C O N T E N T S My Private Wanderlust By Don George, Editor Ibiza: A Navel Voyage By Karl Taro Greenfeld - Books on the Mediterranean - Getting there Mallemaroking runs amok By Simon Winchester - Books by Simon Winchester D E P A R T M E N T S Postmark: New York By Dwight Garner Passages: "Waltz at the End of Earth" By Paula McDonald Table Talk - Readers' Tips and Tales - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - E A R L I E R Welcome to Wanderlust Don George, Editor Isabel Allende Jan Morris Pico Iyer Peter Mayle Amanda Jones Tim Cahill Postmark: Paris

MOTHERS BEWARE! The bawdy philanderings of drunk, ice-bound whalers in Greenland may be coming to a neighborhood near you. BY SIMON WINCHESTER | it is with a heavy heart that I must report grave developments from the polar regions. The dire practice of mallemaroking is on the rise and it appears, ominously, to be spreading once again. We all, ultimately, might be affected. Evidence of this distressing occurrence comes, not from newspapers or the Central Intelligence Agency, which might ordinarily be expected to monitor such things, but from a source immensely more authoritative: the latest edition, hot off the presses in Edinburgh, Scotland, of that most unimpeachable lexical authority, the Chambers Dictionary. I understand that there may be some innocents who, not being entirely proficient in the English tongue, remain blissfully unaware of what, precisely, mallemaroking is. And I readily accept that the word is one of the more curious to have crept into the English language. But there it most undeniably stands, usually pinioned between the small eucalyptus known as a mallee and the fulmar-like bird called a mallemuck, fully defined both by Chambers and by the Complete Oxford (though not by Messrs. Random House, in whose establishment quite another language is spoken). Back when I first came across it, 20 years or so ago, in a very old edition of Chambers, the word seemed merely an amiably eccentric gerund. Its definition was a source of some pleasure: the carousing of drunken seamen, the dictionary said, on icebound Greenland whaling ships. That so complex and specific a niche of human behavior should merit a word all to itself was testament, I thought, to the enduring splendor of the language. Etymologically, however, the word was somewhat odd. It came, said Chambers, from the obsolete Dutch noun mallemerok, which means a foolish, romping woman. (On whether the woman's foolishness stemmed from her romping, or vice versa, the book was tactful, and silent.) It merely added that the Dutch got the word from combining mal, which apparently means foolish, and marok, which is originally French, and suggests a favored object. (Etymologies are often more puzzling than they should be: I have often wondered why the modern word travel comes from the tripalium, a three-legged Roman torture device. But then I go somewhere by Amtrak, and the question answers itself.) My concern stems not so much from the definition, however, as from the way this definition has evolved over the years. I'm a tolerant enough fellow, and if the noisy carryings-on of inebriated Scandinavian whale-hunters locked in the ice of the Davis Strait present a tolerable diversion for them, then no problem -- so long as they keep their habits to themselves. But it seems that isn't the case, not if you go by what the dictionary has to say. The rot began when Chambers offered the world a new edition in the mid-1970s. In this update, the definition had already begun to alter in a most sinister fashion. Now it was more simply the carousing of drunken seamen on icebound whaling ships. The word Greenland had been omitted. The implication was clear: Mallemaroking was spreading. Any whaler, trapped in any ice -- off Spitzbergen, say, or near Point Barrow, Alaska, or even, heaven forfend, off the ice-shelves of the Antarctic -- could be so afflicted. Mallemaroking, like McDonald's, or the Ebola virus, was mutating and transmitting itself across the globe. I first warned the public of this frightening danger 20 years ago. A few newspapers were kind enough to appreciate the severity of the threat, and some hundreds of people in Tangiers, Bahia Blanca and Hull, Quebec, were, to judge from the cuttings eventually sent back to me, apprised of it in some detail. I cherish the fact of my having done so good a deed, even before such limited circles. But now the Internet is with us, and in theory I am able, if necessary, to convey the warning much further afield. The technology could not have arrived at a more appropriate moment. For I am sorry beyond words to have to announce that I am forced to issue my tocsin yet again -- this time not to Hull, Ontario, but to the world. For now that I have examined the relevant page of the latest Chambers Dictionary, a volume that came out some weeks ago and was hastily air-speeded to me in New York, I note that the worst has indeed happened. The curse is rampant once again. The latest intelligence from the lexical giants in Edinburgh has it that mallemaroking -- it grieves me to have to proclaim this, via the Web, both in Gath and the streets of Askelon -- is starkly and with horrifying simplicity stated now to be artlessly and without adornment, the carousing of seamen in icebound ships. No Greenland. No whalers. Not even drunkenness. No longer, it seems, are sober men free from its vile attractions. Not only has the plague skipped geography, but it has transferred its wiles across anthropological barriers as well. Any fishermen -- be he a teetotaler trolling for cod or a Temperance League member searching for the species I gather is known as Charles the Tuna -- may become trapped in ice, and may be tempted or cursed to begin a mallemaroking like few before him. It is a wretched piece of news. Mothers all around the world -- near ice-free waters as well, I fear, for an all-temperature version of the vice is surely next in line -- must up and warn their children, lest mallemaroking should present itself in their own neighborhoods and become for all of us yet another scourge on civilized life as we know it. A blessing only unto the single bright lining to this cloud, the Internet -- perhaps the only remaining possibility for bringing a check to this new menace from the seas. It is a slim hope, but in days such as these, we pray for all we can get. A thousand foolish and romping women, locked in memorial stances to their carousing up in the distant ice-packs of the North, lie as mute testament to that. April 8, 1997

W A N D E R L U S T

S A L O N    A R C H I V E S    N E W S L E T T E R    T A B L E   T A L K    M A R K E T P L A C E