Word: swanning
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Great Swan and Little Swan, 97 miles off the Honduran coast, together cover scarcely three square miles. Little Swan is uninhabited: the larger island is used principally as an air-navigation and weather-reporting station. Its population consists of a U.S. Federal Aviation Agency technician, four weathermen and 16 civilians, most of them related in a four-generation link to the island's thrice-married elder. Captain Donald Glidden, 79, a Cayman Islander who settled on Swan in 1927. There are also innumerable booby birds, notable for their droppings, which for centuries have been used as fertilizer...
After Columbus. The Swans may have been visited in 1502 by Columbus, who was making his fourth voyage in search of that elusive passage to the East Indies. Later expeditions established Spain's claim to them. Because there is no water on the islands, they were usually bypassed. In 1856, however, the U.S. passed the Guano Islands Act, which enabled it to pre-empt any unclaimed islands on which bird droppings or guano abounded. Under that proviso, Washington claimed Great and Little Swan...
...Great Swan became a weather station in 1914, but it was 1960 before the real Swan song began. A New York company called Gibraltar Steamship Corp.. which owned no steamships, set up shop on the island with a 50,000-watt transmitter. Gibraltar, of course, was a CIA cover, and Radio Swan was soon booming propaganda to Fidel Castro's Cuba, 350 miles away. It called Castro and his lieutenants "pigs with beards" and accused Brother Raul Castro of being "a queer with effeminate friends." In reply, Havana Radio called Swan "a cage of hysterical parrots...
...only flagrant U.S. broadcasting propagandist networks. They are only the most successful ones. Radio Free Asia failed because there were not enough anti-Maoists, and no one in Southeast Asia could conceive that a network of that title could possibly support the French against the Viet Minh. Radio Swan aided in the launching of such Latin American escapades as the Bay of Pigs invasion...
...awfully long time putting out to sea. But once he gets launched, his account of the Ra voyage is persuasively faithful to the cresting good cheer and alternately sinking heart of all travelers in the tradition of Odysseus. On one page he can call his ship a golden paper swan, and on another, a floating haystack. Steering oars snapped with annoying regularity, and two days out a squall cracked the yard, carrying the 26-ft.-high wine-colored sail with a rust-red sun painted on it: the symbol of Ra. When the whole structure of papyrus and ropes expanded...