Most of the transportation of the southern islands is accomplished by such boats as the _Victoria_. I can remember well the nights spent on the launch _Da-ling-ding_, an impossible, absurd craft, that rolled from side to side in the most gentle sea. She would start out courageously to cross the bay along the strip of Moro coast in Northern Mindanao; but the throbbing of her engines growing weaker and weaker, she would presently turn back faint-hearted, unable to make headway, at the mercy of a sudden storm, and with the possibility of being swept up on a hostile shore among bloodthirsty and unreasonable Moros. Another time, and we were caught in a typhoon off the north coast. We thought, of course, our little ship was stanch, until we asked the captain his opinion. "If the engines hold out," he replied, "we may come through all right. The engineer says that the old machine will probably blow up now any time, and that the Filipinos have quit working and begun their prayers." Generally a Filipino is the first to give up in a crisis; but I have seen some that managed their canoes in a rough sea with as much skill and coolness as an expert yachtsman could have shown. I have to thank Madroño for the way in which he handled the small boat that put out in a sea like glass and ran into a squall fifteen miles out. All through the morning we had poled along over the crust of coral bottom, where, in the transparent water, indigo fishes swam, where purple starfish sprawled among the coral--coral of many colors and in many forms. But as the wind came up and lashed the choppy sea to whitecaps, as the huge waves swept along and seemed about to knock the little _banca_ "off her feet," Madroño, standing on the bamboo outrigger--a framework lashed together with the native cane, the breaking of which would have immediately upset the boat--kept her bow pointed for the shore, although a counter storm threatened to blow us out to the deep sea. So, after knocking around in _bancas_, picnicking with natives on the chicken-bone and boiled rice; after a wild cruise in the _Thomas_, where the captain and the crew, as drunk as lords, let the old rotten vessel drift, while threatening with a gun the man that dared to meddle with the steering gear; after a dreary six months in a provincial town,--it seemed like coming into a new world to step aboard the clean white transport, with electric-lights and an upholstered smoking-room.