COLLECTING ON A CORAL REEF 8i 



dent 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 commemo- 

 rate 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 expecto- 

 rated 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 



VOL. LXXX.— 6, 



