One asks how, sitting
as they do, they are able to brace themselves, and how with their
forked paddles they obtained sufficient resistance. A coaster's
explanation of the split paddle was that the boys did not want any
more resistance than they could prevent.
[Illustration: The Kroo Boys Sit, Not On the Thwarts, but On the
Gunwales, as a Woman Rides a Side Saddle.]
There is no more royal manner of progress than when one of these
boats lifts you over the waves, with the boys chanting some wild
chorus, with their bare bodies glistening, their teeth and eyes
shining, the splendid muscles straining, and the dripping paddles
flashing like twelve mirrors.
Some of the chiefs have canoes of as much as sixty men-power,
and when these men sing, and their bodies and voices are in
unison, a war canoe seems the only means of locomotion, and a
sixty-horse-power racing car becomes a vehicle suited only to the
newly rich.
I knew I had left the West Coast when, the very night we sailed from
Sierra Leone, for greater comfort, I reached for a linen bed-spread
that during four stifling, reeking weeks had lain undisturbed at the
foot of the berth. During that time I had hated it as a monstrous
thing; as something as hot and heavy as a red flannel blanket, as a
buffalo robe. And when, on the following night, I found the
wind-screen was not in the air port, and that, nevertheless, I still
was alive, I knew we had passed out of reach of the Equator, and
that all that followed would be as conventional as the "trippers"
who joined us at the Canary Isles; and as familiar as the low, gray
skies, the green, rain-soaked hills, and the complaining Channel
gulls that convoyed us into Plymouth Harbor.
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