Preface

I. A Leisurely Approach

II. In the Cloud of Islands

III. Marooned on Mataora

IV. The Land of Ahu Ahu

V. A Memory of Mauke

VI. Rutiaro

VII. A Debtor of Moy Ling

VIII. An Adventure in Solitude

IX. The Starry Threshold

X. Costly Hospitality

XI. His Mother's People

XII. In the Cook Group

XIII. At the House of Tari

XIV. In the Valley of Vaitia

XV. Tahitian Tales

XVI. Anchored off the Reef

XVII. The Englishman's Story

XVIII. Aboard the "Potii Ravarava"

*PREFACE*

The islands of the South Seas are places of an interest curiously

limited. The ethnological problem presented by the native is

interesting only to men of science, commerce is negligible, there is

little real agriculture, and no industry at all. There remains the

charm of living among people whose outlook upon life is basically

different from our own; of living with a simplicity foreign to anything

in one's experience, amid surroundings of a beauty unreal both in

actuality and in retrospect.

It is impossible to write of the islands as one would write of France or

Mexico or Japan--the accepted viewpoint of the traveler is not

applicable here. A simple attempt to impart information would prove

singularly monotonous, and one is driven to essay a different task; to

pry into the life of the mingling races, hoping to catch something of

its significance and atmosphere. In making such an attempt it is

necessary at times to dig deeper than would be consistent with good

taste if names were mentioned, and for this reason--in the case of

certain small islands--the ancient Polynesian names have been used

instead of those given on the chart. All of the islands described are

to be found in the Paumotu, Society, and Hervey groups.

J.N.H.

C.B.N.

TAHITI, _April 10, 1921_.

*Landfall*

[Illustration: Woodcut]

*Faery Lands

Of the South Seas*

*CHAPTER I*

*A Leisurely Approach*

I don't remember precisely when it was that Nordhoff and I first talked

of this adventure. The idea had grown upon us, one might say, with the

gradual splendor of a tropical sunrise. We were far removed from the

tropics at that time. We were, in fact, in Paris and had behind us the

greatest adventure we shall ever know. On the Place de la Concorde and

along the Champs-Elysees stood rank on rank of German cannon, silent

enough now, but still menacing, their muzzles tilted skyward at that

ominous slant one came to know so well. For a month we had seen them

so, children perched astride them on sunny afternoons, rolling pebbles

down their smooth black throats; veterans in soiled and faded horizon

blue, with the joy of this new quiet world bright on their faces,

opening breech-blocks, examining mechanism with the skill of long use at

such employment; with a kind of wondering hesitation in their movements

too, as though at any moment they expected those sinister monsters in

the fantastic colors of Harlequin to spring into life again.

Those were glorious days! Never again, I think, will there be such a

happy time as that in Paris. The boulevards were crowded, the tables

filled under every awning in front of the cafes; and yet there seemed to

be a deep silence everywhere, a silence intensified by the faint

rustling of autumn leaves and the tramping of innumerable feet. One

heard the sound of voices, of laughter, of singing, the subdued,

continuous rumble of traffic; but not a harsh cry, not a discordant

note. All the world seemed to be making holiday at the passing of a

solemn, happy festival.

Well, we had kept it with the others--Nordhoff and I--and have the

memory of it now, to be enjoyed over and over again as the years pass.

But there was danger that we might outstay the freshness of that period.

We were anxious to avoid that for the sake of our memories, if for

nothing else. While we were not yet free to order our movements as we

chose, we pretended that we were, and so one rainy evening in the

December following the armistice we decided to call that chapter of

experience closed and to go forward with the making of new plans.

For we meant to have further adventure of one kind or another--adventure

in the sense of unexpected incident rather than of hazardous activity.

That had been a settled thing between us for a long time. We had no

craving for excitement, but turned to plans for uneventful wanderings

which we had sketched in broad outlines months before. They had been

left, of necessity, vague; but now that any of them might be made

realities, now that we had leisure and a reasonable hope for the

fulfillment of plans--well, we had cause for a contentment which was

something deeper than happiness.

The best of it was that the close of the war found us with nothing to

prevent our doing pretty much as we chose. We might have had houses or

lands to anchor us, or promising careers to drag us back into the

bewilderments of modern civilization; but, fortunately or unfortunately,

there were none of these things. The chance of war had given us a

freedom far beyond anyone's desert. We had some misgivings about

accepting so splendid a gift, which the event sometimes proves to be the

most doubtful of benefits. Viewed in the light of our longings,

however, our capacity for it seemed incalculable, and so, by degrees, we

allowed our minds to turn to an old allurement--the South Pacific. It

became irresistible the more we talked of it, longing as we then were

for the solitude of islands. The objection to this choice was that the

groups of islands which we meant to visit have been endowed with an

atmosphere of pseudoromance displeasing to the fastidious mind.

But there was not the slightest chance of our being pioneers wherever we

might go. We could not hope to see with the eyes of the old explorers

who first came upon those far-off places. We must expect great changes.

But much as we might regret for the purposes of this adventure that we

had not been born two hundred years earlier, comfort was not wanting to

our situation. Had we been contemporaries and fellow-explorers with De

Quiros, or Cook, or Bougainville we should have missed the Great War.

We came within view of Tahiti one windless February morning--such a view

as Pedro Fernandez de Quiros himself must have had more than three

hundred years before. The sky to the west was still bright with stars

and but barely touched with the very ghost of light, giving it the

appearance of a great water, with a few clouds, like islands,

immeasurably distant. Half an hour later the islands themselves lay in

full sunlight, jagged peaks falling away in steep ridges to the sea.

Against sheer walls still in shadow in upland valleys one could see a

few terns; but there was no other movement, no sound, nor any sign of a

human habitation--nothing to shatter the illusion of primitive

loveliness. It was illusion, of course, but the reality was nothing like

so disappointing as I had feared it would be. Outwardly, two hundred

years of progress have wrought no great amount of havoc. There is a

little port, a busy place on boat days. But when the steamer has

emptied the town of her passengers, the silence flows down again from

the hills. Off the main harbor-front thoroughfare streets lie empty to

the eye for half hours at a time. Chinese merchants sit at the doorways

of their shops, waiting for trade. Now and then broad pools of sunlight

flow over the gayly flowered dresses of a group of native women,

scarcely to be seen otherwise as they move slowly through tunnels of

moist green gloom; or a small schooner, like a detail gifted with sudden

mobility in a picture, will back away from shore, cross the harbor,

bright with the reflections of clouds, and stand out to sea. In the

stillness of the noon siesta one hears at infrequent intervals the

resounding thud of ripe fruits as they tear their way to the ground

through barriers of foliage; and at night the melancholy thunder of the

surf on the reef outside the harbor, and the slithering of bare feet in

the moonlit streets.

Coming from a populous exile, doubly attracted for that reason by the

lure of unpeopled places, Nordhoff and I sought here an indication of

what we might find later elsewhere. The few thousands of natives,

whites, Orientals, half-castes, live in a charmed circle of low land

fronting the sea, conscious of their mountains, no doubt, but the whites

without curiosity, the Orientals without desire, the natives without

remembrance. There must have been a maze of trails in the old days,

leading down from the rich valleys. Now they are overgrown, untraveled,

lost. Since the old life is no more than a memory, one is glad for the

desolation, and grateful to the French lack of enterprise which surely

is the only way to account for it.

No, we couldn't have chosen a better jumping-off place for our

unpremeditated wanderings. We had the whole expanse of the Pacific

before us, or, better, around us, and there was, as I have said, a

harbor full of shipping. Boats with pleasing names, like the

_Curieuse_, the _Avarua_, the _Potii Ravarava_, the _Kaeo_, the

_Liane_--and self-confident, seagoing aspect. Some tidy and smart with

new paint and rigging; others with decks warped and sides blistered,

bottoms foul with the accumulation of a six months' cruise, reeking with

the warm odor of copra. Boats newly arrived from remote islands, with

crowds of bare-legged natives on their decks, their eyes beaming with

pleasure in anticipation of the delights of the great capital;

outward-bound to the Marquesas, the Australs, the Cooks, the Low

Archipelago, despite the fact that it was the middle of the hurricane

season. Among these latter there was one whose name was like a friendly

hail from Gloucester, or Portland, Maine. But it was not this which

attracted me to her, for all its assurance of Yankee hospitality. She

was off to the Paumotus, the Cloud of Islands, and a longing to go there

persisted in the face of a number of vague discouragements. There were

no practical difficulties. Easy enough to get passage by one schooner

or another. Paumotu copra is famous throughout the Southern Pacific.

There is a good deal of competition for it, boats racing one another for

cargo to the richer islands. The discouragements weren't so vague,

either, now that I think of them. They came from men kindly disposed,

interested in the islands in their own way. But their concerns were

purely commercial. I heard a deal of talk about copra--in kilos, in

tons, in shiploads; its market value in Papeete, in San Francisco, in

Marseilles, until the stately trees which gave it lost for a time their

old significance. Talk, too, of coconut oil and its richness in

butter-fat. Butter-fat! There was a word to bring one back to a

workaday world. To meet it at the outset of a long-dreamed-of journey

was disheartening. It followed me with the shrill insistence of a

creamery whistle, and I came very near giving up my plans altogether.

Nordhoff did change his. He said that it was silly, no doubt, but he

didn't like the idea of wandering, however lonely, in a cloud of

butter-fat islands. Therefore we said good-by, having arranged for a

rendezvous at a distant date, and set out on diverging paths.

I ought to leave Crichton, the English planter, out of this story

altogether. He doesn't belong in a commonplace record of travel such as

this one set out to be. He had very little to do with the voyage of the

_Caleb S. Winship_ among the atolls. But when I think of that vessel he

comes inevitably into mind. I see him sitting on the cabin deck with

his freckled brown hands clasped about his knees, looking across a

solitude of waters; and in my mental concept of the Low Archipelago he

is always somewhere in the background, standing on the sun-stricken reef

of a tiny atoll, his back to the sea, almost as much a part of the

lonely picture as the sea itself.

But one can't be wholly matter of fact in writing of these islands.

They are not real in the ordinary sense, but belong, rather, to the

realm of the imagination. And it is only in the imagination that you

can conceive of your ever having been there, once you are back again in

a well-plowed sea track. As for the people, whether native or alien, in

order to focus them in a world of reality it is necessary to remember

what they said or did; what they ate; what sort of clothing they wore.

Otherwise they elude you just as the islands do.

This point of view isn't, perhaps, commonly held among the few white men

who know them--captains of small schooners, managers of trading

companies, resident agents, whose interest, as I have said, is in what

they produce rather than in what they are. As one old skipper of my

acquaintance put it, in speaking of the atolls, "Take them by and large,

they are as much alike as the reef-points on that sail." Findlay's

_South Pacific Directory_, a supposedly competent authority, bears him

out in this: "They are all of similar character," adding, for emphasis,

no doubt, "and they exhibit very great sameness in their features." He

does, however, make certain slight concessions to what may be his own

private conception of their peculiar fascination, "This vast collection

of coral islands; one of the wonders of the Pacific," and later, in his

account of them, "The native name, 'Paumotu,' signifies a Cloud of

Islands, an expressive term." But he doesn't forget that he is writing

for practical-minded mariners who want facts and not fancies, however

truthful these may be to reality.

"Now, there's Tikehau," one of them said to me before I had been out

there. "That's a round atoll; and Rahiroa is sort o' square like, an'

so on. Some with passes and a good anchorage inside the lagoon. Others

you got to lay outside an' take your cargo off the reef in a small

boat."

But, to go back to Crichton, no one knew who he was or where he came

from. The manager of the Inter-Island Trading Company had lived in

Papeete for years and had never seen him until the day when he turned up

at the water front trundling a wheelbarrow loaded with four crates of

chickens and an odd lot of plantation tools and fishing tackle.

Following him were two native boys carrying a weather-blackened sea

chest, and an old woman with an enormous roll of bedding tied loosely in

a pandanus mat. That was about an hour before the schooner weighed

anchor. He stacked his gear neatly on the beach and then went on board,

asking for passage to Tanao.

"No, sir," the manager said, in telling about it afterward, "I never

laid eyes on him until that moment, and I don't know anyone who had.

Where's he been hiding himself? And why in the name of common sense

does he want to go to Tanao? There's no copra or pearl shell there--not

enough, anyway, to make it worth a man's while going after it."

Tino, the supercargo, was equally puzzled.

"I know Tanao from the sea," he said. "Passed it once coming down from

the Marquesas when I was supercargo of the _Tiare Tahiti_. We were

blown out of our course by a young hurricane. Didn't land. There's no

one on the God-forsaken place. Now here's this Englishman, or Dane, or

Norwegian--whatever he is--asking to be set down there with four crates

of chickens and an old Kanaka woman for company!" He shook his head

with a give-it-up expression, adding a moment later: "Well, you meet

some queer people down in this part of the world. I don't believe in

asking them their business, but it beats me sometimes, trying to figure

out what their business is."

He was not able to figure it out in this case. The old woman was

talkative; but the information he gathered from her only stimulated his

curiosity the more. She owned Tanao, an atom of an atoll miles out of

the beaten track even of the Paumotu schooners. There had never been

more than a score of people living on it, she said, and now there was no

one. Crichton had taken a long lease on it, and was going out there--as

he told me afterward--"to do my writing and thinking undisturbed."

I didn't know this until later, however. When I first heard him spoken

of we were only a few hours out from Papeete. We had left the harbor

with a light breeze, but at four in the afternoon the schooner was lying

about fifteen miles offshore, lazy jacks flapping against idle sails

with a mellow, crusty sound. After a good deal of fretting at the

fickleness of land breezes, talk had turned to Crichton, who was up

forward somewhere looking after his chickens. I didn't pay much

attention then to what was being said, for I had just had one of those

moments which come rarely enough in a lifetime, but which make up for

all the arid stretches of experience. They give no forewarning. There

comes a flood of happiness which brings tears to the eyes, the sense of

it is so keen. The sad part of it is that one refuses to accept it as a

moment. You say, "By Jove! I'm not going to let this pass!" and it has

gone as unaccountably as it came, half lost through foreboding of its

end. One prepares for it unknowingly, I suppose, through months,

sometimes years, of longing for something remote and beautiful--such as

these islands, for example. And when you have your islands, the moment

comes, sooner or later, and you see them in the light which never was,

as the saying goes, but which is the light of truth for all that. Brief

as it is, no one can say that the reward isn't ample. And it leaves an

afterglow in the memory, tempering regret, fading very slowly; which one

never wholly loses since it takes on the color of memory itself,

becoming a part of that dim world of worth-while illusions.

All of which has very little to do with what was passing aboard the

_Caleb S. Winship_, except that I was prevented from taking an immediate

interest in my fellow passengers; but this being my first near view of a

Polynesian trading schooner, the scene on deck had all the charm of the

unusual. Our skipper was a Paumotuan, a former pearl diver, and the

sailors--six of them, including the mate--Tahitian boys. In addition to

these there were Crichton, the planter; the supercargo, master of three

major languages and half a dozen Polynesian dialects; the manager of the

Inter-Island Trading Company; William, the engineer; Oro, the cabin boy;

a Chinese cook and two Chinese storekeepers--evidence of the leisurely,

persistent Oriental invasion of French Polynesia; thirty native

passengers; a horse in an improvised stall amidships; a monkey perched

in the mainmast rigging; Crichton's four crates of chickens, and five

pigs. In addition to the passengers and live stock, we were carrying

out a cargo of lumber, corrugated iron, flour, rice, sugar, canned

goods, clothing, and dry goods. Each of the native passengers brought

with him as much dunnage as an Englishman carries when he goes

traveling, and his food for the voyage--limes, oranges, bananas,

breadfruit, mangoes, canned meat. With all of this, a two months'

supply of gasoline for the engines, and fresh water and green coconuts

for both passengers and crew, we made a snug fit. Even the space under

the patient little native horse was used to stow his fodder for the long

journey.

The women, with one exception, were barefooted, bareheaded, but

otherwise conventionally dressed according to European or American

standards. This, I suppose, is an outrageous betrayal of a trade

secret, if one may say that writers of South Sea narratives belong to a

trade. Those seriously interested in the islands have, of course, known

the truth about them for years; but I believe it is still a popular

misconception that the women who inhabit them--no one seems to be

interested in the men--are even to this day half-savage,

unself-conscious creatures who display their charms to the general gaze

with naive indifference. Half-savage they may still be, but not

unself-conscious in the old sense. There are a few, to be sure, who, by

means of the bribes or the entreaties of itinerant journalists and

photographers, may be persuaded to disrobe before the camera for a

moment's space; and in this way the primitive legend is preserved to the

outside world. But, as I told Nordhoff, although we are itinerant, we

may as well be occasionally truthful and so gain, perhaps, a certain

amount of begrudged credit.

The one exception was a girl of about nineteen. She came on board

balancing unsteadily on high French heels, her brown legs darkening the

sheen of her white-cotton stockings. I had seen her the day before as

she passed below the veranda of Le Cercle Bougainville, the everyman's

club of the port. She walked with the same air of precarious balance,

and her broad-brimmed straw hat was set at the jaunty angle American

women affect.

"_Voila! L'indigene d'aujourd'hui_," my French companion said. Then,

breaking into English: "The old Polynesia is dead. Yes, one may say

that it is quite, quite dead." A memory he called it. "_Maintenant je

vous assure, monsieur, ce n'est rien que ca_." He rang changes on the

word, in a soft voice, with an air of enforced liveliness.

I was rather saddened at the time, picturing in my mind the scene on the

shore of that bright lagoon two hundred years ago, before any of these

people had been forced to accept the blessings of an alien civilization.

But the girl with the French heels wasn't a good illustration of

_l'indigene d'aujourd'hui_, even in the matter of surface changes. Most

of the women dress much more simply and sensibly, and it was amusing as

well as comforting to see how quickly she got rid of her unaccustomed

clothing once we had left the harbor. She disappeared behind a row of

water casks and came out a moment later in a dress of bright-red

material, barefooted and bareheaded like the rest of them. She had a

single hibiscus flower in her hair, which hung in a loose braid. I

don't believe she had ever worn shoes before. At any rate, as she sat

on a box, husking a coconut with her teeth, I could see her ankle

calluses glinting in the sun like disks of polished metal.

There was another girl sitting on the deck not far from me, with an

illustrated supplement of an American paper spread out before her. It

was an ancient copy. There were pictures of battlefields in France; of

soldiers marching down Fifth Avenue; a tennis tournament at Longwood;

aeroplanes in flight; motor races at Indianapolis; actresses, society

women, dressmakers' models making a display of corsets and other women's

equipment--pictures out of the welter of modern life. The little

Paumotuan girl appeared to be deeply interested. With her chin resting

on her hands and her elbows braced against her knees, she went from

picture to picture, but looked longest at those of the women who smiled

or posed self-consciously, or looked disdainfully at her from the pages.

I would have given a good deal to know what, if anything, was passing in

her mind. All at once she gave a little sigh, crumpled the paper into a

ball, and threw it at the monkey, who caught it and began tearing it in

pieces. She laughed and clapped her hands at this, called the attention

of the others, and in a moment men, women, and children had gathered

round, laughing and shouting, throwing bits of coconut shell, mango

seeds, banana skins, faster than the monkey could catch them.

The spontaneity of the merriment did one's heart good. Even the old men

and women laughed, not in the indulgent manner of parents or

grandparents, but as heartily as the children themselves. Unconscious

of the uproar, one of the Chinese merchants was lying on a thin mattress

against the cabin skylight. Although he was sound asleep, his teeth

were bare in a grin of ghastly suavity, and his left eye was partly

open, giving him an air of constant watchfulness. He was dreaming, I

suppose, of copra, of pearl shell--in kilos, tons, shiploads; of its

market value in Papeete, in San Francisco, in Marseilles, etc. Well,

the whites get their share of these commodities and the Chinamen theirs;

but the natives have a commodity of laughter which is vastly more

precious, and as long as they do have it one need not feel very sorry

for them.

Dusk gathered rapidly while I was thinking of these things. Heavy

clouds hung over Tahiti and Moorea, clinging about the shoulders of the

mountains whose peaks, rising above them, were still faintly visible

against the somber glory of the sky. They seemed islands of sheer

fancy, looked at from the sea. It would have been worth all that one

could give to have seen them then as De Quiros saw them, or Cook, or the

early missionaries; to have added to one's own sense of their majesty,

the solemn and more childlike awe of the old explorers, born of their

feeling of utter isolation from their kind with the presence of the

unknown on every hand. It is this feeling of awe rarely to be known by

travelers in these modern days, which pervades many of the old tales of

wanderings in remote places; which one senses in looking at old sketches

made from the decks of ships, of the shores of heathen lands.

The wind freshened, then came a deluge of cool water, blotting out the

rugged outlines against the sky. When it had passed it was deep night.

The forward deck was a huddle of shelters made of mats and bits of

canvas, but these were being taken down now that the rain had stopped.

I saw an old woman sitting near the companionway, her head in clear

relief against a shaft of yellow light. She was wet through and the

mild misfortune broke the ice between us, if one may use a metaphor very

inapt for the tropics. With her face half in shadow she reminded me of

the typical, Anglo-Saxon grandmother, although no grandmother of my

acquaintance would have sat unperturbed through that squall and

indifferent to her wet clothing afterward. She didn't appear to mind it

in the least, and now that it was over fished a paper of tobacco and a

strip of pandanus leaf out of the bundle on which she was sitting. She

rolled a pinch of tobacco in the leaf, twisting it into a tight

corkscrew, and lit it at the first attempt. Then she began talking in a

deep, resonant voice, and by a simplicity and an extraordinary lucidity

of gesture conveyed the greater part of her meaning even to an alien

like myself. It was not, alas! a typical accomplishment. I have not

since found others similarly gifted.

She was Crichton's landlady, the owner of Tanao. "Pupure" she called

him, because of his fair hair. I couldn't make out what she was driving

at for a little while. I understood at last that she wanted to know

about his family--where his father was, and his mother. I suppose she

thought I must know him, being a white man. They have queer ideas of

the size of our world. He was young. He must have people somewhere.

She, too, couldn't understand his wanting to go to Tanao; and I gathered

from her perplexity that he hadn't confided his purposes to her to any

extent. I couldn't enlighten her, of course, and at length, realizing

this, she wrapped herself in her mat to preserve the damp warmth of her

body, and dozed off to sleep.

I went below for a blanket and some dry clothing, for the night air was

uncomfortably cool after the rain. The cabin floor was strewn with

sleeping forms. Three children were curled up in a corner like puppies

in a box of sawdust. Little brown babies lay snugly bedded on bundles

of clothing, the mothers themselves sleeping in the careless, trustful

attitudes of children. The light from a swinging lamp threw leaping

shadows on the walls; flowed smoothly over brown arms and legs; was

caught in faint gleams in masses of loose black hair. And to complete

the picture and make it wholly true to fact, cockroaches of the enormous

winged variety ran with incredible speed over the oilcloth of the cabin

table, or made sudden flying sallies out of dark corners to the food

lockers and back again.

On deck no one was awake except Maui at the wheel. There was very little

unoccupied space, but I found a strip against the engine-room ventilator

where I could stretch out at full length. By that time the moon was up

and it was almost as light as day. I was not at all sleepy, and my

thoughts went forward to the Paumotus, the Cloud of Islands. We ought

to be making our first landfall within thirty-six hours. I didn't go

beyond that in anticipation, although in the mind's eye I had seen them

for months, first one island and then another. I had pictured them at

dawn, rising out of the sea against a far horizon; or at night, under

the wan light of stars, lonely beyond one's happiest dreams of

isolation; unspoiled, unchanged, because of their very remoteness.

Well, I was soon to know whether or not they fulfilled my hopeful

expectations.

Some one came aft, walking along the rail in his bare feet. It was Oro,

the cabin boy, who is taken with an enviable kind of madness at the full

of the moon. He looked carefully around to make sure that everyone was

asleep, then stood clasping and unclasping his hands in ecstasy,

carrying on a one-sided conversation in a confidential undertone. Now

and then he would smile and straightway become serious again, gazing

with rapt, listening attention at the world of pure light; nodding his

head at intervals in vigorous confirmation of some occult confidence.

At length his figure receded, blurred, took on the quality of the

moonlight, and I saw him no more.

[Illustration: Chapter I tailpiece]

*CHAPTER II*

*In the Cloud of Islands*

Ruau, the old Paumotuan woman, and the owner of Tanao, was the last of

her family. There were relatives by marriage, but none of them would

consent to live on so poor an atoll; and the original population, never

large, had diminished, through death and migration, until at last she

was left alone, living in her memories of other days, awed by the

companionship of spirits present to her in strange and terrible shapes.

At last she felt that she could endure it no longer; but it was many

months before the smoke of one of her signal fires was seen by a passing

schooner. She returned with it to Tahiti, and if she had been lonely

before, she was tenfold lonelier there, so far from the graves of her

husband and children. It was at this time that Crichton met her. He had

been living at Tahiti for more than a year, on the lookout for just such

an opportunity as Ruau offered him. Although only twenty-eight, he was

in the tenth year of his wanderings, and had almost despaired of finding

the place he had so long dreamed of and searched for. During that

period he had been moving slowly eastward, through Borneo, New Guinea,

the Solomons, the New Hebrides, the Tongas, the Cook Group. In some of

these islands the climate was too powerful an enemy for a white man to

contend with; in others there was no land available, or they lacked the

solitude he wanted. This latter embarrassment was the one he had met at

Tahiti. The fact is an illuminating commentary on his character. Most

men would find exceptional opportunities for seclusion there; not on the

seaboard but in the mountains; in the valleys winding deeply among them,

where no one goes from year's end to year's end. Even those leading out

to the sea are but little frequented in their upward reaches. But

Crichton was very exacting in his requirements in this respect. He was

one of those men who make few or no friends--one of those lonely spirits

without the ties or the kindly human associations which make life

pleasant to most of us. They wander the thinly peopled places of the

earth, interested in a large way at what they see from afar or faintly

hear, but looking on with quiet eyes; taking no part, being blessed or

cursed by nature with a love of silence, of the unchanging peace of

great solitudes. One reads of them now and then in fiction, and if they

live in fiction it is because of men like Crichton, their prototypes in

reality, seen for a moment as they slip apprehensively across some

by-path leading from the outside world.

He had a little place at Tahiti, a walk of two hours and a quarter, he

said, from the government offices in the port. He had to go there

sometimes to attend to the usual formalities, and I have no doubt that

he knew within ten seconds the length of the journey which would be a

very distasteful one to him. I can imagine his uneasiness at what he

saw and heard on those infrequent visits. An after-the-war renewal of

activity, talk of trade, development, progress, would startle him into a

waiting, listening attitude. Returning home, maps and charts would be

got out and plans made against the day when it would be necessary for

him to move on. He told me of his accidental meeting with Ruau, as he

called the old Paumotuan woman. It came only a few days after the

arrival from San Francisco of one of the monthly steamers. A crowd of

tourists--stop-over passengers of a day--had somehow discovered the dim

trail leading to his house. "They were much pleased with it," he said,

adding, with restraint: "They took a good many pictures. I was rather

annoyed at this, although, of course, I said nothing." No doubt they

made the usual remarks: "Charming! So quaint!" etc.

It was the last straw for Crichton. So he made another visit to the

government offices where he had his passport viseed. He meant to go to

Maketea, a high phosphate island which stands like a gateway at the

northwestern approach to the Low Archipelago. The phosphate would be

worked out in time and the place abandoned, as other islands of that

nature had been, to the seabirds. But on that same evening, while he

was having dinner at a Chinaman's shop in town, he overheard Ruau trying

to persuade some of her relatives to return with her to Tanao. He knew

of the island. He is one of the few men who would know of it. He had

often looked at it on his charts, being attracted by its isolated

position. The very place for him! And the old woman, he said, when she

learned that he wanted to go there, that he wanted to stay always--all

his life--gripped his hands in both of hers and held them, crying

softly, without saying anything more. The relatives made some

objections to the arrangement at first. But the island being remote,

poverty-stricken, haunted, they were soon persuaded to consent to a ten

years' lease, with the option of renewal. Crichton promised, of course,

to take care of Ruau as long as she lived, and at her death to bury her

decently beside her husband.

He proceeded at once with his altered plans. There were government

regulations to be complied with and these had taken some time. On the

day when he was at last free to start he learned that the _Caleb S.

Winship_ was about to sail on a three months' voyage in the Low

Archipelago. He had no time to ask for passage beforehand. He had to

chance the possibility of getting it at the last moment. It is not to

be supposed that either the manager of the Inter-Island Trading Company

or the supercargo of the _Winship_ would have consented to carry him to

such an out-of-the-way destination had they known his reason for wanting

to be set down there. It amuses me now to think of those two

hard-headed traders, men without a trace of sentiment, going one hundred

and fifty miles off their course merely to carry the least gregarious of

wanderers on the last leg of his long journey to an ideal solitude. It

was their curiosity which gained him his end. They believed he had some

secret purpose, some reason of purely material self-interest in view.

They had both seen Tanao from a distance and knew that it had never been

worth visiting either for pearl shell or copra. It is hard to

understand what miracle they believed might have taken place in the

meantime. During the voyage I often heard them talking about the atoll,

about Crichton--wondering, conjecturing, and always miles off the track.

It was plain that he was a good deal disturbed by their hints and

furtive questionings. He seemed to be afraid that mere talk about Tanao

on the part of an outsider might sully the purity of its loneliness. He

may have been a little selfish in his attitude, but if that is a fault

in a man of his temperament it is one easily forgiven. And what could

he have said to those traders? It was much better to keep silent and let

them believe what they liked.

It must not be thought that Crichton poured out his confidences to me

like a schoolgirl. On the contrary, he had a very likable reserve,

although a good half of it, I should say, was shyness. Then, too, he

had almost forgotten how to talk except in the native dialects of

several groups of widely scattered islands. In English he had a tendency

to prolong his vowels and to omit consonants, which gave his speech a

peculiar exotic sound. He made no advances for some time. Neither did

I. For more than three weeks we lived together on shipboard, went

ashore together at islands where we had put in for copra, and all that

while we did not exchange above two hundred words in conversation.

There was so little talk that I can remember the whole of it, almost

word for word. Once while we were walking on the outer beach at Raraka,

an atoll of thirty-five inhabitants, he said to me:

"I wish I had come out here years ago. They appeal to the imagination,

don't you think, all these islands?"

His volubility startled me. It was a shock to the senses, like the

crash of a coconut on a tin roof heard in the profound stillness of an

island night. There was my opportunity to throw off reserve and I lost

it through my surprise. I merely said, "Yes, very much." An hour later

we saw the captain, no larger than a penny doll, at the end of a long

vista of empty beach, beckoning us to come back. We went aboard without

having spoken again. It was an odd sort of relationship for two white

men thrown into close contact on a small trading schooner in the

loneliest ocean in the world, as Nordhoff put it. We were no more

companionable in the ordinary sense than a pair of hermit crabs.

But the need for talking drops away from men under such circumstances

and neither of us found the long silences embarrassing. The spell of

the islands was upon us both. I can understand Crichton's speaking of

their appeal to the imagination while we were in the midst of them; for

our presence there seemed an illusion--a dream more radiant than any

reality could be. In fact, my only hold upon reality during that voyage

was the _Caleb S. Winship_, and sometimes even that substantial old

vessel suffered sea changes; was metamorphosed in a moment; and it was

hard to believe that she was a boat built by men's hands. Often as she

lay at anchor in a lagoon of dreamlike beauty I paddled out from shore

in a small canoe, and, making fast under her stern, spent an afternoon

watching the upward play of the reflections from the water and the blue

shadows underneath, rippling out and vanishing in the light like flames

of fire. For me her homely, rugged New England name was a pleasant link

with the past. I liked to read the print of it. The word "Boston," her

old home port, was still faintly legible through a coat of white paint.

It brought to mind old memories and the faces of old friends, hard to

visualize in those surroundings without such practical help. Far below

lay the floor of the lagoon where all the rainbows of the world have

authentic end. The water was so clear, and the sunlight streamed

through it with so little loss in brightness that one seemed to be

suspended in mid-air above the forests of branching coral, the deep,

cool valleys, and the wide, sandy plains of that strange continent.

Crichton, I believe, was beyond the desire to keep in touch with the

world he had left so many years before. His experiences there may have

been bitter ones. At any rate, he never spoke of them, and I doubt if

he thought of them often. People had little interest for him, not even

those of the atolls which we visited. When on shore I usually found him

on the outer beaches, away from the villages which lie along the lagoon.

In most of the atolls the distance from beach to beach is only a few

hundred yards, but the ocean side is unfrequented and solitary. On calm

days when the tide begins to ebb the silence there is unearthly. The

wide shore, hot and glaring in the sun, stretches away as far as the eye

can reach, empty of life except for thousands of small hermit crabs

moving into the shade of the palms. They snap into their shells at your

approach and make fast the door as their houses fall, with a sound like

the tinkling of hailstones, among heaps of broken coral. We waded along

the shallows at low tide. When the wind was onshore and a heavy surf

breaking over the outer edge of the reef, we sat as close to it as we

could, watching the seas gathering far out, rising in sheer walls

fringed with wind-whipped spray, which seemed higher than the island

itself as they approached. It was a fascinating sight--the reef hidden

in many places in a perpetual smoke of sunlight-filtered mist, through

which the oncoming breakers could be seen dimly as they swept forward,

curled, and fell. But one could not avoid a feeling of uneasiness, of

insecurity, thinking of what had happened in those islands--most of them

only a meter or two above sea level--in the hurricanes of the past; and

of what would happen again at the coming of the next great storm.

We made landfalls at dawn, in midafternoon, late at night--saw the

islands in aspects of beauty exceeding one's strangest imaginings. We

penetrated farther and farther into a thousand-mile area of atoll-dotted

ocean, discharging our cargo of lumber and corrugated iron, rice and

flour and canned goods; taking on copra; carrying native passengers from

one place to another. Sometimes we were out of sight of land for several

days, beating into head winds under a slowly moving pageantry of clouds

which alone gave assurance of the rotundity of the earth. When at last

land appeared it seemed inaccessibly remote, at the summit of a long

slope of water which we would never be able to climb. Sometimes for as

long a period we skirted the shore line of a single atoll, the water

deepening and shoaling under our keel in splotches of vague or vivid

coloring. From a vantage point in the rigging one could see a segment of

a vast circle of islands strung at haphazard on a thread of reef which

showed a thin, clear line of changing red and white under the incessant

battering of the surf. Several times upon going ashore we found the

villages deserted, the inhabitants having gone to distant parts of the

atoll for the copra-making season. In one village we came upon an old

man too feeble to go with the others, apparently, sitting in the shade

playing a phonograph. He had but three records: "Away to the Forest,"

"The Dance of the Nymphs Schottische," and "Just a Song at Twilight."

The disks were as old as the instrument itself, no doubt, and the

needles so badly worn that one could barely hear the music above the

rasping of the mechanism. There was a groove on the vocal record where

the needle caught, and the singer, a woman with a high, quavery voice,

repeated the same phrase, "when the lights are low," over and over

again. I can still hear it, even at this distance of time and place,

and recall vividly to mind the silent houses, the wide, vacant street

bright with fugitive sunshine, the lagoon at the end of it mottled with

the shadows of clouds.

The sense of our remoteness grew upon me as the weeks and months passed.

Once, rounding a point of land, we came upon two schooners lying inside

the reef of a small atoll. One of them had left Papeete only a short

while before. Her skipper gave us a bundle of old newspapers. Glancing

through them that evening, I heard as in a dream the far-off clamor of

the outside world--the shrieking of whistles, the roar of trains, the

strident warnings of motors; but there was no reality, no allurement in

the sound. I saw men carrying trivial burdens with an air of immense

effort, of grotesque self-importance; scurrying in breathless haste on

useless errands; gorging food without relish; sleeping without

refreshment; taking their leisure without enjoyment; living without the

knowledge of content; dying without ever having lived. The pictures

which came to mind as I read were distorted, untrue, no doubt; for by

that time I was almost as much attracted by the lonely life of the

islands as my friend Crichton. My old feeling of restlessness was gone.

In its place had come a certitude of happiness, a sense of well-being

for which I can find no parallel this side of boyhood.

It was largely the result of living among people who are as permanently

happy, I believe, as it is possible for humankind to be. And the more

remote the island, the more slender the thread of communication with

civilization as we know it, the happier they were. It was not in my

imagination that I found this true, or that I had determined beforehand

to see only so much of their life as might be agreeable and pleasant to

me. On the contrary, if I had any bias at first, it was on the other

side. Disillusionment is a sad experience and I had no desire to lay

myself open to it. Therefore I listened willingly to the less favorable

stories of native character which the traders, and others who know them,

had to tell. But summed up dispassionately later, in the light of my

own observations, it seemed to me that the faults of character of which

they were accused were more like the natural shortcomings of children.

In many respects the Paumotuans, like other divisions of the Polynesian

family, are children who have never grown up, and one can't blame them

for a lack of the artificial virtues which come only with maturity.

They are without guile. They have little of the shrewdness or

craftiness of some primitive peoples. At least so it appeared to me,

making as careful a judgment of them as I could. I have often noticed

how like children they are in their amazing trustfulness, their

impulsive generosity, and in the intensity and briefness of their

emotions.

The more I saw of their life, the more desirable it seemed that they

might continue to escape any serious encroachments of European or

American civilization. They have no doctors, because illness is almost

unknown in their islands. Crime, insanity, feeble-mindedness, evils all

too common with us, are of such rare occurrence that one may say they do

not exist. It may be said, too, without overstatement, that their

community life very nearly approaches perfection. Every atoll is a

little world to itself with a population varying from twenty-five to

perhaps three hundred inhabitants. The chief, who is chosen informally

by the men, serves for a period of four years under the sanction of the

French government. He has very little to do in the exercise of his

authority, for the people govern themselves, are law-abiding without

law.

When I first learned that there are no schools throughout the islands I

thought the French guilty of criminal neglect, but later I reversed this

opinion. Alter all, why should they have schools? No education of ours

could make them more generous, more kindly disposed to one another, more

hospitable and courteous toward strangers, happier than they are now.

Certainly it could not make them less selfish, covetous, rapacious, for

most of them are as innocent of those vices as their own children. In a

few of the richer, more accessible islands they are slowly changing in

these respects, owing to the example set them by men of our own race.

In another fifty years, perhaps, they may have learned to believe that

material wealth is the only thing worth striving for. Then will come

pride in their possessions, envy of those who have greater, contempt and

suspicion for those who have less, and so an end to their happiness.

I had never before seen children growing up in a state of nature and I

made full use of the rare opportunity. I spent most of my time with

them; played on shore with them; went fishing and swimming with them;

and found in the experience something better than a renewal of boyhood

because of a keener sense of beauty, a more conscious, mature

appreciation of the happiness one has in the simplest kinds of

pleasures. Sometimes we started on our excursions at dawn; sometimes we

made them by moonlight. I became a collector of shells in order to give

some purpose to our expeditions along the reef. I couldn't have chosen

a better interest, for they knew all about shells, where and when to

find the best ones, and they could indulge their love of giving to a

limitless extent. In the afternoons we went swimming in the lagoon.

There I saw them at their best and happiest, in an element as necessary

and familiar to them as it is to their parents. It is always a pleasure

to watch children at play in the water, but those Paumotuan youngsters

with their natural grace at swimming and diving put one under an

enchantment. Many of the boys had water glasses and small spears of

their own and went far from shore, catching fish. They lay face down on

the surface of the water, swimming easily, with a great economy of

motion, turning their heads now and then for a breath of air; and when

they saw their prey they dived after it as skillfully as their fathers

do and with nearly as much success. Seen against the bright floor of

the lagoon, with swarms of brilliantly colored fish scattering before

them, they seemed doubtfully human, the children of some forsaken merman

rather than creatures who have need of air to breathe and solid earth to

stand on. If education is the suitable preparation for life, the

children of the atolls have it at its best and happiest without knowing

that it is education. They are skillful in the pursuits and learned in

the interests which touch their lives, and one can wish them no better

fortune than that they may remain in ignorance of those which do not.

Their parents, as I have said, are but children of mature stature, with

the same gift of frank, generous laughter, the same delight in the new

and strange. Very little is required to amuse them. I had a mandolin

which I used to take ashore with me at various atolls, after I had

become convinced that their enjoyment of my music was not feigned. At

first I was suspicious, for I had no illusions about my virtuosity, and

even when I thought of it in the most flattering way their pleasure

seemed out of all proportion to the quality of the performance. But

there was no doubting the genuineness of it. The whole village would

assemble to hear me play. I had a limited repertoire, but that seemed

to matter very little. They liked to hear the same tunes played over

and over again. I learned some of the old missionary hymns which they

knew: "From Greenland's Icy Mountains," "Oh, Happy Day," "We're Marching

to Zion," and others.

It was strange to find those songs, belonging, fortunately, to a bygone

period in English and American life, living still in that remote part of

the world, not because of anything universal in their appeal, but merely

because they had been carried there years ago by representatives of the

missionary societies. Many eccentric changes had been made in both the

rhythm and melody, greatly to the improvement of both, but no amount of

changing could make them other than what they are--the uncouth

expression of a narrow and ugly kind of religious sentiment. I don't

think the Paumotuans care much for them, either. They always seemed

glad to turn from them to their own songs, which have nothing either of

modern or old-time missionary feeling. A woman usually began the

singing, in a high-pitched, nasal, or throaty voice, which she modulated

in an extraordinary way. Immediately other women joined in, then several

men whose voices were of tenor quality, followed by other men in basses

and barytones, chanting in two or three tones which, for rhythm and

tone, quality, were like the beating of kettledrums. The weird blending

of harmonics was unlike anything I had ever heard before. There is

nothing in our music which even remotely resembles theirs, so that it is

impossible to describe the effect of the full chorus. Some of the songs

make a strong appeal to savage instincts. The less resolute of the

early missionaries, hearing them, must have thrown up their hands in

despair at the thought of the long, difficult task of conversion

awaiting them. But if there were any irresolute missionaries, they were

evidently overruled by their sterner brothers and sisters.

On nearly every island there is now a church, either Protestant or

Catholic. In the Protestant ones the native population practice the

only true faith, largely to the accompaniment of this old barbaric

music. Those unsightly little structures rock to the sound of exultant

choruses which ought never to be sung withindoors. The Paumotuans

themselves know best the natural setting for their songs--the lagoon

beach with a great fire of coconut husks blazing in the center of the

group of singers. I liked to hear them from a distance where I could

get their full effect; to look on from the schooner lying a few hundred

yards offshore. All the inhabitants of the village would be gathered

within the circle of the firelight, which brought their figures and the

white, straight stems of the coconut palms into clear relief against a

background of deep shadow. The singing continued far into the night, so

that I often fell asleep while listening, and heard the music dying

away, mingling at last with the interminable booming of the surf.

By degrees we worked slowly through the heart of the archipelago,

pursuing a general southeasterly course, the islands becoming more and

more scattered, until we had before us an expanse of ocean almost

unbroken to the coast of South America. But Tanao lay at the edge of

it, and at length, on a lowering April day, we set out on that last leg

of our outward journey. The _Caleb S. Winship_ lay very low in the

water. By that time she had a full cargo of copra, one hundred tons in

the hold and twelve, sacked, on deck. A portion of the deck cargo was

lost that same afternoon, during a gale of wind and rain which burst

upon us with fury and followed us with a seeming malignity of intent.

We ran before it, far out of our course, for three hours. To me the

weight of air was something incredible, an unusually vigorous flourish

of the departing hurricane season. Water spouted out of the scuppers in

a continuous stream, and loose articles were swept clear of the ship,

disappearing at once in a cloud of blinding rain. There was a fearful

racket in the cabin of rolling biscuit tins and smashing crockery. Then

an eight-hundred-pound safe broke loose and started to imitate Victor

Hugo's cannon. Luckily it hadn't much scope and no smooth runway, so

that it was soon brought to a halt by Ruau, the old Paumotuan woman, who

was the only one below at the time. She made an effective barricade of

copra sacks and bedding, dodging the plunging monster with an agility

surprising in a woman of sixty. But what I remember best was Tane, a

monkey belonging to one of the sailors, skidding along the cabin deck

until he was blown against the engine-room whistle, which rose just

clear of the forward end of it. He wrapped arms and legs around it in

his terror, opening the valve in some way, and the shrill blast rose

high above the mighty roar of wind, like the voice of man lifted with

awe-inspiring impudence in defiance of the mindless anger of nature.

The storm blew itself out toward sundown and the night fell clear--a

night for stars to make one wary of thought; but the moon rose about

nine, softening the pitiless distances, throwing a veil of mild light

across the black voids in the Milky Way, seen so clearly in those

latitudes. The schooner was riding a heavy swell, and, burdened as she

was, rose clumsily to it, sticking her nose into the slope of every sea.

Ruau was at her accustomed place against the cabin ventilator, unmindful

of the showers of spray, maintaining her position on the slanting deck

with the skill of three months' practice. The thought that I must soon

bid her good-by saddened me, for I knew there was small chance that I

should ever meet her again. I envied Crichton his opportunity for

friendship with that noble old woman, so proud of her race, so true to

her own beliefs, to her own way of living. Her type is none too common

among Polynesians in these days. One gets all too frequently an

impression of a consciousness of inferiority on their part, a sense of

shame because of their simple way of living as compared with ours. Ruau

was not guilty of it. She never could be, I think, under any

circumstances. I learned afterward of an attempt which had been made to

convert her to Christianity during her stay at Tahiti. Evidently she had

not been at all convinced by the priest's arguments, and when he made

some slighting remark about the ghosts and spirits which were so real to

her, she refused to listen any longer. Frightened though she was of

spirits, she was not willing that they should be ridiculed.

We sighted her atoll at dawn, such a dawn as one rarely sees outside the

tropics. The sky was overcast at a great height with a film of luminous

mist through which the sun shone wanly, throwing a sheen like a dust of

gold on the sea. Masses of slate-colored cloud billowed out from the

high canopy, overhanging a black fringe of land which lay just below the

line of the horizon. The atoll was elliptical in shape, about eight

miles long by five broad. There were seven widely separated islands on

the circle of reef and one small motu in the lagoon. We came into the

wind about a half mile offshore and put off in the whaleboat. The sea

was still running fairly high, and the roar of the surf came across the

water with a sound as soothing as the fall of spring rain; but it

increased in volume as we drew in until the ears were stunned by the

crash of tremendous combers which toppled and fell sheer, over the ledge

of the reef. It was by far the most dangerous-looking landing place we

had seen on the journey. There was no break in the reef; only a few

narrow indentations where the surf spouted up in clouds of spray.

Between the breaking of one sea and the gathering of the next, the water

poured back over a jagged wall of rock bared for an instant to an

appalling depth. Only a native crew could have managed that landing.

We rode comber after comber, the sailors backing on their oars, awaiting

the word of the boat steerer, who stood with his feet braced on the

gunwales, his head turned over his shoulder, watching the following

seas. All at once he began shouting at the top of his voice. I looked

back in time to see a wall of water, on the point of breaking, rising

high above us. It fell just after it passed under us, and we were

carried forward across the edge of the reef, through the inner shallows

to the beach.

The two traders started off at once on a tour of inspection and we saw

nothing more of them until late in the evening. Meanwhile I went with

Ruau and Crichton across the island to the lagoon beach where her house

was. As in most of the atolls, the ground was nearly free from

undergrowth, the soil affording nourishment only to the trees and a few

hardy shrubs. Coconuts and dead fronds were scattered everywhere. A

few half-wild pigs, feeding on the shoots of sprouted nuts, gazed up

with an odd air of incredulity, of amazement as we approached, then

galloped off at top speed and disappeared far in the distance. Ruau

stopped when we were about halfway across and held up her hand for

silence. A bird was singing somewhere, a melodious varied song like

that of the hermit thrush. I had heard it before and had once seen the

bird, a shy, solitary little thing, one of the few species of land birds

found on the atolls.

While we were standing there, listening to the faint music, Crichton

took me by the arm. He said nothing, and in a moment withdrew his hand.

I was deeply moved by that manifestation of friendliness, an unusual one

for him to make. He had some unaccountable defect in his character

which kept him aloof from any relationship approaching real intimacy. I

believe he was constantly aware of it, that he had made many futile

attempts to overcome it. It may have been that which first set him on

his wanderings, now happily at an end. It was plain to me the moment we

set foot on shore that he would have to seek no farther for asylum.

Tanao is one of the undoubted ends of the earth. No one would ever

disturb him there. He himself was not so sure of this. Once, I

remember, when we were looking at the place on the chart, he spoke of

the island of Pitcairn, the old-time refuge of the Bounty mutineers.

Before the opening of the Panama Canal it had been as far removed from

contact with the outside world as an island could be. Now it lies not

far off the route through the Canal to New Zealand and is visited from

time to time by the crews of tramp steamers and schooners. Tanao,

however, is much farther to the north, and there is very slight

possibility that its empty horizons will ever be stained by a smudge of

smoke. As for an actual visit, one glance at the reef through the

binoculars would convince any skipper of the folly of the attempt.

Even our own crew of natives, skilled at such hazardous work, came to

grief in their second passage over it. They had gone out to the

schooner for supplies Crichton had ordered--a few sacks of flour, some

canned goods, and kerosene oil; in coming back the boat had been swept,

broadside, against a ledge of rock. It stuck there, just at the edge of

the reef, and the sailors jumped out with the line before the next wave

came, capsizing the boat and carrying it inshore, bottom up. All the

supplies were swept into deep water by the backwash and lost. There had

been a similar accident at the other atoll--flour and rice brought so

many thousands of miles having been spoiled within a few yards of their

destination. I remember the natives plunging into the water at great

risk to themselves to save a few sacks of soggy paste in the hope that a

little of the flour in the center might still be dry; and a Chinese

storekeeper, to whom it was consigned, standing on the shore, wringing

his hands in dumb grief. It was the first time I had ever seen a

Chinaman make any display of emotion, and the sight brought home to me a

conception of the tragic nature of such accidents to the inhabitants of

those distant islands.

Crichton took his own loss calmly, concealing whatever disappointment he

may have felt. Ruau was not at all concerned about it, and, while we

were making an examination of the house, went out on the lagoon in a

canoe and caught more than enough fish for supper. Then we found that

all of our matches had been spoiled by sea water, so we could make no

fire. Judging by the way Crichton brightened up at his discovery, one

would have thought the loss a piece of luck. He set to work at once to

make an apparatus for kindling fire, but before it was finished Ruau had

the fish cleaned and spread out on a coverlet of green leaves. We ate

them raw, dipping them first into a sauce of coconut milk, and for

dessert had a salad made of the heart of a tree. I don't remember ever

having eaten with heartier appetite, but at the same time I couldn't

imagine myself enjoying an unrelieved diet of coconuts and fish for a

period of ten years--not for so long as a year, in fact. Crichton,

however, was used to it, and Ruau had never known any other except

during her three months' stay at Tahiti, where she had eaten strange hot

food which had not agreed with her at all, she said.

Dusk came on as we sat over our meal. Ruau sat with her hands on her

knees, leaning back against a tree, talking to Crichton. I understood

nothing of what she was saying, but it was a pleasure merely to listen

to the music of her voice. It was a little below the usual register of

women's voices, strong and clear, but softer even than those of the

Tahitians, and so flexible that I could follow every change in mood. She

was telling Crichton of the tupapaku of her atoll which she dreaded

most, although she knew that it was the spirit of one of her own sons.

It appeared in the form of a dog with legs as long and thick as the stem

of a full-grown coconut tree, and a body proportionally huge. It could

have picked up her house as an ordinary dog would a basket. Once it had

stepped lightly over it without offering to harm her in any way. Her

last son had been drowned while fishing by moonlight on the reef outside

the next island, which lay about two miles distant across the eastern

end of the lagoon. She had seen the dog three times since his death,

and always at the same phase of the moon. Twice she had come upon it

lying at full length on the lagoon beach, its enormous head resting on

its paws. She was so badly frightened, she said, that she fell to the

ground, incapable of further movement; sick at heart, too, at the

thought that the spirit of the bravest and strongest of all her sons

must appear to her in that shape. It was clear that she was recognized,

for each time the dog began beating its tail on the ground as soon as it

saw her. Then it got up, yawned and stretched, took a long drink of

salt water, and started at a lope up the beach. She could see it very

plainly in the bright moonlight. Soon it broke into a run, going faster

and faster, gathering tremendous speed by the time it reached the other

end of the island. From there it made a flying spring, and she last saw

it as it passed, high in air, across the face of the moon, its head

outstretched, its legs doubled close under its body. She believed that

it crossed the two-mile gap of water which separated the islands in one

gigantic leap.

That is the whole of the story as Crichton translated it for me,

although there must have been other details, for Ruau gave her account

of it at great length. Her earnestness of manner was very convincing;

and left no doubt in my mind of the realness to her of the apparition.

As for myself, if I could have seen ghosts anywhere it would have been

at Tanao. Late that night, walking alone on the lagoon beach, I found

that I was keeping an uneasy watch behind me. The distant thunder of

the surf sounded at times like a wild galloping on the hard sand, and

the gentle slapping of little waves near by like the lapping tongue of

the ghostly dog having its fill of sea water.

We left Tanao with a fair wind the following afternoon, having been

delayed in getting away because of the damaged whaleboat, which had to

be repaired on shore. Tino, the supercargo, insisted on pushing off at

once, the moment the work was finished. Crichton and Ruau were on the

other beach at the time, so that I had no opportunity to say good-by;

but as we were getting under way I saw him emerge from the deep shadow

and stand for a moment, his hand shading his eyes, looking out toward

the schooner. I waved, but evidently he didn't see me, for there was no

response. Then he turned, walked slowly up the beach, and disappeared

among the trees. For three hours I watched the atoll dwindling and

blurring until at sunset it was lost to view under the rim of the

southern horizon. Looking back across that space of empty ocean, I

imagined that I could still see it dropping farther and farther away,

down the reverse slope of a smooth curve of water, as though it were

vanishing for all time beyond the knowledge and the concern of men.

My first packet of letters from Nordhoff was brought by the skipper of

the schooner _Alouette_. He had been carrying it about for many weeks,

and had it in the first place from the supercargo of another vessel, met

at Rurutu, in the Austral group. The envelope, tattered and

weather-stained, spoke of its long journey in search of me.

Before separating at Papeete we had arranged for a rendezvous, but at

that time we still possessed American ideas of punctuality and

well-ordered travel. Now we know something of the casual movements of

trading schooners and have learned to regard the timely arrival of a

letter as an event touching on the miraculous--the keeping of a

rendezvous, a possibility too remote for consideration. One hears

curious tales, in this part of the world, of the outcome of such

temporary leave-takings as ours was meant to be--husbands seeking their

wives and wives their husbands; families scattered among these fragments

of land and striving for many months to reunite.

I witnessed, not long ago, the sequel of one of these unsuccessful

quests. A native from a distant group of islands set out for one of the

atolls of the Low Archipelago, the home of his sweetheart. Arrangements

for the marriage had been made long before, but letters had gone astray,

and upon his arrival the young man found that the family of his

prospective father-in-law had gone to another atoll for the diving

season. With no means of following, he submitted to the inevitable, and

married another girl. Months later, the woman of his first choice

returned with her second choice of a husband; and the former lovers met,

for the young man had not yet been able to return to his own island.

Neither made any question of the other's decision--life is too short;

and from the native point of view, it is foolish to spend it in

wanderings which, at the last, may never fulfill their purpose.

Nevertheless, I shall make a search for Nordhoff--a leisurely search,

with some expectation of finding him. Our islands, like those of Mr.

Conrad's enchanted Heyst, are bounded by a circle two thousand or more

miles across, and it is likely that neither of us will ever succeed in

breaking through to the outside world--if, indeed, there is an outside

world. I am beginning to doubt this, for the enchantment is at work.

As for Nordhoff, his letters, which follow, may speak for themselves.

*Eaters of the Lotos*

[Illustration: Woodcut]

*CHAPTER III*

*Marooned on Mataora*

The sun was low when the _Faaite_ steamed out through the pass and

headed for the Cook group, six hundred miles west and south. Dark

clouds hung over Raiatea--Rangi Atea of Maori tradition, the Land of the

Bright Heavens--but the level sunlight still illuminated the hillsides

of Tahaa, the lovely sister island, protected by the same great oval

reef. Far off to the north, the peak of Bora Bora towered abruptly from

the sea.

It was not yet the season of the Trades, and the northeast breeze which

followed us brought a sweltering heat, intolerable anywhere but on deck.

Worthington was sitting beside me--a lean man, darkly-tanned, with very

bright blue eyes. His feet were bare; he wore a singlet, trousers of

white drill, and a Manihiki hat--beautifully plaited of bleached

pandanus leaf--a hat not to be bought with money. The dinner gong

sounded.

"I'm not going down," he remarked; "too hot below. I had something to

eat at Uturoa. How about you?"

I shook my head--it needed more than a normal appetite to drive one to

the dining saloon. Banks of squall cloud, shading from gray to an

unwholesome violet, were gathering along the horizon, and the air was so

heavy that one inhaled it with an effort.

"This is the worst month of the hurricane season," Worthington went on;

"it was just such an evening as this, last year, that the waterspout

nearly got us--the night we sighted Mataora. I was five months up

there, you know--marooned when Johnson lost the old _Hatutu_.

"I was pretty well done up last year, and when I heard that the _Hatutu_

was at Avarua I decided to take a vacation and go for a six weeks'

cruise with Johnson. Ordinarily he would have been laid up in Papeete

until after the equinox, but the company had sent for him to make a

special trip to Penrhyn. We had a wretched passage north--a succession

of squalls and broiling calms. The schooner was in bad shape, anyway:

rotten sails, rigging falling to pieces, and six inches of grass on her

bottom. On a hot day she had a bouquet all her own--the sun distilled

from her a blend of cockroaches and mildewed copra that didn't smell

like a rose garden. On the thirtieth day the skipper told me we were

two hundred miles from Penrhyn and so close to Mataora that we might

sight the palm tops. I'd heard a lot about the place (it has an English

name on the chart)--how isolated it was, what a pleasant crowd the

natives were, and how it was the best place in the Pacific to see

old-fashioned island life.

"We had been working to windward against a light, northerly breeze, but

the wind began to drop at noon, and by three o'clock it was glassy calm.

There was a wicked-looking mass of clouds moving toward us from the

west, but the glass was high and Johnson said we were in for nothing

worse than a squall. As the clouds drew near I could see that they had

a sort of purplish-black heart, broad at the top, pointed at the bottom,

and dropping gradually toward the water. There was something queer

about it; the mate was pointing, and Johnson's Kanakas were all standing

up. Suddenly I heard a rushing sound, like a heavy squall passing

through the bush; the point of the funnel had touched the sea three or

four hundred yards away from us--a waterspout! There wasn't a breath of

air, and the _Hatutu_ had no engine. It was moving straight for us, so

slowly that I could watch every detail of its formation. The boys slid

our boat overboard; the mate sang out something about all hands being

ready to leave the schooner.

"I've heard of waterspouts ever since I was a youngster, but I never

expected to see one as close as we did that day. As the point of cloud

dropped toward the sea it was ragged and ill defined; but when it

touched the water and the noise began I saw its shape change and its

outlines grow hard. It was now a thin column, four or five feet in

diameter, rising a couple of hundred feet before it swelled in the form

of a flat cone, to join the clouds above. Curiously enough, it was not

perpendicular, but had a decided sagging curve. Nearer and nearer it

came, until I could make out the great swirling hole at its base, and

see the vitreous look of this column of solid water, revolving at

amazing speed. It hadn't the misty edges of a waterfall. The outside

was sharply defined as the walls of a tumbler. I wondered what would

happen when it struck the _Hatutu_. The mate was shouting again, but

just then the skipper pushed a rifle into my hands. 'Damned if I leave

the old hooker,' he swore. 'Shoot into the thing--maybe we can break it

up.' And, believe me or not, we did break it up.

"It didn't come down with a crash, as one might have expected. When we

had pumped about twenty shots into it, and it was not more than fifty

yards away, it began to dwindle. The column of water became smaller and

drew itself out to nothing; the rushing noise ceased; the hole in the

sea disappeared in a lazy eddy; the dark funnel rose and blended with

the clouds above.

"A fine southeast breeze sprang up as the clouds dispersed, and we were

reaching away for Penrhyn when a boy up forward gave a shout and pointed

to the northwest. Sure enough there was a faint line on the

horizon--the palms of Mataora. A sudden idea came to me. I was fed up

with the schooner. Why not ask to be put ashore and picked up on the

_Hatutu's_ return from Penrhyn? She would be back in a fortnight, and

it was only a few miles out of her way to drop me and pick me up.

"Johnson is a good fellow; his answer to my proposition was to change

his course at once and slack away for the land twelve miles to leeward.

'You'll have a great time,' he said; 'I wish I were going with you. Old

Tari will put you up--I'll give you a word to him. Take along two or

three bags of flour and a few presents for the women.'

"At five o'clock we were off the principal village, with canoes all

about us and more coming out through the surf. The men were a fine,

brawny lot, joking with the crew, and eager for news and small trade. I

lowered my box, some flour, tobacco, and a few bolts of calico, into the

largest canoe, and said good-by to Johnson.

"It was nearly a year before I saw him again; as you know, he lost the

_Hatutu_ on Flying Venus Shoal. They made Penrhyn in the boat and got a

passage to Tahiti two months later. Everyone knew I was on Mataora, but

it was five months before a schooner could come to take me off.

"There is no pass into the lagoon. As we drew near the shore I saw that

the easy, deceptive swell reared up to form an ugly surf ahead of us.

At one point, where a crowd of people was gathered, there was a large

irregular fissure in the coral, broad and deep enough to admit the

passage of a small boat, and filled with rushing water each time a

breaker crashed on the reef. My two paddlers stopped opposite this

fissure and just outside the surf, watching over their shoulders for the

right wave. They let four or five good-sized ones pass, backing water

gently with their paddles; but at last a proper one came, rearing and

tossing its crest till I thought it would break before it reached us.

My men dug their paddles into the water, shouting exultantly as we

darted forward. The shouts were echoed on shore. By Jove! it was a

thriller! Tilting just on the break of the wave, we flew in between

jagged walls of coral, up the fissure, around a turn--and before the

water began to rush back, a dozen men and women had plunged in waist

deep to seize the canoe.

"Mataora is made up of a chain of low islands--all densely covered with

coconut palms--strung together in a rough oval to inclose a lagoon five

miles by three. Though there is no pass, the surf at high tide breaches

over the gaps between the islands. The largest island is only a mile

and a half long, and none of them are more than half a mile across.

Dotted about the surface of the lagoon are a number of motu--tiny

islets--each with its flock of sea fowl, its clump of palms, and shining

beach of coral sand. Set in a lonely stretch of the Pacific, the place

is almost cut off from communication with the outside world; twice or

three times in the course of a year a trading schooner calls to leave

supplies and take off copra. Undisturbed by contact with civilization,

the life of Mataora flows on--simple, placid, and agreeably

monotonous--very little changed, I fancy, since the old days. It is

true that they have a native missionary, and use calico, flour, and

tobacco when they can get them; but these are minor things. The great

events in their annals are the outrage of the Peruvian slavers in

eighteen sixty-two, when many of the people were carried off to labor

and die in the Chinchas Islands, and the hurricane of nineteen thirteen.

"After presenting myself to the missionary and the chief I was escorted

by a crowd of youngsters to the lagoon side of the island, where Tairi

lived, in a spot cooled by the trade wind and pleasantly shaded by

coconuts. The old chap was a warm friend of Johnson's and made me

welcome; I soon arranged to put up with him during my stay on the

island. His house, like all the Mataora houses, was worth a bit of

study.

"Pandanus logs, five or six inches in diameter and set four feet apart,

made the uprights. On each side of these logs, and extending from top

to bottom a groove was cut. Thin laths, split from the aerial roots of

the pandanus, were set horizontally into the grooves, making a wall

which permitted the free circulation of air. At the windward end of the

house, a large shutter of the same material was hung on hinges of bark;

on warm days it could be opened to admit the breeze. The plates and

rafters were made of the trunks of old coconut palms--a beautiful hard

wood which blackens with age and can be polished like mahogany. The

roof was thatched with kakao--strips of wood over which were doubled

selected leaves of pandanus, six feet long and four inches across. The

kakao are laid on like shingles, so deeply overlapped that only six

inches of each is exposed, and the result is a cool and perfectly

water-tight roof which lasts for years.

"The floor of Tari's house was of fine white gravel, covered with mats.

A bed of mats, a few odds and ends of fishing gear, and a Bible in the

Rarotongan language made up the furniture. The old man had been a pearl

diver for many years; he knew all the lagoons of this part of the

Pacific, and could give the history of every large pearl discovered in

these waters. Twenty fathoms he considered an ordinary depth for the

naked divers--twenty-five, the limit. One day he went too deep, and

since then he had been a cripple with paralyzed legs, dependent for care

on the kindly people of his island. He busied himself in carving out

models of the ancient Polynesian sailing canoes, beautifully shaped and

polished, inlaid with shell, and provided with sails of mother-of-pearl.

Now and then he presented a canoe to the captain of a trading schooner

visiting the island, and received in return a bag of flour or a few

sticks of tobacco.

"I had some interesting yarns with Tari--I speak Rarotongan, and the

Mataora language is a good deal the same. They have three extra

consonants, by the way--the f, l, and h. What a puzzle these island

dialects are!

"Tairi told me a lot about pearl fishing. The people had divided their

lagoon into three sections, one of which was fished each year. In this

way each section got a two years' rest. The shell is the object of the

diving--pearls are a secondary issue. The divers are not much afraid of

sharks, but dread the tonu and the big conger eel. Some years before,

when Tari was resting in a boat after a spell under water, one of his

companions failed to return to the surface. Looking through his water

glass, he saw a great tonu lying on the bottom, sixty feet beneath

him--the legs of his comrade hanging from its jaws. Fancy the ugly

brute, ten feet long and all head, like an overgrown rock cod, with a

man in his mouth. Tairi and several others seized their spears and were

over the side next moment; they killed the tonu, but too late to save

the life of their companion.

"Conger eels grow to enormous size in the pearl lagoons, and the divers

keep a close watch for them. They lie in holes and crevices of the coral

and dart out their heads to seize a passing fish, or the wrist of a

diver stooping and intent on his task. When the conger's jaws close on

wrist or ankle, the diver needs a cool head; no amount of struggling

will pull the eel from his hole. One must wait quietly, Tairi told me,

until the conger relaxes his jaws preparatory to taking a better grip.

Then a quick wrench, and one is free.

"On an atoll like Mataora, where the food supply is limited to fish and

coconuts, with a chicken or a piece of pork as an occasional treat,

fishing plays a large part in the life of the people. The men were all

expert fishermen, and used a variety of ingenious methods to catch the

different kinds of fish. Tairi, of course, was no longer able to go

out; but a friend of his--an old fellow named Tamatoa--used to take me

with him. He was a fine specimen--six feet tall, muscular and active as

a boy, with clear eyes and thick gray hair. One day he proposed trying

for koperu, a small variety of mackerel.

"The settlement is on the lee side of the island, where a coral shoal

runs out half a mile to sea, covered with twenty to forty fathoms of

water. It was early in the morning--a dead calm--when we launched the

big canoe and slipped out through the surf. About a quarter of a mile

offshore Tamatoa asked me to hold the canoe stationary while he went

about his fishing. Fastening a twenty-foot rope to the thwart, he made a

noose at the other end and passed it under his arms. Then he took a ripe

coconut, split it, and gouged out the meat with his knife. With the

white pulp in one hand, he slipped overboard and swam down as far as the

rope would let him. Through my water glass I watched him put pieces of

coconut into his mouth and blow out clouds of the finely chewed stuff,

which drifted and eddied about him in the gentle current. He seemed to

stay under indefinitely--the lungs of a pearl diver are wonderful

things! Now and then he came to the surface for a fresh supply of chum,

and finally--at first in twos and threes, and then in shoals--the koperu

began to appear from the depths. Little by little he enticed them close

to the surface, until they swam all about him fearlessly, gobbling the

morsels of coconut. At last the old man reached up for his fishing

tackle--an eighteen-inch twig, with a bit of doubled sewing cotton and a

tiny barbless hook. He baited the hook with a particle of coconut and

dangled it under the nose of the nearest koperu. While he hung on the

shortened rope, just beneath the surface, his right arm broke water in a

series of jerks, and each time it rose a fish tumbled into the canoe

until they lay in the bottom by dozens.