for both of them to participate in. She decided on Jefferson Davis County Hospital. Conditions there were bad, and with the hospital being significantly underfunded, understaffed, and overcrowded, theu showed no sign of getting better. Jan decided to document the conditions there, which resulted in the non-fiction memoir The Hospital (1964), which exposed the awful conditions of Houston's charity hospitals in the 1960s. The book received a national response but also a local response in which, within a week of the book's release, nearly four hundred citizens volunteered at the hospital. It led to significant reforms of the city's indigent healthcare system through the creation of the Harris County Hospital District. It also led, however, to considerable hostility and many anonymous threats, which finally forced the de Hartogs to move back to Europe. In 1967, Jan wrote The Captain, which revisited his love of the sea and featured a central character based loosely on himself called Martinus Harinxma, who had first appeared in The Lost Sea (1951). The book was a success, and Martinus would live on as a central character in several sequels. Before starting work on the second in the Martinus series, Jan wrote of the experience of adopting his two daughters, who were Korean War orphans, in The Children, which appeared in 1969. He afterwards wrote a fictionalised account of the origin of the Religious Society of Friends, The Peaceable Kingdom: An American Saga, in 1972. It was nominated for the Nobel Prize and was followed eight years later by a Quaker novel, The Lamb's War (1980). In 1985, Jan was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters (L.H.D.) degree from Whittier College. He published the next book in the Martinus series, The Commodore, in 1986 while he was living in "The Walled Garden" in Somerset, England, and it was followed by The Centurion (1989), which explored an interest in which he and his wife had become involved, dowsing. In the novel, Martinus Harinxma dabbled with dowsing and was led on a journey that followed in the footsteps of a Roman centurion. The real story, in terms of researching and writing this book, was not much different from the book itself, with the exception of fictional elements, which were used to carry the story along. In 1993, Jan and Marjorie returned to Houston with minimum publicity, to a much-omproved atmosphere. Shortly afterward, he returned to the Quaker