(from a guide-book—with annotations and an impression of chinatown)
“serene, indifferent to fate,
thou sittest at the western gate.”
san francisco—no well-bred american, unless he comes from chicago, ever says ’frisco—is a delicious combination of wealth and wickedness, splendour and squalor, vice, virtue, villainy, beauty, ugliness, solitude and silence, rush and row—in short, san francisco is just san francisco, and that’s all there is to it, as they say there. it was discovered and settled by franciscan friars. it would be no place for them now.
it is also quite a considerable city as to size. this is what the local guide-book says:
“it is bounded on the west by the pacific ocean, on the north by golden gate strait and the bay of san francisco, on the east by the bay, and on the south by san mateo county.”
[35]
one would naturally expect a city bounded on the west by the pacific ocean to have a considerable water frontage, some nine thousand miles, in fact. this, however, is not quite the case; it is only the american guide-booker’s way of putting it.
as a matter of fact, san francisco is a most picturesque city of some three hundred thousand inhabitants, and it is spread over the bay shore and the adjacent hills to the extent of about twenty-seven thousand acres. it is the eighth city in size in the united states, and the third in commercial rank, but it is not jealous either of new york or chicago. it is the capital of god’s country, and with that it is modestly content. a page advertisement of a magazine in the guide-book begins with the query:
“are you interested in god’s country?”
it doesn’t quite say heaven, but the implied analogy is obvious.
still, even san francisco has to keep its end up, and it is just a little sore on the subject of earthquakes.
“these,” says my guide-booker, “are of rare occurrence. for the past half century there are not known to have been more than half a dozen[36] lives lost from the effects of earthquakes; while in the new england and middle states and in the mississippi valley hundreds are killed annually by sunstroke, lightning, hurricanes, and tornadoes, in addition to the millions of dollars’ worth of property destroyed by tornadoes and blizzards.”
down east they say that the drink and other things you get in the west do all that these can do, and a bit over. this, of course, is mere jealousy; and to this san francisco is as serenely indifferent as she is of fate.
she also seems to be indifferent to everything else. even dollars. this doesn’t sound true, but it is. the splendid recklessness of the argonauts of the fifties still glows in the blood of the true san franciscan.
quite a short time ago a man worth a couple of million dollars—a comparative pauper in a place where they think nothing of paying three millions for a house—gambled every cent he had on the success of a certain more or less honest deal. a friend of his had interests the other way, and dumped down more millions to block the deal. he blocked it. they met at their club the evening after the smash, and conversed as follows:
[37]
“well, how goes it?”
“d——d bad.”
“in that—deal?”
“steal, i call it.”
“how much?”
“whole caboodle! want a janitor up yonder?”
“janitor—no. i want a nervy man to come in with me. come?”
“i’m there.”
and now those two men are piling up millions together instead of betting them against each other. that’s san francisco.
the golden city is entered naturally enough by a golden gate. it is as proud of its golden gate and bay as sydney is of “our harbour,” and that is saying a good deal. all the same, sydney doesn’t quite like california calling itself god’s country.
my guide-booker says, “the entrance through the golden gate cannot be surpassed.” if he said that inside sydney heads he would be thrown to the sharks. and, as a matter of fact, having said that which is not the truth he would in some measure deserve his fate. moreover, outside the golden gate there is a bar, of which more anon.[38] there are other bars in the city which are safer except for millionaires, because you can’t spend less than twenty-five cents in them. a drunk in san francisco is therefore an undertaking not to be entered on lightly.
talking of millionaires naturally suggests nob hill, the millionaire quarter of the golden city. it is veritably a place of palaces. i have never seen so many splendid houses collected in such a small area. their price in bricks and mortar alone runs anywhere from two to four millions, and yet it is a literal fact that the streets between them are grass-grown. if i had five dollars i should be inclined to bet them against five cents that this is a combination which no other city on earth can show.
the reason, of course, is that on the mountainous streets which the cable-cars climb traffic of any other sort is practically impossible. no good american walks more than a block or so on a quite level street, and you might as well ask him to walk up the side of a house as to climb nob hill.
wherefore the cable-cars rush solitary up and down through a wilderness of stone-paved, grass-grown streets, flanked by palaces whose owners,[39] i presume, have horses and carriages. how they get them down to the city and up again is one of the two or three unsolved problems which i brought away with me. another of these is: why did the practical american genius think it worth while to pave the precipices which they call streets round nob hill?
talking about streets reminds me that they don’t say street much in san francisco. there isn’t time. they just mention the name. this is the way my guide-booker speaks somewhat flippantly of the streets in millionairetown:
“upon taking the car you immediately pass through the banking and insurance district, climb up one of the steepest hills of the city to nob hill, passing on the left at the corner of powell the late senator stanford’s residence, corner of mason, the late mark hopkins’ residence.... corner of taylor, the residence of the late a. m. towne.... corner of jones, mr. whittles’.... corner of taylor, the huntington residence, while opposite is the residence of the late charles croker, adjoining, and on the corner of jones is the residence of his son, w. h. croker.”
“powell” has a cable one and a quarter inches in[40] diameter, twenty-six thousand feet long, and weighing sixty-six thousand six hundred and twenty-five pounds. some san franciscan cables last three months. this was expected to last about five weeks. you can understand how terrific the clutch and the wear and tear must be when you sit down on the front seat of a car carrying thirty or forty people, and see a hill half as steep again as the one from richmond up to the star and garter rush down underneath you at about sixteen miles an hour. it was here that the newly landed chinaman saw his first cable-car and made the historic remark:
“no pushee, no pullee; all same go like hellee,” which brings me, no very great distance, only a few blocks in fact, from millionaireville to chinatown.
chinatown, san francisco, is a city within a city. go through it by night as i did with one who knows its inmost secrets, and you will find that it is also a cancer in the body corporate of a fair city (which is itself one of the most politely and delightfully wicked on earth), a foul blot on a fair land, a smudge of old-world filth across a page written by the most nervous hands and the keenest brains that modern civilisation has produced.
geographically, as san francisco is bounded on[41] the west by the pacific ocean, etc., chinatown is bounded by “california” and “pacific,” “kearny” and “stockton.” it has a population of ten thousand mongolians, and an unknown number of americans and europeans, men and women, who have lost caste so hopelessly that they can no longer live among their own kind. the men certainly would not be considered fit society even for an american politician.
as for the women—well you see most of them painted and powdered and tricked out in scanty, tawdry finery, sitting in little rooms behind lattices open on to the street, and opposite these the wayfarer, western or eastern, european or american, jap or chinaman, may stand and peer in. there are whole streets of these latticed rooms, and the women are of all nationalities. the leaseholders pay enormous rents for the houses, and their owners are amongst the most respected citizens of san francisco.
to these last it is only due to say that san francisco is also a city of magnificent churches, and that it sends every month or so many missionaries, male and female, travelling in palace-cars and the saloons of steamers, to enlighten the heathen.[42] many of the good citizens aforesaid subscribe tens of thousands of dollars both to the churches and missions, and so, somehow, i suppose, they get the account squared.
during my stroll through this quarter of chinatown, i must admit that i saw very few chinamen. of japs, tonkinese, sandwich islanders, niggers, half castes, and the lower-down sort of american, there were plenty, and business appeared to be fairly brisk.
the better-class san franciscan doesn’t go to chinatown simply because he doesn’t need to. in fact, as a distinguished and experienced resident said to me after i had been through chinatown:
“my dear mr. griffith, chinatown may be pretty bad, but anyhow it’s run open and above board, as anybody can go and see that likes to take the trouble. if you were stopping here a month instead of two or three days, i could show you things that chinatown isn’t a circumstance to. you just roof all san francisco in, and you’ll have the biggest, dandiest, high-toned, up-to-date——”
“yes,” i interrupted, “i see what you mean. i heard about that in the train. sorry i’m not stopping.”
[43]
this of course only referred to decent, christian vice, the sort which some of the most respectable of us practice without compunction as long as we’re not found out. but when you have eastern and western vice mixed, as you do in chinatown and san francisco, you get a compound calculated to raise the gorge of a graven image. there are certain crimes which have no names, and of such is the wickedness of chinatown.
some one once said that the exterior of a house was a pretty good criterion of the character of the people who lived in it.
this is certainly true of chinatown. the streets are narrow, ill-paved, and dirty. they also smell, as the other streets in san francisco don’t. those who have travelled know that the purple east has a smell entirely its own, just as a london lodging-house has.
moreover, wherever a piece of the east like chinatown is transplanted into the west, you get that smell, full-bodied and entire. wherefore, when i dived into chinatown, san francisco, i remarked:
“why, is this king street, hongkong, or malay street, singapore?”
[44]
the east never changes, no matter whether it is west or east. the restaurants, with their gaudily carved beams and their queer windows, with their upstairs rooms, containing priceless treasures of oriental art, their iron money-chests, with half a dozen different locks on them, so that they could only be opened in the presence of all the partners in the concern; the paper lanterns outside, the weird hieroglyphical signs, the little joss tables in the inner compartments of the shops, with their images and odorous incense sticks—it was all the undiluted orient, ages old, in the midst of the newest of the occidental civilisations, one of those queer paradoxes which go to show the looseness of our most rigid principles and the shallowness of our deepest convictions.
after seeing sundry other things which would be difficult of description in printable english, i made a tour of a common lodging-house in chinatown. i have slept in a common lodging-house in london, and i have seen humanity go to sleep under many and various conditions; but i never saw anything like this.
only a few hundred yards away was the palace[45] hotel, with its rooms at four dollars a night; here you could sleep for five cents,—twopence-halfpenny,—but what sleeping!
little, dark, stifling cells—i have seen infinitely better ones in prisons—lit through a little window by a caged gas-jet on the flagged and iron-railed footway which ran round each floor inside the court within which these doss-houses are built. in the cell a narrow wooden bedstead, covered with unwashed rags and nothing else. below in the court, horrors unnameable.
in the particular lodging-house which i visited i was shown a big, dark, hideous apartment, a perfect black hole, in which nine of the richest merchants of chinatown—and some of them are very rich—were confined on ransom by the gang known as the high-binders for four months until some died and the others paid. a remnant who stuck out were released by the police and a detachment of the united states militia after a regular siege. it was alsatia over again, and yet it happened less than a dozen years ago.
as i was feeling my way down the stairs a figure rose out of a corner on one of the landings, and i heard a thin voice say:
[46]
“boss, gimme ten cents—i’m hungry!”
it was the first time i had ever heard an american beg, and it was quite a shock. somehow, the accent seemed to add an infinite pathos to the words; perhaps because until now i had only heard it from the lips of the proudly prosperous. as i passed he turned his face after me, and the light from a distant gas-lamp fell on it. it was ghastly in its thinness and paleness, and yet it was refined, and the voice, if not the speech, was that of an educated man. i gave him a quarter, and my guide said:
“guess that’ll give him two days in heaven. it’s opium he’s hungry for. bin there myself.”
when we left the lodging-house we went a few yards along the crowded, weirdly lit street with its swarms of paper-lanterns, and then we plunged down a narrow alley up which there drifted a wave of stench, dominated by the acrid, penetrating smell of opium.
presently i discovered that there were lower depths in chinatown even than the doss-house and the brothel. here were not houses, only miserable sheds and shanties round an unpaved courtyard foul beyond description.
we went into some of the shanties. there stood in each near the door a little bench, and on this were two or three pipes and some tiny pots filled with what looked like black-brown treacle. it was opium, and each pot contained ten cents’ worth of heaven and hell, the heaven of oblivion opening out into dreamland of paradise, and then the hell of the awakening horror.
behind the bench squatted a half-clad skeleton, pipe in hand and lamp beside him. he opened his half-shut eyes as we entered, and murmured:
“wantee smoke, tlen cent!” then he recognised my guide, and added, “ah, wantee look; all light.” then his eyelids fell again, he dipped his needle in his pot, and got ready for another whiff.
round the walls of the shanty were two tiers of bunks, just a few planks propped on bare poles. there were ragged blankets on the boards, and on these, with pipe and pot and lamp, lay other scantily clad skeletons, some frizzling the globule of opium in the flame, some rolling it on the flat top of the pipe-bowl, others inhaling the magic blue smoke, others motionless and lifeless, their souls, if they had any, in paradise. one of the skeletons had once been the figure of a white woman.
outside we found other hovels, but without lamps. we struck matches in one, and found other figures, some white and some yellow, huddled about the filthy floor.
“free dosses,” said the guide, in his curt speech, “they’re broke. spent their last dime on a smoke and got fired. after that it’s the poor-house or the bay.”
as we were picking our way out of the court, he continued:
“there’s a cocaine fiend here; better see him. george, where are you?”
the remains of a man tottered out from under a shed. he was white, what there was left of him. as soon as his miserable eyes caught sight of me he began a whining, rambling account of how he fell a victim to the drug; his stock narrative, i suppose.
then he rolled up a dirty, ragged shirt sleeve, and showed me a thing of skin and bone that had once been an arm. it was pitted and seamed and scratched from elbow to wrist. i had seen two or three choice samples of leprosy and other diseases that horrible night, but this made me nearer sick than any of them.
[49]
he had a strangely extemporised syringe of wood and quill and sealing-wax, and a piece of hypodermic needle in his other hand. he picked out a comparatively vacant spot, drove in the needle, and pushed. the skin swelled up in a little lump. it may only have been water, certainly the syringe was made ready for the occasion, but in a moment or two he straightened up, his eye grew brighter, and his voice stronger as he asked me for a dime to buy a supper. i gave it to him, and he crept back into his hovel. i went out into the street feeling that i had been in hell.
we went to wind up the night at the chinese theatre; but the performance was nearly over. so, instead, we made a much more interesting excursion through the subterranean dressing-rooms of the company. women never appear on chinese boards. so when we visited the ladies’ dressing-rooms we found men and boys in female attire, which, after all, doesn’t differ very much from the male, standing before little mirrors painting and powdering themselves and making-up their eyes and eyebrows, and fixing themselves up generally for all the world like an european actress.
in other dressing-rooms we found mild-eyed[50] celestials trying on or taking off masks hideous enough to frighten even an american baby. the rooms were merely little cellars connected by narrow, low, stone passages. their furniture was a little table under the mirror, a big, brass-bound chest, on which stood the inevitable opium apparatus, and a low, dirty sleeping-couch.
the whole scene was literally a piece of the underworld. a few years ago it was veritably so for unfortunates who were decoyed into its depths and never got out again. that is done with now, but for all that i felt better when i was out in the street again.
if i had dreamt that night, the dream would certainly have been a nightmare. as it is, whenever i hear any one letting his emotions loose over the glories and triumphs of civilisation i think of chinatown, san francisco, and remain in a comparatively humble frame of mind.
a sea-interlude
across the pacific on a steam-roller
(with incidental remarks on the paradise thereof and the great tropical fraud)
i
by the end of my third day’s stay in san francisco a splendid sea-wind had blown the smell of chinatown out of my nostrils, and the mephitic stuffiness of its streets and shops and restaurants out of my lungs. i would fain have stayed longer, for i was beginning to like the queen of the golden shore, and some of her loyal subjects were beginning to like me, wherefore there was every prospect of a goodly time ahead for me. when your californian likes you he wants to give you his house, and his town, and his clubs, and all that therein is, and when he doesn’t he makes no secret of it.
but for the man who has connections to make, who has to hitch trains on to steamers and steamers[52] on to trains, and get across the world in the shortest possible time, even the temptations of californian hospitality must be in vain. so the next morning i and my baggage were jolted over a couple of miles of appalling streets—the one defect in the beauty of the golden city—at a cost of three dollars and partial dislocation of the vertebral column, to the wharf where a very polite citizen was obliging enough to carry my steamer trunk on board the nippon maru, for half a dollar more.
the crowd on the wharf was cosmopolitan enough even for the drive at singapore, or the praya at hongkong. of course there were globe-trotters like myself, speaking many tongues from russian to american; there were commercial travellers, mostly german, with mountains of samples prepared with great cunning to suit the varied tastes of hawaiians, japs, and chinese; there were short, thick-set, flat-faced japs in grey tweed trousers, tail coats, and top hats, fresh from the colleges and the counting-houses of the eastern states; there were grave, impassive chinese, mandarins and millionaires, in silken robes and black skull-caps (with the little red button on top),[53] with their wives and children also in silken vesture and orthodoxly shapeless; and then there were the coolies and sailors, jap and chinese, with a sprinkling of wicked-eyed lascars and mild hindoos.
to finish the picture, on the government wharf hard by a detachment of blue-clad, felt-hatted united states troops were lining up for embarkation on one of the transports bound for manila.
the good sea-wind did not seem quite so good when we got outside the golden gate, for there was a villainous sea running on the bar and through the narrow passage between the tail of the bar and the rock-bound coast, which is called the main ship channel. in a bad sea this is one of the most ticklish pieces of navigation in the world.
on the port side, as we went out, the breakers were piling themselves up into mountains of foam on the end of the bar a couple of hundred yards away. to starboard, another two or three hundred yards off, the big pacific rollers were thundering along the base of the cliffs, flinging their spume and spindrift sky-high. the water in between was just what one would expect it to be, and so passenger after passenger, male and female, missionary and mercantile, disappeared from the deck.
[54]
i afterwards learnt that there was much suffering below, and many of the victims did not reappear till we reached the smooth, sunlit waters which wash the shores of what the american tourist agencies, since the annexation, have christened “the paradise of the pacific.” the jap passengers collapsed first of all.
when i had made the closer acquaintance of the nippon i found that her sailors and quartermasters and junior officers were japs, while her stewards and barmen were chinese. the captain and first officer were english, and the chief engineer, of course, a scotchman. i have often wondered how many “chiefs” on the seven seas are not scotch.
the nippon, like most japanese mail-boats, was cheap and gaudy. she gave evidence of her cheapness by bursting a steam-pipe just as she was fighting her way through the channel. it might have been serious, but it wasn’t, though it lengthened our passage by several hours, for the wasted steam, instead of getting into the cylinders, went roaring away in noisy impotence up to the cloudy sky which overhung the alleged pacific ocean.
diamond head, honolulu. the town lies in the bay about halfway between the two headlands.
[55]
on the third night we got into smoother water and stopped while the chief and his assistants repaired the damage. the next morning at breakfast the deserted saloon began to fill up.
so far i and a fellow-traveller from chicago had had the corner table to ourselves. by lunch-time it was full of lady missionaries going to china and japan. for three or four of them that was destined to be their last voyage. the nicest and most pleasantly spoken of them was travelling many thousands of miles to meet an unspeakable fate at the hands of the boxers.
on the fourth morning great blue-grey masses of land began to rise up to port and ahead of us, and that day we spent steaming through summer seas under a lovely sky, between shores whose beauty may well have led captain cook’s sailors to believe that they had at last reached the long-dreamed-of islands of the blest.
for all that, i must confess that i was disappointed with the approach to honolulu. even the most patriotic hawaiian would, i think, agree with me that the capital has not been placed either on the most beautiful of the islands or in the most picturesque position possible.
[56]
still, you would travel far before you found a fairer sea-flanked city than honolulu itself. it is a city of broad, tree-shaded streets, of buildings which are dignified without being pretentious, of palaces and government offices built on a scale of splendour which argues eloquently for the financial conceptions of former monarchs and a belief in their destinies which the sceptical fates and the american republic have since declined to justify.
there are, of course, many churches and schools in honolulu. your hawaiian takes his or her religion in a cheerfully earnest fashion, and sings hymns with keener delight than any one else on earth. still, the schools and churches of honolulu were not built wisely. where everything else is beautiful, softly lined, and tree-embowered, they are hard, bare, and angular, even after the fashion of the ebenezers of the midlands and the north of england. the very gaol looks nice in comparison with them.
but the private houses—for instance, those stretching away along king street, west, to waikiki, perhaps the loveliest bathing-place in the world—are, after all, the pleasantest memories that one brings away from honolulu. mostly low and[57] broad-verandahed, white-painted, and embowered in foliage of every shade of green, faced with smooth, emerald lawns spangled with flower-beds blazing bright with every colour that nature loves to paint her tropical flowers, they seemed rather the dwellings of lotus-eaters in “the land where it is always afternoon” than the houses of hard-headed, keen-witted business men and politicians, mostly of american descent, who have not only piled up many millions by various methods, but have also created this leafy paradise out of the bare and swampy seashore that it was when captain cook landed upon it.
i happened to arrive in honolulu at a very interesting time. the monroe doctrine had been stretched across the pacific from san francisco to the philippines, and honolulu was a sort of hitching-post which kept it from sagging into the water. among the white population there was a good deal more american than english being spoken. the harbour was full of american transports. blue-clad, very business-like-looking american troops were marching and drilling and patrolling all over the place. many of the men wore, in addition to their regimentals, portrait-medallions[58] of the president or their best girls—a sight to make a british war office person ill for the rest of his official days. for myself, it liked me well.
saving the american occupation, but not by any means unconnected with it, the four salient facts of honolulu seemed to me to be missionaries, mosquitos, millionaires, and morality spelt backwards.
the missionaries and the mosquitos came to honolulu at the same time, about seventy-five years ago. the mosquitos are supposed to have come in old sugar-casks from mexico, and it is known that the missionaries came chiefly first-class from san francisco. i mention the coincidence for what it is worth. both are at present going strong.
the missionaries practically own and run the place with the assistance of the sugar millionaires who helped the united states to annex the islands. the mosquitos are, with one exception, the most venomous and insidious that i have ever suffered from.
there is one notable point of difference between the missionaries and the mosquitos in honolulu. the missionaries and their congregations sing[59] voluminously, and also very prettily. the hawaiian mosquito does not sing. he makes his descent silently and stealthily, sucks the life-blood out of you, and goes away, leaving you to scratch and swear and wonder how on earth he managed to get his work in without you knowing it.
there are some unregenerates, both white and bronze, still in honolulu who say something like this about the missionaries and the country. this may or may not have any truth in it. it is certainly quite true that the missionaries have done an immense amount of good in the sandwich islands. it is also true that they and their descendants form the aristocracy and ruling class of the islands. they have the most magnificent houses and most beautiful estates. they also run the most lucrative businesses. not the worthy pastors themselves, of course. in hawaii, the word “missionary” means not only the missionaries themselves, but their descendants to the third and fourth generations. perhaps the most good-natured way to put it would be to say that here the labourer was worthy of his hire and saw that he got it.
but there was one deadly contrast in honolulu[60] which i frankly say shocked and horrified me, hardened globe-trotter as i am! i don’t think i ever saw a place which possesses more churches, schools, missions, and other missionary machinery to the acre than honolulu. it also runs considerably to saloons and hotels with bar-annexes; but these justify their existence by paying enormous licences to the revenue. wherefore they charge the thirsting citizen a shilling a time for a drink, no matter how small or common; which, of course, either keeps down drunkenness or punishes those who drink with poverty. millionaires, and, some whisper, the missionaries, take their liquid comforts at home.
but one night after dinner, having nothing else to do but smoke and listen to small talk in the intervals of fighting the mosquitos, i went off by myself to explore the asiatic quarter. i had no hint or direction from anybody, and, by sheer accident, i found myself in a street which was the exact replica of the slave-market in chinatown, san francisco.
slaves of all colours and nationalities, white and brown and yellow and black, were sitting behind the lattices of their prisons. chinese and japanese[61] “houses of delight” were running full steam ahead. it was only natural that i should catch myself wondering whether i had not been spirited back into chinatown, instead of walking the streets of holy honolulu where the missionaries and the churches have reigned practically supreme for fifty years.
one curiously revolting feature of the scene was this: the americanisation of hawaii was proceeding apace just then. four or five big transports, bound for manila, were in the harbour. there were american sentries at the government buildings over which old glory floated from sunrise to sunset. squads of american troops drilled daily in the open places. american patrols marched through the streets by night, and american soldiers and sailors jostled with jap and chinaman, negro and malay along the narrow pavements of the hawaiian slave-market. it was a curious mingling of east and west, not by any means flattering to the west.
the next day i asked certain citizens who should have known how this thing came to be in such a godly country, and the various answers about came to this: “the government and the churches[62] have done their best to shut those places up, but somehow they haven’t succeeded. and then, you see, they pay enormous rents.”
“but who owns the property?” i asked one old and highly respected resident.
“well, if i did i shouldn’t tell you,” he replied. “come and have a drink!”
it was a hot day and i thought i might as well leave it at that.
later on this moral plague-spot became a physical plague-spot as well. the black death spread its sombre wings over it, and the purging fires have swept it in smoke and flying flame from the face of the insulted earth up to the yet more insulted heavens. wherefore the paradise of the pacific ought to be a good deal cleaner now than it was when i was there.
sanford b. dole. first governor of the territory of hawaii.
that afternoon i called at government house and sent my card in to mr. sanford b. dole, president of the hawaiian republic. he is the man who came to the front when the reactionary tactics of king kalakaua and his sister and successor, liliuokalani, raised the somewhat important question as to whether the hawaiian islands were going to fall into line with civilisation or fall back into a[63] state of semi-barbarism—for that is about what it came to.
president dole is a “missionary”; that is to say, he belongs to the clerical aristocracy of honolulu. he is not a clergyman himself, and he has the credit of belonging to one of the very few missionary families in the islands which have not become wealthy.
the last president that i had interviewed was paul krüger, late of kerk street, pretoria. there was a very striking difference between the two men. the boer was bulky, slow of speech and motion, with manners unspeakable; also little keen eyes which looked at you piercingly for a moment, and then dodged away—cunning incarnate in the flesh and a good deal both of the cunning and the flesh.
still, at the time, i confess that i thought him a man, and, in his way, a great one—not a common boodler who would squeeze his country for all it was worth, and then, at the first note of danger, bolt with all the plunder he could lay his hands on.
when i went into president dole’s council chamber—which had once been the queen’s boudoir, and in kalakaua’s time before her, the[64] scene of many a half-barbaric orgie—i was greeted by a tall, rather slight, but well set-up man dressed in spotless white.
he had the air of being at once virile and venerable, for his hair and his long, almost patriarchal beard were both grey. but the figure was alert. he walked up and down the room the whole time we were talking. the grey-blue eyes were quick and keen and steady. i may also add, en parenthèse, that he was one of the handsomest men i have ever spoken to.
he told me the story of the battle between reaction and advancement, corruption and comparative cleanliness, just as a man who had seen it all but had taken no share in it might have done. the story is history now, and needn’t be repeated here. to me the most interesting fact was that president dole told it without once mentioning himself until it became unavoidable.
when the fighting was over there were seven conspicuous citizens of honolulu in prison under sentence of death as conspirators against the commonwealth, and it rested with mr. dole to say whether they should be executed or not.
“it was, of course, a very painful position for[65] me to be placed in,” he said. “you see i was the head of the provisional government and chief magistrate, and some of them were personal acquaintances of my own.”
“then, after all, you had something to do with it, mr. president? that’s the first time i’ve heard you mention yourself in the whole story.”
there was a smile under the heavy moustache as he answered:
“oh, yes, of course, i had a good deal to do with it. when the revolution was over they elected me president; and the prisoners—well, we sentenced them to different terms of imprisonment, and then let them out gradually. to tell you the truth i hadn’t much fancy for signing death-warrants.”
i was afterwards told on quite reliable authority that if the revolution had not succeeded, sanford b. dole and a few others would undoubtedly have been hung.
mr. dole, being of american descent, very naturally considered that the united states were the proper power to run the hawaiian islands, whether the hawaiians liked it or not. it is a way that all great powers have with small ones. we[66] have it ourselves to a considerable extent. in fact, we once had these same islands with all their vast possibilities. that was in the dark ages of british diplomacy when colonies were “not wanted.” so a few distinguished idiots in downing street gave orders for the flag to be hauled down from the flagstaff on the old fort of honolulu. after which it avails little for an englishman to talk about cousin jonathan stealing the islands for himself.
mr. dole assisted conspicuously and, i believe, quite conscientiously in the transfer. he saw that it was either annexation or semi-barbarism and corruption. he thought that what great powers call annexation and small ones call stealing was the better of the two, and i think he was right.
hawaii is now a territory; and sanford b. dole is its governor. still, i was a little afraid that there might be something of prophecy in the last remark he made as we shook hands.
“there is no doubt about the future or the prosperity of the islands,” he said, in answer to my last question. “with good settled government capital will come in, as it has been doing, and everything will go ahead. but,” he added very gravely, “if we get the millionaire monopolist[67] and the professional politician over here, they’ll ruin us.”
“exactly!” i said. “here you have the paradise, the eden of the pacific. politics will supply the serpent.”
he shook his head and smiled, and i went away without telling him that i had travelled from chicago with a gentleman who had been to washington to see about the introduction of that self-same serpent.
when people who have not been there read about the tropics in books, especially in story-books, the impression they get is one of general gorgeousness pervading the heavens and the earth, and a human state of things not far removed from what some of us honestly hope to deserve some day when days have ceased to count.
blue seas lie rippling gently under azure skies; islands of almost inconceivable beauty, palm-crowned and coral-fringed, gem the surface of the waveless waters. the heat of the sun is tempered by cool, scented breezes.
the day begins and ends with sunrises and[68] sunsets which seem like the opening and shutting of the gates of paradise.
the nights are languorous dreams of soft delights under skies spangled with myriads of stars such as northern eyes have never seen. on other nights earth and sea are bathed in silvery moonlight such as never fell on northern sea or shore.
some authors get their moon and stars shining at the same time. these have probably done their travelling in an armchair. diana of the tropics is a good deal too autocratic for that.
those are the tropics of the novelist and the traveller who wants to make his untravelled readers envious. as a story-writer i have myself sinned thus; wherefore, partly, this confession.
the trouble with most people who have described the tropics in fiction and otherwise is that they leave too much out. all that they put in is correct. you really can see all these beauties, and more, between cancer and capricorn; but you don’t see them everywhere or all the time.
another very serious fault with your tropical word-artist is that he generally ignores the swamps, the fevers, the agues, the rains which come down like bursting water-spouts, the hurricanes which[69] blow brick and stone walls about as if they were paper. further, as to the rippling sunlit sea, they too often omit to state that, when it is inclined that way it can get up into waves which will take a ship clean over a reef and land it halfway up a hillside, and that it has a swell through which a ship may wallow for days, rolling scuppers under every minute of the day and night for weeks on end.
this, by the way, is one of the most villainous features of the tropical pacific. for instance, you wake up out of a nightmare-slumber, bruised and sore and sweating, after hours of sleepy struggle to brace yourself somehow between the sides of your berth so that you may not be flung against the opposite side of your cabin. you watch for a favourable moment—the best one is just when she is going to stop and your side is down. miss this, and you’ll wish you’d waited for the next.
in spite of all your precautions your luggage has broken loose and has taken charge of the floor. nothing is where you put it the night before.
your hair-brushes are under the lower berth in the farthest possible corner. your tooth-brush is probably on the other side under the sofa; and[70] your box of tooth-powder has got into one of your boots and has emptied itself there. your bath-sponge has probably carried away from the rack, and got itself saturated with the contents of your only bottle of scent, which has dashed itself to pieces in its struggles to leap out of its appointed place.
you squeeze this sorrowfully out into the tumbler, if there’s one left unbroken. at peril of life and limb you grope around and find your deck-shoes, and then you start out for the bathroom. the ship is groaning and shuddering like a man with tertian ague and toothache. if your sea-legs are good you get there without a broken limb or many additions to your bruises.
the water in the bath is having a miniature storm all to itself. the bath is usually marble nowadays, and very hard. if you lie down in it you are absolutely at the mercy of the raging waters, and they dash you from side to side, and end to end till you struggle feebly to your feet and try to stand.
you clutch at anything for support. sometimes, as happened to a fellow-voyager of mine, it is the steam-pipe for heating the water, and off comes[71] the skin in a twinkling. when you have got into something like an erect position you keep yourself from being hurled out with one hand and pull the string of the shower with the other.
“swish,” comes the douche, and you have a moment of cooling luxury. then follows the slow inexorable heave of the next roll. you hold on, partly to the string; the water rises up on one side of the bath and slops over, probably filling your shoes. the douche leaves you, crosses the bathroom at an angle of sixty degrees, and drenches your pyjamas, and, peradventure, your towels as well. if this has not happened, you stagger out and dry yourself in the intervals of trying to sit or stand.
whatever else has happened to you in your bath, you’ve got cool for a few minutes. meanwhile the pitiless sun has been rising higher, the exertion of drying yourself has put you into a violent perspiration, and you are about as wet when you give it up in despair as you were when you began.
you get into your pyjamas and shoes, and, if the demoralisation of the tropics has gone far enough with you, and the bar is open, you go and get a cocktail to put a little life into you after a night[72] of gasping, perspiring insomnia. this function is tropically termed “sweetening the bilge-water,” and is greatly in vogue among those who have sat up late in the smoking-room overnight.
then you pull yourself up on deck by handrails and anything else you can get hold of. the morning air is delicious in its virgin freshness, and you begin to draw new breaths of life. the decks are wet and sloppy, but still cool. in a few hours the pitch will be boiling in the seams, and the planks will be hot enough to melt the rubber soles off your shoes.
the masts and funnels are describing slow arcs across the vault of the firmament; deck-chairs are skating about, chasing each other around, or huddling themselves in scared heaps in the safest and wettest corners of the deck.
down below there is the tinkling clatter of crockery, mingled with language from the stewards who are trying to set the table for breakfast. when you have cooled off a bit you nerve yourself to go below again into the furnished oven you call your room and get dressed. perhaps you have to shave—but this is an added agony which may be passed over in silence.
[73]
you stagger back on deck to get cool again. you meet your fellow-sufferers and say things about the ship with disparaging references to round-bottomed old tanks, butter-tubs, steam-rollers, and the like. these things are not exaggerated. i crossed the pacific from honolulu to sydney on a steam-roller called the alameda, and i am speaking of that which i know.
then, perhaps after another visit to the bar, you go to breakfast. you eat your meals in the tropics partly because you must repair the exhaustion of perpetual perspiration, and partly because you have paid for them in advance. naturally, you don’t like the company to get too far ahead of you.
if it wasn’t for this you would probably eat a great deal less and be much better, but human nature is human even in the saloon of a steam-roller on the pacific with the thermometer standing at 97° fahr. thus you eat and drink and loaf your way through the listless, sweltering hours, and vaguely wonder what your liver will be like when you get ashore.
there is another speciality of the tropics to which the tropical glory-mongers have never done[74] full justice. this is the mosquito. of course, there are mosquitos outside the tropics. a veracious british columbian once told me that on the yukon they shoot them with revolvers and catch them in seine nets.
the tropical mosquito, however, does not run to size as a rule. in guayaquil i have seen them a little smaller than sparrows, but they were exceptions. still, for his size, the tropical mosquito carries a greater load of sin and responsibility than any other beast of prey inside the confines of creation.
i never really knew what artistic profanity was till i met him. i had no idea of the magnificent capabilities of the english language, helped out with a little american, till he had his first meal off me.
i have said before that the honolulu mosquito does not sing, so the first night out i went to bed unsuspecting, and foolishly congratulating myself that i had got rid of him for a time. i knew better when i woke up in the still watches of the night, scraping myself from head to foot, like job with his potsherd—it was too hot for bed- or any other kind of clothes—and wondering what had got me.
i turned up the light, and there was the cloud[75] of witnesses. i gave up the struggle there and then, got into my pyjamas, and went on deck with a rug over my arm and many evil thoughts in my heart.
one of those mosquitos got as far as samoa with me. he was the only one that the sea air seemed to agree with, and he was as elusive as a boer brigand surrounded by half a dozen british armies. i killed him the morning we sighted apia. he was too gorged to fly. it was literally blood for blood, only all the blood was on one side.
i didn’t discover any mosquitos in samoa. at least, none discovered me, but that is perhaps because i escaped without sleeping there, and the old steam-roller was lying a long way off the shore. there were, however, plenty of the other winged pests which are characteristic of most tropical paradises.
some of us walked up to vailima in response to the invitation of a fellow-traveller, a rich german merchant, who had bought the ruins of robert louis stevenson’s house—it was torn to pieces by the shells during the bombardment—and “restored” it. i hope the gentle ghost of[76] “r. l. s.” will never revisit it in the glimpses of the moon.
samoa is one of those tropical paradises over which the romancers have spread themselves with the most lavish verbal embroidery. the cold, or rather tepid, truth as to my own brief experiences of it is this.
we trudged over four miles and a half of muddy road, under a grey, leaden sky that would have done justice to an english mid-summer day. from this descended an almost impalpable but drenching mist, the air was thick with flies and other intrusive things, which got into your eyes and nose and mouth and ears.
the exertion of plodding through the mud quickly reduced us to a state of almost intolerable limpness. it was like four and a half miles of turkish bath adorned with tropical foliage. you had to get some of this foliage and swing it about with what vigour you chanced to have left, so that you might keep the flies far enough off to be able to breathe.
we took a languid interest in the shell-smashed and bullet-pierced trees by the wayside, and in the rude entrenchments which the samoans had[77] thrown up, for it was along this road that the british and american detachments had to fight their way to dubious victory so as to get things ready for the german occupation.
at vailima we had warm champagne, for not even all the wealth of our good-hearted host could buy an ounce of ice in samoa, and we ate cakes and pineapples where robert louis stevenson had alternately feasted and half starved, as he tells us in those daintily pathetic “vailima letters” of his.
but a proper respect for the eternal verities forces me to say that this place, round which so many reams of imaginative eulogy have been written and typewritten, entirely disappointed me. everything was shabby and ragged and squalid except the newly “restored” house and the furniture, which might have been sent by telegraph from tottenham court road that morning.
the avenue from the main road to the house, which the samoans voluntarily made for stevenson in repayment for the whole-hearted work he had done for them against the foreign aggressor, was puddle-strewn and inches deep in mud. the paddock was no better than you would have found round the shanty of a first-year selector[78] in australia. there were no paths, only tracks, mostly mud. the historic stream was little more than a stone-strewn brook.
even from the upper verandah of the house you can only just get a glimpse of the sea. a hill crowded with tangled tropical growth rises on either side of the little plateau on which the house stands. on the top of the one to the left hand as you look towards the sea is the grave of the dead word-magician. behind the house another broken, tree-clad slope rising to the misty clouds; and that is all.
personally i would not live at vailima, rent free and everything found, for a thousand a year. i know other places in the pacific where with suitable society life would be a dream of delight if one only had a tent, a hammock, and about ten shillings sterling a week to spend.
the steam-roller did not stop long enough for us to attempt the ascent of the mountain. i left vailima dejected and disappointed, in a state of mind which even the warm champagne had failed to cheer. i tramped back through the mud under the everlasting mist, and through the same cloud of flies.
[79]
when i got on board i found a sort of political demonstration, mingled with a cosmopolitan orgie going on.
the ship was crowded from end to end with splendid specimens of samoan manhood. there was a brass band on deck, and the smoking-room was simply floating in champagne. when i got to the heart of matters i found that the most popular man in samoa was leaving. he was the american consul, and his name was blacklock, which, being translated into samoan, is pillackie-lockie. certain friends of his—men who would raise you out of your boots on a pair of twos—were coming with us, and from samoa to auckland it was my privilege to travel with the hardest crowd i have ever been shipmates with.
this was just the beginning of the german occupation. during the bombardment the first shot fired from the german warship had wrecked the german consulate on the beach instead of hitting the hills beyond, where mataaffa’s men were supposed to be concealed; and this, with other things, seemed to have produced a bad impression in the minds of the natives.
at any rate, after the second whistle had gone,[80] when the band played “god save the queen” and the “star-spangled banner,” the samoans sang their versions of the words for all their lungs were worth, but when, in deference to the presence of the german consul on board, an attempt was made at “die wacht am rhein,” there was first a deadly silence and then a deep-voice “hoo-o-o,” which i interpreted as being the samoan for “come out of it,” or words to that effect.
this, by the way, is a humble, but by no means unmeaning “footnote to history.”
