Dutchman's Mistakes

Sailors have long called St. Paul "the cursed island." As a barren rock in the antarctic fringe of the bleak South Indian Ocean, 2,000 miles from Africa, India and Australia, French-owned St. Paul is seldom free from either mist or mystery, and last week both fell thicker than ever.

Though nothing green grows on St. Paul, the water around it is often bright green with spawning lobsters. Few fishing grounds on earth are richer. But every attempt to cash in on the St. Paul bonanza has failed. A boat called the Austral disappeared into the fog with all hands. Crews on the Kerguelen and Reve, two other ships which made the attempt, could not stand the chilly weather. Since the sole diet on St. Paul is lobster and fish, a 1931 party of seven got 1) terrible tempers; 2) scurvy. Four of them died.

Last year a Dutchman named John de Boers began making mistakes, biggest of which was to dream of a fortune he would scoop in three years from St. Paul's waters. He bought a Newfoundland trawler, L'lle Bourbon, spent a small fortune transforming it into a floating refrigerator. Then he assembled as ill-assorted a crew as ever walked up a gangplank: his expansive, motherly wife, who had once lived with natives in Madagascar; a blonde artist (niece of Paul Chabas, painter of September Morn); a Breton radio operator and his bitter-tongued fishwife; a Turkish engineer; a doctor and his wife, a Parisian hairdresser who filled her trunk with useless sport clothes; a mechanic and his wife; about 25 common seamen and lobstermen. Another bad mistake de Boers made before setting out from sunny St. Malo, France last May was to skimp on coal.

By the time L'lle Bourbon reached the Suez Canal, the women's arguments were as unbearably hot as the weather. Their bickering drove the senior radio operator and ship's doctor ashore at Djibouti. De Boers took aboard a doctor whom he found in French Somaliland. At Madagascar most of the white crew mutinied, and blacks were signed on in their places. Then the fractious expedition set off for frigid St. Paul.

Last week an amateur radio operator in Bremerton, Wash., (about 11,000 miles from St. Paul), picked up a garbled message from L'lle Bourbon: "Ran Short Of Coal Due Bad Weather . . . Hope Madagascar Will Send Rescue. . . ." Expecting the worst, the French Government ordered a rescue ship to sail at once from Madagascar.

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