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 thousand years ago.

Over this land bridge, mayhap, ventured the Caucasian people, the dominant blood in Polynesia to-day, and when the continent fell from the sight of sun and stars save in those spots now the mountainous islands like Tahiti and the Marquesas, the survivors were isolated for untold centuries.

Here in these islands the brothers of our long-forgotten ancestors have lived and bred since the Stone Age, cut off from the main stream of mankind’s development.  Here they have kept the childhood customs of our white race, savage and wild, amid their primitive and savage life.  Here, three centuries ago, they were discovered by the peoples of the great world, and, rudely encountering a civilization they did not build, they are dying here.  With their passing vanishes the last living link with our own pre-historic past.  And I was to see it, before it disappears forever.