e very fine, tapering and beautiful, even to the eye of
a land-lubber.

A hundred and six feet from stem to stern, twenty-three feet of beam
and ten feet of depth, she was loaded to water's edge with cargo for
the islands to which we were bound. Lumber lay in the narrow lanes
between cabin-house and rails; even the lifeboats were piled with
cargo. Those who reckon dangers do not laugh much in these seas.
There was barely room to move about on the deck of the _Morning Star_;
merely a few steps were possible abaft the wheel amid the play of
main-sheet boom and traveler. Here, while my three fellow-passengers
went below, I stood gazing at the rain-whipped illimitable waters
ahead.

Where is the boy who has not dreamed of the cannibal isles, those
strange, fantastic places over the rim of the world, where naked
brown men move like shadows through unimagined jungles, and horrid
feasts are celebrated to the "boom, boom, boom!" of the twelve-foot
drums?

Years bring knowledge, paid for with the dreams of youth. The wide,
vague world becomes familiar, becomes even common-place. London,
Paris, Venice, many-colored Cairo, the desecrated crypts of the
pyramids, the crumbling villages of Palestine, no longer glimmer
before me in the iridescent glamor of fancy, for I have seen them.
But something of the boyish thrill that filled me when I pored over
the pages of Melville long ago returned while I stood on the deck of
the _Morning Star_, plunging through the surging Pacific in the
driving tropic rain.

Many leagues before us lay Les Isles Dangereux, the Low Archipelago,
first stopping-point on our journey to the far cannibal islands yet
another thousand miles away across the empty seas. Before we saw the
green banners of Tahiti's cocoanut palms again we would travel not
only forward over leagues of tossing water but backward across
centuries of time. For in those islands isolated from the world for
eons there remains a living fragment of the childhood of our
Caucasian race.

Darwin's theory is that these islands are the tops of a submerged
continent, or land bridge, which stretches its crippled body along
the floor of the Pacific for thousands of leagues. A lost land,
whose epic awaits the singer; a mystery perhaps forever to be
unsolved. There are great monuments, graven objects, hieroglyphics,
customs and languages, island peoples with suggestive legends--all,
perhaps, remnants of a migration from Asia or Africa a hundred