or bottle with a funnel mouth. Its
sides are almost everywhere of coral; for the reef not only bounds it to
seaward and forms the neck and mouth, but skirting about the beach, it
forms the bottom also. As in the bottle of commerce, the bottom is
re-entrant, and the shore-reef runs prominently forth into the basin and
makes a dangerous cape opposite the fairway of the entrance. Danger is,
therefore, on all hands. The entrance gapes three cables wide at the
narrowest, and the formidable surf of the Pacific thunders both outside
and in. There are days when speech is difficult in the chambers of
shore-side houses; days when no boat can land, and when men are broken
by stroke of sea against the wharves. As I write these words, three
miles in the mountains, and with the land-breeze still blowing from the
island summit, the sound of that vexed harbour hums in my ears. Such a
creek in my native coast of Scotland would scarce be dignified with the
mark of an anchor in the chart; but in the favoured climate of Samoa,
and with the mechanical regularity of the winds in the Pacific, it
forms, for ten or eleven months out of the twelve, a safe if hardly a
commodious port. The ill-found island traders ride there with their
insufficient moorings the year through, and discharge, and are loaded,
without apprehension. Of danger, when it comes, the glass gives timely
warning; and that any modern war-ship, furnished with the power of
steam, should have been lost in Apia, belongs not so much to nautical as
to political history.

The weather throughout all that winter (the turbulent summer of the
islands) was unusually fine, and the circumstance had been commented on
as providential, when so many Samoans were lying on their weapons in the
bush. By February it began to break in occasional gales. On February
10th a German brigantine was driven ashore. On the 14th the same
misfortune befell an American brigantine and a schooner. On both these
days, and again on the 7th March, the men-of-war must steam to their
anchors. And it was in this last month, the most dangerous of the
twelve, that man's animosities crowded that indentation of the reef with
costly, populous, and vulnerable ships.

I have shown, perhaps already at too great a length, how violently
passion ran upon the spot; how high this series of blunders and mishaps
had heated the resentment of the Germans against all other nationalities
and of all other nationalities against the German