The Wasp, 1918 · page 41 of 330
The Wasp — 1918 — page 41: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains **no cartoon or satirical illustration**—it's prose fiction. It appears to be an excerpt from a serialized story in *The Wasp* magazine featuring a character named James Burnham, a castaway who spots a ship approaching at dawn. The passage is pure narrative, describing a beautiful sunrise and the protagonist's desperate hope for rescue. The ironic contrast is between the idyllic natural scene (poetic descriptions of light, color, and sea) and the brutal reality it masks: sharks lurking below, rough sailors aboard the approaching vessel, and the castaway's hunger for basic survival (coffee and stale bread). This represents *The Wasp's* literary content rather than its satirical cartooning. Without knowing the story's context, publication date, or whether "James Burnham" references a real person, we cannot identify specific political satire here.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
32. ~~ ~~~. THE WASP James Burnham gazed slowly around him. - The sun was not yet above the horizon, but the clear flame of it shone like a tide of molten glass between sea and sky. Above this clearest radiance lay a band of tenderest pink. The sea to the eastward sparkled ae Blower y vee silver 7 and gold and rose. To the south-east, and not more then three miles away, the swelling sails of a little brig blushed like the petals of a pink rose. Her hull, transfigured by the morning gleam transfused with the shimmering of waveandair glowed upon the seas like an opal. The whole scene was a picture fit for a child’s wonder-book ; and it was hard to believe that this same sky had glowered wide with naked heat -but a few short hours before, that the fanged ~ shark swam and waited under that marvellous glimmer and gleam, that coffee was even now _ being brewed in the galley of that fairy barque for the consumption of hairy-handed, foul- mouthed fellows in tarry breeks. It was hard to believe; but the castaway knew that it was so. Best of all, to him, was the thought of the coffee and stale bread aboard the brig. He stood at gaze until his eyes con- — _vinced him that the vessel was heading his way. icomichookstcom|