The Pacific Triangle Part 1

The Pacific Triangle.

by Sydney Greenbie.

PREFACE

This book is an attempt to bring within focus the most outstanding factors in the Pacific. With the exception of Chapter II, which deals with the origin of the Polynesian people, there is hardly an incident in the whole book that has not come within the scope of my own personal experience. Hence this is essentially a travel narrative. I have confined myself to the task of interpreting the problems of the Pacific in the light of the episodes of everyday life. Wherever possible, I have tried to let the incident speak for itself, and to include in the picture the average ideals of the various races, together with my own impressions of them and my own reflections. The field is a tremendous one. It encompa.s.ses the most important regions that lie along the great avenues of commerce and general intercourse. The Pacific is a great combination of geographical, ethnological, and political factors that is extremely diverse in its sources. I have tried to discern within them a unit of human commonality, as the seeker after truth is bound to do if his discoveries are to be of any value.

But the result has been an unconventional book. For I have sometimes been compelled to make unity of time and place subservient to that of subject matter. Hence the reader may on occasion feel that the book returns to the same field more than once. That has been unavoidable. The problems that are found in Hawaii are essentially the same as those in Samoa, though differing in degree. It has therefore been necessary, after surveying the whole field in one continuous narrative of my own journey, to a.s.semble stories, types, and descriptions which ill.u.s.trate certain problems, in separate chapters, regardless of their geographical settings. If the reader bears this in mind he will not be surprised in Book Two to find himself in Fiji, Samoa, Hawaii, or New Zealand all at once--for issues are always more important than boundaries.

The plan of the book has been to give the historical approach to the Pacific and its native races; then to take the reader upon a journey of over twenty thousand miles around the Pacific. I hope that he will come away with a clear impression of the immensity of the Ocean, of the diversity of its natural and human elements, and the splendor and picturesqueness of its make-up. Out of this review certain problems emerge, the problems of the relations of native and alien races, of marriages and divorces, of markets and ideals--problems that affect the primitive races in their own new place in the world. But over and above and about these come the issues that involve the more advanced races of Asia, Australasia, and America--where they impinge upon each other and where their interests in these minor races center. This is the logic of the Pacific.

Though the importance of these problems is now obvious to the world, I feel grateful to those who encouraged me while I still felt myself almost like a voice crying in the wilderness, on the subject. I therefore feel specially indebted to the editors of _North American Review_, _World's Work_ and the _Outlook_, who first published some of the material here incorporated. But so rapid has been the movement of events that in no case has it been possible for me to use more than the essence of the ideas there published. In order to bring them up to date, they have been completely re-written and made an integral part of this book. Two or three of the descriptive chapters have also appeared in _Century Magazine_ and _Harper's Monthly_, for permission to reprint which I am indebted to them.

There is a further indebtedness which is much more difficult of acknowledgment. To my wife, Marjorie Barstow, I am under obligation not only for her steadfast encouragement, but for her judgment, understanding, and untiring patience, without which my career of authors.h.i.+p would have been trying indeed.

SYDNEY GREENBIE.

Greensboro, Vermont, August 4, 1921.

BOOK ONE

HISTORICAL AND TRAVEL MATERIAL

CHAPTER I

THE HEART OF THE PACIFIC

_The First Side of The Triangle_

1

... stared at the Pacific--and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise-- Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Exactly four centuries after the event immortalized by Keats, I outstripped Balboa's most fantastic dreams by setting out upon the Pacific and traversing the length and breadth of it. "It is a sight," we are told, "in beholding which for the first time any man would wish to be alone." I was. But whereas Balboa's desires were accomplished in having obtained sight of the Pacific, that achievement only whetted mine. He said:

You see here, gentlemen and children mine, how our desires are being accomplished, and the end of our labors. Of that we ought to be certain, for, as it has turned out true what King Comogre's son told of this sea to us, who never thought to see it, so I hold for certain that what he told us of there being incomparable treasures in it will be fulfilled. G.o.d and His blessed Mother who have a.s.sisted us, so that we should arrive here and behold this sea, will favor us that we may enjoy all that there is in it.

The story of how far he was so a.s.sisted is part of the tale of this book, for in all the wanderings which are the substance of my accomplishment I can recall having met with but a half-dozen of Balboa's kinsmen. Instead there are streaming backward and forward across the Pacific descendants of men Balboa hated and of others of whom he knew nothing.

Balboa was the first to see the ocean. He had left his men behind just as they were about to reach the peak from which he viewed it. But he was not the first to step upon its sh.o.r.es. He sent some of his men down, and of them one, Alonso Martin, was the first to have that pleasure. Martin dipped his sword dramatically into the brine and took possession of it all as far as his mind's eye could reach. Yet to none of the men was this vast hidden world more than a vision and a hope, and the accidental name with which Magellan later christened it seems, by virtue of the motives of gain which dominated these adventurers, anything but descriptive. To be pacific was not the way of the kings of Castile; nor, sad to say, is it the way of most of their followers.

What was it that Balboa took possession of in the name of his Castilian kings? Rather a courageous gamble, to say the least. The dramatic and fictional possibilities of such wholesale acquisition are illimitable.

In the mid-Pacific were a million or more savage cannibals; in the far-Pacific, races with civilizations superior to his own. At that very time China was extending the Great Wall and keeping in repair the Grand Ca.n.a.l which had been built before Balboa's kings were chiefs. j.a.pan was already a nation with arts and crafts, and a social state sufficiently developed to be an aggressive influence in the Oriental world, making inroads on Korea through piracy. Korea was powerful enough to force j.a.pan to make amends. Four years after Balboa's discovery the Portuguese arrived in Canton and opened China for the first time to the European world. The Dutch were beginning to think of Java. It was hardly Balboa's plan to make of all these a little gift for his king: his act was but the customary flourish of discoverers in those days. Men who loved romance more than they loved reality were ready to wander over the unknown seas and rake in their discoveries for hire. Balboa, Magellan, Drake, roamed the seas out of sheer love of wind and sail. Many a man set forth in search of treasure never to be heard from again; some only to have their pa.s.sage guessed by virtue of the signs of white blood in the faces of some of the natives. For two hundred years haphazard discoveries and national jealousies confused rather than enlightened the European world. But late in the eighteenth century, after a considerable lessening of interest in exploration, Captain James Cook began that memorable series of voyages which added more definite knowledge to the geographical and racial make-up of the South Seas than nearly all the other explorers put together. The growth of the scientific spirit and the improvement in navigation gave him the necessary impetus. Imbued with scientific interest, he went to observe the transit of Venus and to make close researches in the geography of the Pacific. But to George Vancouver falls the praise due to a constructive interest in the people whose lands he uncovered. Wherever he went he left fruits and domestic animals which contributed much to the happiness of the primitives, and probably laid the foundation for the future colonization of these scattered islands by Europeans.

Backward and forward across the Pacific through four centuries have moved the makers of this new Atlantis. First from round Cape Horn, steering for the setting sun, then from the Australian continent to the regions of Alaska, these shuttles of the ages have woven their fabric of the nations. Now the problem is, what is going to be done with it?

I suppose I was really no worse than most people in the matter of geography when I set forth on my venture. Though the Pacific had lain at my feet for two years, I seem to have had no definite notions of the "incomparable treasures" that lay therein. j.a.pan was stored away in my mind as something to play with. Typee, the cannibal Marquesas--ah! there was something real and vigorous! Then the South Sea maidens! Ideal labor conditions in New Zealand! Australia was Botany Bay; the Philippines, the water cure. Confucius was confusion to me, but Lao-tsze, the great sage of China--in his philosophy I had found a meeting-ground for East and West.

But I was sizzling with curiosity. I wanted to bring within my own range of experience that "unplumbed, salt estranging sea" with its area of seventy million square miles, equivalent to "three Atlantics, seventy Mediterraneans," and--aside from the hundreds of millions of people round its sh.o.r.e--the seventy-odd millions within its bosom. Yet of the myths, the beliefs, the aspirations of these peoples, even the most knowing gave contradictory accounts, and curiosity was perforce my compa.s.s.

2

Something in a voyage westward across the Pacific gives one the sense of a great reunion; it is not a personal experience, but an historic sensation. One may have few incidents to relate, there may be only an occasional squall. But in place of events is an abstraction from world strife, a heading for the beginning of a cycle of existence--for Asia, the birthplace of the human race. The feeling is that of one making a tour of the universe which has lasted ten thousand centuries and is but at the moment nearing completion. For eons the movement has been a westward one. Races have succ.u.mbed to races in this westward reach for room. Pursuing the retreating glaciers, mankind s.n.a.t.c.hed up each inch of land released, rus.h.i.+ng wildly outward. After the birth of man there was a split, in which some men went westward and became Europeans, some eastward and became Asiatics. The Amerindians were the kick of that human explosion eastward which occurred some time during the Wurm ice age.

One cannot grasp the significance of the Pacific who crosses it too swiftly. Every mapped-out route, every guide-book must be laid aside, and schedules must cease to count. With half a world of water to traverse, its immensity becomes a reality only when one permits oneself to be wayward, with every whim a goal.

A fellow-pa.s.senger said to me, "My boss has given me two weeks'

vacation."

"Mine has given me a lifetime," I answered.

In that mood I watched the _Lurline_ push its way into the San Francisco fogs and out through the fog-choked Golden Gate. The fogs stayed with us a s.p.a.ce beyond and were gone, and the wide ocean lay in every direction roundabout us.

I was bound for j.a.pan by relays. Unable to secure through pa.s.sage to the Land of the Rising Sun, I did the next best thing and booked for Honolulu. There I planned to wait for some steamer with an unused berth that would take me to Kyoto, j.a.pan, in time to attend the coronation of the Tenno, the crownless Emperor. After all, Honolulu was not such an unfavorable spot in which to prepare my soul for the august sight of emperor-wors.h.i.+p on a grand scale, I thought.

And at last I was out upon the bosom of the Pacific, sailing without time limit or fixed plan, sailing where did Cook and Drake and Vancouver, and knowing virtually as little of what was about me as did they. Our s.h.i.+p became the axis round which wheeled the universe, and progress "a succession of days which is like one day." We went on and on, and still the circle was true. We moved, yet altered nothing. When the sky was overcast, the ocean paled in sympathy; when it was bright, the whitecapped, cool blue surface of the sea abandoned itself to the light. At night the cleavage between sea and sky was lost. Then we lost distance, alt.i.tude, depth, and even speed. All became illusive--a time for strong reason.

Then came a storm. The vast disk, the never-s.h.i.+fting circle shrank in the gathering mist. From the prow of the s.h.i.+p, where I loved most to be, the world became more lonely. The iron nose of the vessel burrowed into the blue-green water, thrusting it back out of the way, curling it over upon a volume of wind which struggled noisily for release. The blue became deeper, the strangled air a.s.sumed a thick gray color and emerged in a fit of sputtering querulousness. But the s.h.i.+p lunged on, as unperturbed as the Bhodistava before Mara, the Evil One, sure that he was becoming Buddha.

We were dipping southward and soon tasted the full flavor of the luscious tropical air. The s.h.i.+p never more than swayed with the swells.

During the days that followed there was never more than the most elemental squall. The nights were as clear and balmy as the days. For seven days we danced and made merry to Hawaiian melodies thrummed by an Hawaiian orchestra, or screeched by an American talking-machine, or hammered by a piano-player. The warm air began to play the devil with our feelings.

Thus seven days pa.s.sed. I had taken to sleeping out on deck, under the open sky. The moon was brilliant, the sea as smooth as a pond. I was awakened by whispered conversation at five o'clock of that last day and found a group of women huddling close on the forward deck. Their hair was streaming down their backs, their feet were bare, and their bodies wrapped in loose kimonos. Some of the officers were pointing to the southwestern horizon, where a barely perceptible streak of smoke was rising over the rim of the sea. It was from Kilauea, the volcano on the island of Hawaii, two hundred miles away.

The air was fresh and balmy as on the day the earth was born. Rolling c.u.mulous clouds sought to postpone the day by r.e.t.a.r.ding the rising sun.

Lighthouse lights blinked their warnings. Molokai, the leper island, emerged from the darkness. A blaze of sunlight broke through the clouds and day was in full swing. And as we neared the island of Oahu, a full-masted wind-jammer, every strip of sail spread to the breeze, came gliding toward us from Honolulu.

By noon we were in the open harbor,--a fan-spread of still water. The _Lurline_ glided on and turned to the right and we were before the little city of Honolulu. I can still see the young captain on the bridge, pacing from left to right, watching the water, issuing quiet directions to the sailor who transmitted them, by indicator, to the engine-room. We edged up to the piers amid a profusion of greetings from sh.o.r.e and appeals for coins from brown-skinned youngsters who could a moment later be seen chasing them in the water far below the surface.

This, then, is progress. In 1778, Captain Cook was murdered by these islanders. To-day they "grovel" in the seas for petty cash. One hundred and forty years! Seven days!

3

But Hawaii was only my half-way house. I was still reaching out for j.a.pan. According to the advice of steams.h.i.+p agencies I might have waited seven years before any opportunity for getting there would come my way.

At twelve o'clock one day I learned that the _Niagara_ was in port. She was to sail for the Antipodes at two. By two I was one of her pa.s.sengers. Hadn't "my boss" given me a lifetime's vacation?

The world before me was an unknown quant.i.ty, as it doubtless is to at least all but one in a million of the inhabitants of our globe. My ticket said Sydney, Australia. How long would it take us? Two weeks?

What should we see en route? Two worlds? Here, in one single journey I should cut a straight line across the routes of Magellan, Drake, Cook, and into those of Tasman,--all the great navigators of the last four hundred years. Here, then, I was to trace the steps of Melville, of Stevenson, of Jack London,--largely with the personal recommendations of Jack,--and of one then still unfamed, Frederick O'Brien. All the courage in the face of the unknown, all the conflicts between the world civilizations in their various stages of development, all the dreams of romance, of future welfare and achievement, would unfold in my progress southward and fall into two much-talked-of and little-understood divisions--East and West. I was to discover for myself what it was that Balboa and his like had taken possession of in their grandiloquent fas.h.i.+on and were ready to defend against all comers. Yet the flag at the mast was not Balboa's flag, nor Tasman's, and the pa.s.sengers among whom fate had wheeled me were, with one exception, neither Spanish nor Dutch, but British. As long as I moved from San Francisco westward and as long as I remained in Honolulu, I was, as far as customs and people were concerned, in America. But from the moment I considered striking off diagonally across the South Seas in the direction of the Antarctic I was thrown among Britons. The clerk in the steams.h.i.+p office was Canadian, the steamer was British, the pa.s.sengers were British, and the cool, casual way in which the _Niagara_ kicked herself off from the pier and slipped out into the harbor was confirmation of a certain cleavage. For there was none of the gaiety which accompanies the arrival and departure of American vessels,--no music, no serpentines, no cheering. We just took to our screws and the open sea as though glad to get away from an uncordial "week-end." This was a British liner that was to cut across the equator, to climb over the vast ridge of earth and dip down into the Antipodes. We were to leave America far behind. Henceforward, with but the single exception of tiny Pago Pago, Samoa, we could not enter an American owned port,--and on this route would miss even that one. And now that mandates have become the vogue, there is in all that world of water hardly an important spot that does not fly the Union Jack. The sense of private owners.h.i.+p in all that could be surveyed gave to the bearing of the pa.s.sengers an air of dignity which was not always latent in the individual.