BUTARITARI

At Honolulu we had said farewell to the _Casco_ and to Captain Otis, and
our next adventure was made in changed conditions. Passage was taken for
myself, my wife, Mr. Osbourne, and my China boy, Ah Fu, on a pigmy
trading schooner, the _Equator_, Captain Dennis Reid; and on a certain
bright June day in 1889, adorned in the Hawaiian fashion with the
garlands of departure, we drew out of port and bore with a fair wind for
Micronesia.

The whole extent of the South Seas is desert of ships, more especially
that part where we were now to sail. No post runs in these islands;
communication is by accident; where you may have designed to go is one
thing, where you shall be able to arrive another. It was my hope, for
instance, to have reached the Carolines, and returned to the light of
day by way of Manila and the China ports; and it was in Samoa that we
were destined to re-appear and be once more refreshed with the sight of
mountains. Since the sunset faded from the peaks of Oahu six months had
intervened, and we had seen no spot of earth so high as an ordinary
cottage. Our path had been still on the flat sea, our dwellings upon
unerected coral, our diet from the pickle-tub or out of tins; I had
learned to welcome shark' flesh for a variety; and a mountain, an onion,
an Irish potato or a beef-steak, had been long lost to sense and dear to
aspiration.

The two chief places of our stay, Butaritari and Apemama, lie near the
line; the latter within thirty miles. Both enjoy a superb ocean climate,
days of blinding sun and bracing wind, nights of a heavenly brightness.
Both are somewhat wider than Fakarava, measuring perhaps (at the widest)
a quarter of a mile from beach to beach. In both, a coarse kind of
_taro_ thrives; its culture is a chief business of the natives, and the
consequent mounds and ditches make miniature scenery and amuse the eye.
In all else they show the customary features of an atoll: the low
horizon, the expanse of the lagoon, the sedge-like rim of palm-tops, the
sameness and smallness of the land, the hugely superior size and
interest of sea and sky. Life on such islands is in many points like
life on shipboard. The atoll, like the ship, is soon taken for granted;
and the islanders, like the ship's crew, become soon the centre of
attention. The isles are populous, independent, seats of kinglets,
recently civilised, little visited. In the last decade many changes have
crept in: women no longer go u