CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE 



To the 



South 



Seas 



Verdant 

 isles 



In the summer of 1902, again in the interest of the 

 United States Fish Commission, I made a trip to 

 Sa'moa, accompanied by Mrs. Jordan and Knight, 

 as well as by Professors Kellogg and Allardice, who 

 joined us at Honolulu, and Michitaro Sindo, a Japan- 

 ese student who served as general assistant. 



Four thousand miles from the Golden Gate the 

 little archipelago of Samoa lies in the heart of the 

 "South Seas," a stretch of warm ocean dotted with 

 the asteroids of our earthly Cosmos, tiny verdant 

 worlds — thousands of them between Java and the 

 Marquesas — filled with joyous people as innocent 

 of curiosity as to what happens in London or New 

 York as the folks of Vesta and Ceres are careless of 

 the politics of their planetary neighbors, Mars and 

 Jupiter. 



The narrow home may be an atoll, a ring of broken 

 corals fringed with tall coco ^ palms which skirt a 

 serene blue lagoon; or it may be a tangible island, 

 the sharp verdure-clothed crest of an uplifted volcano, 

 its wide-leaved evergreens mingled with royal palms 

 and tree ferns, the whole inextricably tied together 

 with a meshwork of climbing vines. Lava, however, 

 constitutes the solid framework of all the islands; 

 two hundred inches of rain a year and an ardent 

 tropic sun urge their wonderful "bush" and guarding 

 palms; the coral polyp builds up the white shore-lines 



^This word should be written coco. "Cocoa" is an ignorant corruption due 

 to confusion of the nut with cacao or cocoa, the shrub which produces chocolate. 



C 98 3 



