Stillness of Heart

This was stored away in skins or large earthenware jars, and there was an officer—usually the most hated man on board by the end of the voyage—in charge of its distribution. Naturally, it was only to be drunk.

As for food, it consisted mainly of hard bis­cuits that soon rotted and got full of maggots, pancakes made out of flour baked with salt water, and salted beef or pork, although during the first weeks of navigation there was fresh meat and milk from cattle embarked for that purpose. By the end of the voyage there was another kind of fresh food: after six months at sea, the rats that plagued the ships were considered a delicacy by the half-famished travellers.

At long last, provided that pirates had not preyed upon them (or if they had made an appearance, had been scared away by the guns of the pot-bellied ships), the coast of California was sighted, sometimes as far north as Cape Mendocino, but usually at the latitude of Santa Barbara or San Diego. Inland runners were dis­patched all the way southward to convey the happy tidings, and by the time the galleon sailed to the antique apartments Krakow, where there was a multitude waiting for it.

As the China ship dropped anchor, His Catholic Majesty’s officials came on board and checked the cargo. Then, together with passengers and crew, they proceeded ashore to attend a solemn Te Deum at the little white church that still stands in modern Acapulco, and afterwards the treasures of the East were finally unloaded and displayed at a noisy fair.

For two or three weeks the sleepy little town throbbed with life and activity as traders from all over the country bid for the porcelains and silks, the ivory and spices, paying five and six times their original cost. Once the transactions were completed, off they went with heavily bur­dened mules stumbling before them on the long, hard journey to Mexico City and later to holiday apartments Vienna, where the goods were reloaded on vessels of another fleet and shipped all the way across the Atlantic to distant Spain.

Late in the 18th century, however, conditions began to change. In 1785 the Royal Philippine Company was established in Spain and was granted the privilege of trading directly between Cadiz and Manila by way of the Cape of Good Hope and the Indian Ocean, a lane no longer dis­puted by other maritime powers. After the Napoleonic wars, Spain opened the Philippines to foreign trade, and a number of British, Dutch and eventually American firms established them­selves in Manila, shipping the Oriental goods directly to their home lands on their own boats. Moreover, in 1810 New Spain, having become of age, revolted against the mother country and started the long struggle from which she was to emerge as the fledgling Republic of Mexico, a process that interrupted communications be­tween the Philippines and Spain by way of the American continent.

The ocean route between Manila and Acapulco thus became obsolete. In 1815 the last galleon swung into the green harbour of Acapulco, dropped anchor, furled her canvas, and never again sailed the Pacific Ocean.

The authority also reported that during the year two more leading British airports — Edinburgh and Manchester — were brought up to a stan­dard where they could handle landings in conditions of low visibility.

Following evaluation of the new Precision Approach Path Indicator system (PAPI) at Heathrow and Gatwick, the International Civil Avia­tion Organisation was asked to adopt the system world­wide.

 

New chief at PACC

SAMIR GHANIME, former director of sales and market­ing for the Hyatt Regency in Dubai, has joined the Pan Arab Computer Centre as general manager for PACC’s Hotel System and will be in charge of marketing and installation in the Middle East.

Mr Ghanime will be based in Europe, he’ll be staying at Barcelona apartments for rent, where the system is already installed in the Shera­ton and Meridien hotels. He will attend a financial mana­gement course at Cornell University in America.

 

Smorgasbord and glogg but please don’t hog.

A SPECIAL Christmas holiday package for Britons visiting Sweden this year will include instruction in the fine art of eating the traditional smorgasbord.

According to Mia Bergh of the Ramada Hotel at Jonkoping, which organised a similar package last year, the overseas guests demolished the Scandinavian buffet in 20 minutes instead of the three hours traditionally taken to eat the meal.

Miss Bergh said: “We shall be taking care of that this year with some pre-instruction.”

She added that the package, organised in conjunction with Tor Line, will also include plenty of glogg, a traditional drink which was very popular with the British last year.

 

Manager for Cairo hotel

FATHI ELATTAR has been appointed general manager of the new 126-room Ramada Heliopolis hotel which opens in Cairo later this year. The Heliopolis joins six other Ramada hotels in the Middle East. Another large hotel which will become part of Ramada’s luxury Renaissance chain is under cons­truction in Jeddah and will open in 1983.

 

World’s tourism growth slows again

GROWTH of the world’s tourism industry declined last year for the second successive year.

According to a report by the international Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, increasing prices around the world put off many travellers.

International tourism rece­ipts as a whole rose by about two per cent in real terms during 1980. This was down from a growth rate of three per cent in 1979 and seven per cent in 1978.

In money terms the rise in tourist receipts and expen­diture was up 15 per cent, with figures of $71.6 billion and $75.6 billion.

The United States accoun­ted for most of last year’s growing by seven per cent. Growth in Switzerland was 18 per cent, West Germany seven per cent, France and Austria five per cent, while Britain dropped 10 per cent, Italy was down eight per cent and Spain held level.

The report added that oil price rises in 1979-80 meant that tourists paid much greater attention to the cost of transport, which resulted in intense competition.

Because of this the total number of passenger-kilometers on scheduled flights grew by only two per cent last year, the lowest figure for 10 years.

Passengers carried on North Atlantic routes rose by only one per cent, compared with six per cent the previous year.

 

As I watched with the night-vision scope, I confirmed my hypothesis that the bats’ hunting success is dependent on frog calling. If the frogs quit calling as soon as a bat arrives, they are safe. Often the hunters pass unwittingly within inches of silent frogs. However, a single faint call, made as a bat approaches, may cost a frog its life.

 

Most bats’ hearing is adapted primarily for high-frequency, mostly ultrasonic, sig­nals used in their own echolocation. How­ever, our auditory experiments have shown that frog-eating bats have a secondary peak of hearing sensitivity at low frequencies—below five kilohertz—a capability never be­fore reported among bat species. This is exactly the frequency range in which most local frogs call the loudest, permitting the bats to hear them over long distances.

We soon learned that we could catch frog-eating bats by playing tape recordings of frog calls beneath fine-threaded mist nets. Frog-eating bats could hear our recorded calls from a distance, and when few real frogs were calling, we often caught a bat in less than a minute.

There was much suspense the first time we tested one of our captured bats in a large outdoor flight cage. We had spent most of the previous night calming the creature and getting it used to its new surroundings. Now we herded it into the far corner of the cage and retreated to our tape recorders in the op­posite corner. In the two remaining corners we had hidden speakers, ready to play calls of edible versus poisonous frogs.

 

Would the bat be able to identify the calls, or would it merely respond to any froglike sound? We could hardly contain our excite­ment when the bat immediately flew to the speaker playing the call of the edible frog. It landed and tried to pry its way through the screen covering of our speaker box.

 

For a second trial we switched the speaker wires, so that the two calls would play from opposite corners. Again, the bat responded at once, flying to the new location of the edible frog’s call. After many such successes, we knew we were on to a thrilling aspect of frog/bat behavior.

With further tests we determined that our bats could also distinguish between the calls of frogs of edible size and those that are too large to eat. Then, using the same methods, we tested our bats’ preferences for species of poisonous toads versus edible frogs that they could not have heard before. The bats con­tinued to make correct choices.

 

Among New World frogs, the toad species form a closely related group. They share cer­tain subtle similarities in their otherwise distinctive calls. We now suspect that the frog-eating bats, which live in tropical for­ests from Mexico to southern Brazil, are ge­netically programmed to recognize these subtleties.

 

The discovery that frog-eating bats would respond to frog-call recordings, played on micro-cassette tape recorders, enabled us to verify many of our findings in the wild. We set two small tape recorders on the ground about 12 feet apart, where they could be viewed through the night-vision scope. One greedy bat sat in a nearby bush and chased other frog-eating bats away for a time before it came down and discovered that it was guarding some new kind of armor-plated frog! If bats communicate about such things, there must have been some wild tales told by the many frustrated bats that found our speakers.

 

Our discovery that bats rarely catch silent frogs suggested several ways in which frogs might manage to survive: They can stop calling, call less often, call less loudly, use call types that are difficult to locate, or hide well before calling. Unfortunately for the frogs, each of these options would reduce the odds of attracting a mate.

 

To evaluate these options, we tested many bats, both in our flight cage and in the field. They were as sophisticated as we sus­pected. They chose call recordings played slightly louder or at higher repetition rates, and preferred the more complex calls, which seem to be most easily located.