AT FIRST HAND

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21086, 12 July 1938, Page 12

AT FIRST HAND

DANISH LECTURER SEEKS KNOWLEDGE By Telegraph—Press Association WELLINGTON. July 11. A lecturer in geography at the University of Copenhagen. Denmark. Dr. Sophie Petersen, who landed at Wellington to-day from the Awatea, believes in the theory that it is necessary to visit a country before you are qualified to teach other people about it, so she spends her vacations travelling the world by air because that is the quickest way. She has met many adventures in the course of her wanderings. She intends to spend a fortnight in New Zealand she said to-day, and she is devoting the whole of that time to the North Island. The South Island with its mountains, glaciers and fiords is too like Norway. I am more interested in your geysers, thermal regions, volcanoes and Maoris,” she said. Less than a month ago Dr. Petersen embarked on the flying boat Challenger at Southampton and travelled by air to Brisbane. It was no new experience to her, lor in the course of 12 years she had flown over Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, Alaska and Greenland. Indeed, the antipodes were practically the only part of the world she had not previously visited. Last year Dr. Petersen was travelling off the Liberian coast when the Dutch steamer Maaskerk ran on a sunken reef in thick weather and a heavy sea. The sharp teeth of the rocks bit through her plates and held her fast. It was impossible to launch the boats

without their being instantly dashed to pieces. The passengers were rescued by natives, who put off from the shore in surfboats. For some days the travellers, most of whom were English, lived in a primitive native village on the shore eating such provisions as could be saved from the stranded

steamer and enjoying the hospitality of the natives until a steamer could be sent to take them off. Dr. Petersen afterward felt herself well qualified to lecture on the conditions of the Liberian natives. When she arrives back in Copenhagen barely three months after leaving for the Southern Hemisphere, she will lecture to her class of 400 students belonging to the co-educational college attached to the university on what she will have seen on her present trip to Australia and New Zealand. She speaks English fluently, and is a most interesting and unusual visitor.