1943 NY Times Baja Article, found by Bernie...
Review of the Land Where Time Stands Still, by Ney York Times, sent to me from Baja Bernie:
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, April 11, 1943.
journey to Lower California
j
LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL. By Max Miller. Illustrated with Photographs by George Lindsay and the Author. 236 pp. New York: Dodd, Mead & Go. $3.
*
By EDWARD FRANK ALLEN
ONE of the least described sections of North America is that part of Mexico known as Baja California extending some eight hundred miles southward
from the southern border of our own State of California. Into this dry and desolate country Mr. Miller traveled by automobile with two scientists who
were collecting specimens of animal life for the San Diego Natural History Museum. But he was less concerned with their work than he was with that of
the natives; their play too, for that matter. He is successful in picturing both.
--^Fhe-book is Antell named. JML Miller shows that except for a few hundred miles of pavement near the border the roads are a good deal as they were
in the days of the padres. A little south of Tijuana and Ensenada "suddenly the primitive leaps out of nowhere and strikes the car with the heavy jest
of a big sea." The author has any number of picturesque ways of stating that the road was rough.
Experienced journalist that he is, Mr. Miller makes a colorful story of the festival of San Borjas, with enough background of the Mission's history to
lend point to the wealth of human interest. One may be assured of pictorial writing, whatever the subject, but he is best at bringing people and
atmosphere to the printed page.
The expedition extended the whole length of Lower California. La Paz, near the southeastern tip, was the last place of any size they visited, and that
had shrunk recently both in population and importance. Japanese submarines hid there in Magdalena Bay shortly before their surprise raid on American
shipping: off the California coast. It was a good hiding place.
But the sad condition of La Paz is due to the mysterious epidemic that killed all the pearl oysters within a single season. Even in the beds that were
a hundred miles apart the oysters all died at once and an industry that had been flourishing since the days of Montezuma was wiped out. In La Paz it
is rumored that some Japanese experts are responsible, and this rumor was circulated a year before Pearl Harbor.
The theory is that the Japanese poisoned the oyster beds because the natural-colored pearls of La Paz, which cannot be deliberately cultured, w«re a
serious rival to Japan's culturing industry.
The pirates who came to Lower California's coast to lie in wait for the Malina galleons swash-buckle into Mr. Miller's story with good effect, and
this is heightened, as one might expect, with allusions to buried treasure. .
But the book is readable chiefly for good straight reporting on a land that is so old and so little known that it is news.
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