Part II Chapter 6 Doctor Dolittle's Post Office by Hugh Lofting
WEATHER BUREAUS
When the lunch was over the Doctor took an armchair beside the kitchen stove and lit his pipe. "I am thinking," he said to the gull, "of starting a new department in my post office. Many of the birds who have helped me in this mail business seem to be remarkably good weather prophets. And what you have just told me about your knowledge of the sea and storms has given me the idea of opening a weather bureau."
"What's that?" asked Jip, who was brushing up the table crumbs, to be put out later for the birds on the houseboat deck.
"A weather bureau," said the Doctor, "is a very important thing—especially for shipping and farmers. It is an office for telling you what kind of weather you're going to have."
"How do they do it?" asked Gub-Gub.
"They don't," said the Doctor—"at least they do sometimes. But as often as not they're wrong. They do it with instruments—thermometers, barometers, hygrometers and wind gauges and things. But most weather bureaus so far have been pretty poor. I think I can do much better with my birds. They very seldom go wrong in prophesying the weather."
"Well, for what parts of the world do you want to know the weather, Doctor?" asked the gull. "If it's just for Fantippo or West Africa it will be easy as pie. All you ever get here is tornadoes. The rest of the year is just frying heat. But if you want to prophesy the weather for the Straits of Magellan or Nova Zembla or those countries where they have all sorts of fancy weathers, it will be a different matter. Even prophesying the weather for England would keep you busy. Myself, I never thought that the weather itself knew what it was going to do next in England."
"The English climate's all right," put in Cheapside, his feathers ruffling up for a fight. "Don't you get turning up your long nautical nose at England, my lad. What do you call this 'ere? A climate? Well, I should call it a Turkish bath. In England we like variety in our climate. And we get it. That's why Englishmen 'ave such 'earty red faces. 'Ere the poor creatures turn black."
"I would like," said the Doctor, "to be able to prophesy weather for every part of the world. I really don't see why I shouldn't; this office, together with my branch offices, is in communication with birds going to every corner of the earth. I could improve the farming and the agriculture of the whole human race. But also, and especially, I want to have a bureau for ocean weather, to help the ships."
"Ah," said the gull, "for land weather I wouldn't be much help to you. But when it comes to the oceans, I know a bird who can tell you more about sea weather than any bureau ever knew."
"Oh," said the Doctor, "who is that?"
"We call him One Eye," said the gull. "He's an old, old albatross. Nobody knows how old. He lost an eye fighting with a fish eagle over a flounder. But he's the most marvelous weather prophet that ever lived. All sea birds have the greatest respect for his opinions. He has never been known to make a mistake."
"Indeed?" said the Doctor. "I would like very much to meet him."
"I'll get him for you," said the gull. "His home is not very far from here—out on a rock off the Angola coast. He lives there because the shellfish are so plentiful on the rock and he's too feeble—with his bad sight—to catch the other kinds of livelier fish. It's a sort of dull life for his old age, after all the great traveling he has done. He'll be no end pleased to know you want his help. I'll go and tell him right away."
"That will be splendid," said the Doctor. "I think your friend should be very helpful to us."
So the gull, after thanking the Doctor and Dab-Dab for a very excellent luncheon, took a couple of postcards which were going to Angola and flew off to get One Eye, the albatross.
Later in the afternoon the gull returned and with him came the great One Eye, oldest of bird weather prophets.
The Doctor said afterward that he had never seen a bird who reminded him so much of a sailor. He had the rolling, straddling walk of a seafaring man; he smelt strongly of fish; and whenever he spoke of the weather he had an odd trick of squinting up at the sky with his one eye, the way old sailors often do.
He agreed with the Doctor that the idea of a bird weather bureau was quite a possible thing and would lead to much better weather reports than had so far been possible. Then for a whole hour and a half he gave the Doctor a lecture on winds. Every word of this John Dolittle wrote down in a notebook.
Now the wind is the chief thing that changes the weather. And if, for instance, you know that it is raining in the Channel Islands at tea-time on a Thursday—and there's a northeast wind blowing—you can be pretty sure that the rain will reach England some time Thursday night.
The next thing that the Doctor did was to write to all the branch postmasters and have them arrange exactly with the different kinds of birds a time for them to start their yearly migrations—not just the second week in November, or anything like that—but an exact day and hour. Then by knowing how fast each kind of bird flies, he could calculate almost to a minute what time they should arrive at their destination. And if they were late in arriving, then he would know that bad weather had delayed them on the way or that they had put off their starting till storms died down.
The Doctor, the gull, One Eye, Dab-Dab, Cheapside, Speedy-the-Skimmer and Too-Too the mathematician put their heads together and discussed far into the night, working out a whole lot more arrangements and particulars for running a good weather bureau. And a few weeks later a second brand new notice board appeared on the walls of the Doctor's post office, beside the one for Outgoing and Incoming Mails.
The new notice board was marked at the top Weather Reports, and would read something like this:
The Green Herons were one day, three hours and nine minutes late in their arrival at Cape Horn from the Sandwich Islands. Wind coming south-southeast. Blustery weather can be expected along the west coast of Chili and light gales in the Antarctic Sea.
And then the land birds, particularly those that live on berries, were very helpful to the Doctor in telling him by letter if the Winter was going to be a hard one or not in their particular country. And he used to write to farmers all over the world, advising them whether they could expect a sharp frost, a wet Spring or a dry Summer—which, of course, helped them in their farming tremendously.
And then the Fantippans, who so far had been very timid about going far out to sea on account of storms, now that they had a good weather bureau and knew what weather to expect, began building larger sailboats, instead of their little frail canoes. And they became what is called a mercantile nation, traded up and down the shores of West Africa, and even went as far south as the Cape of Good Hope and entered the Indian Ocean to traffic in goods with people of foreign lands.
This made the kingdom of Fantippo much richer and more important than it had been before, of course. And a large grant of money was given by the King to the Foreign Mails post office, which was used by the Doctor in making the houseboat better and bigger.
And soon the No-Man's-Land Weather Bureau began to get known abroad. The farmers in England, who had received such good weather reports by letter from the Doctor, went up to London and told the government that their own reports were no good, that a certain John Dolittle, M.D., was writing them much better reports from some place in Africa.
And the government got quite worked up about it. And they sent the Royal Meteorologist, an old gray-haired weather man, down to Fantippo to see how the Doctor was doing it.
John Dolittle saw him one day, snooping around the post office, looking at the notice boards and trying to find out things. But he found out nothing. And when he got back to England he said to the government:
"He hasn't any new instruments at all. The man's a fake. All he has down there is an old barge and a whole lot of messy birds flying around."