Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
beautiful. There were about forty-five souls on the island all told . . .
Blessed island of Juan Fernandez!
22
The Pacific crossing, according to Slocum, was the most relaxed
period of the whole voyage. The
Spray
, well provisioned and re-
covered from her ordeal, scudded along before the trade winds for
seventy-two days. As if to make up for the recent chastening she had
administered, the sea now spoiled Slocum:
I sat and read my books, mended my clothes, or cooked my meals
and ate them in peace. I had already found that it was not good to be
alone, and so I made companionship with what there was around me,
sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignific-
ant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else. Nothing
could be easier or more restful than my voyage in the trade-winds.
23
Slocum steered by the sun and the stars. He set a course for
Samoa, ignoring the Marquesas and the Society Islands, where he
could easily have made a landfall, and brought
Spray
to rest in the
port of Apia on 16 July.
This chain of islands is one of the most beautiful in the world
and, for Europeans, perhaps, the most pleasant. Slocum arrived in
the middle of the cool season, when the temperature seldom rises
above 27°C. The heavy rain which keeps the inland ridges perpetu-
ally covered with an aura of cool, hazy green falls mostly at night
and in the morning. Samoa today looks much as it did ninety years
ago. Sadly, the unaffected life style of the people, which so impressed
Slocum has changed with constant exposure to the customs and at-
titudes of supposedly more sophisticated cultures. When the
Spray
's
captain visited a village chief he found him cheerfully contemptuous
of western materialism: “'Dollar, dollar,” said he; “white man know
