RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
of making bead embroidered clothing. So beautiful and so unusual are these garments that the ladies in the party, forgetting everything else, made a grand rush to purchase some of them from the various tribesmen. Our eagerness, indeed, had finally to be restrained in order that attention might be given to the efforts of the Commission to enlighten the people as to our mission, but having patiently awaited the termination of business we returned to our search for the bead-work, only to find that the finer specimens could not by any process of cajolery be secured. Money meant nothing to the hillmen and we had no substitutes in the way of gewgaws to offer them. The only one of us who succeeded in getting a really good suit was Miss Anne Ide, and her success was the result of a curious incident. She met a chieftain gorgeously arrayed, and at a venture tried upon him the Samoan greeting and a Samoan song which she had learned in her childhood when her father was Chief Justice of the Samoan Islands. To her great surprise the Bogobo answered and seemed greatly pleased. He had already had conveyed to him the fact that the only thing the ladies wanted was bead clothing, so he indicated to Miss Ide that he would present to her his coat and pants, and without further ado, and much to her astonishment, he began to divest himself of these garments which she accepted with delight. The incident awakened natural curiosity on our part as to the relation between the Polynesian language of Samoa and the vernacular of the hill tribes around the Davao gulf.
From Davao we proceeded on our journey around Mindanao, sailing out into the open Pacific and up to the province of Surigao in the northeast corner of the island.
The town of Surigao lies six miles up a swamp-bound, sluggish river and we experienced, as we so often did in the whole course of the trip, a sense of being in uncharted and therefore dangerous waters. We embarked in a launch
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