FOLLOWING
THE EQUATOR
A JOURNEY AROUND THE WORLD
By
Mark
Twain
THIS BOOK
Is affectionately inscribed to
MY YOUNG FRIEND
HARRY ROGERS
WITH RECOGNITION
OF WHAT HE IS, AND APPREHENSION OF WHAT HE MAY BECOME
UNLESS HE FORM HIMSELF A LITTLE MORE CLOSELY
UPON THE MODEL OF
THE AUTHOR.
THE PUDD'NHEAD MAXIMS.
THESE WISDOMS ARE FOR THE LURING OF YOUTH TOWARD
HIGH MORAL ALTITUDES. THE AUTHOR DID NOT
GATHER THEM FROM PRACTICE, BUT FROM
OBSERVATION. TO BE GOOD IS NOBLE;
BUT TO SHOW OTHERS HOW
TO BE GOOD IS NOBLER
AND NO TROUBLE.
CONTENTS:
CHAPTER I. The Party--Across America to Vancouver--On Board the Warrimo--Steamer Chairs-The Captain-Going Home under a Cloud--A Gritty Purser--The Brightest Passenger--Remedy for Bad Habits--The Doctor and the Lumbago --A Moral Pauper--Limited Smoking--Remittance-men.
CHAPTER II. Change of Costume--Fish, Snake, and Boomerang Stories--Tests of Memory --A Brahmin Expert--General Grant's Memory--A Delicately Improper Tale
CHAPTER III. Honolulu--Reminiscences of the Sandwich Islands--King Liholiho and His Royal Equipment--The Tabu--The Population of the Island--A Kanaka Diver --Cholera at Honolulu--Honolulu; Past and Present--The Leper Colony
CHAPTER IV. Leaving Honolulu--Flying-fish--Approaching the Equator--Why the Ship Went Slow--The Front Yard of the Ship--Crossing the Equator--Horse Billiards or Shovel Board--The Waterbury Watch--Washing Decks--Ship Painters--The Great Meridian--The Loss of a Day--A Babe without a Birthday
CHAPTER V. A lesson in Pronunciation--Reverence for Robert Burns--The Southern Cross--Troublesome Constellations--Victoria for a Name--Islands on the Map--Alofa and Fortuna--Recruiting for the Queensland Plantations --Captain Warren's NoteBook--Recruiting not thoroughly Popular
CHAPTER VI. Missionaries Obstruct Business--The Sugar
Planter and the Kanaka--The Planter's View--Civilizing the Kanaka The
Missionary's View--The Result --Repentant Kanakas--Wrinkles--The Death Rate in
CHAPTER VII. The
CHAPTER VIII. A Wilderness of Islands--Two Men without a Country--A Naturalist from New Zealand--The Fauna of Australasia--Animals, Insects, and Birds--The Ornithorhynchus--Poetry and Plagiarism
CHAPTER IX.
Close to Australia--Porpoises at Night--Entrance to Sydney Harbor--The Loss of the Duncan Dunbar--The Harbor--The City of Sydney--Spring-time in Australia--The Climate--Information for Travelers--The Size of Australia --A Dust-Storm and Hot Wind
CHAPTER X. The Discovery of Australia--Transportation of Convicts--Discipline --English Laws, Ancient and Modern--Flogging Prisoners to Death--Arrival of Settlers--New South Wales Corps--Rum Currency--Intemperance Everywhere $100,000 for One Gallon of Rum--Development of the Country--Immense Resources
CHAPTER XI. Hospitality of English-speaking People--Writers and their Gratitude--Mr. Gane and the Panegyrics--Population of Sydney An English City with American Trimming--"Squatters"--Palaces and Sheep Kingdoms--Wool and Mutton--Australians and Americans--Costermonger Pronunciation--England is "Home"--Table Talk--English and Colonial Audiences 124
CHAPTER XII. Mr. X., a Missionary--Why Christianity Makes Slow Progress in India--A Large Dream--Hindoo Miracles and Legends--Sampson and Hanuman--The Sandstone Ridge--Where are the Gates?
CHAPTER XIII. Public Works in Australasia--Botanical Garden of Sydney--Four Special Socialties--The Government House--A Governor and His Functions--The Admiralty House--The Tour of the Harbor--Shark Fishing--Cecil Rhodes' Shark and his First Fortune--Free Board for Sharks.
CHAPTER XIV. Bad Health--To Melbourne by Rail--Maps Defective--The Colony of Victoria --A Round-trip Ticket from Sydney--Change Cars, from Wide to Narrow Gauge, a Peculiarity at Albury--Customs-fences--"My Word"--The Blue Mountains--Rabbit Piles--Government R. R. Restaurants--Duchesses for Waiters--"Sheep-dip"--Railroad Coffee--Things Seen and Not Seen
CHAPTER XV. Wagga-Wagga--The Tichborne Claimant--A Stock Mystery--The Plan of the Romance--The Realization--The Henry Bascom Mystery--Bascom Hall--The Author's Death and Funeral
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII. The British Empire--Its Exports and Imports--The Trade of Australia--To Adelaide--Broken Hill Silver Mine--A Roundabout road--The Scrub and its Possibilities for the Novelist--The Aboriginal Tracker--A Test Case--How Does One Cow-Track Differ from Another?
CHAPTER XVIII. Gum Trees--Unsociable Trees--Gorse and Broom--A universal Defect--An Adventurer--Wanted L200, got L20,000,000--A Vast Land Scheme--The Smash-up--The Corpse Got Up and Danced--A Unique Business by One Man --Buying the Kangaroo Skin--The Approach to Adelaide--Everything Comes to Him who Waits--A Healthy Religious sphere--What is the Matter with the Specter?
CHAPTER XIX.
The Botanical Gardens--Contributions from all Countries--The Zoological Gardens of Adelaide--The Laughing Jackass--The Dingo--A Misnamed Province--Telegraphing from Melbourne to San Francisco--A Mania for Holidays--The Temperature--The Death Rate--Celebration of the Reading of the Proclamation of 1836--Some old Settlers at the Commemoration--Their Staying Powers--The Intelligence of the Aboriginal --The Antiquity of the Boomerang
CHAPTER XX. A Caller--A Talk about Old Times--The Fox
Hunt--An Accurate Judgment of an Idiot--How We Passed the Custom Officers in
CHAPTER XXI. The "Weet-Weet"--Keeping down the Population--Victoria--Killing the Aboriginals--Pioneer Days in Queensland--Material for a Drama--The Bush --Pudding with Arsenic Revenge--A Right Spirit but a Wrong Method--Death of Donga Billy
CHAPTER XXII. Continued Description of Aboriginals--Manly Qualities--Dodging Balls --Feats of Spring--Jumping--Where the Kangaroo Learned its Art 'Well Digging--Endurance--Surgery--Artistic Abilities--Fennimore Cooper's Last Chance--Australian Slang
CHAPTER XXIII. To Horsham (Colony of
--Pepper Tree-The Agricultural College, Forty Pupils--High Temperature
--Width of Road in Chains, Perches, etc.--The Bird with a Forgettable
Name--The Magpie and the Lady--Fruit Trees--Soils--Sheep Shearing--To Stawell
--Gold Mining Country--$75,000 per Month Income and able to Keep House
--Fine Grapes and Wine--The Dryest Community on Earth--The Three Sisters
--Gum Trees and Water
CHAPTER XXIV.
Road to Ballarat--The City--Great Gold Strike, 1851--Rush for Australia --"Great Nuggets"--Taxation--Revolt and Victory--Peter Lalor and the Eureka Stockade--"Pencil Mark"--Fine Statuary at Ballarat--Population --Ballarat English
CHAPTER XXV. Bound for
--Description of
--Mr. Blank and His Influence--Conveyance of an Idea--I Had to Like the
Irishman--
CHAPTER XXVI. Where
CHAPTER XXVII. The South Pole Swell--
CHAPTER XXVIII. When the Moment Comes the Man Appears--Why Ed. Jackson called on Commodore Vanderbilt--Their Interview--Welcome to the Child of His Friend --A Big Time but under Inspection--Sent on Important Business--A Visit to the Boys on the Boat
CHAPTER XXIX: Tasmania, Early Days--Description of the Town of Hobart--An Englishman's Love of Home Surroundings--Neatest City on Earth--The Museum--A Parrot with an Acquired Taste--Glass Arrow Beads--Refuge for the Indigent too healthy
CHAPTER XXX. Arrival at Bluff, N. Z.--Where the Rabbit
Plague Began--The Natural Enemy of the Rabbit--
CHAPTER XXXI. The Express Train--"A Hell of a Hotel at Maryborough" --Clocks and Bells--Railroad Service.
CHAPTER XXXII. Description of the Town of Christ Church--A Fine Museum--Jade-stone Trinkets--The Great Man--The First Maori in New Zealand--Women Voters
--"Person" in
--A Voyage in the 'Flora' from Lyttelton--Cattle Stalls for Everybody
--A Wonderful Time.
CHAPTER XXXIII. The Town of Nelson--"The Mongatapu Murders," the Great Event of the Town --Burgess' Confession--Summit of Mount Eden--Rotorua and the Hot Lakes and Geysers--Thermal Springs District--Kauri Gum--Tangariwa Mountains
CHAPTER XXXIV. The Bay of Gisborne--Taking in Passengers by the Yard Arm--The Green Ballarat Fly--False Teeth--From Napier to Hastings by the Ballarat Fly Train--Kauri Trees--A Case of Mental Telegraphy
CHAPTER XXXV. Fifty Miles in Four Hours--Comfortable
Cars--Town of
CHAPTER XXXVI. The Poems of Mrs. Moore--The Sad Fate of William Upson--A Fellow Traveler Imitating the Prince of Wales--A Would-be Dude--Arrival at Sydney --Curious Town Names with Poem
CHAPTER XXXVII. From Sydney for Ceylon--A Lascar Crew--A Fine Ship--Three Cats and a Basket of Kittens--Dinner Conversations--Veuve Cliquot Wine--At Anchor in King George's Sound Albany Harbor--More Cats--A Vulture on Board--Nearing the Equator again--Dressing for Dinner--Ceylon, Hotel Bristol--Servant Brampy--A Feminine Man--Japanese Jinriksha or Cart--Scenes in Ceylon--A Missionary School--Insincerity of Clothes
CHAPTER XXXVIII. Steamer Rosettes to
--
--Correcting a Servant--Killing a Slave--Arranging a Bedroom--Three Hours'
Work and a Terrible Racket--The Bird of Birds, the Indian Crow
CHAPTER XXXIX. God Vishnu, 108 Names--Change of Titles or
Hunting for an Heir--
CHAPTER XL. The Government House at Malabar Point--
CHAPTER XLI. Jain Temple--Mr. Roychand's Bungalow--A Decorated Six-Gun Prince--Human Fireworks--European Dress, Past and Present--Complexions--Advantages with the Zulu--Festivities at the Bungalow-Nautch Dancers--Entrance of the Prince--Address to the Prince
CHAPTER XLII. A Hindoo Betrothal, midnight, Sleepers on the ground, Home of the Bride of Twelve Years Dressed as a Boy--Illumination Nautch Girls--Imitating Snakes--Later--Illuminated Porch Filled with Sleepers--The Plague
CHAPTER XLIII Murder Trial in
--The Plague, Juggernaut, Suttee, etc.--Everything on Gigantic Scale
--India First in Everything--80 States, more Custom Houses than Cats--Rich
Ground for Thug Society
CHAPTER XLIV. Thug Book--Supplies for Traveling, Bedding, and other Freight--Scene at Railway Station--Making Way for White Man--Waiting Passengers, High and Low Caste, Touch in the cars--Our Car--Beds made up--Dreaming of Thugs --Baroda--Meet Friends--Indian Well--The Old Town--Narrow Streets--A Mad Elephant
CHAPTER XLV.
Elephant Riding--Howdahs--The New Palace--The Prince's Excursion--Gold and Silver Artillery--A Vice-royal Visit--Remarkable Dog--The Bench Show --Augustin Daly's Back Door--Fakeer
CHAPTER XLVI. The Thugs--Government Efforts to Exterminate them--Choking a Victim A Fakeer Spared--Thief Strangled
CHAPTER XLVII. Thugs, Continued--Record of Murders--A Joy of Hunting and Killing Men
--Gordon Gumming--Killing an Elephant--Family Affection among Thugs
--Burial Places
CHAPTER XLVIII. Starting for
CHAPTER XLIX. Pyjamas--Day Scene in India--Clothed in a Turban and a Pocket Handkerchief--Land Parceled Out--Established Village Servants--Witches in Families--Hereditary Midwifery--Destruction of Girl Babies--Wedding Display--Tiger-Persuader--Hailstorm Discourages--The Tyranny of the Sweeper--Elephant Driver--Water Carrier--Curious Rivers--Arrival at Allahabad--English Quarter--Lecture Hall Like a Snowstorm--Private Carriages--A Milliner--Early Morning--The Squatting Servant--A Religious Fair
CHAPTER L. On the Road to Benares--Dust and Waiting--The Bejeweled Crowd--A Native Prince and his Guard--Zenana Lady--The Extremes of Fashion--The Hotel at Benares--An Annex a Mile Away--Doors in India--The Peepul Tree--Warning against Cold Baths--A Strange Fruit--Description of Benares--The Beginning of Creation--Pilgrims to Benares--A Priest with a Good Business Stand--Protestant Missionary--The Trinity Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu --Religion the Business at Benares
CHAPTER LI. Benares a Religious
CHAPTER LII. A Curious Way to Secure Salvation--The Banks of the Ganges--Architecture Represents Piety--A Trip on the River--Bathers and their Costumes --Drinking the Water--A Scientific Test of the Nasty Purifier--Hindoo Faith in the Ganges--A Cremation--Remembrances of the Suttee--All Life Sacred Except Human Life--The Goddess Bhowanee, and the Sacrificers--Sacred Monkeys--Ugly Idols Everywhere--Two White Minarets--A Great View with a Monkey in it--A Picture on the Water
CHAPTER LIII. Still in
CHAPTER LIV. Rail to Calcutta--Population--The "City of Palaces"--A Fluted Candle-stick--Ochterlony--Newspaper Correspondence--Average Knowledge of Countries--A Wrong Idea of Chicago--Calcutta and the Black Hole --Description of the Horrors--Those Who Lived--The Botanical Gardens--The Afternoon Turnout--Grand Review--Military Tournament--Excursion on the Hoogly--The Museum--What Winter Means Calcutta
CHAPTER LV On the Road Again--Flannels in Order--Across Country--From Greenland's Icy Mountain--Swapping Civilization--No Field women in India--How it is in Other Countries--Canvas-covered Cars--The Tiger Country--My First Hunt Some Elephants Get Away--The Plains of India--The Ghurkas--Women for Pack-Horses--A Substitute for a Cab--Darjeeling--The Hotel--The Highest Thing in the Himalayas--The Club--Kinchinjunga and Mt. Everest --Thibetans--The Prayer Wheel--People Going to the Bazar
CHAPTER LVI. On the Road Again--The Hand-Car--A Thirty-five-mile Slide--The Banyan Tree--A Dramatic Performance--The Railroad--The Half-way House--The Brain Fever Bird--The Coppersmith Bird--Nightingales and Cue Owls
CHAPTER LVII. India the Most Extraordinary Country on Earth--Nothing Forgotten--The Land of Wonders--Annual Statistics Everywhere about Violence--Tiger vs. Man--A Handsome Fight--Annual Man Killing and Tiger Killing--Other Animals--Snakes--Insurance and Snake Tables--The Cobra Bite--Muzaffurpore --Dinapore--A Train that Stopped for Gossip--Six Hours for Thirty-five Miles--A Rupee to the Engineer--Ninety Miles an Hour--Again to Benares, the Piety Hive To Lucknow
CHAPTER LVIII. The Great Mutiny--The Massacre in
Cawnpore--Terrible Scenes in
CHAPTER LIX. A Visit to the Residency--Cawnpore--The Adjutant Bird and the Hindoo Corpse--The Tai Mahal--The True Conception--The Ice Storm--True Gems --Syrian Fountains--An Exaggerated Niagara
CHAPTER LX. To Lahore--The Governor's Elephant--Taking a Ride-No Danger from Collision--Rawal Pindi--Back to Delhi--An Orientalized Englishman --Monkeys and the Paint-pot--Monkey Crying over my Note-book--Arrival at Jeypore--In Rajputana--Watching Servants--The Jeypore Hotel--Our Old and New Satan--Satan as a Liar--The Museum--A Street Show--Blocks of Houses --A Religious Procession
CHAPTER LXI. Methods in American Deaf and Dumb Asylums--Methods in the Public Schools --A Letter from a youth in Punjab--Highly Educated Service--A Damage to the Country--A Little Book from Calcutta--Writing Poor English --Embarrassed by a Beggar Girl--A Specimen Letter--An Application for Employment--A Calcutta School Examination--Two Samples of Literature
CHAPTER LXII. Sail from Calcutta to Madras--Thence to Ceylon--Thence for Mauritius --The Indian Ocean--Our Captain's Peculiarity The Scot Has one too--The Flying-fish that Went Hunting in the Field--Fined for Smuggling--Lots of pets on Board--The Color of the Sea--The Most Important Member of Nature's Family--The Captain's Story of Cold Weather--Omissions in the Ship's Library--Washing Decks--Pyjamas on Deck--The Cat's Toilet--No Interest in the Bulletin--Perfect Rest--The Milky Way and the Magellan Clouds--Mauritius--Port Louis--A Hot Country--Under French Control --A Variety of People and Complexions--Train to Curepipe--A Wonderful Office-holder--The Wooden Peg Ornament--The Prominent Historical Event of Mauritius--"Paul and Virginia"--One of Virginia's Wedding Gifts--Heaven Copied after Mauritius--Early History of Mauritius--Quarantines --Population of all Kinds--What the World Consists of--Where Russia and Germany are--A Picture of Milan Cathedral--Newspapers--The Language--Best Sugar in the World--Literature of Mauritius
CHAPTER LXIII. Port Louis--Matches no Good--Good Roads--Death Notices--Why European Nations Rob Each Other--What Immigrants to Mauritius Do--Population --Labor Wages--The Camaron--The Palmiste and other Eatables--Monkeys--The Cyclone of 1892--Mauritius a Sunday Landscape
CHAPTER LXIV. The Steamer "Arundel Castle"--Poor Beds in Ships--The Beds in Noah's Ark --Getting a Rest in Europe--Ship in Sight--Mozambique Channel--The Engineer and the Band--Thackeray's "Madagascar"--Africanders Going Home --Singing on the After Deck--An Out-of-Place Story--Dynamite Explosion in Johannesburg--Entering Delagoa Bay--Ashore--A Hot Winter--Small Town--No Sights--No Carriages--Working Women--Barnum's Purchase of Shakespeare's Birthplace, Jumbo, and the Nelson Monument--Arrival at Durban
CHAPTER LXV. Royal Hotel Durban--Bells that Did not Ring--Early Inquiries for Comforts
--Change of Temperature after Sunset-Rickhaws--The Hotel Chameleon
--Natives not out after the
Fashions in Natal--Zulus for Police--A Drive round the Berea--The Cactus and other Trees--Religion a Vital Matter--Peculiar Views about Babies --Zulu Kings--A Trappist Monastery--Transvaal Politics--Reasons why the Trouble came About
CHAPTER LXVI. Jameson over the Border--His Defeat and Capture--Sent to England for Trial--Arrest of Citizens by the Boers--Commuted sentences--Final Release of all but Two--Interesting Days for a Stranger--Hard to Understand Either Side--What the Reformers Expected to Accomplish--How They Proposed to do it--Testimonies a Year Later--A "Woman's Part"--The Truth of the South African Situation--"Jameson's Ride"--A Poem
CHAPTER LXVIL Jameson's Raid--The Reform Committee's Difficult Task--Possible Plans
--Advice that Jameson Ought to Have--The War of 1881 and its Lessons
--Statistics of Losses of the Combatants--Jameson's Battles--Losses on Both
Sides--The Military Errors--How the Warfare Should Have Been Carried on to Be Successful
CHAPTER LXVIII. Judicious Mr. Rhodes--What South Africa Consists of--Johannesburg--The Gold Mines--The Heaven of American Engineers--What the Author Knows about Mining--Description of the Boer--What Should be Expected of Him--What Was A Dizzy Jump for Rhodes--Taxes--Rhodesian Method of Reducing Native Population--Journeying in Cape Colony--The Cars--The Country--The Weather--Tamed Blacks--Familiar Figures in King William's Town--Boer Dress--Boer Country Life--Sleeping Accommodations--The Reformers in Boer Prison--Torturing a Black Prisoner
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 --
A man may have no bad habits and have worse.
--Pudd'nhead
The starting point of this lecturing-trip around the world
was
We sailed for
We started westward from
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
summer sea; an enticing sea, a clean and cool sea, and apparently a welcome sea
to all on board; it certainly was to 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
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
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
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
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 over 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-wells 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-well 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
When in doubt, tell the truth.
--Pudd'nhead
About four days out from
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
"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
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
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
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
"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
"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,
'
"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 mound 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
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.
It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right.
--Pudd'nhead
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
In the night we anchored a mile from shore. Through my port I could see the twinkling
lights of
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, Kainehameha 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
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
Many memories of my former visit to the islands came up in
my mind while we lay at anchor in front of
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
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
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
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,
But
"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
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
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 cone 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
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
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
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!
A dozen direct censures are easier to bear than one morganatic compliment.
--Pudd'nhead
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 1.30 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
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,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
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
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. L, 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
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
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
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.
Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.
--Pudd'nhead
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
"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
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 across 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 "
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
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
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
"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.
He was as shy as a newspaper is when referring to its own merits.
--Pudd'nhead
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
I cannot understand his willingness to go to
"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
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
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
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
"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
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
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
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.
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
"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
prophecy: 'He
shall dwell in the tents of Shem, and
his
servant.' It is not said
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
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
"3. The
whole system is fraught with danger to
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
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."
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
--Pudd'nhead
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
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
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
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
It was said that the old-time devotion to chiefs and reverence for their persons still survive in the native commoner, and in great force. The educated young gentleman who is chief of the tribe that live in the region about the capital dresses in the fashion of high-class European gentlemen, but even his clothes cannot damn him in the reverence of his people. Their pride in his lofty rank and ancient lineage lives on, in spite of his lost authority and the evil magic of his tailor. He has no need to defile himself with work, or trouble his heart with the sordid cares of life; the tribe will see to it that he shall not want, and that he shall hold up his head and live like a gentleman. I had a glimpse of him down in the town. Perhaps he is a descendant of the last king--the king with the difficult name whose memory is preserved by a notable monument of cut-stone which one sees in the enclosure in the middle of the town. Thakombau--I remember, now; that is the name. It is easier to preserve it on a granite block than in your head.
However, as far as I can make out from the books, the King
was between the devil and the deep sea at the time, and hadn't much
choice. He owed the
In old times the Fijians were fierce fighters; they were
very religious, and worshiped idols; the big chiefs were proud and haughty, and
they were men of great style in many ways; all chiefs had several wives, the
biggest chiefs sometimes had as many as fifty; when a chief was dead and ready
for burial, four or five of his wives were strangled and put into the grave
with him. In 1804 twenty-seven British
convicts escaped from
It is a fine race, the Fijians, with brains in their heads, and an inquiring turn of mind. It appears that their savage ancestors had a doctrine of immortality in their scheme of religion--with limitations. That is to say, their dead friend would go to a happy hereafter if he could be accumulated, but not otherwise. They drew the line; they thought that the missionary's doctrine was too sweeping, too comprehensive. They called his attention to certain facts. For instance, many of their friends had been devoured by sharks; the sharks, in their turn, were caught and eaten by other men; later, these men were captured in war, and eaten by the enemy. The original persons had entered into the composition of the sharks; next, they and the sharks had become part of the flesh and blood and bone of the cannibals. How, then, could the particles of the original men be searched out from the final conglomerate and put together again? The inquirers were full of doubts, and considered that the missionary had not examined the matter with--the gravity and attention which so serious a thing deserved.
The missionary taught these exacting savages many valuable things, and got from them one--a very dainty and poetical idea: Those wild and ignorant poor children of Nature believed that the flowers, after they perish, rise on the winds and float away to the fair fields of heaven, and flourish there forever in immortal beauty!
It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
--Pudd'nhead
When one glances at the map the members of the stupendous
island wilderness of the Pacific seem to crowd upon each other; but no, there
is no crowding, even in the center of a group; and between groups there are
lonely wide deserts of sea. Not
everything is known about the islands, their peoples and their languages. A startling reminder of this is furnished by
the fact that in
What a strange and romantic episode it is; and how one is tortured with curiosity to know whence those mysterious creatures came, those Men Without a Country, errant waifs who cannot name their lost home, wandering Children of Nowhere.
Indeed, the Island Wilderness is the very home of romance and dreams and mystery. The loneliness, the solemnity, the beauty, and the deep repose of this wilderness have a charm which is all their own for the bruised spirit of men who have fought and failed in the struggle for life in the great world; and for men who have been hunted out of the great world for crime; and for other men who love an easy and indolent existence; and for others who love a roving free life, and stir and change and adventure; and for yet others who love an easy and comfortable career of trading and money-getting, mixed with plenty of loose matrimony by purchase, divorce without trial or expense, and limitless spreeing thrown in to make life ideally perfect.
We sailed again, refreshed.
The most cultivated person in the ship was a young English,
man whose home was in
His special interest was the fauna of
He told me a great deal about worms, and the kangaroo, and
other coleoptera, and said he knew the history and ways of all such
pachydermata. He said the kangaroo had
pockets, and carried its young in them when it couldn't get apples. And he said that the emu was as big as an
ostrich, and looked like one, and had an amorphous appetite and would eat
bricks. Also, that the dingo was not a
dingo at all, but just a wild dog; and that the only difference between a dingo
and a dodo was that neither of them barked; otherwise they were just the
same. He said that the only game-bird in
The Moa stood thirteen feet high, and could step over an
ordinary man's head or kick his hat off; and his head, too, for that
matter. He said it was wingless, but a
swift runner. The natives used to ride
it. It could make forty miles an hour,
and keep it up for four hundred miles and come out reasonably fresh. It was still in existence when the railway
was introduced into
Speaking of the indigenous coneys and bactrian camels, the naturalist said that the coniferous and bacteriological output of Australasia was remarkable for its many and curious departures from the accepted laws governing these species of tubercles, but that in his opinion Nature's fondness for dabbling in the erratic was most notably exhibited in that curious combination of bird, fish, amphibian, burrower, crawler, quadruped, and Christian called the Ornithorhynchus--grotesquest of animals, king of the animalculae of the world for versatility of character and make-up. Said he:
"You can call it anything you want to, and be right. It is a fish,
for it lives in the river half the time; it is a land animal, for it
resides on the land half the time; it is an amphibian, since it
likes both and does not know which it prefers; it is a hybernian,
for when times are dull and nothing much going on it buries itself
under the mud at the bottom of a puddle and hybernates there a
couple of weeks at a time; it is a kind of duck, for it has a
duck-bill and four webbed paddles; it is a fish and quadruped
together, for in the water it swims with the paddles and on shore it
paws itself across country with them; it is a kind of seal, for it
has a seal's fur; it is carnivorous, herbivorous, insectivorous, and
vermifuginous, for it eats fish and grass and butterflies, and in
the season digs worms out of the mud and devours them; it is clearly
a bird, for it lays eggs, and hatches them; it is clearly a mammal,
for it nurses its young; and it is manifestly a kind of Christian,
for it keeps the Sabbath when there is anybody around, and when
there isn't, doesn't. It has all the tastes there are except
refined ones, it has all the habits there are except good ones.
"It is a survival--a survival of the fittest. Mr. Darwin invented
the theory that goes by that name, but the Ornithorhynchus was the
first to put it to actual experiment and prove that it could be
done. Hence it should have as much of the credit as Mr. Darwin.
It was never in
the
nobly stayed out and worked the theory. Of all creatures in the
world it was the
only one properly equipped for the test.
The
was thirteen months afloat, and all the globe submerged; no land
visible above the flood, no vegetation, no food for a mammal to eat,
nor water for a mammal to drink; for all mammal food was destroyed,
and when the pure floods from heaven and the salt oceans of the
earth mingled their waters and rose above the mountain tops, the
result was a drink which no bird or beast of ordinary construction
could use and live. But this combination was nuts for the
Ornithorhynchus, if I may use a term like that without offense.
Its river home had always been salted by the flood-tides of the sea.
On the face of the Noachian deluge innumerable forest trees were
floating. Upon these the Ornithorhynchus voyaged in peace; voyaged
from clime to clime, from hemisphere to hemisphere, in contentment
and comfort, in virile interest in the constant change Of scene, in
humble thankfulness for its privileges, in ever-increasing
enthusiasm in the development of the great theory upon whose
validity it had staked its life, its fortunes, and its sacred honor,
if I may use such expressions without impropriety in connection with
an episode of this nature.
"It lived the tranquil and luxurious life of a creature of
independent means. Of things actually necessary to its existence
and its happiness not a detail was wanting. When it wished to walk,
it scrambled along the tree-trunk; it mused in the shade of the
leaves by day, it slept in their shelter by night; when it wanted
the refreshment of a swim, it had it; it ate leaves when it wanted a
vegetable diet, it dug under the bark for worms and grubs; when it
wanted fish it caught them, when it wanted eggs it laid them. If
the grubs gave out in one tree it swam to another; and as for fish,
the very opulence of the supply was an embarrassment. And finally,
when it was thirsty it smacked its chops in gratitude over a blend
that would have slain a crocodile.
"When at last, after thirteen months of travel and research in all
the Zones it went aground on a mountain-summit, it strode ashore,
saying in its heart, 'Let them that come after me invent theories
and dream dreams about the Survival of the Fittest if they like, but
I am the first that has done it!
"This wonderful creature dates back like the kangaroo and many other
Australian hydrocephalous invertebrates, to an age long anterior to
the advent of man upon the earth; they date back, indeed, to a time
when a causeway hundreds of miles wide, and thousands of miles long,
joined
were alike, and all belonged to that remote geological epoch known
to science as the Old Red Grindstone Post-Pleosaurian. Later the
causeway sank under the sea; subterranean convulsions lifted the
African continent a thousand feet higher than it was before, but
necessarily began to develop and shade off into new forms and
families and
species, but the animals of
remained stationary, and have so remained until this day. In the
course of some millions of years the African Ornithorhynchus
developed and developed and developed, and sluffed off detail after
detail of its make-up until at last the creature became wholly
disintegrated and scattered. Whenever you see a bird or a beast or
a seal or an
otter in
surviving fragment of that sublime original of whom I have been
speaking--that creature which was everything in general and nothing
in particular--the opulently endowed 'e pluribus unum' of the animal
world.
"Such is the history of the most hoary, the most ancient, the most
venerable creature that exists in the earth today--Ornithorhynchus
Platypus Extraordinariensis--whom God preserve!"
When he was strongly moved he could rise and soar like that with ease. And not only in the prose form, but in the poetical as well. He had written many pieces of poetry in his time, and these manuscripts he lent around among the passengers, and was willing to let them be copied. It seemed to me that the least technical one in the series, and the one which reached the loftiest note, perhaps, was his:
INVOCATION.
"Come forth from thy oozy couch,
O Ornithorhynchus dear!
And greet with a cordial claw
The stranger that longs to hear
"From thy own own lips the tale
Of thy origin all unknown:
Thy misplaced bone where flesh should be
And flesh where should be bone;
"And fishy fin where should be paw,
And beaver-trowel tail,
And snout of beast equip'd with teeth
Where gills ought to prevail.
"Come, Kangaroo, the good and true
Foreshortened as to legs,
And body tapered like a churn,
And sack marsupial, i' fegs,
"And tells us why you linger here,
Thou relic of a vanished time,
When all your friends as fossils sleep,
Immortalized in lime!"
Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist; but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one. The above verses are indeed beautiful, and, in a way, touching; but there is a haunting something about them which unavoidably suggests the Sweet Singer of Michigan. It can hardly be doubted that the author had read the works of that poet and been impressed by them. It is not apparent that he has borrowed from them any word or yet any phrase, but the style and swing and mastery and melody of the Sweet Singer all are there. Compare this Invocation with "Frank Dutton"--particularly stanzas first and seventeenth--and I think the reader will feel convinced that he who wrote the one had read the other:
I.
"Frank Dutton was as fine a lad
As ever you wish to see,
And he was
drowned in
On earth no more will he be,
His age was near fifteen years,
And he was a motherless boy,
He was living with his grandmother
When he was drowned, poor boy."
XVII.
"He was drowned on Tuesday afternoon,
On Sunday he was found,
And the tidings of that drowned boy
Was heard for miles around.
His form was laid by his mother's side,
Beneath the cold, cold ground,
His friends for him will drop a tear
When they view his little mound."
The Sentimental Song Book. By Mrs. Julia Moore, p. 36.
It is your human environment that makes climate.
--Pudd'nhead
Sept. 15--Night.
Close to
That note recalls an experience. The passengers were sent for, to come up in the bow and see a fine sight. It was very dark. One could not follow with the eye the surface of the sea more than fifty yards in any direction it dimmed away and became lost to sight at about that distance from us. But if you patiently gazed into the darkness a little while, there was a sure reward for you. Presently, a quarter of a mile away you would see a blinding splash or explosion of light on the water--a flash so sudden and so astonishingly brilliant that it would make you catch your breath; then that blotch of light would instantly extend itself and take the corkscrew shape and imposing length of the fabled sea-serpent, with every curve of its body and the "break" spreading away from its head, and the wake following behind its tail clothed in a fierce splendor of living fire. And my, but it was coming at a lightning gait! Almost before you could think, this monster of light, fifty feet long, would go flaming and storming by, and suddenly disappear. And out in the distance whence he came you would see another flash; and another and another and another, and see them turn into sea-serpents on the instant; and once sixteen flashed up at the same time and came tearing towards us, a swarm of wiggling curves, a moving conflagration, a vision of bewildering beauty, a spectacle of fire and energy whose equal the most of those people will not see again until after they are dead.
It was porpoises--porpoises aglow with phosphorescent light. They presently collected in a wild and magnificent jumble under the bows, and there they played for an hour, leaping and frollicking and carrying on, turning summersaults in front of the stem or across it and never getting hit, never making a miscalculation, though the stem missed them only about an inch, as a rule. They were porpoises of the ordinary length --eight or ten feet--but every twist of their bodies sent a long procession of united and glowing curves astern. That fiery jumble was an enchanting thing to look at, and we stayed out the performance; one cannot have such a show as that twice in a lifetime. The porpoise is the kitten of the sea; he never has a serious thought, he cares for nothing but fun and play. But I think I never saw him at his winsomest until that night. It was near a center of civilization, and he could have been drinking.
By and by, when we had approached to somewhere within thirty miles of Sydney Heads the great electric light that is posted on one of those lofty ramparts began to show, and in time the little spark grew to a great sun and pierced the firmament of darkness with a far-reaching sword of light.
On board the Duncan Dunbar, flying toward Sydney Heads in the waning afternoon, the happy home-comers made busy preparation, for it was not doubted that they would be in the arms of their friends before the day was done; they put away their sea-going clothes and put on clothes meeter for the meeting, their richest and their loveliest, these poor brides of the grave. But the wind lost force, or there was a miscalculation, and before the Heads were sighted the darkness came on. It was said that ordinarily the captain would have made a safe offing and waited for the morning; but this was no ordinary occasion; all about him were appealing faces, faces pathetic with disappointment. So his sympathy moved him to try the dangerous passage in the dark. He had entered the Heads seventeen times, and believed he knew the ground. So he steered straight for the false opening, mistaking it for the true one. He did not find out that he was wrong until it was too late. There was no saving the ship. The great seas swept her in and crushed her to splinters and rubbish upon the rock tushes at the base of the precipice. Not one of all that fair and gracious company was ever seen again alive. The tale is told to every stranger that passes the spot, and it will continue to be told to all that come, for generations; but it will never grow old, custom cannot stale it, the heart-break that is in it can never perish out of it.
There were two hundred persons in the ship, and but one
survived the disaster. He was a
sailor. A huge sea flung him up the face
of the precipice and stretched him on a narrow shelf of rock midway between the
top and the bottom, and there he lay all night.
At any other time he would have lain there for the rest of his life,
without chance of discovery; but the next morning the ghastly news swept
through Sydney that the Duncan Dunbar had gone down in sight of home, and
straightway the walls of the Heads were black with mourners; and one of these,
stretching himself out over the precipice to spy out what might be seen below,
discovered this miraculously preserved relic of the wreck. Ropes were brought and the nearly impossible
feat of rescuing the man was accomplished.
He was a person with a practical turn of mind, and he hired a hall in
We entered and cast anchor, and in the morning went oh-ing
and ah-ing in admiration up through the crooks and turns of the spacious and
beautiful harbor--a harbor which is the darling of
"It is beautiful, of course it's beautiful--the Harbor;
but that isn't all of it, it's only half of it;
Of course I made an apology; and asked him to convey it to
his friend. He was right about
The narrow inlets which I have mentioned go wandering out
into the land everywhere and hiding themselves in it, and pleasure-launches are
always exploring them with picnic parties on board. It is said by trustworthy people that if you
explore them all you will find that you have covered
If the climates of the world were determined by parallels of
latitude, then we could know a place's climate by its position on the map; and
so we should know that the climate of Sydney was the counterpart of the climate
of Columbia, S. C., and of Little Rock, Arkansas, since Sydney is about the
same distance south of the equator that those other towns are north
of-it-thirty-four degrees. But no,
climate disregards the parallels of latitude.
In
The whole narrow, hilly belt of the Pacific side of
But Nature is always stingy of perfect climates; stingier in
the case of
If we look at a map of the world we are surprised to see how
big
But where as one finds a sufficiently good climate and
fertile land almost everywhere in the United States, it seems settled that
inside of the Australian border-belt one finds many deserts and in spots a
climate which nothing can stand except a few of the hardier kinds of
rocks. In effect,
This stupendous blank is hot, not to say torrid; a part of
it is fertile, the rest is desert; it is not liberally watered; it has no
towns. One has only to cross the
mountains of
"The wind, which had been blowing all the morning from the N.E.,
increased to a heavy gale, and I shall never forget its withering
effect. I sought shelter behind a large gum-tree, but the blasts of
heat were so terrific that I wondered the very grass did not take
fire. This really was nothing ideal: everything both animate and
inanimate gave way before it; the horses stood with their backs to
the wind and their noses to the ground, without the muscular
strength to raise their heads; the birds were mute, and the leaves
of the trees under which we were sitting fell like a snow shower
around us. At noon I took a thermometer graded to 127 deg., out of
my box, and observed that the mercury was up to 125. Thinking that
it had been unduly influenced, I put it in the fork of a tree close
to me, sheltered alike from the wind and the sun. I went to examine
it about an hour afterwards, when I found the mercury had risen to
the-top of the instrument and had burst the bulb, a circumstance
that I believe no traveler has ever before had to record. I cannot
find language to convey to the reader's mind an idea of the intense
and oppressive nature of the heat that prevailed."
That hot wind sweeps over
"As we proceeded the altitude became less, and the heat
proportionately greater until we reached Dubbo, which is only 600
feet above sea-level. It is a pretty town, built on an extensive
plain . . . . After the effects of a shower of rain have passed
away the surface of the ground crumbles into a thick layer of dust,
and occasionally, when the wind is in a particular quarter, it is
lifted bodily from the ground in one long opaque cloud. In the
midst of such a storm nothing can be seen a few yards ahead, and the
unlucky person who happens to be out at the time is compelled to
seek the nearest retreat at hand. When the thrifty housewife sees
in the distance the dark column advancing in a steady whirl towards
her house, she closes the doors and windows with all expedition. A
drawing-room, the window of which has been carelessly left open
during a dust-storm, is indeed an extraordinary sight. A lady who
has resided in Dubbo for some years says that the dust lies so thick
on the carpet that it is necessary to use a shovel to remove it."
And probably a wagon. I was mistaken; I have not seen a proper duststorm. To my mind the exterior aspects and character of Australia are fascinating things to look at and think about, they are so strange, so weird, so new, so uncommonplace, such a startling and interesting contrast to the other sections of the planet, the sections that are known to us all, familiar to us all. In the matter of particulars--a detail here, a detail there--we have had the choice climate of New South Wales' seacoast; we have had the Australian heat as furnished by Captain Sturt; we have had the wonderful dust-storm; and we have considered the phenomenon of an almost empty hot wilderness half as big as the United States, with a narrow belt of civilization, population, and good climate around it.
Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
--Pudd'nhead
Captain Cook found
English law was hard-hearted in those days. For trifling offenses which in our day would be punished by a small fine or a few days' confinement, men, women, and boys were sent to this other end of the earth to serve terms of seven and fourteen years; and for serious crimes they were transported for life. Children were sent to the penal colonies for seven years for stealing a rabbit!
When I was in
Twenty-five lashes!
In Australia and Tasmania they gave a convict fifty for almost any
little offense; and sometimes a brutal officer would add fifty, and then
another fifty, and so on, as long as the sufferer could endure the torture and
live. In
The convict life in
The incidents quoted above are mere hints, mere suggestions of what convict life was like--they are but a couple of details tossed into view out of a shoreless sea of such; or, to change the figure, they are but a pair of flaming steeples photographed from a point which hides from sight the burning city which stretches away from their bases on every hand.
Some of the convicts--indeed, a good many of them--were very bad people, even for that day; but the most of them were probably not noticeably worse than the average of the people they left behind them at home. We must believe this; we cannot avoid it. We are obliged to believe that a nation that could look on, unmoved, and see starving or freezing women hanged for stealing twenty-six cents' worth of bacon or rags, and boys snatched from their mothers, and men from their families, and sent to the other side of the world for long terms of years for similar trifling offenses, was a nation to whom the term "civilized" could not in any large way be applied. And we must also believe that a nation that knew, during more than forty years, what was happening to those exiles and was still content with it, was not advancing in any showy way toward a higher grade of civilization.
If we look into the characters and conduct of the officers and gentlemen who had charge of the convicts and attended to their backs and stomachs, we must grant again that as between the convict and his masters, and between both and the nation at home, there was a quite noticeable monotony of sameness.
Four years had gone by, and many convicts had come. Respectable settlers were beginning to
arrive. These two classes of colonists
had to be protected, in case of trouble among themselves or with the
natives. It is proper to mention the
natives, though they could hardly count they were so scarce. At a time when they had not as yet begun to
be much disturbed--not as yet being in the way--it was estimated that in
People had to be protected.
Officers of the regular army did not want this service--away off there
where neither honor nor distinction was to be gained. So
This was the worst blow of all. The colony fairly staggered under it. The
Corps was an object-lesson of the moral condition of
In those early days the colony was non-supporting. All the necessaries of life--food, clothing,
and all--were sent out from
Meantime, they had spread intemperance everywhere. And they had squeezed farm after farm out of
the settlers hands for rum, and thus had bountifully enriched themselves. When a farmer was caught in the last agonies
of thirst they took advantage of him and sweated him for a drink. In one instance
they sold a man a gallon of rum worth two dollars for a piece of property which
was sold some years later for $100,000. When the colony was about eighteen or
twenty years old it was discovered that the land was specially fitted for the
wool-culture. Prosperity followed,
commerce with the world began, by and by rich mines of the noble metals were
opened, immigrants flowed in, capital likewise.
The result is the great and wealthy and enlightened
It is a country that is rich in mines, wool ranches, trams, railways, steamship lines, schools, newspapers, botanical gardens, art galleries, libraries, museums, hospitals, learned societies; it is the hospitable home of every species of culture and of every species of material enterprise, and there is a, church at every man's door, and a race-track over the way.
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it--and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again--and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more.
--Pudd'nhead
All English-speaking colonies are made up of lavishly
hospitable people, and
Mr. Gane ("
"The
inhabitants of
treatment which we experienced at the hands of this generous-hearted
people will help more than anything else to make us recollect with
pleasure our stay amongst them. In the character of hosts and
hostesses they excel. The 'new chum' needs only the
acquaintanceship of one of their number, and he becomes at once the
happy recipient of numerous complimentary invitations and thoughtful
kindnesses. Of the towns it has been our good fortune to visit,
none have
portrayed home so faithfully as
Nobody could say it finer than that. If he had put in his cork then, and stayed
away from Dubbo----but no; heedless man, he pulled it again. Pulled it when he
was away along in his book, and his memory of what he had said about
"We cannot
quit the promising town of
warm praise, to the kind-hearted and hospitable usages of its
inhabitants.
of its kindly treatment of strangers, possesses a little formality
and reserve. In Dubbo, on the contrary, though the same congenial
manners prevail, there is a pleasing degree of respectful
familiarity which gives the town a homely comfort not often met with
elsewhere. In laying on one side our pen we feel contented in
having been able, though so late in this work, to bestow a
panegyric, however unpretentious, on a town which, though possessing
no picturesque natural surroundings, nor interesting architectural
productions, has yet a body of citizens whose hearts cannot but
obtain for their town a reputation for benevolence and
kind-heartedness."
I wonder what soured him on
In Australia it takes about two acres and a half of pastureland (some people say twice as many), to support a sheep; and when the squatter has half a million sheep his private domain is about as large as Rhode Island, to speak in general terms. His annual wool crop may be worth a quarter or a half million dollars.
He will live in a palace in Melbourne or Sydney or some other of the large cities, and make occasional trips to his sheep-kingdom several hundred miles away in the great plains to look after his battalions of riders and shepherds and other hands. He has a commodious dwelling out there, and if he approve of you he will invite you to spend a week in it, and will make you at home and comfortable, and let you see the great industry in all its details, and feed you and slake you and smoke you with the best that money can buy.
On at least one of these vast estates there is a
considerable town, with all the various businesses and occupations that go to
make an important town; and the town and the land it stands upon are the
property of the squatters. I have seen
that town, and it is not unlikely that there are other squatter-owned towns in
The Australians did not seem to me to differ noticeably from Americans, either in dress, carriage, ways, pronunciation, inflections, or general appearance. There were fleeting and subtle suggestions of their English origin, but these were not pronounced enough, as a rule, to catch one's attention. The people have easy and cordial manners from the beginning --from the moment that the introduction is completed. This is American. To put it in another way, it is English friendliness with the English shyness and self-consciousness left out.
Now and then--but this is rare--one hears such words as
piper for paper, lydy for lady, and tyble for table fall from lips whence one
would not expect such pronunciations to come.
There is a superstition prevalent in
"The tyble is set, and here is the piper; and if the lydy is ready I'll tell the wyter to bring up the breakfast."
I have made passing mention, a moment ago, of the native
Australasian's custom of speaking of
In the Australasian home the table-talk is vivacious and
unembarrassed; it is without stiffness or restraint. This does not remind one of
English and colonial audiences are phenomenally alert and responsive. Where masses of people are gathered together in England, caste is submerged, and with it the English reserve; equality exists for the moment, and every individual is free; so free from any consciousness of fetters, indeed, that the Englishman's habit of watching himself and guarding himself against any injudicious exposure of his feelings is forgotten, and falls into abeyance--and to such a degree indeed, that he will bravely applaud all by himself if he wants to--an exhibition of daring which is unusual elsewhere in the world.
But it is hard to move a new English acquaintance when he is by himself, or when the company present is small and new to him. He is on his guard then, and his natural reserve is to the fore. This has given him the false reputation of being without humor and without the appreciation of humor.
Americans are not Englishmen, and American humor is not
English humor; but both the American and his humor had their origin in
There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and shallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."
--Pudd'nhead
In
Mr. X., the missionary, considered the dream awhile, then said:
"It is not surpassable for magnitude, since its metes and bounds are
the metes and bounds of the universe itself; and it seems to me that
it almost accounts for a thing which is otherwise nearly
unaccountable--the origin of the sacred legends of the Hindoos.
Perhaps they dream them, and then honestly believe them to be divine
revelations of fact. It looks like that, for the legends are built
on so vast a scale that it does not seem reasonable that plodding
priests would happen upon such colossal fancies when awake."
He told some of the legends, and said that they were implicitly believed by all classes of Hindoos, including those of high social position and intelligence; and he said that this universal credulity was a great hindrance to the missionary in his work. Then he said something like this:
"At home, people wonder why Christianity does not make faster
progress in
that they have a natural trust in miracles and give them a
hospitable reception. Then they argue like this: since the Indian
believes easily, place Christianity before them and they must
believe; confirm its truths by the biblical miracles, and they will
no longer doubt, The natural deduction is, that as Christianity
makes but
indifferent progress in
are not fortunate in presenting the doctrines and the miracles.
"But the truth is, we are not by any means so well equipped as they
think. We have not the easy task that they imagine. To use a
military figure, we are sent against the enemy with good powder in
our guns, but only wads for bullets; that is to say, our miracles
are not effective; the Hindoos do not care for them; they have more
extraordinary ones of their own. All the details of their own
religion are proven and established by miracles; the details of ours
must be proven in
the same way. When I first began my work
in
I greatly underestimated the difficulties thus put upon my task. A
correction was not long in coming. I thought as our friends think
at home--that to prepare my childlike wonder-lovers to listen with
favor to my grave message I only needed to charm the way to it with
wonders, marvels, miracles. With full confidence I told the wonders
performed by Samson, the strongest man that had ever lived--for so I
called him.
"At first I saw lively anticipation and strong interest in the faces
of my people, but as I moved along from incident to incident of the
great story, I was distressed to see that I was steadily losing the
sympathy of my audience. I could not understand it. It was a
surprise to me, and a disappointment. Before I was through, the
fading sympathy had paled to indifference. Thence to the end the
indifference remained; I was not able to make any impression upon
it.
"A good old Hindoo gentleman told me where my trouble lay. He said
'We Hindoos recognize a god by the work of his hands--we accept no
other testimony. Apparently, this is also the rule with you
Christians. And we know when a man has his power from a god by the
fact that he does things which he could not do, as a man, with the
mere powers of a man. Plainly, this is the Christian's way also, of
knowing when a man is working by a god's power and not by his own.
You saw that there was a supernatural property in the hair of
Samson; for you perceived that when his hair was gone he was as
other men. It is our way, as I have said. There are many nations
in the world, and each group of nations has its own gods, and will
pay no worship to the gods of the others. Each group believes its
own gods to be strongest, and it will not exchange them except for
gods that shall be proven to be their superiors in power. Man is
but a weak creature, and needs the help of gods--he cannot do
without it. Shall he place his fate in the hands of weak gods when
there may be stronger ones to be found? That would be foolish. No,
if he hear of gods that are stronger than his own, he should not
turn a deaf ear, for it is not a light matter that is at stake. How
then shall he determine which gods are the stronger, his own or
those that preside over the concerns of other nations? By comparing
the known works of his own gods with the works of those others;
there is no other way. Now, when we make this comparison, we are
not drawn towards the gods of any other nation. Our gods are shown
by their works to be the strongest, the most powerful. The
Christians have but few gods, and they are new--new, and not strong;
as it seems to us. They will increase in number, it is true, for
this has happened with all gods, but that time is far away, many
ages and decades of ages away, for gods multiply slowly, as is meet
for beings to whom a thousand years is but a single moment. Our own
gods have been born millions of years apart. The process is slow,
the gathering of strength and power is similarly slow. In the slow
lapse of the ages the steadily accumulating power of our gods has at
last become prodigious. We have a thousand proofs of this in the
colossal character of their personal acts and the acts of ordinary
men to whom they have given supernatural qualities. To your Samson
was given supernatural power, and when he broke the withes, and slew
the thousands with the jawbone of an ass, and carried away the
gate's of the city upon his shoulders, you were amazed--and also
awed, for you recognized the divine source of his strength. But it
could not profit to place these things before your Hindoo
congregation and invite their wonder; for they would compare them
with the deed done by Hanuman, when our gods infused their divine
strength into his muscles; and they would be indifferent to them--as
you saw. In the old, old times, ages and ages gone by, when our god
Rama was warring
with the demon god of
bridge the sea
and connect
might pass easily over; and he sent his general, Hanuman, inspired
like your own Samson with divine strength, to bring the materials
for the bridge. In two days Hanuman strode fifteen hundred miles,
to the
mountains two
hundred miles long, and started with it toward
It was in the night; and, as he passed along the plain, the people
of Govardhun heard the thunder of his tread and felt the earth
rocking under it, and they ran out, and there, with their snowy
summits piled to
heaven, they saw the
this huge continent swept along overshadowing the earth, upon its
slopes they discerned the twinkling lights of a thousand sleeping
villages, and it was as if the constellations were filing in
procession through the sky. While they were looking, Hanuman
stumbled, and a small ridge of red sandstone twenty miles long was
jolted loose and fell. Half of its length has wasted away in the
course of the ages, but the other ten miles of it remain in the
plain by Govardhun to this day as proof of the might of the
inspiration of our gods. You must know, yourself, that Hanuman
could not have
carried those mountains to
strength of the gods. You know that it was not done by his own
strength, therefore, you know that it was done by the strength of
the gods, just as you know that Samson carried the gates by the
divine strength and not by his own. I think you must concede two
things: First, That in carrying the gates of the city upon his
shoulders, Samson did not establish the superiority of his gods over
ours; secondly, That his feat is not supported by any but verbal
evidence, while Hanuman's is not only supported by verbal evidence,
but this evidence is confirmed, established, proven, by visible,
tangible evidence, which is the strongest of all testimony. We have
the sandstone ridge, and while it remains we cannot doubt, and shall
not. Have you the gates?'"
The timid man yearns for full value and asks a tenth. The bold man strikes for double value and compromises on par.
--Pudd'nhead
One is sure to be struck by the liberal way in which
The
There are four specialties attainable in the way of social
pleasure. If you enter your name on the
Visitor's Book at Government House you will receive an invitation to the next
ball that takes place there, if nothing can be proven against you. And it will be very pleasant; for you will
see everybody except the Governor, and add a number of acquaintances and
several friends to your list. The
Governor will be in
The Australasian Governor would not be so restless, perhaps, if he had a war, or a veto, or something like that to call for his reserve-energies, but he hasn't. There isn't any war, and there isn't any veto in his hands. And so there is really little or nothing doing in his line. The country governs itself, and prefers to do it; and is so strenuous about it and so jealous of its independence that it grows restive if even the Imperial Government at home proposes to help; and so the Imperial veto, while a fact, is yet mainly a name.
Thus the Governor's functions are much more limited than are a Governor's functions with us. And therefore more fatiguing. He is the apparent head of the State, he is the real head of Society. He represents culture, refinement, elevated sentiment, polite life, religion; and by his example he propagates these, and they spread and flourish and bear good fruit. He creates the fashion, and leads it. His ball is the ball of balls, and his countenance makes the horse-race thrive.
He is usually a lord, and this is well; for his position compels him to lead an expensive life, and an English lord is generally well equipped for that.
Another of
Third in the list of special pleasures is the tour of the harbor in a fine steam pleasure-launch. Your richer friends own boats of this kind, and they will invite you, and the joys of the trip will make a long day seem short.
And finally comes the shark-fishing.
The shark is the swiftest fish that swims. The speed of the fastest steamer afloat is
poor compared to his. And he is a great
gad-about, and roams far and wide in the oceans, and visits the shores of all
of them, ultimately, in the course of his restless excursions. I have a tale to tell now, which has not as
yet been in print. In
"Say, young fellow, take my line a spell, and change my luck for me."
"How do you know I won't make it worse?"
"Because you can't. It has been at its worst all night. If you can't change it, no harm's done; if you do change it, it's for the better, of course. Come."
"All right, what will you give?"
"I'll give you the shark, if you catch one."
"And I will eat it, bones and all. Give me the line."
"Here you are. I will get away, now, for awhile, so that my luck won't spoil yours; for many and many a time I've noticed that if----there, pull in, pull in, man, you've got a bite! I knew how it would be. Why, I knew you for a born son of luck the minute I saw you. All right--he's landed."
It was an unusually large shark--"a full nineteen-footer," the fisherman said, as he laid the creature open with his knife.
"Now you rob him, young man, while I step to my hamper for a fresh bait. There's generally something in them worth going for. You've changed my luck, you see. But my goodness, I hope you haven't changed your own."
"Oh, it wouldn't matter; don't worry about that. Get your bait. I'll rob him."
When the fisherman got back the young man had just finished washing his hands in the bay, and was starting away.
"What, you are not going?"
"Yes. Good-bye."
"But what about your shark?"
"The shark? Why, what use is he to me?"
"What use is he? I like that. Don't you know that we can go and report him to Government, and you'll get a clean solid eighty shillings bounty? Hard cash, you know. What do you think about it now?"
"Oh, well, you can collect it."
"And keep it? Is that what you mean?"
"Yes."
"Well, this is odd. You're one of those sort they call eccentrics, I judge. The saying is, you mustn't judge a man by his clothes, and I'm believing it now. Why yours are looking just ratty, don't you know; and yet you must be rich."
"I am."
The young man walked slowly back to the town, deeply musing as he went. He halted a moment in front of the best restaurant, then glanced at his clothes and passed on, and got his breakfast at a "stand-up." There was a good deal of it, and it cost five shillings. He tendered a sovereign, got his change, glanced at his silver, muttered to himself, "There isn't enough to buy clothes with," and went his way.
At half-past nine the richest wool-broker in
"There's a sundowner at the door wants to see you, sir."
"What do you bring that kind of a message here for? Send him about his business."
"He won't go, sir. I've tried."
"He won't go? That's--why, that's unusual. He's one of two things, then: he's a remarkable person, or he's crazy. Is he crazy?"
"No, sir. He don't look it."
"Then he's remarkable. What does he say he wants?"
"He won't tell, sir; only says it's very important."
"And won't go. Does he say he won't go?"
"Says he'll stand there till he sees you, sir, if it's all day."
"And yet isn't crazy. Show him up."
The sundowner was shown in. The broker said to himself, "No, he's not crazy; that is easy to see; so he must be the other thing."
Then aloud, "Well, my good fellow, be quick about it; don't waste any words; what is it you want?"
"I want to borrow a hundred thousand pounds."
"Scott! (It's a mistake; he is crazy . . . . No--he can't be--not with that eye.) Why, you take my breath away. Come, who are you?"
"Nobody that you know."
"What is your name?"
"Cecil Rhodes."
"No, I don't remember hearing the name before. Now then--just for curiosity's sake--what has sent you to me on this extraordinary errand?"
"The intention to make a hundred thousand pounds for you and as much for myself within the next sixty days."
"Well, well, well. It is the most extraordinary idea that--sit down--you interest me. And somehow you--well, you fascinate me; I think that that is about the word. And it isn't your proposition--no, that doesn't fascinate me; it's something else, I don't quite know what; something that's born in you and oozes out of you, I suppose. Now then just for curiosity's sake again, nothing more: as I understand it, it is your desire to bor----"
"I said intention."
"Pardon, so you did. I thought it was an unheedful use of the word--an unheedful valuing of its strength, you know."
"I knew its strength."
"Well, I must say--but look here, let me walk the floor a little, my mind is getting into a sort of whirl, though you don't seem disturbed any. (Plainly this young fellow isn't crazy; but as to his being remarkable --well, really he amounts to that, and something over.) Now then, I believe I am beyond the reach of further astonishment. Strike, and spare not. What is your scheme?"
"To buy the wool crop--deliverable in sixty days."
"What, the whole of it?"
"The whole of it."
"No, I was not quite out of the reach of surprises, after all. Why, how you talk! Do you know what our crop is going to foot up?"
"Two and a half million sterling--maybe a little more."
"Well, you've got your statistics right, any way. Now, then, do you know what the margins would foot up, to buy it at sixty days?"
"The hundred thousand pounds I came here to get."
"Right, once more. Well, dear me, just to see what would happen, I wish you had the money. And if you had it, what would you do with it?"
"I shall make two hundred thousand pounds out of it in sixty days."
"You mean, of course, that you might make it if----"
"I said 'shall'."
"Yes, by George, you did say 'shall'! You are the most definite devil I ever saw, in the matter of language. Dear, dear, dear, look here! Definite speech means clarity of mind. Upon my word I believe you've got what you believe to be a rational reason, for venturing into this house, an entire stranger, on this wild scheme of buying the wool crop of an entire colony on speculation. Bring it out--I am prepared--acclimatized, if I may use the word. Why would you buy the crop, and why would you make that sum out of it? That is to say, what makes you think you----"
"I don't think--I know."
"Definite again. How do you know?"
"Because
"Oh, in-deed?
Now then, I've got you! Such a
thunderbolt as you have just let fly ought to have made me jump out of my
chair, but it didn't stir me the least little bit, you see. And for a very simple reason: I have read the
morning paper. You can look at it if you
want to. The fastest ship in the service
arrived at eleven o'clock last night, fifty days out from
"Because I have later news."
"Later news? Oh,
come--later news than fifty days, brought steaming hot from
"My news is only ten days old."
"Oh, Mun-chausen, hear the maniac talk! Where did you get it?"
"Got it out of a shark."
"Oh, oh, oh, this is too much! Front! call the police bring the gun --raise the town! All the asylums in Christendom have broken loose in the single person of----"
"Sit down! And collect yourself. Where is the use in getting excited? Am I excited? There is nothing to get excited about. When I make a statement which I cannot prove, it will be time enough for you to begin to offer hospitality to damaging fancies about me and my sanity."
"Oh, a thousand, thousand pardons! I ought to be ashamed of myself, and I am
ashamed of myself for thinking that a little bit of a circumstance like sending
a shark to
"What does your middle initial stand for, sir?"
"Andrew. What are you writing?"
"Wait a moment. Proof about the shark--and another matter. Only ten lines. There--now it is done. Sign it."
"Many thanks--many. Let me see; it says--it says oh, come, this is interesting! Why--why--look here! prove what you say here, and I'll put up the money, and double as much, if necessary, and divide the winnings with you, half and half. There, now--I've signed; make your promise good if you can. Show me a copy of the London Times only ten days old."
"Here it is--and with it these buttons and a memorandum book that belonged to the man the shark swallowed. Swallowed him in the Thames, without a doubt; for you will notice that the last entry in the book is dated 'London,' and is of the same date as the Times, and says, 'Ber confequentz der Kreigeseflarun, reife ich heute nach Deutchland ab, aur bak ich mein leben auf dem Ultar meines Landes legen mag'----, as clean native German as anybody can put upon paper, and means that in consequence of the declaration of war, this loyal soul is leaving for home to-day, to fight. And he did leave, too, but the shark had him before the day was done, poor fellow."
"And a pity, too. But there are times for mourning, and we will attend to this case further on; other matters are pressing, now. I will go down and set the machinery in motion in a quiet way and buy the crop. It will cheer the drooping spirits of the boys, in a transitory way. Everything is transitory in this world. Sixty days hence, when they are called to deliver the goods, they will think they've been struck by lightning. But there is a time for mourning, and we will attend to that case along with the other one. Come along, I'll take you to my tailor. What did you say your name is?"
"Cecil Rhodes."
"It is hard to remember. However, I think you will make it easier by and by, if you live. There are three kinds of people--Commonplace Men, Remarkable Men, and Lunatics. I'll classify you with the Remarkables, and take the chances."
The deal went through, and secured to the young stranger the first fortune he ever pocketed.
The people of
The government pays a bounty for the shark; to get the
bounty the fishermen bait the hook or the seine with agreeable mutton; the news
spreads and the sharks come from all over the
We can secure other people's approval, if we do right and try hard; but our own is worth a hundred of it, and no way has been found out of securing that.
--Pudd'nhead
My health had broken down in
So we moved south with a westward slant, 17 hours by rail to
the capital of the colony of Victoria, Melbourne--that juvenile city of sixty
years, and half a million inhabitants.
On the map the distance looked small; but that is a trouble with all divisions
of distance in such a vast country as
Outside of
We took the train at
The tickets were round-trip ones--to
Now comes a singular thing: the oddest thing, the strangest
thing, the most baffling and unaccountable marvel that
It is a narrow-gage road to the frontier, and a broader
gauge thence to
All passengers fret at the double-gauge; all shippers of freight must of course fret at it; unnecessary expense, delay, and annoyance are imposed upon everybody concerned, and no one is benefitted.
Each Australian colony fences itself off from its neighbor
with a custom-house. Personally, I have
no objection, but it must be a good deal of inconvenience to the people. We have something resembling it here and
there in
We changed cars. This
was at Albury. And it was there, I
think, that the growing day and the early sun exposed the distant range called
the
A resident told me that those were not mountains; he said
they were rabbit-piles. And explained
that long exposure and the over-ripe condition of the rabbits was what made
them look so blue. This man may have
been right, but much reading of books of travel has made me distrustful of
gratis information furnished by unofficial residents of a country. The facts which such people give to travelers
are usually erroneous, and often intemperately so. The rabbit-plague has indeed been very bad in
We breakfasted at the station. A good breakfast, except the coffee; and
cheap. The Government establishes the
prices and placards them. The waiters
were men, I think; but that is not usual in
All the pleasant morning we slid smoothly along over the
plains, through thin--not thick--forests of great melancholy gum trees, with
trunks rugged with curled sheets of flaking bark--erysipelas convalescents, so
to speak, shedding their dead skins. And
all along were tiny cabins, built sometimes of wood, sometimes of gray-blue
corrugated iron; and the doorsteps and fences were clogged with
children--rugged little simply-clad chaps that looked as if they had been
imported from the banks of the
And there were little villages, with neat stations well placarded with showy advertisements--mainly of almost too self-righteous brands of "sheepdip." If that is the name--and I think it is. It is a stuff like tar, and is dabbed on to places where the shearer clips a piece out of the sheep. It bars out the flies, and has healing properties, and a nip to it which makes the sheep skip like the cattle on a thousand hills. It is not good to eat. That is, it is not good to eat except when mixed with railroad coffee. It improves railroad coffee. Without it railroad coffee is too vague. But with it, it is quite assertive and enthusiastic. By itself, railroad coffee is too passive; but sheep-dip makes it wake up and get down to business. I wonder where they get railroad coffee?
We saw birds, but not a kangaroo, not an emu, not an
ornithorhynchus, not a lecturer, not a native.
Indeed, the land seemed quite destitute of game. But I have misused the word native. In
Truth is stranger than fiction--to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it.
--Pudd'nhead
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
--Pudd'nhead
The air was balmy and delicious, the sunshine radiant; it was a charming excursion. In the course of it we came to a town whose odd name was famous all over the world a quarter of a century ago--Wagga-Wagga. This was because the Tichborne Claimant had kept a butcher-shop there. It was out of the midst of his humble collection of sausages and tripe that he soared up into the zenith of notoriety and hung there in the wastes of space a time, with the telescopes of all nations leveled at him in unappeasable curiosity--curiosity as to which of the two long-missing persons he was: Arthur Orton, the mislaid roustabout of Wapping, or Sir Roger Tichborne, the lost heir of a name and estates as old as English history. We all know now, but not a dozen people knew then; and the dozen kept the mystery to themselves and allowed the most intricate and fascinating and marvelous real-life romance that has ever been played upon the world's stage to unfold itself serenely, act by act, in a British court by the long and laborious processes of judicial development.
When we recall the details of that great romance we marvel to see what daring chances truth may freely take in constructing a tale, as compared with the poor little conservative risks permitted to fiction. The fiction-artist could achieve no success with the materials of this splendid Tichborne romance.
He would have to drop out the chief characters; the public would say such people are impossible. He would have to drop out a number of the most picturesque incidents; the public would say such things could never happen. And yet the chief characters did exist, and the incidents did happen.
It cost the Tichborne estates $400,000 to unmask the
Claimant and drive him out; and even after the exposure multitudes of
Englishmen still believed in him. It
cost the British Government another $400,000 to convict him of perjury; and
after the conviction the same old multitudes still believed in him; and among
these believers were many educated and intelligent men; and some of them had
personally known the real Sir Roger. The
Claimant was sentenced to 14 years' imprisonment. When he got out of prison he went to
He always claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne until death called for him. This was but a few months ago--not very much short of a generation since he left Wagga-Wagga to go and possess himself of his estates. On his death-bed he yielded up his secret, and confessed in writing that he was only Arthur Orton of Wapping, able seaman and butcher--that and nothing more. But it is scarcely to be doubted that there are people whom even his dying confession will not convince. The old habit of assimilating incredibilities must have made strong food a necessity in their case; a weaker article would probably disagree with them.
I was in
For many years I had had a mystery in stock. Melbourne, and only Melbourne, could unriddle
it for me. In 1873 I arrived in
These invitations were always for a long time ahead; if we
were in Europe, three months ahead; if we were in
This first note invited us for a date three months in the
future. It asked us to arrive by the
4.10 p.m. train from
I showed the note to the author of "Tom Brown at
He described Mr. Bascom as being a man of genius, a man of
fine attainments, a choice man in every way, a rare and beautiful character. He
said that Bascom Hall was a particularly fine example of the stately manorial
We paid the visit. We paid others, in later years--the last one in 1879. Soon after that Mr. Bascom started on a voyage around the world in a steam yacht--a long and leisurely trip, for he was making collections, in all lands, of birds, butterflies, and such things.
The day that President Garfield was shot by the assassin Guiteau,
we were at a little watering place on Long Island Sound; and in the mail matter
of that day came a letter with the
My first thought was, why didn't he have the coffin opened? He would have seen that the corpse was an imposter, and he could have gone right ahead and dried up the most of those tears, and comforted those sorrowing governments, and sold the remains and sent me the money.
I did nothing about the matter. I had set the law after living lecture doubles of mine a couple of times in America, and the law had not been able to catch them; others in my trade had tried to catch their impostor-doubles and had failed. Then where was the use in harrying a ghost? None--and so I did not disturb it. I had a curiosity to know about that man's lecture-tour and last moments, but that could wait. When I should see Mr. Bascom he would tell me all about it. But he passed from life, and I never saw him again.. My curiosity faded away.
However, when I found that I was going to
I could not understand it; still, I thought it would all
come right in
So my mystery was a mystery still. It was a great disappointment. I believed it would never be cleared up--in this life--so I dropped it out of my mind.
But at last! just when I was least expecting it----
However, this is not the place for the rest of it; I shall come to the matter again, in a far-distant chapter.
There is a Moral sense, and there is an Immoral Sense. History shows us that the Moral Sense enables us to perceive morality and how to avoid it, and that the Immoral Sense enables us to perceive immorality and how to enjoy it.
-Pudd'nhead
It is the "Melbourne Cup" that brings this multitude together. Their clothes have been ordered long ago, at unlimited cost, and without bounds as to beauty and magnificence, and have been kept in concealment until now, for unto this day are they consecrate. I am speaking of the ladies' clothes; but one might know that.
And so the grand-stands make a brilliant and wonderful spectacle, a delirium of color, a vision of beauty. The champagne flows, everybody is vivacious, excited, happy; everybody bets, and gloves and fortunes change hands right along, all the time. Day after day the races go on, and the fun and the excitement are kept at white heat; and when each day is done, the people dance all night so as to be fresh for the race in the morning. And at the end of the great week the swarms secure lodgings and transportation for next year, then flock away to their remote homes and count their gains and losses, and order next year's Cup-clothes, and then lie down and sleep two weeks, and get up sorry to reflect that a whole year must be put in somehow or other before they can be wholly happy again.
The Melbourne Cup is the Australasian National Day. It would be difficult to overstate its importance. It overshadows all other holidays and specialized days of whatever sort in that congeries of colonies. Overshadows them? I might almost say it blots them out. Each of them gets attention, but not everybody's; each of them evokes interest, but not everybody's; each of them rouses enthusiasm, but not everybody's; in each case a part of the attention, interest, and enthusiasm is a matter of habit and custom, and another part of it is official and perfunctory. Cup Day, and Cup Day only, commands an attention, an interest, and an enthusiasm which are universal--and spontaneous, not perfunctory. Cup Day is supreme it has no rival. I can call to mind no specialized annual day, in any country, which can be named by that large name--Supreme. I can call to mind no specialized annual day, in any country, whose approach fires the whole land with a conflagration of conversation and preparation and anticipation and jubilation. No day save this one; but this one does it.
In
We have a supreme day--a sweeping and tremendous and tumultuous day, a day which commands an absolute universality of interest and excitement; but it is not annual. It comes but once in four years; therefore it cannot count as a rival of the Melbourne Cup.
In
I think it must be conceded that the position of the Australasian Day is unique, solitary, unfellowed; and likely to hold that high place a long time.
The next things which interest us when we travel are, first,
the people; next, the novelties; and finally the history of the places and
countries visited. Novelties are rare in
cities which represent the most advanced civilization of the modern day. When one is familiar with such cities in the
other parts of the world he is in effect familiar with the cities of
"Hello, Mark!"
"Here's to you, old chap!
"Say--Mark!--is he dead?"--a reference to a
passage in some book of mine, though I did not detect, at that time, that that
was its source. And I didn't detect it
afterward in
And speaking of the war-flurry, it seemed to me to bring to
light the unexpected, in a detail or two.
It seemed to relegate the war-talk to the politicians on both sides of
the water; whereas whenever a prospective war between two nations had been in
the air theretofore, the public had done most of the talking and the
bitterest. The attitude of the
newspapers was new also. I speak of
those of Australasia and
No, as I have suggested, novelties are rare in the great
capitals of modern times. Even the wool
exchange in
In the museums you will find acres of the most strange and fascinating things; but all museums are fascinating, and they do so tire your eyes, and break your back, and burn out your vitalities