Meeting with Tommy Eustace, the trader—Strange soil of the atoll—A bath
in the lagoon—Momuni, the thirsty bread baker—Off for Anaa.
THE crusader who entered Jerusalem had no deeper feeling of realization
of a long-cherished hope than I when my foot imprinted its mold in the
glistening sand of the atoll of Niau. I stood in my track and scanned
it, as _Crusoe_ the first human mark other than his own he saw on his
lonely island. Not with his dismay, but yet with a slight panic, a
pleasant but alarmed perturbation, an awe at the wonder of the scene.
The moment had the tenseness of that when I saw my first cocoanut-palm;
it mingled a fear that I had passed one of the great climacterics of
visual emotion.
Here was I in the arcanum of romance, the promised land of chimera,
after years of faint expectation. I was almost stunned by the reality,
and I felt sensibly the need of some one to share the pathos that
oppressed me. I did not forsake my love for Tahiti. That was fixed, but
this atoll was not the same. Tahiti was an adored mistress, this a light
o’ love, a dazzling, alien siren, with whom one could not rest in
safety; a fanciful abode for a brief period, as incomparable to Tahiti
as an ice-field to a garden.
“What the bloody hell’s eatin’ on you?” exclaimed the irked McHenry,
questioningly as he glared at me. “Aren’t your feet mates? Let’s see
Tommy Eustace! He might have a bottle o’ beer buried in a cool place.”
Moet was shaking the salt water from his long, inky hair. He had
stumbled and dipped his head in the brine.
“_’Sus-Maria!_” he swore. “Virginie she say Jean been drink.”
A shed-like building of rough boards, with unpainted corrugated iron
roof, was a hundred steps from the water, the store and warehouse of the
single trader, who supplied the wants and ambitions of the hundred
inhabitants of Niau and endeavored to monopolize a meager output of
copra and pearl-shell. It was on a rude road, which stretched along the
beach, edged by a dozen houses, small, wooden huts, or thatched straw
shanties, much more primitive and poor than in Tahiti. All the remainder
of Niau was coral, water, and cocoanut-trees, except a scanty
vegetation.
Thomas Eustace, the trader, or Tomé, as the natives called him, was in
the doorway of his establishment, awaiting the sailors who had begun at
once to carry the _Marara’s_ freight from the boat through the moat. A
quarter of a century ago, a broth of a boy from Ireland, he had stepped
off a ship alongside the Papeete quay, and had never left the South Seas
since.
“_Faix_, I had the divil’s own toime to shtay,” say Tomé, as we four sat
by an empty barrel head and drank the warmish beer he had offered us
with instant hospitality.
“I waz that atthracted by the purty gir-ruls, the threes, and the
foine-shmellin’ flowers that the ould man of the ship nivir could dhraw
me back to the pots an’ pans iv the galley. I waz the flunky in the
kitchin iv a wind-jammin’ Sassenach bark, peelin’ praties, an’ waitin’
on sailormin. The father iv a darlin’ hid me out be Fautaua falls, an’
the _jondarmy_ hunted an’ hunted, wid nothin’ for their thrubble.”
A stoutish, quizzical man was Tomé, with brown face and throat and
hands, a stubby, chewed mustache and sleepy, laughing eyes. By the
purling steam of Fautaua, where Loti had lived his idyl with Rarahu and
I had walked with a princess, Thomas Eustace became Tomé forever and
ever. He was well satisfied to be bashaw of an atoll, unused to greater
comfort as he was, and enamored of reef and palm, and the lazy,
unstandardized life of the South Seas.
“Ye may picther me,” he went on, as he poured the beer, “jumpin’ out iv
the p’isonous galley iv that wind-jammin’ man-killer, an’ fallin’, be
the grace iv God, into a grove iv cocoanuts, wid roas’ pig, breadfruit,
and oranges fur breakfus, _deejunee_, an’ dinner, to whistle low about a
brown fairy that swung on the same branch wid me! The Emerald Isle the
divil! ‘Tis Tahiti’s the Tir-na’n-Og! This beats the bogs an’ the peat
an’ the stirabout, wid no peeler to move you on, an’ no _soggarth_ to
tell ye ye’re a sinner!”
Tomé was ten years in Penrhyn, the noted pearl island belonging to New
Zealand, and known as Tongareva. Lying Bill, McHenry, and Eustace were
fellow-traders in that lonely spot. “Fellow” in such relations meant the
affectionate intercourse of wolves who united to chase the sheep and
quarrel over the carcass. McHenry and Tomé had greeted each other with
cold familiarity, each knowing the other through and through, wondering
how the other would beat him, and yet not averse to an exchange of trade
news and the gossip of Tahiti and the Group, as they called the
Paumotus.
“How’s old Lovaina?” asked Tomé.
“Chargin’ as much as ever for her cheap scoffin’s,” replied McHenry, who
had never eaten a better meal than that served at the Tiaré Hotel.
Eustace, I doubted not, was a square and genial man, but among his
business kind he had to fight bludgeon with bludgeon. He opened a fresh
cocoanut and diverted the mouth of an infant from its natural fount to
make it swallow a few drops. The mother, a handsome, young woman, proud
of her armful, gestured smilingly that Tomé was its father.
“_Mavourneen dheelish!_” he called her, and the baby, “Molly.”
Cocoanuts differ in kind and quality as much as apples, and Eustace gave
me a _kaipoa_, which at his direction I ate, husks and all, and found it
delicious.
Leaving the two merchants to continue their armed banter, I stepped
outside the store and struck off the road toward the center of the
island, through fields of broken coral, mysterious in its oppositeness
from all other terrestrial formations. There was no earth that one could
see or feel, but a matted vegetation in spots showed that even in these
whited sepulchers of the coral animals outlandish plants had found the
substance of life. The flora, though desperate in its poverty, was
heartening in that it could survive at all. The lofty cocoanut-palm,
standing straight as a mast or curving in singular grace, grew
luxuriantly—the evergreen banner of this giant fleet of anchored ships
of stone. Through a few hundred yards of this weird desert-jungle, I
reached the lagoon which the inner marge of the great coral reef
inclosed.
No lake that I have seen approached this mere in simple beauty, nor had
artist’s vision wrought a more startling, extravagant, yet perfect work
of color. The lagoon of Niau was small enough to encompass with a glance
from where I stood. I felt myself in an enchanted spot. Niau was not all
wooded. For long stretches only the white coral lined the shores, with
here and there the plumy palms refreshing the eyes—brilliant in contrast
with the bare sheen of the coral, and softly rustling in the breeze.
The water of the lagoon was palest blue, verging to green, clear almost
as the pure air, and the beach shelved rapidly into depths.
The beach was made up of tiny shells crumbling into sand, billions and
billions of them in the twenty miles about the lagoon. In each of the
legion coral isles this was repeated, so that the mind contemplating
them was confused at the incalculable prodigality of the life expended
to build them and the oddity of the problem arranged by the power
planning them.
“Every single atom, from the least particle to the largest fragment of
rock, in this great pile,” said Darwin, “bears the stamp of having been
subjected to organized arrangement. We feel surprised when travelers
tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins,
but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these when compared to
these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and
tender animals. This is a wonder which does not at first strike the eye
of the body, but, after reflection, the eye of reason.”
I sat down under a dwarf cocoanut and let my eyes and mind dwell upon
the gorgeousness of the prospect and the insight into nature’s
reticences it afforded. Everywhere were the tombs or skeletons of the
myriad creatures who had labored and died to construct these footstools
of Might. Could man assume that these eons of years and countless
births, efforts, and deaths, were for any concern of his? But else, he
asked, why were they? To show the boundless power and caprice of the
Creator? Was not the world made for humanity?
An atoll was to an island as a comet to a star—a freak or sport in the
garden of the sea-gods. It was as if the Designer had planned to set up,
in the thousand miles of ocean through which the Dangerous Islands
stretched, a whimsical cluster of shallower salt lakes, and so had
hidden trillions of tiny beings to inclose them. For, after all, an
atoll was but a lagoon surrounded by a reef of coral, or rather two
reefs, for in the plan of the Architect there was built a second reef
for every atoll, and this outer barrier was sunken, as the one through
which we had come, but yet took the brunt of the waves, and prevented
them from washing away and destroying the inner and habitable reef on
which I then sat.
This hidden shoal belted the beach regularly, so that it made a moat
between the two; and yet in most atolls there was such an opening as
that through which we had come, often a mere depression, sometimes a
deep and wide mouth. One was forced to consider whether the Architect
had not taken man into his scheme, for without such an opening no people
could reach the shore and lagoon. But the grievous fact was that in some
atolls the minute workers had left no door and that man himself had torn
one open with tools and explosives. Even once within the moat, our boat
was in comparative safety only in the mildest weather, for the moat was
studded with lumps and boulders of coral, and the most crafty
guardianship was imperative to keep our craft whole.
If there had been an entry through the inner shore into the peaceful
lagoon by which I lolled, then would anchorage and calm have been
assured. So, of course, nature had in some other atolls than Niau
attended to this detail, and these I was to find more inhabited and more
developed, for in some even schooners might seek the haven of the lake,
and a fleet lie there in security. The lagoons were thus, generally,
safe and unflurried, though sometimes terribly harried by cyclones, such
as Lying Bill described the Dane as riding from sea to sea across the
entire island of Anaa.
Each of the Paumotus was made up of a number of _motus_, or islets,
parted by lower strata in which was the moat water. This string of
_motus_ assumed many dissimilar figures. One had fifty pieces in its
puzzle—a puzzle not fully solved by science, or, at least, still in
dispute. The _motus_ were all formed of coral rock of comparatively
recent origin geologically. Were these atolls the mountain-tops of a
lost Atlantis or thrust-up marine plateaus? The wise men differed. A
theory was that the atolls were coral formations upon volcanic islands
that had slowly sunk, each a monument marking an engulfed island or
mountain peak.
Another, that volcanic activity, which mothered the high islands in
these seas, caused to rise from the bottom of the ocean a series of
submerged tablelands, leveled by the currents and waves, on which the
coral insects erected the reefs—reefs just peeping above the surface of
the water—and on which the storms threw great blocks of madrepores and
coral broken from the mass. When in this condition, mere rocky rings of
milky coral, over which each billow swept, without life or aught else
than the structures of the marvelous zoöphytes, floors cut and broken
here and there by the surging and pounding breakers, the hand of the
Master raised them up, as through Polynesia other islands had been
raised, and fixed these Paumotus as the fairest growths of Neptune’s
park.
Lifted above the watery level, they were able to begin their task of
usefulness. Seeds carried by currents, borne by the winds, or brought by
those greatest of all pioneers and settlers of new countries, the
sea-birds, were flung on these ready, but yet barren, atolls, and
vegetation gave them an entrancing present.
Volcano and insect combined to make these coral blossoms of the South
Seas so different from any other mundane formations that the man with
any dreaming in his soul stood awe-struck at the wonder and artistry of
nature. They were the most wonderful and simple of nature’s works. They
eluded portrayal by brush and camera. No canvas or film could grasp
their symmetry and grace, seize more than a fragment of their alluring
form or hint of their admirable colors. Ravishing scenes from the deck
of a ship, and marvels of construction and hue when upon them, they were
sad and disappointing to the dweller, like a lovely woman who has a bad
disposition.
Circles, ovals, and horseshoes, regular and irregular, a few miles or a
hundred in circumference, the Paumotus were always essentially the
same—the lagoon and the fringe of reef and palm. These _Iles
Dangereuses_ were the supreme in creation in harmonious light and shade.
They were the very breath of imagination. My thoughts harked back to the
dawn of life, and the struggle between the land and water in which
continents and islands were drowned, and others rose to be the home of
beast and man, when God said, “Let the dry land appear.”
These atolls had fought the ceaseless war which slowly, but eternally,
shifted our terrestrial foothold. Makatea, nearer Tahiti, lifted its
strange cliffs two hundred feet in the air. It had been raised by
subterranean force thirty-five fathoms from the sea-level, and its
coasts were vertical walls of that height.
The young Darwin’s theory appealed even with these examples of
resurgence. It was improbable that an elevatory force would uplift
through an immense area great, rocky banks within twenty or thirty
fathoms of the surface of the sea, and not a single point above that
level. Where on the surface of the globe was a chain of mountains, even
a few hundred miles in length, with their many summits rising within a
few feet of a given level, and not one pinnacle above it? Yet that was
the condition in these atolls, for the coral animal could not live more
than thirty fathoms or so below the atmosphere, so that the basic
foundations of the atolls, on which the mites laid their offerings and
their bones, were fewer than two hundred feet under the surface. The
polyp gnome died from the pressure of water at greater depths. Just
outside the reefs or between the atolls, the depths were often greater
than a mile or two.
The vague science I possessed stimulated the memories of my reading of
that oldest civilization in tradition, the immense continent of Pan,
which a score of millenniums ago, according to the poet archæologists,
flourished in this Pacific Ocean. Its cryptogram attended in many spots
the discovery of a new Rosetta stone. I myself had seen huge monoliths,
half-buried pyramids and High Places, hieroglyphs and carvings,
certainly the fashioning of no living races. Were these Paumotus, and
many other islands from Japan to Easter, the tops of the submerged
continent, Pan, which stretched its crippled body along the floor of the
Pacific for thousands of leagues? There were legends, myths, customs,
inexplicable absences of usages and knowledge on the part of present
peoples, all perhaps capable of interpretation by this fascinating
theory of a race lost to history before Sumer attained coherence or
Babylon made bricks.
[Illustration:
A Paumotu atoll after a blow
]
Over this land bridge, mayhap, ventured a Caucasian people, the dominant
blood in Polynesia to-day, and when the connecting links in the chain to
their cradle fell from the sights of sun and stars, the survivors were
isolated for ages on the islands like Tahiti and the Marquesas. On the
mountain-tops, plateaus beneath the water, the coral insect built up
these atolls until they stood in their wondrous shapes splendid examples
of nature’s self-arrested labor, sculptures of unbelievable brilliancy.
[Illustration:
Photo by Dr. Theodore P. Cleveland
A squall approaching Anaa
]
To them came first Caucasians who had been spared in the cataclysm, and
later the new sailors of giant canoes who followed from Asia the line of
islets and atolls, fighting with and conquering the Caucasians, and
merging into them in the course of generations. These first and
succeeding migrations must have been forced by devastating natural
phenomena, by terrible economic pressure, by wars and tribal feuds. It
was not probable that any people deliberately chose these atolls in
preference to the higher lands, but that they occupied them in lieu of
better on account of evil fortune.
These eighty Paumotu islands averaged about forty miles apart, with only
two thousand people in all of them, which would allow, if equally
distributed, only twenty-five inhabitants to each. On more than half of
them no person lived, and all the others were scantily peopled. Three or
four hundred might occupy one atoll where shell and cocoanuts were
bountiful and fish plentiful and good, while two score and more atolls
were left for the frigate-bird to build its nest and for the robber-crab
to eat its full of nuts.
The thud of a cocoanut beside me stirred me from my reverie. I was wet
with the wading ashore and the sweat of my walk, and so I removed my few
garments and plunged into the lagoon. Going down to test the declivity a
yard or so from the water’s edge I dropped twenty feet and touched no
bottom. The water was limpid, delicious, and I could see the giant coral
fans waving fifty feet below me.
As I loitered on my back in the water, and looked down into the crystal
depths and at the cloudless sky, I had a moment’s phantasm of a great
city, its lofty trade battlements, its crowded streets, the pale, set
faces of its people, the splendor of the rich houses, the squalor of the
tenements, the police with clubs and guns, and the shrieking traffic.
Here was the sweetest contrast, where man had hardly touched the
primitive work of nature. It was long from Sumer, and far from Gotham.
I was floating at ease when I heard a voice. It seemed to come out of
the water. It was soft and almost etheric.
“_Maitai!_” it said, which meant, “You’re all right.”
I turned on my side, and by my garments was a long, gaunt Niauan, with a
loose mouth, loafing there, with his eyes fawning upon me. He smiled
sweetly, and said, “Goodanighta!”
As it was hardly seven o’clock in the morning, the sun a ball of fire,
and the glare of the reef like the shine of a boy’s mirror in one’s
eyes, I argued against his English education. But courtesy is not
correction. I said in kind, “Goodanighta!” He came into the water and
repaid me by shaking my hand, and with a movement toward the beach,
said, “Damafina!”
“_Maitai!_” I corroborated his opinion, and then he beckoned to me to
leave the lagoon and follow him. I dressed, all moist as I was, and we
returned toward the village, I wondering what design on me he had.
“She canna fik (fix) you show Niau,” my cicerone explained, as he waved
toward the island.
“All right, good, number one,” I assented.
He laughed with pleased vanity at his success in conversing with me in
my tongue and at the envious looks of the people on their tiny porches
as we passed them, and I saluted them.
“_Momuni! Momuni!_” they called after him with scornful laughter, and
beckoned me to leave him and join them.
“_Haere mai!_” they said, sweetly to me. Come to us!
My guide did not like either the name they gave him or their efforts to
alienate us. He retorted with an impolite gesticulation, and cried,
“_Popay! Popay!_” _Momuni_, though, was plainly nervous, and afraid that
I might be won over by the opposition. He plucked me by my wet sleeve
and directed me to a shanty of old boards set upon a platform of coral
rocks four feet from the bed of the atoll. In its single room on a white
bedspread were a dozen loaves of bread, crisp and white, and smelling
appetizingly. He lifted one, squeezed it to show its sponginess, and put
it to my nose. He sniffed, and said, “She the greata coo-ooka.”
I guessed that he referred to himself as the baker. He pointed out
toward the schooner and made me understand that this baking was a
present to me. I was embarrassed, and with many flourishes explained
that the Tahitian cook of the _Marara_ could not be compared with him as
a bread-maker, but that he was of a jealous disposition and might resent
bitterly the gift. My companion was cast down for a moment, but
brightened with another idea. Through a hundred yards more of coral
bones we plowed to his oven, a huge, coral stove like a lime-kiln, with
a roof, and bags of Victor flour from the Pacific Coast beside it.
Pridefully he made me note everything, as an artist might his studio.
_Momuni_ then touched my arm, and said, “_Haere!_ We can do.”
We walked along the beach of the lagoon and found a road that paralleled
the one we had come. It was lower than the other and the rain had
flooded it. The water was brown and stagnant, even red in pools, like
blood. Uncanny things shot past my feet or crawled upon them, and once
something that had not the feel of anything I knew of climbed the calf
of my leg, and when I turned and saw it dimly I leaped into the air and
kicked it off. I heard it plop into the dark water.
Down this marsh we plodded and paddled, floundered and splashed for half
a mile. The cocoanut-palms arched across it, but there was not a person
nor a habitation in view. I wondered why “she the great cook” had led me
into this morass. _Momuni_ looked at me mysteriously several times, and
his lips moved as if he had been about to speak.
He studied my countenance attentively, and several times he patted and
rubbed my back affectionately and said, “You damafina.” Then, slimy and
sloppy as I was, covered with the foul water up to my waist, when we
were in the darkest spot _Momuni_ halted and drew me under a palm.
He would either seek to borrow money or to cut my throat, I thought
hastily. Again he scanned me closely, and I, to soften his heart and
avert the evil, tried to appear firm and unafraid. To my astonishment he
took from his pocket five five-franc notes, those ugly, red-inked bills
which are current in all the _Etablissements Français de l’Oceanie_, and
held them under my nose. He smiled and then made the motion of pulling a
cork, and of a bottle’s contents gurgling through his loose mouth and
down his long neck.
I shuddered at my thoughts. Could it be that in this dry atoll, with
intoxicants forbidden, and prison the penalty of selling or giving them
to a native, this hospitable Niauan had offered me his bread and shown
me his oven, and the glories of the isle, and was displaying those five
red notes to seduce me into breaking the law, into smuggling ashore a
bottle of rum or wine?
I was determined to know the worst. I drew from my drawers (I had worn
no trousers) an imaginary corkscrew, and from my undershirt an
unsubstantial bottle. I pulled a supposititious cork, and took a long
drink of the unreal elixir. _Momuni_ was transfixed. His jaws worked,
and his tongue extended. He squeezed my hand with happiness and hope,
and left in it the five scarlet tokens of the _Banque de l’Indo-Chine_.
“Wina damafina; rumma damafina,” he confided. The man would be content
with anything, so it bit his throat and made him a king for an evil
hour.
Tomé was dealing out tobacco when we reached his store. His wife and
baby, an Irish-Penrhyn baby, were now eating a can of salmon and Nabisco
wafers.
“Who is this gentleman, Mr. Eustace?” I asked, pointing to _Momuni_.
“He’s an _omadhaun_, a nuisance, that he is, sure,” said Tomé. “He’s a
Mormon deacon that peddles bread an’ buys his flour from some one else
because I won’t trust him. He’s the only Mormon in this blessed island.
Every last soul is a Roman Cat’lic, except me, and I’m a believer in the
_leprechawn_. Has that hooligan been thryin’ to work ye for a bottle of
rum? He’ll talk a day for a drink.”
“What’s _Momuni_ and _Popay_?”
“_Momuni_ is the way they say ‘Mormons.’ The other’s the pope wid the
accint on the last syllable. It’s the name for Cat’lics all over these
seas, because they worship the pope iv Rome. The Popays run this island,
but the Momunis have got Takaroa and some others by the tail.”
I turned to look at my guide, the bread-maker. I had new admiration for
him. It took courage to be the one Mormon among a hundred Catholics, and
to try to sell them the staff of life. But he could not withstand the
withering glances of Tomé, and fled, with gestures to me which I could
only hazard to mean to meet him later in the fearsome swamp, with the
rum.
“Does _Momuni_ owe you any money?” I asked the trader, who was lighting
his wife’s cigarette.
“Does he? He owes me forty francs for flour, and I’ll nivir see the
shadow iv them. I’ll tell ye, though, he’s the best baker in the Group,
an’ they’re crazy about his bread.”
Eustace had no cargo for us, and McHenry and I caught the last boat for
the _Marara_, Moet having stayed for one trip only.
“Come an’ shtay wid us a month or two,” said Tomé in farewell. “We’ll
make ye happy and find ye a sweetheart! ’Tis here ye can shpend yer
valibil time doin’ nawthin’ at all, at all.”
He laughed heartily at his joke on virtue, and as we dashed through the
surf to climb into the boat I turned to see him telling the assembling
villagers some story that might provoke a laugh and keep their copra a
monopoly for him.
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