Journey on the _Roberta_; the winged cockroaches; arrival at a Swiss
paradise in the valley of Oomoa.
I sailed from Tai-o-hae for an unknown port, carried by the schooner
_Roberta_, which had brought the white mare from Atuona and whose
skipper had bore so well the white banner of Joan in the procession
that did her honor. The _Roberta_ was the only vessel in those
waters and, sailing as she did at the whim of her captain and the
necessities of trade, none knew when she might return to Nuka-hiva,
so I could but accept the opportunity she offered of reaching the
southern group of islands again, and trust to fortune or favor to
return me to my own island of Hiva-oa.
The _Roberta_ lay low in the water, not so heavily sparred as the
_Morning Star_, or with her under-cut stern, but old and battered,
built for the business of a thief-catcher, and with a history as
scarred as her hull and as slippery as her decks. Was she not once
the _Herman_, and before that something else, and yet earlier
something else, built for the Russians to capture the artful
poachers of the Smoky Sea? And later a poacher herself, and still
later stealing men, a black-birder, seizing the unoffending natives
of these South Seas and selling them into slavery of mine or
plantation, of guano-heap and sickening alien clime. Her decks have
run blood, and heard the wailing of the gentle savage torn from his
beloved home and lashed or clubbed into submission by the superior
white. Name and color and rig had changed time and again, owners and
masters had gone to Davy Jones's locker; the old brass cannon on her
deck had raked the villages of the Marquesans and witnessed a
thousand deeds of murder and rapine.
I pulled myself aboard by a topping-lift, climbed upon the low
cabin-house, and jumped down to the tiny poop where Jerome Capriata
held the helm.
This Corsican, with his more than sixty years, most of them in these
waters, was a Marquesan in his intuitive skill in handling his
schooner in all weather, for knowing these islands by a glimpse of
rock or tree, for landing and taking cargo in all seas. Old and worn,
like the _Roberta_, he was known to all who ranged the southern ocean.
What romances he had lived and seen were hidden in his grizzled bosom,
for he said little, and nothing of himself.
The supercargo, Henry Lee, a Norwegian of twenty-five years, six of
which he had passed among the islands, set out the rum and wine and
a clay bottle of water. He introduced me to Père Olivier, a priest
of the mission, whose charge was in the island of Fatu-hiva. From
him I learned that the _Roberta_ was bound for Oomoa, a port of that
Island.
That I had not been given the vaguest idea what our first landfall
would be was indicative of the secrecy maintained by these traders
in the competition for copra. The supply being limited, often it is
the first vessel on the spot after a harvest that is able to buy it,
and captains of schooners guard their movements as an army its own
during a campaign. The traders trust one another as a cat with a
mouse trusts another cat.
The priest was sitting on a ledge below the taffrail, and I spoke to
him in Spanish, as I had heard it was his tongue. His _buenos dias_
in reply was hearty, and his voice soft and rich. A handsome man was
Padre Olivier, though in sad disorder. His black soutane, cut like
the woolen gown of our grandmothers, was soaking wet, and his low
rough shoes were muddy. A soiled bandana was about his head. His
finely chiseled features, benign and intelligent, were framed by a
snow-white beard, and his eyes, large and limpid, looked benevolence
itself. He was all affability, and eager to talk about everything in
the world.
The rain, which all day had been falling at intervals, began again,
and as the _Roberta_ entered the open sea, she began to kick up her
heels. Our conversation languished. When the supercargo called us
below for dinner, pride and not appetite made me go. The priest
answered with a groan. Padre Olivier was prostrate on the deck, his
noble head on a pillow, his one piece of luggage, embroidered with
the monogram of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the needlework of the nuns
of Atuona.
"I am seasick if I wade in the surf," said the priest, in mournful
jest.
The _Roberta's_ cabin was a dark and noisome hole, filled with
demijohns and merchandise, with two or three untidy bunks in corners,
the air soaked with the smells of thirty years of bilge-water,
sealskins, copra, and the cargoes of island traffic. Capriata, Harry
Lee, and I sat on boxes at a rough table, which we clutched as the
_Roberta_ pitched and rolled.
[Illustration: Near the Mission at Hanavave]
[Illustration: Starting from Hanavave for Oomoa]
When the ragged cook brought the first dish, unmistakably a cat
swimming in a liquid I could have sworn by my nose to be drippings
from an ammonia tank, I protested a lack of hunger for any food. My
ruse passed for the moment, but was exposed by a flock or swarm of
cockroaches, which, scenting a favorite food, suddenly sprang upon
the table and upon us, leaping and flying into the plates and
drawing Corsican curses from Capriata and Norwegian maledictions
from Lee. I did not wait to see them throwing the invaders from the
battlements of the table into the moat of salt water and spilt wine
below, but quickly, though feebly, climbed to the deck and laid
myself beside Père Olivier, nor could cries that the enemy had been
defeated and that "only a few" were flying about, summon me below
again.
Père Olivier and I stayed prone all night in alternate pelting rain
and flooding moonlight, as a fair wind bowled us along at six knots
an hour. Padre Olivier, between naps, recited his rosary to take his
mind from his woes. I could tell when he finished a decade by his
involuntary start as he began a new one. I had no such comfort as
beads and prayers, and the flight of those schooner griffins had
struck me in the solar plexus of imagination.
"Accept them as stations of the cross," said the priest. "This life
is but a step to heaven."
I replied with some comments indicating my belief that cockroaches
belonged on a still lower rung, and going in an opposite direction.
"I know those _blattes_, those _saligauds_," he said with sympathy.
"They are sent by Satan to provoke us to blasphemy. I never go below."
Those pests of insects can hardly be estimated at their true
dreadfulness by persons unacquainted with the infamous habits of the
nocturnal beetle of the tropics. Sluggish creatures in the temperate
zone, in warm countries they develop the power of flying, and
obstacles successfully interposed to their progress in countries
where they merely crawl are ineffectual here. They had entire
possession of the _Roberta_.
The supercargo, Lee, was not to be blamed, for he told me that once
he had taken time in port to capture by poisonous lures a number he
calculated at eight thousand, and that within a month those who had
escaped had repopulated the old schooner as before. Then he despaired,
and let them have sway. To sleep or eat among them was not possible
to me, and the voyage was a nightmare not relieved by an incident of
the second night.
Capriata, whose feet were calloused from going bare for years, awoke
from a deep slumber that had been aided by rum, to find that the
cockroaches in his berth had eaten through the half inch or more of
hard skin and had begun to devour his flesh. With blasphemous and
blood-chilling yells he bounded on deck, where he sat treating the
wounds and cursing unrestrainedly for some time before joining Père
Olivier and me in democratic slumber on the bare boards. Several
weeks later his feet had not recovered from their envenomed sores.
When eight bells sounded the hour of four, I got upon my feet and in
the mellow dawn saw a panorama of peak and precipice, dark and
threatening, the coast of Fatu-hiva and the entrance to Oomoa Bay,
the southernmost island of the Marquesas, and the harbor in which
the first white men who saw the islands anchored over three hundred
years ago.
Those Spaniards, on whose ships the cross was seen in cabin and
forecastle, on gun and halberd, murdered many Marquesans at Oomoa to
glut their taste for blood. The standard of death the white flew
then has never been lowered. Oomoa and Hanavave, the adjacent bay
and village, were resorts for whalers, who brought a plague of ills
that reduced the population of Fatu-hiva from many thousands to less
than three hundred. Consumption was first brought to the islands by
one of these whalers, and made such alarming inroads on the people
of Hanavave that most of the remainder forsook their homes and
crossed to the island of Tahuata, to escape the devil the white man
had let loose among them.
We sailed on very slowly after the mountains had robbed us of the
breeze, and when daylight succeeded the false dawn, we dropped our
mud hooks a thousand feet from the beach. On it we could see a
little wooden church and two dwellings, dwarfed to miniature by the
grim pinnacles of rock, crude replicas of the towers of the Alhambra,
slender minarets beside the giant cliffs, which were clothed with
creeping plants in places and in places bare as the sides of a
living volcano.
The fantastic and majestic assemblage of rock shapes on the shores
of Fatu-hiva appeared as if some Herculean sculptor with disordered
brain and mighty hand had labored to reproduce the fearful chimeras
of his dreams.
The priest and I, with the supercargo, went ashore in a boat at six
o'clock, and reached a beach as smooth and inviting as that of Atuona.
A canoe was waiting for Père Olivier; he climbed into it at once,
his black wet robe clinging to him, and called "_Adios!_" as his men
paddled rapidly for Hanavave, where he was to say mass and hear
confessions.
Lee and I took a road lined with a wall of rocks, and passing many
sorts of trees and plants entered an enclosure through a gate.
After a considerable walk through a thrifty plantation, we were in
front of a European house which gave signs of comfort and taste. At
the head of a flight of stairs on the broad veranda was a man in
gold-rimmed eye-glasses and a red breechclout. His well-shaped, bald
head and punctilious manner would have commanded attention in any
attire.
I was introduced to Monsieur François Grelet, a Swiss, who had lived
here for more than twenty years, and who during that time had never
been farther away than a few miles. Not even Tahiti had drawn him to
it. Since he arrived, at the age of twenty-four years, he had dwelt
contentedly in Oomoa.
After we had chatted for a few moments he invited me to be his guest.
I thought of the _Roberta_ and those two kinds of cockroaches, the
Blatta orientalis and the Blatta germanica, who raid by night and by
day respectively; I looked at Grelet's surroundings, and I accepted.
While the _Roberta_ gathered what copra she could and flitted, I
became a resident of Oomoa until such time as chance should give me
passage to my own island.
Twenty years before my host had planted the trees that embowered his
home. With the Swiss farmer's love of order, he had neglected
nothing to make neat, as nature had made beautiful, his surroundings.
"I learned agriculture and dairying on my father's farm in
Switzerland," said Grelet. "At school I learned more of their theory,
and when I had seen the gay cities of Europe, I went to the new
world to live. I was first at Pecos City, New Mexico, where I had
several hundred acres' of government land. I brought grape-vines
from Fresno, in California, but the water was insufficient for the
sterile soil, and I was forced to give up my land. From San
Francisco I sailed on the brig _Galilee_ for Tahiti. I have never
finished the journey, for when the brig arrived at Tai-o-hae I left
her and installed myself on the _Eunice_, a small trading-schooner,
and for a year I remained aboard her, visiting all the islands of
the Marquesas and becoming so attached to them that I bought land
and settled down here."
Grelet looked about him and smiled.
"It isn't bad, _hein_?"
It was not. From the little cove where his boat-house stood a road
swept windingly to his house through a garden of luxuriant verdure.
Mango and limes, breadfruit and cocoanut, _pomme de Cythère_, orange
and papaws, banana and alligator-pear, candlenut and chestnut,
mulberry and sandalwood, _tou_, the bastard ebony, and rosewood, the
rose-apple with purple tasseled flowers and delicious fruit, the
pistachio and the _badamier_, scores of shrubs and bushes and
magnificent tree-ferns, all on a tangled sward of white spider-lilies,
great, sweet-smelling plants, an acre of them, and with them other
ferns of many kinds, and mosses, the nodding _taro_ leaves and the
_ti_, the leaves which the Fatu-hivans make into girdles and
wreaths; all grew luxuriantly, friendly neighbors to the Swiss, set
there by him or volunteering for service in the generous way of the
tropics.
The lilies, oranges, and pandanus trees yielded food for the bees,
whose thatched homes stood thick on the hillside above the house.
Grelet was a skilled apiarist, and replenished his melliferous
flocks by wild swarms enticed from the forests. The honey he
strained and bottled, and it was sought of him by messengers from
all the islands.
Orchard and garden beyond the house gave us Valencia and Mandarin
oranges, lemons, _feis_, Guinea cherries, pineapples, Barbadoes
cherries, sugar-cane, sweet-potatoes, watermelons, cantaloups, Chile
peppers, and pumpkins. Watercress came fresh from the river.
Cows and goats browsed about the garden, but Grelet banned pigs to a
secluded valley to run wild. One of the cows was twenty-two years old,
but daily gave brimming buckets of milk for our refreshment. Beef
and fish, breadfruit and _taro_, good bread from American flour, rum,
and wine both red and white, with bowls of milk and green cocoanuts,
were always on the table, a box of cigars, packages of the veritable
Scaferlati Supérieur tobacco, and the Job papers, and a dozen pipes.
No king could fare more royally than this Swiss, who during twenty
years had never left the forgotten little island of Fatu-hiva.
His house, set in this bower of greenery, of flowers and perfumes,
was airy and neat, whitewashed both inside and out, with a broad
veranda painted black. Two bedrooms, a storeroom in which he sold
his merchandise, and a workroom, sufficed for all his needs. The
veranda was living-room and dining-room; raised ten feet from the
earth on breadfruit-tree pillars placed on stone, it provided a roof
for his forge, for his saddle-and-bridle room, and for the small
kitchen.
The ceilings in the house were of wood, but on the veranda he had
cleverly hung a canvas a foot below the roof. The air circulated
above it, bellying it out like a sail and making the atmosphere cool.
Under this was his dining-table, near a very handsome buffet, both
made by Grelet of the false ebony, for he was a good carpenter as he
was a crack boatsman, farmer, cowboy, and hunter. Here we sat over
pipe and cigarette after dinner, wine at our elbows, the garden
before us, and discussed many things.
Grelet had innumerable books in French and German, all the great
authors old and modern; he took the important reviews of Germany and
France, and several newspapers. He knew much more than I of history
past and present, of the happenings in the great world, art and
music and invention, finances and politics. He could name the
cabinets of Europe, the characters and records of their members, or
discuss the quality of Caruso's voice as compared with Jean de
Reszke's, though he had heard neither. Twenty-two years ago he had
left everything called civilization, he had never been out of the
Marquesas since that time; he lived in a lonely valley in which
there was no other man of his tastes and education, and he was
content.
"I have everything I want; I grow it or I make it. My horses and
cattle roam the hills; if I want meat, beef or goat or pig, I go or
I send a man to kill an animal and bring it to me. Fish are in the
river and the bay; there is honey in the hives; fruit and vegetables
in the garden, wood for my furniture, bark for the tanning of hides.
I cure the leather for saddles or chair-seats with the bark of the
rose-wood. Do you know why it is called rose-wood? I will show you.
Its bark has the odor of roses when freshly cut. Yes, I have all
that I want. What do I need from the great cities?"
He tamped down the tobacco in his pipe and puffed it meditatively.
"A man lives only a little while, _hein_? He should ask himself what
he wants from life. He should look at the world as it is. These
traders want money, buying and selling and cheating to get it. What
is money compared to life? Their life goes in buying and selling and
cheating. Life is made to be lived pleasantly. Me, I do what I want
to do with mine, and I do it in a pleasant place."
His pipe went out while he gazed at the garden murmurous in the
twilight. He knocked out the dottle, refilled the bowl and lighted
the tobacco.
"You should have seen this island when I came. These natives die too
fast. Ah, if I could only get labor, I could make this valley
produce enough for ten thousand people. I could load the ships with
copra and cotton and coffee."
He was twenty-two years and many thousands of miles from the great
cities of Europe, but he voiced the wail of the successful man the
world over. If he could get labor, he could turn it into building
his dreams to reality, into filling his ships with his goods for his
profit. But he had not the labor, for the fruits of a commercial
civilization had killed the islanders who had had their own dreams,
their own ships, and their own pleasures and profits in life.