TROPICALITIES

Korero (AEWS), Volume 2, Issue 14, 17 July 1944, Page 16

TROPICALITIES

By Columnist L. G. Gray, special to News of New Zealand and syndicate newspapers Last evening I dined with those professional funsters, Boswell and Johnson. They had spent the afternoon at the Admiralty, and the talk across the table was solely of Captain Cook and his doings of the last three years. Boswell, who had been talking to the crew while they were waiting for their deferred pay, was. full of a hundred curious stories— which Johnson dismissed airily. Johnson: The trouble Boswell is that you’re gossip happy and rumour conscious. It’s all very well to be carried, away by grand but indefinite notions of world tours. But there’s so little to be learnt. Too much is conjecture. You, nobody at all, knows enough of language: you can believe what see but everything intellectual and everything abstract—politics, morals, religion — can only be darkly guessed. Anyway, one set of savages is much like another. Boswell: I can’t see how you can say the people of Tahiti (alternative spelling, Otaheite) are savages. Johnson: Don’t cant in defence of savages. Boswell: They can navigate. Johnson: A dog or cat can swim. Boswell: They carve ingeniously. Johnson: A cat can scratch, so

can a child with a nail. Bozzy, get on, with your dinner, and don’t lose your sense of perspective. And Johnson continued dryly by saying he hadn’t been told all these stories: I didn’t know I was so much respected. What can’t be in London is not worth knowing, anyway, he said.