The last German colony! We founded it on this beautiful, isolated
coral atoll in the middle of the Pacific. The Imperial German flag
of war flew from the top of the tallest palm. I was the viceroy, by
chance and not by desire, of course, and my sailors and our prisoners
were my subjects. The only visiting nationals from elsewhere were
the three Kanakas, the turtle catchers. "The White King of the
Society Isle of Mopelia," my mate facetiously called me. One of the
Yankee captains put it differently. He called me "the Sea Devil King
of the South Seas." And he caustically described our lovely isle as
"a poisoned paradise." Everybody was good-humoured, despite our hard
luck.
But our little South Sea colony passed its first nights uneasily.
For sleeping places, we slung hammocks between the palms. At
intervals, a cocoanut would fall from a height of fifty or sixty feet
and go whizzing close by a man's head. While our fellow countrymen
back in the cities along the Rhine were complaining about the night
raids of the French and British bombing squadrons, we had our bombing
problem also. It didn't make much difference whether you were bumped
off with a falling cocoanut or a falling bomb. The result was all
the same. After one whizzed by your ear, you would very likely go
down to the open beach to quiet your nerves. Then if you tried to
sleep there, the land crabs would soon convince you that the beach
was no place for a weary war veteran either. Patrols of fighting
marine crabs would raid that beach every night. After being chased
out by the crabs, you would go back to your hammock and lie awake
wondering when the next aërial cocoanut bombardment would commence.
So life during those first days on our tropic isle was not all
skittles and beer or orchids and cocoanut milk. You can bet we
worked hard getting up huts! Luckily, there were no casualties from
either crabs or cocoanuts. We cleared a large space for our village,
and built huts out of timbers, sailcloth, and palm leaves. The first
one up was a queer-looking thing, but our architecture improved with
practice. Our prisoners, who were all Americans, helped us a great
deal. They understood the art of pitching tents. They built a
special town for themselves, and gave the streets such names as
Broadway, State Street, Pennsylvania Avenue, and the Bowery. In time
we contrived to arrange quite decent dwelling places. We had plenty
of furnishings. From the wrecked _Seeadler_, which remained perched
forlornly on the coral reef, we took everything we could carry. We
even built a chapel, took the Bible from the _Seeadler_, and from
parts of the wreck we built a fine altar and crucifix. Of course, we
also installed our wireless set ashore in order to keep in touch with
passing ships and events happening out on this side of the world.
Nor did we neglect to take ashore a heavy arsenal of arms and
ammunition, including rifles, Luger pistols, hand grenades, and
dynamite. In short, we had a perfect little town with everything
except a calaboose. Some of our men who had romantic tendencies
constructed "country homes" for themselves a few hundred yards away
in the jungle. Then we named the place Seeadlerburg, Sea Eagle Town.
There were gull's eggs everywhere along the shore, but the birds were
brooding now, and most of the eggs we collected had half-formed
little gulls in them. We got around this by clearing a large section
of beach and throwing the old eggs into the lagoon. Then the gulls
flocked back and laid more eggs, and thus a supply of fresh eggs was
assured.
Our American prisoners were nearly all cheery fellows. Some of them
fitted in with the new life better than my men. They seemed to know
all about the art of fishing, and taught us Germans things we had
never dreamed of. They were accustomed to what in the States, along
the Gulf of Mexico, is called spearing eels. They fastened iron
barbs to shafts of wood and with these speared big fish in the coral
lagoon. They also showed us a clever way of catching fish on a grand
scale. They took some forty men and boys and, just as high tide was
turning, formed in a line about fifty yards offshore. Then the line
came splashing in, driving the fish before it toward shore, just as
the natives round up tigers for a rajah in India. Many of the fish
floundered into shallow water, and a few minutes later were left
stranded by the receding tide. You see, the water, as it backed
offshore, left large pools on top of the irregular coral reef, and
there the fish were trapped. Sometimes we caught five or six hundred
pounds a day, and it was exciting sport.
One night, while we were sitting around our fire, we heard a
scratching sound. It seemed to come from everywhere. We looked and
found a lot of crabs with big claws. They were hermit crabs. We
caught several and put them in boiling water to cook. Meanwhile, the
crab invasion continued, and more from behind kept pushing the rest
forward. We tried the ones we had cooked, and they were delicious.
They were as good as the best lobster.
"By Joe," I said, "boys, let's get busy."
We spread out a large sail and filled it up with crabs, like a sack.
We must have had several thousand of them. For days we lived on
them, until most of us couldn't look a crab in the face. We had 'em
boiled, broiled, and in soup. Then that invasion of these hermits
passed as mysteriously as it had come, and we never saw them again.
But the turtles were always with us. We caught a number of them and
kept them in a coral basin at one end of the lagoon.
The wild pigs on the island provided us with more fun and more food.
They fed on cocoanuts, which is the best kind of fodder to make good
pork. These animals were said to be the descendants of swine brought
to the South Seas by early explorers long ago. They are found on
many islands, and New Zealand is a regular paradise for them and for
the hunter who likes to chase wild pigs. After generations of living
on cocoanuts, they had changed a lot and had developed a special kind
of tusk and jaw.
There were snipe on our island, too, and we hunted them with great
success, thereby varying our sea food and pork diet. Using cocoanut
shells for fuel, we smoked what flesh and fish we could.
By way of vegetables, we had cocoanuts, and bread made of cocoanut
flour, which the Kanakas taught us to prepare, and hearts of palms.
This latter is one of the rarest of delicacies, and outside the
tropics only multimillionaires can afford it. The price, when you
get palm hearts in Europe, is higher than that of Russian caviar.
For the most part, it is reserved for castaway sailors and buccaneers
like ourselves. It is the core taken from the very tip of the
cocoanut palm, right where the new leaves form. For each heart,
weighing about ten pounds, a noble palm has to be sacrificed. The
taste is between that of hazel nuts and asparagus, only finer and
sweeter than either.
But I must tell you more about that invasion of hermit crabs. It
caused the first and only fatality in the course of all our
adventures. My dog Schnaeuzchen had all of the prying, curious
nature of the dachshund. The island, with its teeming life, was an
endless source of wonder to her. She investigated everything,
forever had her nose sniffing somewhere or other. The swarming
hermit crabs, which covered the ground almost like a carpet, sent her
into a perfect spasm of astonishment. She jumped and barked and
yelped. She cocked one eye and studied the strange creatures, and
quite obviously did not like their looks. They crawled on all sides
of her, and she was filled with bewilderment and fright. She was
furious with them, but kept nimbly out of their way. Finally,
however, the pugnacity of her dachs nature got the better of her, and
she felt she must attack something. A particularly large and
villainous-looking crab excited her ire. She leaped upon it to
devour it. The crab raised its great, ferocious claws to strike at
her. Schnaeuzchen gave a strange yelp of fright, and rolled over in
a spasm. She kicked convulsively for a few moments, and then was
still--dead. Poor little Schnaeuzchen! The exotic life of the South
Seas had been too much for her. She was only two years old, and on
the island she had for the first time found an opportunity to give
vent to her passion for hunting. We gave her a fine grave, and
planted a cocoa palm on it. Her comrade, Piperle, looked around
disconsolately for her and was sad for a long time.
Piperle had an adventure with the birds. He undertook one day to
invade one of the densely populated rookeries. Somehow or other, he
contrived to antagonize the birds. I suppose he tried to raid a
nest. The angry gulls swarmed above him. One seized one ear.
Another seized the other. Several struck at his eyes. One hung on
to his tail. Piperle howled and struggled. It was at this point
that one of our men saw him execute an intelligent bit of strategy.
There was a clump of underbrush near by. He struggled toward it,
taking the birds with him. He dragged himself into the brush and
thereby shook off the birds. He returned to camp a sadly mishandled
dog, and never went near any of the rookeries again. From then on he
confined his courage and daring to chasing the wild pigs at night,
which he did with a prodigious barking and yelping. The pet opossum
that our prisoners had carefully rescued from the wreck picked up an
excellent living on the island, and came into the messroom every
night, asking for water.
If our new home teemed with useful, edible creatures, it was not
lacking in pestilential forms of life, either, these both of native
origin and imported from ships. A thousand kinds of insects were
everywhere. If you awakened thirsty at night and reached for your
glass of water, you were likely to find that it contained more
cockroaches than water. You had to reconcile yourself to getting up
in the morning and finding your toothbrush alive with ants. The ants
were particularly pervasive. We could only guard against them by
putting the legs of tables, chairs, and other articles of furniture
in cups of water. We slept at night to the ceaseless shuffle of
rats, huge insolent fellows, running about on the tops of our tents.
Piperle waged war against them, but the odds were too great. It
would have taken a whole regiment of terriers to end that plague.
Flashing birds of paradise flew from palm to palm. Gorgeous humming
birds with green and yellow breasts darted among the branches. With
every flower there seemed to be a great butterfly. The whole island
was aglow with butterflies. They floated on wide, beating wings of
greens, violets, and reds.
Once, in the middle of the night, I was awakened by a small, sharp,
repeated sound--knick, knick, knack. It was the opening of tropical
flowers. I went outside and there I saw the lovely Queen of Night,
which blossoms by the light of the tropical stars. It is a great,
gorgeous bloom, eight or ten inches across. There were thousands of
them. Scores of glowworms, far brighter than any we know, hovered
above each, eager to catch the magnificent perfume that the opening
Queen of Night gives forth. In the darkness I could see the flowers
only by the light of the glowworms. On every side were these eerie
nocturnal lights, a dancing lamp of gathered glowworms illuminating
each flower. In that unearthly gleaming, like a kind of moonlight
only stranger, the odorous petals shone with the ghostly nuances of
their naturally flaming colours, white, crimson, sapphire blue,
violet blue. In the South Seas, the flowers have little scent by
day, while the sun shines on them. At night, when the dew falls,
perfume awakens. It is truly a perfumed night. And the nostrils of
man are excited by the rich and almost oppressive blending of odours.
The Queen of Night gives off the perfume of vanilla. Mingled with it
comes the scent of hyacinth, orchid, mayflower, and heliotrope.
Sweet-smelling breezes blow, and above is the tropical sky with its
clustered flashing stars and gorgeous Milky Way. Hanging above the
horizon is the far-famed Southern Cross.