In the Track of the Trades / The Account of a Fourteen Thousand Mile Yachting Cruise to the Hawaiis, Marquesas, Societies, Samoas and Fijis

by Lewis R. Freeman

A VISIT TO APIA

On the 9th of June we sailed from Pago Pago for Apia, planning to return at the end of a week in order to be present at an official flag-raising which our patriotic friend, Chief Mauga, was preparing for. We found the breeze veering and uncertain as we beat out of the harbour late in the afternoon, but ample working room and the absence of strong currents in the entrance to this splendid bay made the direction of the wind of little moment. Beyond the shelter of the harbour walls the waves, driven by an unusually heavy Trade, were running tumultuously from the southeast in frothy hummocks of cotton wool. For a couple of miles, close-hauled, we stood straight out from the land, the yacht one moment burying her nose in a malignant curl of green, and the next tossing it skyward while a ton or two of solid water went bounding back along the deck and gurgled hoarsely out through the overworked scuppers. When the offing was sufficient sheets were slacked off and we headed down the coast on a broad reach, making good speed in spite of heavy rollings in the wrench of the quartering seas.

The west blazed for a few moments as the sun went down, to be quickly quenched by a curtain of black cloud that was thrown across the heavens in a final shifting of the scenery for the most spectacular exhibition of marine pyrotechnics that is to be seen in the whole length and breadth of the Seven Seas—a June night assault by the Pacific upon the "Iron Bound Coast" of Tutuila.

The "Iron Bound Coast" opens up beyond the first point west of the entrance to Pago Pago Bay and runs up the island for a half-dozen miles or more, squarely across the path of advancing lines of seas that have been charging to the attack and gathering weight, impetus and arrogance in a thousand miles of unbroken rush before the scourges of the Southeast Trade. Their repulse is sudden, sharp and decisive, and the beetle-browed, black-ribbed cliffs accomplish it without a change of expression. The waves have been beating their heads to pieces against these same frowning, impassive barriers for a million years, more or less, and yet they are never able to overcome their surprise, never stoical enough to hide their resentment, never capable of restraining their expostulations. And what floods of supplications, what varieties of protests they pour out! If you approach near enough, following the thundering crash against the cliff, they appeal to you from where they fall with sobs of anguish and groans of pain; if you gaze from afar they beckon you with high-flung distress flags of white foam, and if you pass in the darkness they signal their despair with ghostly bonfires of glowing spume and phantom rockets of phosphorescent spray.

It was such a display that we were treated to on the night of the 9th of June, and under a fortunate combination of circumstances that made it especially impressive. The seas about the Samoas are extraordinarily prolific of the animalculæ whose presence makes sea water phosphorescent, and in May and June occur their periods of greatest activity. That this night was moonless and heavily overcast made the conditions especially favourable. Daylight and twilight had passed in swift transition, and the yacht was sailing in inky darkness as she rounded the point and opened up the Iron Bound Coast. For a moment the darkness held, and through it the imminent loom of the island was only a blur of darker opacity against the starless void above. Then a great splash of flame burst forth, and in an instant more the coast was picked out in lines of liquid fire, the reflections from which bathed the whole mountainside in fluttering waves of ghostly blue light. Here a great sea struck and erupted like a volcano set-piece, spreading out fan-wise and falling back in lines of vivid light; there a big blow-hole exploded in thunderous geysers of flame, and close by a smaller vent projected, as from the nozzle of a hose, a slender, gleaming stream of liquid fire. In places, where the rock ribs of the cliff broke evenly, the flashes burst out in regular spurts of pale flame like those from the broadside of a warship, and again, where submerged rocks and crooked elbows threw one wave back upon another, there appeared great welters of green light that churned and bubbled and swirled like liquid lava.

Like the film of a biograph the vivid panorama of flame slipped past, and by nine o'clock the ridge of Sail Rock Point had interposed and blotted out the last of it. Beyond, the island broke into hollow, smooth-beached bays, where submerged reefs clipped the claws of the breakers and dissolved them in broad patches of faint luminosity before they reached the shore. At ten o'clock, in order not to reach Apia before morning, jib and mainsail were taken in and the night run out under foresail and forestay-sail.

The smooth, green hills of Upolou were close at hand to the southwest at daybreak, and at seven o'clock, with jack hoisted for a pilot, we were off the entrance of Apia harbour. The passage to the bay is broad and straight, but, as that port was German at the time, the taking of a pilot was compulsory. That functionary came out promptly in response to our signal, and a half hour later left the yacht at anchor a quarter of a mile off the beach and a hundred yards from where, a broken-backed frame of rusting steel, the wreck of the ill-fated German warship, Adler, lay high up on the coral reef, just as it had been left by the waves in the great hurricane of 1889.

We heard from eye-witnesses the story of that hurricane when we went ashore in the afternoon; of how the powerful British Calliope, cheered by the doomed sailors in the shrouds of the American ships, forced her way in the teeth of the storm out through the passage to safety; of the destruction of the Olga and Adler and Eber, and Trenton and Vandalia and Nipsic; of the frightful loss of life; of the heroism of the natives in risking their lives in the mountainous surf and treacherous back-wash to save their late enemies, and a hundred other things closely or remotely bearing on that remarkable disaster. Told by men to whom the memory of the storm was still fresh and clear, with the theatre of the great tragedy opening before us, and countless souvenirs of one kind or another at hand to crystallize interest, the recitals were graphic in the extreme and made deep impression upon us of the Lurline, who had also had some experience of the way of the sea in its harsher moods.

At evening as we came down to the landing for our boat the Commodore's gaze wandered from the great pile of riven steel on the reef to where the yacht, a slender sliver of silver, swung slowly to her anchor in the ebbing tide. At that moment the last rays of the setting sun, striking through the gaunt ribs of the Adler's sinister skeleton, threw a frame of black shadows across the water to rest for an instant in dark blotches on Lurline's snowy side and break the gleaming lines of her standing rigging into rows of detached bars floating in space. Then the sun dipped behind the mountain and the outlines of reef and wreck and schooner began dimming under a veil of purple mist.