"I don't go much on signs myself," said the Commodore musingly as he seated himself in the stern-sheets of the waiting boat and took the yoke lines, "but I suppose there are a good many sailors who would worry about a coincidence like that. Funny thing, too, that just as it happened I was trying to figure out what kind of a chance our poor little Lurline, without steam or power of any description, would stand in a storm that could throw a ship like the Adler high and dry out of the water. And—hurricane season is coming on, you know—I'm still wondering a little, that's all."
Strangely enough, it was written that the question should, in a measure, be answered within the fortnight, though the demonstration, fortunately, was not to take place in a reef-encompassed harbour.
The Bay of Apia, like that of Papeete, is a typical South Pacific harbour; an open roadstead on the leeward side of the island, with a reef cutting it off from the sea and giving good protection in ordinary weathers. The only reason that there have not been other great disasters like that of 1889 is because there has never again chanced to be so many large ships in the harbour when a hurricane came along. The hurricanes still blow up every now and then, and, just as in that historic storm, all the shipping that cannot go to sea goes ashore. The bottom of Apia Bay is almost as thickly littered with trading schooner wreckage as with pink coral.
Lurline at anchor in Bay of Apia, Samoa
(At the summit of the mountain in the background Robert Louis Stevenson is buried)
"The London Missionary Society steamer John Williams lay near us"
The town of Apia, though picturesque—what South Pacific village is not so?—has scarcely the fascinating charm of Papeete with its crumbling sea-wall, its avenues of giant trees and its wealth of traditions. The business section of the town consists of a half mile straggle of galvanized iron stores following the line of the beach road, with numerous copra warehouses and several stubby piers breaking the sweep of the foreshore. The houses of the natives are scattered about through the cocotrees on the flat, while the European residences, bright blocks of white, dot the lower slopes of the mountain beyond. Government House, cool, spacious, inviting, stands apart from the others in the midst of its well-kept grounds, and higher still, through rifts of the encompassing verdure, glimpses may be had of the broad porticos of Villa Vailima, the old home of Robert Louis Stevenson, the loved Tusitala of the Samoans.
Towering above Vailima to the north is an abrupt-sided mountain, running up the slopes of which your glass reveals the scars of a roughly-graded path. Straight up it goes, without zigzag or spiral, until it disappears in the mists about the cloud-wreathed summit. If there were poles, it might be the clearing for a telegraph line to a signal station; if it was broader, a firebreak. It is neither of these utilitarian things, however, but the pathway to a shrine. Up that precarious flood-torn and creeper-hung foot-way was borne with tender care the man who understood and loved Samoa and the Samoans as no other has understood and loved them. You have discovered the path to Stevenson's tomb, for up there where the shifting draperies of the clouds have blown back to show a dull blur of grey through the wall of green that fronts the skyline, is where the "sailor home from the sea" is lying on the spot that he chose for his final resting place.