Kaimiloa - Press ARTICLES
ADVENTURERS TO SEEK “LOST CONTINENT IN SOUTH SEAS’
THE BULLETIN, SAN FRANCISCO, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 11, 1924
I’ve never traveled for more’n a day,
I never was one to roam,
But I likes to sit on the busy quay,
Watchin’ the ships that says to me -
Always somebody goin’ away,
Somebody gettin’ home.
-------Bell
BY HERB WESTON
Sunset-bound for the South Seas to trace the “lost continent” of the Pacific, that legendary land chanted of in song and story for centuries around the native campfires of Polynesia, where ancient priests tell marvelous tales of the mountains that disappeared into the sea; the adventured-scarred old schooner Luzon, veteran of the tropic trade paths, will sail out of the Golden Gate Wednesday on a three-year scientific cruise.
HIS DREAM
It is the dream of M. R. Kellum, retired Florida millionaire, now in San Francisco. He is financing the expedition, and accompanying him will be his family and a group scientist from the Bishop Museum Foundation in Honolulu, authorities on South Sea life, the flora and fauna, the geological formations, oceanography zoology, and biology.
They will dig back of the strange tales, handed down from generation to generation that the tribal troubadours tell of the “ Noah-Noah land,” of the great chiefs that ruled them long before the western world began to record history.
NAME CHANGED
Even the name of the old four-master has been changed, from the Luzon to the Kaimiloa, which in Hawaiian, means “the far search.”
And a strangely transformed schooner she now is. For the past two months she has been at the Atlas wharf in the Oakland estuary being fitted with two 110-horsepower Diesel engines, with palatial staterooms, with scientific laboratories, and tons of equipment , with motion picture machines and with two machine guns and one small canon, between 30 and 35 rifles and shotguns and sidearms for every man, woman and child aboard. Adventure? They will just follow the sunset--to meet what comes.
CONCEIVED YEARS AGO
The trip was conceived several years ago by Kellum who moved from Florida to Honolulu. Originally it was intended for a pleasure cruise among the South Sea Islands. Savants at the Bishop Museum learned of it and asked permission to send one man along. The idea grew until now six experts, running the gamut of scientific subjects, will be picked up at Honolulu for the expedition.
Nothing has been overlooked. There will be two tutors--Joseph Shaw and L. B. Steck of the University of California, majors of chemistry, physics, and mathematics--to care for the education of Kellum’s sons and daughters on the trip. And he is taking all of them.
CARNEGIE NIECE
His wife, a niece of Andrew Carnegie, will accompany him. Then there are “Jim Kellum, 12, who thinks he “ought to have some fun,” and Pink, 3, and Miss Ida Kellum, 23, and Med Jr., 22, who looks upon it as a greatest adventure of my life.” Mr. and Mrs. Dale Miller, friends of the Kellums; Dr. C. E. Wells, ship’s physician, and a crew of eight under Captain A. E. Carter, veteran mariner of the Pacific will complete the party.
Like true adventurers, they leave for no particular point. “ We don’t know where we are going,” Kellum said today. “But we will be gone three years. There are provisions aboard now to last for one year.
We are carrying 18,000 gallons of fuel oil and the same quantity of water.
The arsenal is calculated to take care of any militaristic emergency.
The scientist will dig deep into the plant and animal life of the islands. They are going back thousands of years --seeking the most primitive tribes. From these they will attempt to trace the origin of the Polynesians, their language and their tribal migrations. They will sound the floor of the ocean and study the formation of the islands in an effort to prove a theory that these islands were once a part of the mainland: that they formed a “lost continent.” They are prepared to sit around the fire and listen to the ancient legends of the tribal chiefs of the great civilization that existed thousands— maybe million—of years ago; of the cities and the people.
LAUGH AT DANGER
They laugh at danger and death--these people. They are tired of the cities, and they seek just over the horizon, that which stirs human emotions.
John Joy Bell expressed it when he concluded:
An’ I love the ships more every day
Though I never was one to roam
Oh! The ships confortin’ sights to see
An’ they means a lot when they says to me
“Always somebody goin away,
Somebody gettin’ home.”