I find that I have kept no record of the transactions in the matter of the Vandalia's flag other than skeleton memoranda that I wrote a despatch urging the State Department to condemn it off my property return in Apia, and take it to Washington where the ravages of time would gnaw less quickly, and that some months later I had received instructions as requested and shipped the historic ensign. Details, it will be seen, are lacking, but they remain in my mind with sufficient accuracy.
Take up the story of the disaster where Louis Stevenson left it off in his "Footnote of History." I cite this because it is the most accessible account, the best story of those days and nights of gale was written by John P. Dunning, Associated Press correspondent, and published a month or six weeks after the event by the papers taking that service. It may be yet more convenient to take up the story at the end of my brief letter when presenting to the Academy the autographed photographs of Seumanutafa and Fa'atulia, it would be a fit tribute that the flag and the pictures should find display together.
Sullenly the clouds drew back from the sea, the slope of Mount Vaea came into sight once more, a sight of ruin of a landscape once smiling. Upward and backward the heavy clouds slowly withdrew, men saw again after dreadful days the peak of Vaea, then slope after slope of the rearward mountain was revealed. At last the dull weight lifted from the Tuasivi at the summit of the mountain crest, to windward the sharp ridges of Letongo Mountain were once more visible, to the leeward the eye found again the flat table top of Tofua.
The wind was stilled. That wind, the source of all the evil that had been wrought; afflavit Deus et dissipati sunt, the Armada motto, yet ours was an Armada trapped helpless in Apia, Trenton, Vandalia, Nipsic, wood they were and they were snarling with steel, yet they would have fought man for man had not wind set on a battle gage which neither foe nor friend could decline, a hopeless contest of man against an onshore gale and the biting reef within the tossing of a biscuit. The sea alone was in turmoil when the breeze went down and the nimbus of the storm went upward. You cannot imagine the sea within the Apia reef, it fights and worries for days after the gales have passed; the Vaisingano, pleasantly named the river of the fragrant pandanus blooms, pours torrents over its bar of coral chips; the currents swirl between the reef groves, gnawing, rending, tearing. Fine bones there were to pick in Apia harbor.
Close to the Vaisingano mouth and a little to the westward lay the Olga and the Ebcr stranded and torn; a little farther to the west and on a coral shelf, to which local taste has given the name Cape Horn, lay the Adlcr, tossed high out of water, her keel barely awash at high water full and change; there she lies to-day blushing with rust at such unwonted ship burial, riven is her hull, corkscrewed in the pleasant air. East of Vaisingano on the coral stretch which extends northward to form Matautu Point lay the Trenton, dead, lay the Vandalia, dead; two dead ships, but even dead they were not disgraced. Higher up the point lay the Nipsic, stranded, sorely wounded, but still alive. How she got in safety to that beach no man ever knew. She writhed like a cat in and out among corals which should have torn her bottom out, what she could not dodge she rammed and broke a miracle way through. Ten years afterward when on formal visits to receive the quota of nine guns speaking the peaceful salutation, the shortest way for my gig was through a lane gouged athwart two reefs, the path which the Nipsic had pioneered, scarcely in a century may the madrepores repair what this sole surviving ship did to their walls and bulwarks.
Kimberly, on the beach—no admiral was ever disgraced by striking his flag to the elements in their fury—intent upon the first duty of all captains courageous, was caring for his men whom the sea had spared. There were survivors to be housed; what became of Seumanutafa's Samoans it is hard to say, for every roof that had escaped the gale protected more than its complement of the rescued. There were survivors to be fed, and the fury of the hurricane had spared the land no more than the sea; rations were a crying problem in a scarcely civilized community where today's feast means to-morrow's famine. There were the dead to bury. Every day saw the firing parties winding up the Ifiifi road to a little hillock where grave after grave lengthened the orderly line of burial quarters, there to lie still until the last draft came to carry the crews home to Mare Island.
If food was hard to come at in these first days on the beach drink was put still further out of reach. Here enters Blacklock. You will find Blacklock threading through this narrative, William Blacklock, Vice Consul-General of the United States, by long odds the finest figure that the motley show of Samoa has ever presented. I had cause to regret that I yielded to high representations and neglected to continue him in office; one of the pleasantest recollections of my tour of duty is that at the end I was able to renominate him to the post. It was Blacklock, when the gale was at its worst, who went through the wickedness of waterside Apia and closed the bars; just what his authority might have been no one really ever knew, but a moral force in time of need is superior to ordinances of aldermen and such like foolish officialdom.
Those processions to Ifiifi, and they were spread along many days as the sea reluctant yielded its prey, were not the only funerals. There were dead in the narrow harbor, dead ships to bury and no ritual in any prayer book for such solemnity. It is easy for the disciplined mind to contemplate the death of a ship in her own element, no one but can feel the thrill when the trooper Birkenhead makes her last plunge and the gale pauses abashed at the rattle of accouterments and the soft thud of pieces when aligned on decks already awash platoons present arms to their only conqueror. But what to do with ship corpses on the shore? The dead ships were a danger to the living, twice a day the tides washed out of their bowels that which was a menace to the community. Dead ships caught fast in the coral of a treacherous shore cannot burv their dead. Help must come from somewhere.
Again Blacklock. I have said that he was Vice Consul-General. More than that, he was acting in the place of his absent chief. There were regulations, the navy had its set of regulations, the State Department had its volume of regulations, Blacklock was doubly bound. But coils of the reddest tape could not hold such a man. What could not be done by him in the coils of regulation could be done by a corporation. There sprang into being the Trenton and Vandalia Wrecking Company, its first duty to preserve the little town from the pestilence breeding to windward. It was all Blacklock working for good, sometimes a little difficult to know whether it was Blacklock in official position, or the company, working hotly in the burial of the dead ships. But the work was done, the ships were torn to pieces and the menace was lifted from the town.
It is pleasant to recall the courtesies paid the Calliope as she inched her way through the bottle neck of the barrier reefs and at long last won out to the safety of the open sea. Ready to die the Trenton lay in that passage steaming to her anchors and dragging, her death the only thing that could give the Calliope the chance to be free. Yet as the Calliope went by full honors were given and returned, ave, Caesar, morituri, as gentlemen and gentle ships should do. When we see the executives keeping their manners in the article of death it does not surprise us that the fleet fought through its supreme engagement with colors flying, there is a dress of death and these ships wore it.
After the havoc had all been wrought there rose above the water the ensign of the Vandalia, sodden with the weight of rain in its four fathoms of breadth, far too heavy to be rippled by the milder breezes, hanging in mourning over the wreck and death below. It was Carlin's duty to strike the flag when all was over, once ensign now wreck stuff and mere salvage. In time of such disaster men know men, Carlin gave the flag to Blacklock, a fitting disposition. Modest above all things Blacklock would not accept it for himself, it was to him something too fine for any Trenton and Vandalia Wrecking Company then coming into being out of the nation's loss. He inscribed it on the property return of the consulate and gave it the noble space on the wall, in time he decorated its place of honor with rusted cutlasses and coral-clogged firearms, to which in my own time and in recognition of the same fetichism I added weighter decoration of shells from the Trenton's magazine.
There it hung for ten years. I knew it would leave an emptiness and a void when I shipped it home to custody where it would ever be a green memory. What else could I do? There was the mildew to fear in an unequal fight. There were ravaging insects at work upon the bunting. Once I had a reverend visitor, his title left me incautious, only just in the nick of time did I hold back his pocket knife from the star which he sought to excise from the field of thirty-eight. I am glad that this flag which the Vandalia wore to her death will find its proper home in loving keeping where new sailor generations are bred. It is a record of disaster, it is the flag of a surrender, but we are proud of its reminder that in all history only one foe has ever seen the flags of an American squadron come down, that foe the brute violence of the angry heavens.