Golfing Round the World
Chapter XV Casual Water
Life in these days is really a steady and continuous process of disillusionment. I had imagined the Pacific to be something very vast and awful, but it seemed that no sooner were we fairly in it than we were over it so, rapid and uneventful has modern transport become. In a few years, of course, we shall whirl round this planet through its circumambient ether, and oceans and continents will offer no obstacle to our progress. Even today we pick up our morning paper and learn that Mr. So and So has arrived in the Antipodes when it seemed only yesterday that cheering crowds gave him a send off from Croydon.
The Pacific, then, is nothing more than a good sized lake sprinkled with innumerable islets. From Yokohama to Honolulu is three thousand five hundred miles, and I had always supposed it to be a great lone waste of ocean, whereas in fact one is never more than two hundred miles away from land of some sort or another.
As we neared the tropics once more and carried our deck chairs right aft, for shade and shelter, and dreamed our day dreams in the hypnotic spell of our turbulent wake, it was a never ending puzzle to account for those giant birds which swooped and swerved and nosedived and velplaned in our track. For three days there were but a couple of these huge petrels but on the fourth day they were joined by a third, and on the seventh day out from Yokohama we had a flock of something like a score. One could understand these winged adventures picking up a vessel near the land and following it for days, but for them to suddenly appear when the ship was midway between two ports nearly four thousand miles apart, was a mystery which was only solved when we realised that a chain of islands extends right across the Pacific from the coast of Japan to the Hawaiian islands.