War With the Newts

by Karel Čapek

  On board the captured Newts were flung into tanks. Our ship was an old tanker; the badly cleaned tanks reeked of crude oil and the water in them had a rainbow skin of grease; only the cover had been taken off to admit air; with the Newts thrown in it looked thick and repulsive like some kind of noodle soup. Here and there was a faint and pitiful movement, but for the first day the Newts were left undisturbed to enable them to recover. On the following morning four men arrived with long poles and poked around in that ‘soup’ (it really is called soup in the trade); they stirred those densely packed bodies and identified those which did not move or whose flesh was falling off; these were then fished out of the tank with boathooks. ‘Is the soup clear now?’ asked the captain. ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Run some more water into it!’ ‘Yes, sir.’ This cleaning of the soup had to be repeated daily; each time six to eight items of ‘damaged goods’ - as they called it - were thrown overboard. Our ship was accompanied by a procession of big and well-fed sharks. There was a terrible stench around the tanks; in spite of the occasional changing of the water it was yellow and dotted with excrement and sodden biscuits; in it, languidly splashing or apathetically floating, were painfully gasping bodies. ‘They’re well off here,’ old Mike assured me. ‘I saw a ship once which carried them in tin benzene drums; the whole lot of them pegged out there.’

  Six days later we took new merchandise on board off Nanomea island.

  This, then, is what the Newt trade is like; an illegal trade, admittedly, or more precisely a modern form of piracy that has sprung up virtually overnight. It is said that nearly one-quarter of all Newts bought and sold are captured in this manner. There are Newt breeding places which for the Salamander Syndicate are not worth operating as regular farms; on the lesser Pacific islands the Newts have multiplied on a scale that has made them a downright nuisance; the natives object to them and claim that with their burrows and passages they riddle entire islands; that is why not only the colonial authorities but the Salamander Syndicate itself turn a blind eye to these marauding raids on Newt localities. It is estimated that not far short of four hundred pirate ships are engaged in marauding alone. Apart from small-scale entrepreneurs, there are whole shipping companies which practise this modern buccaneering: the biggest of these is the Pacific Trade Company with its head office in Dublin; its president is the respected Mr Charles B. Harriman. Conditions were rather worse a year ago when a certain Teng, a Chinese bandit, with three ships made an outright raid on some Syndicate farms and did not even flinch from massacring their staff when they offered resistance; last autumn Teng with his small fleet was shot to pieces off Midway island by the American gunboat Minnetonka. Since then Newt piracy has been less savage in character and has even enjoyed a steady boom. Certain practices have come to be accepted, and with them the illegal trade is now tacitly tolerated: thus, for example, the ship’s national naval ensign shall be lowered before an attack is made on foreign territory; Newt piracy shall not be used as a cover for the import or export of other commodities; the captured Newts shall not be dumped at uneconomic prices, and they shall be described in the trade as ‘seconds’. In the illegal trade these Newts are marketed at twenty to twenty-two dollars apiece; they are regarded as an inferior but tough type, considering that they have survived terrible treatment on the pirate ships. It is estimated that on an average between 25 and 30 per cent of the captured Newts survive transportation; those that do are a particularly hardy lot. In business jargon they are called Macaroni; lately they have actually been quoted in the regular commodity market reports.

  Two months later I was playing chess with Mr Bellamy in the lounge of the Hotel France in Saigon. By then, of course, I was no longer a hired hand on his ship.

  ‘Look here, Bellamy,’ I said. ‘You’re a decent sort of chap - what’s called a gentleman. Doesn’t it ever go against the grain to make a living from what, essentially, is the shabbiest kind of slave trade?’

  Bellamy shrugged. ‘Newts are Newts,’ he grunted evasively.

  ‘Two hundred years ago people said Niggers were Niggers.’

  ‘And how right they were,’ said Bellamy. ‘Check!’

  I lost that game. It suddenly seemed to me that every move on the board was old and had been made by someone before. Maybe our history has likewise been played through already and we are merely moving our chessmen to the same squares for the same defeats as in the past. Maybe just such a decent quiet chap as Bellamy once hunted Negroes on the Ivory Coast, shipped them to Haiti or Louisiana, and let them die like flies below deck. He had nothing evil in mind, that Bellamy. Bellamy never has anything evil in mind. That’s why he is incorrigible.

  ‘Black has lost,’ Bellamy announced complacently and got up to stretch himself.

  Alongside a well-organised Newt market and extensive press publicity, the major factor in the spread of the Newts was a huge wave of technological idealism which then flooded the whole world. G. H. Bondy had correctly predicted that the human intellect would start to operate in terms of entire new continents and new Atlantises. Throughout the Newt Age a lively and fruitful argument reigned among the technologists: should heavy continents be built with reinforced concrete coasts or lightweight continents of piled up sea sand? Almost daily giant new projects hit the headlines: Italian engineers were proposing, on the one hand, the construction of a Greater Italy which would take up virtually the entire Mediterranean all the way to Tripolitania, the Balearic Islands and the Dodecanese and, on the other, the establishment of a new continent, to be known as Lemuria, to the east of Italian Somaliland which would, one day, take up the whole of the Indian Ocean. In point of fact, with the aid of a whole army of Newts, a new little island was piled up opposite the Somalian port of Mogadishu, measuring thirteen and half acres. Japan had projected, and indeed partly completed, a big new island in place of the former Mariana group and was planning to link the Carolinas and Marshall Islands into two large islands, named in advance New Nippon; in fact each of these was to have an artificial volcano installed, to remind future inhabitants of the sacred Mount Fuji. There were rumours that German engineers were secretely developing a heavy concrete continent in the Sargasso Sea, to be the Atlantis of the future and capable of threatening French West Africa; but it seemed that no more than is foundations were completed. In Holland, steps were taken to drain Zeeland dry; France, on Guadeloupe, was linking up Grande Terre, Basse Terre and La Desirade into one blessed isle; and the United States had begun to construct the first aircraft island on the 37th meridian (two storeys, with a gigantic hotel, a sports stadium, a Fun Park and a cinema seating five thousand). In short, it seemed that the last barriers had fallen which the world’s oceans had erected to human progress; it was the dawn of a joyous new age of amazing technical projects; man was beginning to realise that only now was he truly becoming the Master of the World, thanks to the Newts who had appeared on the world stage at the right moment and, in a manner of speaking, out of historical necessity. There can be no doubt that the immense proliferation of the Newts would not have come about if our age of technology had not provided for them such a wealth of tasks and such a vast field of permanent employment. The future of the Workers of the Sea seemed to be secure for centuries.

  A significant part in the favourable development of the Newt trade was also played by science which soon turned its attention to investigating the physical and psychological aspects of the Newts.

  We are quoting here an account of a scientific congress in Paris, written by an eye-witness, R. D.:

  Ier Congrès d’Urodèles

  Its short title is Caudate Amphibian Congress but its official title is rather longer: First International Congress of Zoologists for Psychological Research into Caudate Amphibians. Except that a real Parisian does not care for titles as long as your arm; the learned professors in session in the amphitheatre of the Sorbonne are to him simply Messieurs les Urodèles, the Caudate Amphibian Gentlemen, and that is all. Or still more briefly and irreverently Ces Zoos-là.

/>   So we set out to have a look at ces Zoos-là, more out of curiosity than from a journalistic sense of duty. Curiosity, so you don’t get me wrong, not about those mostly elderly and bespectacled academic luminaries but about those … creatures (why do we baulk at the term ‘animals’ ?) about which such a lot has been written, from fat scholarly tomes down to frivolous jingles, and which, according to some, are a newspaper hoax or, according to others, creatures in many ways much more gifted than the Master of the Animal Kingdom and the Crown of Creation, as Man is to this day - I mean: after the Great War and other historical events - labelled. I had hoped that the distinguished gentlemen attending the congress on the psychological investigation of caudate amphibians would be able to give us laymen a clear and definitive answer to the question of what that much-vaunted learning ability of Andrias Scheuchzeri was really like; that they would be able to tell us: yes, this is an intelligent creature or at least one as capable of civilisation as you or me, and therefore we must expect to have him around in the future, just as we must expect to have alongside ourselves human races formerly considered savage and primitive … But let me tell you: no such answer has come from the congress, and indeed no such question has been put; contemporary scholarship is much too … professional to concern itself with that kind of problem.

  Very well, let us be informed on what scientists call the psychological life of animals. That tall gentleman with the flowing sorcerer’s beard, who is at this moment thundering from the rostrum, is the famous Professor Dubosque; he seems to be demolishing some perverse theory of some esteemed colleague, but that side of the argument is difficult for us to follow. It took us a little while to realise that the impassioned sorcerer is talking about Andrias’s perception of colours and about his ability to distinguish different shades of colours. I don’t know if I understood it properly, but I came away with the impression that while Andrias Scheuchzeri may be a little colour-blind, Professor Dubosque must be terribly shortsighted, judging by the way he raised his papers right up to his thick wildly flashing spectacles. He was followed by a smiling Japanese scientist, Dr Okagawa: it was something about a reaction curve and the phenomena which arise when some sensory canal in Andrias’s brain is severed; he then described how Andrias would behave if the mechanism corresponding to the labyrinth of the inner ear were crushed. Professor Rehmann next explained in detail Andrias’s reaction to electrical stimulation. Thereupon some heated argument erupted between him and Professor Bruckner: a short, irascible and almost alarmingly overactive man; among other things he observed that Andrias was just as ill equiped in the sensory respect as man and exhibited the same lack of instincts; seen in purely biological terms, it was just as decadent an animal as man, and like him it tried to overcompensate its biological inferiority by what was called the intellect. It seemed, however, that the other experts did not take Professor Bruckner too seriously, probably because he had not cut any sensory canals or sent electric shocks into Andrias’s brain. Next Professor van Dietan, speaking in an almost liturgical tone, described the disturbances which had appeared in an Andrias whose right frontal or left occipital lobe had been removed. Then the American Professor Devrient explained -

  You must forgive me, I really have no idea what he explained. Because just then a thought flashed through my mind: what kind of disturbances would appear in Professor Devrient if I removed his right frontal lobe? And how would the smiling Dr Okagawa react if I stimulated him electrically? And how would Professor Rehmann behave if someone were to crush his inner-ear labyrinth? I was also feeling a little uncertain about my own ability to distinguish colours and about the t factor in my motor reactions. I was tormented by doubt on whether we were entitled (in the strict scientific sense) to speak about our (I mean: human) mental life unless we first removed each other’s cerebral lobes and cut each other’s sensory canals. Strictly speaking, we should pounce on each other, scalpel in hand, to study each other and our own mentality. As for me, I would be quite prepared, in the interests of science, to smash Professor Dubosque’s spectacles or to send electric shocks into Professor Dieten’s bald head, after which I would publish a paper on their reactions. Actually, I can visualise their reactions quite well. I am less clear about what went on in Andrias’s psyche during those experiments - but it is my impression that he is an exceedingly patient and good-natured creature. None of the distinguished lecturers mentioned that poor Andrias had ever become violent.

  I have no doubt that the First Congress of Caudate Amphibians represents a remarkable scientific success; but when I get a day off I’ll go to the Jardin des Plantes and straight to Andrias Scheuchzer’s tank, in order to say to him softly: ‘You, Newt, when your day comes … heaven forbid you should take it into your head to investigate scientifically the psychological life of homo sapiens!’

  Thanks to such scientific investigation the Newts ceased to be regarded as some kind of marvel; in the sober light of science the salamanders lost much of their original nimbus of being something exceptional and extraordinary; under psychological testing they exhibited very average and uninteresting characteristics; their outstanding gifts were relegated by science to the realm of fantasy. Science established the Normal Salamander, a rather boring and mediocre creature; only the press now and again still discovered a Miracle Newt, capable of multiplying five-digit numbers in its head, but even that ceased to amuse the public when it was shown that, given appropriate training, this skill might even be acquired by a mere human. In short, people began to regard the Newts as something just as natural as a calculating machine or some other mechanical gadget; they no longer considered them something mysterious that had risen from the depths of the sea, heaven only knew why and what for. Besides, people never regard anything that serves and benefits them as mysterious; only the things which damage or threaten them are mysterious. And since the Newts proved to be highly useful creatures in a great variety of ways, they were simply accepted as something that was part and parcel of the natural and rational order of things.

  The usefulness of the Newts was investigated in particular by the Hamburg researcher Wuhrmann, from whose writings on the subject we quote here, at least in brief synopsis, his:

  Bericht uber die somatische Veranlagung der Molche

  The experiments I conducted with the Pacific Giant Salamander (Andrias Scheuchzeri Tschudi) in my Hamburg laboratory pursued a very definite aim: to examine the Newts’ resistance to ambient changes and other external factors, and thereby to demonstrate their practical utility in different geographical regions and under different environmental conditions.

  The first series of experiments was designed to determine how long a Newt can live outside water. The experimental animals were kept in dry tanks at a temperature between 40° and 50°C. After a few hours they exhibited obvious signs of fatigue; if they were sprinkled they revived. After twenty-four hours they lay motionless, moving only their eyelids; their heartbeat was slowed down and all body activity reduced to a minimum. The animals were clearly suffering and the slightest movement entailed a great effort. After three days a state of cataleptic rigor (xerosis) set in: the animals did not react even to burning with the electric cautery. When the humidity of the air was increased they exhibited at least a few signs of life (they shut their eyes to bright light, etc.). If, after seven days, such a desiccated Newt was thrown into the water it recovered after some considerable time; with more prolonged desiccation, however, the major part of the experimental animals perished. In direct sunlight they die within a few hours.

  Other experimental animals were made to turn a shaft in the dark in a very dry environment. After three hours their performance began to decline but it rose again the moment they were copiously sprinkled with water. With frequently repeated sprinkling the animals managed to turn the shaft for seventeen, twenty, and in one instance twenty-six hours without interruption, whereas a control human would show considerable exhaustion after a mere five hours of identical mechanical performance. These experiments j
ustify the conclusion that Newts are eminently suitable even for work on dry land, subject only to two conditions: that they are not exposed to direct sunlight and that they are hosed down with water over the whole surface of their bodies at frequent intervals.

  The second series of experiments was concerned with the resistance which the Newts, originally tropical animals, would show to cold. A sudden chilling of the water caused them to die of intestinal inflammation; if, however, they were gradually acclimatised to a cooler environment they adapted quite easily; after eight months they remained active even at a water temperature of 7°C, provided more fats were included in their diet (150 to 200 grammes per animal daily). If the water temperature was lowered below 5°C they dropped into a state of hypothermic rigor (gelosis); in that condition they were refrigerated and kept frozen into a block of ice for several months; when the ice was melted and the water temperature rose to 5°C they again started to show signs of life, and at 7° to 10°C they began to seek food eagerly. This allows the conclusion that Newts can quite easily become adapted also to our climate and indeed as far north as northern Norway and Iceland. Polar climatic conditions would require further experiments.