ATOLLS OF THE SUN
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[Illustration:
Photo from L. Gauthier
Nature’s mirror showed him why he could not leave
]
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ATOLLS
OF THE SUN
BY
FREDERICK O’BRIEN
Author of “MYSTIC ISLES OF THE SOUTH SEAS,” “WHITE SHADOWS
IN THE SOUTH SEAS,” etc.
WITH MANY
ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM
PAINTINGS, DRAWINGS AND PHOTOGRAPHS
[Illustration]
TORONTO
McCLELLAND & STEWART
1922
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright, 1922, by
THE CENTURY CO.
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
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To G——
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FOREWORD
“Atolls of the Sun” is a book of experiences, impressions, and dreams in
the strange and lonely islands of the South Seas. It does not aim to be
literal, or sequential, though everything in it is the result of my
wanderings in the far and mysterious recesses of the Pacific Ocean.
I am not a scientist or scholar, and can relate only what I saw and
heard, felt and imagined, in my dwelling with savage and singular races
among the wonderful lagoons of the coral atolls, and poignant valleys of
disregarded islands.
If I can make my reader see and feel the sad and beautiful guises of
life in them, and the secrets of a few unusual souls, I shall be
satisfied. The thrills of adventure upon the sea and in the shadowy
glens, the odors of rare and sweet flowers, the memories of lovable
humans, are here written to keep them alive in my heart, and to share
them with my friends.
Life is not real. It is an illusion, a screen upon which each one writes
the reactions upon himself of his sensory knowledge. The individual is
the moving camera, and what he calls life is his projection of the
panorama about him—not more actual than the figures and storms upon the
cinema screen. In this book I have put the film that passed through my
mind in wild places, and among natural people.
It is useless to look to find in the South Seas what I have found. It is
there, glowing and true, and yet, as each beholder conjures a different
vision of the human spectacle about him, each can see the islands of
romance only by the lens life has fitted upon his soul.
To seek a replica of experience or scenes is to spoil a possession.
If this book has interest, one may read and laugh, be entertained or
repelled with thanks that one can sit at ease, and watch this picture
made on another’s mind in long journeys and in many days and nights of
hazard and delight.
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
Leaving Tahiti—The sunset over 3
Moorea—Bound for the Paumotu
Atolls—The Schooner _Marara, Flying
Fish_—Captain Jean Moet and others
aboard—Sighting and Landing on Niau
CHAPTER II
Meeting with Tommy Eustace, the 23
trader—Strange soil of the atoll—A
bath in the lagoon—Momuni, the thirsty
bread baker—Off for Anaa
CHAPTER III
Perilous navigation—Curious green 40
sky—Arrival at Anaa—Religion and the
movies—Character of Paumotuans
CHAPTER IV
The copra market—Dangerous passage to 58
shore at Kaukura—Our boat overturns in
the pass—I narrowly escape
death—Josephite Missionaries—The
deadly nohu—The himene at night
CHAPTER V
Captain Moet tells of Mapuhi, the great 80
Paumotuan—Kopcke tells about
women—Virginie’s jealousy—An
affrighting waterspout—The wrecked
ship—Landing at Takaroa
CHAPTER VI
Diffidence of Takaroans—Hiram Mervin’s 96
description of the cyclone—Teamo’s
wonderful swim—Mormon missionaries
from America—I take a bath
CHAPTER VII
Breakfast with elders—The great Mapuhi 114
enters—He tells of San Francisco—Of
prizefighters and Police gazettes—I
reside with Nohea—Robber-crabs—The
cats that warred and caught fish
CHAPTER VIII
I meet a Seventh Day Adventist 135
missionary, and a descendant of a
mutineer of the Bounty—They tell me
the story of Pitcairn island—An epic
of isolation
CHAPTER IX
The fish in the lagoon and sea—Giant 157
clams and fish that poison—Hunting the
devilfish—Catching bonito—Snarling
turtles—Trepang and sea cucumbers—The
mammoth manta
CHAPTER X
Traders and divers assembling for the 175
diving—A story told by Llewellyn at
night—The mystery of Easter
Island—Strangest spot in the
world—Curious statues and
houses—Borrowed wives—Arrival of
English girl—Tragedy of the Meke Meke
festival
CHAPTER XI
Pearl hunting in the lagoon—Previous 211
methods wasteful—Mapuhi shows me the
wonders of the lagoon—Marvelous
stories of sharks—Woman who lost her
arm—Shark of Samoa—Deacon who rode a
shark a half-hour—Eels are terrible
menace
CHAPTER XII
History of the pearl hunger—Noted jewels 230
of past—I go with Nohea to the
diving—Beautiful floor of the
Lagoon—Nohea dives many times—Escapes
shark narrowly—Descends 148 feet—No
pearls reward us—Mandel tells of
culture pearls
CHAPTER XIII
Story of the wondrous pearls planted in 249
the lagoon of Pukapuka—Tepeva a
Tepeva, the crippled diver, tells
it—How a European scientist improved
on nature—Tragedy of Patasy and
Mauraii—The robbed coral bank—Death
under the sea
CHAPTER XIV
The palace of the governor of the 271
Marquesas in the vale of
Atuona—Monsieur L’Hermier des Plantes,
Ghost Girl, Miss Tail, and Song of the
Nightingale—_Tapus_ in the South
Seas—Strange conventions that regulate
life—A South Seas Pankhurst—How women
won their freedom
CHAPTER XV
The dismal abode of the 294
Peyrals—Stark-white daughter of
Peyral—Only white maiden in the
Marquesas—I hunt wild bulls—Peyral’s
friendliness—I visit his house—He
strikes me and threatens to kill me—I
go armed—Explanation of the bizarre
tragic comedy
CHAPTER XVI
In the valley of Vaitahu—With Vanquished 319
Often and Seventh Man He Is So Angry
He Wallows in the Mire—Worship of
beauty in the South Seas—Like the
ancient Greeks—Care of the
body—Preparations for a belle’s
début—Massage as a cure for ills
CHAPTER XVII
Skilled tattooers of Marquesas Islands a 336
generation ago—Entire bodies covered
with intricate tattooed designs—The
foreigner who had himself tattooed to
win the favor of a Marquesan
beauty—The magic that removed the
markings when he was recalled to his
former life in England
CHAPTER XVIII
A fantastic but dying language—The 364
Polynesian or Maori Tongue—Making of
the first lexicons—Words taken from
other languages—Decay of vocabularies
with decrease of population—Humors and
whimsicalities of the dictionary as
arranged by foreigners
CHAPTER XIX
Tragic Mademoiselle Narbonne—Whom shall 384
she marry?—Dinner at the home of
Wilhelm Lutz—The _Taua_, the
sorcerer—Lemoal says Narbonne is a
leper—I visit the _Taua_—The prophecy
CHAPTER XX
Holy Week—How the rum was saved during 414
the storm—An Easter Sunday
“Celebration”—The Governor,
Commissaire Bauda and I have a
discussion—Paul Vernier, the
Protestant Pastor, and his church—How
the girls of the Valley imperilled the
immortal souls of the first
missionaries—Jimmy Kekela, his
family—A watch from Abraham Lincoln
CHAPTER XXI
Paul Gauguin, the famous French-Peruvian 439
Artist—A Rebel against the society
that rejected him while he lived, and
now cherishes his paintings
CHAPTER XXII
Monsieur l’Inspecteur des Etablissements 460
Français de l’Océanie—How the school
house was inspected—I receive my
congé—The runaway pigs—Mademoiselle
Narbonne goes with Lutz to Papeete to
be married—Père Siméon, about whom
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote
CHAPTER XXIII
McHenry gets a caning—The fear of the 482
dead—A visit to the grave of Mapuhi—En
voyage
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Nature’s mirror showed him why _Frontispiece_
he could not leave
PAGE
Map 7
The atoll of Niau 16
The anchorage at Tahauku. Atuona lies 17
just around the first headland to the
right
A Paumotu atoll after a blow 32
A squall approaching Anaa 33
Picking up the atoll of Anaa from the 48
deck of the schooner _Flying Fish_
Canoes and cutters at atoll of Anaa, 49
Paumotu Islands
The road from the beach 64
An American Josephite missionary and his 65
wife, and their church
Typical and primitive native hut, 80
Paumotu Archipelago
Copra drying 81
Atoll of Hikuera after the cyclone 96
The wrecked _County of Roxburgh_ 97
Mormon elders baptizing in the lagoon 112
Over the reef in a canoe 113
Robber-crab ascending tree at night. One 128
of the few photographs taken of the
marauder in action
Where the _Bounty_ was beached and 129
burned
The church on Pitcairn Island 144
The shores of Pitcairn Island 145
Spearing fish 160
A canoe on the lagoon 161
Ready for the fishing 161
Spearing fish in the lagoon 176
The Captain and two sailors of the _El 177
Dorado_
Beach dancers at Tahiti 192
After the bath in the pool 193
Old cocoanut-trees 208
The dark valley of Taaoa 209
Launch towing canoes to diving grounds 224
in lagoon
Divers voyaging in Paumotu atolls 225
Ghost Girl 256
A double canoe 257
A young palm in Atuona 272
Atuona valley and the peak of Temetiu 273
Malicious Gossip, Le Brunnec, and his 304
wife, At Peace
Exploding Eggs and his chums packing 304
copra
Frederick O’Brien and Dr. Malcolm 305
Douglas at home in Tahiti
Some friends in my valley 320
Wash-day in the stream by my cabin 321
Te Ipu, an old Marquesan chief, showing 336
tattooing
The famous tattooed leg of Queen Vaikehu 337
Tattooing at the present day 352
Easter Islander in head-dress and with 353
dancing-wand
My tattooed Marquesan friend 353
The author with his friends at council 368
House of governor of Paumotu Islands. 369
Atoll of Fakarava
Nakohu, Exploding Eggs 384
Haabuani, the sole sculptor of Hiva-Oa 385
The coral road and the traders’ stores 416
Scene on beach a few miles west of 417
Papeete
Tahiatini, Many Daughters, the little 432
leper lass
François Grelet, the Swiss, of Oomoa 433
Brunneck, the boxer and diver 464
A village maid in Tahiti 465
A Samoan maiden of high caste 465
Throwing spears at a cocoanut on a stake 480
The raised-up atoll of Makatea 481
Paumotuans on a heap of brain coral 496
Did these two eat Chocolat? 496
The stonehenge men in the South Seas 497
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ATOLLS OF THE SUN
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ATOLLS OF THE SUN
CHAPTER I
Leaving Tahiti—The sunset over Moorea—Bound for the Paumotu Atolls—The
Schooner _Marara, Flying Fish_—Captain Jean Moet and others
aboard—Sighting and Landing on Niau.
_“NOUS partons!_ We air off—off!” shouted _Capitaine_ Moet, gaily, as
the _Marara_, the schooner _Flying Fish_, slipped through the narrow,
treacherous pass of the barrier-reef of Papeete Harbor. “_Mon ami_, you
weel by ’n’ by say dam Moet for take you to ze _Iles Dangereuses_. You
air goin’ to ze worse climate in ze _sacré mundo_. Eet ees hot and ze
win’ blow many time like ’urricane. An’ you nevaire wash, because ze
wataire ees salt _como_ se o-c-ean.”
We had waited for a wafting breeze all afternoon, the brown crew alert
to raise the anchor at every zephyr, but it was almost dark when we were
clear of the reef and, with all sails raised, fair on our voyage to the
mysterious atolls of the Paumotu Archipelago. Often I had planned that
pilgrimage in my long stay in Tahiti. At the Cercle Bougainville, the
business club, where the pearl and shell traders and the copra buyers
drank their rum and Doctor Funks, I had heard many stories of a nature
in these Paumotus strangely different of aspect from all other parts of
the world, of a native people who had amazing knowledge of the secrets
of the sea and its inhabitants, and of white dwellers altered by
residence there to a pattern very contrary from other whites. For scores
of years these traders and sailors or their forerunners had played all
the tricks of commerce on the Paumotuans, and they laughed reminiscently
over them; yet they hinted of demons there, of ghosts that soared and
whistled, and of dancers they had seen transfixed in the air. What was
true or untrue I had not known; nor had they, I believed.
Llewellyn, the Welsh-Tahitian gentleman, after four or five glasses of
_Pernoud_, would ask, “Do you know why the Paumotus are unearthly?” and
would answer in the same liquorish breath, “Because they haven’t any
earth about them. They’re all white bones.”
Woronick, the Parisian expert in pearls, referred often to the wonderful
jewel he had bought in Takaroa from a Paumotuan, and the fortune he had
made on it.
“That pearl was made by God and fish and man, and how it was grown and
Tepeva a Tepeva got it, is a something to learn; unique. It is bizarre,
_effrayant_. I will not recite it here, for you must go to Takaroa to
hear it.”
And Lying Bill and McHenry, in a score of vivid phrases, told of the
cyclones that had swept entire populations into the sea, felled the
trees of scores of years’ growth, and left the bare atoll as when first
it emerged from the depths.
“I knew a Dane who rode over Anaa on a tree like a bloody ’orse on the
turf,” said Lying Bill to me, with a frightening bang of his tumbler on
the table. “’E was caught by the top of a big wave, an’ away ’e drove
from one side of the bleedin’ island to the other, and come right side
up. A bit ’urt in the ’ead, ’e was, but able to take ’is bloomin’ oath
on what ’appened.”
I had not depended on these _raconteurs_ for a vicarious understanding
of the Paumotus; for I had read and noted all that I could find in books
and calendars about them, but yet I had felt that these unlettered
actors in the real dramas laid there gave me a valid picture. My hopes
were fixed in finding in spirit what they saw only materially.
Moet stood by the wheel until we cleared the waters where the lofty bulk
of the island confused the winds, and I, when the actions of the sailors
in shifting the sails with his repeated orders had lost newness, looked
with some anguish at that sweet land I was leaving. It had meant so much
to me.
A poetic mood only could paint the swiftly changing panorama as the
schooner on its seaward tacks moved slowly under the faint vesper
breeze; the mood of a diarist could tell how “the sun setting behind
Moorea in a brilliant saffron sky, splashed with small golden and
mauve-colored clouds, threw boldly forward in a clear-cut, opaque purple
mass that fantastically pinnacled island, near the summit of whose
highest peak there glittered, star-like, a speck of light—the sky seen
through a hole pierced in the mountain. How in the sea, smooth as a
mirror, within the reef, and here and there to seaward, blue ruffled by
a catspaw, away to the horizon was reflected the saffron hue from above;
how against purple Moorea a cocoa-crowned islet in the harbor appeared
olive-green—a gem set in the yellow water. How the sunlight left the
vivid green shore of palm-fringed Tahiti, and stole upward till only the
highest ridges and precipices were illuminated with strange pink and
violet tints springing straight from the mysterious depth of dark-blue
shadow. How from the loftiest crags there floated a long streamer
cloud—the cloud-banner of Tyndal. Then, as the sun sank lower and lower,
the saffron of the sky paled to the turquoise-blue of a brief tropical
twilight, the cloud-banner melted and vanished, and the whole color
deepened and went out in the sudden darkness of the night.”
If one must say farewell to Tahiti, let it be in the evening, in the
tender hues of the sunset, the effacing shadows of the sinking orb in
sympathy with the day’s tasks done; the screen of night being drawn amid
flaming, dying lights across a workaday world, the dream pictures of the
Supreme Artist appearing and fainting in the purpling heavens. I was
leaving people and scenes that had taught me a new path in life, or, at
least, had hung lamps to guide my feet in an appreciation of values
before unknown to me.
I came back to the deck of the schooner with Moet’s call for a
steersman, and his invitation to go below for food and drink. I refused
despite his “_Sapristi!_ Eef you no eat by ’n’ by you cannot drink!” and
when he disappeared down the companion-ladder I climbed to the roof of
the low cabin. The moon was now high—a plate of glowing gold in an
indigo ceiling. The swelling sea rocked the vessel and now and then
lifted her sharp prow out of the water and struck it a blow of
friendship as it rejoined it. I unrolled a straw mat, and, placing it
well aft so that the jibing boom would not touch me, lay upon my back,
and visioned the prodigious world I was seeking. The very names given by
discoverers were suggestive of extravagant adventure. The Half-drowned
Islands, the Low Archipelago, the Dangerous Isles, the Pernicious
Islands, were the titles of the early mariners. For three hundred years
the Paumotus had been dimly known on the charts as set in the most
perilous sea in all the round of the globe. I had read that they were
more hazardous than any other shores, as they were more singular in
form. They had excited the wonder of learned men and laymen by even the
scant depiction of their astounding appearance. For decades after the
eyes of a European glimpsed them they were thought by many bookish men
to be as fabulous as Atlantis or Micomicon; too chimerical to exist,
though witches then were a surety, and hell a burning reality.
I fell asleep, and as during the night the wind shifted and with it the
schooner veered, I had but a precarious hold upon the mat and was
several times stood on my feet in the narrow passageway. The dream
_jinn_ seized these shiftings and twistings, the shouts of the mate in
charge, the chants of the sailors at work, the whistle of the wind
through the cordage, and wove them into fantasies,—ecstasies or
nightmares,—and thus warded off my waking.
But the sun, roused from his slumber beneath the dip of the sphere,
could be put off with no fine frenzies. When even half above the dipping
horizon his beams opened my eyes as if a furnace door had been flung
wide, and I turned over to see my hard couch occupied by others. Beside
me was McHenry, next to him Moet, and furthest, the one white woman
aboard, the captain’s wife. We yawned in unison; and, with a quick,
accustomed movement, she dropped below. The day had begun on the
schooner.
The _Marara_ was once a French gunboat of these seas when cannons were
needed to prevent dishonor to the tricolor by failure to obey French
discipline, while France was making good colonists or corpses of all
peoples hereabout. She was the very pattern of the rakish craft in which
the blackbirders and pirates sailed this ocean for generations—built for
speed, for entering threatening passes, for stealing silently away under
giant sweeps, and for handling by a small number of strong and fearless
men. The bitts on the poop were still marked by the gun emplacements,
and the rail about the stern was but two feet high.
Now her owners were a company of Tahiti Europeans who, trusting largely
to the seamanship and business shrewdness of her master, despatched her
every few weeks or months on voyages about the French islands within a
thousand miles or so to sell the natives all they would buy, and to get
from them at the least cost the copra, shells, and pearls which were
virtually the sole products of these islands.
[Illustration:
TUAMOTU ARCHIPELAGO
(PACIFIC OCEAN)
click on map for a larger view
]
The cabin was one room, stuffy and hot, and malodorous of decades of
cargo. A small table in the center for dining was alone free from
shelves and boxes holding merchandise, which was displayed as in a
country store. Besides all kinds of articles salable to a primitive
people, there were foods in barrels, boxes, tins, and glass, for whites
and for educated native palates.
Jean Moet, the commander of the _Marara_, was of the type of French
sailor encountered in the Mediterranean, and especially about Marseilles
and Spanish ports. He had a slight person, with hair and moustache black
as the stones of Papenoo beach—nervous, excitable, moving incessantly,
gesturing with every word. Twenty-eight of his forty years had been
passed in ships. He had visited the _Ile du Diable_, and had seen
Dreyfus there; he chattered of New York, Senegal, Yokohama, Cayenne, was
full of French ocean oaths, breaking into English or Spanish to
enlighten me or press a point, singing a Parisian music-hall
_chansonette_, or a Spanish _cancioncita_. His language was a curious
hodge-podge bespeaking the wanderings of the man and his intensely
mercurial temperament.
His wife, who sailed with him on all voyages since their marriage five
years before, was his opposite—large-boned and heavy, like a Millet
peasant, looking at her brilliant husband as a wistful cow at her
master, but not fearing to caution him against extravagance in stimulant
or money. Her life had begun in Tahiti, and she had always been there
until the dashing son of the _Midi_ had lifted her from the house of her
father—a petty official—to the deck of the _Flying Fish_. She was a
housekeeper and accountant.
She paid especial attention to the shelves of pain-killers, cough cures,
perunas, bitters and medical discoveries from America, which, in islands
where all alcoholic liquors were forbidden to the aborigines, sold
readily to all who sickened for them. Moet was affectionate but stern
toward Virginie, the wife, and talked to her as does a kind but wise
master to a trained seal.
For breakfast, the captain, Madame Moet, McHenry, and I had canned
sardines, canned hash from Chicago, California olives, canned pineapple
from Hawaii, and red wine from Bordeaux.
Virginie explained in Tahitian French that Jean had forgotten to get
aboard stores of fresh food. He had been at the Cercle Bougainville
until we had gone aboard, she said caustically. Jean put his arm about
her fat waist.
“_Mais_, dar-leeng,” he said, soothingly, “_tais-toi!_” And then to me,
“We are _camarades, ma femme y mi, compañeros buenos_. Ma wife she wash
ze _linge_. That good, eh? _Amerique_ ze woman got boss hand now.
_Diable! C’est_ rottan! _Hombre_, ze wife ees for ze _cuisine_, and ze
babee.”
He pressed her middle, and advised her to clear up the table while we
went on deck for a smoke.
He became confidential with me after a _pousse café_ or two.
“We _faire_ ze _chose économique_, Virginie _y mi_,” he said. “Maybee
som’ day we weesh _avoir_ leetle farm _en France. En vérité, mon ami_, I
forget ze vegetable an’ ze meat because I beat McHenry at _écarté_ in ze
Cercle Bougainville, jus’ _avant_ we go ’way from Papeete. I nevaire
play ze _carte_ on ze schoonaire! _Jamais de la vie!_”
The captain had aboard a brown pup, a mongrel he had found in the
Marquesas Islands. He had named him Chocolat, and passed hours each day
in teaching him tricks—to lie down and sit up at command, to stand and
to bark. The dog liked to run over the roof of the cabin and to crouch
upon the low rail at the stern. As any roll or pitch of the vessel might
toss him into the ocean, I feared for his longevity, but
Chocolat—pronounced by Moet “Shockolah”—was able to fall inboard
whenever the motion jeopardized his safety.
“_Eh, petit chien_,” Jean Moet would cry, when Chocolat skated down the
inclined deck into the scuppers, or hung for a moment indecisively on
the rail, “you by ’n’ by goin’-a be eat by ze _requin_. Ze big shark
getta you, _perrillo_, an’ you forget all my teach you, _mi querido_!”
He whipped Chocolat many times a day, when the puppy let down from
“attention” before told, or when he attacked his food before a certain
whistled note.
“What will you do with him when his education is complete?” I asked
Moet.
“When he ees educate, _hein_? He will be like ze saircuss animal. One
year old, maybe, he make turnover, fight ze _boxe_, drink wine, an’,
_puedeser_, he talk leetle. Zen I sell heem some tourist, some crazee
_Americain_ who zink he do for heem like me. I sharge five hunder
franc.”
McHenry, who kicked Chocolat whenever he had an opportunity unseen,
ridiculed Moet’s dream of gain.
“You will like hell!” said McHenry. “When you’ve got the dirty little
bastard sayin’, ‘Good mornin’, ‘nice an’ proper, he’ll sneak ashore in
some boat-load o’ truck, an’ some Paumotuan ’ll hotpot him. Wait till
he’s fat! You know what they’ll do for fresh meat.”
“_Non, non!_” answered the captain, angrily. “I am not afraid of zat. I
teach heem I keel heem he go in boat, but maybe you take heem an’ sell
heem on ze quiet, McHenry.”
The small, cold eyes of McHenry gleamed, and a queer smile twisted his
mouth.
“Well, keep him from under my feet!” he warned, and laughed at some
thought now fully formed in his mind. I could see it squirming in his
small brain.
McHenry was as rollicking a rascal as I knew in all the South Seas. He
was bitter and yet had a flavor of real humor at odd times. Without
schooling except that of a wharf-rat in Liverpool, New York, and San
Francisco, he had come into these latitudes twenty years before. Cunning
yet drunken, cruel but now and again doing a kindness out of sheer
animal spirits or a desire to show off, he had many enemies, and yet he
had a few friends. When the itching for money or the desire to feel
power over those about him urged him, as most of the time, he proved
himself the ripest and rottenest product of his early and present
environment. He had had desperate fights to keep from being a decaying
beachcomber, a parasite without the law; but a certain Scotch caution, a
love of making and amassing profits, and, as I learned later, a firm and
towering native wife, had kept him at least out of jail and in the
groove of trading.
Boasting was his chief weakness. He would go far to find the chance to
ease his latent sense of inferiority to an audience that did not know
fully his poverty of character and attainment. After years of ups and
downs he had now quarreled with his recent employers, and was going to
pitch his trade tent on some Paumotu atoll where copra and pearl-shell
might be found. He thought that he might stay a while in Takaroa, one of
our ports, because the diving season was about to open there. He and I
being the only ones whose language was English, we were much together,
but I always half despised myself for not speaking my mind to him.
Still, those lonely places make a man compromise as much as do cities.
What one might fear most would be having no one to talk with.
We lived on deck, all four of us, the Moets, McHenry, and I, along with
a half-caste mate, sleeping always on the roof of the cabin, and taking
our meals off it, except in rain. In that moist case we bundled on the
floor of the cabin. There was no ceremony. The cook brought the food
through the cabin, and we handed up and down the dishes through the
after scuttle, helping ourselves at will to the wine and rum which were
in clay bottles on the roof. McHenry and I were the only passengers, and
the crew of six Tahitians was ample for all tasks. They were Piri a
Tuahine, the boat-steerer; Peretia a Huitofa, Moe a Nahe, Roometua a
Terehe, Piha a Teina, and Huahine, with Tamataura, the cook.
The whole forward deck of the schooner was crowded with native men,
women, and children, the families of church leaders who were returning
to their Paumotu homes after attending a religious festival in Tahiti.
They lay huddled at night, sleeping silently in the moonlight and under
the stars. All day, and until eight or nine o’clock, they conversed and
ate, and worked with their hands, plaiting hats of _pandanus_,
sugar-cane, bamboo, and other materials. White laborers massed in such
discomfort would have quarreled, squabbled for place, and eased their
annoyance in loud words, but the Polynesian, of all races, loves his
fellow and keeps his temper.
These were the first Paumotuan people I had seen intimately, and I
listened to them and asked them questions. A deacon who at night removed
a black coat and slept in a white-flowered blue loin-cloth, the _pareu_
of all the Polynesians, gazed at the heavens for hours. He knew many of
the stars.
“Our old people,” he said, “believed that the gods were always making
new worlds in distant sky places beyond the Milky Way, the
_Maoroaheita_. When a new world was made by the strong hands of the
gods, the _Atua_, it went like a great bird to the place fixed for it.
That star, _Rehua_,”—he pointed toward Sirius “was first placed by the
_Atua_ near the _Tauha_, the Southern Cross, but afterwards they changed
it, and sent it to where it is now.”
I looked at the glowing cross, and remembered the emotion its first
sight had stirred in me. I was tossing on the royal yard of a bark bound
for Brazil, up a hundred feet and more from deck, when, raising my head
from the sail I had made fast, there burst upon me the wonderful form
and brilliance of the constellation which five thousand years ago
entranced the Old World but which is hidden from it now.
The deacon again raised his hand and indicated the spot where _Rehua_
had shone before the divine mind had changed. It was the Coal-sack, the
black vacancy in the Magellan Clouds, so conspicuous below the cross
when all the rest of the sky is cloudless and clear. The Maori mind had
wisely settled upon that vast space in the stellar system in which not
even an atom of stellar dust sheds a single flicker of luminosity as the
point from which the gods had plucked _Rehua_. I had no such lucid
reason for this amazing, celestial void as the half-naked deacon on the
deck of the _Marara_.
We had a poor wind for two days, and I looked long hours in the water,
so close to the deck, at the manifestations of organic and vegetable
vitality. All life of the ocean, I knew, depended ultimately on minute
plants. The great fish and mammals fed on plant forms which were
distributed throughout the seas. These grew in the waters themselves or
were cast into them along their shores or by the thousands of rivers
which eventually feed the ocean. The flora of all the earth, seeds,
nuts, beans, leaves, kernels, swam or sank in the majority element, and
aided in the nourishment of the creatures there. They had, also, taken
root on shores foreign to their birth, and had, from immigrants, become
esteemed natives of many lands. They had increased man’s knowledge, too,
as the sea-beans found on the shores of Scotland led to the discovery of
that puzzle of all currents, the Gulf Stream. After all was said, the
land was insignificant compared to the water—little more than a fourth
of the surface of the globe, and in mass as puny. The average elevation
of the land was less than a fifth of a mile, while the average depth of
the sea was two miles, or thirty times the mass of the land. If the
solid earth were smoothed down to a level, it would be entirely covered
a mile deep by the water. I felt very close to the sea, and fearful of
its might. I envied the natives their assurance, or, at least,
stolidity.
The days were intensely hot. When the sails were furled or flapped idly,
and the _Marara_ lay almost still, listening for even a whisper of wind,
I suffered keenly. The second noon our common exasperation broke out in
the inflammable Moet.
The captain shouted to Huahine, a sailor, to cover his head with a hat.
The man was a giant, weighing more than two hundred and fifty pounds,
but Moet addressed him as he would a child.
“_Sapristi!_” he yelled, _“Taupoo! Maamaa!_ Your hat, you fool!”
“_Diablo! amigo_,” he said, testily. “Zose nateev air babee. I have ze
men paralyze by ze sun in ze Marqueses. In ze _viento_, when ze win’
blow, no dan-gair, but when no blow—_sacré!_ ze sun melts ze brain
off-off.”
Captain Moet was dramatic. Whatever he said he acted with face, hands
and arms, feet, and even his whole body. He made a gesture that caused
me to touch my own hat, to consider its resistance to the sun, to feel
an anticipation of harm. Suddenly he took the arm of the sailor at the
wheel, Piha a Teina, a Tahitian, and, releasing the spokes from his
hands, himself began to steer.
“Go there in the lee of the mainsail,” he said in Tahitian, “and tell
the American about your terrible adventure when you almost died of
thirst!”
“Look at him!” said Moet to me. “He is old before his time. The sun did
that.”
[Illustration:
Photo from L. Gauthier
The atoll of Niau
]
Piha a Teina stood beside me, shy, slow to begin his epic. He was
shriveled and withered, pitifully marked by some experience unusual even
to these Maori masters of this sea. I gave him a cigarette, and,
lighting it, he began;
“I am Piha a Teina,” he said. “I was living in the island of Marutea in
the Paumotus when this thing happened. I set out one day in a cutter for
Manga Reva. That island was seven hundred miles away, and we were sent,
Pere Ani, my friend, and I, to bring back copra. The cutter was small,
not so large as a ship’s boat. We had food for eight or nine days, and
as the wind was as we wanted it, blowing steadily toward Manga Reva, we
felt sure we would arrive there in that time. But we lost the stars.
They would not show themselves, and soon we did not know which way to
steer. This schooner has a compass, but we could not tell the direction
by the sun as we had not the _aveia_. We became uneasy and then afraid.
Still we kept on by guess and hope, believing the wind could not have
changed its mind since we started. On the tenth day we ate the last bite
of our food. We had not stinted ourselves until the eighth day, and then
we felt sure the next day or the next would bring the land.
[Illustration:
The anchorage at Tahauku. Atuona lies just around the first headland
to the right
]
“But on the eleventh day we saw nothing but the sea. I had a pearl hook
and with it we caught _bonito_. We ate them raw. They made us thirsty,
and we drank all our water. It did not rain for many days, and we drank
the salt water. When it rained we had nothing in which to catch and keep
the fresh water. We could only suck the wet sail which we had taken down
because we had become too weak to handle it if the gale had caught us
with it up. We drifted and drifted with the current. The sun beat upon
us and we were burned like the breadfruit in the oven. I could not touch
my breast in the daytime it was so hot. The time went on as slowly as
the cocoanut-tree grows from the nut we plant. We left in the month you
call October. Days and nights we floated without using the tiller except
to keep the cutter before the wind when it blew hard. We had been asleep
maybe a day or two when a storm came. We did not wake up, but it cast us
on the island of Rapa-iti. Pere Ani never woke up, but I am here. The
sun killed him.”
“How long were you in the cutter?” I asked.
Moet heard my question and replied:
“_Mais_, zey lef’ Marutea in _octobre_, an’ ze Zelee, the Franche
war-sheep, fin’ zem on Rapa-iti in Januaire. Zey was—_yo no se_—more zan
seexty day in ze boat.”
Piha a Teina expressed neither gladness nor sorrow that he had escaped
the fate of Pere Ani. He knew, as his race, that fate was inexorable,
and he contemplated life as the gift of a powerful force that could not
be argued with nor threatened by prayers, though, to be in the mode, he
might make such supplications.
“If I had had such a _hohoa moana_, a chart of the sea, as we formerly
made of sticks,” he said, “I could have found Manga Reva without the
stars. We made them of straight and curved pieces of wood or bamboo, and
we marked islands on them with shells. They showed the currents from the
four quarters of the sea, and with them we made journeys of thousands of
miles to the Marquesas and to Hawaii and Samoa. But we have forgotten
how to make them, and I know nothing of the paper charts the white man
has, but I can read the _aveia_, the compass of the schooner. We did not
take our _hooa_ in our canoes, but studied them at home.”
The captain whistled, caught my eye, touched his forehead to signify
Piha a Teina was wandering mentally, and summoned the sailor to take the
wheel.
“He ees _maamaa_ evvair since zat leetle voyage,” he said, sagely.
On the morning of the fourth day from Papeete the first of the eighty
Paumotu atolls raised a delicate green fringe of trees four or five
miles away. It lay so low that from the deck of the schooner it could
not be seen even on the clearest days at a greater distance. One heard
the surf before the island appeared. It was only a few feet above the
plane of the sea, flat, with no hill or eminence upon it, a leaf upon
the surface of a pond. I could hardly believe it part of the familiar
globe. It was more like the fairy-island of childhood, the coral strand
of youth, the lotus land of poesy. It was, in reality, the most
beautiful, fascinating, inconceivable sight upon the ocean.
McHenry and I stood with Chocolat and watched the slow rise of the atoll
of Niau, as the _Marara_, under lessened sail and with Captain Moet at
the helm, cautiously approached the land. We crept up to it, as one
might to a trap in which one hoped to snare a hare but feared to find a
wolf. All hands stood by for orders. Though the sky was azure and the
sun broiling, one never knew in the Pernicious Islands when the
unforeseen might happen.
Seven miles long and five wide, Niau was a matchless bracelet of ivory
and jade. Grieg Island, some Anglo-Saxon discoverer once named it, but
Grieg had fame abroad only. None spoke his name as we advanced warily
over the road, familiar to them all as the Sulu Sea to me. The cargo for
Niau came through the hatches, thrown up from the hold, sailor to
sailor, and was piled on deck until all was checked. Madame Moet was on
the poop by the after door of the cabin, hanging over each item and
marking it off upon her inventory, while Jean hummed the “Carmagnole,”
and swung the _Flying Fish_ about on short tacks for her goal. Between
the shifting of the canvas the long-boat was lowered, and the goods
heaped in it: boxes and barrels, bales and buckets, edibles and
clothing, matches and tobacco, gimcracks and patent medicines.
As closer we went, I saw that Niau was a perfect oval, composed of a
number of separate islets or _motus_. These formed the land on which
were the trees and shrubs and the people, but this oval itself was
inclosed by a hidden reef, several hundred feet wide, on which the
breakers crashed and spilled in a flood of foaming billows.
There was no enthusiasm over the beauty of Niau except in my heaving
breast, and I concealed it as I would free thinking in a monastery. To
McHenry and Jean and Virginia, a lovely atoll was but a speck upon the
ocean on which to cozen inferior creatures.
“_Madre de Dios!_” vociferated the skipper, when, a mile from the
gleaming teeth of the reef, he brought the _Marara_ up into the wind and
halted her like a panting mare thrown upon her haunches. “Mc’onree et
M’sieu’ O’Breeon, eef you go ’shore, tomble een, _pronto_!”
He released the wheel to the mate, and we three scrambled over the rail
and jumped upon the cargo as the boat rose on a wave, joining the four
Tahitians who were at the heavy oars, with Piri a Tuahine at the stern,
holding a long sweep for a rudder. It was attached by a bight of rope,
and by a longer rope kept from floating away in case of mishap.
Now came as delicate a bit of action with sails as a yachtsman, with his
mother-in-law as a guest, might recklessly essay. Captain Moet sang out
from his perch on a barrel to the half-caste at the wheel to go ahead,
and the _Flying Fish_, which for a few minutes had been trembling in
leash, turned on her heel and headed directly for the streak of foam,
the roar of which drowned our voices at that distance.
Eight hundred feet away, when it must have looked to a landsman on the
schooner that she was almost in the breakers, we cast off the line and
took to our oars. It was nice seamanship to save time by minimizing
rowing, but certainly not in Lloyd’s rules of safety. Those who reckon
dangers do not laugh in these parts. A merry rashness helps ease of
mind.
In five minutes our boat was in the surf, rolling and tumbling, and I on
my merchandise peak clasped a bale fervently, though McHenry and Moet
appeared glued to barrels which they rode jauntily. It was now I saw the
art of the Polynesians, the ablest breaker boatmen in the world.
All about seemed to me solid coral rock or distorted masses of limestone
covering and uncovering with the surging water, but suddenly there came
into my altering view, as the steersman headed toward it, a strange pit
in the unyielding strata. Into this maelstrom the water rushed
furiously, drawn in and sucked out with each roll of the ocean. The
Tahitians, at a word, stopped rowing, while Piri a Tuahine scrutinized
intently the onrushing waves. He judged the speed and force of each as
it neared him, and on his accuracy of eye and mind depended our lives.
The oarsmen tugged with their blades to hold the boat against the
sweeping tide, and abruptly, with a wild shout, Piri a Tuahine set them
to pulling like mad, while he with his long oar both steered and
sculled.
“_Tamau te paina!_” all yelled amid the boom of the surf.
“Hold on to the wood!” and down into the pit we tore; down and in, the
boat raced through the vortex of the chute, the pilot avoiding narrowly
the coffin-like sides of the menacing depression, and the sailors, with
their oars aloft for the few dread seconds, awaiting with joyous shouts
the emergence into the shallows. All was in the strong hands and steady
nerves of Piri a Tuahine. A miscalculated swerve of his sturdy lever,
and we would have been smashed like egg-shells, boat and bodies, against
the massive sides. But spirit and wood were stedfast, and I rode as high
and dry from the imminent Scylla as if on a camel in the Sahara.
In a few twinklings of an eye we were past the reef, and in the moat in
fast shoaling, quiet water, studded with hummocks and heaps of coral.
The sailors leaped into it shoulder-deep, and guided and forced the boat
as far shoreward as possible, to curtail the cargo-carrying distance.
Captain Moet, McHenry, and I went up to our waists, and reached the
beach.
------------------------------------------------------------------------