**CLPRA scripts are working drafts for recording sessions. Recorded performances may vary due to editing for broadcast.** Links key: CLP Atlas Informational (with hover) Online Books CLP Author page CLP Intern

Walter Nordhoff (1858-1937) http://tinyurl.com/WNordhoff

Click the below to hear radio segment.

Sea-Devil

From The Journey of the Flame, 1933.

Reader: Kevin Hearle

The island California has been imagined as the home to many vicious beasts, the focus of colorful legends of danger that never seem to fade.

In the historical novel The Journey of the Flame, Walter Nordhoff's narrator, the one hundred four year-old Señor Don Juan Obrigón, recalls a boyhood journey up the coast of Baja California, a story made more memorable by the fisherman's tales of the devilish manta rays that were said to feed on the pearl divers of the Vermillion Sea.

With gluttonous voracity this vast sea-devil tears and devours its victim, regardless of his comrades all around it: grinding its flat teeth as it eats, half in rage that it cannot consume all the pearler's crew at one breakfast, and half with joy at its meal. Meanwhile, the dead man's comrades, safe for that day, rise all about this crunching monster and, expelling used air from their lungs, swim to their boat; so rejoiced at their own escape as scarcely to mourn the dead companion, though bearing always with them the vision of greedy, merciless eyes and the sound of flat teeth grinding their friend's bones. . . .

"But the manta is a gentleman, after all," some old diver would say. "It eats only one of us at once." And the rest, shrugging their shoulders, would assent.

The son of one writer and the father of another, Walter Nordhoff avoided public comparisons of his literary pedigree by hiding his authorship of The Journey of the Flame. The book was presented in 1933 using the witty psuodonym Antonio de Fierro Blanco.