Last Adventure

At Miss Hutchinson's School in Memphis, where Mrs. Nell Halliburton still teaches practical applied psychology, the only boy ever admitted as a pupil was Mrs. Halliburton's son Richard. Dick Halliburton grew up and went to Princeton, where he was the shy, retiring editor of a photography magazine. In 1921, the year he graduated, he climbed the Matterhorn, surveyed the world and set out on a career of self-conscious adventuring that few men would have had the energy or ambition to undertake.

Richard Halliburton fulfilled himself in many ways and made it pay. He batted about Europe and the Orient, toured Tibet, climbed Fujiyama in midwinter. He mounted Olympus, swam the Hellespont, followed the trail of Ulysses from Ithaca back to Ithaca. Women's clubs began to clamor for him to address them and in 1925 he published his first book, The Royal Road to Romance.

He became one of the greatest press-agents of his time, and his only client was himself. He published seven books of personal adventure, which have sold over a million copies. He was always turning up in odd places, doing odd things (and taking odd notes); newspapers printed thousands of columns of his exploits and plans for exploits. About nearly all of them there was an element of bravery and an element of bravura. He swam the Panama Canal (in installments), followed, on foot, the course of 1) Cortez' conquest of Mexico, 2) Balboa's march across Darien to the Pacific. He wandered through Yucatan, Peru and Brazil, with a pet monkey that died at last from overeating. He swam the Sea of Galilee, appeared in a movie called India Speaks, rode an elephant over the Alps. He grew older (he was 39 last January), but never grew up.

Last winter he planned to sail a Chinese junk across the Pacific to San Francisco and the Fair. Just before he sailed he wrote: "I want to steer her straight into the Golden Gate, where a long time ago I first saw a whitesailed schooner and first heard the call of the sea."

The 75-foot Sea Dragon put out from Hong Kong last February, Captain John Wenlock Welch commanding. She has not been seen since. Public interest in Richard Halliburton's fate was modified by the suspicion that his disappearance might be a pressagent stunt. But last week, in the United States Naval Institute Proceedings, was published the record of what appeared to be the only unpremeditated adventure of Adventurer Halliburton's career.

On the night of March 23 the Sea Dragon was some 1,200 miles west of Midway Island. In the same seas, 40 feet high, the liner President Coolidge was running' through a typhoon, her speed slowed to six knots. From the Sea Dragon Captain Welch radioed to Dale Collins, executive officer of the President Coolidge: Southerly gales, Squalls. Lee rail under water. Hard tack. Bully beef. Wet bunks. Having wonderful time. Wish you were here instead of me. Welch, Master.

Mr. Collins heard nothing after that In his report to his company he wrote "If the Sea Dragon encountered such weather as we did on the night of March 23, and she undoubtedly did, there i small chance that the little craft survived.

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