144 
Ferber has been well today. The sea has been calm again. The Captain 
tells me that a typhoon with gales over 100 miles per hour is north west of 
the Marshalls, but not likely to disturb us in Ponape or Pingalap. I stand 
breathless at the thought that Mbagintao arrived today in Ponape and will 
be with us the day after tomorrow. How I wish that Mathias had stayed in 
Micronesia to join us now in Ponape for the Pingalap trip. He could have 
strutted so well in showing off "his islands" to Ivan, and it might have 
done him so much good. But for all of the boys I must take Henry Miller's 
words to heart. I can only go so far in playing Jehovah. And along the way 
my best service to them is to make them realize this early, and to learn 
face Jehovah themselves, alone, as every man must face life and death alone. 
At sea. .approaching Ponape, Micronesia November 17, 1972 
We arrive in Ponape tomorrow morning. Early this morning I spoke on 
radio telephone with Paul and Marion. Mbaginta'o stayed with Rosen in 
Honolulu and should have arrived yesterday in Ponape. The dry ice left 
today for Ponape from Guam in four small and three large hat boxes. Our 
Revco is working again, the temperature gauge is not. It is very cold, but 
how cold we do not know. We have transferred back into it the clots, to 
get them as cold as possible for shipping off tomorrow. I do not know 
whether we can collect the dry ice and get the boxes packed in time for 
the mid-day flight to Honolulu. I certainly hope so. 
Most pleasing is the news that the boxes we saw leave Honiara by Air 
Pacific for Fiji have arrived safely at NIH and that John Sheridan did get 
the erythrocytes and frozen clots to Canberra in good shape, and they seem 
OK. I am now worried that the thaw of the Revco may have really ruined our 
large collection of 1800 clots, but we will not know about this until Kirk 
has a chance to examine them. Bob Kirk is undertaking the blood grouping 
of the clots, Paul has arranged a $2500 contract for this, and Leon Rosen 
has an empty Revco standing by for intermediate storage of clots and sera 
which we send off to him at Hawaii. He can receive "collect" shipments. 
Thus, many problems may be solved if we have a successful day tomorrow. 
I have spent the day reading Edmund Wilson's "The Bit Between My Teeth", 
and I find him interesting but by no means as penetrating or as convincing 
or as stimulating a critic as Bobby. Here I think I am objective. Bobby 
is always more exciting and usually less outlandish. Wilson belittles 
Marquis de Sade too much, fails to penetrate either his personality or his 
philosophy deeply, and in his commentaries on "Dr. Zhivago" leaves me cold. 
Yet it is good to be poring over serious works of letters once again. 
We have packed a box containing all the field note books of the exped- 
ition and many other books, films, finger prints, and the last few artifacts 
I have on hand for air shipment to NIH. I am only retaining the major serum 
list notebook from the BSIP, and without having made Xerox copies of it, 
it is too risky to ship it, for if it is lost, so too are the results on 
all the sera and clots and erythrocytes we are to send off and those we 
have already sent off, as well. 
