The crowd on the wharf was cosmopolitan enough even for the Drive at Singapore, or the Praya at Hongkong. Of course there were globe-trotters like myself, speaking many tongues from Russian to American; there were commercial travellers, mostly German, with mountains of samples prepared with great cunning to suit the varied tastes of Hawaiians, Japs, and Chinese; there were short, thick-set, flat-faced Japs in grey tweed trousers, tail coats, and top hats, fresh from the colleges and the counting-houses of the Eastern States; there were grave, impassive Chinese, mandarins and millionaires, in silken robes and black skull-caps (with the little red button on top), with their wives and children also in silken vesture and orthodoxly shapeless; and then there were the coolies and sailors, Jap and Chinese, with a sprinkling of wicked-eyed Lascars and mild Hindoos. To finish the picture, on the Government wharf hard by a detachment of blue-clad, felt-hatted United States troops were lining up for embarkation on one of the transports bound for Manila. The good sea-wind did not seem quite so good when we got outside the Golden Gate, for there was a villainous sea running on the bar and through the narrow passage between the tail of the bar and the rock-bound coast, which is called the Main Ship Channel. In a bad sea this is one of the most ticklish pieces of navigation in the world. On the port side, as we went out, the breakers were piling themselves up into mountains of foam on the end of the bar a couple of hundred yards away. To starboard, another two or three hundred yards off, the big Pacific rollers were thundering along the base of the cliffs, flinging their spume and spindrift sky-high. The water in between was just what one would expect it to be, and so passenger after passenger, male and female, missionary and mercantile, disappeared from the deck. I afterwards learnt that there was much suffering below, and many of the victims did not reappear till we reached the smooth, sunlit waters which wash the shores of what the American tourist agencies, since the Annexation, have christened “the Paradise of the Pacific.” The Jap passengers collapsed first of all. When I had made the closer acquaintance of the _Nippon_ I found that her sailors and quartermasters and junior officers were Japs, while her stewards and barmen were Chinese. The captain and first officer were English, and the chief engineer, of course, a Scotchman. I have often wondered how many “Chiefs” on the Seven Seas are not Scotch. The _Nippon_, like most Japanese mail-boats, was cheap and gaudy. She gave evidence of her cheapness by bursting a steam-pipe just as she was fighting her way through the channel. It might have been serious, but it wasn’t, though it lengthened our passage by several hours, for the wasted steam, instead of getting into the cylinders, went roaring away in noisy impotence up to the cloudy sky which overhung the alleged Pacific Ocean.