Kane returned to Apia on the 19th, to find the Calliope the sole survivor of thirteen sail.  He thanked his men, and in particular the engineers, in a speech of unusual feeling and beauty, of which one who was present remarked to another, as they left the ship, “This has been a means of grace.”  Nor did he forget to thank and compliment the admiral; and I cannot deny myself the pleasure of transcribing from Kimberley’s reply some generous and engaging words.  “My dear captain,” he wrote, “your kind note received.  You went out splendidly, and we all felt from our hearts for you, and our cheers came with sincerity and admiration for the able manner in which you handled your ship.  We could not have been gladder if it had been one of our ships, for in a time like that I can truly say with old Admiral Josiah Latnall, ’that blood is thicker than water.’” One more trait will serve to build up the image of this typical sea-officer.  A tiny schooner, the Equator, Captain Edwin Reid, dear to myself from the memories of a six months’ cruise, lived out upon the high seas the fury of that tempest which had piled with wrecks the harbour of Apia, found a refuge in Pango-Pango, and arrived at last in the desolated port with a welcome and lucrative cargo of pigs.  The admiral was glad to have the pigs; but what most delighted the man’s noble and childish soul, was to see once more afloat the colours of his country.

Thus, in what seemed the very article of war, and within the duration of a single day, the sword-arm of each of the two angry Powers was broken; their formidable ships reduced to junk; their disciplined hundreds to a horde of castaways, fed with difficulty, and the fear of whose misconduct marred the sleep of their commanders.  Both paused aghast; both had time to recognise that not the whole Samoan Archipelago was worth the loss in men and costly ships already suffered.  The so-called hurricane of March 16th made thus a marking epoch in world-history; directly, and at once, it brought about the congress and treaty of Berlin; indirectly, and by a process still continuing, it founded the modern navy of the States.  Coming years and other historians will declare the influence of that.

CHAPTER XI—­LAUPEPA AND MATAAFA

1889-1892

With the hurricane, the broken war-ships, and the stranded sailors, I am at an end of violence, and my tale flows henceforth among carpet incidents.  The blue-jackets on Apia beach were still jealously held apart by sentries, when the powers at home were already seeking a peaceable solution.  It was agreed, so far as might be, to obliterate two years of blundering; and to resume in 1889, and at Berlin, those negotiations which had been so unhappily broken off at Washington in 1887.  The example thus offered by Germany is rare in history; in the career of Prince Bismarck, so far as I am instructed, it should