At Batavia the well-known Captain Edward Salisbury left his world-touring yacht "Wisdom," to join our party. He entertained us in the evenings with weird tales of his adventures in the South Seas, where pigs are exchanged for wives and the wives thus acquired are then put to work to raise more pigs to get new wives.
Saigon
Good students of geography will doubtless recall that the approach to Saigon is through the crookedest river in the world. As I usually "just passed" in this subject, cannot speak with authority, but I will guarantee that it has many more curves than our Tamalpais railroad, advertised all over as being "The crookedest railway on the globe."
So the members of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce tour were busy speculating on just how many turns and twists the Empire State had made before she finally docked at Saigon, when some members of the Saigon Reception committee told us that we were the largest American steamship that ever had landed in port.
Two large busses were placed at the disposal of our delegation. The Cercle Sportivo gave a dance at their club in our honor and two tea dansants were held at the Continental Hotel. Some of the ladies got quite accustomed to the bags of mosquito netting that one slips one's feet in, to evade the pests while dining, but most of us forget to step out, and, for a moment, thought we were in a sack race.
The elephant at the beautiful botanical gardens, that would go and buy himself food when given the proper amount of money was interesting, but he was not the real attraction at Saigon. Our party had been entertained by the Geisha girls, sung almost to distraction (you know it is impolite for the sing-song girls of China to stop singing until requested to stop). We had watched the dancing of the Javanese and Philippine Ballerinas, but, we had to come here to see the real French girls. We now understand why many of our soldiers came home with French wives - "vamp" is the only word we could think of in describing every one of them. Never before had we seen so many picture hats.
What fun we all had airing our moth-eaten French. (Here I am not referring to the few of our party that speak French fluently.) And it was several days before some of us stopped calling the Chinese cabin-boys "Garcon."
Perhaps, to show that the San Francisco committee appreciated the distinction of being on board a ship fifteen feet longer than any other American steamer to make that port, we broke off part of the propeller as a souvenir in departing.
Chapter X
Manila