We parted at Papeete. I remained ashore to recuperate, and he
went on in a cutter to his own island, Bora Bora. Six weeks later
he was back. I was surprised, for he had told me of his wife and
said that he was returning to her and would give over sailing on
far voyages.
"Where do you go, master?" he asked, after our first greetings.
I shrugged my shoulders. It was a hard question. "To all the
world, "was my answer. "All the world, all the sea, and all the
islands that are in the sea."
"I will go with you," he said simply. "My wife is dead."
I never had a brother, but from what I have seen of other men's
brothers I doubt if any man ever had one who was to him what Otoo
was to me. He was brother, and father and mother as well. And
this I know--I lived a straighter and a better man because of
Otoo. I had to live straight in Otoo's eyes. Because of him I
dared not tarnish myself. He made me his ideal, compounding me, I
fear, chiefly out of his own love and worship; and there were
times when I stood close to the steep pitch of hell and would
have taken the plunge had not the thought of Otoo restrained me.
His pride in me entered into me until it became one of the major
rules in my personal code to do nothing that would diminish that
pride of his. Naturally, I did not learn right away what his
feelings were toward me. He never criticised, never censured, and
slowly the exalted place I held in his eyes dawned upon me, and
slowly I grew to comprehend the hurt I could inflict upon him by
being anything less than my best.
For seventeen years we were together. For seventeen years he was
at my shoulder, watching while I slept, nursing me through fever
and wounds, aye, and receiving wounds in fighting for me. He
signed on the same ships with me, and together we ranged the
Pacific from Hawaii to Sydney Head and from Torres Strait to the
Galapagos. We blackbirded from the New hebrides and the Line
Islands over to the westward, clear through the Louisiades, New
Britain, New Ireland, and New Hanover. We were wrecked three
times--in the Gilberts, in the Santa Cruz group, and in the
Fijis. And we traded and salved wherever a dollar promised in the
way of pearl and pearl shell, copra, beche de mer, hawkbill
turtle shell, and stranded wrecks.
It began in Papeete, immediately after his announcement that he
was going with me over all the sea and the islands in the midst
thereof. There was a club in those days in Papeete, where the
pearlers, traders, captains, and South Sea adventurers
foregathered. The play ran high and the drink ran high, and I am
very much afraid that I kept later hours than were becoming or
proper. No matter what the hour was when I left the club, there
was Otoo waiting to see me safely home. At first I smiled. Next I
chided him. Then I told him flatly I stood in need of no
wet-nursing. After that I did not see him when I came out of the
club. Quite by accident, a week or so later, I discovered that he
still saw me home, lurking across the street among the shadows of
the mango trees. What could I do? I know what I did do.
Insensibly I began to keep better hours. On wet and stormy
nights, in the thick of the folly and the fun, the thought would
come to me of Otoo keeping his dreary vigil under the dripping
mangoes. Truly, he made me a better man.
Yet he was not strait-laced. And he knew nothing of common
Christian morality. All the people on Bora Bora were Christians.
But he was a heathen, the only unbeliever on the island, a gross
materialist who believed that when he died he was dead. He
believed merely in fair play and square-dealing. Petty meanness,
in his code, was almost as serious as wanton homicide, and I am
sure that he respected a murderer more than a man given to small
practices. Concerning me, personally, he objected to my doing
anything that was hurtful to me. Gambling was all right. He was
an ardent gambler himself. But late hours, he explained, were bad
for one's health. He had seen men who did not take care of
themselves die of fever. He was no teetotaler, and welcomed a
stiff nip any time when it was wet work in the boats. On the
other hand, he believed in liquor in moderation. He had seen many
men killed or disgraced by squareface or Scotch.
Otoo had my welfare always at heart. He thought ahead for me,
weighed my plans and took a greater interest in them than I did
myself. At first, when I was unaware of this interest of his in
my affairs, he had to divine my intentions, as, for instance, at
Papeete, when I contemplated going partners with a knavish fellow
countryman on a guano venture. I did not know he was a knave. Nor
did any white man in Papeete. Neither did Otoo know; but he saw
how thick we were getting and found out for me, and that without
my asking. Native sailors from the ends of the seas knock about
on the beach in Tahiti, and Otoo, suspicious merely, went among
them till he had gathered sufficient data to justify his
suspicions. Oh, it was a nice history, that of Randolph Waters! I
couldn't believe it when Otoo first narrated it, but when I
sheeted it home to Waters he gave in without a murmur and got
away on the first steamer to Auckland.
At first, I am free to confess, I resented Otoo's poking his nose
into my business. But I knew that he was wholly unselfish, and
soon I had to acknowledge his wisdom and discretion. He had his
eyes open always to my main chance, and he was both keen-sighted
and far-sighted. In time he became my counselor, until he knew
more of my business than I did myself. He really had my interest
at heart more than I did. Mine was the magnificent carelessness
of youth, for I preferred romance to dollars, and adventure to a
comfortable billet with all night in. So it was well that I had
some one to look out for me. I know that if it had not been for
Otoo, I should not be here to-day.
Of numerous instances, let me give one. I had had some experience
in blackbirding before I went pearling in the Paumotus. Otoo and
I were on the beach in Samoa--we really were on the beach and
hard aground--when my chance came to go as a recruiter on a
blackbird brig. Otoo signed on before the mast, and for the next
half-dozen years, in as many ships, we knocked about the wildest
portions of Melanesia. Otoo saw to it that he always pulled
stroke-oar in my boat. Our custom, in recruiting labor, was to
land the recruiter on the beach. The covering boat always lay on
its oars several hundred feet off shore, while the recruiter's
boat, also lying on its oars, kept afloat on the edge of the
beach. When I landed with my trade goods, leaving my steering
sweep apeak, Otoo left his stroke position and came into the
stern sheets, where a Winchester lay ready to hand under a flap
of canvas. The boat's crew was also armed, the Sniders concealed
under canvas flaps that ran the length of the gunwales. While I
was busy arguing and persuading the woolly-headed cannibals to
come and labor on the Queensland plantations Otoo kept watch. And
often and often his low voice warned me of suspicious actions and
impending treachery. Sometimes it was the quick shot from his
rifle, knocking a nigger over, that was the first warning I
received. And in my rush to the boat his hand was always there to
jerk me flying aboard.
Once, I remember, on Santa Anna, the boat grounded just as the
trouble began. The covering boat was dashing to our assistance,
but the several score of savages would have wiped us out before
it arrived. Otoo took a flying leap ashore, dug both hands into
the trade goods, and scattered tobacco, beads, tomahawks, knives,
and calicoes in all directions. This was too much for the woolly
heads. While they scrambled for the treasures, the boat was
shoved clear and we were aboard and forty feet away. And I got
thirty recruits off that very beach in the next four hours.
The particular instance I have in mind was on Malaita, the most
savage island in the easterly Solomons. The natives had been
remarkably friendly; and how were we to know that the whole
village had been taking up a collection for over two years with
which to buy a white man's head? The beggars are all
head-hunters, and they especially esteem that of a white man. The
fellow who captured the head would receive the whole collection.
As I say, they appeared very friendly, and this day I was fully a
hundred yards down the beach from the boat. Otoo had cautioned
me, and, as usual when I did not heed him, I came to grief. The
first thing I knew a cloud of spears sailed out of the mangrove
swamp at me. At least a dozen were sticking into me. I started to
run, but tripped over one that was fast in my calf and went down.
The woolly heads made a run for me, each with a long-handled,
fantail tomahawk with which to hack off my head. They were so
eager for the prize that they got in one another's way. In the
confusion I avoided several hacks by throwing myself right and
left on the sand. Then Otoo arrived--Otoo the man-handler. In
some way he had got hold of a heavy war-club, and at close
quarters it was a far more efficient weapon than a rifle. He was
right in the thick of them, so that they could not spear him,
while their tomahawks seemed worse than useless. He was fighting
for me, and he was in a true Berserker rage. The way he handled
that club was amazing. Their skulls squashed like overripe
oranges. It was not until he had driven them back, picked me up
in his arms, and started to run, that he received his first
wounds. He arrived in the boat with four spear-thrusts, got his
Winchester, and with it got a man for every shot. Then we pulled
aboard the schooner and doctored up.
Seventeen years we were together. He made me. I should to-day be
a supercargo, a recruiter, or a memory, if it had not been for
him.
"You spend your money, and you go out and get more," he said, one
day. "It is easy to get money, now. But when you get old, your
money will be spent and you will not be able to go out and get
more. I know, master. I have studied the way of white men. On the
beaches are many old men who were young once and who could get
money just like you. Now they are old, and they have nothing, and
they wait about for the young men like you to come ashore and buy
drinks for them.
"The black boy is a slave on the plantations. He gets twenty
dollars a year. He works hard. The overseer does not work hard.
He rides a horse and watches the black boy work. He gets twelve
hundred dollars a year. I am a sailor on the schooner. I get
fifteen dollars a month. That is because I am a good sailor. I
work hard. The captain has a double awning and drinks beer out of
long bottles. I have never seen him haul a rope or pull an oar.
He gets one hundred and fifty dollars a month. I am a sailor. He
is a navigator. Master, I think it would be very good for you to
know navigation.
Otoo spurred me on to it. He sailed with me as second mate on my
first schooner, and he was far prouder of my command than was I
myself. Later on it was:
"The captain is well paid, master, but the ship is in his keeping
and he is never free from the burden. It is the owner who is
better paid, the owner who sits ashore with many servants and
turns his money over."
"True, but a schooner costs five thousand dollars--an old
schooner at that," I objected. "I should be an old man before I
saved five thousand dollars. "
"There be short ways for white men to make money," he went on,
pointing ashore at the cocoanut-fringed beach.
We were in the Solomons at the time, picking up a cargo of
ivory-nuts along the east coast of Guadalcanar.
"Between this river mouth and the next it is two miles," he said.
"The flat land runs far back. It is worth nothing now. Next
year--who knows!--or the year after--men will pay much money for
that land. The anchorage is good. Big steamers can lie close up.
You can buy the land four miles deep from the old chief for ten
thousand sticks of tobacco, ten bottles of squareface, and a
Snider, which will cost you maybe one hundred dollars. Then you
place the deed with the commissioner, and the next year, or the
year after, you sell and become the owner of a ship."
I followed his lead, and his words came true, though in three
years instead of two. Next came the grass-lands deal on
Guadalcanar--twenty thousand acres on a governmental nine hundred
and ninety-nine years' lease at a nominal sum. I owned the lease
for precisely ninety days, when I sold it to the Moonlight Soap
crowd for half a fortune. Always it was Otoo who looked ahead and
saw the opportunity. He was responsible for the salving of the
Doncaster--bought in at auction for five hundred dollars and
clearing fifteen thousand after every expense was paid. He led me
into the Savaii plantation and the cocoa venture on Upolu.
We did not go seafaring so much as in the old days now. I was too
well off. I married and my standard of living rose; but Otoo
remained the same old-time Otoo, moving about the house or
trailing through the office, his wooden pipe in his mouth, a
shilling undershirt on his back, and a four-shilling lava-lava
about his loins. I could not get him to spend money. There was no
way of repaying him except with love, and God knows he got that
in full measure from all of us. The children worshiped him, and
if he had been spoilable my wife would surely have been his
undoing.
The children! He really was the one who showed them the way of
their feet in the world practical. He began by teaching them to
walk. He sat up with them when they were sick. One by one, when
they were scarcely toddlers, he took them down to the lagoon and
made them into amphibians. He taught them more than I ever knew
of the habits of fish and the ways of catching them. In the bush
it was the same thing. At seven, Tom knew more woodcraft than I
ever dreamed existed. At six, Mary went over the Sliding Rock
without a quiver--and I have seen strong men balk at that feat.
And when Frank had just turned six he could bring up shillings
from the bottom in three fathoms.
"My people in Bora Bora do not like heathen; they are all
Christians; and I do not like Bora Bora Christians," he said one
day, when I, with the idea of getting him to spend some of the
money that was rightfully his, had been trying to persuade him to
make a visit to his own island in one of our schooners--a special
voyage that I had hoped to make a record-breaker in the matter of
prodigal expense.
I say one of OUR schooners, though legally, at the time, they
belonged to me. I struggled long with him to enter into
partnership.
"We have been partners from the day the Petite Jeanne went down,"
he said at last. "But if your heart so wishes, then shall we
become partners by the law. I have no work to do, yet are my
expenses large. I drink and eat and smoke in plenty--it costs
much, I know. I do not pay for the playing of billiards, for I
play on your table; but still the money goes. Fishing on the reef
is only a rich man's pleasure. It is shocking, the cost of hooks
and cotton line. Yes, it is necessary that we be partners by the
law. I need the money. I shall get it from the head clerk in the
office."
So the papers were made out and recorded. A year later I was
compelled to complain.
"Charley," said I, "you are a wicked old fraud, a miserly
skinflint, a miserable land-crab. Behold, your share for the year
in all our partnership has been thousands of dollars. The head
clerk has given me this paper. It says that during the year you
have drawn just eighty-seven dollars and twenty cents."
"Is there any owing me?" he asked anxiously.
"I tell you thousands and thousands," I answered.
His face brightened as with an immense relief.
"It is well," he said. "See that the head-clerk keeps good
account of it. When I want it, I shall want it, and there must
not be a cent missing. If there is," he added fiercely, after a
pause, "it must come out of the clerk's wages."
And all the time, as I afterward learned, his will, drawn up by
Carruthers and making me sole beneficiary, lay in the American
consul's safe.
But the end came as the end must come to all human associations.
It occurred in the Solomons, where our wildest work had been done
in the wild young days, and where we were once more--principally
on a holiday, incidentally to look after our holdings on Florida
Island and to look over the pearling possibilities of the Mboli
Pass. We were lying at Savo, having run in to trade for curios.
Now Savo is alive with sharks. The custom of the woolly heads of
burying their dead in the sea did not tend to discourage the
sharks from making the adjacent waters a hang-out. It was my luck
to be coming aboard in a tiny, overloaded, native canoe, when the
thing capsized. There were four woolly heads and myself in it, or
rather, hanging to it. The schooner was a hundred yards away. I
was just hailing for a boat when one of the woolly heads began to
scream. Holding on to the end of the canoe, both he and that
portion of the canoe were dragged under several times. Then he
loosed his clutch and disappeared. A shark had got him.
The three remaining niggers tried to climb out of the water upon
the bottom of the canoe. I yelled and cursed and struck at the
nearest with my fist, but it was no use. They were in a blind
funk. The canoe could barely have supported one of them. Under
the three it up-ended and rolled sidewise, throwing them back
into the water.
I abandoned the canoe and started to swim toward the schooner,
expecting to be picked up by the boat before I got there. One of
the niggers elected to come with me, and we swam along silently,
side by side, now and again putting our faces into the water and
peering about for sharks. The screams of the men who stayed by
the canoe informed us that they were taken. I was peering into
the water when I saw a big shark pass directly beneath me. He was
fully sixteen feet in length. I saw the whole thing. He got the
woolly head by the middle and away he went, the poor devil, head,
shoulders, and arms out of water all the time, screeching in a
heart-rending way. He was carried along in this fashion for
several hundred feet, when he was dragged beneath the surface.
I swam doggedly on, hoping that that was the last unattached
shark. But there was another. Whether it was one that had
attacked the natives earlier, or whether it was one that had made
a good meal elsewhere, I do not know. At any rate, he was not in
such haste as the others. I could not swim so rapidly now, for a
large part of my effort was devoted to keeping track of him. I
was watching him when he made his first attack. By good luck I
got both hands on his nose, and, though his momentum nearly
shoved me under, I managed to keep him off. He veered clear and
began circling about again. A second time I escaped him by the
same maneuver. The third rush was a miss on both sides. He
sheered at the moment my hands should have landed on his nose,
but his sandpaper hide--I had on a sleeveless undershirt--scraped
the skin off one arm from elbow to shoulder.
By this time I was played out and gave up hope. The schooner was
still two hundred feet away. My face was in the water and I was
watching him maneuver for another attempt, when I saw a brown
body pass between us. It was Otoo.
"Swim for the schooner, master," he said, and he spoke gayly, as
though the affair was a mere lark. "I know sharks. The shark is
my brother."
I obeyed, swimming slowly on, while Otoo swam about me, keeping
always between me and the shark, foiling his rushes and
encouraging me.
"The davit-tackle carried away, and they are rigging the falls,"
he explained a minute or so later, and then went under to head
off another attack.
By the time the schooner was thirty feet away I was about done
for. I could scarcely move. They were heaving lines at us from on
board, but these continually fell short. The shark, finding that
it was receiving no hurt, had become bolder. Several times it
nearly got me, but each time Otoo was there just the moment
before it was too late. Of course Otoo could have saved himself
any time. But he stuck by me.
"Good by, Charley, I'm finished," I just managed to gasp.
I knew that the end had come and that the next moment I should
throw up my hands and go down.
But Otoo laughed in my face, saying:
"I will show you a new trick. I will make that shark damn sick."
He dropped in behind me, where the shark was preparing to come at
me.
"A little more to the left," he next called out. "There is a line
there on the water. To the left, master, to the left."
I changed my course and struck out blindly. I was by that time
barely conscious. As my hand closed on the line I heard an
exclamation from on board. I turned and looked. There was no sign
of Otoo. The next instant he broke surface. Both hands were off
at the wrist, the stumps spouting blood.
"Otoo," he called softly, and I could see in his gaze the love
that thrilled in his voice. Then, and then only, at the very last
of all our years, he called me by that name.
"Good by, Otoo," he called.
Then he was dragged under, and I was hauled aboard, where I
fainted in the captain's arms.
And so passed Otoo, who saved me and made me a man, and who saved
me in the end. We met in the maw of a hurricane and parted in the
maw of a shark, with seventeen intervening years of comradeship
the like of which I dare to assert have never befallen two men,
the one brown and the other white. If Jehovah be from his high
place watching every sparrow fall, not least in His Kingdom shall
be Otoo, the one heathen of Bora Bora. And if there be no place
for him in that Kingdom, then will I have none of it.
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Vol. XXIII No.2 AUGUST 1910