Glimpses of China and Japan on the Way Home from the Philippines—Hongkong a Greater Gibraltar—Coaling the China—Gangs of Women Coaling the China—How the Japanese Make Gardens of the Mountains—Transition from the Tropics to the Northern Seas—A Breeze from Siberia—A Thousand Miles Nothing on the Pacific—Talk of Swimming Ashore.
Formosa was so far away eastward—a crinkled line drawn faintly with a fine blue pencil, showing as an artistic scrawl on the canvass of the low clouds—we could hardly claim when the sketch of the distant land faded from view, that we had seen Japan. When Hongkong, of sparkling memory, was lost to sight, the guardian walls that secluded her harbor, closing their gates as we turned away, and the headlands of the celestial empire grew dim, a rosy sunset promised that the next day should be pleasant, our thoughts turned with the prow of the China to Japan. We were bound for Nagasaki, to get a full supply of coal to drive us across the Pacific, having but twelve hundred tons aboard, and half of that wanted for ballast. It was at the mouth of the harbor of Nagasaki that there was a settlement of Dutch Christians for some hundreds of years. An indiscreet letter captured on the way to Holland by a Portuguese adventurer and maliciously sent to Japan, caused the tragic destruction of the Christian colony. The enmity of Christian nations anxious to add to their properties in the islands in remote seas was so strong that any one preferred that rather than his neighbors might aggrandize the heathen should prevail. The first as well as the last rocks of Japan to rise from and sink into the prodigous waters, through which we pursued our homeward way, bathing our eyes in the delicious glowing floods of eastern air, were scraggy with sharp pinnacles, and sheer precipices, grim survivals of the chaos that it was, before there was light. I have had but glimpses of the extreme east of Asia, yet the conceit will abide with me that this is in geology as in history the older world, as we classify our continents, that a thousand centuries look upon us from the terrible towers, lonesome save for the flutter of white wings, that witness the rising of the constellations from the greater ocean of the globe. But there are green hills as we approach Nagasaki, and on a hillside to the left are the white walls of a Christian church with a square tower, stained with traditions of triumphs and suffering and martyrdom long ago. Nagasaki is like Hongkong in its land-locked harbor, in clinging to a mountain side, in the circle of illumination at night and the unceasing paddling of boats from ship to ship and between the ships and landings. One is not long in discovering that here are a people more alert, ingenious, self-confident and progressive than the Chinese. As we approached the harbor there came to head us off, an official steam launch, with men in uniform, who hailed and commanded us to stop. Two officers with an intense expression of authority came aboard, and we had to give a full and particular account of ourselves. Why were we there? Coaling. Where were we from? Manila and Hongkong. Where were we going? San Francisco. Had we any sickness on board? No. We must produce the ship doctor, the list of passengers, and manifest of cargo. We had no cargo. There were a dozen passengers. It was difficult to find fault with us. No one was ill. We wanted coal. What was the matter? We had no trouble at Hongkong. We could buy all the coal we wanted there, but preferred this station. We had proposed to have our warships cleaned up at Nagasaki, but there were objections raised. So the job went to the docks at Hongkong, and good gold with it. Why was this? Oh yes; Japan wanted, in the war between the United States and Spain, to be not merely formally, but actually neutral! The fact is that the Japanese Empire is not pleased with us. They had, in imperial circles, a passion for Honolulu, and intimated their grief. Now they are annoyed because that little indemnity for refusing the right to land Japanse labor was paid by the Hawaiian Government before the absorption into the United States. As the Hawaiian diplomatic correspondence about this was conducted with more asperity than tact, if peace were the purpose, it was a good sore place for the Japanese statesmen to rub, and they resent in the newspapers the facile and cheap pacification resulting from the influence of the United States. In addition the Japanese inhabitants, though they have a larger meal than they can speedily digest in Formosa, are not touched with unqualified pleasurable feeling because we have the Philippines in our grasp. If Japan is to be the great power of the Pacific, it is inconvenient to her for us to hold the Hawaiian, the Aleutian and the Philippine groups of islands. The Philippines have more natural resources than all the islands of Japan, and our Aleutian Islands that are waiting for development would probably be found, if thoroughly investigated, one of our great and good bargains. The average American finds himself bothered to have to treat the Japanese seriously, but we must, for they take themselves so, and are rushing the work on new ships of war so that they will come out equal with ourselves in sea power. They have ready for war one humdred thousand men. If we did not hold any part of the Pacific Coast, this might be a matter of indifference, but we have three Pacific States, and there is no purpose to cede them to the Japanese. It would not be statesmanship to give up the archipelagoes we possess, even if we consider them as lands to hold for the hereafter. It is not deniable that the Japanese have good reason to stand off for strict examination the ships of other nations that call at their ports. The British and Chinese have had an experience of the bubonic plague at Hongkong, and the Japanese are using all the power of arms and the artifice of science they possess to keep aloof from the disastrous disease, which is most contagious. The China had called at Hongkong, and hence the sharp attentions at a coaling station where there are about seventy-five thousand inhabitants of the Japanese quarters, which are an exhibit of Old Japan, and most interesting. Nagasaki has, indeed, the true Japanese flavor. If there had been a sick man on our ship we should have been quarantined. Further on we were halted in the night off the city of Kobe, to the sound of the firing of a cannon, for we had dropped there a passenger, Mr. Tilden, the Hongkong agent of the Pacific Mail line, and if our ship had been infected with plague he might have passed it on to Japan! I had gone to bed, and was called up to confront the representative of the Imperial Government of the Japanese, and make clear to his eyes that I had not returned on account of the plague. Authorities of Japan treat people who are quarantined in a way that removes the stress of disagreeableness. All are taken ashore and to a hospital. There is furnished a robe of the country, clean and tidy in all respects. The common clothing is removed and fumigated. It is necessary for each quarantined person to submit to this and also to a bath, which is a real luxury, and after it comes a cup of tea and a light lunch. There was an actual case of plague on an American ship at this city of Kobe not long ago, at least, it was so reported with pretty strong corroborative evidence. The symptom in the case on the ship was that of a fever, probably pneumonia. The man was landed and examined. The plague fever resembles pneumonia at an early stage. The Japanese physicians found signs of plague and the end came soon. The sick man, taken ashore in the afternoon, at nine o'clock was dead, transferred at once to the crematory, in two hours reduced to ashes, and the officers of the ship informed that if they wanted to carry the "remains" to America they would be sealed in a jar and certified. The ship's officers did not want ashes, and the Japs hold the jar. They are so "advanced" that cremation is becoming a fad with them. It would not be surprising to find that the impending danger of the Japanese is excessive imitative progress, which is not certain to be exactly the right thing for them. They have reached a point where it is worth while to examine the claim of new things with much care before adopting them. We have very high authority to examine all things for goodness sake, before committing ourselves to hold them fast. We had to take aboard eighteen hundred tons of coal at Nagasaki. A fleet of arks with thirty tons of Japanese coal approached and gathered around the ship, which has sixteen places to throw coal into the bunkers. So the coal business was carried on by from twelve to fifteen gangs, each of about ten men and twenty women! The latter were sturdy creatures, modestly attired in rough jackets and skirts. There were not far from thirty bamboo baskets to the gang. One man stood at the porthole, and each second emptied a coal basket, using both hands, and throwing it back into the barge with one hand, the same swing of the arm used to catch the next basket hurled to him with a quick, quiet fling. There were three men of a gang next the ship, the third one standing in the barge, served with baskets by two strings of women. At the end of the string furthest from the ship the coal was shoveled into the baskets by four men, and there were two who lifted and whirled them to the women. The numbers and order of the laborers varied a little at times from this relation, yet very little, but frequently a lump of coal was passed without using a basket. The work of coaling was carried on all night, and about thirty-six hours of labor put in for a day. There was a great deal of talking among the laborers during the few moments of taking places, and some of it in tones of high excitement, but once the human machine started there was silence, and then the scratching of the shovels in the coal, and the crash of the coal thrown far into the ship were heard. It is, from the American contemplation, shocking for women to do such work, but they did their share with unflinching assiduity, and without visible distress. When the night work was going on they were evidently fatigued, and at each change that allowed a brief spell of waiting, they were stretched out on the planks of the boats, the greater number still, but some of the younger ones talking and laughing. There did not seem to be much flirtation, nothing like as much as when both sexes of Europeans are engaged in the same wheat or barley field harvesting. There were, it is needful to remark, neither lights nor shadows to invite the blanishments of courting. The coal handling women were from fifteen to fifty years of age, and all so busy the inevitable babies must have been left at home. I have never seen many American or European babies "good" as weary mothers use the word, as the commonest Japanese kids. They do not know how to cry, and a girl of ten years will relieve a mother of personal care by carrying a baby, tied up in a scarf, just its head sticking out (I wish they could be induced to use more soap and water on the coppery heads, from which pairs of intent eyes stare out with sharp inquiry, as wild animals on guard). The girl baby bearer, having tied the child so that it appears to be a bag, slings it over her shoulder, and it interferes but slightly with the movements of the nurse; does not discernibly embarrass her movements. The men colliers, it must be admitted, are a shade reckless in the scarcity of their drapery when they are handling baskets in the presence of ladies. They do usually wear shirts with short tails behind, and very economical breechcloths, but their shirts are sleeveless, and the buttons are missing on collar and bosom. The only clothing beneath the knees consists of straw sandals. The precipitation of perspiration takes care of itself. There are no pocket handkerchiefs.
Nagasaki has good hotels, a pleasant, airy European quarter, and shops stored with the goods of the country, including magnificent vases and other pottery that should meet the appreciation of housekeepers. There is no city in Japan more typically Japanese, few in which the line is so finely and firmly drawn between the old and the new, and that to the advantage of both.
It is hardly possible for those who do not visit Japan to realize what a bitter struggle the people have had with their native land, or how brilliant the victory they have won. The passage of the China through the inner sea and far along the coast gave opportunity to see, as birds might, a great deal of the country. The inner sea is a wonderfully attractive sheet of water, twice as long as Long Island Sound, and studded with islands, a panorama of the picturesque mountains everywhere, deep nooks, glittering shoals, fishing villages by the sea, boats rigged like Americans, flocks of white sails by day, and lights at night, that suggest strings of street lamps. The waters teem with life. Evidently the sea very largely affords industry and sustenance to the people, for there is no botlom or prairie land, as we call the level or slightly rolling fields in America. There was not a spot from first to last visible in Japan, as seen from the water, or in an excursion on the land, where there is room to turn around a horse and plow. The ground is necessarily turned up with spades and mellowed with hoes and cakes, all, of course, by human hands. This is easy compared with the labor in constructing terraces. The mountains have been conquered to a considerable extent in this way, and it is sensational to see how thousands of steep places have been cut and walled into gigantic stairways, covering slopes that could hardly answer for goat pasture, until the shelves with soil placed on them for cultivation have been wrought, and the terraces are like wonderful ladders bearing against the skies. So rugged is the ground, however, that many mountains are unconquerable, and there are few traces of the terraces, though here and there, viewed from a distance, the evidences that land is cultivated as stairways leaning against otherwise inaccessible declivities. I have never seen elsewhere anything that spoke so unequivocably of the endless toil of men, women and children to find footings upon which to sow the grain and fruit that sustain life. It is not to be questioned that the report, one-twelfth, only of the surface of Japan is under tillage, is accurate. The country is more mountainous than the Alleghenies, and some of it barren as the wildest of the Rockies on the borders of the bad lands, and it is volcanic, remarkably so, even more subject to earthquakes than the Philippines. The whole of Japan occupies about as much space as the two Dakotas or the Philippines, and the population is forty-two millions. With work as careful and extensive as that of the agricultural mountaineers of Japan, the Dakotas would support one hundred million persons. But they would have to present the washing away of the soil and the waste through improvident ignorance or careless profligacy of any fertilizer, or of any trickle of water needed for irrigation. One of the features of the terraces is that the rains are saved by the walls that sustain the soil, and the gutters that guide the water conserve it, because paved with pebbles and carried down by easy stages, irrigating one shelf after another of rice or vegetables, whatever is grown, until the whole slope not irreclaimable is made to blossom and the mountain torrents saved in their descent, not tearing away the made ground, out of which the means of living grows, but percolating through scores of narrow beds, gardens suspended like extended ribbons of verdure on volcanic steeps, refreshing the crops to be at last ripened by the sunshine. This is a lesson for the American farmer—to be studied more closely than imitated—to grow grass, especially clover, to stop devastation by creeks, with shrubbery gifted with long roots to save the banks of considerable streams, and, where there is stone, use it to save the land now going by every freshwater rivulet and rivers to the seas, to the irreparable loss of mankind. It is the duty of man who inherits the earth that it does not escape from him, that his inheritance is not swept away by freshets. We are growing rapidly, in America, in the understanding of this subject, beginning to comprehend the necessity of giving the land that bears crops the equivalent of that which is taken from it, that the vital capital of future generations may not be dissipated and the people grow ever poor and at last perish.
A ride in a jinrikisha, a two-wheeler, with a buggy top and poles for the biped horse to trot between, from Nagasaki to a fishing village over the mountains, five miles away, passing at the start through the Japanese quarter, long streets of shops, populous and busy, many diligent in light manufacturing work, and all scant in clothing—the journey continuing in sharp climbs alongside steep places and beside deep ravines, the slopes elaborately terraced, and again skirting the swift curves of a rapid brook from the mountains, that presently gathered and spread over pretty beds of gravel, providing abundant fresh water bathing, in which a school of boys, leaving a small guard for a light supply of clothing ashore—the ride ending in a village of fishermen that, by the count of the inhabitants, should be a town—permitted close observation of the Japanese in a city and a village, on their sky-scraping gardens and in the road, going to and coming from market, as well as in places of roadside entertainment; and at last a seaside resort, in whose shade a party of globetrotters were lunching, some of them, I hear, trying to eat raw fish. There could hardly have been contrived a more instructive exhibit of Japan and the Japanese. The road was obstructed in several places by cows bearing bales of goods from the city to the country, and produce from the hanging gardens to the streets, an occasional horse mustered in, and also a few oxen. The beast of burden most frequently overtaken or encountered was the cow, and a majority of the laborers were women. There were even in teams of twos and fours, carrying heavy luggage, men and women, old, middle-aged and young, barefooted or shod with straw, not overloaded, as a rule, and some walking as if they had performed their tasks and were going home. On the road it was patent there was extraordinary freedom from care as to clothing, and no feeling of prejudice or dismay if portions of it esteemed absolutely essential in North America and Europe had been left behind or was awaiting return to the possessor. This applies to both sexes. The day was warm, even hot, and the sun shone fiercely on the turnpike—for that is what we would call it—making walking, with or without loads, a heating exercise. Even the bearing of baskets, and the majority of the women carried them, was justification under the customs of the country for baring the throat and chest to give ample scope for breathing, and there is no restriction in the maintenance of the drooping lines of demarkation, according to the most liberal fashionable allowances, in dispensing with all the misty suggestions of laces to the utmost extent artists could ask, for the study of figures. Beauty had the advantage of the fine curves of full inhalations of the air that circulated along the dusty paths between the sea and the mountains. It is a puzzle that the artists of Japan have not better improved the unparalleled privilege of field and wall sketching, that they enjoy to a degree not equalled within the permission of the conventional construction of that which is becoming in the absence of the daylight habilaments of any great and polite people. The art schools of Japan, out of doors, on the highway, even, cannot fail to produce atmospheric influences of which the world will have visions hereafter, and the Latin quarter of Paris will lose its reputation that attracts and adjusts nature to inspiration.
When we had succeeded, at Kobe, in convincing the authorities that none of the passengers on the China had picked up the plague at Hongkong, we put out into the big sea, and shaped our course for the fairer land so far away, not exactly a straight line, for the convexity of the earth that includes the water, for the ocean—particularly the Pacific—is rounded so that the straightest line over its surface is a curved line, if astronomically mentioned. We struck out on the great Northern circle, purposing to run as high as the forty-eighth parallel, almost to our Alutian Islands, and pursued our course in full view, the bald cliffs of Japan changing their color with the going down of the sun. When morning came the purple bulk of the bestirring little empire still reminded us of the lights and shadows of Asia and the missionary labors of Sir Edwin Arnold, which have a flavor of the classics and a remembrance of the Scriptures. "Yonder," said the Captain, "is the famous mountain of Japan, Fugeyana. It is not very clearly seen, for it is distant. Oh, you are looking too low down and see only the foot-hills—that is it, away up in the sky!" It was there, a peak so lofty that it is solitary. We were to have seen it better later, but as the hours passed there was a dimness that the light of declining day did not disperse, and the mountain stayed with us in a ghostly way, and held its own in high communion.
As we were leaving Asian waters there came a demand for typhoons that the Captain satisfied completely, saying he was not hunting for them, but the worst one he ever caught was five hundred miles east of Yokohama. The tourists were rather troubled. The young man who had been in the wild waltz of the Zealandia did not care for a typhoon. We had been blessed with weather so balmy and healing, winds so soft and waves so low, that the ship had settled down steady as a river steamboat. We pushed on, but the best the China could do was fourteen knots and a half an hour, near 350 knots a day, with a consumption of 135 tons of coal in twenty-four hours. So much for not having been cleaned up so as to give the go of the fine lines. The China had been in the habit of making sixty miles a day more than of this trip, burning less than 100 tons of coal. As we climbed in the ladder of the parallels of latitude, we began to notice a crispness in the air, and it was lovely to the lungs. It was a pleasure, and a stimulant surpassing wine, to breathe the north temperate ozone again, and after a while to catch a frosty savor on the breeze. We had forgotten, for a few days, that we were not in a reeking state of perspiration. Ah! we were more than a thousand miles north of Manila, and that is as far as the coast of Maine to Cuba. The wind followed us, and at last gained a speed greater than our own; then it shifted and came down from the northwest. It was the wind that swept from Siberia, and Kamschatka's grim peninsula pointed us out. The smoke from our funnels blew black and dense away southeast, and did not change more than a point or two for a week. The Pacific began to look like the North Atlantic. There came a "chill out of a cloud" as in the poetic case of Annabel Lee. There had been, during our tropical experience, some outcries for the favor of a few chills, but now they were like the typhoons. When it was found that they might be had we did not want them. After all, warm weather was not so bad, and the chills that were in the wind that whistled from Siberia were rather objectionable. It was singular to call for one, two, three blankets, and then hunt up overcoats. White trousers disappeared two or three days after the white coats. Straw hats were called for by the wind. One white cap on an officer's head responded alone to the swarm of white caps on the water. The roll of the waves impeded our great northern circle. We could have made it, but we should have had to roll with the waves. We got no higher than 45 degrees. We had our two Thursdays, and thought of the fact that on the mystical meridian 180, where three days get mixed up in one! The Pacific Ocean, from pole to pole, so free on the line where the dispute as to the day it is, goes on forever, that only one small island is subject to the witchery of mathematics, and the proof in commonplace transactions unmixed with the skies that whatever may be the matter with the sun—the earth do move, is round, do roll over, and does not spill off the sea in doing so. At last came shrill head winds, and as we added fifteen miles an hour to this speed, the harp strings in the rigging were touched with weird music, and we filled our lungs consciously and conscientiously with American air, experiencing one of the old sensations, better than anything new.
It was figured out that we were within a thousand miles of the continent, and were getting home. When one has been to the Philippines, what's a thousand miles or two! "Hello, Captain Seabury! It is only about a thousand miles right ahead to the land. You know what land it is, don't you? Well, now, you may break the shaft or burst the boilers, fling the ship to the sperm whales, like the one that was the only living thing we saw since Japan entered into the American clouds of the West. We are only a thousand miles away from the solid, sugary sweet, redolent, ripe American soil, and if there is anything the matter we do not mind, why we will just take a boat and pull ashore." But we would have had a hard time if the Captain had taken us up in the flush of the hilarity that laughed at a thousand miles, when the breeze brought us the faint first hints that we were almost home, after a voyage of five thousand leagues. The wind shifted to the south and increased until it roared, and the waves were as iron tipped with blue and silver, hurling their salty crests over our towering ship; and we were in the grasp—
On the Pacific of the terrific
Storm King of the Equinox.
Mr. Longfellow mentioned the storm wind gigantic, that shook the Atlantic at the time of the equinox—the one that urges the boiling surges bearing seaweed from the rocks; and all those disappointed because they had not bounded on the billows of the briny enough for healthy exercises, were satisfied in the reception by the tremendous Pacific when nigh the shore, which was once the western boundary, but is so no more, of that blessed America, of which her sons grow fonder the farther they roam. God's country, as the boys and girls call it reverently, when they are sailing the seas, was veiled from us in a fog that blanketed the deep. For five thousand miles our ship had been in a remorseless solitude. No voice had come to us; no spark of intelligence from the universe touched us, save from the stars and the sun, but at the hour of the night, and the point of the compass, our navigator had foretold, we should hear the deep-throated horn on Reyes point—it came to us out of the gloomy abyss—and science had not failed. Across the trackless waste we had been guided aright, and there was music the angels might have envied in the hoarse notes of the fog-horn that welcomed the wanderers home.