A Memory of Mauké
We sighted Mauké at dawn. The cabin lamp was still burning when the
boy brought my coffee; I drank it, lit a cigarette, and went on deck
in a _pareu_. The skipper himself was at the wheel; half a dozen men
were in the shrouds; the native passengers were sitting forward,
cross-legged in little groups, munching ship's biscuit and gazing
ahead for the expected land.
The day broke wild and gray, with clouds scudding low over the sea,
and squalls of rain. Since we had left Mangaia, the day before, it
had blown heavily from the southeast; a big sea was running, but in
spite of sixty tons of copra the schooner was reeling off the knots
in racing style, running almost free, with the wind well aft of
the beam, rising interminably on the back of each passing sea, and
taking the following slope with a swoop and a rush. We had no log;
it was difficult to guess our position within a dozen miles; the low
driving clouds, surrounding us like a curtain, made it impossible
to see more than a few hundred yards. Until an observation could be
obtained, the landfall was a matter of luck and guesswork. Our course
had been laid almost due north-northeast--to pass a little to the
west of Mauké--which gave us the chance of raising Mitiaro or Atiu if
we missed the first island; but ocean currents are uncertain things,
and with a horizon limited to less than half a mile, nothing would be
easier than to slip past the trio of low islands and into the stretch
of lonely ocean beyond. Every trading skipper is accustomed to face
such situations; one can only maintain a sharp lookout and hold on
one's course until there is an opportunity to use the sextant, or
until it becomes obvious that the land has been passed.
A squall of rain drove down on us; for five minutes, while we
shivered and the scuppers ran fresh water, our narrow circle of
vision was blotted out. Then suddenly, with the effect of a curtain
drawn aside, the clouds broke to the east, flooding the sea with
light. A shout went up. Close ahead and to starboard, so near that
we could see the white of breakers on the reef, was Mauké--densely
wooded to the water's edge, a palm top rising here and there above
the thick bush of ironwoods. Next moment the curtain descended; gray
clouds and rearing seas surrounded us; it was as though we had seen
a vision of the land, unreal as the blue lakes seen at midday on the
desert. But the skipper was shouting orders in harsh Mangaian; the
schooner was swinging up into the wind; the blocks were clicking and
purring as half a dozen boys swayed on the mainsheet.
Presently the land took vague form through the mist of squalls; we
were skirting the reef obliquely, drawing nearer the breakers as
the settlement came in view. A narrow boat passage, into which an
ugly surf was breaching, had been blasted through the hard coral of
the reef; a path led up the sloping land beyond, between a double
row of canoe houses to the bush. A few people were gathering by
the canoe houses; it was evident that we had just been sighted, and
that it would be some time before a boat could put out, if, indeed,
the boatmen were willing to risk the surf. Meanwhile we could only
stand off and on until they came out to us, for the skipper had no
intention of risking his ship's boat and the lives of his men on such
a forbidding shore. "_Arari!_" he sang out, dwelling long on the last
syllable of this Cook Island version of "hard alee." The schooner
rounded into the wind with a ponderous deliberation calculated
to make the nerves of a fair-weather sailor twitch; she seemed to
hesitate, like a fat and fluttering grandmother; at last, after an
age of bobbing and ducking into the head sea, while boom tackles were
made fast and headsails backed, she made up her mind, and filled away
on the port tack.
Riley, the American coconut planter, who was recruiting labor for the
season on his island, turned to me with a wink. "If this old hooker
was mine," he remarked in a voice meant to reach the skipper's ears,
"I'd start the engine every time I came about; she can't sail fast
enough to keep steerageway!"
The skipper sniffed a British sniff; they are old friends. "If this
damn fine schooner was yours," he observed, without turning his head,
"she'd have been piled up long ago--like as not in broad daylight, on
an island a thousand feet high."
Riley chuckled. "Too early for an argument," he said. "Let's go below
and have a drink."
I have not often run across a more interesting man than Riley. Thrown
together, as he and I have been, in circumstances which make for
an unusual exchange of confidence, I have learned more of him in
two months than one knows of many an old acquaintance at home. At
thirty-five years of age he is a living object lesson for those who
bewail the old days of adventure and romance, and wish that their
lives had been cast in other times. His blood is undiluted Irish;
he has the humor, the imagination, the quick sympathy of the race,
without the Irish heritage of instability. Born in South Boston and
reared with only the sketchiest of educations, he set out to make
his way in the world at an age when most boys are playing marbles
and looking forward with dread to the study of algebra. For fifteen
years he wandered, gathering a varied background of experience. He
worked in mills; he drifted west and shipped as cabin boy on vessels
plying the Great Lakes; he drifted farther west to become a rider
of the range. Finally he reached San Francisco and took to the sea.
He has been a sealer, an Alaska fisherman, an able-bodied seaman on
square-riggers sailing strange seas. He has seen Cape Horn and the
Cape of Good Hope; he speaks of the ports of India, China, Africa,
the Java Sea, as you would speak of Boston or New York.
In the days when a line of schooners ran from San Francisco to
Tahiti, touching at the Marquesas on the way, he felt a call to the
South Seas, and shipped for a round trip before the mast. When he
returned to San Francisco a change seemed to have come over him; the
old, wandering life had lost its charm--had gone flat and stale. Like
many another, he had eaten of the wild plantain unaware. The evenings
of carousal ashore no longer tempted him; even the long afternoons
of reading (for reading has always been this curious fellow's chief
delight), stretched on his bed in a sailor's boarding house, had lost
their flavor--the print blurred before his eyes, and in its place he
saw lands of savage loveliness rising from a warm blue sea; shadowy
and mysterious valleys, strewn with the relics of a forgotten race;
the dark eyes of a girl in Tai-o-Hae.
Remember that Riley was both a sailor and an Irishman--a rough
idealist, keenly susceptible to beauty and the sense of romance.
It is stated that the men who live romance are seldom aware of it;
this may be true, though I doubt it--certainly in Riley's case the
theory does not work out. He is the most modest of men, untainted
by a trace of egoism; in his stories, superbly told with the Irish
gift for circumstantial detail and dramatic effect, the teller's
part is always small. And yet as one listens, thrilled by the color
and artistry of the tale, one is all the while aware that this man
appraises his memories at their full value--reviews them with a
ripened gusto, an ever-fresh appreciation. In short, he is one of
those fortunate, or unfortunate, men for whom realities, as most of
us know them, do not exist; men whose eyes are incapable of seeing
drab or gray, who find mystery and fresh beauty in what we call the
commonplace.
It is scarcely necessary to say that Riley was aboard the next
schooner bound south for the islands. Nukuhiva knew him for a time,
but the gloom and tragedy of that land--together with an episode of
domestic infelicity--were overpowering to a man of his temperament.
From the Marquesas he went to Tahiti, and his wanderings ended in the
Cook group, six hundred miles to the west. Perhaps the finding of his
journey's end wrought the change, perhaps it was due to his rather
practical Tahitian wife--in any case, the wanderer ceased to rove,
the spendthrift began to save and plan. In the groups to the eastward
he had picked up a smattering of coconut lore; it was not long before
he got a berth as superintendent of a small plantation. With a native
wife and the Irishman's knack for languages, he soon mastered the
dialect of his group; he is one of a very few men who speak it with
all the finer shadings. This accounts in part for his success with
labor--the chief difficulty of the planter throughout Polynesia. To
one interested as I am in the variations of this oceanic tongue, it
is a genuine pleasure to talk with Riley. In school he learned to
read and write; beyond that he is entirely self-educated. A good half
of his earnings, I should say, in the days when he followed the sea,
were spent on books; a native intelligence enabled him to criticize
and select; he has read enormously, and what he has read he has
remembered. Each time a new subject attracted him he hastened to the
book shops of San Francisco, or Liverpool, or Singapore, and gathered
a little forecastle library of reference. Like most intelligent
men in this part of the world, he has grown interested in the
subject of Polynesian research; it is odd to hear him discuss--with
a strong accent of South Boston and the manner of a professor of
ethnology--some question of Maori chronology, or the variations in a
causative prefix. Once he made clear to me a matter often referred to
in print, but which I had never properly understood. He was speaking
of the language of Tahiti.
"When you hear a Tahitian talk," he said, "it sounds different,
but really it's the same as Hawaiian, or Marquesan, or Rarotongan,
or New Zealand Maori. Tahiti is the oldest settled place, and the
language has kind of rotted away there. Nowadays the Tahitian has
lost the strong, harsh sounds of the old lingo, the _k_ and _ng_;
in place of them there is simply a catch between two vowels. If
you know Rarotongan and understand the system of change, you can
get on all right in Tahiti. Take our word _akatangi_--to play a
musical instrument. _Tangi_ means 'wail' or 'weep'; _aka_ is the old
causative prefix; the combination means 'cause to weep.' Now let's
figure that word out in Tahitian. First we've got to take out the
_k_ and _ng_; that leaves a bad start--it doesn't sound good, so
the Tahitians stick on an _f_ at the beginning. That's all there is
to it; _fa'ata'i_ is the word. It makes me laugh to think of when I
first came down here. I was working in Tahiti, and when I came home
in the evening my girl would look up from her sewing and sing out,
'O Riley!' 'For the love of Mike,' I'd tell her, 'don't you know my
name yet? It's Riley, not O'Riley!' Finally I caught on; I'd been
fooled on the same proposition as Cook and all the rest of them. You
remember they called the island Otahiti. That O is simply a special
form of the verb used before personal pronouns and proper nouns.
The old navigators, when the canoes came out to meet them, pointed
to the land and asked its name. 'O Tahiti' said the natives ('It
is Tahiti'). My girl didn't mean to call me O'Riley at all; she was
simply saying, 'It's Riley.'"
A serious white man, particularly when he is able to recruit and
handle native labor, is always in demand in the islands; it was not
long before Riley's talents were recognized; now he is manager and
part owner of an entire atoll. I have listened with a great deal
of interest to his accounts of the life there. Every year, at about
Christmas time, a schooner comes to load his copra and take his boys
back to their respective islands. Not a soul is left on the atoll;
Riley boards the schooner with his wife and takes passage to Papeete
for a couple of months of civilization. When the time is up he makes
a tour of the Cook group to recruit twenty or thirty boys for the
new season, and is landed on his island with a nine months' supply
of medicine, provisions, and reading matter. He is the only white
man on the atoll; one would suppose such a life deadly monotonous
and lonely, but just now he is pining to get back. It is really the
pleasantest of lives, he says; enough routine in keeping the men
properly at work, superb fishing when one desires a touch of sport,
plenty of time to read and think, the healthiest climate in the
world, and a bit of trouble now and then to give the spice a true
Irishman needs.
Riley is a man of medium size, with thick brown hair and eyes of
Celtic dark blue, perpetually sparkling with humor. I have never
seen a stronger or more active man of his weight; on his atoll he
spends an hour every day in exercise, running, jumping, working with
dumbbells and Indian clubs. From head to foot he is burnt a deep,
ruddy brown--a full shade darker than the tint of his native wife.
Sometimes, he says, he works himself into such a pink of condition
that he aches to pick a fight with the first comer, but I fancy he
finds trouble enough to satisfy another man. Once a huge, sullen
fellow from the Gambier group attempted to spear him, and Riley
called all of his men in from their work, appointed the foreman
referee, and beat the two-hundred-and-twenty-pound native--fierce and
lithe and strong as a tiger--slowly and scientifically, to a pulp.
On another occasion, a half-savage boy, from a far-off island of
the southern Paumotus, took a grudge against the manager and bided
his time with the cunning of a wild animal. The chance came one
afternoon when Riley was asleep in the shade behind his house. The
Paumotan stole up with a club and put him still sounder asleep with
a blow on the head that laid his scalp open and nearly fractured his
skull. Half a dozen kicks from the ball of a toughened foot stove
in the ribs on one side of his chest; with that, the native left his
victim, very likely thinking him dead. Riley's wife, from whom I got
the story, was asleep in the house at the time; toward evening she
went to look for her husband, and found him stretched out, bloody and
unconscious, on the sand. In spite of her agitation--her kind are not
much use in a crisis--she managed to get him to the house and revive
him. Riley's first act was to drink half a tumbler of whisky; his
second, to send for the foreman. The Paumotan boy had disappeared;
overcome by forebodings of evil, he had taken a canoe and paddled
off to hide himself on an uncleared islet across the lagoon. Riley
gave the foreman careful instructions; early in the morning he was
to take all the boys and spend the day, if necessary, in running down
the fugitive, who under no circumstances was to be injured or roughly
handled.
They brought the boy in at noon--deadly afraid at first, sullen
and relieved when he learned his punishment was no worse than to
stand up to the manager before the assembled plantation hands. It
must have been a grievous affair; Tetua could scarcely describe it
without tears. Riley was still sick and dizzy; his ribs were taped
so tightly that he could breathe with only half his lungs, and a
two-inch strip of plaster covered the wound on his head. The Paumotan
was fresh and unhurt; he outweighed his antagonist by twenty pounds,
and fought with confidence and bitterness. The Kanaka is certainly
among the strongest men of the world, a formidable adversary in a
rough-and-tumble fight. It went badly with Riley for a time; the
boy nearly threw him, and a blow on his broken ribs almost made
him faint, but in the end--maddened by pain and the thought of the
treacherous attack--he got his man down and might have killed him if
the foreman and half a dozen others had not intervened.
Riley's island is a true atoll--a broad lagoon inclosed by an oval
sweep of reef along which are scattered islets of varying size. Many
people must have lived on it in the past; everywhere there are traces
of man's occupation. A dozen inhabitants were there within the memory
of living men, but the dead outnumbered the living too heavily--the
place became unbearable to them, and in the end a schooner took them
away.
The outlying Cook Islands are places full of interest. I determined,
when I began this letter, to give you a real account of Mauké--the
island itself, its people, the number of tons of copra produced
annually, and other enlightening information. But somehow, when one
begins to write of this part of the world it seems a hopeless task
to stick to a train of facts--there are too many diverging lines
of fancy; too many intangible stimuli to thought, stirring to the
imagination.
Our landing on Mauké was a ticklish business. Like Mangaia, Mitiaro,
and Atiu, this island is of mixed volcanic and raised-coral
origin--the pinnacle of a submerged peak, ringed with millions
of tons of coral, and without any lagoon worthy of the name. The
polyps have built a sort of platform around the land, low inshore
and highest--as seems usually the case--just before it drops off
into the sea. Breaching across the outer ridge, the surf fills a
narrow belt of shallows between it and the shore; the result is a
miniature edition of a lagoon--a place of rocky pools where children
wade knee-deep, on the lookout for crayfish and baby octopus. On
the outer edge the reef is steep, too, dropping off almost at the
perpendicular. It is difficult to realize, when one has been brought
up on the friendly coasts of America, that if a boat capsizes off
these reefs one must swim offshore and wait to be picked up--that it
is wiser to chance the sharks than to attempt a landing in the surf,
for the sea is breaking along the summit of a sunken cliff--jagged
and sharp as broken glass, poisonous as the venom of a snake.
They came out to us in a whaleboat; Riley, the supercargo, and I
were the first to go ashore. As we pulled away from the schooner a
high-pitched argument began. One of the principal men of the island
had come out as a passenger and was sitting beside me. He insisted
that as they had got off safely from the boat passage it was best to
return the same way. The boat steerer disagreed; it was all very well
to put out from the passage, with a score of men to hold the boat
until the moment came, and launch her out head-on to the breakers,
but now the situation was different; the passage was narrow; it must
be entered just so, and a mishap might have unpleasant consequences
in such a surf. The steersman had the best of it; he took us a
quarter of a mile beyond the passage, and let his men rest on their
oars off a place where the reef seemed a little lower than elsewhere.
Each time we swung up to the crest of a swell I got a look at the
surf, and the prospect was not reassuring. Once or twice, as the
backwash poured off in a frothy cascade, I caught a glimpse of the
coral--reddish-black, jagged and forbidding. Little by little we drew
near the land until the boat lay just where the waves began to tower
for the final rush; the oarsmen backed water gently--the boat steerer
turned his head nervously this way and that, glancing at the reef
ahead and at the rearing water behind. I thought of a day, many years
before, when my father had taken me for a first experience of the
"chutes," and our little boat seemed to pause for an instant at the
summit of the tower before it tilted forward and flew down the steep
slope to the water--infinitely far off and below. The feeling was the
same--fear mingling with delight, an almost painful exhilaration.
All of us, saving the watchful figure in the stern, were waiting
for a signal which would make the oarsmen leap into activity, the
passengers clench their teeth and grip the rail. Suddenly it came--a
harsh shout. Six oars struck the water at once; the whaleboat
gathered way; a big sea rose behind us, lifted us gently on its back,
and swept us toward the reef. Next moment I saw that we had started
a breath too late. We were going like the wind, it was true, but
not tilted forward on the crest as we should have been; the wave was
gradually passing beneath us. Riley glanced at me and shook his head
with a humorous turndown of the mouth. It was too late to stop--the
men were pulling desperately, their long oars bending at every
stroke. When the sea broke we were slipping down into the trough
behind; as we passed over the edge of the reef the wave was beginning
its backward wash. There were shouts; I found myself up to my waist
in a foaming rush of water, struggling with might and main to keep
my footing and to hold the boat from slipping off into the sea. We
stopped her just on the brink; her keel grated on the coral; another
sea was coming at us, towering high above our heads. Riley, the
supercargo, and I leaped aboard in response to a sharp command. The
boys held her stern-on to the last; as they scrambled over the sides
the sea caught us, half swamping the boat and lifting her stern high
in the air. She tilted wildly as her bow crashed on the coral, but a
rare piece of luck saved her from turning broadside on. Next moment
we were over the reef and gliding smoothly into the shallow water
beyond. As I drew a long, satisfying breath I heard Riley chuckle.
"I think I'll get a job diving for shell," he remarked. "I'll swear I
haven't breathed for a good three minutes!"
When we stood on the beach a dozen men came forward, smiling, to
greet their friend Rairi. With a decently pronounceable name--from
the native standpoint--Riley has got off easily; I never tire of
wondering what these people will call a white man. They seem to
prefer the surname if it can be pronounced; if not, they try the
given name, and Charley becomes Teari, or Johnny, Tioni. If this
fails, or if they take a dislike to one, the fun begins. I have a
friend who, unless he leaves the islands, will be called Salt Pork
all his life; and I know another man--a second-rate colonial of the
intolerant kind--who goes blissfully about his business all unaware
that hundreds of people know him by no other name than Pig Dung.
No doubt you have noticed another thing down here--the deceptive
simplicity of address. In these eastern islands the humblest speaks
to the most powerful without any title of respect, with nothing
corresponding to our "mister" or "sir." At first one is inclined
to believe that here is the beautiful and ideal democracy--the
realization of the communist's dream--and there are other things
which lead to the same conclusion. Servants, for one example, are
treated with extraordinary consideration and kindliness; when the
feast is over the mistress of the household is apt as not to dance
with the man who feeds her pigs, or the head of the family to take
the arm of the girl who has been waiting on his guests. The truth is
that this impression of equality is false; there are not many places
in the world where a more rigid social order exists--not of caste,
but of classes. In the thousand or fifteen hundred years that they
have inhabited the islands the Polynesians have worked out a system
of human relationships nearer the ultimate, perhaps, than our own
idealists would have us believe. Wealth counts for little, birth for
everything; it is useless for an islander to think of raising himself
in a social way--where he is born he dies, and his children after
him. On the other hand, except for the abstract pleasure of position,
there is little to make the small man envious of the great; he eats
the same food, his dress is the same, he works as little or as much,
and the relations between the two are of the pleasantest. There
is a really charming lack of ostentation in these islands, where
everything is known about everyone, and it is useless to pretend to
be what one is not. That is at the root of it all--here is one place
in the world, at least, where every man is sure of himself.
We were strolling up the path between the canoe houses when Riley
stopped me. "Come and have a look," he said; "this is the only island
I know of where you can see an old-fashioned double canoe."
There were two of them in the shed we entered, under a roof of
battered galvanized iron--long, graceful hulls fashioned from the
trunks of trees, joined in pairs by timbers of ironwood laid across
the gunwales and lashed down with sinnet. They were beautifully
finished--scraped smooth and decorated with carving. In these craft,
my companion told me, the men of Mauké still voyage to Atiu and
Mitiaro, as they had done for generations before Cook sailed through
the group. There is an ancient feud between Mauké and Atiu; it is
curious how hard such grudges die. The men of Atiu were the most
warlike of all the Cook Islanders; even in these times of traders and
schools and missionaries no firearms are allowed on the island. Time
after time, in the old days, they raided Mauké, stealing by night
upon the sleeping villages, entering each house to feel the heads of
the sleepers. When they felt the large head of a warrior they seized
his throat and killed him without noise; the children and women--the
small heads and the heads with long hair--were taken back alive to
Atiu. Terrible scenes have been enacted under the old ironwoods of
Mauké, when the raiders, maddened with the heat of killing, danced
in the firelight about the opened ovens and gorged on the bodies
of the slain; for the Cook-Islanders, excepting perhaps the people
of Aitutaki, were cannibals as fierce as the Maoris of New Zealand
or the tawny savages of the Marquesas. Why should Aitutaki have
bred a gentler and finer people? The group is not widely scattered
as islands go; there must have been fighting and intermarriage for
ages past. Yet any man who has been here long can tell you at a
glance from which island a native hails; even after my few weeks
I am beginning to have an eye for the differences. The Mangaian is
certainly the most distinct, recognizable at once by his dark skin,
his wide, ugly mouth, his uncouth and savage manner. The full-blooded
Rarotongan, who will soon be a rarity, is another type--handsome in
a square-cut leonine way, with less energy and far more dignity of
presence. The people of Aitutaki are different still--fair as the
average Tahitian, and pleasing in features and manner; I have seen
girls from that island who would be called beautiful in any country.
These differences are not easy to account for, it seems to me, when
one considers that the islanders are all of one race, tracing their
ancestry back to common sources and speaking a common tongue.
The trader, a friend of Riley's, took us to his house for lunch. The
day was Sunday and a feast was already preparing, so we were spared
the vocal agonies of the pig. Times must be changing--I have seen
very few traders of the gin-drinking type one expects to find in the
South Seas; nowadays they seem to be rather quiet, reflective men,
who like to read and play their phonographs in the evening, and drink
excellent whisky with soda from a sparklet bottle. This one was no
exception; I found him full of intelligence and a dreamy philosophy
which kept him content in this forgotten corner of the world. He was
young and English; there were cricket bats and blazers in his living
room, and shelves filled with the kind of books one can read over
and over again. He was pessimistic over Riley's chances of getting
men--the people of Mauké were growing lazier each year, he said, and
seemed to get along with less and less of the European things for
which, at one time, they had worked. As for copra, they no longer
bothered much with it; the nuts were left to sprout under the palms.
The taro patches were running down; the coffee and breadfruit dropped
off the trees unpicked; the oranges, which brought a good price when
a vessel came to take them off, were allowed to drop and rot.
As we sat smoking after lunch, a native boy came in, with a vague air
of conspiracy, to hold a whispered conversation with Riley. When he
had gone the American winked at our host and turned to me.
"There's a beer tub going full blast out in the bush," he said. "I
think I'll drop in on them and see if I can pick up a man or two.
You'd better come along."
Liquor is prohibited to the natives throughout the Cook Islands; even
the white man must buy it from the government in quantities regulated
by the judgment of the official in charge. The manufacture of
anything alcoholic is forbidden, but this latter law is administered
with a certain degree of tolerance. Fortunately for everyone
concerned, the art of making palm toddy has never been introduced;
when the Cook-Islander feels the need of mild exhilaration he
takes to the bush and brews a beverage known as orange beer. The
ingredients are sugar, orange juice, and yeast--the recipe would
prove popular, I fancy, in our own orange-growing states. The story
goes that when the Cook Island boys went overseas to war they found a
great drought prevailing in their eastern field of action--Palestine,
I think it was. But there were oranges in plenty, and these untutored
islanders soon showed the Tommies a trick that brought them together
like brothers. I have tasted orange beer at all stages (even the
rare old vintage stuff, bottled two or three months before) and
found it not at all difficult to take; there are worse varieties of
tipple, though this one is apt to lead to fighting, and leaves its
too-enthusiastic devotee with a headache of unusual severity.
We found fifteen or twenty men assembled under an old utu tree;
a dance ended as we drew near, and the cup was being passed. Two
five-gallon kerosene tins, with the tops cut off and filled with the
bright-yellow beer, stood in the center of the group. Women are never
present on these occasions, which correspond, in a way, to Saturday
evenings in a club at home. A sort of rude ceremonial--a relic,
perhaps, of kava-drinking days--is observed around the beer tub. The
oldest man present, armed with a heavy stick, is appointed guardian
of the peace, to see that decency and order are preserved; the
natives realize, no doubt, that any serious disturbance might put an
end to their fun. The single cup is filled and passed to each guest
in turn; he must empty it without taking breath. After every round
one of the drinkers is expected to rise and entertain the company
with a dance or a song.
Riley was welcomed with shouts; he was in a gay mood and when we had
had our turns at the cup he stripped off his tunic for a dance. He
is a famous dancer; unhampered by the native conventions, he went
through the figures of _heiva_, _otea_, and _ura_--first the man's
part, then the woman's--while the men of Mauké clapped their hands
rhythmically and choked with laughter. No wonder Riley gets on with
the people; there is not an ounce of self-consciousness in him--he
enters into a bit of fun with the good-natured abandon of a child. As
for dancing, he is wonderful; every posture was there, every twist
and wriggle and flutter of the hands--what old Bligh called, with
delightful, righteous gusto, the "wanton gestures" of the _heiva_.
Riley had told his friends on the beach that he was on the lookout
for labor; by this time, probably, the whole island knew he was on
his way to the atoll and that he needed men. Before we took leave of
the drinkers three of them had agreed to go with my companion. The
sea was calmer now, and, since Riley's wife was on the schooner, we
decided to go aboard for dinner. Four more recruits were waiting by
the canoe houses to sign on--it was odd to see their response to the
Irishman's casual offer when half the planters of the group declare
that labor is unobtainable.
The whaleboat was waiting in the passage. It was evening. The wind
had dropped; the sky overhead was darkening; out to the west the sun
had set behind banks of white cloud rimmed with gold. The oarsmen
took their places; friendly hands shot us out in a lull between two
breakers; we passed the surf and pulled offshore toward where the
schooner was riding an easy swell, her lights beginning to twinkle in
the dusk.
Rutiaro
[Illustration]