Читать книгу The Pacific Triangle - Sydney Greenbie - Страница 8

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.