Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa

SATURDAY, JANUARY 4, 1913.—This is written in the Pacific ocean, on the ship “Sonoma,” two days out of Sydney, Australia, where we expect to land next Monday. We have been on the ship seventeen days, and the passengers and servants seem as familiar as people with whom we have associated many years. In the main, we have had a pleasant voyage, although the weather was somewhat boisterous the first few days out of San Francisco. We stopped eight hours at Honolulu, and five hours at Pago Pago, in the Samoa Islands. There was an elaborate celebration on board on Christmas day, which included a big dinner, speeches, and a dance, and we also had a similar New Year celebration, although we actually had no New Year’s day. At a late hour on the 31st of December we crossed the 180th meridian, and, when we awoke the following morning, the date was January 2, 1913. Ships sailing westward drop a day on crossing the 180th meridian, and ships going eastward add a day. In traveling toward the sun, the day increases in length, and, in a trip around the world, this increase amounts to exactly twenty-four hours. Every day we set our watches back from twenty to thirty minutes, and when we reach Canton, Ohio, on our return, this daily increase in the day’s length will have amounted to the day we dropped. In traveling eastward, you set your watch forward every day, and, on completion of your journey around the world, you will have gained a day.... Few young people travel; only the old or middle-aged seem able to afford it, while only the young are able to enjoy it. Adelaide, my niece, is the only youngster on the ship, and, although she never saw the sea until this trip, she is thoroughly enjoying it. She was ill in a quiet, ladylike way two or three days, but now she has forgotten all about the motion, and dreads to leave the “Sonoma” at Sydney. The stewardess calls her “dear,” but invariably refers to me as “Mr. Works.” I am trying to get even by inventing a new name for the stewardess every time I speak to her. Her name is Mrs. Coombs, but I began by calling her Mrs. Ashton, and followed it with Mrs. Bullard, Mrs. Comstock, Mrs. Davis, Mrs. Everett, and on down the alphabet until I now call her Mrs. Wheeler. James, the room steward, and George, our dining-room steward, know my name, but to the stewardess I am always Mr. Works. She is an American, but most of the crew are English, or Australians, outside the captain and his chief officers. It is ship gossip that the first officer is a very able man, but so ill-natured that he has never been given a ship, although an older man than the captain. It is important to understand your trade, but if you hope to get into fast company, you must also be polite.

Among the passengers is a life insurance man named Adams, en route to Australia to protest because of unfriendly legislation. His wife has been seasick almost continuously, and the women say he keeps her sick because of too much kindness: that the moment she gets a little better, he stuffs her with unsuitable food, and thus brings on another spell. He has heard somewhere that champagne is good for seasickness, and keeps her full half the time. But however mistaken he may be in his treatment, he is certainly an attentive husband, and the men are proud of him. It is a beautiful sight to see this good husband modestly taking the air on deck, after devoting hours to his sick wife. His duty is to his wife, and he does not seem to care for other people. The women take turns in going down to sit with his wife. It was Adelaide’s turn this afternoon, and the good husband walked awhile with me on deck. He says that a good many years ago there was a demand from total abstainers that they be given a better life-insurance rate than smokers and patrons of barrooms. The rate was granted, but, after long experience, the experts of the Equitable and Mutual life companies found that the death-rate among total abstainers was slightly greater than the average death-rate among all classes.

Another interesting passenger as far as Honolulu was the manager of a sugar plantation who receives $18,000 a year salary. He spent several years in Porto Rico and in the Hawaiian Islands, but is now opening a plantation in Mexico. He frequently has two thousand employees, and, as they are constantly scheming to get the best of him, he delights in scheming to get the best of them. He told me he had been marked for assassination several times, but had always heard of it. He finds that when any body of men engage in a disreputable transaction, several of them are always anxious to turn informers, and secure a reward. An informer nearly always asks a thousand dollars, but he will usually compromise, and take two hundred. If you engage in any kind of dirty work, remember that some one will know about it, and sell you out.... The sugar man says that reliable Mexicans tell him that during the thirty-two years Diaz was president of Mexico, he ordered forty thousand men shot, and that he didn’t make a mistake in a single case.

The “Sonoma” is a ten-thousand-ton ship, and has been in the Australian trade only a few months since it was rebuilt last winter. It ran between San Francisco and Sydney several years ago, but the owners claimed the business did not pay, so the three ships in the line lay in San Francisco bay a long time. Then the owners decided to try it again, and the ships were rebuilt, and fitted with oil-burners. This is the fifth voyage of the “Sonoma” since the owners changed their minds. A good deal of the trade has been lost, and the employees are very polite, with a view of recovering the lost business. We have enough fuel oil on board to run the ship to Sydney and back to Honolulu. We all like the ship, except that it is a great roller. The other night, while the passengers were at dinner, a big roll sent the dishes and food into heaps on the floor, and those on deck were shot against the rail with great force.

Captain Trask is a very pleasant man, and most of the passengers know him. Some captains, particularly those on the Atlantic, see very little of the passengers, but on the Pacific, captains have little to do, and are more genial. On the Atlantic, there is always something for captains to do. Ships are seen frequently, and if it isn’t ships, it is fog. But the Pacific is very lonely; a ship is rarely seen here, although we have seen one on this voyage: the “Ventura,” the sister ship of the “Sonoma.” We met the “Ventura” on Christmas day, two days out of Honolulu, but it went by like a race-horse, and we saw little of it.... Adelaide sits on Captain Trask’s left, a lady with a maid having secured the coveted place on his right. He likes to talk, and we are already in possession of many of his reminiscences. He learned his trade as most Americans do—from the ground up, and went to sea as a common sailor when fifteen years old. By degrees he learned the technical side of his trade, and has been around the world many times in sailing-ships. He is a big fellow, and I imagine he has quelled many a mutiny with his fists. Occasionally, early in the morning, I catch him punching the bag on deck, and no other man on board is equally expert at it. Not long ago, the crew of the “Sonoma” mutinied at Sydney, in trying to enforce some rule of the union, and he landed sixty-two of them in jail. He took the ship back to San Francisco with a new and inexperienced crew, and reached port on time. He is very good-natured now, but I imagine that, on occasion, he would be real rough, and I shall behave myself while on board.... Poets love to use the expression, “As true as the needle to the pole,” but Captain Trask says the needle is not true to the pole, and does not point toward it. It isn’t the pole that attracts the needle of the compass, but the Magnetic North. A good many degrees west of the pole there is a great magnetic mountain, and this, and not the pole, attracts the needle by which mariners guide their ships. The pole has no attraction whatever for the needle of the compass.

Stories told by the captain at dinner: In Australia there once lived a very rich and very eccentric old bachelor. A certain old maid was very anxious to capture him, and pursued him so steadily that there was considerable talk among the neighbors. On one occasion the old bachelor gave a reception at his home, and the old maid was one of the guests. During the evening, the old bachelor invited the old maid to walk on the terrace. She thought he was about to propose.

“You have a beautiful place here,” she said to him, as they walked about in the moonlight.

“Yes,” he said, “yet it lacks one thing. But for that, I would be a very fortunate and happy man.”

The old maid thought she had him; that he could mean but one thing: the refining influence of a wife.

“And what is that?” she asked, coyly.

“Water,” the old bachelor replied.

Australia is a very dry country, and the average Australian longs for water as you long for money.... The captain says dogs never do well at sea; that they soon get fits, and die. In order to have good health, a dog must have grass to eat. But cats do well at sea. When the captain was master of a sailing vessel, he owned a cat which made three voyages around the world with him. He tells of the smart tricks of this cat as you tell of the smart tricks of your dog. While his ship was once tied up at the London docks, the cat was prowling around other vessels, and one of them carried it three miles away, to another loading-dock. The crew mourned the cat as dead, but one day he turned up: he had found his way back to the ship through three miles of London’s streets.... The captain says there is nothing in the story that rats will desert a sinking ship; he never knew a ship to go down that was not full of rats. In the Indian ocean he once came across an abandoned ship, and went aboard of it. He found the deck covered with rats that had starved to death. He tried to burn the ship, as it was a menace to navigation, but failed. Six months later, two thousand miles away, he ran across the same dangerous, drifting hulk. This time he succeeded in burning it.... Captain Trask says that in the old days of wooden sailing-ships the rats frequently gnawed holes in the bottom, in seeking water. They could hear the rush of water outside, and, not knowing it was salt water, worked toward it. When a ship was known to be full of rats, they were watered regularly, to prevent their sinking it.

Captain Trask says that on one of his voyages in a sailing-ship, he was in company every day with another vessel forty-seven days. The ships were of about equal size, and bound in the same direction. On another occasion, he left New York with a cargo of wheat, bound for Liverpool. Another sailing-ship went out of the harbor at the same time, bound also for Liverpool. They did not sight each other during the entire voyage, but arrived at Liverpool at almost the same hour.... The captain says that after a sailor has been ashore a few weeks, he finds the first part of a voyage very irksome, but after that he doesn’t care; he has spent six weeks beating around Cape Horn without minding it much. Frequently a bad wind will undo all that has been accomplished in weeks of hard work. But that is part of the game, and sailors usually take it philosophically.... But a story is told of one captain who fought two months to round Cape Horn, where the current and the wind flow in a south-easterly direction three hundred days of the year. He was finally compelled to put back to Buenos Aires for provisions. Again he struggled for two months without rounding the cape, and again he put back to Buenos Aires for provisions; but while lying in the harbor, he killed himself. Thereupon the first officer took command, and rounded the Cape without the loss of an unnecessary day, the wind and current being favorable for the first time in months.

At two o’clock one afternoon, Old Neptune came aboard the “Sonoma,” the ship having crossed the equator early in the morning. Neptune was dressed in a fantastic way, and followed by a numerous train, including his wife, several policemen, a physician, a barber, etc. A recorder read a long proclamation, and the passengers took pictures. It had been rumored that all those who had not crossed the line before, and could not produce a certificate showing they had been across, would be shaved with a wooden razor, and ducked in the swimming-tank. There was a good deal of nervousness among the passengers, but it turned out that the ceremony only referred to new members of the crew. About a dozen of these were operated on, greatly to the amusement of the passengers gathered on the upper deck. A platform had been erected beside the swimming-tank, and the victims were seated on this, one by one. First they were examined by the doctor, and given a huge pill. Then they were lathered with a paste made of flour and water, and shaved with a huge wooden razor. This being completed, the victim was thrown into the tank, and ducked. Sometimes the victim fought, and this caused great amusement. One of the passengers, a young athlete, went through the ceremony, to amuse his friends, and he pulled the barber into the tank. This angered the barber, and he began a rough tussle with the passenger. The passenger was getting the best of it, when another member of the crew went to the barber’s assistance. A friend of the passenger, who had been perched in the rigging, watching the exercises, climbed down hurriedly, and was preparing to go to his friend’s assistance, when a word from the captain stopped the row; but for a time it looked as though there might be a fight between passengers and crew. A young member of the crew who was being shaved, became gay, and also pushed the barber into the tank. There was a shout of merriment, and when the young fellow was chased and brought back to the platform, he continued his joke, and pushed the doctor in. This caused the barber to strike the young fellow, which brought forth a round of hissing from the passengers looking on. Altogether, the affair was pretty rough, but everything soon calmed down, and Neptune and his lady, and the doctor, and the barber and his assistant, and the policemen, marched around the deck and took up a collection. A collection was also taken up by a passenger for the twelve new members of the crew who had been ducked. Neptune was represented by a tall young fellow we had seen scrubbing the decks every morning. He wore a grotesque costume, and represented his part very cleverly, as did the others. Soon after Neptune and his court had counted the money taken in the collection, the big whistle blew for a fire drill, and we had quite a busy afternoon.

We had rather a pleasant Christmas, in spite of hot weather. Christmas eve we went to bed in sweltering rooms, with electric fans going, and slept without covering. At dinner next day we found the dining-room prettily decorated. We had turkey with cranberry sauce, plum pudding, pumpkin pie, etc. A good deal of champagne was ordered, as it costs but $2.75 per quart on a ship sailing to a foreign port, as against $4.50 at the average restaurant. The captain’s health having been proposed, he made a speech in which he complimented England, America, Santa Claus, and the passengers. He also said the “Sonoma” had been talked about unjustly by officers of a rival line. How readily rivals in any calling talk about each other! ... While cracking nuts, we began throwing little rolls of paper at each other. This soon filled the room with colored strips of paper, and the waiters got about with difficulty. The captain began the paper-throwing, which was accepted as license by the others. While still seated in the dining-room, the second-cabin passengers passed through the aisles in a procession, the captain having given them permission to dance on the main deck. They brought a good violinist and piano-player with them, and the dancing and music continued until midnight. There is a larger company in the second-cabin than in the first, and they are much livelier. One woman, a professional whistler, gave a performance, and attracted great applause. She is on her way to Australia to fill an engagement. The pianist is a young newspaper man from Chicago.... Maud Powell, possibly the best woman violinist living, was a first-cabin passenger to Honolulu, but she did no playing, although she was agreeable and much liked by the passengers. My room is on the upper deck, near where the deck piano is located, and early one morning Miss Powell’s accompanist played awhile; to exercise his fingers a little, I imagine. It was really a remarkable performance, and I enjoyed it almost alone. Miss Powell was entered on the passenger list as Mrs. Turner, her married name, and her husband accompanied her, as business manager.

Nearly all the passengers on the “Sonoma” are old travelers. On the Atlantic you meet many people who have never been over before, but Australia is out of the way, and is usually visited only by old travelers. Several people I have talked with have been nearly everywhere, and one man is making his seventh trip around the world.... We often have three or four rainstorms and rainbows in a day. A squall of rain came up this afternoon very suddenly, but in five minutes we were admiring the rainbow that accompanied it.

We have a wonderful country in the United States, but we pay very little attention to ships. I heard the captain say at dinner today that the United States sends only twelve passenger ships to foreign countries, the “Sonoma” being one of them, whereas England sends eleven thousand. Germany comes next with five thousand, and little Japan has five hundred. Our decline in shipping began with the Civil War; we have given our attention to building up the country, and neglected ship-building. The captain says that many of our rich men are interested in foreign ship lines, and that they impudently maintain a lobby in Washington to fight every measure intended to benefit domestic shipping. Our financiers will in time gain control of many of the big foreign ship companies; this, in the captain’s judgment, will be the final solution of the problem.

The Atlantic ocean is small compared with the great bulk of the Pacific. Immense fields of water never parted by the cut-water of a ship or steamer lie between the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn. Perhaps half of the Pacific is as yet unexplored and uncharted. In the lonely South Seas lie the Samoa islands, two of which belong to the United States. The “Sonoma” stopped at one of these on the 29th, and we found the harbor at Pago Pago exceedingly pretty. The captain said we should reach Pago Pago at 4 P.M., and at 3:50 P.M. we went ashore. The “Sonoma” makes its time as accurately as a railroad train. Two hours before, the island had been in sight, and long before turning into the harbor we skirted the island so closely that we could see children waving at us from the shore. The island is mountainous, but along the shore were many villages of grass-covered houses, and many groves of cocoanut trees. The harbor of Pago Pago is completely land-locked, and has deep water, but the mountains surrounding it are very high, and we found the weather very warm. As we approached the dock we passed the little gunboat “Princeton,” the captain of which acts as governor of American Samoa. His crew comprises the defensive force, except that fifty natives are employed by our government to act as police. These men receive a dollar a day, and the sons of the most aristocratic native chiefs are anxious to enlist. The entire native population of Tutuila and Manua, the two islands we control, is seven thousand, whereas the total white population is only a hundred. This is made up largely of the crew of the “Princeton.” Mail is received from home only once a month, and as the “Sonoma” was their Christmas boat, you can imagine that nearly all of the white population greeted our landing. Packages of newspapers were thrown out before the lines were made fast, and soon there was cheering: we brought the news that the naval school at Annapolis won the football game from Hartford. Mingling with the white men and women of the naval establishment were hundreds of natives, who looked a good deal like our Indians, except that they were better dressed. One swell we saw was barefoot, and carried a cane. The officers told us he was the head chief of a village. Sometimes the villages are not half a mile apart, but every one has a chief. Three native villages were in sight from the deck of the ship when we landed. The best building in Pago Pago is the house of the governor, which occupies a sightly position on top of a hill overlooking the sea and harbor. There are perhaps a dozen houses for the officers and men, and these, with a cold storage and electric-light plant, coal bunkers, and a small custom-house, make up the naval station. In addition to the “Princeton,” we found two or three smaller boats in the harbor. These had come from the other islands after freight and mail from the “Sonoma.” The “Dawn” I shall long remember as the dirtiest boat I have ever seen. It runs to Apia, fifty miles away. Apia is controlled by the Germans, and is much larger than Pago Pago. You may recall that a good many years ago several gunboats were loafing in Apia harbor when a great storm came up. Two gunboats belonging to the United States and two belonging to Germany went ashore, and a good many sailors were drowned. The incident was one of the big sensations at the time. Robert Louis Stevenson is buried near Apia, and he wrote that the Samoa islands furnish the finest climate in the world.... We spent five hours at Pago Pago, walking about and visiting with the naval officers and their families. Most of them came to the islands on the “Sonoma,” and a dozen or more of them dined with us. The government has built a reservoir in the hills back of the town, and water is piped to all of the houses occupied by the officers. The naval people were so glad to see us that they permitted us to fill the ship’s water tanks without charge. There are two or three American girls visiting married sisters in Pago Pago, and they told us they had not tired of the place after an experience of several months. All of them came over on the “Sonoma,” and they hurried on board to see their friend, the captain. He dined at the executive mansion. Governor Crose’s lady had peanut soup, and the captain said it was not only new, but very good. She also had fried chicken, mashed potatoes, apple salad, and several other things the captain could not remember when questioned next morning at breakfast, although he spoke particularly of home-made butter. The governor owns the cow we saw tied on the hillside near the executive mansion.... Hundreds of the natives were permitted to come on board the “Sonoma.” Usually they give a dance on the parade ground, and assess the passengers twenty-five cents each, but the day being Sunday, the missionaries objected to the usual dance being given. However, Adelaide and I saw the dance. When we came in from one of our three excursions on shore, we found sixty or seventy native women and girls in the ladies’ saloon of the ship, and they were coaxing each other to dance; it reminded me of a country party when the different guests are coaxed to sing. Two sailors from the “Princeton” wandered in, and one of them was coaxed to play the piano for the dancing. He played awhile, but as no one danced, he finally quit in disgust. Then a native girl, after much giggling and coaxing, was persuaded to play, and three or four of the girls danced. Two of them were particularly good; so Adelaide and I saw the much-discussed Samoan dance, in spite of the missionaries. But we were the only passengers present; the others were ashore looking at postal cards. The dance will be given at the approaching San Francisco exposition, a speculator having arranged already for a Samoan village. I am certain I saw three hundred natives on board during our stay at Pago Pago. When I went down to the barber shop to get shaved before dinner, I found the room packed with native women looking at the barber’s wares. A ship barber operates a little store, and his wares include toilet articles, clothing, medicines, confectionery, plug tobacco, etc. I don’t know that the Samoan women chew plug tobacco, but I saw a good many of them smoking. By-the-way, the barber on the “Sonoma” was barber on the “Siberia” when I went to Japan several years ago.

The afternoon we left Honolulu a new passenger came aboard, and I saw him first in the smoking-room. He was very plain, and I thought it my duty to be nice to him. He was agreeable enough, but not much disposed to talk. Later I learned that he is a member of the British Parliament, and that he has twenty-eight pieces of luggage. He is traveling with a doctor, and woman nurse, as he is not well. Ship gossip is to the effect that he is a son of Sir John Lister, a noted Englishman who has done much in a scientific way. Listerine was named for Sir John Lister. I do not see many talk to the British celebrity, except his doctor. His nurse has been seasick ever since coming on board, and she cannot be of much use to her employer. The man sits almost opposite me at the table, and I am satisfied that if anyone should look at him steadily, he would leave the dining-room. He is very plain, and knows it, in which respect he is different from Andrew Carnegie. He is known as “Mr. Lister,” and is going to South Africa to hunt lions. At first, the passengers picked at him a good deal, but during the long voyage to Sydney he became one of the most popular men on board, largely because he is quiet and well-behaved.

One of the passengers is an Australian who lived for a time in South Africa, and made money in mining. Disposing of his holdings to advantage, he went to Oregon, and engaged in apple-growing. It is very interesting to hear him tell of his experiences. He knew nothing about apple-growing when he went to Oregon, but “picked up” a practical knowledge of the business through experience. One of his “experiences” was losing $40,000 in buying a bad orchard. This taught him caution, and later he made money. His apple-pickers are compelled to wear gloves, and to twist rather than pull fruit from the trees. His specialty is buying orchards of shiftless owners, and reviving them. I heard him say last night that there were two sure ways of making money in the United States: the best is apple-growing, and the second is sheep-raising. It interested me greatly to hear that a man might learn a new business and make a success of it in three or four years, as this man did in the apple business.... Captain Trask has great contempt for the modern sailor; he says any old woman of fifty could do the work of a sailor these days, but in the old days of sailing-ships, seamen were compelled to work very hard, and their trade was a difficult one. The sailors on the “Sonoma,” almost without exception, wear blue overalls, and not the wide pantaloons you associate with sailor-men.

There is a wireless apparatus on board, and every day news of no importance is posted in the companionway. The night before Christmas, when we were twenty-four hundred miles out, a good many passengers sent messages to friends.... When you sit on your porches at home, on summer evenings, you hear locusts in the trees. Old-fashioned colored people call them jar-bugs. The wireless, when in operation, sounds exactly like a locust buzzing: a good many of the passengers have remarked the similarity. There are two operators, one of whom is always on duty. One of them is a tall young fellow who does great stunts in the swimming-pool, and the other looks and talks exactly as Lieutenant Rowan did when he carried that famous message to Garcia.

We had an enjoyable time at our New Year celebration. First there was an elaborate dinner, followed by a concert and dance, participated in by the second-cabin passengers. At the conclusion of the concert, we all joined hands and sang, “Should Old Acquaintance be Forgot?” When the dancing began, quadrilles soon became the fashion, and the affair reminded me of “a good time” among neighbors who had known each other many years. Most of the talent for the concert was furnished by the second-cabin, although the best two numbers came from first-class passengers. Refreshments were passed around, and the gayety continued until after midnight. Late in the evening, some one tied down the ship’s big whistle, and the trouble was not located for five minutes. Members of the crew also got up a grotesque parade, headed by the young man who blows a cornet three times a day to announce when meals are ready. Between quadrilles, the passengers stood at the rail, and looked at the Southern Cross, and found it rather disappointing; near it is a false cross which looks rather better than the genuine. The Southern Cross is seen only in the far South, and down here everything in the heavens is new to Northern eyes. Stars are more numerous than at home, and the night of the dance the heavens were particularly clear, and the sea very smooth. Further on, in South Africa, the nights are said to be so brilliant that it is possible to read comfortably by moonlight. During the dance and concert, the first-class passengers became so well acquainted with those in the second-cabin that they now go down to visit them, which they are at liberty to do, although the second-cabin passengers cannot come up on our deck without a special invitation from the captain or purser. Once a week the captain dines in the second-cabin. The food is about the same in the two dining-rooms, but our location is amidships, while the second is far aft, and the motion is more pronounced. The difference in fare is considerable, amounting to one-quarter or a third.

One of the most interesting men on board is J. L. Dwyer, secretary of native affairs in American Samoa, and chief district judge. He is on his way to Sydney, on a vacation. Judge Dwyer has been in Pago Pago five years. When he arrived, he found a king ruling over the island of Manua, but he managed to amicably dispose of His Majesty by making him a district judge. The king lived in a five-room house, and Judge Dwyer says he was a man of intelligence, and ruled justly, but he abdicated quietly, and, as district judge, did all he could for his people for a salary of $25 a month. The king died a year or two ago, but left a daughter, now twenty years old, who will be married shortly to a white clerk in a store at Pago Pago. The clerk gave Judge Dwyer $50 with which to buy a wedding ring in Sydney, and the judge says I may help select it. I have never before been on equally intimate terms with royalty.... The Samoan men believe it beneath their dignity to be annoyed by anything a woman does, so there are almost no quarrels among them on account of jealousy. But if a Samoan woman becomes jealous of another woman, trouble may be expected promptly.... The natives have no income except from the sale of copra, which is the dried meat of the cocoanut. Traders formerly robbed them unmercifully, so the United States Government now attends to the selling of copra, without expense to the natives. The income from this source amounts to $20 per inhabitant per year.... In going into Pago Pago, we saw a great many churches; every village seemed to have at least two. Judge Dwyer says there are too many churches in the islands. Many of the preachers are natives, and much of the money obtained from copra is sent away to missionary societies, for evangelistic work in other communities.

Five of our second-cabin passengers were Mormon missionaries for Pago Pago. The missionaries are thrifty: I was told that every big institution in the Hawaiian islands is owned by a descendant of the old missionaries. But there is little in the Samoan islands to develop; almost no agricultural land, and the little there is (in the vicinity of Apia) is in the hands of Chinese. At Pago Pago, all vegetables come from San Francisco, 4,400 miles away. A monthly paper is printed in Pago Pago, by the government, and distributed gratuitously among the natives. One column out of eight is devoted to English local news.... In the two American islands in Samoa there are but four vehicles, and these are two-wheel carts. There are no agricultural implements, and no farms. Wealth is calculated by the number of cocoanut trees a man owns. The trees are worth $5 each, and the nuts from each tree average about $1 per year in value. The waters surrounding the islands produce many food fish, but the natives do not much care for them. There are a good many pigs of an inferior breed, and some of these run wild, and are hunted with dogs. The only other game in the island are wild pigeons, though there is talk that wild cattle may be found on Tutuila island, a story Judge Dwyer does not believe. Every little while the natives hunt the wild cattle, but never find them. Sugar-cane is grown in Samoa, but is used for no other purpose than to thatch the queer circular houses of the natives.... A village chief is simply the village mayor, and is elected annually. Occasionally the elections are very exciting, and fraud freely resorted to, but in the main the Samoans are a peaceful people, and fairly honest.... It is impossible to get away from taxes, and the Samoan head of a family pays 270 pounds of copra as his annual contribution to the state. This is all used to pay local chiefs, and none of it goes to the United States.... Communism is practiced by the people, and when a man earns $20 a month working as a servant in an American household, he is compelled to divide with members of his family, but the industrious Samoans are tiring of this plan, and resort to all sorts of subterfuges to avoid dividing their wages.... Pago Pago is a beautiful place for naval lieutenants to take their brides, and it was delightful to spend five hours in the American colony there, but we have no more use for it than we have for Guam, or the Philippines. The supplies come from San Francisco, and cost a great deal; coal costs $13 a ton for the cruises of the “Princeton,” but our government does not receive ten cents a day income from American Samoa. In our career of conquest in Samoa, we have not robbed the Samoans; they have robbed us.

At breakfast-time on the morning of December 31, we passed Turtle island, of the Fiji group. We could see smoke ashore, and that was about all. The 180th meridian crosses one of these islands, and the captain says a native has a house on the line. In one end of his house the day of the week is Thursday, while in the other end it is Friday.

Most of the passengers are English. Among the Americans is a Chicago doctor named Beeson, who greatly interests me. Dr. Beeson has a son who is thirty years old, and when the father is away the son attends to his business, as the son is also a doctor. When the father returns, the son will take a trip. Harry Clay Blaney and wife, who toured the country for years in a play called “Across the Pacific,” are also interesting passengers. Mr. Blaney and his brother Charles operate theatres in New York, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Jersey City, and in other cities, in addition to owning several road shows. Mrs. Blaney is an actress, but is very domestic, and spends most of her time sitting on deck doing fancy work.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 5.—We celebrated our approach to Sydney, Australia, by running into a storm. I have never seen worse weather at sea. Heavy seas continually broke over the prow, and at breakfast only one woman appeared in the dining-room. It will surprise you to learn that this lone woman was Adelaide, the farmer’s daughter. The gentlemen gave her quite a reception, but I wasn’t there to witness it: I was sick in bed. Women are very much more subject to seasickness than men, as a rule.... The night before the storm, we had another impromptu dance, and Adelaide, who never danced in her life, danced the lancers with Judge Dwyer, chief judge of American Samoa. There were two sets, and a good-natured doctor from London called the figures in an amusing way. I hear it frequently remarked that we have a very agreeable passenger list; not a disagreeable person on the list. At the captain’s dinner the captain made another speech, in which he threw us gorgeous bouquets.

MONDAY, JANUARY 6.—The captain said we should see land on the morning of the 6th, at 8 o’clock. At almost exactly that hour, land appeared off the starboard beam (I take this to mean off to the right). When land first appears at sea, it is very faint, and is only distinguished from clouds with difficulty. At 10 A.M. we were in plain sight of Sydney’s famous harbor, and saw other ships entering ahead of us. A half an hour later, we took on a pilot, and at 11 o’clock we stopped at quarantine to wait for a doctor. When this official came, we found him a huge man who would create a sensation in a museum. After the usual inspection, the “Sonoma” steamed toward her dock, eight miles away, and we had an opportunity to see the harbor.... In reading, you are almost constantly in sight of the statement that Sydney has the finest harbor in the world, and, after you have seen it, you are disposed to admit the truth of the statement. After passing in from the sea, a ship travels eight or ten miles to the city docks, and the course winds around through hills almost large enough to be called mountains. On either side are bays, and everywhere on top of the hills you see houses with red tile roofs. Sydney is a city of more than seven hundred thousand, and has doubled its population in the past twenty-five years. It is only a question of a few years until Sydney has a million population, and is destined to become one of the great cities of the world. Its houses are nearly all built of a native stone of yellow cast. Through this wonderful harbor we steamed slowly, and finally landed at noon, as the captain said we would.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 7.—This morning we employed a messenger boy to show us around Sydney. The boy is fourteen years old, and was educated in English schools. He talks no other language than English, but we could not understand half he said: there is this marked difference in American and English pronunciation. Sydney is an English city, and its signs are in English, but we do not understand many of them. Australia is not only an English colony, but the people of its larger towns have a dialect of their own. Sydney is a fine city, but looks more like Manchester or Liverpool than it looks like London. There are no sky-scrapers here, in the American sense; one of the Sydney newspapers wanted to build a sky-scraper, and occupy it as an office, but Parliament would not permit it. Everywhere you see American goods, and signs calling attention to them, and Bud Atkinson’s American Wild West is giving exhibitions daily in one of the parks. It seemed queer to me that an exhibition of this character should be granted permission to exhibit in one of the parks; imagine an Australian Wild West in Central Park in New York. And I do not recall Bud Atkinson as a noted American in the Wild West line. This show came over a month ago, in the ship ahead of ours. I should say a jump of three weeks is a tolerably big one. This is the summer season here, and the show will return to the United States in April.... In the fruit stores in Sydney you see strawberries, cantaloupes, peaches, green corn, tomatoes, etc. At home you hear a good deal about low prices in Australia. I only know I paid fifty cents each for cantaloupes, which are known as Rock Melons here, but they are particularly large and fine. Strawberries were fifty cents a quart, but they were extra good. I am told that the people here do not care much for Rock Melons. The melons we bought we carried to a restaurant, and the woman who served them had never tasted melons, and thought we had queer taste.... A thing that attracted our attention in Sydney was an unusually large number of young women. At one of the bathing-beaches I saw a party of twelve, and nine of them were young women. We entered Sydney harbor early Monday morning, and the bathing-beaches were already crowded; there seems to be more merrymaking here than in American cities. On Monday and Tuesday the parks were crowded, as were the bathing-beaches. And the parks here are wonderfully fine, and the zoölogical garden I visited was the best I have ever seen. The impudent English sparrows may be seen here in great numbers, and in the parks they enter the cages of rare birds and rob them of their feed.... Adelaide is very polite, but she says the people here look funny to her; that it is a constant source of amusement to her to walk the streets and see the people. She says the women wear afternoon dresses in the morning, on the street. Along the docks this morning, we came upon a big crowd witnessing the departure of a ship. Half the women wore fancy white dresses, and big picture hats.... The residences here do not seem to be numbered, but each has a name; a flat with four occupants will have four names, and a double house will have two. Out in the suburbs, little houses of two and three rooms will have tremendously big names. And we passed through miles of suburbs where every house seemed to be new: there is no doubt that Sydney is growing rapidly.... An attraction here at one of the theatres is “Faust,” of which America tired years ago. “Marguerite” is exploited after the fashion of “Little Eva” in an “Uncle Tom” show, and somehow it looks ridiculous. “Faust” is a ridiculous play, so far as that goes, and the story of “Marguerite” foolish. One of the bills now being shown in Sydney represents “Marguerite” being transported alive into heaven, by angels, in spite of the devil, who is flying along with the angels, and snorting fire.... We hear in the United States that there are no labor troubles in Australia; that everything is settled by arbitration. But I see much more about labor troubles in the Sydney papers than I ever see in the papers of America. One of the unions now making trouble is that of the Rabbit Trappers. You may think I made that up, but I didn’t: there is really such a union here, and it is just now prominent because of some sort of controversy. Many years ago rabbits were imported to Australia, to afford sport for the people. Conditions are so favorable for rabbits here that they soon became a great pest. Farmers are now compelled to fence against rabbits, and millions of the animals are caught, frozen, and sent to the London market.... At least one of the leading newspapers here, The Morning Telegraph, denounces unionism, saying it was originally in the interest of workingmen, but lately it has become political despotism, and union labor leaders political adventurers. “Capital,” said The Telegraph, in an editorial this morning, “will leave Australia, and go where labor is not a political despot.” I do not know of a leading paper in the United States that would care to print a similar editorial. Plenty of such editorials are printed in the United States, but in trade papers, and not in leading daily newspapers.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8.—We sailed at noon today for Auckland, New Zealand, on the ship “Maheno.” It is about the size of the “Sonoma;” six thousand tons.... We are accomplishing so much by law now that I suggest the adoption of a law providing that no ship of less than twelve thousand tons be permitted to carry passengers; a six-thousand-ton ship is too small. Adelaide drew seat No. 13 at the table, but I did worse than that: I drew two men in my room. I resent two men in my room as I do going to jail, but resentment did me no good; the ship is crowded, and I was compelled to stand it. But what do you think happened to Adelaide, who occupies seat No. 13 at the table? She has a room to herself.... One of the men in my room is a New-Yorker named Bond, an importer who has a branch house in Sydney. The man with him is one of his traveling salesmen. Mr. Bond is an old traveler, and has made this trip many times. He hates the “Maheno,” and predicts a disagreeable experience. He says the “Maheno” can kick up a rough sea when the weather is fine, and that there is nothing commendable about the boat except that it usually gets across in a little less than four days.... You can never know what it means to be crowded until you have been one of three in a steamship stateroom. It was a disagreeable experience, getting to bed, which we attempted at 8:30, as the weather was rough. After I was in bed with my two roommates, I began thinking: “Suppose one of them should snore!” I am a bad sleeper at best, and the thought of a snoring man in my room all night set my nerves on edge.... The opportunity was too good to be neglected. Mr. Bond and his friend talked business awhile, another thing I am not accustomed to in my sleeping-room, and then Mr. Bond began snoring. For years, people around me have paid attention to my nerves, because I am a bad sleeper, and I resented this snoring as a spoilt child does when whipped by a neighbor. I stood it until midnight, and then I crawled out of bed, found a bath-robe and slippers, and spent the night on a sofa in the music-room.