The London Missionary Society steamer, John Williams, came in and lay near us for a few days before we left Apia. John Williams was the pioneer missionary of the famous London society in the South Pacific, and since his death in the early years of the last century at the hands of New Hebridean natives every ship of that organization has borne his name. For more than fifty years these were schooners, and as each was piled up on a reef in turn, its name, with the number next in line affixed, was passed on to its successor. This continued until steamers finally supplanted schooners, when the serial system of nomenclature was dropped. The present John Williams, the thirtieth or thereabouts, of the name, is a Clyde-built steamer of something over 3,000 tons. It has unusually graceful lines and is able to do better than sixteen knots an hour if required. Its principal duties are the provisioning of the mission stations scattered throughout the southwest Pacific and the carrying on of a most lucrative trading business which the Society—fighting the devil with fire—carries on in opposition to its arch enemies, the real traders.
John Williams proved a most unsociable craft, sullenly refusing to meet any of the timidly tentative advances of either of the visiting yachts. The solemn, black-coated figures in the stern sheets of its boats would pass La Carabine and Lurline with averted eyes, evidently classifying us, with all the rest of the whites, as instruments of the world, the flesh and the devil sent to demoralize their work with the simple native.
Before leaving Apia we discharged our Chino-Malayan cook, Harrick Siah, whom we had signed on at Honolulu, shipping in his place one Andrew Clark, a Jamaican mulatto. Clark had married a Samoan girl the week previously, only to have her elope the next day with the native missionary who performed the ceremony, taking with her the accumulated savings of the unlucky cook's last year of voyaging. Being thus cast "on the beach," as they put it in the South Seas, nothing was left for him but to ship again. Now it chanced that Siah, who was but five feet two in height, had been able to walk erect in the galley's five feet three of headroom, as had also his diminutive Japanese predecessor; Clark's five feet nine required something more than six inches of reefing to swing in the clear, and even then his head ran afoul of occasional hooks and pipes and other projections. The poor fellow stuck manfully to his job, but within a fortnight the reef-points of his neck became so firmly tied that, even after he had been an hour or two ashore, we would see him on the streets or in the market with hunched shoulders, drawn-in neck and a furtive look of fear in his shifting eyes.
On June 13th we received word that Chief Mauga's flag-raising at Pago Pago, a function at which we had promised to endeavour to be present, had been scheduled for one o'clock of the 15th, in order that the officers and men of the Wheeling, which was to sail that afternoon for Bremerton, might participate. This necessitated our leaving on the 14th, just as we were getting comfortably settled down to a full enjoyment of hospitable Apia. A whistling east wind on the starboard beam carried us out of the passage at a rattling gait, but only to come squarely ahead as we trimmed in for Tutuila. All afternoon, against a rising wind and sea, we sailed in short tacks up the coast of Upolou, and by nine P. M., with double reefs in mainsail and foresail, just managed to clear Albatross Rock, five miles east of the windward end of the island.
At daybreak Tutuila showed dimly, a point forward of the port beam. Reefs were shaken out at eight o'clock, but the tiresome beating continued until we had doubled Sail Rock Point at one-thirty. From there we made fair wind of it down the coast and into the harbour. When the anchor was let go at four o'clock Mauga's "Stars and Stripes" had been flapping in the breeze for close to three hours, and the Wheeling, with a 300-foot "Homeward Bound" pennant streaming from her main, had just cast off her mooring lines and was backing into the stream.
[CHAPTER XV]
KAVA AND THE SIVA