to sell. Worst of all, during the years Wooden Head had been away, Molenaar had cut down the decorative fir trees. Wooden Head sued him for this outrage. — 126 WOODEN HEAD Now he had to figure out what he was going to do about the laying house and the fruit trees that were still on the property. The medical committee had extended his sick leave for another six months. Keeping in mind what the doctor in Batavia had told him, "not to come back to that hot climate," he thought he should wait because he was quite sure that, in the end, he would be pensioned off. Kay came over for a few days, and Wooden Head talked over with her what he might be able to do, but they could not decide anything definite. Wooden Head again got an incubator, purchased some Rhode Island Red hatching eggs from a breeder in Holland, and proceeded to raise the chicks in the laying house. While in the States, he had bought a set of canonizing tools and he canonized several of his young cockerels. A capon is a male chicken whose male sexual organs have been taken away. When this has been done, the fowls are much quieter and do not get excited. Then they grow faster and get heavier, so that they have a higher meat value while the meat is more tender. Besides this, they can be used to raise baby chicks. Wooden Head used them in this way himself. A capon can cover more chicks than the average hen can and no hawk will snatch a chick away from a capon. In the meantime, Wooden Head was looking around for shelter that could be rented, so that they could start their own household again. A former colleague of his had built a small wooden house on the main road in Heelsum, about opposite the house where Wooden Head had lived earlier. He called it Het Planken Huisje (the Wooden House). He was teaching somewhere and came out to the house only on his holidays. Wooden Head got in touch with him, and they arranged that he could rent it September first. To give Jessica a somewhat better summer holiday than she could have in Heelsum, they went in August, on their bikes, to a small bathing place on the North Sea in North Holland, Callant- soog. They cycled via Haarlem and saw Kay. The place in Callant- soog where they rented a room was not exactiy modern—far from it. It was, of course, less expensive to stay there than in the better- At Home in Holland 127 known bathing places. There were some other guests there. The people who ran the place must have had a tavern there. There was also a large hall, where local people one night staged a play. The swimming was good. The land around was absolutely flat, sandy soil. A lot of nasturtiums were grown there, for the seed, which would be pickled. When their few weeks in North Holland were over, Jessica and Wooden Head cycled back to Heelsum and moved into the "Wooden House." It was not so very small. There was a living room in the center, in front, with a bedroom at either side; behind the living room was a kitchenette, a toilet, and then two more rooms, at the left and right One of those two rooms, the owner reserved for himself; the other was another bedroom. There was no bathroom, as we know bathrooms on the American continent, but wash basins were built into the bedrooms and supplied with running water. There was no entrance hall, such as most Dutch houses have; you walked right into the living room. The living room could be heated with gas, and the kitchen also used gas; but there was no other way of heating the house—no fireplace (the owner said that he had not been allowed to build a chimney; wooden houses are unusual in Holland). There was a small garden, which permitted Wooden Head to house the Rhode Island Reds he had raised so far. He put an ad in a poultry magazine offering the laying house for sale. It had cost a thousand guilders to build in 1914; he asked six hundred guilders for it. It had to be broken off and removed from its concrete foundations. A young woman, Kathy, came to see it. She had been in England during the war, as a nurse in a mental institution, and returned to Holland after the war. She was living temporarily with her parents in Arnhem. She told Wooden Head that she planned to start a chicken ranch with a brother, not far away. But she did not buy. In September the weather was still quite good, so that not much extra heating was necessary in the wooden house; but when October came, it was a different story. With a gas heater, the living room could be kept comfortable, but it took a lot of gas. So 128 WOODEN HEAD Wooden Head went to see the alderman—Wethouder, in Dutch— of the municipality to try to get permission to have a chimney built so that heating the house would not be so expensive. After many objections and a general hassle, he got permission. Wooden Head communicated with the owner of the house about it. The owner was quite willing for him to put in the chimney. Before he built it, Wooden Head happened one day to see Kathy pass by on the bike. They talked, and she said that she was on her way to a small house and some land, about ten miles to the northwest, where she wanted to start her chicken ranch. But, she said, something had come up. Her brother, who had planned to join her, had changed his mind and was going to do other work. So she was on her own, and Wooden Head soon noticed that she knew very little about the poultry business. Another day he went along with her to have a look at her house and land. It was a small house, originally a boerenhuisje (a small farmer's or tenant's house), but it had been modernized a little. It was built of brick and had two small bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, a small entrance hall, and, at the north side, a wooden addition built on. There was a toilet but no bathroom. Water had to be pumped up from a well; the pump was in the kitchen. The house stood alone with a cherry tree in front. There was also a small farmhand's house on the place. The land itself consisted of about two acres of sandy soil, part of it overgrown with oak scrub. It looked fit for raising poultry. The house and land had a mortgage on it. After talking things over, Wooden Head and Kathy decided to pool their resources; Wooden Head had the laying house, which could be turned into a number of smaller poultry houses. He had his leave-pay and expected, after another year, to get his pension; Kathy had the house and land, the mortgage payments on which would about equal the rent which Wooden Head otherwise would have to pay. They went to a notary in the nearest town, who drew up an agreement, which they both signed. Kathy was willing to take Jessica with her in the larger bedroom while Wooden Head could use the very small one and could just cram a small incubator into it as well. At Home in Holland 129 By that time it was only a few days from the end of October, when Wooden Head's rent for the Wooden House would run out. Kathy stayed with them those last few days. It was handier for her than having to go back to Arnhem, and they all had a chance to get better acquainted. The carpenter who had built the laying house in 1914 now took it apart and built from the old materials smaller poultry houses on the new place. Jessica had to change schools again, but she could get to the new school on her bike. She had joined the Girl Guides in Holland, and there were quite a few in the new location. In December, 1919, one of the largest poultry shows in Holland was held in Utrecht—at "Ornithophilia." Wooden Head entered a few birds. At the show he met other Rhode Island Red breeders. None of them was satisfied with the way the judging was done. It was a fact that some of the judges considered the owners more than the birds, with the result that prizes went to some birds which should have been disqualified on account of glaring defects, which stared at one from the coops. Some of the Red breeders decided that something had to be done about that—as far as their breed was concerned, anyhow; and in 1920 they prepared for such action. The same month, Kathy and Wooden Head came to the conclusion that they might as well marry, to save appearances, and so they did. That month they went to The Hague to hear a special concert. During an intermission Wooden Head spotted Mr. Verbeek, bis fellow-passenger of 1916 on the trip to Java, and his wife. Verbeek looked certainly ten years younger than he had in 1916. He had lost all his superfluous fat and he felt ten years younger. This was further proof of the soundness of the good-chewing process. As soon as the weather permitted, Wooden Head started to work the garden and the land. Part of the oak shrubs were taken out and the land plowed. Not only was it plowed, but a second team with a subsoil plow was also used. The soil was very light, but it could be worked up. There did not seem to be really good Rhode Island Reds in 130 WOODEN HEAD Holland at that time; Wooden Head got in touch with an English Red breeder. When some money became available for this purpose, they decided that Kathy and Jessica would go to England over the Easter holidays and get some Red baby chicks from this breeder. They would stay with a friend of Kathy's, whom she had met while she was nursing in England during the war. Jessica took advantage of her stay in London to buy a first-aid outfit, which was not yet available in Holland. This she would use in her Girl Guides club. Wooden Head met them in Rotterdam when they came back with the baby chicks. They took these with them in the passenger railway car; but halfway on the journey, the conductor objected, so that Wooden Head went, along with the chicks, into the baggage car. In this way they got a better start with Reds than otherwise would have been possible. Since Jessica and he had been about sixteen months in the United States and both had been very pleased with their stay there, Wooden Head erected a flagpole and, in the daytime, flew the American flag. After a few months in Bennekom, they got acquainted with a few people there. Jessica had regular meetings with her Girl Guides club; when summer came, it was sometimes quite late at night before she came home from such meetings. Wooden Head did not like this very much, but Jessica was the leader of the club and she gave all she could to it. They also met members of the Boy Scout club at the school that Jessica attended. In the summer holiday, in July, all the Girl Guides were going to get together at a camp in the center of the country, Gelderland, where the heather was abundant Jessica went there on her bike, taking the blankets and other equipment she would need, promising her father that she would write him after she had arrived in the camp. Soon after Jessica arrived at the camp, she caught her foot in a rabbit hole in the heather and sprained her ankle so badly that she could not take part in all the activities. She helped in the kitchen, where she could sit. Since she could not get around, others from all over the camp, both the leaders and the girls, came to her. The At Home in Holland 131 Chief Girl Guide in Holland, a woman, also talked with Jessica, and when she found out that Jessica had been in the States, she said she wanted her to be one of Holland's Girl Guides' delegates to an international camp in England the next year. Happily, the accident with Jessica's foot proved not to be serious; when the camp broke up, she was able to cycle back to Bennekom. That last half-year or so, Jessica had quite often talked with her father about possibly returning to America some day. They had been closer together in the years since 1912 than is possible to put down in so many words. When she came back home from camp, she told her father that another group, from close to Amsterdam, had invited her to come the next week to a camp near the North Sea. Wooden Head was quite busy in the garden at that time. He asked Jessica to help him first for a few days, before she went to the North Sea Camp. Those few days Wooden Head could not help thinking con- stantiy about her departure. There was something quite different about their relationship now. He could not describe it. Anyway, he arranged with Jessica, this time, that she would wire him as soon as she arrived at the camp. Her last day at home, Friday, August 6, Jessica got all her things together, including her first-aid outfit, which she had bought in England. She had wanted to cycle all the way to the camp, but Wooden Head thought that too far to cycle, so they compromised. She would leave home at 6 a.m. and cycle to Utrecht, a little over thirty miles; there she would take the train to Leyden, and from Leyden cycle again to the camp near Noordwyk, another eight miles. She had to take blankets and other essentials along on the bike. Jessica was going to call her father a little before 6 a.m. so that they could say good-bye. 24/ Saturday, August 7, 1920—Fate Again Jessica called: "Vader, het is by Zessen" ("Father, it is nearly six"). Wooden Head got up and went outside with her. They said good-bye; but Wooden Head watched Jessica on her bike as long as he could see her: it was flat land, and she had to follow a path or trail along their land for about one-tenth of a mile; then the path made a turn to the right and disappeared from sight behind a hedge; farther on, the path joined the main road. The moment Jessica disappeared from sight, Wooden Head had a vision; he saw, as clearly as if it happened that moment, that he took leave of his oldest sister, after whom Jessica was named, and his brother from Tjileboet in September, 1898, at Batavia Harbor, Tandjong Priok, when he, Wooden Head, had to go and join the Blommendal; his oldest sister had died suddenly half a year later. He did not know what the vision meant, but he felt that something was wrong (or going to be wrong). He felt miserable the whole day. Wooden Head could not help thinking about the dream his mother had in 1899 when his oldest sister took sick—"that she could not get any nurse"; it had happened so, and his mother had had to do the nursing herself. After the accident had happened, Wooden Head got hold of a few books about telepathy and a book written by an Englishman who had lost a son during the war in France. The Englishman described how he tried to get in touch with the soul, the spirit, or whatever you will call it, of his son. Kathy, a few years later, had an experience with telepathy between living persons. She woke up at 3 a.m. and heard or felt that something special was going to happen. Wooden Head had to go to Arnhem that day, on his bike, to cash his pension check. When he came back at 5 p.m. and passed the window of their living room, she waved a paper at him; it was a cablegram from a man in Saturday, August 7, 1920—Fate Again 133 Batavia, Java, with whom Wooden Head had done business with Rhode Island Reds, telling him that he had cabled two thousand guilders (then the equivalent of eight hundred dollars) to a bank in the nearest city, for him, to help him out. Later, Kathy had other similar experiences, which mostiy had to do with money on the way. So Wooden Head came to the conclusion that the vision he saw early the morning of August 7, 1920, could not be anything else than a warning from the soul or spirit of his oldest sister that there was danger ahead for his daughter Jessica. He could not help thinking later that, if he had read those books earlier, before that fateful day, and had known about Kathy's susceptibility to telepathy, he would have gone by train to the camp and might have been able to prevent the accident When later he heard or read about happenings which had been more or less foreseen by somebody, he always thought about this vision, but he could not get hold of an address where his own experience might have been thought worthy of an investigation. The April 8, 1961, issue of the Canadian Weekend Magazine had an article, "Ghost Hunters of Adam and Eve Mews," mentioning the Society for Psychical Research in England. We are going to try to find out if that society can offer any explanations. This, in our opinion, has nothing to do with an imaginary God, nor other churchianity propaganda. But there must exist something we do not know about yet which creates such a warning. Those who live long enough may yet find the explanation. At seven that night, a telegraph messenger came along the path to the house. Kathy and Wooden Head saw him coming on the bike and thought that he was bringing Jessica's telegram. It was a telegram, but not from Jessica. It was from the leader of the Girl Guides camp at Noordwyk; but a woman employee at Benne- kom's telegraph office had changed the wording of the telegram. She knew Wooden Head. It said something had happened to Jessica, but it did not say what. A little later, after she left the office, the woman employee came to Wooden Head's house and gave him the real telegram. While swimming, Jessica had disappeared. Two daughters of the camp leader had gone on the 134 WOODEN HEAD train to Ede, the nearest railway station, to tell exactiy what had happened. Wooden Head went to the railway station at Ede to meet those two girls. When they arrived, they all went together to the house. The girls told it this way: Jessica had arrived at the camp on her bike at 2 or 2:30 p.m. It was a hot day, so she was all in. The girls at the camp had already had their dinner, but Jessica was able to get a heavy meal. They rested for a few hours. Then the girls asked the leader of the camp if they could go for a swim. The camp was within the dunes; the North Sea could not be seen from there. The leader said: "All right, the older girls for so long, the younger ones for a shorter time." Her oldest daughter, a girl about twenty, and one other girl of the same age would have to watch. (Those two girls themselves could not swim.) Jessica went in with a girl a few years younger, who lived in Leyden. It had been blowing hard the last few days, so there was quite a swell. After they had swum for quite a stretch, the other girl shouted to Jessica, "Jessica, we better turn back." "All right," Jessica said. The local girl turned around and swam back to land, thinking that Jessica was right behind her. When she was close enough, those girls watching shouted to her, "Where is Jessica?" "Right behind me," was the answer. But looking back, she did not see Jessica. The official bathing place was about three-quarters of a mile farther south; people there heard the shouting and came running north; some went into the water, but they did not find Jessica. This was all the girls knew. They stayed overnight. Wooden Head could not sleep, hoping all night long that Jessica might have been picked up by a passing fisherman or the like. The next morning, the three of them took the first train to Leyden and from there went to Noordwyk. Wooden Head found Jessica's body laid out on a bed, in a room there. The woman camp leader told him that when they could not find Jessica anywhere, a man with a team of horses went into the sea, and after some time he found her floating. He brought her in. Three doctors tried to revive her unsuccessfully. At that time there was no pulmotor available to help in the process. Saturday, August 7, 1920—Fate Again 135 She had brought a first-aid outfit along to help others, but when she needed help herself, there was none. Later, when back in Bennekom, Wooden Head heard from a young woman, who happened to be that day on the dunes, what really happened. She saw how, at the moment that Jessica tried to turn around, a wave had struck her. There was a strong undertow, and the current evidently took her farther out. And so, one who promised to become one of the best world citizens was gone forever. Wooden Head wired Annie at Den Helder (and also Kathy) that if she wanted to see Jessica for the last time, she would have to come over the next day; she did, as did Kay from Haarlem. Wooden Head's younger brother, Karel, helped pay for the cost of burial. Boy Scouts whom Jessica had known at the school near Bennekom came over and carried the coffin, a white one, to her grave. Her father spoke a few words there. It was for him as if the sun had disappeared forever. It took him a long time before he could do his regular work again. During those terrible days, he flew the American flag at half-mast But life had to go on. He wanted to try to help make this world a little better place to live in for everybody, as Jessica had wanted. For the benefit of other Girl Guides in Holland, and others, Wooden Head considered putting together some outstanding facts of Jessica's short life, with some snapshots of her, getting that printed, and distributing it to the many who had expressed their sympathy. However, this involved more than her father could manage to do then. Kathy was expecting; her first child, a girl, was born in the second part of September. Let us call her Gloria. 25/ The Rhode Island Red Club Soon after all this, poultry-show time came; and though Wooden Head's heart was not in it, he had to do his share, with other Rhode Island Red breeders, to try to get better recognition of the breed by the Dutch judges. Eleven such breeders got together in December, 1920, in Utrecht, at Ornithophilia; they formed the Rhode Island Red Club of Holland (the Netherlands). Since Wooden Head was the only one who had been in the United States, the birthplace of this breed, and but few of the others knew enough English to read American magazines and correspond with American breeders, he was elected President. The American standard of perfection was adopted as their Red Club standard. Wooden Head started translating some American articles about the breed and got them published in one of the Dutch poultry magazines. Gradually the club grew. In Blue Ribbon Reds, an American booklet, was a color picture of a trio of Reds. One of the members, an artist painted a large picture of the trio four feet by six feet. The Red Club had this framed and showed it at future poultry shows on the stand they had at the larger shows. One of the Red Club members, Job, in Wageningen, helped build a small barn, with a concrete floor, close to the house, for Wooden Head's goats. They even fixed a water pipe and tap in the barn, connected with the tank in the kitchen to which the water was pumped from the well; and they fixed it in such a way that it could not freeze. Job did most of the work. Thus, the addition to the house, in which the goats had been housed from the beginning, was made free for human inhabitants. During 1921, Wooden Head started building up a bit of business with his Rhode Island Reds. More breeders joined the Red Club; and he kept in regular contact with the Rhode Island Red Club of America. This breed became better known in Holland as a good layer and a good-eating bird. There was a general poul- The Rhode Island Red Club 137 a Holland, which most breeders joined. Three co- i the north, center, and south, handled most of the eggs. They paid for weight, and producers got the money for their eggs within a week after delivery. As Holland had an extensive network of trains and trams, transportation was easy. At that time, few people had cars. Wooden Head got one firm to make special boxes for hatching eggs so that these could be shipped all over the country by parcel post with little risk of breakage. Special wicker baskets for transportation of live poultry were also available in different sizes. These were handy for shipping to the shows and for shipments of breeding stock. They were light but strong. At the same time, Wooden Head did as much as possible with the garden. He planted some decorative shade trees. Most of the land was in use for runs for the Reds. He wrote a yearly bulletin and mating list, about his Reds, with hints about raising, and so forth, and had it printed and distributed. A few days in the year he had to take off to visit the graves of his children in Haarlem and Noordwyk and those of his mother and father in Amersfoort. (His father had died in January, 1918, while Wooden Head was in America.) Wooden Head's leave expired at the end of October, 1920. He was then declared unfit for further service in the Dutch East Indies and subsequently was pensioned off. Officially he only heard about it in January, 1921, when he went to the Colonial Department at The Hague to investigate. The papers in question were there, but the employee who had to handle them told Wooden Head that he had had so many personal troubles that he had forgotten all about it. It had landed at the bottom of a pile of papers. Well, Wooden Head himself had experienced enough similar troubles so that he could understand this happening. This pension was a little more than his Navy pension. Together they came to a little less than two hundred guilders a month, or eighty dollars. He had contributed to that pension with a certain percentage of his salary. Another percentage was set aside for an eventual widow's pension. At marriage, a considerable amount had to be 138 WOODEN HEAD paid in one sum into this widow's pension. The amount was determined by the ages of the man and the woman. In the beginning of 1922, six or seven members of the Rhode Island Red Club, including Wooden Head, decided to import some hatching eggs from a few of the best exhibition breeders in the States. They had to pay up to three dollars per hatching egg. The other members of that group had asked Wooden Head if he would try to hatch them out. The eggs arrived in May, having been en route for twenty-three days. Wooden Head had a few broody hens himself and he collected more from the surroundings. Finally he had twenty setting hens ready. Most of the American breeders had several pens. The eggs were marked to determine from which pen they had come, and Wooden Head wanted to hatch them out separately so that he could mark the chicks. In this way, a better selection could be made later for breeding. It was quite a job for Wooden Head to handle twenty setting hens every day for three weeks. Finally this orgy of procreation ended, every hen having a few chicks. The club members took the chicks home to raise. About a month later, the Secretary of the Red Club, who lived not far from Wooden Head, came to him on the bike with his three chicks. He had only a small place, where chickens had been raised for several years, so that the soil may have been contaminated. The three chicks looked all but dead—they could not stand on their legs. He asked Wooden Head if he would try to get them into shape again. Wooden Head gave the chicks a bit of castor oil, to clear them out; then he fed them warm goafs milk. After thirty-six hours, they started to struggle to get onto their feet again. He kept them for about a month. They were then perfectiy all right and went back to their owner, who raised them further. The eggs those three chicks were hatched from came from M. F. Delano, Owen Farms, at that time one of the most prominent Red breeders. In January, 1923, one, a cockerel, was at "Avicultura," the second-largest show in Holland, The Hague; there were thirty- seven cockerels in that class, and the bird placed third. Later in 1922, Wooden Head got in touch with George Scott, then Secretary of the Rhode Island Red Club of England, which The Rhode Island Red Club 139 had six hundred members. The Dutch Club intended to have its annual club show at The Hague in January, 1923, at "Avicul- tura." Wooden Head asked Scott if he were willing to come over then and judge the Reds. He agreed; Wooden Head had told him that he had to judge according to the American Standard of Perfection. The English had their own standard, in which some American disqualifications were considered only defects. As I mentioned before, there were thirty-seven Red cockerels at the show; and the numbers of cocks, hens, and pullets were also high. Judging in Holland was done before the show started. All shows, large and small, issued, besides the prize list we know on this continent, a catalog which was prepared beforehand. The night before the show, after the judging was done, the prizes awarded were printed. The catalog was useful for those who wanted to buy birds, chicks, and hatching eggs. Wooden Head often wondered why some of the shows on this continent do not do this. The catalogs also carried lots of advertising and so paid for themselves. It took George Scott nearly the whole day to judge the Reds. But even then, he was not through. The Red Club had prepared cards for every entry; after the judging was over, Scott went along the coops again with Wooden Head, giving a few comments on every bird entered. Wooden Head took down the comments, translated them, and put them on the cards which were attached to the coops. In that way, every entrant learned in a few words what the judge thought of their bird. This was of great educational value, and that is surely one of the main purposes of any show—or should be. The next day, the Red Club had arranged for a talk by Scott explaining his reasons for his selections. The Club had invited the Dutch judges to attend, trying in that way to convince them that what the Club had done so far was really for the benefit of everyone concerned. These shows in Holland lasted two days in the case of the smaller ones and three days in the case of the larger ones, but Sunday was always included and drew most visitors. In those days, Saturday was not yet a holiday. Kathy and Gloria had come along to The Hague with Wooden 140 WOODEN HEAD Head. The Red Club had a good stand there with the picture of the Red Trio as the center. Quite a few new members joined the Club. But there was more to it. For several years Wooden Head had been in regular correspondence with Wid Card, Secretary of the Rhode Island Red Club of America. Mr. Card had asked Wooden Head to try to get a Branch of the American Club established in Holland. American Club dues were then two dollars a year (five guilders). Though only a comparative few could read and understand English well enough to read the Club magazine, the Rhode Island Red Journal, yet several Dutch members joined the American Club, so great was their enthusiasm for the breed. In the first half of 1923, the Branch grew to forty-five members. Wooden Head sent Wid Card a cablegram then, but Card may never have received that message, for he died suddenly early that summer. In the meantime, other things had happened. Wooden Head's former wife, Jane, had remarried. She was working at the Observatory. In the summer of 1923 she came on leave to Holland with Wooden Head's two children, a girl and a boy, her husband, and her baby. Wooden Head went to Rotterdam to meet them. It certainly was only logical that Wooden Head should want to see Rosalind and her brother. That at the same time he had to see their mother, Jane, was inevitable. And while she was taking care of them during their growing-up period, he wanted to be as sure as possible that they would grow up to become as independent as circumstances would warrant. Besides, he wanted to arrange with Jane to have the two children left with him for a short time while they were in Holland for their half-year leave. Somebody remarks about all this in this way, quote: "What was Wooden Head's attitude toward his former wives? He had enough of them." This is certainly a fact which is quite general; those who marry and are fortunate enough to find their proper, real mate right away are very lucky and should be happy. But the fact remains that the average man needs a woman, and vice versa; and when they find out later that they have made a mistake, the only right thing to do is to dissolve such a partnership. In that way there The Rhode Island Red Club 141 may be a chance for both or one of them to find real happiness, a commodity to which everybody is entided. There was a mortgage on Wooden Head's house in Bennekom. The mortgage holder charged a high interest rate—7 per cent, which was excessive in those times, when the ordinary rate was 5 per cent. There was occasional unpleasantness when Wooden Head could not pay the interest on time, so he started looking around for another place. The Notary knew somebody who was willing to rent the house for a sum high enough to pay the mortgage interest, the taxes, insurance, and so forth. Wooden Head found a place about seven miles to the southwest, near Rhenen. This was part of a larger estate. There was quite a large house where there was room to take some boarders; a large barn, with plenty of room for the goats and part of his birds; a large, walled- in garden; and quite some land, part pasture, for runs for his Reds. There was also a tower for pigeons; the place was named, after this, De Duiventoren (Duif—pigeon, toren—tower). Later Wooden Head had a brush with the owner, and he renamed it De Duivels- toren (duivel—devil). Wooden Head's brother, Karel, paid part of the rent. They moved in later in the summer. The larger house, with its extra rooms, required more furniture if they wanted to take advantage of those rooms by taking in boarders. This was quite a problem, which was only partly solved. While still at Bennekom, Wooden Head had, of course, met Kathy's family, who lived in Arnhem. Some of them had stayed with them now and then. Now, with so much more room at Rhenen, they came more often and stayed longer, especially in the summer. Kathy's father had been an employee in the Government Postal and Telegraph Service and was retired. Kathy's mother had died quite some time ago. Her father had remarried. There were two older sisters from the first marriage and one brother. The oldest sister was married and lived in Belgium. The other sister was a spinster; she took care of other people's children, living in; at one time she went with such a family for some I 142 WOODEN HEAD time to California. Wooden Head met her now and then. The brother was married and lived in another part of the country; Wooden Head never met him. Kathy's father's second marriage had brought him three boys and three girls; Wooden Head met all of them. Later, they all married. The oldest of these girls married a seafarer; he was later captain of one of the Koninklyke Paketvaart Maatschappy (K. P. M.—Royal Dutch Mail) boats in the Dutch East Indies. But a few years ago, Indonesian dictator Sukarno confiscated most of Dutch property, and the captain had to give up the job. Wooden Head still corresponds now and then with two of the girls. Before Kathy went to England just before the 1914-18 war and became a nurse there, her father and stepmother and the younger children had lived somewhere outside Arnhem, where they had a good-sized garden; they produced quite some vegetables and some fruit there which was sold in Arnhem. But they had to give that up when the children went their own way. Kathy's father was born in Friesland, one of the two most northerly provinces, and most of his relatives lived there. In the fall of 1923, Wooden Head's two children who were on short leave in Holland with their mother, Jane, came over for a few weeks from The Hague; they were nearly eight and six at that time. Kathy gave birth to her second child, Kate, in October, 1923. That same fall a young man whom Wooden Head had met at a poultry show paid them a visit. He intended to go to the United States, and he had heard that Wooden Head had been there for some time and was eager to get information. He could just get into the States before the new immigration quota went into effect He went to the States, but stayed only a few years and then returned to Holland. But after the last war he went to the States again. He had married in the meantime and had a son. After some time he was sufficientiy well established to have his wife and son come out. Around that time, Wooden Head started to write a book about Rhode Island Reds. He was contributing quite regularly to The Rhode Island Red Club 143 one of the Dutch poultry magazines, and he made an arrangement with the publisher of that magazine to print his book when he had the manuscript ready. In December, George Scott, the secretary of the British Red Club, was going to judge the Reds at Ornithophilia, Utrecht. Wooden Head had become acquainted with a Mr. Van de Putte, a Hollander, and his wife, who had lived several years in Russia. They had prospered there, but after the 1917 revolution they had fled to Holland and could salvage only a little of what they had accumulated in Russia. They had brought along a Russian who had been one of their servants there. Van de Putte also lived in Gelderland. He had bought some chickens, a sorry lot. He housed them in a shed, where they were crowded. But after getting in touch with the Red Club, he got some better stock and housed them in a better way. He was in Utrecht the day that Scott judged the Reds and drove Scott home, because he wanted Scott to look over his birds, thereby getting advice without having to pay for it Wooden Head had arranged with Scott to give a lecture for the members of the Rhode Island Red Club in the morning. Van de Putte had promised to get Scott to Wooden Head's place early enough for all to reach Utrecht in time for the talk. But he did not show up in time. It got so late that Wooden Head had to send a telegram to Utrecht advising that the talk would be held that afternoon, as Scott had been detained. When they finally came, hours later, Wooden Head remarked about their lateness. Van de Putte was quite rude about it. That afternoon in Utrecht, Wooden Head, as president of the Club, had to make a tactful explanation of the delay. Now and then meetings of the Executives of the Red Club were held at Wooden Head's house, since he had more room; the others stayed then for a bite to eat. Wooden Head met the brother of a doctor in Utrecht who was a bit out of sorts. He had no special job and really was looking for shelter and board. He could type and do other clerical work, so Wooden Head took him in. He was of considerable help with the office work. After a while, his brother became interested in 144 WOODEN HEAD some exhibition stock; he came over from Utrecht and bought some good show birds, paying four hundred guilders. The money relieved some of the financial pressure under which Wooden Head lived. In the spring of 1924, Jane and her family had to go back to Batavia. Wooden Head saw them off at Amsterdam. It was rather hard to see his two children go so far away, not knowing when he would see them again, if ever. (In fact, he has not seen them since, although he is in regular correspondence with them; the oldest, Rosalind, is in Indonesia and Jan is in Holland.) The same spring, Wooden Head's book, De Rhode Island Reds, was ready. Each member of the Red Club received a copy, while the balance were sold. In 1921 the first World Poultry Congress had been held at The Hague; Wooden Head attended. Several participating countries sent some birds with their delegates. Some nice Rhode Island Reds from Denmark were shown. In 1924 the Second Congress was going to be held in Barcelona, Spain. The Dutch Committee picked a trio of Wooden Head's Rhode Island Reds to be sent there as part of Holland's representation, and one of the Dutch delegates sold the trio there for Wooden Head. The same year, somebody in the southeastern part of Gelderland, Doesburg, wanted to buy a good cockerel from Wooden Head. A local show was coming up soon and he wanted to show off there. He could not come to Rhenen to pick out a bird, so he asked Wooden Head to come on a Sunday and bring three birds along, from which he then would pick the one he liked best. Wooden Head said: "All right, I will come, but you will have to pay me twenty-five guilders for my day." (That was the price Wooden Head charged for a day's advice re poultry.) He agreed. Being a Sunday, the trip took longer than usual. He arrived there about noon. After examining the three birds, this fellow picked the best one. Wooden Head had set a price of one hundred fifty guilders on that bird. The fellow tried to get it for much less but in the end was willing to pay one hundred twenty-five guilders. In that way, he saved himself twenty-five guilders, which The Rhode Island Red Club 145 he had to pay extra for the day's work. But he was satisfied, and so was Wooden Head. The same year, Wooden Head received inquiries from other countries regarding his birds. He made a few sales and shipped some birds to a few European countries. He sent a few to Java, to Jane and the children. He got an order from somebody, a Mr. V. d. B., in Batavia,; that was a good order and he shipped good birds to fill the order. Taking boarders had not panned out for Wooden Head. The maintenance of house, garden, and land took more than he could carry, and so he went looking again for something less costly. It was a pity to have to let that walled-in garden go. It was really something. In one sheltered corner some fig trees were growing, and there were several other fruit trees. But there was no help for it. He found a house in Heelsum with sufficient garden to be able to keep a limited number of birds. He could only rent the house starting in April, 1925. He found another place, owned by people whom he knew close to Bennekom, from whom he could rent a few rooms for a few months. They had sufficient room outside to put up a few poultry coops. He had to sell a good number of his birds to pay feed bills, which had been running up. He could not have kept them all anyhow. When Wooden Head shipped the Rhode Island Reds to Mr. V. d. B. in Batavia, Java, he had written him also extensively in answer to his questions and in a general way about his breeding work. One night in early February, Kathy woke up at 3 A.M. and said that she had had what she called something like a phone call, a very strong one. She could not describe it any better. That morning Wooden Head had to go to Arnhem for some business. When he came back in the afternoon and passed the living room, Kathy waved a piece of paper to him through the window. Coming in, he saw that this was a cablegram from Batavia, from Mr. V. d. B., saying that he had sent him through a bank in Wageningen, the nearest city, two thousand guilders. It was quite a surprise. 146 Clearing things up at the Pigeon Tower and moving had taken so much that they were, financially, at rock bottom. Besides, Kathy expected her third child in a short time. So the money was a blessing. Later, a letter from Mr. V. d. B. explained that he had understood that Wooden Head was in very straitened circumstances, and so he sent the money to help out. Not long after that, Kathy's third child, another girl, Millicent, was born. Finally the house in Heelsum became vacant and they could move in there. It was still quite cold in early April that year; there was some trouble getting the house—or part of it—properly heated. It was a large house. Downstairs there were a hall, with a living room and a good-sized bedroom at one side, with a glassed-in veranda, connected with the living room; at the other side, a roomy kitchen, another good-sized room, which Wooden Head used as an office and where he later put a large incubator, an entrance with glass doors, and at the end of the hall a small room. Upstairs there were three large bedrooms and a smaller one, and a room with bath and gas-geyser. There was no bathroom, as we know them on the American continent, but a toilet in the hall downstairs. The garden was about one-quarter acre. Carpenter Klaassen built a small barn behind the house in such a way that at the right and left, one of the smaller coops could be attached to it. Wooden Head had written Mr. V. d. B. telling him what he was going to do with the two thousand guilders in connection with his small poultry business. For one thing, he wanted to try to get the agency for Holland of one of the incubator manufacturers in the United States, and for some other things. Mr. V. d. B. wrote back saying that he did not think that what he had sent would be sufficient; so he sent Wooden Head another thousand guilders! For quite a few years, Wooden Head had entered a pen of Rhode Island Reds (twelve birds) in the government's Laying Contest at the Experimental Station at Beekbergen, in Gelderland. His birds never made outstanding laying records, but they laid sufficiently; and he got an award for production of the largest The Rhode Island Red Club 147 weight of eggs. In Holland eggs are sold by weight, not by the When Wooden Head came back to Holland in 1919, he had Klaassen make him a small sample coop on the same principles of the large laying house, about four feet square and two feet high in front. He displayed the coop at a poultry show in Arnhem. He tacked onto the coop a copy of The Goat World, containing the first article about vitamins he had ever read. The coop was quite an attraction; so was the article, evidentiy as the copy of The Goat World disappeared. One of the people he came in contact with at the show was Berghuys, who became a good friend. He joined the Red Club later; and he raised some Reds. He already raised some Barred Plymouth Rocks. Berghuys worked for the poultry magazine to which Wooden Head contributed now and then, and which sponsored the printing of his book De Rhode Island Reds. He travelled all over the country to get ad contracts for the magazine. He was married and had children. To be able to live, he had to earn sixty guilders a week. Sometimes he could not make it. In those later years, when he was in Heelsum again, he came to Wooden Head on a Saturday night asking for some help. He had not made his quota in ad contracts that week and was short. He was really an artist, but he could not make a living by painting. He brought two small paintings with him, pictures of rural views in Gelder- Iand—of heather, birches, a little cottage, and so on, really nice. He asked twenty-five guilders for these two products of his skill. Wooden Head was glad that he had the money at the moment and could help him. Berghuys' health was not first-class, for he had a stomach ailment. But he was always cheerful. Another friend, K., a former colleague of the Naval College, of his own class, wanted to start more or less in the poultry business. He was retired and had an income. When Wooden Head moved to Rhenen in 1923, he had no need any more for a quite good-sized poultry house. So he sold it to K., went to the place K. had bought somewhere else in Gelderland, and helped him put it together again. 148 WOODEN HEAD Another friend, Job, who had built the goat barn for him in Bennekom, had joined the Branch of the Rhode Island Red Club of America. As he did not know English, he took lessons from Wooden Head. Job is still there; Wooden Head might see him once more perhaps. Wooden Head got in touch with an incubator manufacturer in Santa Cruz, California. He ordered a five-hundred-forty-egg machine. The incubator worked on coal oil and electricity. It was so constructed that, if the coal-oil lamp heater gave up for some reason, electricity took over automatically. He could order the incubator with the money Mr. V. d. B. of Batavia had sent him. When the incubator arrived, Wooden Head put it up. He studied the instructions and, to make sure that everything was all right, he took the machine apart; that is, he took the top off. He noticed then that some parts were not the same as they were described. They were only minor things. He put them right, and wrote the manufacturer about it, at the same time asking for the Holland franchise. The manufacturer was quite surprised that Wooden Head had gone to the trouble to open the incubator to make sure that everything was all right. He gave him the agency, which was worthwhile, since by this means he got a forty per cent reduction on the retail price. At the same time, the manufacturer sent him a two-hundred-seventy-egg incubator to use as a display at poultry shows. With the instructions, description, and his first experience with the five-hundred-forty-egg incubator, Wooden Head wrote a little booklet describing the incubator, how it worked, and so forth, and added a few pictures of the most important features. He sent a copy to the manufacturer, who was so pleased with it that he asked Wooden Head for twelve more copies, which he wanted to distribute through his agents in the United States. Wooden Head sold quite a few of those incubators. There was one thing that, perhaps, had been exaggerated in the description. It said that even if the incubator was set up in a garage or similar building, where the weather might get very cold, the incubator would hold its own. One of Wooden Head's customers had put the incubator in a The Rhode Island Red Club 149 large building where there was no heat whatever. He complained that the incubator did not maintain the proper temperature. This was an extreme case, however, and Wooden Head was able to rectify it. Once in a while Wooden Head had to go to The Hague for some business. All the government's departments are there. When there, he usually called on his brother, Karel. Karel's family lived quite in style, even having a buder. His brother was not always there, being quite often on a trip. One day bis wife told Wooden Head the following story. Their maid was outside cleaning windows. She had a boy-friend, a Scot—probably attached to the British Embassy. He often came to see her when he was off duty. This day he was there helping her clean the windows. Line overheard her maid saying to the Scot, while he was standing on a ladder in his kilt, looking up at him, "The more I see of you, the more I love you." In December of that year, 1925, tragedy struck again. Karel had gone to Switzerland for a holiday. While he was skating, he had a stroke and died instantiy. His body was brought to Holland and he was cremated at The Hague. He had had a busy life. As a boy, he had gone for a year to a Merchant Marine school in Amsterdam, but then they had found that his eyes were not up to par, so they let him out He took some training at an agricultural school and then went to Java, where his special capabilities soon came to the fore. He was only fifty when he died. It was the first cremation Wooden Head had ever seen. A number of people were there: relatives and friends and, probably, also business acquaintances. Where the audience was, it was quite dark; there was some light where the coffin was and later disappeared to be cremated. The coffin stood on a kind of dais at the end of the hall and disappeared through the floor of the dais into the cremation room underneath. Wooden Head, being the oldest of his nearest relatives, spoke a few words. Karel had undoubtedly helped many more people in his life besides himself. There was no religious spectacle. Wooden Head does not care for those people, as I have mentioned earlier. (In Holland they are not called "reverend," but just "domine." They cannot marry people; only a civil I 150 WOODEN HEAD marriage is legal in Holland. Those who want a church wedding can have it after they are legally married.) Notwithstanding all this, Wooden Head thought that the cremation was a dignified procedure. That same December, 1925, brought other things. Wooden Head was asked to judge the Reds at "Ornithophilia," Utrecht, Holland's largest poultry show. Not long before the show, somebody bought a good pullet from Wooden Head, telling him that he wanted to show the bird in Utrecht There is in Holland what is called the Merken Bureau (merk, in this sense, meaning identification). They issue solid, numbered legbands, which have to be put on the birds while they are young. When the birds mature, the bands cannot be slipped off and changed. They keep a record of those who buy these bands; and at some shows special prizes are given for eigen fok ("own breeding"). Wooden Head told his customer that he should take the band off the pullet, since Wooden Head was going to judge. But the fellow failed to do so. Wooden Head might have recognized the bird anyhow, but it was embarrassing. There were two hundred Rhode Island Reds at the show, so it was quite a judging job. He started at 9 a.m. and, with the exception of time for lunch, he was busy until 6 p.m. All the other judges were ready long before that. The show days were busy days, but it was pleasant and interesting to meet so many other breeders. His customer's pullet was awarded fifth prize in a large class. Had he taken the legband off, as he was told to do, he might even have gotten a higher prize. In January, 1926, at "Avicultura," The Hague, the second- largest show, Wooden Head also judged the Reds. In The Hague they did not have the same facilities to coop a large show as they had in Utrecht. Part of the entries had to be cooped in a tent, and that could be quite cold. But the Reds were inside. There was a good entry. Wooden Head remembers one case in particular. There was an entry from an English breeder. His poultryman was at the show. The English Red Club has its own standard, while the Dutch Red Club had, at its start in 1920, adopted the American Standard of The Rhode Island Red Club 151 Perfection. The English entry was a good cockerel, but it had a stub—a small feather—on one of its legs. This is a disqualification by the American Standard. Wooden Head had no choice—he had to disqualify the bird. When the judging was over, the Englishman talked to Wooden Head about it. He should have noticed in the literature that the American Standard would apply. He probably never noticed that small feather. If he had, he could have pulled it and nobody would have been the wiser. Around that time there was a general election in the offing in Holland. The vote-booth for Heelsum was opposite Wooden Head's house. He and some friends were for labor, called the Social Democratic party in Holland. Berghuys helped Wooden Head to put up in his garden a large sign advocating the cause of the labor party. In Holland there is a proportional representation, which works in this way. Suppose a hundred members of Parliament have to be elected; say that a million votes are cast over the whole country; then a member would need ten thousand votes to get elected. Let us take the labor party. Say that the top labor candidate gets fifteen thousand votes; the extra five thousand votes he (or she) got, are transferred to the second highest labor candidate; if that brings him to thirteen thousand votes, the extra three thousand go to the third highest, and so further down the line. At that time the labor party elected about twenty-five members. The same procedure is followed for all the other parties, of which there were about half a dozen (not so bad as in France). If there is a second party which gets about twenty-five members elected, then the logical thing would be that these two parties should form a coalition, if they can come to a workable agreement; if not, the largest party (in members elected) will have to try to form such a coalition with two other smaller parties. It of course takes time to settle the matter. And the result is that the government formed will be a compromise; none of the partaking parties can do exacdy what it would like to do. Just the same, this way of doing has brought results for a long time— as long as I can remember, and that is not far from a century now. A new Dutch Parliament has to be elected every four years. Look at what has been accomplished since the last war, when 152 WOODEN HEAD Holland was one of the most devastated countries. Rotterdam was all but destroyed by the German bombs. Not only has Rotterdam been rebuilt, but it is now the second-largest port of the world; and some—who are in the know—say that New York must look out that it does not lose its first place. There is practically no unemployment in Holland; special labor in certain trades is even being imported from Italy and Spain. And this notwithstanding the economic loss of the former Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and the forced return to Holland of three hundred fifty thousand people from Indonesia. "Return" is the wrong word, since a great number of these were born there and had always lived there. This may lead to the forming of a rather large number of parties, but, after all, the members of parliament who get elected represent the people according to the number of people who favour a certain party and who do vote. Sometimes Wooden Head received inquiries from people who preferred a light breed and white eggs. So he thought it might pay to get a limited number of different birds. He ordered some An- cona hatching eggs from a good strain in America. These hatched and grew into nice birds. But he had to make a shelter for them in another part of the garden, to separate them from the Rhode Island Reds. He also got a few Red Bantams from England, but these were considerably off color, and the like, compared with the large Reds, so he did not think it worth trying to improve them. When the weather became mild in 1926, one Sunday, Wooden Head and his family hired a horsedrawn carriage for an outing to the Middachter Allee, the stretch of road northeast of Arnhem with two rows of old shade trees at either side of the road, one of the beauty spots of Holland in those days. They took Kathy's family. All had a nice day for a change. In July of that year, Kathy had her fourth child, Floris. She gave birth at home. They had some extra help for a few weeks. Around that time, Mr. V. d. B. came to Holland, having retired. He was in poor health and went to the hospital in Haarlem. Wooden Head went to see him and have a talk. Later this friend moved to Renkum, not far from Wooden Head's home. A little later, Mr. Kramer, a Hollander who lived in Buenos The Rhode Island Red Club 153 Aires, Argentine, came over to Holland for some weeks. He came to see Wooden Head. He wanted two pens of Rhode Island Reds, each "1-4" ("1-4" means one male and four females), or ten birds in all. He had sailed on a German line via Hamburg. He wanted to go back with the same line, so the birds bad to be shipped via Hamburg. Further, he asked Wooden Head if he could supply him with twelve dozen hatching eggs, which he wanted to take along to hatch out in Buenos Aires. It was already late summer—a bad time for hatching eggs. But Wooden Head had some birds mated up and could get part of that amount; the others he got from other Red Breeders Club members in the vicinity. The trip from Hamburg to Buenos Aires took nearly a month. Mr. Kramer turned the eggs on board everyday. He put the eggs in an incubator and got fourteen chicks, which in Wooden Head's opinion was quite good, taking everything into consideration. In all, it was a good deal, of course. Toward the end of the year, Wooden Head got the idea that their four children might have a better chance if they grew up in another country. Of course, he meant the United States. Education in Holland at colleges and universities was very expensive. Only those boys and girls whose parents were very well off financially could take advantage of such higher education. Wooden Head remembered only too well that he had wanted teaining in an agricultural line and that he could not get it because bis parents could not afford it. He had had to go to the Naval College, which cost his parents four hundred guilders a year and his father, and later himself, a contract to serve at least ten years as an officer. It cost the government eight hundred guilders a year on top of that. While Wooden Head was in the United States for those sixteen months, he had found out that there was a possibility there for students to get a paying job in the summer holiday which might make it possible for them to get a university training even if their parents could not afford to contribute much. In Holland this was out of the question. He went to Amsterdam to see the American Consul. Around 1924, free immigration to the United States had been abolished and a quota system for different countries had taken its place. I 154 WOODEN HEAD Wooden Head was told that the Dutch quota for the next five years had already been filled and no further applications were being taken. While he was in the States, Wooden Head had heard about Canada. However, the information which had reached him was contradictory and confusing. He realized that it was necessary to get more precise data. There was a Canadian Government's representative in Rotterdam at that time. He and a representative of the C. P. R., Canadian Pacific Railway, were touring Holland and lecturing to stir up interest in emigration to Canada. To give smaller Red breeders a chance to show how well their Reds could lay, the Red Club in 1926 organized a one-hen laying contest for their members. The contest was started on November 1, 1926, on the premises of one of the members near Bennekom, who had volunteered his place. A suitable house for the hens with teapnests had been built there. A water trough was laid with an electrical heating to prevent freezing, and the like. The contest was opened with a bit of a ceremony. Wooden Head entered a pullet—the birds had to be of exhibition quality— which ended up with two hundred eggs. (This he learned later. He had already left Holland when the year of the contest was up in 1927.) In January, 1927, Wooden Head got under the weather with a minor illness. He needed help to look after the daily chores. Kay came to the rescue, as she had done before. Wooden Head decided to try to sell bis poultry business. He had started this in 1920 and had then given it the name Poultry Breeding Go-Ahead. A friend of his, editor of one of the poultry magazines, advertised this sale and acted as intermediary. After some time, he found a party who was interested. He was willing to take over the available stock and equipment and the right to use the name "Go Ahead," which by that time was known all over the country. He was willing to pay ninety per cent down and the balance at a later date. He also wanted the incubator franchise, but Wooden Head had no say about that; one of his Red Club friends got that later. Wooden Head kept a trio of Reds out of the sale, which he had put in the name of his oldest girl, Gloria. A considerable part of that money Wooden Head had to use to pay bills. The Rhode Island Red Club 155 Then Wooden Head got in touch with the Canadian Government's representative and the Canadian Pacific Railway agent in Rotterdam, to get more information about Canada. He also wrote to Canada for such information. He had met Mr. de Boer, who lived in California and was in Holland for a holiday; de Boer had been in western Canada, near the coast. He told him, "If you can't get into the United States, then your best bet is western Canada." Mr. Brown and Mr. Whale asked Wooden Head to come and see them and have lunch with them so that they could give him all the desired information. He did. He also obtained information direct from Canada. (But later he found out that some of it was rather exaggerated, and that other things were kept hidden.) He had contacted two girls who lived near Barneveld who also wanted to emigrate. They arranged to travel on the same ship with them. Wooden Head thought that these girls might help Kathy in looking after his four children. Wooden Head's younger brother, Peter, who had a good position in the Dutch East Indies, in East Java, was on leave in Holland; he promised to help with the fare to Canada and, if everything went normally, he said, later he might be able to help Wooden Head to get established in Canada. Wooden Head had managed to get part of the land in Bennekom divided from the part on which the house stood. A public road ran between those two parts, and that part he had registered separately. He gave his friends in Heelsum, de Groot, authority to sell the land, whenever there was a chance, and to remit the money to Canada. With the Notary, Mr. Feenstea, in Wageningen, he arranged to clear up the mortgage on the house in Bennekom. The house was still rented. Mr. Feenstea was going to sell their furniture and other things at a public sale. It took Wooden Head two weeks to sort out his personal belongings, and the like, burning what he could not keep. He went to visit for the last time the graves of his parents in Amersfoort, and those of his boy in Haarlem and of Jessica in Noordwyk, and arranged for their upkeep. 26/ Off to Canada On April 28, 1927, they left Rotterdam for London on the Batavier Line. Kay and one of the Red Club members saw them off. They got to London early on the twenty-ninth, went to the C. P. R. Hotel, and were there for the day and night. It was a cold and gloomy day. Wooden Head had to go to the C. P. R. Warehouse to check their luggage. Kathy had written Mrs. Wegerif near London, with whom she had stayed with Jessica in the spring of 1920, that they would be in the C. P. R. Hotel. (Their third daughter had been named after Mrs. Wegerif.) Mrs. Wegerif came around later in the afternoon and they had tea together. It was chilly all over the hotel. The fireplaces gave only a little warmth. The bathroom also was on the primitive side. The next morning they boarded the train for Southampton, where the Empress of France was waiting. Wooden Head had had a shipping coop made for his three Rhode Island Reds, and he took that along to Canada. A feed hopper was built in with sufficient feed for the trip, so he really had only to see that the birds got water. The crossing was uneventful, taking seven days. The help from the two girls for Kathy and the children did not amount to much. Going up the St. Lawrence River, the Empress of France docked at Quebec early in the afternoon of May 7. The immigration hall at Quebec Station did not look exactiy attractive or promising. But they got through without too much trouble. In the early evening they arrived at Montreal, where they boarded the transcontinental train. That also took some doing, especially because the younger children were sleepy by that time. They got on board the colonial car—they had to travel at the least possible expense—and tried to settle down for the night. The two girls from Barneveld disappeared into another part Off to Canada 157 of the train. Now that they had reached Canada with some help from Wooden Head, they evidently preferred to be on their own. On the tenth of May they arrived in Winnipeg, which was still covered with snow. They had planned to stay there one day, to give a bit of a break to the children and themselves. Apart from the snow, it was quite a good day; they looked around some and took a team ride to the outskirts. Their hotel was not exactiy what you would like after three days of riding on the train in the colonial car. The next day they went on through the prairies and during the last night went through the Rockies. Friday morning, May 13, they passed Agassiz and further places in the Fraser Valley and then arrived at Vancouver. Most of Wooden Head's information pertained to an island on the West Coast of Canada which by some was praised as an earthly paradise! Wooden Head was old enough by this time to take such propaganda with a pinch of salt Still, he hoped for the best. They sailed across the sound, which took around six hours, arriving late in the afternoon on the ground where they had to begin a new life. They knew no place to spend the first night and could not afford a large hotel. So they walked around for a while until they saw a likely-looking man, who proved willing to direct them. He gave them an address and told Wooden Head how to get there. They found it—evidently a small apartment-hotel. It was clean and suitable for their needs. They stayed there for a few days and nights. On Monday following, Wooden Head visited a few people whose names and addresses had been given him by the Canadian representatives in Holland. They found a few rooms somewhere, where they stayed a week or so, then moved to some other rooms in a more open part of the place, where the youngsters would have room to play. Meanwhile Wooden Head continued to look for a permanent spot. It rained heavily that month, which did not make it easier. He saw quite a few places, some pretty close to that city, others farther away. Some, Kathy did not like; others did not suit Wooden Head—they were too large and needed too much hard work to 158 WOODEN HEAD get them into shape. In the end, he found a place of about five acres, rundown as far as soil went but with a suitable house and on terms which he thought he would be able to meet. This was about twelve miles from the city; there was city water and electricity and a bus-stage communication a few times a week. Further, there was a school not too far away. The community was called Lucky Valley. A family was living there who wanted to leave the country. They were British and wanted to go to Central Africa. They had some furniture, which Wooden Head and Kathy took over. The place itself had to be bought on an "agreement for sale." On June first they moved in. The house stood nearly a hundred yards from the road. Entrance was through a porch. There were a good-sized living room at the right and a large bedroom at the left; then a kitchen-living room over the width of the house; then at the right a small bedroom and at the left a bath; behind that a storage room at the right; and a privy which was a nuisance as it had to be emptied every so often. A cedar hedge along the road gave some privacy. There was an orchard, or there had been. It was badly neglected; later on, Wooden Head found out that there was quite some hardpan in the orchard. Hardpan is a layer of coarse gravel, often good-sized rocks, which hangs together like concrete; it may be two to three feet deep below the top of the soil, while in the orchard it cropped up in some spots. It takes hard work to break through it. Below such a layer there may be looser soil, often sand. To plant deep- rooted trees, it is necessary to break through the hardpan in digging plant-holes. It is probably a deposit left by a moving glacier. At the right side there were perhaps three acres which did not grow anything at that time (besides weeds, of course). After a stretch behind the house, a creek ran through, leaving around four acres on the part on which the house stood and one acre on the other side of the creek. On that part there was a chicken house, a tool shed, and another shed, which Wooden Head used later for a few goats. Half a log lay over the creek as a bridge. In summer there Off to Canada 159 was little water in the creek, and crossing over the log with a wheelbarrow loaded with feed was not too difficult then; but in winter and spring, the water rose up to the bottom of the log, and then it proved quite a job to pass over with a load, especially when there was snow or ice on top. Gloria had to go to school for a few weeks before the summer holiday started. It was not easy for her, as she did not yet know sufficient English; but she managed. Kathy and Wooden Head had already started to speak English to get the children used to it; but it of course took time. The neighbors next door and across the road were helpful, and after some time Kathy got some help in the household from a local girl. Gradually Wooden Head got to know a few more people. One of them had a good team of horses and plowed the greater part of his three acres for him Wooden Head wanted to try raising a crop there. He had to use sprinklers to get enough moisture on that land; since the first of June it had been absolutely dry. He also tried to put a bit of a garden in, close to the house. He joined the local Farmers Institute and so got to know some more people. A Finnish couple who had been fellow passengers on the Empress of France had also come to the island. They visited Wooden Head and stayed for a few days and nights, sleeping on the front porch. Some other people whom they had met in the city those first few weeks, who had a car, came out and took them all on a sort of picnic to a beach. At the Provincial Department of Agriculture, Wooden Head got in touch with the secretary of the local goat association. Through him he met some other goat breeders and bought a few goats so that the family could have their own milk. He also bought about a dozen white leghorns to get sufficient eggs for the household. During that summer they often saw rain clouds, and in the beginning they expected rain, as they had had in summer in Holland. But not a drop fell. There was another family, the H.'s, living on the same road, who had a large plot of land. Mr. H. had a team of horses and Wooden Head borrowed them a few times to do some plowing and other work himself. He tried to plow the orchard, and then 160 he found out about the hardpan. Mrs. H. was a nurse, so she and Kathy had much in common. Next to the kitchen Wooden Head built a lean-to where he could stack firewood. They were dependent on wood for the kitchen range and, later, for heating the house. Even the youngest girl, Millicent, then only two and a half years old, helped bring wood in. The dry summer lasted nearly three months. Finally, on the twenty-fifth of August, the weather broke with a good shower, and some more rain came now and then, with good weather in between. Wooden Head secured a booklet published by the weather bureau. In that booklet the weather on the south part of the island was described as coming in five-year cycles. For five years the summer—June, July, and August—was usually mostly dry, and then for another five years some rain would usually fall in those months. The year of 1927 was evidentiy the first year of such a dry cycle. There was a girl of around twenty in Lucky Valley who rode horseback. Polly lived with her parents. She often passed Wooden Head's place and took an interest in the children. Kathy was expecting again. When the child was born in 1928, they named it Polly, after this girl. Wooden Head soon realized that his Dutch pension was inadequate. It was not much more than eighty dollars a month. They luckily had brought enough clothes and other necessities with them to last for some time, but even so, they had to pinch to keep going. With the coming of winter, keeping a sufficient supply of firewood was quite a problem. Quite often Wooden Head had to dry fresh ldndling in the oven of the kitchen range. Different fuel was out of the question. No wonder he often thought of Holland, where there is practically no wood to burn but where other fuel was not so difficult to get for low-incomers. There was heavy snow and frost that winter. To prevent freezing of the water pipes in the night, he had to shut off the water each evening. To do this he had to walk a hundred yards to the shut-off valve close to the road; then early in the morning he had to do the same thing to open the valve once more. Only part of the house could be kept warm enough for living. Off to Canada 161 Kathy made arrangements with Mrs. H. to help her at the birth of her coming child, and a city doctor was contacted. Spring, 1928, luckily came quite early. In the first part of March, Wooden Head had to go early one morning to get Mrs. H. She phoned the doctor, as Wooden Head had no phone. There were no complications. It was another girl, Polly. The doctor who had helped Kathy lost his life not long after this in a plane accident. Early that spring some good news came from Holland. Wooden Head's property in Holland had been sold and the money was being sent to him. That was a great help. H. in Lucky Valley, from whom he had borrowed the team a few times the year before, had sold the team that winter and had bought a car with the money. Now, with part of the sale money, Wooden Head bought a horse, harness, a plow, and so forth. It was a pretty light horse, but good enough to plow with and do other work. He had no special stable for the horse, for there was no barn on the place; but with the better weather, they managed. He plowed part of his own land and put a crop in while the soil was still moist enough. Then he did some plowing for H. Someone else also, on a rough gravel crossroad, wanted him to do some plowing for him. He did, but to get up the rough road, he had to put the plow on a stone boat. A few times the horse broke loose during the night. Then Wooden Head might waste half a day trying to find it. They had fallen into arrears in the payments on the house. Household expenses did not go down as expected. The owner refused to listen to any pleadings. He foreclosed. They had to leave the place by the end of June. Again Wooden Head had to find some other shelter. When and where possible, he went around in his search on horseback. On the main highway there were a few bridges with wooden decks. This horse was perfecdy at home on these; but one of those bridges was being replaced by another one with a concrete deck. The horse refused to pass the bridge, while he was on top, or later when it was drawing a wagon; Wooden Head had to get off and lead the horse over it. He found a house about eight miles north of Victoria. It was a good-sized house, really a better one than the one in Lucky Valley. It was built on top of a rock, not far from Trout Lake. It had 162 WOODEN HEAD electricity but no city water. There was a water tank not far from the house which had to be filled by a gasoline pump at the bottom of the hill with water out of a swamp there. There was quite a garden with fruit trees, bearing, with more land down the slope of the hill and across a road running along the bottom of the hill. The house was partly furnished. The rent was reasonable. There was a small barn where Wooden Head could house his goats. Apart from the route along good highways, there was a shorter approach along a primitive country road, from Lucky Valley. A neighbor at the hill-house had an old, dilapidated light wagon, which he offered to give to Wooden Head if he could see his way to repair it. Wooden Head was able to do this and got a lot of use out of it. Toward the end of June, they moved to the new house. Keeping the water tank filled was quite a job. Wooden Head did not know much about gasoline engines. The only one he had ever handled was the one he used on the ranch near Workman Station in southern California in 1918, which pumped up irrigation water. When he had the pump working, he climbed up the hill to the house again, and that was quite a climb. But every now and then the engine stopped, for some reason, after he was up the hill, so that he had to go down to get it going until the tank was full. They became friendly with a neighbor who lived by himself. This man had no bath in his house; he came over on Sunday mornings to get a hot bath and then stayed for a hot meal. It was a rather dry summer. There were a number of Bartlett pear trees in the garden near the house. There was more fruit than they could use all by themselves. The farmer's co-operative had been so flooded with the pears that they would not take any more. But Wooden Head got acquainted with a French-Canadian who often went fishing in the lake. He caught trout and exchanged part of his catch for Bartlett pears. It was possible to swim in the lake, but it was quite deep close to shore, so it was rather risky for the children. When September rolled along, it became time to think about the coming winter. Wooden Head eyed the water pipes running Off to Canada 163 from the gasoline engine to the tank up the hill; as they ran over the rocks, they would be wholly exposed to frost in the winter. So they had to think sincerely about another move to some place where there was no risk of such a freeze-up. Toward the end of September, Wooden Head began looking again. Nothing that he saw was suitable or within financial reach. One afternoon he went up the main highway going up the island. He came to a spot where a side road went to the left. On that corner was an oak tree with a sign saying "House for rent or sale." He went up the side road—a rough gravel road—and asked the few people he saw living on the road if they knew about such a house, seeing no sign along the road anywhere. Nobody knew anything, so he turned around and went to the highway. Before he got too far, he spotted a sign on the wall of an empty house. He got out and had a look; the house was locked, but he could see something of it through the windows. There was a basement. Then he looked at the garden. It was nothing—there was no growth there besides some broom here and there, weeds, and a few old stumps. At the back the ground sloped down. So he went for a look. There was a wooded part going down to a lake. He assumed that some of that beach frontage went with the house. From the very beginning he had been looking for a place where swimming water would be close by. He wanted to be able to swim himself, and he wanted the children to learn to swim. So when he saw the lake and beach, he thought "This is what I want, and I am going to get it, if it is at all possible." There was no plain address on the sign, but after nosing around, he found out who the owner was and that he lived in the city. Wooden Head went to see him. Together they went out to the house to look things over. The house was absolutely empty. A cold-water tap in a corner of the kitchen above a half-broken- down sink was the only facility. No bathroom, no toilet—only an outhouse, close to a half-broken-down old garage on the road. There was some water frontage with the property—in all, about one and a quarter acres of land, with a wide road frontage tapering down to the lake. The terms were easy enough. The property was for sale on an r 164 WOODEN HEAD agreement The owner was getting on, being nearly seventy. He told Wooden Head that originally he had nearly a hundred acres around the lake, and that he had divided it into building lots and sold them. This was the last of the lots. The house was built during the First World War by day labor. In the end Wooden Head heard that the place was in the hands of a lawyer who lived around there and had his office in the city. So he went to see the lawyer. The upshot was that he could buy the place without a down payment. He had to pay $22.50 a month, interest (6 per cent) and principal. Papers would have to be drawn up, which would cost fifteen dollars. (The owner must have had business dealings wherein that property was involved, with the result that he was not free to do with it as he might want. He had originally said that he did not want any interest, but as soon as Wooden Head talked with the lawyer, he understood that the lawyer was setting the terms. But, even so, the deal seemed reasonable enough.) Well, Wooden Head had no extra cash whatever. His small pension had to be used to pay the household bills. All he had, more or less, was the horse. He hated to let it go, but there was no help for it. A neighbor near Trout Lake was willing to buy the animal, but would pay only twenty-five dollars. Fifteen dollars of that would have to go for the papers, and the other ten dollars would have to be the down payment for moving. They decided to move October 30, 1928. When Wooden Head rented the Trout Lake House, the owner had told him that he could use a little of some coal he had stored in the basement. Wooden Head had used only very little. The day before they moved, Wooden Head began to think. Winter was coming soon and there was no fuel at the new place. The lawyer had promised to order a cord of wood, which Wooden Head could pay later. But Wooden Head was quite sure that the millwood would be pretty wet and full of sap, so, looking at that coal in that basement, he filled ten gunnysacks with coal. I 27/ The Years on Vancouver Island They arrived at the new place around 5 p.m., nearly dark. They had only a coal-oil lamp, as there was not yet electricity on that road. They had ordered a range on the installment plan. It came the next day along with some groceries. Wooden Head set up the range in the kitchen, and with some coal and wet wood they could cook. The floors were just bare wood, but that had to do for the beginning. The children were, of course, anxious to explore the outside; there was luckily no snow or frost yet. With the kitchen range going and some fire in the fireplace in the living room, they could keep the house—the downstairs anyway—sufficientiy warm. In front of the garden, on the road, was a kind of garage, rather dilapidated, but Wooden Head put the goats and chickens in it. At the west side of the house, the land sloped down to the lake, about three hundred fifty feet away. As Wooden Head found out later, the house was about forty-five feet above the lake. The children wanted to see the lake, of course. They heard later that at some time somebody had planted sunfish in the lake, which eat other young fishes. There was some bass in the lake; still they baptized it Sunfish Lake. That day, October 31, was Halloween. In Holland they don't have a day like that. But somebody took the children to a party in the local Women's Institute Hall. There were a lot of flies around at that time, and, as the weather was getting colder, they swarmed into the house; it took quite some time, disinfectant spray, and window screens to control those pests. Though their first winter was not so severe, having no indoor toilet was a great handicap. So Wooden Head made one in the southwest corner of the basement. It was also primitive, but at least they did not have to go outside. The old garage was drafty for the goats, so Wooden Head made some wooden floors for them 166 s he could fix the and put them in the basement until such time a garage up sufficiently. In February, 1929, Wooden Head had a chance for a few days' work on a chicken ranch. Although the pay was very low— one dollar a day, with a hot meal—he took it, as they were desperately in need of a few extra dollars. He worked there five days. Then he heard about the possibility of road work when better weather came; that would pay forty-five cents an hour, five and a half days a week. He was told that the road foreman would let him know if and when he could use him. In the first part of March, spring weather was already coming. Wooden Head remembered that one day, Polly's first birthday, he sat with her in the sun on the slope toward the lake. By that time Kathy had found a few days' work now and then looking after children and helping with household work. On March 15 Kathy was out on such work. In the forenoon the road foreman came along and told Wooden Head that he wanted him to come to work in the afternoon. They had started work on the road where he lived, farther on where it was only a trail so far; they were going to widen the road. Wooden Head had to leave the three smaller children in the care of Kate, who was only five and a half years old then, to be able to go to work. From March 16 on, Kathy stayed home while Wooden Head worked on the road. Since he had to milk the goats and do other chores, he had to get up at 4 A.M. to be able to get on the road at 8 a.m. Saturday afternoons and Sundays, he had to get enough firewood ready for the coming week. Earlier he had taken over five hundred feet of good lumber from somebody who had ordered too much for his own use. (The price was only a fraction of what it is now.) Wooden Head lined the old garage with it so that he could put the goats in it. In the house he made shelves in the larger bedroom and in the living room, so that there would be some place to put things away, and also bookshelves. He worked for a few weeks on the extension of the road where he lived, widening it. One day a stump had to be blasted out on the corner. This was quite close to Wooden Head's house. There The Years on Vancouver Island 167 was a man on the road gang who did this special work, but somehow he miscalculated. A large chunk of wood sailed through the air and hit the window in the basement of Wooden Head's house. The window was, of course, shattered. The foreman didn't want to report the accident, so he told Wooden Head that he would book him for an extra day of work to make up for it. Wooden Head had applied to the electric utility company to get electric current put into the house. He made a deal to have the house wired (paying for it on the installment plan). The utility company had to put up five poles along the secondary road to bring the current so far, and then another pole was needed in the garden between the road and the house. Wooden Head got that one done for less than half the amount that the company would have charged. But he had to sign an agreement stating that he would use, or pay for the use of, thirty-five dollars' worth of electricity as a minimum per year for the next five years. So the electric light was put in during April, 1929. That first year after April, 1929, they had used only about twenty-five dollars worth of current instead of thirty-five dollars' worth. The utility company sent Wooden Head a bill for the difference of ten dollars. But another house had been built during that year which was served through the first of those five poles along the road. Wooden Head wrote the company about that, suggesting that the people in the new house certainly must have used ten dollars' worth of current The company did not reply. But the next year they tried the trick again. Later, when more houses were built along that road, the company had to give the service. Though the road work left him very little time to do anything extra, Wooden Head made a start at getting a bit of garden in. The slope at the west side of the house, going down to the lake, seemed to have less gravel than the other parts; besides, it bad a bit of loam here and there. Spading it thoroughly, as he was used to doing in Holland, and using the manure of the goats, he got a small stretch ready in time for planting. In May the water in the lake started to warm up and was soon good enough for a swim. For around ten dollars Wooden 168 WOODEN HEAD Head got enough logs and deck for a small raft, and soon the children were at the lake most of the time. Wooden Head had kept up his contact with the Rhode Island Red Club of America. He wrote the Secretary, then W. T. Brooker, asking where he could buy a good setting of hatching eggs. Mr. Brooker replied with an offer of a setting of eggs from his own Reds. Although the eggs had to travel nearly four thousand miles from Columbia, South Carolina, they produced a satisfactory hatch; in fact, the chicks grew up well—so much so that a cockerel and pullet both won first prizes at the Vancouver Winter Show in December of that year. So Wooden Head had some more good material to breed from. The first few days of June, there was a demand for strawberry pickers; Kathy thought she might be able to do that and earn something extra. She packed up—for she had to stay there overnight— and went there; but she soon found out that it was too much for her, and after a few days she came home. With some of the road-work money, Wooden Head hired a man to haul a large quantity of chicken manure from chicken ranches in the vicinity and to plow part of his land. He sowed oats between the house and the road and gave the soil plenty of water (it was already dry in June) with sprinklers and hoped for the best. But the soil evidently lacked every nutrient it needed; notwithstanding all the chicken manure put in, the oats never grew higher than three to four inches. The bit of garden he had put in earlier did better. In September the second girl, Kate, also went to school. Kathy got some work now and then, which brought in something. In the fall of 1929, Wooden Head got another letter from eastern Germany, which had been sent to his last address in Holland. This party wanted seventy-six hundred hatching eggs. Wooden Head got in touch with Professor Lloyd, head of the poultry department at the University of British Columbia. Professor Lloyd wrote him after a while that he would be able to get that many hatching eggs from a number of Record of Performance poultry breeders. He quoted a reasonable price, around ten cents per egg. (Wooden Head had been warned that Professor Lloyd was The Years on Vancouver Island 169 a sharp man to deal with.) The eggs would be seventeen to eighteen days on the way (there being no air transportation at that time), and the cost would be considerable. Wooden Head made the German an offer (there were several large rural estates there, and their poultry flocks had been depleted by the war); but they found it too risky. He then tried to land the order in Holland, through the President of the General Poultry Association there, who was a good friend. But nothing came of this. After his first cord of wood was gone, Wooden Head cut up several old logs, partly rotten, which were lying along the road. When they were depleted, he cut trees in a large wooded lot farther along the road. He had heard that this belonged to the C. P. R. (Canadian Pacific Railway), but there was never anybody there. To get the wood home required that it be pulled uphill. It was impossible for him to pull a wheelbarrow full by himself, so he had to wait till the older children came home from school and helped him. This went on for several years. His brother Peter, who had a good position in Soerabaja, had promised to help Wooden Head to get settled as soon as Peter received his expected bonus. But, in 1929 the New York Stock Market crash came, upsetting business all over the world. Peter got no bonus and so Wooden Head got no help. There was nothing else to do but try to plod on. The Great Depression had arrived. Millions were thrown on relief. Wooden Head and his family, with his small pension, were even better off than many others who had been thrown out of work. In the fall of 1929, a Dutch couple, V. d. M., contacted Wooden Head and his family. They had come to Canada for a holiday, but at the same time they wanted to try to find out if there would be any advantage for them if they emigrated to Canada. As far as he could, Wooden Head gave them all the information available to him and showed them around. After they returned to Holland, they wrote that they had decided to stay in their own country. After his triumph at the Vancouver Winter Show with two Rhode Island Reds of the Brooker strain, Wooden Head was visited by the editor of a western Canada poultry magazine. They I 170 WOODEN HEAD had a nice talk and Wooden Head arranged for a regular ad in that monthly magazine. That led to inquiries and started some business, which, through the years, covered a great deal of British Columbia and now and then farther afield. Once in a while, Wooden Head had a chance to hire a horse for a few days, which he did so that he could do some plowing himself. With goat and chicken manure which he collected and some lime and artificial fertilizer, he could make a better start in making the land a little more productive. Thus he could produce most of the vegetables they needed, and later enough to sell. Wooden Head became acquainted with a man who had quite a large herd of goats and ran a goat milk route to the city. This man leased a substantial piece of land; Wooden Head plowed part of it for him. In 1932, when Gloria had to go to high school in Victoria, the man took her along to town on the milk truck and brought her back in the afternoon. When Wooden Head first took the new house, the approach to the lake was, for the greater part, overgrown. There really was an eight-foot-wide alley for the public next to his place. In the early nineteen-thirties, the public works cut some trees which stood right in that alley and cleared it further so that the public could get down. Gloria and Kate met other children at school, of course, and where there was at the lake only the small raft that Wooden Head had built in 1929, other children used it too, when they came down for a swim. At that time there were only about four hundred people in the community. The children helped quite a bit with the clearing of the place, especially in carrying away coarse gravel, which their father dug up, to a pile. Kathy worked away from home quite a bit in those years—at first only in the nearby community so that she could be home at night; later she went into the city. Then she came home only Saturday night and had to go back to the city on Sunday night. It was not long before the children—the older ones, at least— picked up the slogan, "We have done work; we want wages." Wooden Head gave them a small allowance according to their ages—very small, according to present standards, but it was all that he could manage at the time. Gloria went to high school in Victoria on the goat-milk truck. The Years on Vancouver Island 111 One afternoon she did not come back with the truck; she had missed it, evidently. Later, they heard that two ladies spotted her on the sidewalk in tears and talked to her; Gloria had no money with her and did not know what to do; the ladies talked to a policeman on duty, and before long the police brought her home. In the early depression years, there were two extremely cold winters. The outside waterpipes froze in about half of the homes in this community. Those who could afford to had their waterpipes electrically thawed out. But Wooden Head's pipe between meter and house was frozen for six weeks. Every day he had to fetch water from one of the more fortunate families. It was an ordeal. They had a wooden box for firewood in the kitchen between the range and the chimney. It being so cold, the fires in fireplace and kitchen had to be kept going all the time; once, while Wooden Head was fetching water, wood or rubbish in the wood box against the hot chimney started smoldering. When Wooden Head came home with the water, he luckily noticed it in time to be able to extinguish it before it got out of control. In the late fall of 1932, there was a political meeting in one of the larger halls in Victoria. There were a few speakers, one of whom was really good. This meeting took place a short time after the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in Regina, Saskatchewan, had been founded. Wooden Head had read about it. In the question period Wooden Head asked whether the speakers intended to cooperate with the C. C. F. They looked at each other, questioning in their attitudes; they evidently had not yet heard about it. A few weeks later that same good speaker, Mr. Sheppard, was scheduled to speak at another meeting, in the country north of Victoria. Wooden Head wanted very much to hear Sheppard again, but he had no money whatever at that time to spend on bus fare, so he started walking at 5 p.m. It was late November, and the snowfall had been heavy. It took him three and a half hours to walk those thirteen miles. He arrived at the hall at 8:30 p.m., half an hour after the meeting had started. But Sheppard had not yet arrived; he was late for some reason. There were a few people there who lived not far from Wooden Head. These offered him a lift when the meeting was over; so that was some help. In a United States agricultural magazine, Wooden Head saw an L 172 WOODEN HEAD ad of a big nursery offering fruit trees for sale at a very low price. Not only that, but they were so overstocked, evidently, that, with certain varieties, they were offering a bonus tree with every tree bought. Wooden Head wrote the nursery and got a permit from Ottawa to import a number of trees. He figured that he could lay out the cost of the trees and the express charges; there were, of course, a lot of other things which could have been bought with the fifteen dollars which those trees would cost him; but he was convinced that the trees were more important. He dug plant-holes, two feet long and two feet wide and two feet deep, for which he had to break through the hardpan. The trees arrived on a Saturday in May, 1933. The next day he planted them, with the help of the older children. They were young trees, only four to five feet tall. They needed a lot of irrigation water, of course, with the summer coming, but they all took root. Among his trees were a sour cherry, Montmorency; a sweet cherry, Lambert; an early Gold Plum; a German prune (pretty much the same as an Italian prune, but a little later and a little larger fruit); an apricot; a Bartlett pear; a Lincoln pear (the nursery claimed this as their best pear, but it did not turn out so good, needing perhaps other soil); and four winter apples: two golden delicious, one red delicious, and one Grimes golden. During 1933, Wooden Head received a letter from an outfit in the United States telling him that a cousin of his who had come from New Zealand not long ago had died in San Francisco. It might be necessary or advisable for him to come to San Francisco in connection with the cousin's estate. So Wooden Head started considering how be could get hold of some extra money so that he could go to San Francisco and stay long enough to see the business setded. He was unable to raise the money, however, and he did not get to San Francisco. He never heard how that estate was settled nor did he get any part of it. The Conservative government under Dr. Tolmie, which had been in power in British Columbia from 1928 until 1933, had been replaced by a Liberal one under Duff Pattullo. They intended to push a law through which would restrict residents of British Colum- The Years on Vancouver Island 173 bia in some ways. This act of the Legislature of British Columbia was called the Special Powers Act. It gave the Lieutenant-Governor in Council the authority to proclaim an act in connection with a multitude of subjects during the time that the Legislature was not in session. The Special Powers Act would lose its validity at the start of the next session of the Legislature. The act was assented to on March 29, 1934. There was quite some protest against it. Toward the end of the year 1933, a big meeting was called in one of the largest halls in the city. Wooden Head attended. Several speakers discussed the proposed law. There were nearly a thousand people there. At the end there was a question period. Quite a few people from the audience spoke and Wooden Head had a chance to say a few words. He said, "The legislature is sitting at the moment, debating the proposed law. Why don't we all get up and march to the Parliament Buildings and demand a hearing?" There was quite some applause after that, but there were too many, evidentiy, who could not make up their minds to take action; so that was the end of the protest meeting. The law was passed; but, as far as Wooden Head can remember, not much use has been made of it. Around that time, a Rhode Island Red Club was formed in British Columbia and attracted several Red breeders. J. B., of Chilliwack, was president. By that time Wooden Head had been able to enlarge his Rhode Island Red flock. He had also started a yearly bulletin, a mating list, at the same time quoting prices for hatching eggs, chicks, and older stock, similar to the way he had operated earlier in Holland. Through its distribution he had come in contact with several other breeders in B. C. In 1934, the Rhode Island Red Club of B. C. planned a Club show at the Vancouver winter show in December. They asked a prominent Red breeder in Tacoma, Washington, to judge the Reds. The president of the Club asked Wooden Head to attend the club show and the meeting. The B. C. Red Club would bear bis expenses. Wooden Head wanted to go, of course, to meet bis fellow breeders. He was going to show some birds there also, but two of the children would have to stay home from school to take care of the Reds and the goats and to help Kathy. A few days before he left, Wooden 174 WOODEN HEAD Head was splitting wood in the basement, to get a stock of fuel ready for the days he would be away. The axe slipped and cut his left hand between thumb and forefinger. The district nurse took him to the hospital, where his hand was stitched. It was a bad cut, rendering the hand useless for quite some time. He went over to Vancouver, but he had to keep the hand covered. The President of the Red Club, J. B. of Chilliwack, and a few other members met him at the dock in Vancouver about 7 p.m. The fog was quite heavy, but they went up to the show to have a look. That night they slept in a hotel in Vancouver, and early the following morning J. B. took Wooden Head up to his home in Chilliwack. J. B. had hundreds of Rhode Island Reds. He was a traveling salesman for a firm, so he had to attend to his Reds in his spare time; but some of his children helped him. He showed Wooden Head his different pens, and later, at home, showed him the records of his matings. He was very precise about that, and he got results. Wooden Head stayed the night there. The following morning they went back to Vancouver to the show. The judge from Tacoma, Mr. L., was there with his wife. Wooden Head had a nice talk with them. The editor of the Coast's poultry magazine, F. B., also was there. He had visited Wooden Head a few years earlier on the island. He and his wife invited Wooden Head to stay with them the few days more he would be in Vancouver. The meeting of the Red Club was very well attended. Mr. S., who is still in the poultry show business, went to quite some length to welcome Wooden Head. It was a wonderful experience for Wooden Head to be a part of such enthusiastic breeders. F. B. took Wooden Head around to a few poultry farms near Vancouver. It was most interesting and profitable to see how others managed. When the show was over, Wooden Head took the night boat back to the island. He had been away five days. It was about time he was back, evidently. He found Kathy, Kate, and their boy huddled around a miserable bit of a fire in the fireplace, nearly shivering from the cold. There was still wood enough in the basement, but somehow they had not got the fire going properly. At The Years on Vancouver Island 175 least, Kate and her brother had taken good care of the goats and the Reds. In Country Gentleman, a United States magazine, Wooden Head read about a plant, a leguminose, which was grown extensively in the southern states for improvement of the soil and as green feed. He got some seed and planted it. It grew and the goats ate it but it was a bit stocky and did not fare as well in the harsher northern climate, evidently. He also sowed some alfalfa seed for the same purpose, and for a few years he got a good stand, but then it started petering out. He experimented with other leguminous seeds, some of which did well for a while. Vetch did the best; sunflower also did quite well, as long as it got plenty of water and fertilizer. The seeds of the latter were very good for poultry, especially those birds which were moulting at the time. But one year, just when the seeds started to get ripe, the crows came along. The ravenous birds demolished the seeds in a few days. Wooden Head had one sunflower stalk, standing alone, and which he had given special care. It's head attained a diameter of seventeen inches. Corn also grew well, if taken care of. A few times they had a corn feast toward the end of August. Other children who came to swim at the lake and some of their parents joined in the feast. One day a nurseryman from the mainland called. He wanted some Rhode Island Red stock. He was a specialist in gladioli. They made a deal. Wooden Head exchanged some Red stock for some of the best gladioli bulbs. Wooden Head planted the bulbs close to the road in front and gave them special care. They grew up to a height of over six feet with special long flower stalks—beautiful things. One of the local papers printed a story about it. By that time, Wooden Head was secretary of the local C. C. F. Club. Meetings were held at his house, because there was more room. Later, the meetings of the C. C. F. Constituency Council were also held there, because the house was more or less in the center of the constituency. At some of those meetings, thirty or more people attended. In 1936, there was a lot of controversy in the press in connection with the new King of England, Edward VIII. It soon be- r 176 WOODEN HEAD came clear that the reactionary clique in England was set to try to get rid of him. He was too liberal-minded for them, and when he made clear that he was going to marry a divorced woman, the hypocritical churchianity bunch joined forces with the Prime Minister to force him to abdicate. Wooden Head had his own opinion about that business. He listened to the Duke's now-famous broadcast after he had abdicated in December, 1936. Wooden Head wrote a letter about this to one of the city papers, which printed it. In the fall of the same year, 1936, two Record of Performance Poultry Inspectors called on Wooden Head, urging him to put his Rhode Island Reds under R. O. P. This had to begin in November with a minimum of fifty pullets. He did not have that many pullets ready to lay by November first, but they could get around that. The birds had to be examined to see that they were free of disqualifications for the breed; blood-tested for pullorium; teapnested; and so forth. Wooden Head had teapnested his birds for several years; pedigree-hatched, and so on, for his own purposes. An inspector came usually once a month for a day and took over the teapnest- ing, inspected the records, and so forth. There was no warning beforehand, so they could come any day. Wooden Head also had a pen of twelve pullets at the laying contest at the Experimental Farm at Agassiz, on the mainland. Record of Performance— R. O. P. for short—was started several years ago to make it possible for poultry breeders to get the production of their birds under official government control and so build up strains of birds in different breeds which could be relied on to reproduce good layers. A lay of two hundred large eggs (twenty-four ounces to a dozen) in the pullet year was the minimum requirement for recognition. The government issued specially marked R. O. P. legbands. The eggs of those R. O. P. birds had to be pedigree-hatched; the resultant chicks were banded with special chickbands, in the wing. In this way birds were produced which were first-generation R. O. P., second-, third-, fourth-generation, and so on. Such birds were, of course, more valuable for breeding purposes than the general run; the breeder could demand much higher prices for such stock; at the same time it entailed considerably more work. The average production of such strains over the whole country of course, went The Years on Vancouver Island 111 up. Besides the production, other factors came into play. A better- quality egg, outside (the shell, quality and color) and inside (freedom from blood spots; better quality of the white of the egg, and also of the yolk); better hatchability, livability, and so forth. Record of Performance work is also done in the United States and in European countries. In 1937, Wooden Head shipped some birds to Batavia, Java, to Jane and the two children. In 1938, he got an order from Holland for some good Reds. The same buyer wanted him to get him a good white leghorn cockerel of a good strain. So Wooden Head got in touch with one of the R. O. P. White Leghorn Breeders and secured a good bird. He had to pay fifty dollars for the cockerel; he shipped them all to Holland. He never heard much about how they stood up in Holland, and soon the war stopped all such shipments. Later he had an inquiry from Argentina, but he could not find a ship which was willing to take birds. But in British Columbia he got more and more business with his birds. In the meantime, more of his children were going to high school in the city, and Gloria had started college at Victoria. She wanted to become a teacher. While she was at Victoria College, she was chosen to take part in a public debate with another girl. Wooden Head and Kathy went to hear her. She was quite good. Since the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation was formed in Regina in 1932, which was followed by the formation of C. C. F. groups in several parts of British Columbia, one of the best speakers of those early years, Dr. L. T., of Vancouver, often came to the island to address meetings. Wooden Head attended these meetings whenever he was able to make the trip to the city. After some C. C. F.'ers were elected to the B. C. Legislature, Wooden Head also attended part of a session of the Legislature when some of the C. C. F. members were scheduled to speak. He remembered especially one occasion when a member, Mrs. D. S., was speaking, criticizing the Pattullo Government. At one point in her address he heard a fellow visitor on the Public Gallery say, "Atta Boy." In the later nmeteen-thirties, Wooden Head heard J. W., the National Leader of the C. C. F., speak quite a few times. The C. C. 178 WOODEN HEAD F. was always in a very precarious financial condition. In 1935 there was a federal election in Canada. Where other parties had money enough to hire radio time, the C. C. F. could not. But when the election was over, Mr. Woodsworth was given some free radio time by the broadcasting company. He said then that if he had had that time before the election, the result for the C. C. F. might have been better. The C. C. F. had no large contributors, as the other parties had, from big business, and so forth, which counted on getting their money back several times over if their party formed the government. The C. C. F. was and is, in the main, dependent on membership dues. The subject of all talks, meetings, and so forth, was of course, what could be done to improve the lot of the common man. Mr. Woodsworth was one of the main sponsors of the original old-age pension in Canada. When Mackenzie King was Prime Minister, at a time when he had only a shaky majority in Parliament, he needed the help and the voice of Woodsworth and the only other Socialist member for a certain measure; he got those two votes by promising to start an old-age pension scheme. Wooden Head could not contribute much in money; but by acting for several years as secretary of the local C. C. F. Club, as a member of the Constituency Council, and one year as chairman of that council, and by opening his house for several years for the meetings of Club and Council, which included serving of refreshments, he did his share. One of the things Wooden Head liked most was that J. W. never referred to his religious background. Later he had the opportunity to exchange a few letters with J. W., letters which he appreciated very much. To improve certain characteristics in his Rhode Island Reds, Wooden Head in the later nmeteen-thirties imported a cockerel from a prominent Red breeder in Webster Groves, Missouri. This was in warm summer weather and, through some oversight, the transportation company left the bird for thirty-six hours on the dock after arrival on the island. Fortunately the bird survived. It was a nice bird, coming from a breeder who in the nineteen-twenties had sent R. I. Red hatching eggs to Holland, which eggs had produced some outstanding birds. In 1939, Wooden Head imported another Red cockerel from a The Years on Vancouver Island 179 breeder in Waco, Texas, who had won a number of laying contests. Wooden Head purchased this bird in order to improve the eye-color of his Reds. At the same time he counted on the laying background of that strain. He also got some hatching eggs from the breeder who was under R. O. P., as Wooden Head himself was. But he received a bad jolt. The hatching eggs were below par, in his opinion. He would never have shipped such eggs to a customer. But he did get the desired improvement in eye-color in the offspring of the cockerel. He studmated the bird with several of his Red females. Wooden Head also imported some hatching eggs from a good Red Bantam breeder in the States. He got some fine Red Bantams in that way. He let the Red Bantams run loose over part of the place. One of the hens disappeared early in the fall, but after three weeks she turned up with a whole batch of chicks. He sold a good Bantam cockerel to a party in eastern Canada. He kept the Bantams for only a few years. He was unable to retain them because they required more time than he was able to give to them. So after a few years he sold his Bantams to the daughter of J. B. in Chilli- In the late summer of 1939, the Seventh World Poultry Congress was slated for Cleveland, Ohio. The Rhode Island Red Club of America had asked those members who produced good brown eggs to ship a dozen or more to the Congress for display. Wooden Head sent two dozen. As it happened, the Chief of the Canadian R. O. P. was at that Congress with one of the R. O. P. Inspectors, who came regularly to check on Wooden Head's birds. He spotted those Red eggs from British Columbia. Meanwhile, other events had gathered and now broke in a terrifying storm. Before the Congress was finished, war had broken out, and in a few days Canada was also at war. One of the first results for Wooden Head personally was that laying contests in Canada were stopped. And they were not resumed when the war was over. In November, 1939, a new family—a couple with a daughter and a son—moved into a house on the same road, close to where the Wooden Head family lived. By this time, Glorida had finished her second year of college 180 WOODEN HEAD and secured a teaching job on the mainland, in the southern part of the province. The next three children, two girls and a boy, were at high school in the city, while the youngest girl still attended the local elementary school. In the summer of 1940 it became necessary to make some repairs to the kitchen floor where the boards were giving way, because they were nearly always damp, if not actually wet. Since there was, so far, no bathroom in the house, a corner of the kitchen had been used for taking baths in a big galvanized tub; water was, of course, splashed over, and so the floor boards were nearly always wet. Since repairs had to be made, they decided to combine them with the installation of a proper sink with cold and hot water taps, drain board, and cupboards underneath; further, they altered the kitchen range in such a way that sawdust could be burned and hot water automatically produced. So far, water could be heated only on top of the range in a big wash boiler. A boiler was installed in the corner of the small bedroom adjoining the kitchen. Wooden Head partitioned part of the basement off so that a load of sawdust could be stored there. To prevent recurrence of frozen waterpipes outside, the existing pipe was dug up and replaced by a larger pipe laid lower. In the summer of 1940, Wooden Head turned the radio on— they had had a radio since 1932, bought on the installment plan, like all other things—and heard that the Germans had overrun Holland. This gave him a violent shock. Apart from what this meant for their close relatives and friends in Holland, this turn in the war made living for the whole Wooden Head family very precarious. All communication with Holland was broken off—which, for one thing, meant that his pension did not come through. This made the situation nearly desperate, so Wooden Head applied for relief. He had to pass a medical examination, which found him unfit for hard physical labor. After some time, he got a monthly relief cheque, which amounted to about half of his pension. Kathy took any work she could get. The girls, who went to high school in the city, each found a family which would take them in, in exchange The Years on Vancouver Island 181 for help in the household. In some cases this interfered with the homework they had to do for school. The whole situation was abominable, but nothing could be done. Wooden Head had tried much earlier to get work, but without any results. Now he got only an occasional job which gave a few hours' work and pay. This same summer, 1940, national registration was started in Canada and, with this, rationing. Windows had to be blacked out at night. An American family settled not far away around this time. H. was a doctor, but he did not practice any more. They had a daughter who went to school in the city and who soon got chummy with Millicent, the third girl. Wooden Head visited them now and then, and Dr. H. came over to listen to the radio when something special was on, like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "fireside chats." One day, in a department store in the city, Wooden Head saw a bunch of special plum trees for sale. He wanted to buy one, but he could not spare the two dollars. A few weeks later, he had two dollars and went in there to get a tree, but they were all gone. He talked to the employee who was in charge there and got the address of the person who produced the trees, an Italian named Maglio. He lived in Nelson, on the mainland. Wooden Head wrote him; he got a letter back from Mrs. Maglio, who, evidentiy, attended to the correspondence. She wrote that quite a few people who had bought trees at the store had been disappointed. The trees did not take; evidently the roots had dried out at the store. Mrs. Maglio asked Wooden Head if he was willing to act as their agent for the Island. How the tree was produced was Mr. Maglio's secret. It was a cross between two different plums, or perhaps between a plum and a peach. Wooden Head wrote Mrs. Maglio that he was willing to take the agency, but that he had no transportation and could not go around trying to sell the trees. He further asked her to give him all the facts about the trees and the plums they produced. She did, and with that information, Wooden Head wrote a little pamphlet, which he had printed and distributed along with his poultry bulletin. When the next planting season was in the offing, Wooden Head ordered two trees for himself and eleven or twelve more trees 182 WOODEN HEAD for neighbors. The Maglios did not ship very young trees. They left the trees in the nursery until they developed fruit buds, so that every buyer was sure to get some fruit during the first year, as long as the planting was done properly and the tree taken care of. For the neighbors around, Wooden Head dug the plant-holes and planted the trees himself, to make sure that they would get a good start. Further care depended, of course, on the owners, but in some cases Wooden Head gave a hand with that as well. His purpose was not first to sell a tree, but to see to it that it would grow and produce. He used the same method in the sale of hatching eggs, chicks, and older stock from his Rhode Island Reds, and always asked his customers to report results, promising to make good if anything untoward happened. Only once in a great while did a customer complain, then an investigation usually showed that instructions had not been followed correctly. The main thing was that his customer should be completely satisfied with what he had bought. Only once was Wooden Head badly taken in. He happened to get an extraordinarily good hatch, having around one hundred twenty chicks, which he could not raise himself for lack of room. He advertised them for sale. A man drove up in a truck. When he saw the chicks, which were in a large box, he wanted to buy them. But he had no money with him. He promised to mail the amount. Wooden Head let him take the chicks, and that was the last he saw or heard of the man. When his Maglio plum tree pamphlet was circulated, Wooden Head received quite a few more orders for the trees. The plum trees had one drawback: they blossomed in April. They needed dry weather to set properly. If it was rather wet while they were in full bloom, there might be a poor crop. In an average season, the Maglio plums would ripen in the second part of September, producing beautiful, large blue-red plums, with a special flavour. If picked while still hard but fully grown, they will last for some weeks in a refrigerator. To earn sufficient money for his own clothes, Wooden Head's son, Floris, had started delivering one of the local papers. As he was mechanically inclined, after going for some years to high The Years on Vancouver Island 183 school in the city, he transferred to the technical school. His inclination came more to the fore later when it became a question of earning a living. After the first few years in their new community, the F. family became better acquainted with Wooden Head's family. The two families started getting together on Saturday nights for a game of whist, alternately in each other's houses. Since the F. family had quite a few older fruit trees which had been rather neglected before they came there, and Mr. F. could not attend to them himself, Wooden Head helped to prune them regularly. For several years, the early Gold Plum, usually ripe after the first week in August, yielded over five hundred pounds of plums. An average of around three hundred pounds was normal. The Montmorency (sour) cherry produced an average of one hundred forty pounds of cherries—besides what the birds ate. One year the yield ran up to two hundred forty pounds. Especially during the war years, this was very valuable. Jam was hard to get in those years, and these cherries made beautiful jelly. Of the five winter apple trees, the single Grimes Golden started to get ripe at the end of September; the two Red Delicious and the two Golden Delicious produced hundreds of pounds. One year Wooden Head picked fourteen hundred pounds from those five trees. Wooden Head was secretary of the local C. C. F. Club. This required quite a lot of additional work on his part, such as correspondence and record-keeping. In the early nineteen-forties he also was a member of the C. C. F. Constituency Council, and for a while its chairman. Mrs. F. and a few other neighbors also joined the C. C. F., and Mrs. F. also was a member of the Constituency Council for some time. They often had very enjoyable meetings. Where the ultimate goal of the C. C. F. was—and is— to build a better society for the common man, based on co-operation, not on competition (as we know this now), club members tried to give a helping hand in their own community in the first place, which produced interest in their movement. Existing laws and customs, which stood in the way of that goal, were, of course, criticized and means to get such obstacles removed were dis- 184 WOODEN HEAD cussed. Once a month the Constituency Council came together, while once a year a provincial council met in Vancouver; and once in two years a national convention was held in different parts of Canada. As the French say, Du choc des opinions jaillit la verite ("From the meeting of minds, truth will be born"). There was one meeting which Wooden Head remembers where a rather controversial subject was brought up. He raised the subject which concerned the antiquated—out-of-the-Dark- Ages—Canadian divorce law. After hours of debate a resolution was adopted, which would go to the Provincial Council at Vancouver and to the yearly party Convention. During the debate— this was early 1944—the war situation was brought up, especially the fact that a great number of young men were losing their lives, with the inevitable result that, after the war, there would be considerably fewer men in Canada than women. Thus, it was argued, the time might come soon that, to give every female a chance to get a mate, the law would have to be changed to make it possible for a man to marry two women. This idea, of course, brought strong protest from the married women present. The end was that a resolution was passed which would make these opinions known to the Provincial Convention, with the purpose of having the convention appoint a committee to study the matter and bring back a report later. The member on the Constituency Council, H. W., was the delegate to the Provincial Convention and spoke for the resolution. Controversy there was rampant; but the convention in the end appointed a committee to study the subject and make a proposal about it later in the year. In this way, opinions which came from the grass roots of the C. C. F. found their way to the top and came to expression in a proposed law which, when the C. C. F. is forming a Government in British Columbia, will have to be considered. After Kate had finished high school, she got a job with an air force outfit which went to the west coast of the Island in 1941. Included in the letters she wrote to her father there was a poem which Wooden Head gave me and asked me to include in this tale, since he thinks it too good to be lost to posterity. I agree that others should have a chance to see the literary product of an eighteen-year-old. The Years on Vancouver Island 185 There's a censored Air Force Station on a nameless West Coast Shore Where the wild Pacific rollers ebb and swell Where it seems it's always raining—more or less—but often more, And in early spring the black flies give you hell. There were months and months of planning, cancellations, counter plans, There were contour maps and boundaries to stake, And grunting, groaning Behemoths came churning through the land, Till the erstwhile virgin tract became a lake. There were men of all descriptions, nationalities and creeds, The first serrated Vanguard of "the Coast," There were engineer assistants, linemen, G-Men, lesser breeds, And the tribes that do the least but talk the most. There were shacks and sheds and dining halls, deploying through the mire, With their little backhouse chalets cold and bleak; There were squadron leaders, commodores, just burning up the wire, Switching, changing, re-locating week by week. There were miles of muddy highway stretching either end of camp, Ending north at little, south at something less, Where the weary workmen weekly seek diversion through the damp, "Say, by Jesus ain't this dump a blurry mess." There are long partitioned bunkhouses beside a smelly creek, Where the men of many nations take their ease: Where stale tobacco, sweaty sox and drying garments reek, And the air you breathe is redolent of cheese. There are female clerks and Major Gods and lesser Gods and And waitresses to tempt the roving mind, There are building superintendents, and "dirt" lists kept in books, And other minor records of the kind. 186 WOODEN HEAD There's a plethora of air force now, of every rating known, W. O.'s and L.A.C.'s and B.U.M.'s, Their "temporary" quarters, as on the blueprints show, Are changed at least six times before they're done. There are "temporary" hangars built of concrete, steel and wood, And a "temporary" runway—more or less, There's a large steam-heated building standing close beside the We think that it's a temporary mess. There's a temporary station now beside the western shore, There's a rumor we'll be leaving any moon, There's a temporary feeling that we won't be very sore If our marching orders reach us very soon. But lest you take exception to this cynical declaim And reason we are very hard to please, There's another link of Empire just welded in the chain, That will help to bring the Axis to their knees. Later, Kate was transferred and spent part of her time in Vancouver and later in the city on the Island. Toward the end of 1944 she joined the Dutch W.A.C., with the idea of going to the Dutch East Indies. She went first to eastern Canada with some other girls, W.A.C.'s. Then for about two months she was in a camp in the southeastern United States for preliminary training. From there she went to another camp on the West Coast, which must have been around San Francisco, but her whereabouts were so hush-hush that even her parents were not allowed to know them. Later they heard that she had gone to a Dutch base near Brisbane, Australia. We shall meet her again later. Millicent finished high school in 1943. She wanted to become a nurse, and so, in February, 1944, she began her training course in one of the city's hospitals. It looked as if the girls taking the course did not get enough to eat in that hospital. When she came home on her free weekends, the first thing she did was look in the pantry to see if there was something she could eat. She had to be The Years on Vancouver Island 187 back at the hospital Sunday night. Wooden Head's neighbor, who had a small car, liked Milly very much and he often took her back in his car Sunday nights, since busses were scarce on Sunday. That same February, 1944, Crown Princess Juliana of Holland, who lived in Ottawa during the war, visited Victoria. There was a reception at the B. C. Government House. The Dutch Consul in Vancouver, an Englishman, knew that Wooden Head had the Militaire Willemsorde (the Dutch equivalent of the Victoria Cross). He came over to the city for that reception and invited Wooden Head to attend. Wooden Head went with Kathy and the youngest girl, Polly. The consul introduced them to Princess Juliana. In the summer of 1944 Floris was eighteen and, being Dutch, he was drafted by the Dutch Armed Services. He was first sent to eastern Canada for training, and later went to England, but the war ended before he saw action. After the war was over, he spent some time in Holland. He came back to Canada in the summer of 1946. In the meantime the oldest girl, Gloria, had secured a teaching job near Victoria. While there, she became acquainted with a Canadian Army officer. One day later, in April, he told her that he had just received a transfer by wire—that he had to leave for Europe the next day. They wanted to marry the same night. He had gotten a special license. There was no time to make any preparations. The sweet cherry (Lambert) was coming into full bloom, so Wooden Head cut a stalk full of buds, just opening, so that Gloria had some flowers to carry. They were married that night and went to a hotel in the city. The next day they left for Vancouver and farther east. Wooden Head and Kathy went to the city to see them off. Gloria's in-laws lived in the East, and she was going to stay there for a while. By the end of October, 1944, Record of Performance ended for Wooden Head's Rhode Island Reds. By November 1, 1944, the number of pullets which had to be put under R. O. P. was to be doubled—brought to a hundred from fifty; as he had no means to raise that many pullets in time, he had to quit. This was a pity, especially since there were no more laying contests in Canada; it 188 WOODEN HEAD now became impossible for the small producer to show under public control how his birds would produce. But the trend which squeezes the small producer out grew more and more. For those who are unfamiliar with Dutch marriage laws and customs, I want to state here that in Holland, when a man and woman marry, they do not make any extravagant promises to each other, as they evidendy do here in Canada under the pressure of churchianity propagandists and their henchmen. In Holland they just say that they take each other as man and wife; that is all. And if they love each other—as they should, otherwise they should not marry—that is all that is necessary. If they do not love each other, or they find out later that they have made a mistake or cannot be happy together—or worse—no promise made here in Canada in a church wedding can force them to keep on living together in misery. Everybody is entitied to happiness. In connection with this, the dissolving of such a marriage by divorce is simple in Holland; there are no obstacles in the way there which cannot be easily overcome. Here in Canada it is just the opposite. This last fact should be explained to prospective immigrants. The same churchianity propagandists—they pay lip service to Christianity but practice churchianity—try to prevent the public reading of books, the viewing of movies, and the like, which give us the "realities" of life. Books such as Peyton Place and Return to Peyton Place by Grace Metalious, From the Terrace by John O'Hara, and Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence, are taboo to these hypocrites. Another book which every grownup should read is Marriage Morals, by Bertrand Russell, the Nobel Prize winner who puts the blame for so much unhappiness and misery in life where it belongs: on the so-called Christian church. After all is said and done, the nonconformers are responsible for what progress this world makes. One can live according to the principles of Christianity (and other, older religions), by the Golden Rule, without believing in an imaginary superbeing. Here in Canada, the passing years may bring us to the threshold of great changes. I cannot help thinking of James Woodsworth, The Years on Vancouver Island 189 the founder of the C. C. F. How he would have loved to see some of has ideals of a fair society for everyone come to realization! Who knows! The vision which Wooden Head saw on Saturday, August 7, 1920, can, as far as we can see now, have been only a communication between the mind of a person, alive in this world, and the spirit or soul of one who died more than twenty- one years earlier. The June, 1961 Reader's Digest has an article about "The Mysterious World Beyond the Five Senses," similar to an article in the Canadian Weekend Magazine of April 8, 1961. But as far as I can see, the American article mentions only communication between living persons. I noticed an item in The Knickerbocker of April, 1961, p. 35 (published by International American Netherlands Magazine, 609 Fifth Ave., New York 17), about the work of Dr. W. H. C. Ten- haeff, the world-famed professor of parapsychology of the University of Utrecht, Holland, and his assistant, Ricky Louwerens. The item refers to two articles written by Jack H. Pollack in This Week, a Sunday supplement with a circulation of close to fourteen million. It says that Dr. Tenhaeff holds the world's only university chair in parapsychology (the science of extrasensory perception) , and that he and his assistant studied the cases of a number of these psychically gifted persons who, through astounding visions, can "see" the past and future as weE as the present. It says that Dr. TenhaefFs research has brought him acclaim from scientists in ten countries, including the United States. We are going to get in touch with these three scientific organizations, in the hope they can suggest some acceptable explanation of Wooden Head's vision. Besides the books mentioned earlier, I would like to suggest that the reader read or reread Edward Bellamy's books, In the Year 2000, Looking Backward, and Equality, written more than sixty years ago, to get some idea of the world that Bellamy visualized then, and which, or something similar to which, some of us now alive may yet be able to see, if the majority co-operates to make such a society possible. To end this with something uplifting, I would like to mention that, for about twenty years, Wooden Head carried on the front 190 WOODEN HEAD of his poultry bulletin (mating list) the saying "A thing of beauty is a joy forever" (referring then in the first place to the Rhode Island Reds). A good friend told me a short time ago that the author of that line was Keats, who lived on the Isle of Wight, England; I see now that there should be added: "its loveliness increases." Try to see the beauty that Nature creates all around us—the trees, the plants, the flowers, the animals, and so on. If so gifted and so inclined, you may be able to create some of that beauty yourself. And, last but not least, there are the beautiful women you may meet in this world (perhaps the most mysterious creation). The French have a proverb: Souvent femme varie ("Woman often changes"); just the same, we can't do without them. Another French proverb emphasizes this: Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut ("What woman wants, God wants"). Those who do not believe in a God may say: "What woman wants, my Goddess wants." Some of these women may give you the happiness we are all entitled to; but don't forget that they like to be told that they are beauiful! Go to it! Gambling! Don't listen to those who proclaim it to be a mortal sin! Don't we all take part in the greatest gamble there is—what our life is going to be from birth to death? How many of us find the happiness we are all entitled to? So take the little gambling plays that you meet on your way in your stride! Before I end this "Part One" of Wooden Head's tale, I urge every reader to reread Chapter 19 and the following Appendix, for your own sake, and act accordingly. So long, till we meet again. APPENDIX Resistance Against Disease (Prevention Is Better Than Cure) The article "Cancer is Yielding Up Its Secrets" by Pat McGrady and Murry Morgan in The Saturday Evening Post, May 9, 1964, must be of considerable interest to many of its readers. I was, and am, most interested in these parts, where Natural Resistance is mentioned: p. 21, end last column; p. 22, middle third column (this does not mention the word resistance but speaks of "cancer antigen," a substance that stimulates production of antibodies to combat a particular cancer virus); p. 22, last column, where it says, "If there is a human cancer virus, it can attack only when, in some way not yet fully understood, the ground has been prepared"; One further sentence: "If it's a virus, at least we'll know what we are dealing with. We will be able to concentrate on what it is that enables most persons to resist the challenge of the virus, while a few cannot." I am no doctor, but I was in my earlier years, 1902 and 1915, in close contact with one of Holland's most progressive doctors, G. W. S. Lingbeek. In 1902 the Dutch Navy sent me for pernicious sciatica to a small sanatorium which Dr. Lingbeek ran. Using as much as possible methods close to nature, he gave me some relief in the six months I was there. He could not cure me of my illness then, since he himself did not realize what the cause was. Besides that sciatica, which I got in 1897, I suffered from everlasting colds, boils, migraine, insomnia, and a depressed outiook on life. In September, 1915, being on leave in Holland from a job in the then Dutch East Indies, I ran into Dr. Lingbeek in the small rural village where I lived. His first words were, "Staverman, how is your sciatica?" I answered, "Pretty much the same, Doctor." He 194 WOODEN HEAD countered with, "Come along with me, I have a book for you to read." He had just bought a large old house in that place, where he was going to establish a small sanatorium. The book he referred to was Die Eszsucht (The Eatmania), written by a German naturopath. This man said, "We all eat, drink, breathe, twenty-four hours long, all kinds of germs; they can do us no harm if we are clean inside (he compared that cleanliness with a new waterpipe), they pass through and that is the end of it, but, if we are not clean inside, if we are constipated, then we have a rotten mass in our intestines; those germs thrive on that stuff; they throw off waste, which gets into the blood as poison. If that process goes on and on, those poisons crystallize, which causes pain, attacking every individual in his or her weakest spot The orthodox medical profession gives it a name, different names, dependent on where the pain is; but the cause is all the same, that—constipation; and that is the result of not chewing food and drinking properly, gulping down, washing down. Only when chewing is done properly, so that food goes down of its own, sufficient saliva comes, which makes food and drink undergo a chemical change in the mouth, preparing same in that way for the other digestive organs. Drink must be moved in the mouth with the tongue." The only thing which I had ever heard about chewing, was Gladstone's saying, "Thirty-two times." I had been constipated forty-one and a half years, my whole life so far. Nobody had ever told me how bad that was. I could not judge if that man talked sense or not; but I thought, Chewing the way he says can't do me any harm: so I started right away. You may believe it or not but I got rid of my persistent constipation in twenty-four hours. I knew that I was on the right track; I went on chewing properly, counting the times it took me to chew different foods. Brown bread, as it was in Holland then, took me fifty-six times; white bread (robbed of the living ingredients) took one hundred twelve times; a piece of tough meat (how often do you get tender meat?) took over seven hundred times. Other foods had rates in between. It did not take long before my colds disappeared; as did those Resistance Against Disease 195 boils, the migraine and insomnia. The sciatica, which I had had for eighteen years, took the longest. Every unfavorable change in the weather caused a pain in my left hip twelve to twenty-four hours beforehand that made me feel fit to scream. It took about a year and a half before this symptom disappeared altogether, though the pains got progressively less severe during that time. The naturopath explained this. He said: "When you are no longer constipated, you won't get more poison in your body; the blood will get gradually the capability to dissolve those poison crystals and the poison will leave in the natural way." Dr. Lingbeek helped me in several ways to get rid of those poisons more quickly. He told me to take all my clothes off early in the morning; then wrap a sheet which had been soaked in warm water around me and get under the blankets. After half an hour he came along; we took that sheet off and rinsed it out in a bathtub, which I happened to have in that bedroom. You could see the dirt that that sheet had extracted from my skin, thus opening the pores. Then he gave me an electric-current bath. Having studied Professor Freud, he believed in the subconscious. He told me to put a pad of paper and pencil close to my bed, and if I had a dream, to jot down immediately what I remembered of it when I woke up. In this way he tried to find out what happenings in my earlier fife could be responsible for some of my idiosyncrasies. We also went together on long walks, talking about eveiything under the sun. No special diet is necessary. I eat and drink what I like (and can afford). I am allergic to shell fish, so I shun that. Others may have another allergy. I only eat a little meat; drink a fair amount of milk, by itself or in coffee or cocoa. (I had for several years goat's rndlk—goat's milk is the best substitute for mother's milk.) I also drink quite a lot of fruit juice, and eat vegetables, fruit, and ice cream. Where I have to live alone, I have to make my own meals, so I make them as simple as possible. Other drink? Yes, a little—if I have a pleasant visitor. Exercise as much as you can; walk, swim, work in the garden. . . . Sleep with a window open. As a result of all this, it is no wonder that my outlook on life changed considerably for the better. 196 WOODEN HEAD Besides being an outstanding doctor, Dr. Lingbeek was a real friend. He knew that my income—leave pay—was rather limited. He never sent me a bill for all his work or for the time spent on my behalf. That I now, at over ninety, am still capable of doing a day's work, every day,—I have been for forty-five years an exhibit poultry breeder (Rhode Island Reds) in a small way and a gardener (fruit trees); I owe this for the greater part to him. Less than a year after I learned to chew properly, in September, 1915,1 had to return to my work at the observatory in Batavia, Java. Since Holland was neutral in the first war, and as the Suez Canal was blocked up, we had to go via Capetown to get there. A few weeks before arriving at Batavia I talked with another passenger—with whom two others and I had played whist every day to pass the time—about this chewing business. When we said goodbye at Batavia, he told me that he already had had much benefit from chewing the way I had told him. This man was too stout for his age. About three and one-half years later, I saw him again in Holland, after I had spent sixteen months in the United States (from November 1917 till March 1919—most of the time in California). He—that former fellow-passenger, looked ten years younger. He said he felt ten years younger and he had lost all that surplus fat. In September, 1934, in Victoria, my last teeth had to be pulled; they had deteriorated before I learned to chew properly;—no money for artificial ones. Since then I have been chewing with my gums. After I take a bath, I rub my whole body with salt; it may sting a bit here and there for a moment but it helps to keep the skin open and it gives a good feeling. When I was in the United States from 1917 to 1919, there was a man named Fletcher, who also advocated chewing properly; people called it "Fletcherize"—but he did not seem to go far enough. The idea did not take sufficiently. Yet, when I talked with somebody around here about my experience, a man who could do with good chewing, he remembered having heard some- Resistance Against Disease 197 thing about it years ago. When I mentioned the name "Fletcher," it came back to him. At the top of p. 22 of the article in the Post which I have quoted we see this in large letters, "If we only knew why most persons can resist the virus." In my opinion, the reason is that many people have accumulated sufficient resistance; not only against a cancer virus, but against any disease. When you keep clean inside, always having a proper elimination every day—I have that more than once, early in the morning, so that I am ready for the day's work— you build up resistance against any pests, which are around all of us. Those, who have no resistance—who are full of poison—become the victims. I have lived for forty years with a woman—my third wife—who was constipated all her life; who often went without an elimination for a whole week. I could not get her to learn to chew properly; she got arthritis, and in the end, cancer. The hospital could not do anything for her; in less than three months the cancer spread throughout her system and the end came. In the last war, 45 per cent of the young men, nineteen to twenty-six, were unfit for military service in the United States; here in Canada the figure reached fifty per cent. About a year ago, I heard President Kennedy say that, at that time, out of seven young men of draft age only two were fit There is no doubt in my mind that most of those unfit suffer from digestive troubles and their consequences. Since September 1915, when I started to get rid of all my physical miseries, I have done without a doctor, nurse (maybe a pity), hospital, drugs—except for a period nearly four years ago when the old men's problem, prostate gland trouble—bladder nuisance—kept me for nine days in hospital. In my ward, there were about a dozen patients—all the others were much younger than I was. My surgeon rid me of the trouble without an operation. When you have an accident, it is another thing, of course. For the last ten years or so I have been going once a year for a check-up to a naturopath; every time I see him he says that my blood is as good as ever, if not better. For the last dozen years I have been trying to get my expe- 198 WOODEN HEAD | rience in print—this at considerable cost to me, where I have to 1 live on a limited pension. In the end, a few weeks ago, the Vic- 1 toria, British Columbia Times was good enough to print a short I letter of mine, wherein I quoted the word resistance, used by Dr. I Walter Alvarez in his column in the Times, and commented that 1 this was the best remark he had ever made. The Times used the ] headline "Something to Chew On." In my opinion, the functioning of the digestive system and j the principles of good chewing should be in every school curriculum all over the world. This would prevent millions of people 1 from becoming useless wrecks long before their time; it would | save billions in expenses for those who are now without resist- 1 ance to the pests around us. They have to be told, just as I had j to be told by Dr. G. W. S. Lingbeek and that book Die Eszsucht j in September 1915. If they are told and use common sense, they ] can enjoy life considerably longer. There are, of course, secondary reasons which may upset a j person's digestion—shock, having to work with a boss one can't 1 stand, marriage troubles, and so on. (I have been through it), but ] if one chews properly, one can take these interferences in one's j stride. I consider it my duty to tell others what the main reason has j been for my being still around at my age and still being able to do j some creative work for mankind. In 1907 I planted six thousand j rubber trees in West Java—Hevea brasiliensis—with the help j of a native team, of course. The seed I got from Singapore (Malay 1 States). Here in Canada in the last thirty years I planted about >■ Ihirty fruit trees. Have you planted a tree? Everyone should. If you take care of it, it will pay you back many times. On January 25, 1965,1 received a letter from Doctor C. Evans Sawyer, M.D., Butier Road, Manson, Massachusetts about this article. Dr. Sawyer is a member of the Rhode Island Red Club of America, Dover, New Jersey. The secretary of that club, E. G. Jones, had printed that article in full in the Red Club Chronicle (a bimonthly) of September, 1964; I have been a member of the ice Against Dise 199 Red Club for forty-six years. Dr. Sawyer had read that article and in his letter he said: "Your writing on 'Resistance against Disease' I believe touches a topic of tremendous importance to both Man and beast" Dr. Sawyer is the first doctor to recognize this and speak out. Millions of other doctors should do the same. This would prevent unlimited misery and save countless money for better purposes. (continued from front flap) he moves to a farm in California. Then his wanderlust, still unabated, impels him back to Holland, where he operates a poultry farm, and then on to Canada, where he settles permanendy. This is the record of a productive and meaningful life, coupled with valuable advice from a nonagenarian on matters of health. It will provide rewarding reading for an armchair traveler as he vicariously shares the author's many memorable expe- About the Author F. H. Staverman was bom in 1874 in Borneo, where his father served as an officer in the Dutch Army. He attended the Naval CdUege of the Netherlands from 1890 to 1894. Following his retirement, he joined the staff of a meteorological observatory in Batavia. Widely traveled, he became interested in poultry husbandry in the United States just after World War I. In 1927 he emigrated from Holland to Canada where he has since lived. Mr. Staverman, a widower, lives at Longford Lake, ten miles from Victoria, British Columbia. He is a member of the Victoria Horticultural Society, the Rhode Island Red Club of America, the American Poultry Association and the American Humanist Associa- Exposition Press Inc. 3 Park Avenue South New York 10016 F. H. STAVERMAN
Other copies : http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/175845
Books
Biographies
III-3349
English
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
New York : Exposition Press
Images provided for research and reference use only. For permission to publish, copy, or otherwise distribute these images please contact digital.initiatives@ubc.ca.
Original Format: University of British Columbia. Library. Rare Books and Special Collections. CT1158.S7 A3 1966
Adventure and adventurers
Victoria (B.C.)
Travelers
Netherlands
Wooden Head; a story of nine decades in the Dutch East Indies, Holland, the United States, and Canada
Text