I
There is good fishing to be had round Sydney way, yellow-tail and
schnapper and green backed sea bream; jew-fish and mullet and
trevalli. You can fish at low tide in the pools or you can fish from a
boat, beaching her for the night in one of the coves and camping out
under the stars, with the scent of the gums mingling with the scent of
the sea, and the song of the waves for lullaby.
Over Dead Man’s Cove and its beach of hard sand the cliff stands bluff
and humped like a crouching lion, and there one night the year before
last old Captain Brent and I were kicking our heels and smoking after
supper and passing in review the day’s work and the tribes of the sea.
Brent was a keen fisherman, and there were few waters he did not know,
and few fish he hadn’t taken one time or another. He had always
travelled with his eyes open, and his natural history was first hand
and his views fresh as originality itself. He said crabs could think,
instancing certain hermit crabs that always chose protective-coloured
shells, and that not only did sword-fish fight duels—I knew that, for
I had seen it myself—but that there were tribal wars carried on in
the sea, international struggles so to speak, between the nations of
the fishes.
“If fish didn’t kill fish,” said the Captain, “the sea would be solid
with mackerel inside two years, to say nothing of herring. Haven’t you
ever thought of what keeps them down? It’s the Almighty, of course,
but how does He work it? Lots of folk think He works it by making the
fish eat the fish just because they are hungry. That’s one of His
ways, but another is just war for war’s sake, or for the sake of the
grouch one tribe keeps up against another. You see, it’s a bit
unfortunate, seeing that if the herring once got above a certain
number all the eating in the world wouldn’t stop them from turning the
sea solid with herring, so the Almighty has fixed His killing machine
with two blades, one that kills for the sake of food and the other for
the sake of killing.
“It’s the same with the tribes of men, I reckon, only with them
there’s only one blade left, since they don’t kill each other nowadays
for the sake of food.
“There’s something in one tribe that makes for war against another
tribe. You may boil them but you won’t get it out of them. I’ve seen
it. You’d have seen it too if you’d traded among the Islands in the
old days, selling Winchesters to the natives to prosecute their wars
with, and I’ll give you a case in point.
“I’ve told you how me and Slane pulled off that pearling job, but I
never told you what we did with the money. Most chaps would have bust
it, we just stuck it in the bank and, after a run to the Yosemite,
back we come to ’Frisco on the look out for more larks. We weren’t set
on money for the sake of money so much as for the fun of getting it,
for I tell you as a mortal truth there’s no hunting to beat the
hunting of a dollar, more especial when you’ve got a herd of twenty or
thirty thousand of them with their tails up and you after them. We’d
had enough of pearling, we had no taste for blackbirding and we were
turning copra over in our minds when, sitting having our luncheon one
day in Martin’s restaurant, a slab-sided Yank, six foot and over and
thin as a Jackstaff, comes along up to us.
“‘You’re Mr. Slane?’ says he.
“‘That’s me,’ says Buck.
“‘I’ve heard tell of you,’ says the chap, ‘and I’ve got a
double-barrelled proposition to put before you. May I take a seat at
your table? Scudder’s my name, and Martin will tell you I’m a straight
man.’
“Down he sits. We’d finished feeding and so had he; the place was
pretty empty and no one by to hear, and he begins.
“‘First barrel of the prop,’ he says, ‘is a dodge for killing fish.
You know how they fish out in the Islands? Well, they do a good deal
of spearin’ and hookin’ and sometimes they poison the fish pools with
soap, but the king way is dynamite.’ He pulls a stick of something out
of his pocket and goes on. ‘Here’s a stick of dynamite. You can fire
it by electricity or you can shove a match on one end and light it and
throw the durned thing into the water. It goes bang and a minute after
every fish in that vicinity come to the surface stunned dead. That’s
so, but the bother is the stuff goes off sometimes premature and the
Kanakas are always losing hands and legs and things, which don’t make
for its popularity. Being out there last year at Taleka Island I set
my invention trap working to hit a device. I’ve always took notice
that a man who fills a want fills his pockets, and a patent safety
explosive fish killer is a want with a capital “W” right from ’Frisco
to Guam. Well, here it is,’ he says, and out of his other pocket he
takes the great-grandfather of a Mills bomb, same as the Allies have
been pasting the Germans with. It wasn’t bigger than a tangerine
orange and rough made, but it had all the essentials. You didn’t pull
a pin out, it was just two caps of metal screwed together. The thing
was dead as mutton when it was lightly screwed, but screwed tight it
exposed its horns and was live as Satan. Just one turn of the wrist
tightened it up and then if you flung it against anything, even water,
it would go bang. It was a working model, and he showed us the whole
thing and the cost of manufacture. His factory was a back bedroom in
Polk Street, but he reckoned with a shed and a lathe and a couple of
Chink artisans to help he could turn out fifty Scudder Fish
Crackers—that’s the name he gave them—a day. He said the Bassingtons
had a share in the patent and would give him the material for nothing
so as to have the thing tried out. He wanted five hundred dollars to
start his factory, then he wanted us to give him an order for two
thousand crackers at fifty cents each.
“‘You don’t want no more cargo than that,’ said he, ‘once the Kanakas
get the hang of this thing they’ll trade you their back teeth for
them; you see it’s new. It’s like millinery. If I could invent a new
sort of hat and start a store in Market Street every woman from here
to St. Jo would be on it in a cluster. You could scrape them off with
a spoon. Kanakas are just the same as women, for two thousand of them
crackers you can fill up to your hatches in copra.
“‘Well, now,’ he goes on, ‘on top of that I’ll make you a present of
three thousand dollars, if you’ll take the proposition up. Sru, the
chief chap at Taleka, wants Winchester rifles and ammunition and he’s
got the money in gold coin to pay for them. He wants six thousand
dollars’ worth and I can get the lot from Bassingtons for three
thousand dollars, boxed and laded on board your ship. The crackers
won’t take no room for stowage and the guns and cartridges won’t eat
half your cargo space, so you can take some cheap trade goods that’ll
give you a deck cargo of turtle shell and _bêche de mer_. Get me? You
make money on the crackers, you make money on the guns and you make a
bit out of the shell. It’s a golden goose layin’ eggs at both ends and
the middle, and I’ll give you a writing promising to pay the five
hundred dollars for the factory in one year with twenty per cent, for
the loan.’
“I could see Slane was sniffing at it so I didn’t interfere, and the
upshot was we made an appointment with Scudder to meet us next day and
take a boat out in the harbour to test a couple of his crackers. We
did, and he was no liar, the things went off like guns and dead fish
were still coming up when a police boat nailed us and rushed us ashore
and we had to pay ten dollars fine for illegal behaviour. That’s what
the Yanks called it—anyhow the dead fish settled the business and
Slane took up the proposition and put his hand in his pocket and
fetched out the money to start the factory and gave Scudder his order
for two thousand crackers.
“Slane hadn’t disposed of the _Greyhound_. We ran her into dock and
had the barnacles scraped off her, gave her some new spars and a new
mainsail and finished up with a lick of paint. It took six weeks and
by that time Scudder had finished his job and had the crackers ready
boxed and all and the Bassington company were waiting to deliver the
Winchesters and ammunition. We took the old hooker over to Long Wharf
for the stowing and the stuff came down in boxes marked eggs and
crockery ware.
“They were pretty sharp after gun-runners in those days, but Scudder
fixed everything somehow so that none of the cases were opened. We got
the cracker boxes on first and then stowed the guns and cartridges
over that, and on top of the guns some trade goods, stick tobacco and
rolls of print and such, six Chinks we took for a crew and a Kanaka by
name of Taute who could speak the patter of most of the Islands, and
off we started.