option on 2,244 pounds of gum opium at $14,586, which he could export and sell for $24,684 within twenty-one days. All he asked was "a little amount" for himself, and a profit of "close to $50,000" was held out to her in this business in one year's time. To meet her require ments for a safe investment returning a regular income, she was also offered some Colorado silver stock that had been paying at the rate of 24 per cent. a year for three months. The other field as popular to-day with the get-rich-quick promoter as mining was represented by the offer to sell her one or more barrels of oil per day from the "producing and tested wells" of an oil company in Texas. Here she began to run up against the methods of the experienced promoter. In this case the shift of approach to avoid the public reaction against promotion stocks in the oil field is seen: "This is an entirely new proposition and is not a stock issue. We sell to the investor one or more barrels of oil per day out of our production. One barrel costs Sixteen Hundred Dollars, for which we credit the investor's account with one barrel of oil per day at the market price. One barrel of oil, which costs $1,600.00, yields an income of approximately One Thousand Dollars per year; two barrels of oil, which costs $3,200.00, will yield an income of about Two Thousand Dollars per year: and so on. The life of one of these wells will run anywhere from eight to twelve years, and you can readily see it makes a very handsome return for the money invested." More human interest was involved in the proposition offered by a moving picture actress, evidently out of a job. She wrote, "I am sure that it is just the time for small concerns to start and develop. My director is of the same mind, and where we both have all the experience that is necessary to make a success of an organization of this kind, we have not the capital with which to complete our arrangements. If you are personally interested in the acting of the Moving Pictures, it would be a double opportunity, as you could draw a salary besides getting interest and dividends." The height of the ridiculous was reached in the following letter, printed without editing: Dear Widow i saw your add how you wold like to invest some money i have got a leetle money saved up come too Bridgport and Wee Will Bild a house and start a chicken farm i ame a Bachlr 53 years old and i wuld like too have you as a Companion. A man in Pennsylvania had a formula for making paint at low cost and wanted money to open stores "after the plan of the United Cigar Stores." Many manufacturing concerns were looking for more capital and were anxious for an opportunity to convince her of the large profits she would make in them. In one case she was frankly told, "Within a year's time it may double or treble your investment." Opportunities in paper mills, food, chemical, cotton, export companies, automobile and jewelry specialties (in the latter case "Tiffany & Company would be called upon for many thousand") were laid at her feet. In another case there was a follow-up letter offering her the position of treasurer of the company, "which would not entail any labor on your part except to sign the checks," in addition to $50.00 per week on her $15,000. There were several real estate propositions and the current offerings of some high-pressure stockand bond-selling organizations. This gives some idea of the number and variety of temptations placed in the way of inexperienced investors when the fact that they possess some money becomes known. The number is not so great, but the appeal is frequently greater, when the fact is known to only a few friends. Walter Bagehot's facetious scheme for remedying this was not to allow any one to have £100 who could not prove to the satisfaction of the Lord Chancellor that they knew what to do with £100. Our most hopeful remedy is in more effective and more far-reaching selling methods by the retailers of sound investment securities, and by continuous educational campaigns. Investments for a Woman On this page each month will be printed practical sug- W 'HEN the widow of the secretary of a great financier went to him to ask how she should invest the $4,000 which her husband had left her, he shook his head and said, "Madam, I can name for you no investment that will give you more than four dollars a week in income from such a sum. To try to do so would be to expose you to danger that you should not run. Put the money in a savings bank. Use what you need of it to pay for a six months' course in stenography, and I will give you a salary that will net you 201 per cent. on your whole capital." Money thus invested cannot be lost, and in these times of high living costs the temptation for women to try to get a higher return on investments than is possible with safety is greater than many of them can resist. If they are along in years they might solve this problem by buying an annuity from a good life insurance company. This uses up the principal but provides a larger income as long as the purchaser lives. If the amount to be invested is ample, or the woman realizes that high interest return and safety do not go together, the problem is easier to solve. Many insurance companies are now recognizing a responsibility where it is insurance money to be invested. They do not give as high a return as some good in-. vestment bonds yield to-day; but their long lists of security holdings afford much greater diversification than any investor can obtain and thus afford greater safety with a freedom from care and a greater convenience that should appeal to women. When it comes to making their own investments, women should most beware of that desire to get a high return. It is that which makes stock promoters rich and keeps their victims poor. A woman in California wrote: "Your articles on investments are helping me in my financial education. However, here is the problem on which I am seeking advice. I find myself at thirty-five with a start of only $5,000. In the next fifteen years, no matter how carefully I save and wisely I invest in bonds, even at 6 per cent., I cannot save enough to retire on comfortably. It stands to reason then, one has to make more than 6 per cent. Can one do that safely by investing in good stocks of some well-established, growing concerns and realize on an advance in price?" The answer is that it cannot be done safely. The woman who does add to her principal by successful speculation in high grade stocks is the exception to the rule. It is an undertaking for which women, and many men, are not equipped. For an investment of $35,000 of insurance money by a widow who had a good home, $20,000 of income-producing real estate, and $17,000 invested in a local building and loan association, bank and industrial preferred stocks and bonds, the following suggestions of high grade, non-callable, long-term bonds were recently made by the Investment Editor: Union Pacific 1st lien and refunding 5s due 2008 Pennsylvania R. R. general mortgage 5s due 1968 Dominion of Canada 5s due 1952, redeemable at 100 after 1942 Brooklyn Union Gas 1st consolidated 55 due 1945 Detroit Edison 1st mortgage 5s due 1933 Liggett & Myers 5s due 1951 Niagara Falls Power Co. 1st mortgage 5s due 1932 The services of a reliable investment banking house should always be secured by women who are making investments in securities. H WHALERS" BY CAMERON ROGERS Illustrations by Edward A. Wilson for "Iron Men and Wooden Ships" E WAS old and to us who thrice a day could not avoid watching his action at mess, offensively toothless. He was unclean and unshaven as even the mate of a 5,000 ton tramp of no distinction and evil manners in a seaway should not be. The steward bullied him; the "old man" laughed and sneered at him. But he was above them all and they knew it and were jealous of him, and their mocking was a puerile spite that harmed him not at all. For he had been in "sails." With the amazing fecundity of an imagination fostered by a halfcentury at sea, he would, prevailing against his tormentors, spin yarns that silenced even them with the gale-whipped splendor of their conceptions. The days when he had been in "sails" and not the mate of a stinking steam-shovel as foul as the mud of the Mersey; the days of the queens of the sea, the days of the Darlings, the clipper ships. As a mariner might think to himself in words, perhaps, of a woman whom he had loved in the best and burning days of his life, so would "the officer" tenderly, brutally, in timately, remotely, speak of his first command, a McKay clipper, already, when he took her over, nearly thirty years old. And the "old man," years his junior, would be abashed and entranced and greatly moved and jealous as the devil, for he had not known sails. He, poor stripling, had spent the meagre years of his experience in steam, and ignoble steam at that. In his leisure when what I fear was his last command as mate was lurching unbeautifully eastward through the night of sea and stars, the "officer" would spin us yet more yarns, sagas that he had heard as a lad along the quays of Liverpool and Bristol and the wharves of Boston and New Bedford. They dealt with whaling and whalers, the industry of courage, of scathe and adventure. With men and boys who sailed away on three-year cruises and who, some of them, made fortunes, and some of them died of fo'c'sle damp, or were killed by a hard master or a bucko mate, or were destroyed by the great prey of their pursuing. To the telling of these tales he did not bring the perspective of the men who write books, but his was the appreciation of a seaman for those seamen who pursued the most hazardous calling that the sea could offer, for the Yankee whalers. Like this relict of fortune, widowed by the sea of his youth and his of occurrence that so often fringed upon sudden and utter destruction and was always shot through and through with action. The sinister story of the mutiny of the whaler Globe of Nantucket, which sailed from Edgartown, Massachusetts, in December, 1822, strikes with a purple horror across a history fraught in. any case with great hardship and often with incidents of unbelievable misery endured. The young madman, Comstock, splitting the head of the sleeping captain with an axe, mutilating and then, after reeling to and fro in the pitch black cabin with the twenty-six year old mate fighting blindly for his life, killing him as he lay unconscious in the pantry, and the ensuing days of terror aboard that tragic vessel make as horrid yet as real á picture as may well be imagined. Charles Boardman Hawes had the genius of prosperity, yet still with the vision of the great ships and the great crews of yesterday in his eyes, Charles Boardman Hawes1 tells the story of whaling with a graphic lucency that brings its ships and its men back into our ken as though the fleets had hove in sight again around a headland after half a century of cruising. He writes of the history of whaling in other nations, of the Basque whalers and the Dutch, the Norwegians who followed a community system, and the English whose cautious custom it was when speaking Yankee vessels to first inquire the amount of the other's catch and then top it by two or three whales. He describes the whale itself and its species, the right whale, the fin whale, the cachalot, and the California gray whale a wicked beast who had been known, on the authority of many a mariner, to chase the crew of a boat right ashore and then tree them. These are but some of the species enumerated. The first chapters of the book are devoted in this way to a scholarly yet thoroughly practical exposition of the fundamentals of the industry. Then come the actual chronicles of the cruises: the sighting, the lowering, the harpooning, and so on throughout a sequence "Whaling," by Charles Boardman Hawes (Doubleday, Page. $5). ΠΟ Mariners Who Knew Not Cautiousness one whaling vessel sailing from her harbor), the chronicles of American whaling will live as they should live, commemorative history of the days when the United States had no peer as a maritime nation and when her masters and mariners were known from Boston to Hong Kong as the smartest men afloat. As whaling might be called, perhaps, the workaday clothes of our maritime success of the last century, the overalls, oily and tarred, of our supremacy, so might the clipper ships, those clippers that formed the treasured reminiscence of my battered but visionary tramp ship mate, be their dress uniform. The clippers of Donald McKay, himself a visionary and a dreamer whose achievements in shipbuilding were the more magnificent for the beauty that was in his visions, were the queens of the sea, their masters actually the ablest sailing. The crews too often were the polyglot leavings of quay and groghouse and brothel in days when eighteen dollars a month offered no inducement to smart lads to leave shore employment for a life always hazardous and hard. But a good mate on a long voyage could often whip his hands into shape, drunk or sober, and mongrels though many of them might be, they could always work a ship. And then there were always a few superb tars aboard and there were always the chanteys and the forebitters to make the work easier and keep Jack cheery. With the chanties the brutalities incidental to whaling, the horrors of mutinies, and the abuses that befel sailormen upon the beautiful clippers at the hands of mas ters like "Bully" Waterman of the Sea Witch, who drove their ships as they drove their crews, with an unrelenting severity, all are forgotten in our minds. The chanties evoke the most cherished conceptions of Jack, his jocund humor, his rolling gait, his rich and lovely vocabulary, and his illimitable capacity for rum. He becomes again the perfect subject for romance, the friend of little boys who listen to his astonishing yarns and sail his hand-whittled brigs and barques and are thereby filled with an unquenchable desire to go to sea. In his own mind always an irresistible lover, Jack in his chanties and forebitters or ballads flings his prowess with the maids of many hundred ports to the gale with an insouciance that is nevertheless not without its pathos. The melodies of the chanties have in them the somber semitones of the sea, the uncertainty of its clemency and the warning of the hurricane that hangs always ready mustered in the vault of the skies to destroy the hapless sailorman. But as Edward Wilson, in the charming illustrations of "Iron Men and Wooden Ships, "2 portrays him, bluff and carefree in his fascinating slacks and trim reefer, so is the Jack of "Whiskey Johnnie," of "Away, Rio," "Do Me Ama" and scores of others. He belongs to a generation of mariners that knew not providence or cautiousness; that flung their pay on the bars of the nearest groghouse to the wharves and into the palm of the first doxie to attract their bold and roving eyes. Laden as Edward Wilson sees him, with a parrot in a cage and no end of curious and touchingly useless gimcracks stowed away in a kerchief, Jack comes Deep Sea Chanties." Illustrated by Edward A. Wilson, with a foreword by William McFee (Doubleday, Page. $7.50). |