Of the beauties of Anaho books might be written. I remember waking about
three, to find the air temperate and scented. The long swell brimmed
into the bay, and seemed to fill it full and then subside. Gently,
deeply, and silently the _Casco_ rolled; only at times a block piped like
a bird. Oceanward, the heaven was bright with stars and the sea with
their reflections. If I looked to that side, I might have sung with the
Hawaiian poet:
_Ua maomao ka lani_, _ua kahaea luna_,
_Ua pipi ka maka o ka hoku_.
(The heavens were fair, they stretched above,
Many were the eyes of the stars.)
And then I turned shoreward, and high squalls were overhead; the
mountains loomed up black; and I could have fancied I had slipped ten
thousand miles away and was anchored in a Highland loch; that when the
day came, it would show pine, and heather, and green fern, and roofs of
turf sending up the smoke of peats; and the alien speech that should next
greet my ears must be Gaelic, not Kanaka.
And day, when it came, brought other sights and thoughts. I have watched
the morning break in many quarters of the world; it has been certainly
one of the chief joys of my existence, and the dawn that I saw with most
emotion shone upon the bay of Anaho. The mountains abruptly overhang the
port with every variety of surface and of inclination, lawn, and cliff,
and forest. Not one of these but wore its proper tint of saffron, of
sulphur, of the clove, and of the rose. The lustre was like that of
satin; on the lighter hues there seemed to float an efflorescence; a
solemn bloom appeared on the more dark. The light itself was the
ordinary light of morning, colourless and clean; and on this ground of
jewels, pencilled out the least detail of drawing. Meanwhile, around the
hamlet, under the palms, where the blue shadow lingered, the red coals of
cocoa husk and the light trails of smoke betrayed the awakening business
of the day; along the beach men and women, lads and lasses, were
returning from the bath in bright raiment, red and blue and green, such
as we delighted to see in the coloured little pictures of our childhood;
and presently the sun had cleared the eastern hill, and the glow of the
day was over all.
The glow continued and increased, the business, from the main part,
ceased before it had begun. Twice in the day there was a certain stir of
shepherding along the seaward hills. At times a canoe went out to fish.
At times a woman or two languidly filled a basket in the cotton patch.
At times a pipe would sound out of the shadow of a house, ringing the
changes on its three notes, with an effect like _Que le jour me dure_,
repeated endlessly. Or at times, across a corner of the bay, two natives
might communicate in the Marquesan manner with conventional whistlings.
All else was sleep and silence. The surf broke and shone around the
shores; a species of black crane fished in the broken water; the black
pigs were continually galloping by on some affair; but the people might
never have awaked, or they might all be dead.
My favourite haunt was opposite the hamlet, where was a landing in a cove
under a lianaed cliff. The beach was lined with palms and a tree called
the purao, something between the fig and mulberry in growth, and bearing
a flower like a great yellow poppy with a maroon heart. In places rocks
encroached upon the sand; the beach would be all submerged; and the surf
would bubble warmly as high as to my knees, and play with cocoa-nut husks
as our more homely ocean plays with wreck and wrack and bottles. As the
reflux drew down, marvels of colour and design streamed between my feet;
which I would grasp at, miss, or seize: now to find them what they
promised, shells to grace a cabinet or be set in gold upon a lady’s
finger; now to catch only _maya_ of coloured sand, pounded fragments and
pebbles, that, as soon as they were dry, became as dull and homely as the
flints upon a garden path. I have toiled at this childish pleasure for
hours in the strong sun, conscious of my incurable ignorance; but too
keenly pleased to be ashamed. Meanwhile, the blackbird (or his tropical
understudy) would be fluting in the thickets overhead.
A little further, in the turn of the bay, a streamlet trickled in the
bottom of a den, thence spilling down a stair of rock into the sea. The
draught of air drew down under the foliage in the very bottom of the den,
which was a perfect arbour for coolness. In front it stood open on the
blue bay and the _Casco_ lying there under her awning and her cheerful
colours. Overhead was a thatch of puraos, and over these again palms
brandished their bright fans, as I have seen a conjurer make himself a
halo out of naked swords. For in this spot, over a neck of low land at
the foot of the mountains, the trade-wind streams into Anaho Bay in a
flood of almost constant volume and velocity, and of a heavenly coolness.
It chanced one day that I was ashore in the cove, with Mrs. Stevenson and
the ship’s cook. Except for the _Casco_ lying outside, and a crane or
two, and the ever-busy wind and sea, the face of the world was of a
prehistoric emptiness; life appeared to stand stock-still, and the sense
of isolation was profound and refreshing. On a sudden, the trade-wind,
coming in a gust over the isthmus, struck and scattered the fans of the
palms above the den; and, behold! in two of the tops there sat a native,
motionless as an idol and watching us, you would have said, without a
wink. The next moment the tree closed, and the glimpse was gone. This
discovery of human presences latent overhead in a place where we had
supposed ourselves alone, the immobility of our tree-top spies, and the
thought that perhaps at all hours we were similarly supervised, struck us
with a chill. Talk languished on the beach. As for the cook (whose
conscience was not clear), he never afterwards set foot on shore, and
twice, when the _Casco_ appeared to be driving on the rocks, it was
amusing to observe that man’s alacrity; death, he was persuaded, awaiting
him upon the beach. It was more than a year later, in the Gilberts, that
the explanation dawned upon myself. The natives were drawing palm-tree
wine, a thing forbidden by law; and when the wind thus suddenly revealed
them, they were doubtless more troubled than ourselves.
At the top of the den there dwelt an old, melancholy, grizzled man of the
name of Tari (Charlie) Coffin. He was a native of Oahu, in the Sandwich
Islands; and had gone to sea in his youth in the American whalers; a
circumstance to which he owed his name, his English, his down-east twang,
and the misfortune of his innocent life. For one captain, sailing out of
New Bedford, carried him to Nuka-hiva and marooned him there among the
cannibals. The motive for this act was inconceivably small; poor Tari’s
wages, which were thus economised, would scarce have shook the credit of
the New Bedford owners. And the act itself was simply murder. Tari’s
life must have hung in the beginning by a hair. In the grief and terror
of that time, it is not unlikely he went mad, an infirmity to which he
was still liable; or perhaps a child may have taken a fancy to him and
ordained him to be spared. He escaped at least alive, married in the
island, and when I knew him was a widower with a married son and a
granddaughter. But the thought of Oahu haunted him; its praise was for
ever on his lips; he beheld it, looking back, as a place of ceaseless
feasting, song, and dance; and in his dreams I daresay he revisits it
with joy. I wonder what he would think if he could be carried there
indeed, and see the modern town of Honolulu brisk with traffic, and the
palace with its guards, and the great hotel, and Mr. Berger’s band with
their uniforms and outlandish instruments; or what he would think to see
the brown faces grown so few and the white so many; and his father’s land
sold, for planting sugar, and his father’s house quite perished, or
perhaps the last of them struck leprous and immured between the surf and
the cliffs on Molokai? So simply, even in South Sea Islands, and so
sadly, the changes come.
Tari was poor, and poorly lodged. His house was a wooden frame, run up
by Europeans; it was indeed his official residence, for Tari was the
shepherd of the promontory sheep. I can give a perfect inventory of its
contents: three kegs, a tin biscuit-box, an iron saucepan, several
cocoa-shell cups, a lantern, and three bottles, probably containing oil;
while the clothes of the family and a few mats were thrown across the
open rafters. Upon my first meeting with this exile he had conceived for
me one of the baseless island friendships, had given me nuts to drink,
and carried me up the den ‘to see my house’—the only entertainment that
he had to offer. He liked the ‘Amelican,’ he said, and the ‘Inglisman,’
but the ‘Flessman’ was his abhorrence; and he was careful to explain that
if he had thought us ‘Fless,’ we should have had none of his nuts, and
never a sight of his house. His distaste for the French I can partly
understand, but not at all his toleration of the Anglo-Saxon. The next
day he brought me a pig, and some days later one of our party going
ashore found him in act to bring a second. We were still strange to the
islands; we were pained by the poor man’s generosity, which he could ill
afford, and, by a natural enough but quite unpardonable blunder, we
refused the pig. Had Tari been a Marquesan we should have seen him no
more; being what he was, the most mild, long-suffering, melancholy man,
he took a revenge a hundred times more painful. Scarce had the canoe
with the nine villagers put off from their farewell before the _Casco_
was boarded from the other side. It was Tari; coming thus late because
he had no canoe of his own, and had found it hard to borrow one; coming
thus solitary (as indeed we always saw him), because he was a stranger in
the land, and the dreariest of company. The rest of my family basely
fled from the encounter. I must receive our injured friend alone; and
the interview must have lasted hard upon an hour, for he was loath to
tear himself away. ‘You go ’way. I see you no more—no, sir!’ he
lamented; and then looking about him with rueful admiration, ‘This goodee
ship—no, sir!—goodee ship!’ he would exclaim: the ‘no, sir,’ thrown out
sharply through the nose upon a rising inflection, an echo from New
Bedford and the fallacious whaler. From these expressions of grief and
praise, he would return continually to the case of the rejected pig. ‘I
like give present all ’e same you,’ he complained; ‘only got pig: you no
take him!’ He was a poor man; he had no choice of gifts; he had only a
pig, he repeated; and I had refused it. I have rarely been more wretched
than to see him sitting there, so old, so grey, so poor, so hardly
fortuned, of so rueful a countenance, and to appreciate, with growing
keenness, the affront which I had so innocently dealt him; but it was one
of those cases in which speech is vain.
Tari’s son was smiling and inert; his daughter-in-law, a girl of sixteen,
pretty, gentle, and grave, more intelligent than most Anaho women, and
with a fair share of French; his grandchild, a mite of a creature at the
breast. I went up the den one day when Tari was from home, and found the
son making a cotton sack, and madame suckling mademoiselle. When I had
sat down with them on the floor, the girl began to question me about
England; which I tried to describe, piling the pan and the cocoa shells
one upon another to represent the houses, and explaining, as best I was
able, and by word and gesture, the over-population, the hunger, and the
perpetual toil. ‘_Pas de cocotiers_? _pas do popoi_?’ she asked. I told
her it was too cold, and went through an elaborate performance, shutting
out draughts, and crouching over an imaginary fire, to make sure she
understood. But she understood right well; remarked it must be bad for
the health, and sat a while gravely reflecting on that picture of
unwonted sorrows. I am sure it roused her pity, for it struck in her
another thought always uppermost in the Marquesan bosom; and she began
with a smiling sadness, and looking on me out of melancholy eyes, to
lament the decease of her own people. ‘_Ici pas de Kanaques_,’ said she;
and taking the baby from her breast, she held it out to me with both her
hands. ‘_Tenez_—a little baby like this; then dead. All the Kanaques
die. Then no more.’ The smile, and this instancing by the girl-mother
of her own tiny flesh and blood, affected me strangely; they spoke of so
tranquil a despair. Meanwhile the husband smilingly made his sack; and
the unconscious babe struggled to reach a pot of raspberry jam,
friendship’s offering, which I had just brought up the den; and in a
perspective of centuries I saw their case as ours, death coming in like a
tide, and the day already numbered when there should be no more Beretani,
and no more of any race whatever, and (what oddly touched me) no more
literary works and no more readers.