Follow-up regarding Skirting the Sands of Sable Island by Myron Arms — January 2009

In response to the review posted here in October, on November 18th, Myron Arms posted a rebuttal on his website http://myronarms.com

He refers to my review of his article as an “attack”, and complained that he has “no idea why Lucas felt constrained to make such an attack”. He went on to say that the issues raised in the review ranged in importance from “silly to potentially libelous”. Those comments were followed by a point-by-point refutation and defense of his article. He explains some misunderstandings as issues of metaphor and splitting hairs, and dismisses concerns about quotes attributed to Gerry Forbes by pointing out that I was not present during his conversations with Gerry.

Myron Arms is correct in saying that I was not present during the conversations with Gerry Forbes (and I should have made that clear in the review). However, the concern about Arms’s article did not begin or end with me, and when I prepared the review I asked Gerry about the statements attributed to him, and he described the quotes as fabricated.

Regarding quotes attributed to both Gerry and myself, Arms dances around this primary issue by discussing general conversation and background information. However, a quote should present what the speaker said, not what the author imagines they could have said, might have said, or intended to say.

Arms wrote “This is the type of disagreement that is the most difficult to resolve, as it pits my memory against hers, my method of careful note-taking against her “certainty” about what she would and would not say”. Myron Arms was not taking notes when he spoke with me.

Arms complains that some of the some of the issues raised are “silly”. Indeed some issues may seem trivial, but they demonstrate the pervasiveness of his approach—at least in this article—of putting his words and opinions in the voice of other people.

However… having read Arms’s rebuttal, the source of some of the problems is clear. In his second point Arms states that he used as a reference Sable Island: The Strange Origins and Curious History of a Dune Adrift in the Atlantic (2004) by Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle. Anyone relying on this book is sure to be misled as it contains a number of significant errors that were then repeated in several publications preceding the Cruising World article. It is understandable that Myron Arms would have considered the de Villiers & Hirtle book to be a solid source, however, had he done some fact-checking before submitting his article, and had he used his own voice rather than attributing statements (and errors) to the Station Manager and myself, his article in Cruising World would have been less disconcerting.