Fishes of the Coral Seas 59 



on its flanks, securely within the Valhalla of literary fame. 

 Apia harbor, calm and safe on ordinary days when the 

 trades blow across from the land, changes, in the season of 

 the northwest hurricanes, into a narrow gorge with jagged 

 jaws of coral. Then the great ships are helpless in its 

 tortuous channels, and the sheltering reefs become them- 

 selves the sources of the direst danger. It was in 1889, in 

 this harbor, that an impatient hurricane blew its breath on 

 a Gordian knot of world politics, and made ropy spindrift 

 of it. 



Fifty miles beyond Upolu lies Tutuila, twenty miles long, 

 and from two to five miles wide. Sixty miles still farther 

 to the southeast, out in the sea, is Manua, almost circular, 

 ten miles in diameter, and oldest of all the Samoan group 

 in geological time, and once most honored in hereditary 

 leadership. 



Tutuila is primarily a huge volcanic crater, which has 

 built up the island with the lava it has ejected. This crater 

 of Pago-Pago (pronounced Pango-Pango), is fringed about 

 with steep walls from 1000 to 2500 feet high, almost vert- 

 ical on the inner edge, after the fashion of craters, sloping 

 away on the outside as the lava flows ; two points in its rim, 

 the mountains of Matafao and Peoa, much higher than the 

 rest, and with a break half a mile wide on the south letting 

 in the sea. 



The harbor of the Pago-Pago, thus formed within the 

 crater of Peoa, is nearly two miles deep and a mile wide. 

 This size is, however, much reduced by the barrier reef, 

 which forms an unbroken rim about the shore within. But 

 with all this, there is room enough, if not for all the navies 

 in the world, for all the ships likely ever to put into Samoa. 

 The winding entrance shuts out all the surf from the south, 

 and the great walls on every other side make the harbor 

 securely landlocked, whatever the hurricane without. It is, 

 in brief, the one good harbor in all the South Seas, and for 

 that reason it is of high value to a great nation with expan- 



