When the Coast and Geodetic Survey opens its doors to business on February 10, 1957, it will have become the first technical bureau to celebrate a 150th birthday, and one of the few agencies besides the Army, Navy, and other executive departments to reach such age. An infant bureau of the early 19th century has grown into a modern service responsible for much geographical exploration and scientific and technological accomplishment. The birthday of this service draws attention to its long history—one having many highlights of significance to the Navy.
It is hard to believe that only 150 years ago the charts of our coastal waters were so few and sketchy that navigation was un-certain and dangerous—that our 60,000 coasting vessels had to endure heavy losses each year because every move about the coast was an uncertain adventure. Isolated sketch maps from the British Neptune, the inadequate notes of Captain Southack and of the British Pilot, and the charts and sailing directions published by Blunt—all were incomplete and full of errors. The country was essentially without charts—of all instruments of navigation the most fundamental!
Thomas Jefferson and others, including members of the American Philosophical Society, had long agitated for a Federal program of hydrographic surveys. In 1807 Congress took care of the matter, in effect ordering complete surveys of our waterways—by authorizing the “Survey of the Coast,” a new bureau to be assigned to the Treasury Department. The fledgling agency, for which no precedent existed, had a hard time getting started. After long delays, however, under the ministrations of a scientific genius who antagonized and angered almost all officialdom, it finally found its place in the growing land. As new territory was annexed, the job grew larger before it was even started. This undertaking, which Congress supposed would be finished in a few years, has now taken 150 years, and no end is in sight.
The “Survey of the Coast,” known in mid-century as the “Coast Survey,” eventually became the “Coast and Geodetic Survey” when, in 1878, its nation-wide geodetic surveys, necessary as a foundation for maps, were recognized as a basic function. In 1903 the Survey was removed from the Treasury to what is now the Commerce Department. In its long history there have been many events and outstanding men, of which we can here glimpse but a few.
In this period of serving the maritime, mapping, and, more lately, the aviation interests of the country, the work of the Survey has brought it into continuous and often intimate relations with the military agencies. It has been merged on more than one occasion with the Navy, only to be separated again on the grounds that its highly specialized work required the administration of scientific rather than military heads. The Navy has, of course, long had its companion agency, the Hydrographic Office, for the discharge of commitments in foreign areas and those having special military significance. During long periods Navy officers served
Survey duty assignments, often with great distinction. There still exists a law authorizing such assignments on the request of the Survey, but it has not been used since the Spanish-American War. Frequently, in the early days, Army officers, usually topographic engineers, were also so assigned.
Many of the skills of the Survey—reconnaissance surveying, geodetic work, photo interpretation, and chart production, for instance—have military significance. In every war its officers have served on direct detail with the military forces, engaging in many campaigns as surveyors and scouts, map compilers, pilots, and navigators. Its ships as well have performed many duties with the Navy. In part because of these military connotations of the work and the nature of its field operations and customs, the Survey became a commissioned service during World War I, subject to military duty in wartime. In World War II six of its ships served with the Navy, and numerous officers in ranks up to Captain were assigned duty in naval and other military commands, often in heavy combat.
When President Jefferson found himself charged by Congress with the duty of starting a national hydrographic survey, he asked the American Philosophical Society to recommend an expert to take charge. There were no established procedures, and so the Society invited proposals from respected engineers, including James Madison, for starting the work. The best plan of those received was from a Swiss geodesist seeking a career in America, Ferdinand Hassler. It offered a brilliant solution and a work of high scientific quality, with astronomic determinations of “remarkable” points on the coast, a triangulation survey to establish controlling points for the detail work, and a nautical survey of the coastal waters, to show the shoals and the navigable channels. Hassler thus became the first Superintendent and organizer of the new bureau and the author of its creed. Because of his profound and lasting influence, he deserves much attention in any historical account of the Survey.
Hassler was ahead of his time. Where Congress meant to provide for the needs of the moment, he saw a chance to build for the future. Time and cost were not to be considered in meeting this challenging problem, which called for well-ordered development from a technically firm foundation. To fulfill this ideal was his determination. He was indomitable—also improvident, proud, and intolerant. His beginnings were understandably halting, while Congress cast him aside, then in despair called him back. Though by his nature he defeated his own ends, he did finally see his vision come true, after a lifetime of effort. His greatest gift to America was not the surveys he accomplished—it was his reverence for sound thinking, integrity, and accuracy, which have endured as basic elements of Survey philosophy.
Hassler had nothing at the outset. Needing theodolites and other scientific tools not available in America, he had first to visit Europe to get them. Copper of suitable quality for the chart engravings was lacking, as indeed were qualified engravers themselves, who could not be found nearer than Germany. In London he had a “great” theodolite of 24-inch circle built to his own design by E. Troughton. He collected reference books, standards of measurement, and other necessities. These dealings took a long time; moreover, political disturbances intervened to lengthen his stay to years. His impractical zeal resulted in his exceeding his $50,000 authorization, and he had to come back at his own expense, under severe censure.
Many things, including lack of funds, delayed the start of operations until 1816, when the first work in preparation for the survey of New York Harbor was undertaken. At the outset, arrangements for the measurement of a baseline near Long Branch were interrupted by the first of a long series of controversies—in this case a lawsuit about some branches of a cedar bush used as a temporary survey signal. This, however, was less serious than the impatience of Congress, which expected results practically overnight. Hassler’s determination to build a strong foundation, with a geodetic survey before ever a sounding was taken, left Congress fuming with impatience and wondering what he was about. Financial support was withdrawn before the submission of the first annual report of progress—thus there began another long period of inactivity while Congress tried to get along without Hassler.
His personal means gone, and a sufferer of personal privations, Hassler clung nevertheless to his dream. Temporary relief came in 1818 in the form of a commission to mark the New England Boundary with Canada, as required by the Treaty of Ghent. No one else could be found to do the job. A quarrel with the British surveyors developed over certain geodetic problems having to do with the ellipticity of the earth. Hassler carried his point, obtaining a favorable demarkation, and he thus became the first of many Coast Survey engineers to lay down, confirm, or adjust local or national boundaries—sometimes in the heat of controversy, as in the quarrel over “54-40 or fight!”
In 1830, because of Hassler’s interest in measurement standards, he was appointed Superintendent of a new office of weights and measures by Congress. There he achieved success in standardizing measures in trade and industry. This related activity remained a specialty of the Survey for many years until the creation, in 1901, of the National Bureau of Standards. Hassler’s standards were painstaking copies of those in England, and it was America’s singular privilege, upon the burning of Parliament in 1843, to make England a present of new ones copied from Hassler’s copies!
The survey of the coast was resumed in 1832, after numerous false starts, with Hassler again in charge. He was the only man with the technical genius for the job—otherwise Congress would never have put up with his intolerance and irascibility. When Congressional committees waited upon him for explanations of his work and its delays, he dismissed them with scathing denunciation of their stupidity in presuming to question him—rebuffs that created much mirth in Congress and little in the way of financial support.
Among the points of issue with Congress was an estimated completion date, which he could not provide. Of course he could not! The original area of a few thousand square miles grew endlessly toward a final total of more than 100,000 miles of shorelines and 2,500,000 square miles of coastal lands and waters. Through the years, moreover, the demands of ever-deeper ships, advancing marine technology, and increasing speeds have had to be met, as well as vexing problems of instability and change affecting much of the coast. Necessary resurveys and growing technological requirements have been encountered while opening the dangerous waters of Alaska to sea commerce and giving the 7,000 islands of the Philippines the boon of modern charts.
By 1835, a substantial foundation of astronomic and geodetic points having been established and the adjacent shores and landmarks charted, Hassler was ready to sound the waters. The schooner Experiment was the first of a long line of survey ships to sail back and forth across the sea, sounding by cast of the lead, and fixing position by three-point fix controlled by sextant cuts on the survey signals ashore. She didn’t last long, but she was joined, before her retirement two years later, by the brig Washington, a former revenue cutter and a very clumsy vessel which did her work very slowly but well enough. The Washington displayed her sturdiness by surviving one of the most dramatic storm disasters in American maritime history. Contrasted with the efficient hydrographic ships of today, those labors were primitive indeed! They represented to Hassler, however, and to an impatient Congress, the first fruits of his work.
Among the first visible benefits were the finding of numerous rocks and ledges, hitherto unknown, in Long Island Sound. Singularly striking was the discovery by Lieutenant T. R. Gedney, on assignment from the Navy, of a deep channel approaching New York from the southeast, passing near Sandy Hook. This had the utmost navigational importance. It was realized that, had Gedney Channel been known in 1778, a surreptitious entry of the friendly French fleet might have been effected with disastrous results for the British vessels within. Hassler had the satisfaction, before his death in 1843, of seeing the first surveys done from Point Judith to Cape Henlopen—some 9,000 square miles of charted area containing 1,600 miles of shorelines.
Hassler may have been as consecrated a public servant as ever lived. No one could doubt it who saw him as he sat night after night in his office, after midnight at a table lit by candles, checking computations, verifying map-sheets of soundings, or writing his reports. He was doing work for which his meager appropriations did not provide workers, and he was seeing personally to the attainment of his own impeccable standards. When he could spare himself from his office or from the incessant demands of Congress for explanations and justifications, he endured the hardships of field life. It was on such an occasion in 1843 that, during a storm, he fell in the dark trying to protect one of his cherished instruments from the elements, injuring himself upon a pointed rock and subjecting himself to exposure. Aged 73 years and weakened by a lifetime of relentless work, he died in pursuit of his vision, probably little realizing how enduring his example was to be.
The Bureau grew rapidly in size and in the strength of its organization under Hassler’s successor, Alexander Dallas Bache, who served until 1867. One of America’s all-time great educators and scientists, this great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin had intellectual curiosity, progressiveness, organizing ability, and personal charm. Having graduated with high honors from West Point, he was qualified in military science. He found time to design the military defenses of Philadelphia, while directing the Coast Survey participation in the campaigns of the Civil War. He was one of the founders and the first president of the National Academy of Science.
Bache fell heir to the entire Atlantic and Gulf coasts, soon to be augmented by the admission of Texas in 1848, and California soon after. He divided the area into districts, speeding the work at once in all parts and presenting a picture of progress favorable for political appraisal. This required the development of a strong corps of assistants.
Lieutenant Commander W. P. McArthur began hydrographic surveys in California with the USS Ewing even before the gold rush. In 1849 he started work at San Francisco to meet the influx of traffic, only to be interrupted by a mutiny of the gold-crazed crew—the only mutiny in Survey history.[1] McArthur was responsible for the selection of the Mare Island site for the famous naval base. His pioneering work in the West, continued by a line of outstanding descendants, has left his name permanently known in the Pacific Northwest.
Assistant George Davidson, veritably the father of science in California, went west in 1850 to start geodetic and topographic work related to the hydrography of McArthur and others, and he spent most of the next fifty years in that new land. A tireless worker in various fields, he surveyed much of the western coast, investigated tidal and hydraulic problems, operated an astronomic observatory, wrote geographical notes and compendiums, organized the California Academy of Science, and taught in the university. He induced an eccentric millionaire, James Lick, to endow one of the world’s great astronomical observatories. Davidson, and later Assistant W. H. Dall, made reconnaissance surveys and wrote coast pilot notes necessary to the opening to navigation of the dangerous waters of the northwest and Alaska. Davidson’s first pilot notes of the West Coast appeared in California newspapers as early as 1848—far ahead of the first official Coast Pilots of the Bureau, which began in 1875 with a book on the Gulf of Maine.
Bache had the responsibility of guiding the Civil War operations of the Bureau. These were of many kinds, confirming earlier ideas regarding the potential military value of the work, particularly in coast defense problems. Almost countless campaigns found their progress dependent on technical services rendered by Coast Survey men. They worked at New Orleans and Vicksburg, at Lookout Mountain and Chickamauga, in the Shenandoah Valley and on Sherman’s march. The naval victory at Port Royal, possibly of decisive effect on the course of the war, was partly the result of reconnaissance, piloting, and minelaying by Assistant C. O. Boutelle, Lieutenant Commander C. H. Davis, and others.
In later wars the diverse skills of the Survey contributed to operations in all theaters. World War II, with it numerous amphibious operations, presented especially difficult requirements for surreptitious beachhead surveys, often made at night by Survey officers on military assignment, for the study and prediction of tidal regimes, and for the emergency charting of perilous waters in little-known island groups.
Very early in the time of Bache, the slow speeds and unwieldy properties of sailing vessels led to the trial of steamers. The first of these, the Bibb, began work in 1847, after tests by then Lieutenant C. H. Davis, who later became a Rear Admiral and Superintendent of the Naval Observatory. His tests of the Bibb signalled the change from sail to steam, perhaps the greatest of the early technological advances in hydrography.
Major ships of the Survey today displace two or three thousand tons, and they are built to be fairly wide and steady, for much launch handling is necessary for the survey of inshore areas. Speeds are moderate, but the complex of electronic instruments devoted to survey operations is impressive. There are at present four such ships in the Survey fleet, with two more authorized. In addition, tenders of all sizes capable of maintaining themselves at sea are used in intermediate areas too exposed for launches but too close in for major ships. All, ships and launches alike, work with sonic gear permitting rapid and comprehensive scanning of the sea bottom features. All, moreover, but the launches, are capable of working with radar, shoran, and the Survey’s electronic position indicator system, known as EPI. It is hard now to find a quartermaster fully skilled in the ancient art of heaving the lead!
The growth of hydrographic work during and after the time of Bache saw continuous improvements and inventions of equipment and methods. Lieutenant George Stellwagen, operating on Georges Bank, invented a bottom sampler, while Louis Agassiz made studies of Florida coral reef growth especially for the Survey. Lieutenant Matthew F. Maury, the great oceanographer of the Navy and long Superintendent of the Depot of Charts and Instruments, though not officially assigned to the Survey, worked in such close association that he was naturally identified with it. He originated the use of wire in place of hemp for deep-sea soundings, vastly improving accuracy and speed. Registering deep-sea thermometers and water-samplers were invented. Lieutenant John E. Pillsbury, who became a Rear Admiral after distinguished service in the Spanish War, spent many years in the Survey, advancing the techniques of deep-sea exploration and inventing a direction-indicating current meter of great value. Surface current observations carried out by tracking marked bottles led to the intensive study of the Gulf Stream in 1848 and since.
Among the many outstanding later developments in oceanographic instrumentation were those of Commander C. D. Sigsbee, later a Rear Admiral, whose name is immortal for his contributions to deep-sea exploration. He commanded the Blake in the Gulf of Mexico in 1875-7, where he adapted Sir William Thomson’s sounding machine to deep work, in part by the addition of a registering sheave to indicate the length of wire paid out. He also invented a water-cup to bring up samples from several depths at one haul, and a collection trap for biological samples. In addition to these effective means of perpetuating his memory, he later commanded the Maine when she was lost at Havana.
In the early twentieth century, Nicholas Heck and others developed the wire drag, following the wrecking of the cruiser Brooklyn on a pinnacle rock at New Bedford. This method, an improvement on earlier clumsy pipe sweeping devices, has been widely used to sweep the passages of rocky coasts to disclose hidden dangers, such as the famous “Washington Monument Rock” which rises to within a few feet of the surface from general depths of 650 feet in Southeast Alaska.
A relatively recent development is the fathometer, brought into useful form by the Submarine Signal Company with the help of the Survey. Its value is beyond reckoning. Another was the radio-acoustic ranging system, used for many years as a distance measurement device until superseded by electronic position-finding methods. Radioacoustic ranging used the transmission-times of underwater sound signals. In the course of development work in this field, Commander O. W. Swainson and Dr. Karl Dyk, working off the California coast on the Pioneer in the early 1930’s, discovered and explained a striking phenomenon, earlier predicted by A. L. Shalowitz, which later led to the operational use of SOFAR, a signalling device. Sound signals travel great distances when directed into certain minimum-velocity layers, constituting effective sound-conducting channels. Vast areas of offshore hydrography, controlled by the radio-acoustic ranging method, have benefited by this fortunate circumstance.
Charts in Hassler’s time were laboriously prepared by engraving myriads of details on stone or copper plates, from which impressions were made by hand. The first one of all, showing Newark Bay, was printed from the stone, which gave poorer definition than copper. In 1844 the first copper-plate engraving, of New York Harbor, was prepared. In 1850, processes had been so speeded that the first sheets from the West Coast resulted as published charts within twenty days. The Bureau gradually assembled a large group of skillful men whose artistry resulted in some of the most beautiful chart engravings ever seen. This craft endured until recent years, to be supplanted at last by newer methods of glass negative engraving and photolithography, developed largely in the Survey in the unromantic cause of efficiency.
The first years of chart production saw perhaps 4,000 copies produced in a year. These were all nautical charts. With the advent of aviation and the sudden great growth of air navigation, the bureau had thrust upon it a duty of supplying aeronautical charts as well, a duty which multiplied the cartographic and printing work many times. A vast number of general aeronautical charts have been required—World Aeronautical Charts, regional, sectional, and route charts—as well as special facility and airport approach and landing charts. The multi-color presses of today have delivered more than 43 million nautical and aeronautical charts in a year, many of them printed cooperatively to augment the reproduction facilities of the Hydrographic Office and other Federal chart agencies. The development of the crude chart of olden times into a highly specialized instrument of navigation has involved a long series of changes, simplification, and adaptation. Chart use is now complicated by the requirements of high-speed navigation, radio and radar techniques, and other new practices not dreamed of in the early 19th century.
Sea-level studies, the handmaiden to hydrographic surveys, have had to be carried on. Tide gages were widely distributed and the analysis of tidal regimes begun in 1853, permitting the publication of tide predictions for use in ship operations. Assistant Joseph Saxton invented an automatic-recording tide gage. Basic hydrodynamic theories of tidal motion were later developed by Assistant William Ferrell and elaborated by Mathematician Rollin Harris. They brought weird notions of the ocean pulse into systematic order. Harris and Fischer built a tide-predicting machine capable of integrating the phases of 37 separate harmonic components into the complex tidal curve. These activities earned for the Survey the primary responsibility in the United States for tidal investigations, and the publication of world-wide tide and tidal current predictions is now effected by the Survey, in cooperation with the Navy, which has the basic responsibility for the foreign-area work in this field.
The laborious chaining method of surveying shore areas and landmarks necessary in coasting and piloting has gradually given way to the planetable and stadia rod, to photography, and finally to air-photogrammetry, which quickly and accurately provides the information needed for the compilation of detailed topographic maps. Captain O. S. Reading, a recently retired photogrammetrist of the Survey, developed a nine-lens mapping camera particularly adapted to the survey of coastal areas. From a height of 14,000 feet, it can snap all the details in 121 square miles of land—a tremendous aid in the incidental problem of shore mapping, notwithstanding the intricate processes of photo-interpretation, rectification, and compilation.
The 1,200 triangulation stations originally laid down by Hassler were forerunners of a vast structure of geodetic control surveys of the utmost importance in all areas of engineering and natural-resource development. Bache started the eastern oblique arc of primary triangulation destined eventually to reach from the Bay of Fundy to New Orleans. This, and the later great transcontinental arc across 2,500 miles of varied terrain from coast to coast, have figured in scientifically important investigations into the most basic and fundamental properties of the earth itself.
Widespread improvements in the fieldwork methods of astronomy and geodesy have been highlighted by such dramatic innovations as the use of the electric telegraph in 1848 for the determination of longitude between land stations, and Bache’s apparatus for measuring a seven-mile baseline with an uncertainty of only one inch. Baseline work, first done with iced measuring bars placed end to end, later employed tapes made of metals that do not change length with varying temperature. Such improvements culminated in the precision that permitted the triangulation of the distance between two California mountain peaks used by Michelson in his classic determination of the speed of light—a distance fixed with a residual probable error of less than one part in five million. Geodetic survey work has seen innumerable smaller improvements, including light and portable theodolites, heliotropes, and electric signal lamps to pinpoint signal points at great distances, and the Bilby steel towers, portable and far faster to use than wooden ones, for the elevation of instruments above surrounding objects. New methods of distance measurement directly by radio or light-beam methods are under test now and provide possibilities of superseding time-honored methods of triangulation.
As a necessary corollary to the involved reductions of geodetic computations, gravity investigations were started in 1875, using Bessel pendulums, later supplanted by temperature-insensitive invar pendulums and the present improved apparatus. Such investigations led to earth-crustal studies by later geodesists John Hayford and William Bowie, who became authors of the fundamental theory of isostasy, upon which modern notions of mountain-building and other tectonic processes are based. Captain Bowie, one of the outstanding modern scientists of the Survey, was a strong advocate of comprehensive national mapping programs. He had much to do with the establishment of coordinate systems designed to bring the benefits of geodetic control to all surveyors. He was also the architect of the existing 1927 North American geodetic datum, which resulted from one of the greatest mathematical feats of general adjustment in the history of geodesy.
Benjamin Peirce, one of the foremost mathematicians of the country and also a Superintendent of the Survey, employed his son Charles, who worked several years before going on to become a world-famous philosopher and author of the theory of pragmatism. Bureau mathematicians, trained to recognize faultless observations, were called on to examine the questioned north-pole observations of former Survey draftsman, Robert Peary. These, as the world knows, were found beyond possibility of falsification, closing the controversy by a simple demonstration of the truth, and paving the way to his receiving the rank of Rear Admiral from a grateful Congress.
Later officers have served as special experts and adjudicators in numerous trials over riparian rights, waterfront land grants, and other beach problems. Some such cases have involved millions of dollars, and one concerned the actual ownership of parts of the naval base at Mare Island. Today such special knowledge is in demand in cases of offshore rights involving the troublesome problems and definitions of seaward boundaries.
Plans initiated by Hassler and carried forward by Bache and his successors to investigate the elusive and little-understood magnetic forces that actuate the compass needle have led the Survey to the operation of several fixed observatories, where instruments of great sensitivity make continuous recordings of the fluctuating magnetism. They provide the magnetic information necessary to the use of magnetic compasses in navigation, thus serving all ships and aircraft. They help monitor radio communication conditions, use of radio navigational aids, and the prediction of radio fadeouts. They provide basic information for the interpretation of magnetic prospecting surveys made in the search for oil and minerals, as well as for the use of military implements.
The first isogonic chart was published in 1855, partly as a result of the use of a magnetometer of Bache’s design. The Survey has now been legally designated as the nation’s collection agency and repository for world magnetic data, and it compiles all American-issue magnetic charts, including world charts prepared for publication by the Hydrographic Office.
Experience in the exacting task of operating magnetic observatories led to an assignment of like nature in 1925, when the responsibility for seismological investigations was added. This called for similar skills and took advantage of the existence of the observatories, excellent places to operate seismographs. The Survey therefore detects, locates, and studies earthquakes for scientific purposes, as well as for practical ends having to do with engineering precautions, public safety, and insurance rates.
The interest and observational skill of the Bureau in geodesy, geomagnetism, seismology, and some aspects of physical oceanography have led to its selection as the operating agency for substantial portions of the United States program for the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58. Field activities of this program will augment those of many other countries joined together for world-wide cooperation in this event, as in the previous two International Polar Years of 1882-83 and 1932-33, which provided important scientific advances in geophysics.
The discovery of gold in Alaska in 1882, and the later Klondike gold rush of 1897, speeded the northern work and started a long and still, unfinished story of charting in that remote, austere land. All later Survey officers have had their share of battling what have often seemed to be hopeless odds of weather and terrain. The waters of Alaska, infinitely complicated and strewn almost everywhere with rocks rising out of the depths, have nevertheless great importance in the development of the territorial resources of fish and minerals. Almost unbelievably dismal, and torn by some of the world’s worst weather, the seas and waterways of the territory are nevertheless exquisitely beautiful at times. Every man who has put in his time sounding its channels, surveying its craggy shores, or tracing boundaries through the muskeg, must count it a highlight of his life. The peaks, bays, headlands, and glaciers bear the names of Dall, Mendenhall, Faris, and many other survey field men. Literally hundreds of places have names betraying the visits of the famous steam-launch Cosmos and other survey vessels that spent their years in those waters.
Much the same can be said of the other great overseas undertaking of the Survey, involving the provision of modern charts for the 7,000 islands of the Philippines. Beginning in 1901, this became a routine part of every Survey career—an interlude spent in a tropical wonderland where the weather was almost always good, the scenery lush and beautiful, and where experience was gained apace, despite certain drawbacks of local insurrections, unfriendly natives, tropical heat with pests and fever, and typhoons. Starting from nothing, a basic modern survey was made in forty years, and a skilled hydrographic and geodetic service developed in time to be handed over to the new government of the Republic after World War II.
When Hassler died in 1843 it is probable that he little realized how enduring his example would be. On this 150th anniversary of his bureau, the realization becomes vivid indeed!
A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Captain Roberts is Chief of the Division of Geophysics, U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. During World War II he served as navigator, executive officer, and commanding officer of various Coast and Geodetic Survey ships on hydrographic and geodetic surveys in the Aleutian Islands under operational orders of the Commandant, 17th Naval District. He is the author of numerous professional articles in the field of geophysics and surveying.
*
MAXIMUM SPEED
Contributed by COMMANDER MILTON J. SILVERMAN, U. S. Navy
During World War II our Commodore’s four-piper flagship was assigned to escort an old merchantman from Noumea to Guadalcanal. The Commodore was irked by the heavy, black smoke that poured from the merchantman’s stack. He signalled a speed change down to twelve knots and the smoke continued. He slowed to ten knots and still the smoke poured forth. In exasperation, the Commodore sent a message asking, “What is your maximum speed without smoking?”
Back came the laconic answer, “Speed zero.”
PINK ELEPHANTS
Contributed by LIEUTENANT LeROY R. BROUN, U. S. Navy
A Lieutenant attached to the Asiatic Squadron in the pre-World War II era had gone elephant hunting in Cambodia when the destroyers called at Saigon. In the interim his wife and child were staying in the Philippines at Camp John Hay, Bagio, and funds were getting low.
Success had crowned the hunter’s efforts, and upon his return to the ship he sent a triumphant MSG to his wife—”HAVE LARGE AND HANDSOME BULL ELEPHANT X WHAT SHALL I DO WITH IT?” Quite naturally, every communicator in the Squadron composed an appropriate reply to present in lieu of his wife’s response, but they were all discarded when her reply came.
“I SUPPOSE IT IS PINK X HOW ABOUT SOME MONEY”
(The Proceedings will pay $5.00 for each anecdote submitted to, and printed in, the Proceedings.)