CHAPTER LXIX.

An Absorbing Novelty—The Kimberley Diamond Mines—Discovery of Diamonds

—The Wronged Stranger—Where the Gems Are—A Judicious Change of

Boundary—Modern Machinery and Appliances—Thrilling Excitement in

Finding a Diamond—Testing a Diamond—Fences—Deep Mining by Natives in

the Compound—Stealing—Reward for the Biggest Diamond—A Fortune in

Wine—The Great Diamond—Office of the De Beer Co.—Sorting the Gems

—Cape Town—The Most Imposing Man in British Provinces—Various Reasons

for his Supremacy—How He Makes Friends

CONCLUSION.

Table Rock—Table Bay—The Castle—Government and Parliament—The Club

—Dutch Mansions and their Hospitality—Dr. John Barry and his Doings—On

the Ship Norman—Madeira—Arrived in Southampton

FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR

CHAPTER I.

A man may have no bad habits and have worse.

—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

The starting point of this lecturing-trip around the world was Paris,

where we had been living a year or two.

We sailed for America, and there made certain preparations. This took

but little time. Two members of my family elected to go with me. Also a

carbuncle. The dictionary says a carbuncle is a kind of jewel. Humor is

out of place in a dictionary.

We started westward from New York in midsummer, with Major Pond to manage

the platform-business as far as the Pacific. It was warm work, all the

way, and the last fortnight of it was suffocatingly smoky, for in Oregon

and British Columbia the forest fires were raging. We had an added week

of smoke at the seaboard, where we were obliged to wait awhile for our

ship.

She had been getting herself ashore in the smoke, and she had to be

docked

And repaired. We sailed at last; and so ended a snail-paced march across

the continent, which had lasted forty days.

We moved westward about mid-afternoon over a rippled and sparkling summer

sea; an enticing sea, a clean and cool sea, and apparently a welcome sea

to all on board; it certainly was to me, after the distressful dustings

and smokings and swelterings of the past weeks. The voyage would furnish

a three-weeks holiday, with hardly a break in it. We had the whole

Pacific Ocean in

front of us, with nothing to do but do nothing and be comfortable. The

city of Victoria was twinkling dim in the deep heart of her smoke-cloud,

and getting ready to vanish and now we closed the field-glasses and sat

down on our steamer chairs contented and at peace. But they went to

wreck and ruin under us and brought us to shame before all the

passengers. They had been furnished by the largest furniture-dealing

house in Victoria, and were worth a couple of farthings a dozen, though

they had cost us the price of honest chairs. In the Pacific and Indian

Oceans one must still bring his own deck-chair on board or go without,

just as in the old forgotten Atlantic times—those Dark Ages of sea

travel.

Ours was a reasonably comfortable ship, with the customary sea-going fare

—plenty of good food furnished by the Deity and cooked by the devil.

The discipline observable on board was perhaps as good as it is anywhere

in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The ship was not very well arranged

for tropical service; but that is nothing, for this is the rule for ships

which ply in the tropics. She had an over-supply of cockroaches, but

this is also the rule with ships doing business in the summer seas—at

least such as have been long in service. Our young captain was a very

handsome man, tall and perfectly formed, the very figure to show up a

smart uniform's finest effects. He was a man of the best intentions and

was polite and courteous even to courtliness. There was a soft grace and

finish about his manners which made whatever place he happened to be in

seem for the moment a drawing room. He avoided the smoking room. He had

no vices. He did not smoke or chew tobacco or take snuff; he did not

swear, or use slang or rude, or coarse, or indelicate language, or make

puns, or tell anecdotes, or laugh intemperately, or raise his voice above

the moderate pitch enjoined by the canons of good form. When he gave an

order, his manner modified it into a request. After dinner he and his

officers joined the ladies and gentlemen in the ladies' saloon, and

shared in the singing and piano playing, and helped turn the music. He

had a sweet and sympathetic tenor voice, and used it with taste and

effect. After the music he played whist there, always with the same

partner

and opponents, until the ladies' bedtime. The electric lights burned

there

as late as the ladies and their friends might desire; but they were not

allowed to burn in the smoking-room after eleven. There were many laws

on the ship's statute book of course; but so far as I could see, this and

one other were the only ones that were rigidly enforced. The captain

explained that he enforced this one because his own cabin adjoined the

smoking-room, and the smell of tobacco smoke made him sick. I did not

see how our smoke could reach him, for the smoking-room and his cabin

were on the upper deck, targets for all the winds that blew; and besides

there was no crack of communication between them, no opening of any sort

in the solid intervening bulkhead. Still, to a delicate stomach even

imaginary smoke can convey damage.

The captain, with his gentle nature, his polish, his sweetness, his moral

and verbal purity, seemed pathetically out of place in his rude and

autocratic vocation. It seemed another instance of the irony of fate.

He was going home under a cloud. The passengers knew about his trouble,

and were sorry for him. Approaching Vancouver through a narrow and

difficult passage densely befogged with smoke from the forest fires, he

had had the ill-luck to lose his bearings and get his ship on the rocks.

A matter like this would rank merely as an error with you and me; it

ranks as a crime with the directors of steamship companies. The captain

had been tried by the Admiralty Court at Vancouver, and its verdict had

acquitted him of blame. But that was insufficient comfort. A sterner

court would examine the case in Sydney—the Court of Directors, the lords

of a company in whose ships the captain had served as mate a number of

years. This was his first voyage as captain.

The officers of our ship were hearty and companionable young men, and

they entered into the general amusements and helped the passengers pass

the time. Voyages in the Pacific and Indian Oceans are but pleasure

excursions for all hands. Our purser was a young Scotchman who was

equipped with a grit that was remarkable. He was an invalid, and looked

it, as far as his body was concerned, but illness could not subdue his

spirit. He was full of life, and had a gay and capable tongue. To all

appearances he was a sick man without being aware of it, for he did not

talk about his ailments, and his bearing and conduct were those of a

person in robust health; yet he was the prey, at intervals, of ghastly

sieges of pain in his heart. These lasted many hours, and while the

attack continued he could neither sit nor lie. In one instance he stood

on his feet twenty-four hours fighting for his life with these sharp

agonies, and yet was as full of life and cheer and activity

the next day as if nothing had happened.

The brightest passenger in the ship, and the most interesting and

felicitous talker, was a young Canadian who was not able to let the

whisky bottle alone. He was of a rich and powerful family, and could have

had a distinguished career and abundance of effective help toward it if

he could have conquered his appetite for drink; but he could not do it,

so his great equipment of talent was of no use to him. He had often taken

the pledge to drink no more, and was a good sample of what that sort of

unwisdom can do for a man—for a man with anything short of an iron will.

The system is wrong in two ways: it does not strike at the root of the

trouble, for one thing, and to make a pledge of any kind is to declare

war against nature; for a pledge is a chain that is always clanking and

reminding the wearer of it that he is not a free man.

I have said that the system does not strike at the root of the trouble,

and I venture to repeat that. The root is not the drinking, but the

desire to drink. These are very different things. The one merely

requires will—and a great deal of it, both as to bulk and staying

capacity—the other merely requires watchfulness—and for no long time.

The desire of course precedes the act, and should have one's first

attention; it can do but little good to refuse the act over and over

again, always leaving the desire unmolested, unconquered; the desire will

continue to assert itself, and will be almost sure to win in the long

run. When the desire intrudes, it should be at once banished out of the

mind. One should be on the watch for it all the time—otherwise it will

get in. It must be taken in time and not allowed to get a lodgment. A

desire constantly repulsed for a fortnight should die, then. That should

cure the drinking habit. The system of refusing the mere act of

drinking, and leaving the desire in full force, is unintelligent war

tactics, it seems to me. I used to take pledges—and soon violate them.

My will was not strong, and I could not help it. And then, to be tied in

any way naturally irks an otherwise free person and makes him chafe in

his bonds and want to get his liberty. But when I finally ceased from

taking definite pledges, and merely resolved that I would kill an

injurious desire, but leave myself free to resume the desire and the

habit whenever I should choose to do so, I had no more trouble. In five

days I drove out the desire to smoke and was not obliged to keep watch

after that; and I never experienced any strong desire to smoke again. At

the end of a year and a quarter of idleness I began to write a book, and

presently found that the pen was strangely reluctant to go. I tried a

smoke to see if that would help me out of the difficulty. It did. I

smoked eight or ten cigars and as many pipes a day for five months;

finished the book, and did not smoke again until a year had gone by and

another book had to be begun.

I can quit any of my nineteen injurious habits at any time, and without

discomfort or inconvenience. I think that the Dr. Tanners and those

others who go forty days without eating do it by resolutely keeping out

the desire to eat, in the beginning, and that after a few hours the

desire is discouraged and comes no more.

Once I tried my scheme in a large medical way. I had been confined to my

bed several days with lumbago. My case refused to improve. Finally the

doctor said,—

“My remedies have no fair chance. Consider what they have to fight,

besides the lumbago. You smoke extravagantly, don't you?”

“Yes.”

“You take coffee immoderately?”

“Yes.”

“And some tea?”

“Yes.”

“You eat all kinds of things that are dissatisfied with each other's

company?”

“Yes.”

“You drink two hot Scotches every night?”

“Yes.”

“Very well, there you see what I have to contend against. We can't make

progress the way the matter stands. You must make a reduction in these

things; you must cut down your consumption of them considerably for some

days.”

“I can't, doctor.”

“Why can't you.”

“I lack the will-power. I can cut them off entirely, but I can't merely

moderate them.”

He said that that would answer, and said he would come around in

twenty-four hours and begin work again. He was taken ill himself and

could not come; but I did not need him. I cut off all those things for

two days and nights; in fact, I cut off all kinds of food, too, and all

drinks except water, and at the end of the forty-eight hours the lumbago

was discouraged and left me. I was a well man; so I gave thanks and took

to those delicacies again.

It seemed a valuable medical course, and I recommended it to a lady. She

had run down and down and down, and had at last reached a point where

medicines no longer had any helpful effect upon her. I said I knew I

could put her upon her feet in a week. It brightened her up, it filled

her with hope, and she said she would do everything I told her to do. So

I said she must stop swearing and drinking, and smoking and eating for

four days, and then she would be all right again. And it would have

happened just so, I know it; but she said she could not stop swearing,

and smoking, and drinking, because she had never done those things. So

there it was. She had neglected her habits, and hadn't any. Now that

they would have come good, there were none in stock. She had nothing to

fall back on. She was a sinking vessel, with no freight in her to throw

overboard and lighten ship withal. Why, even one or two little bad

habits

could have saved her, but she was just a moral pauper. When she could

have

acquired them she was dissuaded by her parents, who were ignorant people

though reared in the best society, and it was too late to begin now. It

seemed such a pity; but there was no help for it. These things ought to

be attended to while a person is young; otherwise, when age and disease

come, there is nothing effectual to fight them with.

When I was a youth I used to take all kinds of pledges, and do my best to

keep them, but I never could, because I didn't strike at the root of the

habit—the desire; I generally broke down within the month. Once I tried

limiting a habit. That worked tolerably well for a while. I pledged

myself to smoke but one cigar a day. I kept the cigar waiting until

bedtime, then I had a luxurious time with it. But desire persecuted me

every day and all day long; so, within the week I found myself hunting

for larger cigars than I had been used to smoke; then larger ones still,

and still larger ones. Within the fortnight I was getting cigars made

for me—on a yet larger pattern. They still grew and grew in size.

Within the month my cigar had grown to such proportions that I could have

used it as a crutch. It now seemed to me that a one-cigar limit was no

real protection to a person, so I knocked my pledge on the head and

resumed my liberty.

To go back to that young Canadian. He was a “remittance man,” the first

one I had ever seen or heard of. Passengers explained the term to me.

They said that dissipated ne'er-do-weels belonging to important families

in England and Canada were not cast off by their people while there was

any hope of reforming them, but when that last hope perished at last, the

ne'er-do-weel was sent abroad to get him out of the way. He was shipped

off with just enough money in his pocket—no, in the purser's pocket—for

the needs of the voyage—and when he reached his destined port he would

find a remittance awaiting him there. Not a large one, but just enough

to keep him a month. A similar remittance would come monthly thereafter.

It was the remittance-man's custom to pay his month's board and lodging

straightway—a duty which his landlord did not allow him to forget—then

spree away the rest of his money in a single night, then brood and mope

and grieve in idleness till the next remittance came. It is a pathetic

life.

We had other remittance-men on board, it was said. At least they said

they were R. M.'s. There were two. But they did not resemble the

Canadian; they lacked his tidiness, and his brains, and his gentlemanly

ways, and his resolute spirit, and his humanities and generosities. One

of them was a lad of nineteen or twenty, and he was a good deal of a

ruin, as to clothes, and morals, and general aspect. He said he was a

scion of a ducal house in England, and had been shipped to Canada for the

house's relief, that he had fallen into trouble there, and was now being

shipped to Australia. He said he had no title. Beyond this remark he

was economical of the truth. The first thing he did in Australia was to

get into the lockup, and the next thing he did was to proclaim himself an

earl in the police court in the morning and fail to prove it.

CHAPTER II.

When in doubt, tell the truth.

—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

About four days out from Victoria we plunged into hot weather, and all

the male passengers put on white linen clothes. One or two days later we

crossed the 25th parallel of north latitude, and then, by order, the

officers of the ship laid away their blue uniforms and came out in white

linen ones. All the ladies were in white by this time. This prevalence

of snowy costumes gave the promenade deck an invitingly cool, and

cheerful and picnicky aspect.

From my diary:

There are several sorts of ills in the world from which a person can

never escape altogether, let him journey as far as he will. One escapes

from one breed of an ill only to encounter another breed of it. We have

come far from the snake liar and the fish liar, and there was rest and

peace in the thought; but now we have reached the realm of the boomerang

liar, and sorrow is with us once more. The first officer has seen a man

try to escape from his enemy by getting behind a tree; but the enemy sent

his boomerang sailing into the sky far above and beyond the tree; then it

turned, descended, and killed the man. The Australian passenger has seen

this thing done to two men, behind two trees—and by the one arrow. This

being received with a large silence that suggested doubt, he buttressed

it with the statement that his brother once saw the boomerang kill a bird

away off a hundred yards and bring it to the thrower. But these are ills

which must be borne. There is no other way.

The talk passed from the boomerang to dreams—usually a fruitful subject,

afloat or ashore—but this time the output was poor. Then it passed to

instances of extraordinary memory—with better results. Blind Tom, the

negro pianist, was spoken of, and it was said that he could accurately

play any piece of music, howsoever long and difficult, after hearing it

once; and that six months later he could accurately play it again,

without having touched it in the interval. One of the most striking of

the stories told was furnished by a gentleman who had served on the staff

of the Viceroy of India. He read the details from his note-book, and

explained that he had written them down, right after the consummation of

the incident which they described, because he thought that if he did not

put them down in black and white he might presently come to think he had

dreamed them or invented them.

The Viceroy was making a progress, and among the shows offered by the

Maharajah of Mysore for his entertainment was a memory-exhibition.

The Viceroy and thirty gentlemen of his suite sat in a row, and the

memory-expert, a high-caste Brahmin, was brought in and seated on the

floor in front of them. He said he knew but two languages, the English

and his own, but would not exclude any foreign tongue from the tests to

be applied to his memory. Then he laid before the assemblage his program

—a sufficiently extraordinary one. He proposed that one gentleman

should give him one word of a foreign sentence, and tell him its place in

the sentence. He was furnished with the French word 'est', and was told

it was second in a sentence of three words. The next gentleman gave him

the German word 'verloren' and said it was the third in a sentence of

four words. He asked the next gentleman for one detail in a sum in

addition; another for one detail in a sum of subtraction; others for

single details in mathematical problems of various kinds; he got them.

Intermediates gave him single words from sentences in Greek, Latin,

Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and other languages, and told him their

places in the sentences. When at last everybody had furnished him a

single rag from a foreign sentence or a figure from a problem, he went

over the ground again, and got a second word and a second figure and was

told their places in the sentences and the sums; and so on and so on. He

went over the ground again and again until he had collected all the parts

of the sums and all the parts of the sentences—and all in disorder, of

course, not in their proper rotation. This had occupied two hours.

The Brahmin now sat silent and thinking, a while, then began and repeated

all the sentences, placing the words in their proper order, and untangled

the disordered arithmetical problems and gave accurate answers to them

all.

In the beginning he had asked the company to throw almonds at him during

the two hours, he to remember how many each gentleman had thrown; but

none were thrown, for the Viceroy said that the test would be a

sufficiently severe strain without adding that burden to it.

General Grant had a fine memory for all kinds of things, including even

names and faces, and I could have furnished an instance of it if I had

thought of it. The first time I ever saw him was early in his first term

as President. I had just arrived in Washington from the Pacific coast, a

stranger and wholly unknown to the public, and was passing the White

House one morning when I met a friend, a Senator from Nevada. He asked

me if I would like to see the President. I said I should be very glad;

so we entered. I supposed that the President would be in the midst of a

crowd, and that I could look at him in peace and security from a

distance, as another stray cat might look at another king. But it was in

the morning, and the Senator was using a privilege of his office which I

had not heard of—the privilege of intruding upon the Chief Magistrate's

working hours. Before I knew it, the Senator and I were in the presence,

and there was none there but we three. General Grant got slowly up from

his table, put his pen down, and stood before me with the iron expression

of a man who had not smiled for seven years, and was not intending to

smile for another seven. He looked me steadily in the eyes—mine lost

confidence and fell. I had never confronted a great man before, and was

in a miserable state of funk and inefficiency. The Senator said:—

“Mr. President, may I have the privilege of introducing Mr. Clemens?”

The President gave my hand an unsympathetic wag and dropped it. He did

not say a word but just stood. In my trouble I could not think of

anything to say, I merely wanted to resign. There was an awkward pause,

a dreary pause, a horrible pause. Then I thought of something, and

looked up into that unyielding face, and said timidly:—

“Mr. President, I—I am embarrassed. Are you?”

His face broke—just a little—a wee glimmer, the momentary flicker of a

summer-lightning smile, seven years ahead of time—and I was out and gone

as soon as it was.

Ten years passed away before I saw him the second time. Meantime I was

become better known; and was one of the people appointed to respond to

toasts at the banquet given to General Grant in Chicago—by the Army of

the Tennessee when he came back from his tour around the world. I

arrived late at night and got up late in the morning. All the corridors

of the hotel were crowded with people waiting to get a glimpse of General

Grant when he should pass to the place whence he was to review the great

procession. I worked my way by the suite of packed drawing-rooms, and at

the corner of the house I found a window open where there was a roomy

platform decorated with flags, and carpeted. I stepped out on it, and

saw below me millions of people blocking all the streets, and other

millions caked together in all the windows and on all the house-tops

around. These masses took me for General Grant, and broke into volcanic

explosions and cheers; but it was a good place to see the procession, and

I stayed. Presently I heard the distant blare of military music, and far

up the street I saw the procession come in sight, cleaving its way

through the huzzaing multitudes, with Sheridan, the most martial

figure of the War, riding at its head in the dress uniform of a

Lieutenant-General.

And now General Grant, arm-in-arm with Major Carter Harrison, stepped out

on the platform, followed two and two by the badged and uniformed

reception committee. General Grant was looking exactly as he had looked

upon that trying occasion of ten years before—all iron and bronze

self-possession. Mr. Harrison came over and led me to the General and

formally introduced me. Before I could put together the proper remark,

General Grant said—

“Mr. Clemens, I am not embarrassed. Are you?”—and that little

seven-year smile twinkled across his face again.

Seventeen years have gone by since then, and to-day, in New York, the

streets are a crush of people who are there to honor the remains of the

great soldier as they pass to their final resting-place under the

monument; and the air is heavy with dirges and the boom of artillery, and

all the millions of America are thinking of the man who restored the

Union and the flag, and gave to democratic government a new lease of

life, and, as we may hope and do believe, a permanent place among the

beneficent institutions of men.

We had one game in the ship which was a good time-passer—at least it was

at night in the smoking-room when the men were getting freshened up from

the day's monotonies and dullnesses. It was the completing of

non-complete stories. That is to say, a man would tell all of a story

except the finish, then the others would try to supply the ending out of

their own invention. When every one who wanted a chance had had it, the

man who had introduced the story would give it its original ending—then

you could take your choice. Sometimes the new endings turned out to be

better than the old one. But the story which called out the most

persistent and determined and ambitious effort was one which had no

ending, and so there was nothing to compare the new-made endings with.

The man who told it said he could furnish the particulars up to a certain

point only, because that was as much of the tale as he knew. He had read

it in a volume of sketches twenty-five years ago, and was interrupted

before the end was reached. He would give any one fifty dollars who

would finish the story to the satisfaction of a jury to be appointed by

ourselves. We appointed a jury and wrestled with the tale. We invented

plenty of endings, but the jury voted them all down. The jury was right.

It was a tale which the author of it may possibly have completed

satisfactorily, and if he really had that good fortune I would like to

know what the ending was. Any ordinary man will find that the story's

strength is in its middle, and that there is apparently no way to

transfer it to the close, where of course it ought to be. In substance

the storiette was as follows:

John Brown, aged thirty-one, good, gentle, bashful, timid, lived in a

quiet village in Missouri. He was superintendent of the Presbyterian

Sunday-school. It was but a humble distinction; still, it was his only

official one, and he was modestly proud of it and was devoted to its work

and its interests. The extreme kindliness of his nature was recognized

by all; in fact, people said that he was made entirely out of good

impulses and bashfulness; that he could always be counted upon for help

when it was needed, and for bashfulness both when it was needed and when

it wasn't.

Mary Taylor, twenty-three, modest, sweet, winning, and in character and

person beautiful, was all in all to him. And he was very nearly all in

all to her. She was wavering, his hopes were high. Her mother had been

in opposition from the first. But she was wavering, too; he could

see it. She was being touched by his warm interest in her two

charity-proteges and by his contributions toward their support. These

were two forlorn and aged sisters who lived in a log hut in a lonely

place up a cross road four miles from Mrs. Taylor's farm. One of the

sisters was crazy, and sometimes a little violent, but not often.

At last the time seemed ripe for a final advance, and Brown gathered his

courage together and resolved to make it. He would take along a

contribution of double the usual size, and win the mother over; with her

opposition annulled, the rest of the conquest would be sure and prompt.

He took to the road in the middle of a placid Sunday afternoon in the

soft Missourian summer, and he was equipped properly for his mission. He

was clothed all in white linen, with a blue ribbon for a necktie, and he

had on dressy tight boots. His horse and buggy were the finest that the

livery stable could furnish. The lap robe was of white linen, it was

new, and it had a hand-worked border that could not be rivaled in that

region for beauty and elaboration.

When he was four miles out on the lonely road and was walking his horse

over a wooden bridge, his straw hat blew off and fell in the creek, and

floated down and lodged against a bar. He did not quite know what to do.

He must have the hat, that was manifest; but how was he to get it?

Then he had an idea. The roads were empty, nobody was stirring. Yes, he

would risk it. He led the horse to the roadside and set it to cropping

the grass; then he undressed and put his clothes in the buggy, petted the

horse a moment to secure its compassion and its loyalty, then hurried to

the stream. He swam out and soon had the hat. When he got to the top of

the bank the horse was gone!

His legs almost gave way under him. The horse was walking leisurely

along the road. Brown trotted after it, saying, “Whoa, whoa, there's a

good fellow;” but whenever he got near enough to chance a jump for the

buggy, the horse quickened its pace a little and defeated him. And so

this went on, the naked man perishing with anxiety, and expecting every

moment to see people come in sight. He tagged on and on, imploring the

horse, beseeching the horse, till he had left a mile behind him, and was

closing up on the Taylor premises; then at last he was successful, and

got into the buggy. He flung on his shirt, his necktie, and his coat;

then reached for—but he was too late; he sat suddenly down and pulled up

the lap-robe, for he saw some one coming out of the gate—a woman; he

thought. He wheeled the horse to the left, and struck briskly up the

cross-road. It was perfectly straight, and exposed on both sides; but

there were woods and a sharp turn three miles ahead, and he was very

grateful when he got there. As he passed around the turn he slowed down

to a walk, and reached for his tr—— too late again.

He had come upon Mrs. Enderby, Mrs. Glossop, Mrs. Taylor, and Mary.

They were on foot, and seemed tired and excited. They came at once to

the buggy and shook hands, and all spoke at once, and said eagerly and

earnestly, how glad they were that he was come, and how fortunate it was.

And Mrs. Enderby said, impressively:

“It looks like an accident, his coming at such a time; but let no one

profane it with such a name; he was sent—sent from on high.”

They were all moved, and Mrs. Glossop said in an awed voice:

“Sarah Enderby, you never said a truer word in your life. This is no

accident, it is a special Providence. He was sent. He is an angel—an

angel as truly as ever angel was—an angel of deliverance. I say angel,

Sarah Enderby, and will have no other word. Don't let any one ever say

to me again, that there's no such thing as special Providences; for if

this isn't one, let them account for it that can.”

“I know it's so,” said Mrs. Taylor, fervently. “John Brown, I could

worship you; I could go down on my knees to you. Didn't something tell

you?—didn't you feel that you were sent? I could kiss the hem of your

laprobe.”

He was not able to speak; he was helpless with shame and fright. Mrs.

Taylor went on:

“Why, just look at it all around, Julia Glossop. Any person can see the

hand of Providence in it. Here at noon what do we see? We see the smoke

rising. I speak up and say, 'That's the Old People's cabin afire.'

Didn't I, Julia Glossop?”

“The very words you said, Nancy Taylor. I was as close to you as I am

now, and I heard them. You may have said hut instead of cabin, but in

substance it's the same. And you were looking pale, too.”

“Pale? I was that pale that if—why, you just compare it with this

laprobe. Then the next thing I said was, 'Mary Taylor, tell the hired

man to rig up the team-we'll go to the rescue.' And she said, 'Mother,

don't you know you told him he could drive to see his people, and stay

over Sunday?' And it was just so. I declare for it, I had forgotten it.

'Then,' said I, 'we'll go afoot.' And go we did. And found Sarah

Enderby on the road.”

“And we all went together,” said Mrs. Enderby. “And found the cabin set

fire to and burnt down by the crazy one, and the poor old things so old

and feeble that they couldn't go afoot. And we got them to a shady place

and made them as comfortable as we could, and began to wonder which way

to turn to find some way to get them conveyed to Nancy Taylor's house.

And I spoke up and said—now what did I say? Didn't I say, 'Providence

will provide'?”

“Why sure as you live, so you did! I had forgotten it.”

“So had I,” said Mrs. Glossop and Mrs. Taylor; “but you certainly said

it. Now wasn't that remarkable?”

“Yes, I said it. And then we went to Mr. Moseley's, two miles, and all

of them were gone to the camp meeting over on Stony Fork; and then we

came all the way back, two miles, and then here, another mile—and

Providence has provided. You see it yourselves.”

They gazed at each other awe-struck, and lifted their hands and said in

unison:

“It's per-fectly wonderful.”

“And then,” said Mrs. Glossop, “what do you think we had better do—-let

Mr. Brown drive the Old People to Nancy Taylor's one at a time, or put

both of them in the buggy, and him lead the horse?”

Brown gasped.

“Now, then, that's a question,” said Mrs. Enderby. “You see, we are all

tired out, and any way we fix it it's going to be difficult. For if Mr.

Brown takes both of them, at least one of us must, go back to help him,

for he can't load them into the buggy by himself, and they so helpless.”

“That is so,” said Mrs. Taylor. “It doesn't look-oh, how would this do?

—one of us drive there with Mr. Brown, and the rest of you go along to

my house and get things ready. I'll go with him. He and I together can

lift one of the Old People into the buggy; then drive her to my house

and——

“But who will take care of the other one?” said Mrs. Enderby. “We

musn't leave her there in the woods alone, you know—especially the crazy

one. There and back is eight miles, you see.”

They had all been sitting on the grass beside the buggy for a while, now,

trying to rest their weary bodies. They fell silent a moment or two, and

struggled in thought over the baffling situation; then Mrs. Enderby

brightened and said:

“I think I've got the idea, now. You see, we can't walk any more. Think

what we've done: four miles there, two to Moseley's, is six, then back to

here—nine miles since noon, and not a bite to eat; I declare I don't see

how we've done it; and as for me, I am just famishing. Now, somebody's

got to go back, to help Mr. Brown—there's no getting around that; but

whoever goes has got to ride, not walk. So my idea is this: one of us to

ride back with Mr. Brown, then ride to Nancy Taylor's house with one of

the Old People, leaving Mr. Brown to keep the other old one company, you

all to go now to Nancy's and rest and wait; then one of you drive back

and get the other one and drive her to Nancy's, and Mr. Brown walk.”

“Splendid!” they all cried. “Oh, that will do—that will answer

perfectly.” And they all said that Mrs. Enderby had the best head for

planning, in the company; and they said that they wondered that they

hadn't thought of this simple plan themselves. They hadn't meant to take

back the compliment, good simple souls, and didn't know they had done it.

After a consultation it was decided that Mrs. Enderby should drive back

with Brown, she being entitled to the distinction because she had

invented the plan. Everything now being satisfactorily arranged and

settled, the ladies rose, relieved and happy, and brushed down their

gowns, and three of them started homeward; Mrs. Enderby set her foot on

the buggy-step and was about to climb in, when Brown found a remnant of

his voice and gasped out—

“Please Mrs. Enderby, call them back—I am very weak; I can't walk, I

can't, indeed.”

“Why, dear Mr. Brown! You do look pale; I am ashamed of myself that I

didn't notice it sooner. Come back-all of you! Mr. Brown is not well.

Is there anything I can do for you, Mr. Brown?—I'm real sorry. Are you

in pain?”

“No, madam, only weak; I am not sick, but only just weak—lately; not

long, but just lately.”

The others came back, and poured out their sympathies and commiserations,

and were full of self-reproaches for not having noticed how pale he was.

And they at once struck out a new plan, and soon agreed that it was by

far the best of all. They would all go to Nancy Taylor's house and see

to Brown's needs first. He could lie on the sofa in the parlor, and

while Mrs. Taylor and Mary took care of him the other two ladies would

take the buggy and go and get one of the Old People, and leave one of

themselves with the other one, and——

By this time, without any solicitation, they were at the horse's head and

were beginning to turn him around. The danger was imminent, but Brown

found his voice again and saved himself. He said—

“But ladies, you are overlooking something which makes the plan

impracticable. You see, if you bring one of them home, and one remains

behind with the other, there will be three persons there when one of you

comes back for that other, for some one must drive the buggy back, and

three can't come home in it.”

They all exclaimed, “Why, sure-ly, that is so!” and they were, all

perplexed again.

“Dear, dear, what can we do?” said Mrs. Glossop; “it is the most

mixed-up thing that ever was. The fox and the goose and the corn and

things—Oh, dear, they are nothing to it.”

They sat wearily down once more, to further torture their tormented heads

for a plan that would work. Presently Mary offered a plan; it was her

first effort. She said:

“I am young and strong, and am refreshed, now. Take Mr. Brown to our

house, and give him help—you see how plainly he needs it. I will go

back and take care of the Old People; I can be there in twenty minutes.

You can go on and do what you first started to do—wait on the main road

at our house until somebody comes along with a wagon; then send and bring

away the three of us. You won't have to wait long; the farmers will soon

be coming back from town, now. I will keep old Polly patient and cheered

up—the crazy one doesn't need it.”

This plan was discussed and accepted; it seemed the best that could be

done, in the circumstances, and the Old People must be getting

discouraged by this time.

Brown felt relieved, and was deeply thankful. Let him once get to the

main road and he would find a way to escape.

Then Mrs. Taylor said:

“The evening chill will be coming on, pretty soon, and those poor old

burnt-out things will need some kind of covering. Take the lap-robe with

you, dear.”

“Very well, Mother, I will.”

She stepped to the buggy and put out her hand to take it——

That was the end of the tale. The passenger who told it said that when

he read the story twenty-five years ago in a train he was interrupted at

that point—the train jumped off a bridge.

At first we thought we could finish the story quite easily, and we set to

work with confidence; but it soon began to appear that it was not a

simple thing, but difficult and baffling. This was on account of Brown's

character—great generosity and kindliness, but complicated with unusual

shyness and diffidence, particularly in the presence of ladies. There

was his love for Mary, in a hopeful state but not yet secure—just in a

condition, indeed, where its affair must be handled with great tact, and

no mistakes made, no offense given. And there was the mother wavering,

half willing-by adroit and flawless diplomacy to be won over, now, or

perhaps never at all. Also, there were the helpless Old People yonder in

the woods waiting-their fate and Brown's happiness to be determined by

what Brown should do within the next two seconds. Mary was reaching for

the lap-robe; Brown must decide-there was no time to be lost.

Of course none but a happy ending of the story would be accepted by the

jury; the finish must find Brown in high credit with the ladies, his

behavior without blemish, his modesty unwounded, his character for self

sacrifice maintained, the Old People rescued through him, their

benefactor, all the party proud of him, happy in him, his praises on all

their tongues.

We tried to arrange this, but it was beset with persistent and

irreconcilable difficulties. We saw that Brown's shyness would not allow

him to give up the lap-robe. This would offend Mary and her mother; and

it would surprise the other ladies, partly because this stinginess toward

the suffering Old People would be out of character with Brown, and partly

because he was a special Providence and could not properly act so. If

asked to explain his conduct, his shyness would not allow him to tell the

truth, and lack of invention and practice would find him incapable of

contriving a lie that would wash. We worked at the troublesome problem

until three in the morning.

Meantime Mary was still reaching for the lap-robe. We gave it up, and

decided to let her continue to reach. It is the reader's privilege to

determine for himself how the thing came out.

CHAPTER III.

It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right.

—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

On the seventh day out we saw a dim vast bulk standing up out of the

wastes of the Pacific and knew that that spectral promontory was Diamond

Head, a piece of this world which I had not seen before for twenty-nine

years. So we were nearing Honolulu, the capital city of the Sandwich

Islands—those islands which to me were Paradise; a Paradise which I had

been longing all those years to see again. Not any other thing in the

world could have stirred me as the sight of that great rock did.

In the night we anchored a mile from shore. Through my port I could see

the twinkling lights of Honolulu and the dark bulk of the mountain-range

that stretched away right and left. I could not make out the beautiful

Nuuana valley, but I knew where it lay, and remembered how it used to

look in the old times. We used to ride up it on horseback in those days

—we young people—and branch off and gather bones in a sandy region

where one of the first Kamehameha's battles was fought. He was a

remarkable man, for a king; and he was also a remarkable man for a

savage. He was a mere kinglet and of little or no consequence at the

time of Captain Cook's arrival in 1788; but about four years afterward he

conceived the idea of enlarging his sphere of influence. That is a

courteous modern phrase which means robbing your neighbor—for your

neighbor's benefit; and the great theater of its benevolences is Africa.

Kamehameha went to war, and in the course of ten years he whipped out all

the other kings and made himself master of every one of the nine or ten

islands that form the group. But he did more than that. He bought

ships, freighted them with sandal wood and other native products, and

sent them as far as South America and China; he sold to his savages the

foreign stuffs and tools and utensils which came back in these ships, and

started the march of civilization. It is doubtful if the match to this

extraordinary thing is to be found in the history of any other savage.

Savages are eager to learn from the white man any new way to kill each

other, but it is not their habit to seize with avidity and apply with

energy the larger and nobler ideas which he offers them. The details of

Kamehameha's history show that he was always hospitably ready to examine

the white man's ideas, and that he exercised a tidy discrimination in

making his selections from the samples placed on view.

A shrewder discrimination than was exhibited by his son and successor,

Liholiho, I think. Liholiho could have qualified as a reformer, perhaps,

but as a king he was a mistake. A mistake because he tried to be both

king and reformer. This is mixing fire and gunpowder together. A king

has no proper business with reforming. His best policy is to keep things

as they are; and if he can't do that, he ought to try to make them worse

than they are. This is not guesswork; I have thought over this matter a

good deal, so that if I should ever have a chance to become a king I

would know how to conduct the business in the best way.

When Liholiho succeeded his father he found himself possessed of an

equipment of royal tools and safeguards which a wiser king would have

known how to husband, and judiciously employ, and make profitable. The

entire country was under the one scepter, and his was that scepter.

There was an Established Church, and he was the head of it. There was a

Standing Army, and he was the head of that; an Army of 114 privates under

command of 27 Generals and a Field Marshal. There was a proud and

ancient Hereditary Nobility. There was still one other asset. This was

the tabu—an agent endowed with a mysterious and stupendous power, an

agent not found among the properties of any European monarch, a tool of

inestimable value in the business. Liholiho was headmaster of the tabu.

The tabu was the most ingenious and effective of all the inventions that

has ever been devised for keeping a people's privileges satisfactorily

restricted.

It required the sexes to live in separate houses. It did not allow

people to eat in either house; they must eat in another place. It did

not allow a man's woman-folk to enter his house. It did not allow the

sexes to eat together; the men must eat first, and the women must wait on

them. Then the women could eat what was left—if anything was left—and

wait on themselves. I mean, if anything of a coarse or unpalatable sort

was left, the women could have it. But not the good things, the fine

things, the choice things, such as pork, poultry, bananas, cocoanuts, the

choicer varieties of fish, and so on. By the tabu, all these were sacred

to the men; the women spent their lives longing for them and wondering

what they might taste like; and they died without finding out.

These rules, as you see, were quite simple and clear. It was easy to

remember them; and useful. For the penalty for infringing any rule in

the whole list was death. Those women easily learned to put up with

shark and taro and dog for a diet when the other things were so

expensive.

It was death for any one to walk upon tabu'd ground; or defile a tabu'd

thing with his touch; or fail in due servility to a chief; or step upon

the king's shadow. The nobles and the King and the priests were always

suspending little rags here and there and yonder, to give notice to the

people that the decorated spot or thing was tabu, and death lurking near.

The struggle for life was difficult and chancy in the islands in those

days.

Thus advantageously was the new king situated. Will it be believed that

the first thing he did was to destroy his Established Church, root and

branch? He did indeed do that. To state the case figuratively, he was a

prosperous sailor who burnt his ship and took to a raft. This Church was

a horrid thing. It heavily oppressed the people; it kept them always

trembling in the gloom of mysterious threatenings; it slaughtered them in

sacrifice before its grotesque idols of wood and stone; it cowed them, it

terrorized them, it made them slaves to its priests, and through the

priests to the king. It was the best friend a king could have, and the

most dependable. To a professional reformer who should annihilate so

frightful and so devastating a power as this Church, reverence and praise

would be due; but to a king who should do it, could properly be due

nothing but reproach; reproach softened by sorrow; sorrow for his

unfitness for his position.

He destroyed his Established Church, and his kingdom is a republic today,

in consequence of that act.

When he destroyed the Church and burned the idols he did a mighty thing

for civilization and for his people's weal—but it was not “business.”

It was unkingly, it was inartistic. It made trouble for his line. The

American missionaries arrived while the burned idols were still smoking.

They found the nation without a religion, and they repaired the defect.

They offered their own religion and it was gladly received. But it was

no support to arbitrary kingship, and so the kingly power began to weaken

from that day. Forty-seven years later, when I was in the islands,

Kamehameha V. was trying to repair Liholiho's blunder, and not

succeeding. He had set up an Established Church and made himself the

head of it. But it was only a pinchbeck thing, an imitation, a bauble,

an empty show. It had no power, no value for a king. It could not harry

or burn or slay, it in no way resembled the admirable machine which

Liholiho destroyed. It was an Established Church without an

Establishment; all the people were Dissenters.

Long before that, the kingship had itself become but a name, a show. At

an early day the missionaries had turned it into something very much like

a republic; and here lately the business whites have turned it into

something exactly like it.

In Captain Cook's time (1778), the native population of the islands was

estimated at 400,000; in 1836 at something short of 200,000, in 1866 at

50,000; it is to-day, per census, 25,000. All intelligent people praise

Kamehameha I. and Liholiho for conferring upon their people the great

boon of civilization. I would do it myself, but my intelligence is out

of repair, now, from over-work.

When I was in the islands nearly a generation ago, I was acquainted with

a young American couple who had among their belongings an attractive

little son of the age of seven—attractive but not practicably

companionable with me, because he knew no English. He had played from

his birth with the little Kanakas on his father's plantation, and had

preferred their language and would learn no other. The family removed to

America a month after I arrived in the islands, and straightway the boy

began to lose his Kanaka and pick up English. By the time he was twelve

he hadn't a word of Kanaka left; the language had wholly departed from

his tongue and from his comprehension. Nine years later, when he was

twenty-one, I came upon the family in one of the lake towns of New York,

and the mother told me about an adventure which her son had been having.

By trade he was now a professional diver. A passenger boat had been

caught in a storm on the lake, and had gone down, carrying her people

with her. A few days later the young diver descended, with his armor on,

and entered the berth-saloon of the boat, and stood at the foot of the

companionway, with his hand on the rail, peering through the dim water.

Presently something touched him on the shoulder, and he turned and found

a dead man swaying and bobbing about him and seemingly inspecting him

inquiringly. He was paralyzed with fright. His entry had disturbed the

water, and now he discerned a number of dim corpses making for him and

wagging their heads and swaying their bodies like sleepy people trying to

dance. His senses forsook him, and in that condition he was drawn to the

surface. He was put to bed at home, and was soon very ill. During some

days he had seasons of delirium which lasted several hours at a time; and

while they lasted he talked Kanaka incessantly and glibly; and Kanaka

only. He was still very ill, and he talked to me in that tongue; but I

did not understand it, of course. The doctor-books tell us that cases

like this are not uncommon. Then the doctors ought to study the cases

and find out how to multiply them. Many languages and things get mislaid

in a person's head, and stay mislaid for lack of this remedy.

Many memories of my former visit to the islands came up in my mind while

we lay at anchor in front of Honolulu that night. And pictures—pictures

pictures—an enchanting procession of them! I was impatient for the

morning to come.

When it came it brought disappointment, of course. Cholera had broken

out in the town, and we were not allowed to have any communication with

the shore. Thus suddenly did my dream of twenty-nine years go to ruin.

Messages came from friends, but the friends themselves I was not to have

any sight of. My lecture-hall was ready, but I was not to see that,

either.

Several of our passengers belonged in Honolulu, and these were sent

ashore; but nobody could go ashore and return. There were people on

shore who were booked to go with us to Australia, but we could not

receive them; to do it would cost us a quarantine-term in Sydney. They

could have escaped the day before, by ship to San Francisco; but the bars

had been put up, now, and they might have to wait weeks before any ship

could venture to give them a passage any whither. And there were

hardships for others. An elderly lady and her son, recreation-seekers

from Massachusetts, had wandered westward, further and further from home,

always intending to take the return track, but always concluding to go

still a little further; and now here they were at anchor before Honolulu

positively their last westward-bound indulgence—they had made up their

minds to that—but where is the use in making up your mind in this world?

It is usually a waste of time to do it. These two would have to stay

with us as far as Australia. Then they could go on around the world, or

go back the way they had come; the distance and the accommodations and

outlay of time would be just the same, whichever of the two routes they

might elect to take. Think of it: a projected excursion of five hundred

miles gradually enlarged, without any elaborate degree of intention, to a

possible twenty-four thousand. However, they were used to extensions by

this time, and did not mind this new one much.

And we had with us a lawyer from Victoria, who had been sent out by the

Government on an international matter, and he had brought his wife with

him and left the children at home with the servants and now what was to

be done? Go ashore amongst the cholera and take the risks? Most

certainly not. They decided to go on, to the Fiji islands, wait there a

fortnight for the next ship, and then sail for home. They couldn't

foresee that they wouldn't see a homeward-bound ship again for six weeks,

and that no word could come to them from the children, and no word go

from them to the children in all that time. It is easy to make plans in

this world; even a cat can do it; and when one is out in those remote

oceans it is noticeable that a cat's plans and a man's are worth about

the same. There is much the same shrinkage in both, in the matter of

values.

There was nothing for us to do but sit about the decks in the shade of

the awnings and look at the distant shore. We lay in luminous blue

water; shoreward the water was green-green and brilliant; at the shore

itself it broke in a long white ruffle, and with no crash, no sound that

we could hear. The town was buried under a mat of foliage that looked

like a cushion of moss. The silky mountains were clothed in soft, rich

splendors of melting color, and some of the cliffs were veiled in

slanting mists. I recognized it all. It was just as I had seen it long

before, with nothing of its beauty lost, nothing of its charm wanting.

A change had come, but that was political, and not visible from the ship.

The monarchy of my day was gone, and a republic was sitting in its seat.

It was not a material change. The old imitation pomps, the fuss and

feathers, have departed, and the royal trademark—that is about all that

one could miss, I suppose. That imitation monarchy, was grotesque

enough, in my time; if it had held on another thirty years it would have

been a monarchy without subjects of the king's race.

We had a sunset of a very fine sort. The vast plain of the sea was

marked off in bands of sharply-contrasted colors: great stretches of dark

blue, others of purple, others of polished bronze; the billowy mountains

showed all sorts of dainty browns and greens, blues and purples and

blacks, and the rounded velvety backs of certain of them made one want to

stroke them, as one would the sleek back of a cat. The long, sloping

promontory projecting into the sea at the west turned dim and leaden and

spectral, then became suffused with pink—dissolved itself in a pink

dream, so to speak, it seemed so airy and unreal. Presently the

cloud-rack was flooded with fiery splendors, and these were copied on the

surface of the sea, and it made one drunk with delight to look upon it.

From talks with certain of our passengers whose home was Honolulu, and

from a sketch by Mrs. Mary H. Krout, I was able to perceive what the

Honolulu of to-day is, as compared with the Honolulu of my time. In my

time it was a beautiful little town, made up of snow-white wooden

cottages deliciously smothered in tropical vines and flowers and trees

and shrubs; and its coral roads and streets were hard and smooth, and as

white as the houses. The outside aspects of the place suggested the

presence of a modest and comfortable prosperity—a general prosperity

—perhaps one might strengthen the term and say universal. There were no

fine houses, no fine furniture. There were no decorations. Tallow

candles furnished the light for the bedrooms, a whale-oil lamp furnished

it for the parlor. Native matting served as carpeting. In the parlor

one would find two or three lithographs on the walls—portraits as a

rule: Kamehameha IV., Louis Kossuth, Jenny Lind; and may be an engraving

or two: Rebecca at the Well, Moses smiting the rock, Joseph's servants

finding the cup in Benjamin's sack. There would be a center table, with

books of a tranquil sort on it: The Whole Duty of Man, Baxter's Saints'

Rest, Fox's Martyrs, Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy, bound copies of The

Missionary Herald and of Father Damon's Seaman's Friend. A melodeon; a

music stand, with 'Willie, We have Missed You', 'Star of the Evening',

'Roll on Silver Moon', 'Are We Most There', 'I Would not Live Alway', and

other songs of love and sentiment, together with an assortment of hymns.

A what-not with semi-globular glass paperweights, enclosing miniature

pictures of ships, New England rural snowstorms, and the like; sea-shells

with Bible texts carved on them in cameo style; native curios; whale's

tooth with full-rigged ship carved on it. There was nothing reminiscent

of foreign parts, for nobody had been abroad. Trips were made to San

Francisco, but that could not be called going abroad. Comprehensively

speaking, nobody traveled.

But Honolulu has grown wealthy since then, and of course wealth has

introduced changes; some of the old simplicities have disappeared. Here

is a modern house, as pictured by Mrs. Krout:

“Almost every house is surrounded by extensive lawns and gardens

enclosed by walls of volcanic stone or by thick hedges of the

brilliant hibiscus.

“The houses are most tastefully and comfortably furnished; the

floors are either of hard wood covered with rugs or with fine Indian

matting, while there is a preference, as in most warm countries, for

rattan or bamboo furniture; there are the usual accessories of

bric-a-brac, pictures, books, and curios from all parts of the

world,

for these island dwellers are indefatigable travelers.

“Nearly every house has what is called a lanai. It is a large

apartment, roofed, floored, open on three sides, with a door or a

draped archway opening into the drawing-room. Frequently the roof

is formed by the thick interlacing boughs of the hou tree,

impervious to the sun and even to the rain, except in violent

storms. Vines are trained about the sides—the stephanotis or some

one of the countless fragrant and blossoming trailers which abound

in the islands. There are also curtains of matting that may be

drawn to exclude the sun or rain. The floor is bare for coolness,

or partially covered with rugs, and the lanai is prettily furnished

with comfortable chairs, sofas, and tables loaded with flowers, or

wonderful ferns in pots.

“The lanai is the favorite reception room, and here at any social

function the musical program is given and cakes and ices are served;

here morning callers are received, or gay riding parties, the ladies

in pretty divided skirts, worn for convenience in riding astride,

—the universal mode adopted by Europeans and Americans, as well as

by the natives.

“The comfort and luxury of such an apartment, especially at a

seashore villa, can hardly be imagined. The soft breezes sweep

across it, heavy with the fragrance of jasmine and gardenia, and

through the swaying boughs of palm and mimosa there are glimpses of

rugged mountains, their summits veiled in clouds, of purple sea with

the white surf beating eternally against the reefs, whiter still in

the yellow sunlight or the magical moonlight of the tropics.”

There: rugs, ices, pictures, lanais, worldly books, sinful bric-a-brac

fetched from everywhere. And the ladies riding astride. These are

changes, indeed. In my time the native women rode astride, but the white

ones lacked the courage to adopt their wise custom. In my time ice was

seldom seen in Honolulu. It sometimes came in sailing vessels from New

England as ballast; and then, if there happened to be a man-of-war in

port and balls and suppers raging by consequence, the ballast was worth

six hundred dollars a ton, as is evidenced by reputable tradition. But

the ice-machine has traveled all over the world, now, and brought ice

within everybody's reach. In Lapland and Spitzbergen no one uses native

ice in our day, except the bears and the walruses.

The bicycle is not mentioned. It was not necessary. We know that it is

there, without inquiring. It is everywhere. But for it, people could

never have had summer homes on the summit of Mont Blanc; before its day,

property up there had but a nominal value. The ladies of the Hawaiian

capital learned too late the right way to occupy a horse—too late to get

much benefit from it. The riding-horse is retiring from business

everywhere in the world. In Honolulu a few years from now he will be

only a tradition.

We all know about Father Damien, the French priest who voluntarily

forsook the world and went to the leper island of Molokai to labor among

its population of sorrowful exiles who wait there, in slow-consuming

misery, for death to come and release them from their troubles; and we

know that the thing which he knew beforehand would happen, did happen:

that he became a leper himself, and died of that horrible disease. There

was still another case of self-sacrifice, it appears. I asked after

“Billy” Ragsdale, interpreter to the Parliament in my time—a half-white.

He was a brilliant young fellow, and very popular. As an interpreter he

would have been hard to match anywhere. He used to stand up in the

Parliament and turn the English speeches into Hawaiian and the Hawaiian

speeches into English with a readiness and a volubility that were

astonishing. I asked after him, and was told that his prosperous career

was cut short in a sudden and unexpected way, just as he was about to

marry a beautiful half-caste girl. He discovered, by some nearly

invisible sign about his skin, that the poison of leprosy was in him.

The secret was his own, and might be kept concealed for years; but he

would not be treacherous to the girl that loved him; he would not marry

her to a doom like his. And so he put his affairs in order, and went

around to all his friends and bade them good-bye, and sailed in the leper

ship to Molokai. There he died the loathsome and lingering death that

all lepers die.

In this place let me insert a paragraph or two from “The Paradise of

the Pacific” (Rev. H. H. Gowen)—

“Poor lepers! It is easy for those who have no relatives or friends

among them to enforce the decree of segregation to the letter, but

who can write of the terrible, the heart-breaking scenes which that

enforcement has brought about?

“A man upon Hawaii was suddenly taken away after a summary arrest,

leaving behind him a helpless wife about to give birth to a babe.

The devoted wife with great pain and risk came the whole journey to

Honolulu, and pleaded until the authorities were unable to resist

her entreaty that she might go and live like a leper with her leper

husband.

“A woman in the prime of life and activity is condemned as an

incipient leper, suddenly removed from her home, and her husband

returns to find his two helpless babes moaning for their lost

mother.

“Imagine it! The case of the babies is hard, but its bitterness is

a trifle—less than a trifle—less than nothing—compared to what

the mother must suffer; and suffer minute by minute, hour by hour,

day by day, month by month, year by year, without respite, relief,

or any abatement of her pain till she dies.

“One woman, Luka Kaaukau, has been living with her leper husband in

the settlement for twelve years. The man has scarcely a joint left,

his limbs are only distorted ulcerated stumps, for four years his

wife has put every particle of food into his mouth. He wanted his

wife to abandon his wretched carcass long ago, as she herself was

sound and well, but Luka said that she was content to remain and

wait on the man she loved till the spirit should be freed from its

burden.

“I myself have known hard cases enough:—of a girl, apparently in

full health, decorating the church with me at Easter, who before

Christmas is taken away as a confirmed leper; of a mother hiding her

child in the mountains for years so that not even her dearest

friends knew that she had a child alive, that he might not be taken

away; of a respectable white man taken away from his wife and

family, and compelled to become a dweller in the Leper Settlement,

where he is counted dead, even by the insurance companies.”

And one great pity of it all is, that these poor sufferers are innocent.

The leprosy does not come of sins which they committed, but of sins

committed by their ancestors, who escaped the curse of leprosy!

Mr. Gowan has made record of a certain very striking circumstance. Would

you expect to find in that awful Leper Settlement a custom worthy to be

transplanted to your own country? They have one such, and it is

inexpressibly touching and beautiful. When death sets open the

prison-door of life there, the band salutes the freed soul with a burst

of glad music!

CHAPTER IV.

A dozen direct censures are easier to bear than one morganatic

compliment.

—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

Sailed from Honolulu.—From diary:

Sept. 2. Flocks of flying fish-slim, shapely, graceful, and intensely

white. With the sun on them they look like a flight of silver

fruit-knives. They are able to fly a hundred yards.

Sept. 3. In 9 deg. 50' north latitude, at breakfast. Approaching the

equator on a long slant. Those of us who have never seen the equator are

a good deal excited. I think I would rather see it than any other thing

in the world. We entered the “doldrums” last night—variable winds,

bursts of rain, intervals of calm, with chopping seas and a wobbly and

drunken motion to the ship—a condition of things findable in

other regions sometimes, but present in the doldrums always. The

globe-girdling belt called the doldrums is 20 degrees wide, and the

thread called the equator lies along the middle of it.

Sept. 4. Total eclipse of the moon last night. At 7.30 it began to go

off. At total—or about that—it was like a rich rosy cloud with a

tumbled surface framed in the circle and projecting from it—a bulge of

strawberry-ice, so to speak. At half-eclipse the moon was like a gilded

acorn in its cup.

Sept. 5. Closing in on the equator this noon. A sailor explained to a

young girl that the ship's speed is poor because we are climbing up the

bulge toward the center of the globe; but that when we should once get

over, at the equator, and start down-hill, we should fly. When she asked

him the other day what the fore-yard was, he said it was the front yard,

the open area in the front end of the ship. That man has a good deal of

learning stored up, and the girl is likely to get it all.

Afternoon. Crossed the equator. In the distance it looked like a blue

ribbon stretched across the ocean. Several passengers kodak'd it. We

had no fool ceremonies, no fantastics, no horse play. All that sort of

thing has gone out. In old times a sailor, dressed as Neptune, used to

come in over the bows, with his suite, and lather up and shave everybody

who was crossing the equator for the first time, and then cleanse these

unfortunates by swinging them from the yard-arm and ducking them three

times in the sea. This was considered funny. Nobody knows why. No, that

is not true. We do know why. Such a thing could never be funny on land;

no part of the old-time grotesque performances gotten up on shipboard to

celebrate the passage of the line could ever be funny on shore—they

would seem dreary and witless to shore people. But the shore people

would

change their minds about it at sea, on a long voyage. On such a voyage,

with its eternal monotonies, people's intellects deteriorate; the owners

of the intellects soon reach a point where they almost seem to prefer

childish things to things of a maturer degree. One is often surprised at

the juvenilities which grown people indulge in at sea, and the interest

they take in them, and the consuming enjoyment they get out of them.

This is on long voyages only. The mind gradually becomes inert, dull,

blunted; it loses its accustomed interest in intellectual things; nothing

but horse-play can rouse it, nothing but wild and foolish grotesqueries

can entertain it. On short voyages it makes no such exposure of itself;

it hasn't time to slump down to this sorrowful level.

The short-voyage passenger gets his chief physical exercise out of

“horse-billiards”—shovel-board. It is a good game. We play it in this

ship. A quartermaster chalks off a diagram like this-on the deck.

The player uses a cue that is like a broom-handle with a quarter-moon of

wood fastened to the end of it. With this he shoves wooden disks the

size of a saucer—he gives the disk a vigorous shove and sends it fifteen

or twenty feet along the deck and lands it in one of the squares if he

can. If it stays there till the inning is played out, it will count as

many points in the game as the figure in the square it has stopped in

represents. The adversary plays to knock that disk out and leave his own

in its place—particularly if it rests upon the 9 or 10 or some other of

the high numbers; but if it rests in the “10off” he backs it up—lands

his disk behind it a foot or two, to make it difficult for its owner to

knock it out of that damaging place and improve his record. When the

inning is played out it may be found that each adversary has placed his

four disks where they count; it may be found that some of them are

touching chalk lines and not counting; and very often it will be found

that there has been a general wreckage, and that not a disk has been left

within the diagram. Anyway, the result is recorded, whatever it is, and

the game goes on. The game is 100 points, and it takes from twenty

minutes to forty to play it, according to luck and the condition of the

sea. It is an exciting game, and the crowd of spectators furnish

abundance of applause for fortunate shots and plenty of laughter for the

other kind. It is a game of skill, but at the same time the uneasy

motion of the ship is constantly interfering with skill; this makes it a

chancy game, and the element of luck comes largely in.

We had a couple of grand tournaments, to determine who should be

“Champion of the Pacific”; they included among the participants nearly

all the passengers, of both sexes, and the officers of the ship, and they

afforded many days of stupendous interest and excitement, and murderous

exercise—for horse-billiards is a physically violent game.

The figures in the following record of some of the closing games in the

first tournament will show, better than any description, how very chancy

the game is. The losers here represented had all been winners in the

previous games of the series, some of them by fine majorities:

Chase,102 Mrs. D.,57 Mortimer, 105 The Surgeon, 92

Miss C.,105 Mrs. T.,9 Clemens, 101 Taylor,92

Taylor,109 Davies,95 Miss C., 108 Mortimer,55

Thomas,102 Roper,76 Clemens, 111 Miss C.,89

Coomber, 106 Chase,98

And so on; until but three couples of winners were left. Then I beat my

man, young Smith beat his man, and Thomas beat his. This reduced the

combatants to three. Smith and I took the deck, and I led off. At the

close of the first inning I was 10 worse than nothing and Smith had

scored 7. The luck continued against me. When I was 57, Smith was 97

—within 3 of out. The luck changed then. He picked up a 10-off or so,

and couldn't recover. I beat him.

The next game would end tournament No. 1.

Mr. Thomas and I were the contestants. He won the lead and went to the

bat—so to speak. And there he stood, with the crotch of his cue resting

against his disk while the ship rose slowly up, sank slowly down, rose

again, sank again. She never seemed to rise to suit him exactly. She

started up once more; and when she was nearly ready for the turn, he let

drive and landed his disk just within the left-hand end of the 10.

(Applause). The umpire proclaimed “a good 10,” and the game-keeper set

it down. I played: my disk grazed the edge of Mr. Thomas's disk, and

went out of the diagram. (No applause.)

Mr. Thomas played again—and landed his second disk alongside of the

first, and almost touching its right-hand side. “Good 10.” (Great

applause.)

I played, and missed both of them. (No applause.)

Mr. Thomas delivered his third shot and landed his disk just at the right

of the other two. “Good 10.” (Immense applause.)

There they lay, side by side, the three in a row. It did not seem

possible that anybody could miss them. Still I did it. (Immense

silence.)

Mr. Thomas played his last disk. It seems incredible, but he actually

landed that disk alongside of the others, and just to the right of them-a

straight solid row of 4 disks. (Tumultuous and long-continued applause.)

Then I played my last disk. Again it did not seem possible that anybody

could miss that row—a row which would have been 14 inches long if the

disks had been clamped together; whereas, with the spaces separating them

they made a longer row than that. But I did it. It may be that I was

getting nervous.

I think it unlikely that that innings has ever had its parallel in the

history of horse-billiards. To place the four disks side by side in the

10 was an extraordinary feat; indeed, it was a kind of miracle. To miss

them was another miracle. It will take a century to produce another man

who can place the four disks in the 10; and longer than that to find a

man who can't knock them out. I was ashamed of my performance at the

time, but now that I reflect upon it I see that it was rather fine and

difficult.

Mr. Thomas kept his luck, and won the game, and later the championship.

In a minor tournament I won the prize, which was a Waterbury watch. I

put it in my trunk. In Pretoria, South Africa, nine months afterward, my

proper watch broke down and I took the Waterbury out, wound it, set it by

the great clock on the Parliament House (8.05), then went back to my room

and went to bed, tired from a long railway journey. The parliamentary

clock had a peculiarity which I was not aware of at the time

—a peculiarity which exists in no other clock, and would not exist in

that

one if it had been made by a sane person; on the half-hour it strikes the

succeeding hour, then strikes the hour again, at the proper time. I lay

reading and smoking awhile; then, when I could hold my eyes open no

longer and was about to put out the light, the great clock began to boom,

and I counted ten. I reached for the Waterbury to see how it was getting

along. It was marking 9.30. It seemed rather poor speed for a

three-dollar watch, but I supposed that the climate was affecting it. I

shoved it half an hour ahead; and took to my book and waited to see what

would happen. At 10 the great clock struck ten again. I looked—the

Waterbury was marking half-past 10. This was too much speed for the

money, and it troubled me. I pushed the hands back a half hour, and

waited once more; I had to, for I was vexed and restless now, and my

sleepiness was gone. By and by the great clock struck 11. The Waterbury

was marking 10.30. I pushed it ahead half an hour, with some show of

temper. By and by the great clock struck 11 again. The Waterbury showed

up 11.30, now, and I beat her brains out against the bedstead. I was

sorry next day, when I found out.

To return to the ship.

The average human being is a perverse creature; and when he isn't that,

he is a practical joker. The result to the other person concerned is

about the same: that is, he is made to suffer. The washing down of the

decks begins at a very early hour in all ships; in but few ships are any

measures taken to protect the passengers, either by waking or warning

them, or by sending a steward to close their ports. And so the

deckwashers have their opportunity, and they use it. They send a bucket

of water slashing along the side of the ship and into the ports,

drenching the passenger's clothes, and often the passenger himself. This

good old custom prevailed in this ship, and under unusually favorable

circumstances, for in the blazing tropical regions a removable zinc thing

like a sugarshovel projects from the port to catch the wind and bring it

in; this thing catches the wash-water and brings it in, too—and in

flooding abundance. Mrs. I., an invalid, had to sleep on the locker—

sofa

under her port, and every time she over-slept and thus failed to take

care of herself, the deck-washers drowned her out.

And the painters, what a good time they had! This ship would be going

into dock for a month in Sydney for repairs; but no matter, painting was

going on all the time somewhere or other. The ladies' dresses were

constantly getting ruined, nevertheless protests and supplications went

for nothing. Sometimes a lady, taking an afternoon nap on deck near a

ventilator or some other thing that didn't need painting, would wake up

by and by and find that the humorous painter had been noiselessly daubing

that thing and had splattered her white gown all over with little greasy

yellow spots.

The blame for this untimely painting did not lie with the ship's

officers, but with custom. As far back as Noah's time it became law that

ships must be constantly painted and fussed at when at sea; custom grew

out of the law, and at sea custom knows no death; this custom will

continue until the sea goes dry.

Sept. 8.—Sunday. We are moving so nearly south that we cross only about

two meridians of longitude a day. This morning we were in longitude 178

west from Greenwich, and 57 degrees west from San Francisco. To-morrow

we shall be close to the center of the globe—the 180th degree of west

longitude and 180th degree of east longitude.

And then we must drop out a day-lose a day out of our lives, a day never

to be found again. We shall all die one day earlier than from the

beginning of time we were foreordained to die. We shall be a day

behindhand all through eternity. We shall always be saying to the other

angels, “Fine day today,” and they will be always retorting, “But it

isn't to-day, it's tomorrow.” We shall be in a state of confusion all the

time and shall never know what true happiness is.

Next Day. Sure enough, it has happened. Yesterday it was September 8,

Sunday; to-day, per the bulletin-board at the head of the companionway,

it is September 10, Tuesday. There is something uncanny about it. And

uncomfortable. In fact, nearly unthinkable, and wholly unrealizable,

when one comes to consider it. While we were crossing the 180th meridian

it was Sunday in the stern of the ship where my family were, and Tuesday

in the bow where I was. They were there eating the half of a fresh apple

on the 8th, and I was at the same time eating the other half of it on the

10th—and I could notice how stale it was, already. The family were the

same age that they were when I had left them five minutes before, but I

was a day older now than I was then. The day they were living in

stretched behind them half way round the globe, across the Pacific Ocean

and America and Europe; the day I was living in stretched in front of me

around the other half to meet it. They were stupendous days for bulk and

stretch; apparently much larger days than we had ever been in before.

All previous days had been but shrunk-up little things by comparison.

The difference in temperature between the two days was very marked, their

day being hotter than mine because it was closer to the equator.

Along about the moment that we were crossing the Great Meridian a child

was born in the steerage, and now there is no way to tell which day it

was born on. The nurse thinks it was Sunday, the surgeon thinks it was

Tuesday. The child will never know its own birthday. It will always be

choosing first one and then the other, and will never be able to make up

its mind permanently. This will breed vacillation and uncertainty in its

opinions about religion, and politics, and business, and sweethearts, and

everything, and will undermine its principles, and rot them away, and

make the poor thing characterless, and its success in life impossible.

Every one in the ship says so. And this is not all—in fact, not the

worst. For there is an enormously rich brewer in the ship who said as

much as ten days ago, that if the child was born on his birthday he would

give it ten thousand dollars to start its little life with. His birthday

was Monday, the 9th of September.

If the ships all moved in the one direction—westward, I mean—the world

would suffer a prodigious loss—in the matter of valuable time, through

the dumping overboard on the Great Meridian of such multitudes of days by

ships crews and passengers. But fortunately the ships do not all sail

west, half of them sail east. So there is no real loss. These latter

pick up all the discarded days and add them to the world's stock again;

and about as good as new, too; for of course the salt water preserves

them.

CHAPTER V.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as

if she had laid an asteroid.

—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 11. In this world we often make mistakes of judgment.

We do not as a rule get out of them sound and whole, but sometimes we do.

At dinner yesterday evening-present, a mixture of Scotch, English,

American, Canadian, and Australasian folk—a discussion broke out about

the pronunciation of certain Scottish words. This was private ground,

and the non-Scotch nationalities, with one exception, discreetly kept

still. But I am not discreet, and I took a hand. I didn't know anything

about the subject, but I took a hand just to have something to do. At

that moment the word in dispute was the word three. One Scotchman was

claiming that the peasantry of Scotland pronounced it three, his

adversaries claimed that they didn't—that they pronounced it 'thraw'.

The solitary Scot was having a sultry time of it, so I thought I would

enrich him with my help. In my position I was necessarily quite

impartial, and was equally as well and as ill equipped to fight on the

one side as on the other. So I spoke up and said the peasantry

pronounced the word three, not thraw. It was an error of judgment.

There was a moment of astonished and ominous silence, then weather

ensued. The storm rose and spread in a surprising way, and I was snowed

under in a very few minutes. It was a bad defeat for me—a kind of

Waterloo. It promised to remain so, and I wished I had had better sense

than to enter upon such a forlorn enterprise. But just then I had a

saving thought—at least a thought that offered a chance. While the

storm was still raging, I made up a Scotch couplet, and then spoke up and

said:

“Very well, don't say any more. I confess defeat. I thought I knew, but

I see my mistake. I was deceived by one of your Scotch poets.”

“A Scotch poet! O come! Name him.”

“Robert Burns.”

It is wonderful the power of that name. These men looked doubtful—but

paralyzed, all the same. They were quite silent for a moment; then one

of them said—with the reverence in his voice which is always present in

a Scotchman's tone when he utters the name.

“Does Robbie Burns say—what does he say?”

“This is what he says:

'There were nae bairns but only three

—Ane at the breast, twa at the knee.'”

It ended the discussion. There was no man there profane enough, disloyal

enough, to say any word against a thing which Robert Burns had settled.

I shall always honor that great name for the salvation it brought me in

this time of my sore need.

It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with

confidence, stands a good chance to deceive. There are people who think

that honesty is always the best policy. This is a superstition; there

are times when the appearance of it is worth six of it.

We are moving steadily southward-getting further and further down under

the projecting paunch of the globe. Yesterday evening we saw the Big

Dipper and the north star sink below the horizon and disappear from our

world. No, not “we,” but they. They saw it—somebody saw it—and told

me about it. But it is no matter, I was not caring for those things, I

am tired of them, any way. I think they are well enough, but one doesn't

want them always hanging around. My interest was all in the Southern

Cross. I had never seen that. I had heard about it all my life, and it

was but natural that I should be burning to see it. No other

constellation makes so much talk. I had nothing against the Big Dipper

—and naturally couldn't have anything against it, since it is a citizen

of

our own sky, and the property of the United States—but I did want it to

move out of the way and give this foreigner a chance. Judging by the

size of the talk which the Southern Cross had made, I supposed it would

need a sky all to itself.

But that was a mistake. We saw the Cross to-night, and it is not large.

Not large, and not strikingly bright. But it was low down toward the

horizon, and it may improve when it gets up higher in the sky. It is

ingeniously named, for it looks just as a cross would look if it looked

like something else. But that description does not describe; it is too

vague, too general, too indefinite. It does after a fashion suggest a

cross — a cross that is out of repair—or out of drawing; not correctly

shaped. It is long, with a short cross-bar, and the cross-bar is canted

out of the straight line.

It consists of four large stars and one little one. The little one is

out of line and further damages the shape. It should have been placed at

the intersection of the stem and the cross-bar. If you do not draw an

imaginary line from star to star it does not suggest a cross—nor

anything in particular.

One must ignore the little star, and leave it out of the combination—it

confuses everything. If you leave it out, then you can make out of the

four stars a sort of cross—out of true; or a sort of kite—out of true;

or a sort of coffin-out of true.

Constellations have always been troublesome things to name. If you give

one of them a fanciful name, it will always refuse to live up to it; it

will always persist in not resembling the thing it has been named for.

Ultimately, to satisfy the public, the fanciful name has to be discarded

for a common-sense one, a manifestly descriptive one. The Great Bear

remained the Great Bear—and unrecognizable as such—for thousands of

years; and people complained about it all the time, and quite properly;

but as soon as it became the property of the United States, Congress

changed it to the Big Dipper, and now every body is satisfied, and there

is no more talk about riots. I would not change the Southern Cross to

the Southern Coffin, I would change it to the Southern Kite; for up there

in the general emptiness is the proper home of a kite, but not for

coffins and crosses and dippers. In a little while, now—I cannot

tell exactly how long it will be—the globe will belong to the

English-speaking race; and of course the skies also. Then the

constellations will be re-organized, and polished up, and re-named—the

most of them “Victoria,” I reckon, but this one will sail thereafter as

the Southern Kite, or go out of business. Several towns and things, here

and there, have been named for Her Majesty already.

In these past few days we are plowing through a mighty Milky Way of

islands. They are so thick on the map that one would hardly expect to

find room between them for a canoe; yet we seldom glimpse one. Once we

saw the dim bulk of a couple of them, far away, spectral and dreamy

things; members of the Horne-Alofa and Fortuna. On the larger one are

two rival native kings—and they have a time together. They are

Catholics; so are their people. The missionaries there are French

priests.

From the multitudinous islands in these regions the “recruits” for the

Queensland plantations were formerly drawn; are still drawn from them, I

believe. Vessels fitted up like old-time slavers came here and carried

off the natives to serve as laborers in the great Australian province.

In the beginning it was plain, simple man-stealing, as per testimony of

the missionaries. This has been denied, but not disproven. Afterward it

was forbidden by law to “recruit” a native without his consent, and

governmental agents were sent in all recruiting vessels to see that the

law was obeyed—which they did, according to the recruiting people; and

which they sometimes didn't, according to the missionaries. A man could

be lawfully recruited for a three-years term of service; he could

volunteer for another term if he so chose; when his time was up he could

return to his island. And would also have the means to do it; for the

government required the employer to put money in its hands for this

purpose before the recruit was delivered to him.

Captain Wawn was a recruiting ship-master during many years. From his

pleasant book one gets the idea that the recruiting business was quite

popular with the islanders, as a rule. And yet that did not make the

business wholly dull and uninteresting; for one finds rather frequent

little breaks in the monotony of it—like this, for instance:

“The afternoon of our arrival at Leper Island the schooner was lying

almost becalmed under the lee of the lofty central portion of the

island, about three-quarters of a mile from the shore. The boats

were in sight at some distance. The recruiter-boat had run into a

small nook on the rocky coast, under a high bank, above which stood

a solitary hut backed by dense forest. The government agent and

mate in the second boat lay about 400 yards to the westward.

“Suddenly we heard the sound of firing, followed by yells from the

natives on shore, and then we saw the recruiter-boat push out with a

seemingly diminished crew. The mate's boat pulled quickly up, took

her in tow, and presently brought her alongside, all her own crew

being more or less hurt. It seems the natives had called them into

the place on pretence of friendship. A crowd gathered about the

stern of the boat, and several fellows even got into her. All of a

sudden our men were attacked with clubs and tomahawks. The

recruiter escaped the first blows aimed at him, making play with his

fists until he had an opportunity to draw his revolver. 'Tom

Sayers,' a Mare man, received a tomahawk blow on the head which laid

the scalp open but did not penetrate his skull, fortunately. 'Bobby

Towns,' another Mare boatman, had both his thumbs cut in warding off

blows, one of them being so nearly severed from the hand that the

doctors had to finish the operation. Lihu, a Lifu boy, the

recruiter's special attendant, was cut and pricked in various

places, but nowhere seriously. Jack, an unlucky Tanna recruit, who

had been engaged to act as boatman, received an arrow through his

forearm, the head of which—apiece of bone seven or eight inches

long—was still in the limb, protruding from both sides, when the

boats returned. The recruiter himself would have got off scot-free

had not an arrow pinned one of his fingers to the loom of the

steering-oar just as they were getting off. The fight had been

short but sharp. The enemy lost two men, both shot dead.”

The truth is, Captain Wawn furnishes such a crowd of instances of fatal

encounters between natives and French and English recruiting-crews (for

the French are in the business for the plantations of New Caledonia),

that one is almost persuaded that recruiting is not thoroughly popular

among the islanders; else why this bristling string of attacks and

bloodcurdling slaughter? The captain lays it all to “Exeter Hall

influence.” But for the meddling philanthropists, the native fathers and

mothers would be fond of seeing their children carted into exile and now

and then the grave, instead of weeping about it and trying to kill the

kind recruiters.

CHAPTER VI.

He was as shy as a newspaper is when referring to its own merits.

—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

Captain Wawn is crystal-clear on one point: He does not approve of

missionaries. They obstruct his business. They make “Recruiting,” as he

calls it (“Slave-Catching,” as they call it in their frank way) a trouble

when it ought to be just a picnic and a pleasure excursion. The

missionaries have their opinion about the manner in which the Labor

Traffic is conducted, and about the recruiter's evasions of the law of

the Traffic, and about the traffic itself—and it is distinctly

uncomplimentary to the Traffic and to everything connected with it,

including the law for its regulation. Captain Wawn's book is of very

recent date; I have by me a pamphlet of still later date—hot from the

press, in fact—by Rev. Wm. Gray, a missionary; and the book and the

pamphlet taken together make exceedingly interesting reading, to my mind.

Interesting, and easy to understand—except in one detail, which I will

mention presently. It is easy to understand why the Queensland sugar

planter should want the Kanaka recruit: he is cheap. Very cheap, in

fact. These are the figures paid by the planter: £20 to the recruiter

for getting the Kanaka or “catching” him, as the missionary phrase goes;

£3 to the Queensland government for “superintending” the importation; £5

deposited with the Government for the Kanaka's passage home when his

three years are up, in case he shall live that long; about £25 to the

Kanaka himself for three years' wages and clothing; total payment for the

use of a man three years, £53; or, including diet, £60. Altogether, a

hundred dollars a year. One can understand why the recruiter is fond of

the business; the recruit costs him a few cheap presents (given to the

recruit's relatives, not to the recruit himself), and the recruit is

worth £20 to the recruiter when delivered in Queensland. All this is

clear enough; but

the thing that is not clear is, what there is about it all to persuade

the recruit. He is young and brisk; life at home in his beautiful island

is one lazy, long holiday to him; or if he wants to work he can turn out

a couple of bags of copra per week and sell it for four or five shillings

a bag. In Queensland he must get up at dawn and work from eight to

twelve hours a day in the canefields—in a much hotter climate than he is

used to—and get less than four shillings a week for it.

I cannot understand his willingness to go to Queensland. It is a deep

puzzle to me. Here is the explanation, from the planter's point of view;

at least I gather from the missionary's pamphlet that it is the

planter's:

“When he comes from his home he is a savage, pure and simple. He

feels no shame at his nakedness and want of adornment. When he

returns home he does so well dressed, sporting a Waterbury watch,

collars, cuffs, boots, and jewelry. He takes with him one or more

boxes—[“Box” is English for trunk.]—well filled with clothing, a

musical instrument or two, and perfumery and other articles of

luxury he has learned to appreciate.”

For just one moment we have a seeming flash of comprehension of, the

Kanaka's reason for exiling himself: he goes away to acquire

civilization. Yes, he was naked and not ashamed, now he is clothed and

knows how to be ashamed; he was unenlightened; now he has a Waterbury

watch; he was unrefined, now he has jewelry, and something to make him

smell good; he was a nobody, a provincial, now he has been to far

countries and can show off.

It all looks plausible—for a moment. Then the missionary takes hold of

this explanation and pulls it to pieces, and dances on it, and damages it

beyond recognition.

“Admitting that the foregoing description is the average one, the

average sequel is this: The cuffs and collars, if used at all, are

carried off by youngsters, who fasten them round the leg, just below

the knee, as ornaments. The Waterbury, broken and dirty, finds its

way to the trader, who gives a trifle for it; or the inside is taken

out, the wheels strung on a thread and hung round the neck. Knives,

axes, calico, and handkerchiefs are divided among friends, and there

is hardly one of these apiece. The boxes, the keys often lost on

the road home, can be bought for 2s. 6d. They are to be seen

rotting outside in almost any shore village on Tanna. (I speak of

what I have seen.) A returned Kanaka has been furiously angry with

me because I would not buy his trousers, which he declared were just

my fit. He sold them afterwards to one of my Aniwan teachers for

9d. worth of tobacco—a pair of trousers that probably cost him 8s.

or 10s. in Queensland. A coat or shirt is handy for cold weather.

The white handkerchiefs, the 'senet' (perfumery), the umbrella, and

perhaps the hat, are kept. The boots have to take their chance, if

they do not happen to fit the copra trader. 'Senet' on the hair,

streaks of paint on the face, a dirty white handkerchief round the

neck, strips of turtle shell in the ears, a belt, a sheath and

knife, and an umbrella constitute the rig of returned Kanaka at home

the day after landing.”

A hat, an umbrella, a belt, a neckerchief. Otherwise stark naked. All

in a day the hard-earned “civilization” has melted away to this. And

even these perishable things must presently go. Indeed, there is but a

single detail of his civilization that can be depended on to stay by him:

according to the missionary, he has learned to swear. This is art, and

art is long, as the poet says.

In all countries the laws throw light upon the past. The Queensland law

for the regulation of the Labor Traffic is a confession. It is a

confession that the evils charged by the missionaries upon the traffic

had existed in the past, and that they still existed when the law was

made. The missionaries make a further charge: that the law is evaded by

the recruiters, and that the Government Agent sometimes helps them to do

it. Regulation 31 reveals two things: that sometimes a young fool of a

recruit gets his senses back, after being persuaded to sign away his

liberty for three years, and dearly wants to get out of the engagement

and stay at home with his own people; and that threats, intimidation, and

force are used to keep him on board the recruiting-ship, and to hold him

to his contract. Regulation 31 forbids these coercions. The law

requires that he shall be allowed to go free; and another clause of it

requires the recruiter to set him ashore—per boat, because of the

prevalence of sharks. Testimony from Rev. Mr. Gray:

“There are 'wrinkles' for taking the penitent Kanaka. My first

experience of the Traffic was a case of this kind in 1884. A vessel

anchored just out of sight of our station, word was brought to me

that some boys were stolen, and the relatives wished me to go and

get them back. The facts were, as I found, that six boys had

recruited, had rushed into the boat, the Government Agent informed

me. They had all 'signed'; and, said the Government Agent, 'on

board they shall remain.' I was assured that the six boys were of

age and willing to go. Yet on getting ready to leave the ship I

found four of the lads ready to come ashore in the boat! This I

forbade. One of them jumped into the water and persisted in coming

ashore in my boat. When appealed to, the Government Agent suggested

that we go and leave him to be picked up by the ship's boat, a

quarter mile distant at the time!”

The law and the missionaries feel for the repentant recruit—and

properly, one may be permitted to think, for he is only a youth and

ignorant and persuadable to his hurt—but sympathy for him is not kept in

stock by the recruiter. Rev. Mr. Gray says:

“A captain many years in the traffic explained to me how a penitent

could betaken. 'When a boy jumps overboard we just take a boat and

pull ahead of him, then lie between him and the shore. If he has

not tired himself swimming, and passes the boat, keep on heading him

in this way. The dodge rarely fails. The boy generally tires of

swimming, gets into the boat of his own accord, and goes quietly on

board.”

Yes, exhaustion is likely to make a boy quiet. If the distressed boy had

been the speaker's son, and the captors savages, the speaker would have

been surprised to see how differently the thing looked from the new point

of view; however, it is not our custom to put ourselves in the other

person's place. Somehow there is something pathetic about that

disappointed young savage's resignation. I must explain, here, that in

the traffic dialect, “boy” does not always mean boy; it means a youth

above sixteen years of age. That is by Queensland law the age of

consent, though it is held that recruiters allow themselves some latitude

in guessing at ages.

Captain Wawn of the free spirit chafes under the annoyance of “cast-iron

regulations.” They and the missionaries have poisoned his life. He

grieves for the good old days, vanished to come no more. See him weep;

hear him cuss between the lines!

“For a long time we were allowed to apprehend and detain all

deserters who had signed the agreement on board ship, but the

'cast-iron' regulations of the Act of 1884 put a stop to that,

allowing the Kanaka to sign the agreement for three years' service,

travel about in the ship in receipt of the regular rations, cadge

all he could, and leave when he thought fit, so long as he did not

extend his pleasure trip to Queensland.”

Rev. Mr. Gray calls this same restrictive cast-iron law a “farce.” “There

is as much cruelty and injustice done to natives by acts that are legal

as by deeds unlawful. The regulations that exist are unjust and

inadequate—unjust and inadequate they must ever be.” He furnishes his

reasons for his position, but they are too long for reproduction here.

However, if the most a Kanaka advantages himself by a three-years course

in civilization in Queensland, is a necklace and an umbrella and a showy

imperfection in the art of swearing, it must be that all the profit of

the traffic goes to the white man. This could be twisted into a

plausible argument that the traffic ought to be squarely abolished.

However, there is reason for hope that that can be left alone to achieve

itself. It is claimed that the traffic will depopulate its sources of

supply within the next twenty or thirty years. Queensland is a very

healthy place for white people—death-rate 12 in 1,000 of the population

—but the Kanaka death-rate is away above that. The vital statistics for

1893 place it at 52; for 1894 (Mackay district), 68. The first six

months of the Kanaka's exile are peculiarly perilous for him because of

the rigors of the new climate. The death-rate among the new men has

reached as high as 180 in the 1,000. In the Kanaka's native home his

death-rate is 12 in time of peace, and 15 in time of war. Thus exile to

Queensland—with the opportunity to acquire civilization, an umbrella,

and a pretty poor quality of profanity—is twelve times as deadly for him

as war. Common Christian charity, common humanity, does seem to require,

not only that these people be returned to their homes, but that war,

pestilence, and famine be introduced among them for their preservation.

Concerning these Pacific isles and their peoples an eloquent prophet

spoke long years ago—five and fifty years ago. In fact, he spoke a

little too early. Prophecy is a good line of business, but it is full of

risks. This prophet was the Right Rev. M. Russell, LL.D., D.C.L., of

Edinburgh:

“Is the tide of civilization to roll only to the foot of the Rocky

Mountains, and is the sun of knowledge to set at last in the waves

of the Pacific? No; the mighty day of four thousand years is

drawing to its close; the sun of humanity has performed its destined

course; but long ere its setting rays are extinguished in the west,

its ascending beams have glittered on the isles of the eastern seas

. . . . And now we see the race of Japhet setting forth to

people the isles, and the seeds of another Europe and a second

England sown in the regions of the sun. But mark the words of the

prophecy: 'He shall dwell in the tents of Shem, and Canaan shall be

his servant.' It is not said Canaan shall be his slave. To the

Anglo-Saxon race is given the scepter of the globe, but there is not

given either the lash of the slave-driver or the rack of the

executioner. The East will not be stained with the same atrocities

as the West; the frightful gangrene of an enthralled race is not to

mar the destinies of the family of Japhet in the Oriental world;

humanizing, not destroying, as they advance; uniting with, not

enslaving, the inhabitants with whom they dwell, the British race

may,” etc., etc.

And he closes his vision with an invocation from Thomson:

“Come, bright Improvement! on the car of Time,

And rule the spacious world from clime to clime.”

Very well, Bright Improvement has arrived, you see, with her

civilization, and her Waterbury, and her umbrella, and her third-quality

profanity, and her humanizing-not-destroying machinery, and her

hundred-and-eighty death-rate, and everything is going along just as

handsome!

But the prophet that speaks last has an advantage over the pioneer in the

business. Rev. Mr. Gray says:

“What I am concerned about is that we as a Christian nation should

wipe out these races to enrich ourselves.”

And he closes his pamphlet with a grim Indictment which is as eloquent in

its flowerless straightforward English as is the hand-painted rhapsody of

the early prophet:

“My indictment of the Queensland-Kanaka Labor Traffic is this

“1. It generally demoralizes and always impoverishes the Kanaka,

deprives him of his citizenship, and depopulates the islands fitted

to his home.

“2. It is felt to lower the dignity of the white agricultural

laborer in Queensland, and beyond a doubt it lowers his wages there.

“3. The whole system is fraught with danger to Australia and the

islands on the score of health.

“4. On social and political grounds the continuance of the

Queensland Kanaka Labor Traffic must be a barrier to the true

federation of the Australian colonies.

“5. The Regulations under which the Traffic exists in Queensland are

inadequate to prevent abuses, and in the nature of things they must

remain so.

“6. The whole system is contrary to the spirit and doctrine of the

Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Gospel requires us to help the weak,

but the Kanaka is fleeced and trodden down.

“7. The bed-rock of this Traffic is that the life and liberty of a

black man are of less value than those of a white man. And a

Traffic that has grown out of 'slave-hunting' will certainly remain

to the end not unlike its origin.”

CHAPTER VII.

Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.

—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

From Diary:—For a day or two we have been plowing among an invisible

vast wilderness of islands, catching now and then a shadowy glimpse of a

member of it. There does seem to be a prodigious lot of islands this

year; the map of this region is freckled and fly-specked all over with

them. Their number would seem to be uncountable. We are moving among

the Fijis now—224 islands and islets in the group. In front of us, to

the west, the wilderness stretches toward Australia, then curves upward

to New Guinea, and still up and up to Japan; behind us, to the east, the

wilderness stretches sixty degrees across the wastes of the Pacific;

south of us is New Zealand. Somewhere or other among these myriads Samoa

is concealed, and not discoverable on the map. Still, if you wish to go

there, you will have no trouble about finding it if you follow the

directions given by Robert Louis Stevenson to Dr. Conan Doyle and to Mr.

J. M. Barrie. “You go to America, cross the continent to San Francisco,

and then it's the second turning to the left.” To get the full flavor of

the joke one must take a glance at the map.

Wednesday, September 11.—Yesterday we passed close to an island or so,

and recognized the published Fiji characteristics: a broad belt of clean

white coral sand around the island; back of it a graceful fringe of

leaning palms, with native huts nestling cosily among the shrubbery at

their bases; back of these a stretch of level land clothed in tropic

vegetation; back of that, rugged and picturesque mountains. A detail

of the immediate foreground: a mouldering ship perched high up on a

reef-bench. This completes the composition, and makes the picture

artistically perfect.

In the afternoon we sighted Suva, the capital of the group, and threaded

our way into the secluded little harbor—a placid basin of brilliant blue

and green water tucked snugly in among the sheltering hills. A few ships

rode at anchor in it—one of them a sailing vessel flying the American

flag; and they said she came from Duluth! There's a journey! Duluth is

several thousand miles from the sea, and yet she is entitled to the proud

name of Mistress of the Commercial Marine of the United States of

America. There is only one free, independent, unsubsidized American ship

sailing the foreign seas, and Duluth owns it. All by itself that ship is

the American fleet. All by itself it causes the American name and power

to be respected in the far regions of the globe. All by itself it

certifies to the world that the most populous civilized nation, in the

earth has a just pride in her stupendous stretch of sea-front, and is

determined to assert and maintain her rightful place as one of the Great

Maritime Powers of the Planet. All by itself it is making foreign eyes

familiar with a Flag which they have not seen before for forty years,

outside of the museum. For what Duluth has done, in building, equipping,

and maintaining at her sole expense the American Foreign Commercial

Fleet, and in thus rescuing the American name from shame and lifting it

high for the homage of the nations, we owe her a debt of gratitude which

our hearts shall confess with quickened beats whenever her name is named

henceforth. Many national toasts will die in the lapse of time, but

while the flag flies and the Republic survives, they who live under their

shelter will still drink this one, standing and uncovered: Health and

prosperity to Thee, O Duluth, American Queen of the Alien Seas!

Row-boats began to flock from the shore; their crews were the first

natives we had seen. These men carried no overplus of clothing, and this

was wise, for the weather was hot. Handsome, great dusky men they were,

muscular, clean-limbed, and with faces full of character and

intelligence. It would be hard to find their superiors anywhere among

the dark races, I should think.

Everybody went ashore to look around, and spy out the land, and have that

luxury of luxuries to sea-voyagers—a land-dinner. And there we saw more

natives: Wrinkled old women, with their flat mammals flung over their

shoulders, or hanging down in front like the cold-weather drip from the

molasses-faucet; plump and smily young girls, blithe and content, easy

and graceful, a pleasure to look at; young matrons, tall, straight,

comely, nobly built, sweeping by with chin up, and a gait incomparable

for unconscious stateliness and dignity; majestic young men—athletes for

build and muscle—clothed in a loose arrangement of dazzling white, with

bronze breast and bronze legs naked, and the head a cannon-swab of solid

hair combed straight out from the skull and dyed a rich brick-red. Only

sixty years ago they were sunk in darkness; now they have the bicycle.

We strolled about the streets of the white folks' little town, and around

over the hills by paths and roads among European dwellings and gardens

and plantations, and past clumps of hibiscus that made a body blink, the

great blossoms were so intensely red; and by and by we stopped to ask an

elderly English colonist a question or two, and to sympathize with him

concerning the torrid weather; but he was surprised, and said:

“This? This is not hot. You ought to be here in the summer time once.”

“We supposed that this was summer; it has the ear-marks of it. You could

take it to almost any country and deceive people with it. But if it

isn't summer, what does it lack?”

“It lacks half a year. This is mid-winter.”

I had been suffering from colds for several months, and a sudden change

of season, like this, could hardly fail to do me hurt. It brought on

another cold. It is odd, these sudden jumps from season to season. A

fortnight ago we left America in mid-summer, now it is midwinter; about a

week hence we shall arrive in Australia in the spring.

After dinner I found in the billiard-room a resident whom I had known

somewhere else in the world, and presently made some new friends and

drove with them out into the country to visit his Excellency the head of

the State, who was occupying his country residence, to escape the rigors

of the winter weather, I suppose, for it was on breezy high ground and

much more comfortable than the lower regions, where the town is, and

where the winter has full swing, and often sets a person's hair afire

when he takes off his hat to bow. There is a noble and beautiful view of

ocean and islands and castellated peaks from the governor's high-placed

house, and its immediate surroundings lie drowsing in that dreamy repose

and serenity which are the charm of life in the Pacific Islands.

One of the new friends who went out there with me was a large man, and I

had been admiring his size all the way. I was still admiring it as he

stood by the governor on the veranda, talking; then the Fijian butler

stepped out there to announce tea, and dwarfed him. Maybe he did not

quite dwarf him, but at any rate the contrast was quite striking.

Perhaps that dark giant was a king in a condition of political

suspension. I think that in the talk there on the veranda it was said

that in Fiji, as in the Sandwich Islands, native kings and chiefs are of

much grander size and build than the commoners. This man was clothed in

flowing white vestments, and they were just the thing for him; they

comported well with his great stature and his kingly port and dignity.

European clothes would have degraded him and made him commonplace. I

know that, because they do that with everybody that wears them.