Читать книгу Down Under with the Prince - Everard Cotes - Страница 7

Table of Contents

In passing the Culebra Cut landslide, in the Panama Canal, one of the propellers of the Renown touched a submerged rock which had escaped the notice of the surveyors. When Balboa harbour was reached the ship's divers went down to see what the damage amounted to; and as poking about the cruiser's bottom, thirty-three feet below the surface, in muddy water infested with sharks, is, to say the least, an unpleasant task, it was characteristic of the ship that one of the first to don diving-dress and go over the side was the Engineer-Commander himself. The result was to ascertain that one of the blades of one of the propellers had had a small piece broken off, but that the damage was so slight that it would not be necessary to dock the vessel for repair.

A start was therefore made for San Diego, our next port of call. The course skirted the mountainous coast of Mexico, which showed mistily on the starboard horizon. The water was of the smoothest and clearest, and of tint so blue as to be almost azure. The temperature was tropical, and we found surprising abundance of sea-life. Yellow turtles, as big as footballs, with their little pointed heads stuck out to watch us, floated by in scores. Schools of glistening porpoises leapt in the sun besides a couple of big, slow-moving, log-like blackfish. You can travel from London to Bombay and see hardly a creature, but here the sea teemed. Birds too were plentiful—quantities of duck, white, wheeling gulls, and black, slender, frigate-birds that sailed past like kites.

A few days later, in an amethyst sea, off the green slopes of Loma point, the Renown cast anchor. The houses and towers of San Diego, seven miles off, across the Harbour of the Sun, glistened pearl-like in soft morning light, above the golden setting of the Coronada sand. Out at sea, at dawn that day, six grey, business-like American destroyers had met the Renown and escorted her in, a score of United States flying-boats and aeroplanes hovering in well-kept formations overhead. At the mouth of the harbour was lying that fine battleship the New Mexico, flagship of the United States Pacific Squadron, which fired a welcoming salute. After the anchor was down, Admiral Williams, acting Naval Commander-in-Chief in the Pacific, who flew his flag on the New Mexico, visited the Prince. Mayor Wild, of San Diego, and other local residents also arrived from the shore to pay their respects.

The morning was taken up with the receiving and returning of these visits. In the afternoon the Prince landed at the municipal pier in the heart of the city. Here he found Governor Stephens, of California, at the head of a large deputation, waiting to welcome him. Every avenue to the wharf was blocked with motor-cars. Well-dressed crowds pressed upon the ropes that fenced in a central space reserved for British veterans, to whom had been given the place of particular honour in the town's reception of its visitor. The veterans were some hundred and fifty strong, and gave the Prince the heartiest of cheers. They proved to be residents of California, about half of them being from San Diego itself. They had all served in the forces of the British Empire in the Great War. At their head was General Carruthers, lately Chief-of-the-Staff with the Australian Expeditionary Force in France. It was a wonderful spectacle of colour and cheerfulness, as the Prince went down the line, shaking hands with his old comrades in the field, while mites in pinafores pushed to the front to present him with bouquets, and pretty girls in Highland costume sang "God save the King." The crowd broke through the barriers, before the motor-cars, provided to convey the party to the Stadium, had been reached, but everybody was in the friendliest of humours, and did their utmost individually to make space for the procession to start. The first three or four cars, containing the Prince, the Governor, the Mayor, and a few of the Staff, eventually got through. The rest extricated themselves gradually from the press of people and vehicles, and made their way by more or less devious routes, the road marked out for the procession having by this time become so crowded as to be almost impassable. The procession reformed at the Stadium, a mile or so distant. On the way, prosperous suburbs of extraordinary attractiveness were passed, the houses often of Spanish-colonial type, with deep verandas set in spacious gardens and well-kept lawns, with masses of roses, geraniums, hibiscus, and purple salt-grass in full bloom. The ground here was high, and one looked down upon the city, with palm-trees in the foreground, and the harbour and its shipping in the middle distance, while on the horizon were piled the rugged mountains of southern California, pink in the evening light.

The Stadium proved to be a massive open-air amphitheatre of cream-coloured stone, capable of seating fifty thousand spectators, of whom some ten thousand were present. Here complimentary addresses were presented and replied to, the gathering applauding, with equal energy, the heart-to-heart statement of Mayor Wild that the Prince was a "regular fellow," and the impressive periods of Governor Stephens, who dwelt upon the importance of the Royal visit as strengthening the connexion between the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race. Another feature of the occasion was the playing of a gigantic open-air organ, the largest of its kind in the world. The organist sat by the roadside and the pipes of his instrument pointed unprotected to the sky. An official dinner and a ball followed later in the day at the big hotel on Coronada Beach. Innumerable motor and other parties had meanwhile been organized by individual residents, every one of the thirteen hundred sailors and marines on the Renown who could in any way be spared from duty, being given a delightful outing and the kindest and most hospitable of entertainment. In this way numbers of them were able to see something of the wonderful country around San Diego, with its incomparable mountains and valleys, and its hundreds of square miles of fertile peach-orchards, just then one gorgeous mass of coral blossom.

San Diego, with its famous bathing beach, its clear air, dry balmy climate, and seventy thousand prosperous white inhabitants, thus took to its generous western heart not alone the Prince himself, but also every British soul aboard the ship by which he travelled. A year before, the Renown had become acquainted, in New York, with American kindness and hospitality which seemed, at the time, to be impossible to equal. The ship now had experience, on the other side of the American continent, of a similar reception, in every way as warm and spontaneous, accorded too by people as representative of the western states of the Union as New York is of the eastern. This inclusion of the battle-cruiser's men was one of the pleasantest features at almost every port of call upon the voyage, but it was nowhere more general or more genial than in this American city of the Far South.