Colonies

Nearly four decades after astronaut Neil Armstrong planted his boot on the surface of the moon, the U.S. is about to take the first small step toward colonizing Earth's tag-along satellite. On Wednesday, NASA is scheduled to launch a robotic mission aimed at finding the best site for Earth's first off-world colony, the centuries-old dream of science fiction writers and utopians.

Atop an oak-shrouded hill near the Central California Mother Lode town of Coloma, a lonely grave holds the first Japanese woman known to have died on American soil. The 136-year-old granite headstone, inscribed in English and Japanese, reads: "In Memory of Okei, Died 1871. Aged 19 years. (A Japanese Girl)." It has been retired for safekeeping; a replica will take its place.

David Gritten is delusional, poor boy ("Need a Villain? Any Brit Will Do," July 12). If he thinks that the Yanks are out to get him and his countrymen, he should take a look at home-grown English literature. Neither Shakespeare nor Dickens had to venture very far to find a blackguard in their midst. And English behavior in "the colonies"--whether in America or India or any other "outpost of progress"--has a more than modest sampling of historically documented scurrilous acts. In Gritten's myopic view, one would think that the establishment of the Irish Republic and the fight for home rule in Scotland (or Wales, for that matter)

The worst droughts of the past 800 years probably were responsible for wiping out the first British settlers who tried to colonize North America, according to researchers who have reconstructed the weather of the era when European colonists struggled for a toehold in the New World. "If the English had tried to find a worse time to launch their settlements in the New World, they could not have done so," said Dennis B. Blanton, director of the William and Mary Center for Archeological Research.

The article on the mythological beast terrifying Mexico (May 19) illustrates one of the difficulties that conservation biologists have in their attempt to save endangered species. Fear of the imagined "goat-sucker" monster created a hysterical reaction in which colonies of bats were torched in their caves. At this time of year those caves are almost certainly nursery colonies containing mothers and their babies. To make matters worse, some bats are clinging to existence only by the presence of very few remaining roosting sites.

When African leader Felix Houphouet-Boigny was laid to rest last week in Ivory Coast, 3,000 miles south of Paris, 100 French politicians stood dutifully at the graveside. But even as President Francois Mitterrand, Prime Minister Edouard Balladur and other French officials mourned an old friend and assured Africa of their support, they were steadily putting an end to the long, cozy and paternalistic relationship with France's former colonies on the continent.