XI 



ENEMIES, VULNERABLE AND INVULNERABLE 



THE perils of the sea are facts with which we all feel 

 quite familiar, however little we really know about them. 

 The poets have done their best, and the experiences of seafar- 

 ing men have done at least as well, to show us the possibilities 

 of an Inferno on this side of the grave. Some of these perils 

 still exist, and we are instinctively in awe of the sea. But act- 

 ual mortal dangers on land, or from half-civilized man, seem 

 to belong to ancient tales of travel, to crude etchings more 

 comic than tragic, and we can hardly realize how lately these 

 dangers could overtake the mariner in distant seas. 



Right here it may be remarked that for the missionaries and 

 their work among the South Sea Islanders many whalemen 

 had no manner of use. The prejudice has survived in various 

 forms — most vividly, perhaps, in Herman Melville's books — 

 and the reasons for it were numerous. Yet although heathen 

 who attended church in the morning resorted with easy in- 

 difference to various pagan excesses in the evening (a phe- 

 nomenon that need not be sought so far as the South Seas), 

 even such free-and-easy Christianity as prevailed among the 

 islands preserved not a few shipwrecked sailors from lining the 

 ribs of cannibal epicures. 



For instance, the story is told of a ship that ran on a sunken 

 rock and foundered. The officers and men took to the boats 

 and for fourteen days saw neither sail nor land. On the fif- 

 teenth day, too nearly dead to fight for their lives, they sighted 

 an unknown island, but with no certainty of being kept alive, 

 for natives crowded the shore. As they drifted nearer, with 

 little confidence in the outcome of their adventure, a native 



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