Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 80.djvu/85

Rh of eighty millions of people did no more than recognize the brotherhood of man when he sent Seeumanu, sturdy, half-naked chief of a few hundred brown barbarians, the gift of a rich boat to commemorate the day of revelation.

Now Upolu, whereon sits Apia, is about eighty-five miles away from Pago-Pago on Tutuila where the American steamers touch, and so we must descend from the high decks of our 6,000-ton Sydney packet to the spray-wet planks of the Kawau, inter-island messenger and carry-all. I had long had my misgivings about these last eighty-five miles of our ocean voyaging from San Francisco to the Samoan reefs. And these misgivings were not abated when I ventured to ask the captain of the Ventura something of the figures, as to tonnage and knots, of his little ocean sister, the Kawau. Quietly and unexplosively he expectorated over the gunwale of the upper deck where we stood.

"Sir, if the Kawau were alongside I could spit into her funnel from here," said he. Inelegant, perhaps, but sufficiently expressive to give me forthwith a symptom.

It was even so. Thirty-five is the Kawau's tonnage figure. The boats that the bare-legged Paris children sail in the round pool of the Tuileries gardens look larger and roomier to me than the Kawau as I recall these two types of vessels now. But our reef lay eighty-five miles away across the heaving swells of a trade-wind irritated ocean. And the Kawau was the only boat going our way. So we transshipped. Boxes and bags went into a tiny cavity amidships called cabin. We sprawled faa Samoa (native-wise) on the salt-encrusted deck. My own seat was a coil of tarry rope on the stern grating. As the swift tropic twilight fell we issued from the harbor's mouth and rode full tilt against the first great swell. All night were we a-Jousting. "We had, from the start, hardly any symptoms. It all looked too dangerous to waste time or handicap oneself with seasickness. The soft tropic night wore on, while we momentarily expected the apparently certain overwhelming. Far in the middle of the long dark hours, as we slid about on the slippery deck, face to the strange new star pictures of the southern sky, the captain came aft, surrendering the wheel to a native roust-abou—ah, quartermaster, and, opening a microscopic cellular deck-closet, went in, leaving the little door ajar. Soon streamed out a fitful light and the extraordinary sounds of a cheap gramophone, singing "Lead, Kindly Light"! Even the captain had apparently lost all hope!

With the first soft gray light of morning we stared hard to port where land should lie. Soon the lifting shores of Upolu took form. We nosed through a narrow opening in the fringing reef and hove-to in a shallow bay bordered shoreward by a flat crescent of white sand beach. Along this beach we could pick out, in the swiftly growing light, the low white houses of Apia. Behind the houses was the dense green mass