In the Cook Group
I was close to beginning this letter with a little fun at your
expense; you would have been mystified--perhaps convinced that my
haunted friends of Ahu Ahu were just a bit uncanny. It is really
a pity not to do it! I should have begun with a vivid glimpse of
a séance; the quiet moonlight outside, seen through an open door;
the glimmer of a turned-down lamp in the house, revealing the rapt
sightless face of the medium; the summoning of old Rakamoana from her
sleeping place in the _marae_; the unnatural voice proclaiming the
coming of the spirit.
Then I would have told how a message from the visitor was
announced--for the strange white man vouched for by the mother of
Apakura. "I see an island," the ghostly voice might have gone on--"a
little land surrounding a great lagoon. It is Nukuhina, in the
far-off Sea of Atolls. A schooner lies at anchor in the calm water
off the settlement; she does not move, for the lagoon is very still.
A boat is putting off for shore, and in the stern sits a dear friend
of the white man--a slender man, who gazes eagerly toward the shore
with dark eyes like the eyes of our people. A crowd is gathered on
the beach; the girls carry gifts of necklaces and wreaths; and in
the village the old women are preparing a feast. The man in the boat
believes that this welcome is for the captain of the schooner, not
knowing that this people was once a race of warriors, and that they
are gathered to give _him_ welcome--the first soldier from the army
of France to visit their island since the war. The keel of the boat
grates on the sand; a score of men seize her to pull her up; the
women crowd about the stranger (_Aué!_ They are good to look upon
these girls of Nukuhina!), to throw their necklaces over his head
and crown him with wreaths of flowers and shell. His face grows red;
the old men smile; the girls laugh aloud. One, bolder than the rest,
runs at him suddenly, puts her arms about him, and kisses him after
the fashion of the white man. His face grows redder still; at that,
the old men, too, laugh aloud. One after another, pushing and pulling
to be first, the girls scramble to kiss him; he is overwhelmed,
suffocated, and now his face is like fire, but he is not angry, for
he smiles."
Well, what do you think of Ahu Ahu magic? I really ought to refrain
from telling you the truth, which--like the stuff of most spirit
messages--is simple, unexpected, and disillusioning. When we got
to Avarua I found S---- there, over from Tahiti to buy cattle;
before his departure the _Alouette_ had turned up from the Paumotus,
bringing word of your reception on Nukuhina.
I fancy you haven't had much time, in your progress through the Low
Archipelago, for the pursuits of a landsman, so I'll give you an idea
of how I've frittered away the days on Rarotonga.
Soon after our arrival there was a great stir over the coming of a
shipload of parliamentary visitors from New Zealand, making a tour
of the Cook Islands; a feast of welcome was to be given in Avarua,
scores of pigs and hundreds of chickens were set aside for fattening,
and the dancers of each village were to be seen rehearsing in the
evenings. We drove to Avarua on the appointed day and found the
government boat already anchored in the roadstead off the town--an
anchorage dreaded by skippers, for unless the anchor strikes exactly
on the summit of a sharp submerged peak, it will slide clean off
soundings. Long before we reached the settlement the air had been
vibrant with the sound of drums, the visitors were coming ashore, the
dancing was in full swing.
The performance, of course, was a perfectly sophisticated one--like
Papeete, Avarua is a small ocean metropolis, the capital of a
group--but it interested me to see that the people, in spite of
the efforts of the missionaries to make them ashamed of everything
pertaining to heathen days, were not entirely without pride in
the past. Each village was represented by a corps of dancers, men
and women equally divided, and had its own drums and drummers,
who furnished the sole music of the dance. The drums are of three
varieties. The smallest are merely hollow sticks--six inches in
diameter and a yard long--open on one side, and producing a loud,
resonant click when struck with a bit of wood. There are others of
medium size, standing on short legs and beaten with the hand, but the
huge oldtime drums, suspended from the limbs of trees, interested
me most of all. Imagine a five-foot section of the trunk of a big
_Barringtonia_, carefully hollowed out and smoothed, with the skins
of wild goats stretched over the ends, and sides decorated with
outlandish painting.
The big drums are struck with the heel of the hand--with such furious
energy that the drummer streams perspiration and is soon exhausted.
The deep pulsing sound of them carries for miles in still air;
sometimes at night, when there was dancing in the villages, I have
heard it far and near, rising, falling, throbbing, from Arorangi,
from Titikaveka, and from Ngatangiia, whence the ancients set out on
their thousand-league voyages to the south.
I wish I could make you feel, as I have felt, the quality of this
savage drumming. Monotonous and rhythmic sound, reduced almost to
its simplest form, it is the ancestor of all music, toward which,
perhaps, our modern dance music is a reversion. There is syncopation
in it when the big drum halts at irregular intervals, and the time
is carried by the clicking of hollow wood; but it is solemn and
ominous--anything but the meretricious syncopation of ragtime. One
feels in it an appeal to the primitive emotions, at once vague and
charged with meaning; fear and madness are there, with cruelty, lust,
triumph, and a savage melancholy.
Except in the case of the contingent from Manihiki--an atoll far off
to the north--there was little variation in the dances, for which one
can only say that they showed evidence of careful drilling. The women
performed a variety of the dance common to all branches of their
race--basically the same whether called _hula_, _hura_, or _ura_--but
their motions were awkward and stiff, without the abandon and
graceful movements of the arms to be seen in Hawaii or the Society
Islands. The men, who carried long staves like spears, were freer
in their motions, leaping, thrusting out their arms, and clattering
their sticks in unison.
The costumes--unfortunately for the eye of a sensitive
spectator--were slipped on over the wearer's best European clothes; a
concession to the missionary point of view; but the beauty of some of
the kilts, tunics and headdresses, and the trouble evidently taken in
braiding them, showed that the Rarotongans have not wholly forgotten
the past.
The dance was followed by speeches, and the speeches by a feast--all
very conventional and uninteresting. I wonder if you are heartily
fed up on baked pig. One needs a dash of Island blood to appreciate
it after the twentieth time! Any other sort of meat would be welcome
here where bully beef and pork are the staples. The need of a change
of diet drives one to the lagoon; fishing becomes a practical as well
as a sporting proposition.
During the proper phases of the moon we lead a most irregular life,
for the hours from 3 to 5 A.M. are often the ones most profitable to
spend on the reef, and the evenings are occupied with a search for
hermit crabs. You have probably made the acquaintance of the hermit
crab, but in case you have been too busy to give him the notice he
deserves, I'll venture to dwell for a bit on his eccentricities. It
was not a pure love of natural history that turned my attention to
him; I have been obliged to study him--at least superficially--by the
fact that he is the dainty preferred by all the fish of this lagoon,
and his capture, therefore, an indispensable preliminary to every
fishing expedition.
There must be several varieties of hermit crab--I have counted three
already: the ordinary small brown one called _kakara_, the huge red
one found in deep water, and the black, hairy kind, whose pounded-up
body is mixed with grated coconut to extract the oil. This latter
is called _unga_; in the old days the lowest class of Rarotonga
society was known by the same name--meaning, I suppose, that all of
their property could be carried on their backs. The common variety
is a good deal like the robber crab in habits; the natives go so far
as to say that it is the same creature, in different stages of its
existence. I doubt this theory, for while there are plenty of the
little _kakara_ on the volcanic islands, the robber crab is very
rare; he lives on the atolls, and to my mind it is incredible that
he should journey from island to island, through leagues of deep
sea. Like his formidable relative, the _kakara_ spends most of his
time ashore, frequenting the bush along the water's edge, where he
lies hidden throughout the day in a hole or under a pile of leaves.
His first duty of the evening is a trip to salt water, for he seems
to need a thorough wetting once in each twenty-four hours. After
his bath he heads back for the bush to begin his nightly search for
food--nearly any kind of edible refuse--a dead fish on the beach, the
fallen fruit of a pandanus, a coconut, opened by rat or flying fox,
and containing a few shreds of meat.
The size of the _kakara_ can be judged from his shell, which may be
as small as a thimble or as large as an orange. The creature inside
is marvelously adapted to the life he leads. His soft and muscular
body curls into the spiral of the shell and is securely anchored by
a twist of the tail. The fore-end of the crab, which protrudes from
the shell when he is in motion, reminds one of a tiny lobster; the
same stalk eyes, the same legs, the same strong claws. When alarmed
he snaps back into his mobile fortress, and you perceive that legs
and claws fold into a flat armored barrier, sealing up perfectly the
entrance of the shell. Sit still and watch him; presently the claws
unfold cautiously and he emerges little by little, feelers waving and
eyes peering about in a ludicrously apprehensive manner. Finally he
gathers courage and starts off for the bush at his curious rolling
gait.
One might suppose the hermit crab the least social of living things,
but in reality he is gregarious and seems to enjoy the company of
his friends. They wander in little bands; very often one finds two or
three small ones perched on the back of a larger comrade and enjoying
an effortless trip across the beach to the lagoon. One afternoon I
came upon three of them traveling in single file; the last member of
the party--a frail little chap--crunched under the heel of my boot
before I saw him. I stopped a moment in regret and saw that the two
other crabs were also stopping--warned, by I know not what obscure
sense, that all was not well with their friend. They drew together as
they halted, and went through a hasty and obviously anxious exchange
of ideas--face to face, with feelers waving nervously. One was
reminded irresistibly of a pair of fussy little old gentlemen, halted
in the street to decide which should do an unpleasant errand. At
length one of the two settled himself to wait, while the other faced
about and shambled off briskly to the rear. A few seconds brought him
to what was left of his unfortunate comrade; his eyes seemed to start
from his head as he felt over the crushed wreck. A moment later he
turned and hastened back even faster than he had come. His arrival
had an air of palpitating excitement; I fancied I felt transmitted to
me a tiny thrill of horror at the news about to be communicated. This
time the four antennæ fairly vibrated--I imagined the conversation
going on an inch above the ground.
"My God!" announced the bearer of ill tidings, breathlessly. "Poor
Bill is dead!"
"Bill dead!" exclaimed the other, shocked in spite of his
incredulity; "but no, you must be wrong--what could have killed him?"
"I don't know; he's dead all the same--crushed and mangled--it upset
me fearfully."
"Come, come--you've been seeing things; he must have taken a short
cut to the beach."
"I tell you he's dead; come and have a look if you don't believe me."
So off they went together for a look at the corpse, and I left them
to mourn their friend--perhaps to eat him.
If you want to see a curious sight get a hermit crab some day
and pick up half a dozen empty shells of the size to fit him.
Lay the shells on the sand in a circle a few inches across,
extract the crab without hurting him from his house, and set
him down naked among the empty shells. To get him out, by the
way, is not so easy as it sounds, but you can do it by taking
hold of his claws and maintaining a steady, gentle pull; in time
the muscles of his tail will tire and his grip relax. You will
be amused when you see his first attempts to walk without his
shell, which weighs three or four times as much as the tenant;
it is precisely as a man might act, set down on some planet
where gravity is weaker than on our earth. Naked, helpless, and
worried--_très, très inquiet_--the crab makes a dash for one
of the shells, gives it a hasty inspection with his feelers,
finds something not quite right, and hobbles off to the next
one. Perhaps this suits him. He faces about, in goes his tail to
take a grip on the whorls, he snaps in and out a few times as if
trying the strategic possibilities of the new quarters, and next
moment you will see him ambling off blissfully toward the bush.
The chase of the hermit crab is tame sport, no doubt, but not
entirely without interest. One evening we set out just after dark,
bucket and torch in hand--not the old South Sea torch of coconut
leaf, but the modern tube of galvanized iron, filled with kerosene
and plugged with burlap, which acts as a wick. The high beach is best
at this hour, for one's quarry is beginning to emerge from the bush
for the evening dip, and those that have passed will leave spoor
in the soft coral sand. Here is the track of a small one, winding
toward the water in eccentric curves and zigzags; follow it and you
find him, motionless in the torchlight, hoping to escape notice. He
goes into the pail with a clang--you can hear his feet scratching
vainly at the smooth sides. There were not many about on this stretch
of beach; they are uncertain in their habits and seem to be great
wanderers. Here is the track of a monster, broad and corrugated
like the trail of a miniature Whippet Tank; the spoor leads to the
lagoon--no signs of him at the water's edge--he has doubled back.
Lift up that rotten coconut frond ... an _unga_, black, hairy, armed
with a vicious pair of claws; you can hear him raging in the pail, a
noise halfway between a whine and a growl--a crab with a voice!
A stroll of an hour or two along the beach usually procures enough
bait for a day's fishing, and one turns inland to follow the road
home. Sometimes, when the new moon has set behind the Avarua peaks
and thick darkness settles over the bush--when the surf murmurs
almost inaudibly in a stillness broken by the plunge of a fish in
the lagoon, or the grating screech of a flying-fox, quarreling with
his mates in the palm tops--one is not sorry when the lights of the
plantation begin to glimmer through the trees.
We went to bed early that evening, for we had to be up long before
daylight to catch the first of the flood tide, but these island
nights are not meant for sleep--I was soon up again, to spend a
couple of hours alone on the veranda. The feel of the air was like
a caress; neither hot nor cold, and perfumed with the scents of
strange flowers--waxen _Tiaré Tahiti_, sweet and heady frangipani,
languorous Queen of the Night. In the mango tree behind the house a
mynah twittered--a drowsy overture to one of their abrupt nocturnal
choruses. They are quaint birds, the mynahs; introduced to the
Islands many years ago, they have increased amazingly in this
friendly environment, where they live in a state of half-domesticated
familiarity with mankind. One sees them everywhere, hopping
fearlessly about the streets of villages, fluttering to the table
to finish the bread crumbs left after a meal, perched on the backs
of cattle in the coconut groves. They are intensely gregarious,
gathering in large flocks at sunset to roost in some thick-foliaged
tree--orange, mango, or alligator pear. From time to time during the
night, with an abruptness and perfect unison that make one suspect
the presence of a feathered leader of the orchestra, the two or three
hundred members of the colony burst into deafening song--a chorus
which lasts perhaps twenty seconds, and stops as suddenly as it
began.
At last I knocked the ashes out of my pipe and turned in; at
intervals, before sleep came, I heard the far-off thud of a ripe
coconut, or the faint slither and crash of an old frond, falling from
a palm. We were awakened at three o'clock by the cook's announcement
that coffee was ready; it is a pleasure to live where dressing is
only a matter of slipping on a fresh singlet and hitching the _pareu_
tight about one's waist. Each man carried a pair of old shoes,
for even the leathery feet of a native must be protected before he
ventures on the live coral. Half a dozen plantation boys followed us
to the beach, along a path leading down an avenue of coconuts, the
slender boles illuminated by the glare of torchlight. In five minutes
we were under the dark ironwoods at the water's edge, where the
canoes are hauled up; without waiting for us, the boys plunged into
the lagoon--half swimming, half wading toward the reef--torches held
aloft in their left hands.
The tide was very low; we had only a short paddle to the shallow
water on the inner side of the barrier. It was dead calm--ideal
weather for the spear--but there had been a storm somewhere
to the south; lines of tall glassy combers, faintly visible in
the starlight, were curling with the splitting reports of field
artillery--crashing down on the reef until the coral beneath us
seemed to tremble at each shock. The eastern sky had not yet begun to
pale--the constellations glimmered with the soft glow of the tropics:
the Southern Cross, Orion, and the Pleiades.
When the water was only knee-deep we moored the canoe to a coral
mushroom and went overboard in bare legs and tucked-up _pareus_.
Wading slowly, about twenty feet apart--the lagoon so still and clear
that it was not easy to tell where air ended and water began--nothing
moving in the circle of torchlight could escape notice. It was
necessary to watch the bottom and walk warily; the reef is a
honeycomb of holes and passages through which the sea boils in at
certain tides. Many of these holes, only a few feet in diameter at
the surface, lead deep down and out into the caverns lining the edges
of the pass--the haunts of octopus and the man-eating rock-cod called
_tonu_. A faint ripple revealed a big blue parrot fish skulking in
the shadow of a bowlder; one of the native boys slipped his spear
close before he thrust with a skill that needs years to acquire. He
killed the fish with a stab just where the head joins the body, and
strung it on the strip of hibiscus bark at his waist.
These lagoons swarm with strange forms of life unknown in northern
waters; until one learns one's way about there is a certain amount of
danger in wading through the shallows along the reef. A sea scorpion
passed close by us--a wicked-looking thing, all feelers and enormous
fins; a touch of those spines would give you a nasty leg. An even
more poisonous fish is found here--though fortunately not often:
the _noo_, which lies buried in patches of coral sand. I have never
seen one, and do not know its name in English, but the spines of its
dorsal fin are said to be hollow like the fangs of a rattlesnake,
and to inject a poison--when stepped on--that is apt to kill or
cripple for life. The _totara_, or sea porcupine, is another odd
creature, but not at all to be feared; at the approach of danger he
blows himself up like a football, and once inflated, is proof against
almost anything--I've seen a man hurl a heavy stone on one a dozen
times without being able to burst him open. In a different way, the
conger eels are nearly as hard to kill, particularly the big ones,
which are no joke to handle when one is wading barelegged. One must
be on the alert every moment--torch blazing, spear poised. One moment
you jump on a mushroom of coral to avoid a pair of sea snakes, long,
slender and spotted--active, fearless creatures whose bite is said to
be a serious matter; a moment later you are slipping and scrambling
at top speed to cut off some large fish, working his way through
the shallows. One of the boys bagged a _patuki_--a young _tonu_;
I was glad to have a look at the ugly little brute. He was only a
foot long--a marvel of protective coloring, irregularly spotted and
blotched so as to be nearly invisible against a background of coral.
The size of the mouth, the power of the jaws, and the rows of cruel
little teeth, convinced me that the full-grown fish must deserve the
bad name given him by the pearl divers.
The light was gray and the cloud banks along the eastern horizon
flushing pale rose when the boys extinguished their torches and set
out across the lagoon, each one trailing a heavy string of fish. My
host had had enough sport for once, but I love to be on the water at
dawn, so when I had landed him I paddled out to the pass to fish for
_titiara_. The current was slack and not a breath of wind stirred the
lagoon. The light grew stronger; the contours of the island developed
in sharp serrations against the sky; presently the sun rose.
I anchored the canoe in a fathom of water at the edge of the pass,
allowing her to swing out over the depths. Through my water-glass I
could examine the precipitous walls of the channel--fifty feet high,
overhanging in places, seamed, pitted, broken by the dark mouths
of caverns. Shoals of fish moved leisurely along the face of the
coral--appearing and disappearing like nesting swallows, seen from
a cliff-top: swinish parrot fish, bright blue and long as a man's
arm; _taputapu_, spangled orange and black--stopping to nibble at the
coral; slender pipefish; swift _nanue_; fish of extraordinary form
and coloring--indescribable, perhaps undescribed. At last I saw what
I was after--a school of _titiara_, working in from the sea.
I wonder if you know this fish; it is new to me, though I have
been told that it exists in the northern Pacific. It is of the
true game type--swift and rapacious--with the conformation of a
mackerel, and related, I should say, to the pompano of American
waters. The young ones, eight to ten inches long, and appearing at
certain times of year, in great schools, are called _aturi_. When
medium-sized--running from two pounds up to twelve--it is known as
_titiara_ in the Cook Islands; _paihere_ in Tahiti and to the east.
The fully grown fish, which attains a weight of a hundred pounds
or more, is called _urua_. These different names for stages in the
life of the same fish are interesting to me, for they illustrate the
richness, in certain directions, of a language so poor in others. We
have such terms in English, but they are rapidly becoming obsolete;
I doubt, for example, if the average man at home knows that a young
salmon is called a grilse, and a still younger one, a parr.
One's outfit for this kind of fishing consists of a pail of hermit
crabs, a couple of stones for crushing them, a hundred feet of stout
cotton line, a single hook on a length of piano wire, and several
dozen pebbles, to be used as sinkers. First of all you smash the
shells of a few crabs, tear off the soft bodies for bait, and crush
the claws and legs to a paste. This chum is thrown overboard little
by little to attract the fish and keep them about the canoe. When
a glance through the water-glass shows that the fish you want are
gathered beneath you, a pebble is attached to the line by means of a
special hitch, which can be undone by a jerk. Now you lower the line
over the side until the bait is in the required position; a sharp
pull frees the sinker, and you are ready for the first client. The
theory of the detachable sinker is that it enables one to fish at a
distance from the boat without having the hook rest on the bottom,
where it is apt to foul in the coral.
On this occasion my sport was ruined by one of those tantalizing
incidents which lend charm to every variety of angling. I had caught
two fish and was lowering my line to try for a third, when the small
fry gobbling my chum suddenly scattered and disappeared. Next moment
a monstrous _titiara_--almost in the _urua_ class--loomed up from the
depths, seized my bait, and made off so fast that the line fairly
scorched my fingers. My tackle was not designed for such game as
this--there was nothing to do but try to play him; but when only a
yard of line remained in my hands I was forced to check the rush. A
powerful wrench, the line slackened dead, he was off, the light hook
had snapped at the bend--and I had no other! The old, old story--it
is never the fingerlings that get away.
Cut into filets and soaked for six hours in lime juice, my two fish
made a raw _hors-d'œuvre_ of the most delicate kind. I took a plate
of it to the house of a neighbor who had asked me to dinner, and
this old-timer in the South Seas pronounced it of the very first
order. You would enjoy knowing him: he has been in this part of the
world since the 'seventies--supercargo, skipper, trader on islands
seldom visited even to-day. Now he is retired and lives on a small
plantation which represents the savings of a lifetime. After dinner,
as we sat on his wide veranda with pipes going and glasses on the
table between us, he told me a tale so curious that I cannot resist
repeating it to you--the story of an island far away to the north and
west--an island I shall call _Ariri_.
Atolls are by nature lonely places, but of all atolls in the Pacific,
Ariri is perhaps the loneliest--never visited, far off from any
group, out of the paths of navigation. Not very many years ago Ariri
was a bit of no man's land; though marked on the chart, its existence
was ignored by the Powers--it had never been inhabited, no flag had
ever been raised above its beaches of dazzling coral sand. At that
time, as for centuries before, the sea birds nested undisturbed on
the islets within the reef, where all day long the water flashed blue
in the sunlight and the trade wind hummed a song of loneliness among
the palm tops.
Then a day came when two Frenchmen--shrewd traders and planters of
coconuts in the Tuamotu--spoke of Ariri. Here was an island capable
of an annual hundred tons of copra, and claimed by no man; they would
plant it and reap the rewards of enterprise. The chief difficulty was
to find a superintendent to take charge of the project; it needed a
white man, but white men willing to undertake a task of such poignant
loneliness were not to be found every day in Papeete. As it chanced,
their man was at hand.
The natives called him Tino--perhaps his name had once been King.
Years among the islands had obliterated whatever stamp of nationality
he might have possessed; it was rumored that he was English by birth,
and also that he had held a commission in the Confederate navy.
Tall, strong, and of fine presence, with a full blond beard and eyes
of reckless blue, a great singer and dancer--always the merriest
at a feast and the idol of the women, a remarkable linguist and
story-teller, drunken, brave, witty, and unprincipled--Tino was of a
type which thrives in Polynesia.
When they offered him the position of superintendent at Ariri the two
Frenchmen were not without misgivings. He was on the beach at the
time, though the only sign of that condition was an unusual laxity
in returning the favor when a friend invited him to drink. Tino had
no money, but that was his sole limitation; each of a dozen native
families vied for the honor of transferring his mat and camphorwood
box to their house; when evening came he had his choice of a dozen
invitations to dine, and a dozen girls competed for the joy of doing
his laundry and making hats for him. But this easy-going philosophy
and lack of worry over a situation scarcely respectable in the eyes
of Papeete's business men were calculated to sow distrust. In the
case of Ariri, however, it was difficult to see how he could go
astray; there would be no liquor--they would see to that--and with
no visitors and no means of leaving the island there seemed little
chance of trouble, Tino was a famous handler of native labor.
The agreement was made and in due time a schooner sailed into the
Ariri lagoon to land Tino and a score of Raiatea boys with their
wives. The Frenchmen took care to leave no boat capable of putting
out to sea, but as there were houses and sheds to build they left
a considerable variety of tools and gear, in addition to a year's
supply of medicine, food, and clothing. A day or two later the
schooner sailed away.
The superintendent called his men together and appointed a foreman.
The main island was to be cleared, rows staked out, and the nuts
brought for seed to be planted in such a manner. Before this work
began, a house was to be built for each family. That was all, except
that Tino needed five men at once for special work of his own--let
them be those most skilled in woodworking. With that he seems to have
dismissed the business of planting coconuts from his mind.
There was a certain amount of hibiscus on the island, as well as the
trees called _tou_ and _puka_. In seven months' time, with the help
of his men, Tino cut down trees, sawed out timbers and planking, and
built a forty-foot cutter--sturdy, fast, and seaworthy. Her mast was
the smoothed-down trunk of an old coconut palm; her sails a patchwork
of varied fabrics; her cordage of cinnet, twisted and braided
coconut fiber--the work of women, incredibly skillful and patient.
For anchor, she carried a grooved coral bowlder, and her water tanks
were five-gallon kerosene tins. At the end of the seventh month this
improbable vessel was launched, rigged, and provisioned. Tino bade
his men farewell and set sail--promising to return--to the westward,
fearless and alone. His only instrument was a compass, and yet he
made the passage to Fiji--twelve hundred miles--in fifteen days.
I forgot to say that before his departure he had ordered the top of
a tall palm chopped off, and on this stout flagpole had hoisted a
homemade edition of the Union Jack. In Fiji he wasted no time. At
the office of the High Commissioner of the Pacific he announced that
he had taken possession of Ariri in the name of the British Empire,
and petitioned that a fifty years' lease of the island--at nominal
rate--be given him. The request was granted; a few days later Tino
was again at sea, still alone, and headed for his little kingdom.
The story is that he bought a sextant in Fiji, but at any rate,
something went wrong and he was fifty days without a landfall.
Think of this extraordinary man, drifting about alone in his absurd
boat--careless, self-confident, and unworried! Even Captain Slocum,
said to have navigated thousands of miles of ocean with no other
chronometer than a Connecticut alarm clock, performed no madder feat.
Tino fetched up at a big lagoon island, six or seven hundred miles
out of his course. It is enough to say of his stop there that he
spent a week and left, loaded down with provisions and drinking nuts,
and accompanied by five of the younger and prettier girls of the
village.
This time all went smoothly; the plural honeymoon party enjoyed a
merry voyage to Ariri, where Tino established his large and amicable
family, and proceeded to the less diverting business of planting
coconuts. A year passed; a day came when the schooner from Tahiti
rounded to in the lagoon and sent a boat ashore. Accompanied by his
twenty men, Tino met the supercargo on the beach. Copra from the old
trees? There was not much, but what there was belonged to him. This
was a British island, and he was the lessee; here were the papers
to prove it. He regretted that as the proprietor he could not allow
strangers ashore--demoralize the labor, you know. The Frenchmen
fumed, but they were too shrewd not to recognize defeat.
The years passed in peaceful and idyllic fashion; a score of Tino's
half-savage offspring fished and swam and raced along the beach. Then
one day Tino fell ill.
While he lay in bed, despondent, and brooding over the unfamiliar
experience, a schooner entered the lagoon and dropped anchor opposite
the settlement. Her boat--trim and smartly manned as a yacht's
gig--brought ashore the first missionary to set foot on Ariri.
Tino was difficult in the beginning, but the moment was perhaps the
weakest of his life; when the missionary left he had married the sick
man to Manini--his favorite wife--and received permission to install
a native teacher for the children of the island.
It amuses me to think of Tino's recovery and probable regret over
his weakness--the thing is so natural, so human; bodily illness and
spiritual reform have always gone hand in hand. But his word had
been given in good faith; he finished the church and school-house
he had promised, and in due time installed the teacher among his
flock. The supreme irony of the affair comes at this point, for
the native teacher, on the lookout for a flirtation, was indiscreet
enough to select Manini as the object of his attentions, and ended
by being caught with her under circumstances of the most delicate and
compromising nature. As Tino said afterward:
"He had a score of women to choose from, beside four of mine who
wouldn't have mattered--and then he picked on Manini! Why, damn it
all! man, I was a bit fond of the old girl!"
The teacher paid dearly for his indiscretion. Tino lashed him to a
post in the sun, where he would probably have died if the missionary
schooner had not appeared just at that time. Cowed and whimpering,
the culprit was thrown into a canoe by the indignant husband, who
pushed off and paddled angrily alongside the schooner.
"Here's your bleeding missionary!" he roared out, as he hurled the
struggling native into the lagoon. "I'm through with him--from now on
this island will have to get along with me for teacher and missionary
and king!"
That is all of the story, except that Tino died not long ago--happy,
rich enough, and surrounded by a numerous tribe of grandchildren.