A VISIT TO APIA
On the 9th of June we sailed from Pago Pago for Apia, planning to
return at the end of a week in order to be present at an official
flag-raising which our patriotic friend, Chief Mauga, was preparing
for. We found the breeze veering and uncertain as we beat out of the
harbour late in the afternoon, but ample working room and the absence
of strong currents in the entrance to this splendid bay made the
direction of the wind of little moment. Beyond the shelter of the
harbour walls the waves, driven by an unusually heavy Trade, were
running tumultuously from the southeast in frothy hummocks of cotton
wool. For a couple of miles, close-hauled, we stood straight out from
the land, the yacht one moment burying her nose in a malignant curl
of green, and the next tossing it skyward while a ton or two of solid
water went bounding back along the deck and gurgled hoarsely out
through the overworked scuppers. When the offing was sufficient sheets
were slacked off and we headed down the coast on a broad reach, making
good speed in spite of heavy rollings in the wrench of the quartering
seas.
The west blazed for a few moments as the sun went down, to be quickly
quenched by a curtain of black cloud that was thrown across the heavens
in a final shifting of the scenery for the most spectacular exhibition of
marine pyrotechnics that is to be seen in the whole length and breadth
of the Seven Seas--a June night assault by the Pacific upon the "Iron
Bound Coast" of Tutuila.
The "Iron Bound Coast" opens up beyond the first point west of the
entrance to Pago Pago Bay and runs up the island for a half-dozen miles
or more, squarely across the path of advancing lines of seas that have
been charging to the attack and gathering weight, impetus and arrogance
in a thousand miles of unbroken rush before the scourges of the
Southeast Trade. Their repulse is sudden, sharp and decisive, and the
beetle-browed, black-ribbed cliffs accomplish it without a change of
expression. The waves have been beating their heads to pieces against
these same frowning, impassive barriers for a million years, more or
less, and yet they are never able to overcome their surprise, never
stoical enough to hide their resentment, never capable of restraining
their expostulations. And what floods of supplications, what varieties
of protests they pour out! If you approach near enough, following the
thundering crash against the cliff, they appeal to you from where they
fall with sobs of anguish and groans of pain; if you gaze from afar
they beckon you with high-flung distress flags of white foam, and
if you pass in the darkness they signal their despair with ghostly
bonfires of glowing spume and phantom rockets of phosphorescent
spray.
It was such a display that we were treated to on the night of the 9th
of June, and under a fortunate combination of circumstances that made
it especially impressive. The seas about the Samoas are extraordinarily
prolific of the animalculæ whose presence makes sea water
phosphorescent, and in May and June occur their periods of greatest
activity. That this night was moonless and heavily overcast made the
conditions especially favourable. Daylight and twilight had passed in
swift transition, and the yacht was sailing in inky darkness as she
rounded the point and opened up the Iron Bound Coast. For a moment
the darkness held, and through it the imminent loom of the island was
only a blur of darker opacity against the starless void above. Then a
great splash of flame burst forth, and in an instant more the coast was
picked out in lines of liquid fire, the reflections from which bathed the
whole mountainside in fluttering waves of ghostly blue light. Here a
great sea struck and erupted like a volcano set-piece, spreading out
fan-wise and falling back in lines of vivid light; there a big blow-hole
exploded in thunderous geysers of flame, and close by a smaller vent
projected, as from the nozzle of a hose, a slender, gleaming stream of
liquid fire. In places, where the rock ribs of the cliff broke evenly,
the flashes burst out in regular spurts of pale flame like those from
the broadside of a warship, and again, where submerged rocks and
crooked elbows threw one wave back upon another, there appeared great
welters of green light that churned and bubbled and swirled like liquid
lava.
Like the film of a biograph the vivid panorama of flame slipped past,
and by nine o'clock the ridge of Sail Rock Point had interposed and
blotted out the last of it. Beyond, the island broke into hollow,
smooth-beached bays, where submerged reefs clipped the claws of the
breakers and dissolved them in broad patches of faint luminosity before
they reached the shore. At ten o'clock, in order not to reach Apia
before morning, jib and mainsail were taken in and the night run out
under foresail and forestay-sail.
The smooth, green hills of Upolou were close at hand to the southwest
at daybreak, and at seven o'clock, with jack hoisted for a pilot, we
were off the entrance of Apia harbour. The passage to the bay is broad
and straight, but, as that port was German at the time, the taking of
a pilot was compulsory. That functionary came out promptly in response
to our signal, and a half hour later left the yacht at anchor a quarter
of a mile off the beach and a hundred yards from where, a broken-backed
frame of rusting steel, the wreck of the ill-fated German warship,
_Adler_, lay high up on the coral reef, just as it had been left by the
waves in the great hurricane of 1889.
We heard from eye-witnesses the story of that hurricane when we went
ashore in the afternoon; of how the powerful British _Calliope_,
cheered by the doomed sailors in the shrouds of the American ships,
forced her way in the teeth of the storm out through the passage to
safety; of the destruction of the _Olga_ and _Adler_ and _Eber_, and
_Trenton_ and _Vandalia_ and _Nipsic_; of the frightful loss of life;
of the heroism of the natives in risking their lives in the mountainous
surf and treacherous back-wash to save their late enemies, and a
hundred other things closely or remotely bearing on that remarkable
disaster. Told by men to whom the memory of the storm was still fresh
and clear, with the theatre of the great tragedy opening before us,
and countless souvenirs of one kind or another at hand to crystallize
interest, the recitals were graphic in the extreme and made deep
impression upon us of the _Lurline_, who had also had some experience
of the way of the sea in its harsher moods.
At evening as we came down to the landing for our boat the Commodore's
gaze wandered from the great pile of riven steel on the reef to where
the yacht, a slender sliver of silver, swung slowly to her anchor in
the ebbing tide. At that moment the last rays of the setting sun,
striking through the gaunt ribs of the _Adler's_ sinister skeleton,
threw a frame of black shadows across the water to rest for an instant
in dark blotches on _Lurline's_ snowy side and break the gleaming lines
of her standing rigging into rows of detached bars floating in space.
Then the sun dipped behind the mountain and the outlines of reef and
wreck and schooner began dimming under a veil of purple mist.
"I don't go much on signs myself," said the Commodore musingly as he
seated himself in the stern-sheets of the waiting boat and took the
yoke lines, "but I suppose there are a good many sailors who would
worry about a coincidence like that. Funny thing, too, that just as
it happened I was trying to figure out what kind of a chance our poor
little _Lurline_, without steam or power of any description, would
stand in a storm that could throw a ship like the _Adler_ high and dry
out of the water. And--hurricane season is coming on, you know--I'm
still wondering a little, that's all."
Strangely enough, it was written that the question should, in a
measure, be answered within the fortnight, though the demonstration,
fortunately, was not to take place in a reef-encompassed harbour.
The Bay of Apia, like that of Papeete, is a typical South Pacific
harbour; an open roadstead on the leeward side of the island, with a reef
cutting it off from the sea and giving good protection in ordinary
weathers. The only reason that there have not been other great disasters
like that of 1889 is because there has never again chanced to be so many
large ships in the harbour when a hurricane came along. The hurricanes
still blow up every now and then, and, just as in that historic storm,
all the shipping that cannot go to sea goes ashore. The bottom of Apia
Bay is almost as thickly littered with trading schooner wreckage as with
pink coral.
[Illustration: _Lurline_ AT ANCHOR IN BAY OF APIA, SAMOA
(At the summit of the mountain in the background Robert
Louis Stevenson is buried)]
[Illustration: "THE LONDON MISSIONARY SOCIETY STEAMER
_JOHN WILLIAMS_ LAY NEAR US"]
The town of Apia, though picturesque--what South Pacific village is not
so?--has scarcely the fascinating charm of Papeete with its crumbling
sea-wall, its avenues of giant trees and its wealth of traditions.
The business section of the town consists of a half mile straggle of
galvanized iron stores following the line of the beach road, with
numerous copra warehouses and several stubby piers breaking the sweep
of the foreshore. The houses of the natives are scattered about through
the cocotrees on the flat, while the European residences, bright blocks
of white, dot the lower slopes of the mountain beyond. Government
House, cool, spacious, inviting, stands apart from the others in the
midst of its well-kept grounds, and higher still, through rifts of
the encompassing verdure, glimpses may be had of the broad porticos
of Villa Vailima, the old home of Robert Louis Stevenson, the loved
_Tusitala_ of the Samoans.
Towering above Vailima to the north is an abrupt-sided mountain,
running up the slopes of which your glass reveals the scars of a
roughly-graded path. Straight up it goes, without zigzag or spiral,
until it disappears in the mists about the cloud-wreathed summit.
If there were poles, it might be the clearing for a telegraph line
to a signal station; if it was broader, a firebreak. It is neither of
these utilitarian things, however, but the pathway to a shrine. Up that
precarious flood-torn and creeper-hung foot-way was borne with tender
care the man who understood and loved Samoa and the Samoans as no
other has understood and loved them. You have discovered the path to
Stevenson's tomb, for up there where the shifting draperies of the
clouds have blown back to show a dull blur of grey through the wall of
green that fronts the skyline, is where the "sailor home from the sea"
is lying on the spot that he chose for his final resting place.
It is fitting that the way to a shrine should be a hard one, for to the
man filled with the true passion of pilgrimage the pangs of the journey
are a part of the reward for making it. The one who loves his Stevenson
and his South Seas, will also love every stone upon which he stumbles,
every creeper that rasps his cheek, every throb of his overworked
heart, every ache in his racked muscles in that soul and body-trying
climb to the summit of the mountain where the Master sleeps. I had
seen pilgrims of one kind or another stumbling on their way many times
previous to that stormy afternoon that I climbed the heights behind
Vailima, but always without comprehending what it was that urged them
forward. That day knowledge came, and when, in the year that followed,
I met Nepalese and Burman plodding the dusty river road to Buddh-Gaya,
or Turk and Arab trudging south from Damascus on the last leg of the
Mecca Hadj, it was to greet them with the sympathetic smile that said,
"I, too, know why."
Of the Great Ones of the earth, only Cecil John Rhodes, looking forth
"Across the world he won--
The granite of the ancient North--
Great spaces washed with sun,"
sleeps as appropriately surrounded as does Stevenson. But _Tusitala_--I
have seen the tears start to the eyes of the great Chiefs, Mataafa and
Seumanu, at the mention of that name--has also the world he won at
his feet, while on his tomb are words unparalleled in fitness by any
epitaph ever graven, a verse as deathless as the fame of the gentle
soul that sleeps beneath. Stevenson's self-composed epitaph, read from
a printed page, is an unblemished jewel of verse, no more; read from
the bronze tablet of the tomb by the climber of the Heights, to the
requiems of the Trade-wind in the trees and the mutter of the distant
surf, it is as though breathed by the spirit of the Master himself.
"Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and glad did I die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
'Here he lies where he longed to be--
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.'"
As a colonial experiment German Samoa--the islands of Upolou, Savaii,
Manono and Apolima--was not a startling success. During the first
four years of the militant Teutonic government disaffection became
rife among the natives, agricultural production fell off and trade
languished. Realizing that a change of policy was imperative, Emperor
William sent out to Apia one of the most distinguished statesmen and
scholars in the Fatherland, Dr. Solf, a former member of the Reichstag,
and under his wise régime much of the lost ground was regained. As
far as might be in a German colony, the new Governor endeavoured to
follow the plan so successfully adopted by the Americans in Tutuila,
that of exercising a gentle supervision over the natives, directing them
in matters of insular importance and leaving the Chiefs supreme in
village affairs. This policy--the only one that can ever be successful
with the high-spirited, liberty-loving Samoans--will be good as long as
it lasts, but unfortunately it will take a man of no less breadth of
character, humanity and imagination than Dr. Solf to maintain it, and
such a governor is hardly likely to be forthcoming.
As the administrator of actual colonies, Germany's problem in her
Samoan possessions is a more difficult one than that of the United
States, which only exercises a protectorate over Tutuila and Manua.
With extensive copra and cacao plantations under exploitation, German
subjects in Samoa will never cease to chafe under the necessity of
importing practically all of their labour from the Solomons, New
Hebrides and other islands to the west, when there are thirty or forty
thousand Samoans close at hand who spend their days in dreaming and
their nights in singing and dancing. Of course, the Samoans never have
performed regular labour, and can never be brought to do so, a fact,
however, which the energetic and industrious Teuton finds it hard to
understand. A governor of less force and breadth of vision than Dr.
Solf will find it difficult to withstand the pressure of the planting
interests for the inauguration of a policy that will, in some manner,
make the Samoan more productive. One does not need a lifetime of
acquaintance with the Samoan to know that the first step in this
direction will mark the beginning of an era of discontent that nothing
but a re-establishment of the broad, human régime of Dr. Solf can bring
to an end.
Dr. Solf was the Governor of German Samoa at the time of our visit to
Apia, and our meetings with him were among the pleasantest features
of our stay. We found him all that our naval friends in Tutuila had
claimed, quite the biggest figure among South Pacific executives,
and it was with no surprise and much pleasure that we heard of his
subsequent elevation to the post of Colonial Secretary, next to that
of Prime Minister the most important portfolio in the gift of Emperor
William.[1]
Outside of his political activities, Dr. Solf had long been prominent in
German yachting circles, and on one of his calls aboard _Lurline_ he
appeared in the uniform of an officer of the Kiel Yacht Club.
An especially pleasing coincidence of our visit to Apia was the arrival
there, on the day following our own, of the auxiliary schooner yacht,
_La Carabine_, of Melbourne, with her owner, Sir Rupert Clark, and
his brother, Lieutenant Ralph Clark, R.N., aboard. Sir Rupert is the
eldest son of the famous philanthropist, the late Sir William Clark,
and in addition to being the richest man in the Commonwealth and its
most prominent racing figure, is also distinguished as being one of the
only two Australian baronets. His brother, Lieutenant Clark, for some
years the Navigating Officer of the flagship of the British Australian
Squadron, resigned his commission to sail _La Carabine_ on the cruise
on which she was then embarked.
_La Carabine_ we found to be a stoutly built schooner of fifty tons'
register constructed in Auckland especially for sailing in Polynesia
and Micronesia. Her heavy channels and running bowsprit marked her
at once as British, while her stubby foremasts and huge lifeboats
suggested the trader rather than the yacht. She was equipped with
gasoline engines capable of driving her five knots an hour in a smooth
sea. The yacht took her name from Sir Rupert's famous racer,
_La Carabine_, winner of the classic Melbourne Cup of a year or two
previously.
The Clarks had already visited several ports in the Tongan group, and
from Samoa were planning to cruise for some months among the wild
and little-known islands of the New Hebrides, Solomons and New
Britain archipelagos. In many of these islands money has no value
whatever, a contingency which had been provided against by stocking
a barter room on _La Carabine_ similar to those of the regular traders.
Here were carried prints, knives, guns, jewelry, tinned meats and
tobacco, which were to be exchanged for pigs, fish, fowls and curios.
Nor was the matter of defence neglected. Just forward of the house a
swivel had been set in the deck and the installation completed to greet
the first "cutting-out" party with a hail of bullets from a
vicious-looking little Maxim set thereon. The gun was served by an old
man-of-war's man shipped with the crew for that purpose. We never heard
whether or not occasion ever arose for its serious use. At any rate, as
Clark put it, the fact that so many labour schooners had been attacked
recently made its presence "a comfort if not a necessity."
A number of very pleasant affairs were arranged for the joint pleasure
of the two yachting parties, especially enjoyable proving picnics at
Vailima and Papa-seea, the Sliding Rock, teas on several of the large
plantations and at the Consulates, a dinner at Government House,
and a couple of _siva-sivas_ at Chief Seamanu-Tafu's. The latter were
directed by the chief's daughter, Vau, the _taupo_ of Apia, a young
woman of fine face and figure and of considerable quickness of wit
as well, if the manner in which she put our good friend Clark to the
blush one afternoon may be taken as a criterion.
Vau and her handmaidens were off to tea on _La Carabine_, preliminary
to a swimming party at Papa-seea. Governor Solf, Dr. Clarence
Fahnstock, of the New York Yacht Club, on his way home from the Tongas,
and a couple of us from the _Lurline_ were also present. The talk
turned to the reforms, political, economic and industrial, lately
instituted in New Zealand. Clark, in expatiating on the stringent
prohibition laws in force in that colony, made the statement that a
man once convicted of drunkenness in a New Zealand hotel forfeited his
right to register at any other hostelry in the country. Upon hearing
which Vau looked up from the fashion supplement of a Sydney illustrated
weekly in which she had been engrossed and, with just enough twinkle in
her dark eyes to belie the innocence of expression that sat upon the
rest of her face, cooed sweetly, "So you have now to stay with frens,
Sir Ruper', when you go Nu-zelan?"
And Clark, the suave, the debonair, the cool-headed; Clark, for years
the endlessly-angled-for catch of two hemispheres; Clark, who took the
coveted Melbourne Cup without the flicker of an eyelash, blushed and
stammered like a débutante in an effort to explain. Finally, judging
the temper of the company unpropitious, he gave up his ill-advised
effort to save his reputation and took his revenge an hour later by
pushing Vau, with all her finery, over the brink of Papa-seea.
[Illustration: MAID OF HONOUR TO THE _Taupo_ OF APIA]
[Illustration: A SAMOAN SUNSET]
The London Missionary Society steamer, _John Williams_, came in and
lay near us for a few days before we left Apia. John Williams was the
pioneer missionary of the famous London society in the South Pacific,
and since his death in the early years of the last century at the hands
of New Hebridean natives every ship of that organization has borne his
name. For more than fifty years these were schooners, and as each was
piled up on a reef in turn, its name, with the number next in line
affixed, was passed on to its successor. This continued until steamers
finally supplanted schooners, when the serial system of nomenclature
was dropped. The present _John Williams_, the thirtieth or thereabouts,
of the name, is a Clyde-built steamer of something over 3,000 tons.
It has unusually graceful lines and is able to do better than sixteen
knots an hour if required. Its principal duties are the provisioning
of the mission stations scattered throughout the southwest Pacific
and the carrying on of a most lucrative trading business which the
Society--fighting the devil with fire--carries on in opposition to its
arch enemies, the real traders.
_John Williams_ proved a most unsociable craft, sullenly refusing
to meet any of the timidly tentative advances of either of the
visiting yachts. The solemn, black-coated figures in the stern sheets
of its boats would pass _La Carabine_ and _Lurline_ with averted
eyes, evidently classifying us, with all the rest of the whites, as
instruments of the world, the flesh and the devil sent to demoralize
their work with the simple native.
Before leaving Apia we discharged our Chino-Malayan cook, Harrick Siah,
whom we had signed on at Honolulu, shipping in his place one Andrew
Clark, a Jamaican mulatto. Clark had married a Samoan girl the week
previously, only to have her elope the next day with the native
missionary who performed the ceremony, taking with her the
accumulated savings of the unlucky cook's last year of voyaging.
Being thus cast "on the beach," as they put it in the South Seas,
nothing was left for him but to ship again. Now it chanced that Siah,
who was but five feet two in height, had been able to walk erect in
the galley's five feet three of headroom, as had also his diminutive
Japanese predecessor; Clark's five feet nine required something more
than six inches of reefing to swing in the clear, and even then his
head ran afoul of occasional hooks and pipes and other projections.
The poor fellow stuck manfully to his job, but within a fortnight the
reef-points of his neck became so firmly tied that, even after he had
been an hour or two ashore, we would see him on the streets or in
the market with hunched shoulders, drawn-in neck and a furtive
look of fear in his shifting eyes.
On June 13th we received word that Chief Mauga's flag-raising at Pago
Pago, a function at which we had promised to endeavour to be present,
had been scheduled for one o'clock of the 15th, in order that the
officers and men of the _Wheeling_, which was to sail that afternoon
for Bremerton, might participate. This necessitated our leaving on
the 14th, just as we were getting comfortably settled down to a full
enjoyment of hospitable Apia. A whistling east wind on the starboard
beam carried us out of the passage at a rattling gait, but only to come
squarely ahead as we trimmed in for Tutuila. All afternoon, against a
rising wind and sea, we sailed in short tacks up the coast of Upolou,
and by nine P. M., with double reefs in mainsail and foresail, just
managed to clear Albatross Rock, five miles east of the windward end
of the island.
At daybreak Tutuila showed dimly, a point forward of the port beam.
Reefs were shaken out at eight o'clock, but the tiresome beating
continued until we had doubled Sail Rock Point at one-thirty. From
there we made fair wind of it down the coast and into the harbour.
When the anchor was let go at four o'clock Mauga's "Stars and Stripes"
had been flapping in the breeze for close to three hours, and the
_Wheeling_, with a 300-foot "Homeward Bound" pennant streaming from
her main, had just cast off her mooring lines and was backing into the
stream.
[1] I have left the three preceding paragraphs as originally written.
The presence of a man of Dr. Solf's outstanding ability in such
comparatively unimportant possessions as the German Samoas has always
been a good deal of a puzzle to me, though a possible reason for it
was suggested by a remark dropped by Frederick William, the late Crown
Prince, whom I met in the course of his visit to India in the autumn of
1911.
"Perhaps Apia is not so unimportant to us as you may think," he blurted
out impatiently when I told him it had always seemed strange to me
that Germany had kept a man of Cabinet calibre (Solf had recently
been recalled to Berlin to become Colonial Secretary) for a decade in
a colony which appeared to have but the slightest of political and
commercial prospects. "Or, at least, we are hopeful of developing a
considerable trade there in time," he added somewhat confusedly, as
though his first hasty words might have implied more than he intended.
But there is little doubt that that inadvertent implication pointed to
the truth. The Samoas, at the crossroads of the Southern Seas, may well
have been intended to become the seat of the German Pacific insular
empire when _Deutschland Ueber Alles_ had become an accomplished fact
in the rest of the world. It is easy to understand how the Junkers
of the Pan-German party may have deemed the blazing the way for such
a consummation a task not too small for the powers of the suave and
diplomatic Solf. The latter's broad humanitarianism (in which I
have never ceased to believe) can have had nothing to do with his
appointment. He was the only German colonial official I ever met who
appeared to have anything approaching the interest in the welfare of
the native population under him which one expects as a matter of course
in the Briton or American occupying a similar position.
Dr. Solf's later record will be readily recalled. Holding one or
another Cabinet portfolios during all of the war, he was Foreign
Minister at the time of the signing of the Armistice. At the present
moment he is being prominently mentioned as the first after-the-war
Ambassador to Washington. I can think of no one of his countrymen so
likely to fill acceptably what at best must be an incalculably trying
post.
L. R. F.