CHAPTER I

THE HEART OF THE PACIFIC

_The First Side of The Triangle_

1

... stared at the Pacific--and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise-- Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Exactly four centuries after the event immortalized by Keats, I outstripped Balboa's most fantastic dreams by setting out upon the Pacific and traversing the length and breadth of it. "It is a sight," we are told, "in beholding which for the first time any man would wish to be alone." I was. But whereas Balboa's desires were accomplished in having obtained sight of the Pacific, that achievement only whetted mine. He said:

You see here, gentlemen and children mine, how our desires are being accomplished, and the end of our labors. Of that we ought to be certain, for, as it has turned out true what King Comogre's son told of this sea to us, who never thought to see it, so I hold for certain that what he told us of there being incomparable treasures in it will be fulfilled. God and His blessed Mother who have assisted us, so that we should arrive here and behold this sea, will favor us that we may enjoy all that there is in it.

The story of how far he was so assisted is part of the tale of this book, for in all the wanderings which are the substance of my accomplishment I can recall having met with but a half-dozen of Balboa's kinsmen. Instead there are streaming backward and forward across the Pacific descendants of men Balboa hated and of others of whom he knew nothing.

Balboa was the first to see the ocean. He had left his men behind just as they were about to reach the peak from which he viewed it. But he was not the first to step upon its shores. He sent some of his men down, and of them one, Alonso Martin, was the first to have that pleasure. Martin dipped his sword dramatically into the brine and took possession of it all as far as his mind's eye could reach. Yet to none of the men was this vast hidden world more than a vision and a hope, and the accidental name with which Magellan later christened it seems, by virtue of the motives of gain which dominated these adventurers, anything but descriptive. To be pacific was not the way of the kings of Castile; nor, sad to say, is it the way of most of their followers.

What was it that Balboa took possession of in the name of his Castilian kings? Rather a courageous gamble, to say the least. The dramatic and fictional possibilities of such wholesale acquisition are illimitable. In the mid-Pacific were a million or more savage cannibals; in the far-Pacific, races with civilizations superior to his own. At that very time China was extending the Great Wall and keeping in repair the Grand Canal which had been built before Balboa's kings were chiefs. Japan was already a nation with arts and crafts, and a social state sufficiently developed to be an aggressive influence in the Oriental world, making inroads on Korea through piracy. Korea was powerful enough to force Japan to make amends. Four years after Balboa's discovery the Portuguese arrived in Canton and opened China for the first time to the European world. The Dutch were beginning to think of Java. It was hardly Balboa's plan to make of all these a little gift for his king: his act was but the customary flourish of discoverers in those days. Men who loved romance more than they loved reality were ready to wander over the unknown seas and rake in their discoveries for hire. Balboa, Magellan, Drake, roamed the seas out of sheer love of wind and sail. Many a man set forth in search of treasure never to be heard from again; some only to have their passage guessed by virtue of the signs of white blood in the faces of some of the natives. For two hundred years haphazard discoveries and national jealousies confused rather than enlightened the European world. But late in the eighteenth century, after a considerable lessening of interest in exploration, Captain James Cook began that memorable series of voyages which added more definite knowledge to the geographical and racial make-up of the South Seas than nearly all the other explorers put together. The growth of the scientific spirit and the improvement in navigation gave him the necessary impetus. Imbued with scientific interest, he went to observe the transit of Venus and to make close researches in the geography of the Pacific. But to George Vancouver falls the praise due to a constructive interest in the people whose lands he uncovered. Wherever he went he left fruits and domestic animals which contributed much to the happiness of the primitives, and probably laid the foundation for the future colonization of these scattered islands by Europeans.

Backward and forward across the Pacific through four centuries have moved the makers of this new Atlantis. First from round Cape Horn, steering for the setting sun, then from the Australian continent to the regions of Alaska, these shuttles of the ages have woven their fabric of the nations. Now the problem is, what is going to be done with it?

I suppose I was really no worse than most people in the matter of geography when I set forth on my venture. Though the Pacific had lain at my feet for two years, I seem to have had no definite notions of the "incomparable treasures" that lay therein. Japan was stored away in my mind as something to play with. Typee, the cannibal Marquesas--ah! there was something real and vigorous! Then the South Sea maidens! Ideal labor conditions in New Zealand! Australia was Botany Bay; the Philippines, the water cure. Confucius was confusion to me, but Lao-tsze, the great sage of China--in his philosophy I had found a meeting-ground for East and West.

But I was sizzling with curiosity. I wanted to bring within my own range of experience that "unplumbed, salt estranging sea" with its area of seventy million square miles, equivalent to "three Atlantics, seventy Mediterraneans," and--aside from the hundreds of millions of people round its shore--the seventy-odd millions within its bosom. Yet of the myths, the beliefs, the aspirations of these peoples, even the most knowing gave contradictory accounts, and curiosity was perforce my compass.

2

Something in a voyage westward across the Pacific gives one the sense of a great reunion; it is not a personal experience, but an historic sensation. One may have few incidents to relate, there may be only an occasional squall. But in place of events is an abstraction from world strife, a heading for the beginning of a cycle of existence--for Asia, the birthplace of the human race. The feeling is that of one making a tour of the universe which has lasted ten thousand centuries and is but at the moment nearing completion. For eons the movement has been a westward one. Races have succumbed to races in this westward reach for room. Pursuing the retreating glaciers, mankind snatched up each inch of land released, rushing wildly outward. After the birth of man there was a split, in which some men went westward and became Europeans, some eastward and became Asiatics. The Amerindians were the kick of that human explosion eastward which occurred some time during the Wurm ice age.

One cannot grasp the significance of the Pacific who crosses it too swiftly. Every mapped-out route, every guide-book must be laid aside, and schedules must cease to count. With half a world of water to traverse, its immensity becomes a reality only when one permits oneself to be wayward, with every whim a goal.

A fellow-passenger said to me, "My boss has given me two weeks' vacation."

"Mine has given me a lifetime," I answered.

In that mood I watched the _Lurline_ push its way into the San Francisco fogs and out through the fog-choked Golden Gate. The fogs stayed with us a space beyond and were gone, and the wide ocean lay in every direction roundabout us.

I was bound for Japan by relays. Unable to secure through passage to the Land of the Rising Sun, I did the next best thing and booked for Honolulu. There I planned to wait for some steamer with an unused berth that would take me to Kyoto, Japan, in time to attend the coronation of the Tenno, the crownless Emperor. After all, Honolulu was not such an unfavorable spot in which to prepare my soul for the august sight of emperor-worship on a grand scale, I thought.

And at last I was out upon the bosom of the Pacific, sailing without time limit or fixed plan, sailing where did Cook and Drake and Vancouver, and knowing virtually as little of what was about me as did they. Our ship became the axis round which wheeled the universe, and progress "a succession of days which is like one day." We went on and on, and still the circle was true. We moved, yet altered nothing. When the sky was overcast, the ocean paled in sympathy; when it was bright, the whitecapped, cool blue surface of the sea abandoned itself to the light. At night the cleavage between sea and sky was lost. Then we lost distance, altitude, depth, and even speed. All became illusive--a time for strong reason.

Then came a storm. The vast disk, the never-shifting circle shrank in the gathering mist. From the prow of the ship, where I loved most to be, the world became more lonely. The iron nose of the vessel burrowed into the blue-green water, thrusting it back out of the way, curling it over upon a volume of wind which struggled noisily for release. The blue became deeper, the strangled air assumed a thick gray color and emerged in a fit of sputtering querulousness. But the ship lunged on, as unperturbed as the Bhodistava before Mara, the Evil One, sure that he was becoming Buddha.

We were dipping southward and soon tasted the full flavor of the luscious tropical air. The ship never more than swayed with the swells. During the days that followed there was never more than the most elemental squall. The nights were as clear and balmy as the days. For seven days we danced and made merry to Hawaiian melodies thrummed by an Hawaiian orchestra, or screeched by an American talking-machine, or hammered by a piano-player. The warm air began to play the devil with our feelings.

Thus seven days passed. I had taken to sleeping out on deck, under the open sky. The moon was brilliant, the sea as smooth as a pond. I was awakened by whispered conversation at five o'clock of that last day and found a group of women huddling close on the forward deck. Their hair was streaming down their backs, their feet were bare, and their bodies wrapped in loose kimonos. Some of the officers were pointing to the southwestern horizon, where a barely perceptible streak of smoke was rising over the rim of the sea. It was from Kilauea, the volcano on the island of Hawaii, two hundred miles away.

The air was fresh and balmy as on the day the earth was born. Rolling cumulous clouds sought to postpone the day by retarding the rising sun. Lighthouse lights blinked their warnings. Molokai, the leper island, emerged from the darkness. A blaze of sunlight broke through the clouds and day was in full swing. And as we neared the island of Oahu, a full-masted wind-jammer, every strip of sail spread to the breeze, came gliding toward us from Honolulu.

By noon we were in the open harbor,--a fan-spread of still water. The _Lurline_ glided on and turned to the right and we were before the little city of Honolulu. I can still see the young captain on the bridge, pacing from left to right, watching the water, issuing quiet directions to the sailor who transmitted them, by indicator, to the engine-room. We edged up to the piers amid a profusion of greetings from shore and appeals for coins from brown-skinned youngsters who could a moment later be seen chasing them in the water far below the surface.

This, then, is progress. In 1778, Captain Cook was murdered by these islanders. To-day they "grovel" in the seas for petty cash. One hundred and forty years! Seven days!

3

But Hawaii was only my half-way house. I was still reaching out for Japan. According to the advice of steamship agencies I might have waited seven years before any opportunity for getting there would come my way. At twelve o'clock one day I learned that the _Niagara_ was in port. She was to sail for the Antipodes at two. By two I was one of her passengers. Hadn't "my boss" given me a lifetime's vacation?

The world before me was an unknown quantity, as it doubtless is to at least all but one in a million of the inhabitants of our globe. My ticket said Sydney, Australia. How long would it take us? Two weeks? What should we see en route? Two worlds? Here, in one single journey I should cut a straight line across the routes of Magellan, Drake, Cook, and into those of Tasman,--all the great navigators of the last four hundred years. Here, then, I was to trace the steps of Melville, of Stevenson, of Jack London,--largely with the personal recommendations of Jack,--and of one then still unfamed, Frederick O'Brien. All the courage in the face of the unknown, all the conflicts between the world civilizations in their various stages of development, all the dreams of romance, of future welfare and achievement, would unfold in my progress southward and fall into two much-talked-of and little-understood divisions--East and West. I was to discover for myself what it was that Balboa and his like had taken possession of in their grandiloquent fashion and were ready to defend against all comers. Yet the flag at the mast was not Balboa's flag, nor Tasman's, and the passengers among whom fate had wheeled me were, with one exception, neither Spanish nor Dutch, but British. As long as I moved from San Francisco westward and as long as I remained in Honolulu, I was, as far as customs and people were concerned, in America. But from the moment I considered striking off diagonally across the South Seas in the direction of the Antarctic I was thrown among Britons. The clerk in the steamship office was Canadian, the steamer was British, the passengers were British, and the cool, casual way in which the _Niagara_ kicked herself off from the pier and slipped out into the harbor was confirmation of a certain cleavage. For there was none of the gaiety which accompanies the arrival and departure of American vessels,--no music, no serpentines, no cheering. We just took to our screws and the open sea as though glad to get away from an uncordial "week-end." This was a British liner that was to cut across the equator, to climb over the vast ridge of earth and dip down into the Antipodes. We were to leave America far behind. Henceforward, with but the single exception of tiny Pago Pago, Samoa, we could not enter an American owned port,--and on this route would miss even that one. And now that mandates have become the vogue, there is in all that world of water hardly an important spot that does not fly the Union Jack. The sense of private ownership in all that could be surveyed gave to the bearing of the passengers an air of dignity which was not always latent in the individual.

Meanwhile the ship pressed steadily on, coldly indifferent, fearless and emotionless. We were nearing the equator, and the days in its neighborhood steeped us all in drooping feebleness. Climate gets us all, ultimately. We forgot one another beneath the heavy weight of nothingness which hangs over that equatorial world. Sleep within my cabin was impossible, so I had the steward bring me a mattress out on deck. At midnight a heavy wind turned the air suddenly so cold that I had to secure a blanket. The wind howling round the mast and the flapping of the canvas sounded like a tragedy without human agency. The night was pitch-black and the blackness was intensified by intermittent streaks of lightning. But there was no rain.

It was Tuesday, yet the next day was Thursday. Where Wednesday went I have never been able to find out. We had arrived at the point in the Pacific where one day swallows up another and leaves none. The European world, measuring the earth from its own vantage-point, had allotted no day for the mid-Pacific, so that instead of arriving at Suva, Fiji, in proper sequence of time, we were both a day late and a day ahead. We had cut across the 180th meridian, where time is dovetailed.

That afternoon we sighted land for the first time in seven days. Alofa Islands, pale blue, smooth-edged, were a living lie to reality. A peculiar feeling came over me in passing without touching terra firma. It was like the longing for the sun after days and days of gray, the longing for rain in the desert. It was the longing for the return to the actualities of life after days on the unvariable sea. And presently I was in Fiji, and the _Niagara_ sailed on without me. Once again I changed my course to wander among the South Seas and leave Sydney for the future.

Yet even on land he who has been brought up on a continent cannot escape a feeling of isolation, the consciousness of being completely surrounded by water. After you have had the deep beneath you for seven days, and again seven days, you begin to feel that even the islands are but floating in the same fluid. The fact that you cannot go anywhere without riding the waves, and that it takes two whole days by steamer to get from Fiji to Samoa, and four from Fiji to New Zealand, and then four again between New Zealand and Australia, a water-consciousness takes possession of you, and the islands become mere ledges upon which you rest occasionally. Something of the joy of being a bird on the wing is the experience of the traveler in the Pacific seas.

Imagine, then, my delight and surprise, early one morning on my return trip from Samoa to Fiji, to find the _Talune_ sidling up to an unknown isle considerably off our course. It was, we were told, the island of Niuafoou, and was visited every month or so to deliver and take off the mails. It was a chill morning. Everything was blue with morning cold. The waves dashed in desperation against the cliffs. Glad was I that we were not run ashore, for I have never yet been able to see the virtue in ice-cold sea-water. Fancy our consternation when down slid a native, head first, from the bluff half a mile away into the water, as we slide into a swimming-pool. For a moment he was lost behind the tossing crests. Then we saw him coming slowly toward us, resting on a plank and paddling with his free hand, seeming like a tremendous water-spider. Tied to a stick like to a mast was a tightly wrapped bundle of mail. The _Talune_ kept swerving like an impatient horse, waiting for the arrival of that amphibian. When he came alongside he dropped the little bundle into a bucket let down to him at the end of a rope, and kicked himself away. A second man arrived with a packet,--the parcels-post man of Niuafoou. A third came merely as an inspector. Meanwhile, on the bluff the whole community had gathered for the irregular lunar event.

Or, days later, after my second call at Fiji as the ship pressed steadily on toward Auckland, New Zealand, we passed the island of Mbenga where dwell the mystic fire-walkers so vividly portrayed by Basil Thomson in his "South Sea Yarns." I wished that I had had a "callous" on my habits in cleanliness to protect me from the unpleasantnesses of the vessel, as have those Fijian fire-walkers on their soles, then I should have been happier. Their soles are half an inch thick. I should have needed a callous at least two inches thick to endure the _Talune_ more than the six days it took us to get from Samoa to Auckland.

Early in the morning of the fourth day of our journey from Suva, Fiji, we passed the Great Barrier Island, which stands fifty miles from Auckland. We crept down the Hauraki Gulf, passed Little Barrier Island, and entered Waitemata Harbor, where we dropped anchor, awaiting the doctor's examination. Just from the tropics, I was taken by surprise to find the wind biting and chill as we went farther south, and here at the gates of Auckland the coat I had unnecessarily carried on my arm for months became most welcome. Before I could adjust myself to the new landing-place, I had to readjust my mind to another fact which had never been any vital part of my psychology,--that henceforth the farther south I should go the colder it would feel, and that though it was the sixth of November, the longer I remained the warmer it would become. In the presence of such phenomena, losing a thirteenth day of one's month while crossing the 180th meridian was a commonplace. The habits of a short lifetime told me to put on my coat, for winter was coming. But here I had come amongst queer New Zealanders who told me to unbutton it, even to shed it, for spring, they assured me, was not far behind.

And then for the first time in months I felt the spirit of the landlubber work its way into my consciousness again. I had cut a diagonal line of 6,000 miles across a mysterious, immeasurable sea, and my reason, my heart and my body longed for respite from its benumbing influence. I had seen enough to last me a long time. I fairly ached for retirement inland, for sight of a cool, still lake, for contact with snow-capped mountain peaks. More than all else, I yearned for the cold, for the scent of snow, for the snug satisfaction of self-generated warmth. My soul and my body seemed seared and scorched by the blazing tropical sun under the wide, unsheltered seas. Later, when I should be "well" again, I thought, I would risk the climb up over the equator, the curve of the world that lies so close to the sun.

And now that I was settled I had time to reflect on all I had seen. I had cut a diagonal line through the heart of the Pacific, and had seen in succession the various types of native races--the Hawaiians, the Fijians, the Samoans--while all about me were the Maories. So I reviewed and classified my memories before I started north on another diagonal course which led me among the transplanted white peoples of Australia and Asia. Yet one question preceded all others: whence came these Pacific peoples and when? The answer to that must be given before specific descriptions of the South Sea Islanders can be clear.