"Though the people of Mataora made sport of their work, they had plenty

of leisure for other things. In the evening, when the tasks of the day

had been completed by lighting the lamps in the roofed-over sleeping

places of the dead, the young people loved to gather for a session of

_akatu talanga_--story telling. They met in some one's house or brought

mats to spread in the bright moonlight outside; and while the others lay

about, intent on the tale, one after another related the adventures of

some Polynesian hero or the loves of some legendary island

princess--strange fragments from the old days, full of specters and

devils and monstrous heathen gods. There was a girl named Porima who

told her stories marvelously well--a tall youngster of seventeen, with a

dash of off-island blood; Hawaiian, I think. She was an artist in her

way; one could imagine in her the pioneer of a literature to come. Her

broad forehead, the masses of black hair which from time to time, with

an impatient gesture, she shook back over her shoulders, and the

slumberous eyes, with a suggestion of hypnotic power, made her a person

not easily forgotten. Although she had told them many times, Porima's

stories never failed to hold her audience; the whispering ceased when

she began, and every head turned toward where she sat, her hands

continually in motion, her voice rising in excitement, or dying away to

a murmur, while the listeners held their breath. As the hours passed,

both audience and performers used to grow weary and drop off to sleep,

one by one; finally a rooster crowed and one awoke with a start to

realize that it was day.

"One evening, at a story telling, I heard a shout from the beach and

remembered that I had been invited to go after flying fish. A dozen

canoes were putting out through the surf, each manned by four paddlers.

I made a fourth in the last canoe; we shot out of the opening with a

receding wave, paddled desperately through the surf, and a moment later

were rocking gently beyond the breakers. The canoes were formed into a

rough line; each stern-man lit a torch of coconut leaves bound with

bark, and a man forward took his place standing--net in hand. The net

is like a shallow landing net, set on a haft of stiff bamboo, and can be

handled only after years of unconscious training. My position, paddling

amidships, enabled me to watch how the net was managed--one doesn't

often see such an exhibition of dexterity and strength. The art

consists in clapping the net over the fish just at the moment when he is

lying at the surface, hesitating before taking flight; at any instant

the netter may see a fish to port, to starboard, or directly ahead. Our

man swung his net continually, and each time it passed over the canoe he

flipped it upside-down to drop a fish. Think of the muscles needed for

this sort of thing; the quickness of eye and hand, where a delicate

balance must be maintained, and one is constantly alert to guard one's

face against the fish, which whizz past at all angles. Then remember

that it is a pretty serious matter to capsize in this torch-lit water,

swarming with sharks, where it is imprudent even to trail one's hand

overboard.

"In the bend of a bow-shaped islet at the north end of the lagoon, under

the palms behind a shore of blue water and dazzling sand, lived an old

chap named Ruri, who introduced me to another kind of fishing. Ruri was

close to seventy, but a strong man still; his only complaint was lack of

teeth, which compelled him to live on _varuvaru_--the grated-up meat of

the young coconut, mixed with its own milk. The ambition of his life

was a trip to Tahiti to get a set of false teeth. He was not a native

of Mataora--his mother was a Gilbert-Islander and his father a Samoan.

For many years Ruri had followed the sea--cabin boy under Bully Hayes;

deserter (to keep a whole skin) from the famous _Leonora_; blackbirder

in the New Hebrides and Solomon Islands; pearl fisher in Penrhyn and the

lagoons of the Paumotu. At last, on a black night of storm, his vessel

struck and went to pieces on the coral of Mataora, and Ruri's days of

wandering were over. He married a woman of the island, but now she was

dead and the old man lived alone, a mile from the settlement, occupied

with his simple wants and immersed in dreams of the past. Close beside

his house was the grave of his wife--a tomb of cement inclosed in a neat

building of octagonal shape, with a door and a small curtained window.

A fine lamp, carefully tended and lit every evening at sunset, hung

above the grave, and a few stunted gardenias and frangipanis, brought

from enormous distances, were planted about the door. Ruri's little

plantation of coconuts and coarse taro was free from weeds, and the

neatness of his house, shipshape and scrupulously clean, betrayed the

old sailor.

"After a spell of calm weather, when the breaching surf had ceased to

cloud the waters of the lagoon, and the suspended particles of coral

sand had settled to the bottom, Ruri offered to show me how to catch

tenu--a fine fish, inhabiting the lagoon in ten to twenty fathoms of

water--speckled like a trout on a ground of brown and gold, and reaching

a weight of twenty pounds.

"In the absurdly complicated process of obtaining bait, tenu-fishing is

typical of the South Pacific. The night before, Ruri had spent two

hours with a torch, catching hermit crabs; now, using these crabs for

bait we had to catch some ku ta--a small, prickly fish which alone has

power to interest the tenu. We set out in Ruri's leaky canoe and

paddled to a big, coral mushroom, which rose to within a yard of the

surface. Here the old man smashed the shells of his hermit crabs with a

stone, broke off the claws, set the soft bodies to one side, and mashed

the claws to a paste, which he dropped overboard and allowed to drift

into a dark hole in the coral. Then he produced a short line, baited

the hook with a body of a crab, and let it sink out of sight into the

darkness of the hole. In ten minutes a dozen ku ta were gasping in the

bottom of the canoe--fantastic little fish, colored scarlet and

vermilion, with enormous black eyes and a dorsal fin which seemed to be

carved out of red sealing wax. We put them in a basket, trailed

overboard to keep them alive, and began the real fishing of the day. I

paddled slowly, while Ruri--who did not believe in fishing till the fish

was in sight--leaned over the side, scrutinizing the bottom through his

water glass. Finally he signaled me to stop--his eye had caught the

movement of a tenu among the masses of live coral, forty feet below us.

The rest was simple: one hooked a ku ta under the dorsal fin, tossed him

overboard, and allowed the weight of the hook and line to carry him to

the bottom. By means of the water glass, one could watch the approach

of the tenu, see him seize the bait, and judge the proper moment to

strike.

"The bonito, which they call atu, is the most important of all fish to

the people of Mataora. Almost any fine day one could see a fleet of

canoes working offshore, busy at bonito catching, surrounded by a cloud

of the sea birds which guide one to the schools. They use a pretty lure

for this fishing--a sort of jig cut out of mother-of-pearl, equipped

with a tuft of red-dyed coconut husk and a barbless hook of shell. Each

fisherman carries a stiff bamboo rod and half a dozen of these

lures--ranging in color from pale green to black--attached to ten-foot

lengths of line. The islanders have discovered that the condition of

the water and the variations of light make certain colors more

attractive than others at a given time; and when a school is found they

try one shade after another till they discover which the bonito prefer.

Then the jigs not in use are hooked to a ring at the base of the pole,

and the fisherman begins to pull bonito from the water, heaving them out

by main strength, without a moment's play. The barbless hook releases

itself the moment the fish is in the canoe, and the lure goes overboard

without the loss of an instant.

"One day, after a period of low tides, I saw another method of

fishing--rarely practised nowadays--an ora, or fish-poisoning picnic.

You know the barringtonia, probably--the big tree from which they make

their drums; it grows on all the high islands, and sometimes one finds

it on the richer atolls. There were a few on Mataora. Ever notice the

flower? It is a lovely thing--a tassel of silky cream-colored stamens,

shading to old rose at the ends, and tipped with golden beads. The

fruit is odd-looking, like a squarish pomegranate, and it has odd

properties, for when pounded up and put into shallow water it seems to

stupefy the fish.

"I was sitting in the shade beside Tari's house when a boy came through

the settlement, blowing melancholy blasts on a conch shell and

announcing that the chief wanted everyone to be on hand that afternoon

at a certain part of the lagoon, where an ora was to be held. We set

out at noon, the women carrying the crushed seeds of the barringtonia in

hastily woven baskets of green coconut frond. A crowd from the other

settlements was awaiting our arrival; and when the babies had been put

to sleep in the shade, with small children stationed beside them to fan

away the flies, the fun began. A shallow stretch of lagoon lay before

us, half a mile long by a quarter wide, and into this plunged the women

and girls, wading and swimming in all directions, trailing behind them

their baskets of poison. As time went on, a faint and curious odor

began to rise from the water--a smell which reminded me vaguely of

potassium cyanide. Soon the spearmen were busy--wild brown figures,

naked except for scarlet loin cloths--pursuing the half-stupefied fish

among the crevices of the coral. Before the effect of the poison wore

off and the reviving fish began to make their escape to deeper water the

men were returning to the beach, the strings of hibiscus bark at their

belts loaded and dragging.

"On another day I joined a party of young people for a picnic across the

lagoon. It was glassy calm; the water was like a mirror in which the

palms of the wooded islets were reflected with motionless perfection.

The beaches on the far side, invisible on an ordinary day, seemed to

rise far out of water in the mirage. We landed on an uninhabited island,

hauled up our canoes, and set out on a hunt for coconut crabs.

"They are extraordinary creatures, these crabs, enormous, and delicious

to eat. You will not find many on the high islands; but in a place like

Mataora there are hundreds of them, and they do a lot of damage to the

coconuts. During the day they hide in their holes, deep among the roots

of some big trees; at night they come out, climb the palms, nip off the

nuts with their powerful claws, descend to the ground, tear off the

husks, break open the shells, and devour the meat. To catch them, one

can either dig them out or build a fire at the mouth of the hole, which

never fails to draw them. Fire simply fascinates the brutes. They must

be handled warily, for their claws can grip like a pair of pipe tongs

and shear off a man's finger without an effort.

"We lit a fire under the shade of a puka tree and liberated the crabs we

had captured. It sounds incredible, but they walked into the fire, and

sat down quietly on the embers to roast! One of the boys climbed a palm

and brought us some coconuts of a variety called nu mangaro, with an

edible husk, sweet and fibrous, like sugar cane. After lunch we had a

swim in the deep water close inshore and lay about smoking while the

girls wove us wreaths of sweet fern. It was an idyllic sort of a day.

"I spent five months on Mataora. At first, when the schooner did not

appear, I was worried and used to fret a little; but as time went on I

grew to like the easy-going, dreamy life, and when at last a schooner

came to take me off I didn't know whether to be glad or sorry--there

were moments when I almost decided to send for a few things and follow

the example of old Ruri.

"During those five months I knew more disinterested kindliness than I

had supposed existed in the world; my heart warmed to the people of

Mataora.

"Finally the day came when the schooner dropped anchor in the lee of the

village--Whitmore's _Tureia_. Canoe after canoe shot out through the

surf; the women gathered in the shade of the canoe houses on the beach,

awaiting the landing of the boatmen, who would bring news of husbands

diving for shell in distant lagoons, or relatives scattered among

far-off groups of islands. As I shook hands with Whitmore I heard a

prolonged wailing from the village--the tangi of a new widow.

"When I went to the house to get my things together Tari informed me

that, as the schooner would not leave till next day, the people were

preparing a farewell feast in my honor. It was held in the assembly

house of the village, decorated with arches of palm frond, garlands of

scented fern, and the scarlet flowers of the hibiscus. Everyone brought

a gift for the departing stranger--a fan, a hat, a pearl fishhook, a

drinking cup of ornamented coconut shell, a carved paddle of porcupine

wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl. I distributed what little I had to

offer, wishing it were a dozen times as much.

"On the beach next morning the people of Mataora gathered for a last

handclasp; smile cynically if you will--there were tears shed; I wasn't

too happy myself when I heard their plaintive song of farewell floating

out across the water."

Worthington ceased speaking and leaned forward to scratch a match. The

squall had passed long since; the immense arch of the Milky Way

stretched overhead, and low in the south--beyond Hull Island and

Rimatara, over the loneliest ocean in the world--the Southern Cross was

rising. Lying on mats behind us, a party of Cook-Islanders spoke in

soft tones, their faces illuminated fitfully by the glow of their

cigarettes. My companion was lighting his pipe, and in the flare of the

match I could see that he was smiling to himself.

"Some day," he said, "you will hear that I have closed up my affairs and

disappeared. Don't worry when that happens; you'll know I have gone to

Mataora--this time to stop for good."

*CHAPTER IV*

*The Land of Ahu Ahu*

I might attempt to set down a matter-of-fact description of this place

if only the subject permitted one to be matter-of-fact. Strange and

remote, set in a lonely space of the sea and isolated from the world for

the seven or eight centuries following the decline of Polynesian

navigation, there is no other land like this hollow island of Ahu Ahu.

Week after week, month after month, the watcher on its cliffs may gaze

out toward the horizon and see never a sail nor a distant trail of smoke

to liven the dark-blue desert of the Pacific. The cliffs themselves are

strange--the reef of an ancient atoll, upraised in some convulsion of

the earth to form a ring of coral limestone--sheer precipices facing the

sea, half a mile of level barren summit, and an inner wall of cliffs,

overlooking the rich lowlands of the interior. During the unnumbered

years of their occupation, the land has set a stamp upon its people--so

long on Ahu Ahu that they have forgotten whence they came. Hardy,

hospitable, and turbulent, they are true children of the islands, and

yet a family apart--ruder and less languid than the people of Samoa or

Tahiti, and speaking a harsher tongue. And, more than any other island

folk, they live in the past, for ghosts walk on Ahu Ahu, and the living

commune nightly with the old dead who lie in the _marae_.

It was an hour before sunset when we sighted the land--the merest blue

irregularity on the horizon, visible from one's perch in the shrouds

each time the schooner rose to the crest of a sea. The mellow shout of

landfall brought a score of native passengers to their feet; at such a

moment one realizes the passionate devotion of the islander to his land.

Men sprang into the rigging to gaze ahead with eager exclamations;

mothers held up their babies--born on distant plantations--for a first

glimpse of Ahu Ahu; seasick old women, emerging from disordered heaps of

matting, tottered to the bulwarks with eyes alight. The island had not

been visited for six months, and we carried a cargo of extraordinary

variety--hardware, bolts of calico, soap, lumber, jewelry, iron roofing,

cement, groceries, phonograph records, an unfortunate horse, and several

pigs, those inevitable deck-passengers in the island trade. There were

scores of cases of bully beef and ship's biscuit--the staple luxuries of

modern Polynesia, and, most important of all, six heavy bags of mail.

As we drew near the land, toward midnight, I gave up the attempt to

sleep in my berth and went on deck to spread a mat beside Tari, our

supercargo, who lay aft of the mainmast, talking in low tones with his

wife. It was calm, here in the lee of the island; the schooner slipped

through the water with scarcely a sound, rising and falling on the long

gentle swell. Faint puffs of air came off the land, bringing a scent of

flowers and wood smoke and moist earth. We had been sighted, for lights

were beginning to appear in the village; now and then, on a flaw of the

breeze, one heard a sigh, long drawn and half inaudible--the voice of

the reef. A party of natives, seated on the forward hatch, began to

sing. The words were modern and religious, I believe, but the

music--indescribably sad, wild, and stirring--carried one back through

the centuries to the days when man expressed the dim yearnings of his

spirit in communal song. It was a species of chant, with responses;

four girls did most of the singing, their voices mingling in barbaric

harmonies, each verse ending in a prolonged melodious wail. Precisely

as the last note died away, in time with the cadence of the chant, the

deep voices of the men took up the response, "_Kare, aue!_" ("No,

alas!") Tari turned to me.

"They sing well," he said, "these Ahu Ahu people; I like to listen to

them. That is a hymn, but a stranger would never suspect it--the music

is pure heathen. Look at the torchlights in the village; smell the land

breeze--it would tell you you were in the islands if you were set down

here blindfold from a place ten thousand miles away. With that singing

in one's ears, it is not difficult to fancy oneself in a long canoe, at

the end of an old-time voyage, chanting a song of thanksgiving to the

gods who have brought us safely home."

He is by no means the traditional supercargo of a trading schooner, this

Tari; I have wasted a good deal of time speculating as to his origin and

the reasons for his choosing this mode of life. An Englishman with a

hint of Oxford in his voice--quite obviously what we call a gentleman--a

reader of reviews, the possessor (at his charming place on Nukutere) of

an enviable collection of books on the natural history and ethnology of

the South Seas, he seldom speaks of himself or of his people at home.

For twenty years he has been known in this part of the world--trading on

Penrhyn, Rakahanga, Tupuai, the atolls of the Paumotu. He speaks a

dozen of the island dialects, can join in the singing of _Utes_, or

bring a roar of applause by his skill in the dances of widely separated

groups. When the war broke out he enlisted as a private in a New Zealand

battalion, and the close of hostilities found him with decorations for

gallantry, the rank of captain, and the scars of honorable wounds. As a

subject for conversation, the war interests him as little as his own

life, but this evening he had emptied a full bottle of rum, and was in

the mildly mellow state which is his nearest approach to intoxication.

"I never thought I'd see the old country again," he said, "but the war

changed all that. I got a nasty wound in Gallipoli, you see, and they

sent me home to convalesce. The family wasn't meant to know I was hurt,

but they saw a bit of a thing in the paper [an account of the exploit

which won Tari his D.C.M.], and there they were at the dock when the

transport off-loaded. I hadn't laid eyes on them for fifteen years....

The old governor--by Jove! he was decent. It was all arranged that I

should stop in England when the war was over; I thought myself it was a

go. When the job was finished, and I'd got a special dispensation to be

demobbed at home, I stood it for a fortnight and then gave up....

"Home is all very well for a week or two, but for a steady thing I seem

to fit in better down here. What is it that makes a chap stop in the

islands? You must have felt it yourself, and yet it is hard to put into

words. This sort of thing, perhaps [he swept his hand through the soft

darkness] ... the beauty, the sense of remoteness, the vague and

agreeable melancholy of these places. Then I like the way the years

slip past--the pleasant monotony of life. My friends at home put up

with a kind of dullness which would drive me mad; but here, where there

is even less to distinguish one day from another, one seems never to

grow fretful or impatient of time. One's horizon narrows, of course; I

scarcely look at the newspaper any more. If you stop here you will find

yourself unconsciously drifting into the native state of mind,

readjusting your sense of values until the great events of the world

seem far off and unreal, and your interests are limited to your own

business, the vital statistics of your island, and the odd kinks of

human nature about you. Perhaps this is the way we are meant to live;

at any rate, it brings serenity.

"I've been here too long to sentimentalize about the natives--they have

their weak points, and plenty of them. Allowing for these, you'll find

the Kanakas a good sort to have about--often amusing, always

interesting; at once deep, artful, gay, simple, and childish. At bottom

they are not very different from ourselves; it is chiefly a matter of

environment. Consider any of the traders who came here as boys--old

fellows who will buttonhole you and spend hours abusing the people--the

truth is that they have become more native than the men they abuse.

"There are places, like Africa, where one can live among a primitive

people and absorb nothing from them; their point of view is too alien,

their position in the scale of humanity too widely separated from our

own. It is different in the islands. If one could discover the truth,

it wouldn't surprise me to learn that these people were distant cousins

of ours. The scholars--in whose conclusions I haven't much faith--trace

them back, along the paths of successive migrations, through Indonesia

to northern India or the land of the Cushites. In any case, I believe

that the blood we term Caucasian flows in their veins, the legacy of

ancestors separated from the parent stock so long ago that mankind had

not yet learned the use of iron. And they are old, these island tribes

who were discovering new lands in the Pacific in the days when our

forefathers wore the horns of bulls upon their heads. Don't judge them

in the present, or even in the time of Cook; they were a dying people

then, whose decline had begun five or six hundred years before. It

seems to me that a race, like an individual, grows old, loses heart, and

fades away. On nearly every island they are dying to-day--a tragedy, an

inevitable one, which the coming of the European has hastened, but not

caused.

"Whether or not it may be accounted for on grounds of a distant kinship,

it is impossible to stop long in the islands without absorbing, to a

certain extent, the native point of view. Things which seemed rubbish

at first slowly acquire significance; one begins to wonder if, after

all, there may not be varieties of knowledge lost to us in the

complexities of civilization.... I've seen some queer things myself.

"My wife's mother lives on Ahu Ahu, where her ancestors have been

hereditary rulers since Maui fished the island out of the sea. I've

known the family a good many years, and long before I married Apakura

the old lady was kind enough to take a motherly interest in me. I

always put up with her when we touched at Ahu Ahu. Once, after I had

been away for several months, I sat down to have a yarn with her, and

was beginning to tell about where I'd been and what I'd done when she

stopped me. 'No, let me tell you,' she said, with an odd smile; and,

upon my honor, she did--down to the details! I got the secret out of

her the same evening. She is very friendly, it seems, with an ancestor

of hers--a woman named Rakamoana, who lived twenty-eight

generations--seven hundred years--ago, and is buried in the big _marae_

behind the village. When one of the family is off on a trip, and my

mother-in-law suspects that he is in trouble or not behaving himself,

she puts herself into a kind of trance, calls up old Rakamoana, and gets

all the facts. I hope the habit won't come into general use--might

prove jolly awkward, eh? Seriously, though, I can't account for the

things she told me without accepting her own explanation. Strange if

there were a germ of truth in the legends of how the old sea-going

canoes were navigated--the priests, in a state of trance, directing the

helmsmen which way to steer for land....

"There is another old woman on Ahu Ahu whose yarns are worth hearing.

Many years ago a Yankee whaling vessel called at the island, and a

Portuguese harpooner, who had had trouble with the captain, deserted and

hid himself in the bush. The people had taken a fancy to him and

refused to give him up, so finally the captain was obliged to sail away

without his man. From all accounts this harpooner must have been a good

chap; when he proved that he was no common white waster, the chief gave

him a bit of land and a girl of good family for a wife--now the old lady

of whom I spoke. I think it was tools he needed, or some sort of gear

for a house he was building; at any rate, when another whaler touched he

told his wife that he was going on a voyage to earn some money and that

he might be gone a year. There was a kind of agreement, current in the

Pacific in those days, whereby a whaling captain promised to land a man

at the point where he had signed him on.

"Well, the harpooner sailed away, and, as might have been expected, his

wife never saw him again; but here comes the odd part of the story. The

deserted wife, like so many of the Ahu Ahu women, had an ancestor who

kept her in touch with current events. Being particularly fond of her

husband, she indulged in a trance from time to time, to keep herself

informed as to his welfare. Several months after his departure the

tragedy occurred--described in detail by the obliging and sympathetic

dweller in the _marae_. It was a kind of vision, as told to me,

singularly vivid for an effort of pure imagination--the open Pacific,

heaving gently and ruffled by a light air; two boats from rival vessels

pursuing the same whale; the Portuguese harpooner standing in the bows

of one, erect and intent upon the chase, his iron the first, by a second

of time, to strike. Then came a glimpse of the two boats foaming side

by side in the wake of the whale; the beginning of the dispute; the

lancing and death flurry of an old bull sperm; the rising anger of the

two harpooners, as the boats rocked gently beside the floating carcass;

the treacherous thrust; the long red blade of the lance standing out

between the shoulders of the Portuguese.

"The woman awoke from her trance with a cry of anguish; her husband was

dead--she set up the widow's _tangi_. One might have thought it an

excellent tale, concocted to save the face of a deserted wife, if the

same vessel had not called at Ahu Ahu within a year, to bring news of

the husband's death under the exact circumstances of the vision.

"What is one to believe? If seeing is believing, then count me a

believer, for my own eyes have seen an incredible thing. It was on

Aitutaki, in the Cook group. An old chief, the descendant of a very

ancient family, lay ill in the village. I had turned in early, as I'd

promised to go fishing on the reef when the tide served, an hour after

midnight. You know how the spirits of the dead were believed to flee

westward, to Hawaiki, and how their voices might be heard at night,

calling to one another in the sky, as they drove past, high overhead.

Early in the evening, as I lay in bed, a boy came into the next room,

panting with excitement. He had been to a plantation in the hills, it

seemed, and as he returned, just after dusk, had heard the voices of a

shouting multitude passing in the air above him. I was tired and paid

little attention to his story, but for some reason I found it impossible

to sleep. It was a hot night, very still and sultry, with something in

the air that made one's nerves twitch every time a coconut frond dropped

in the distance. I was still lying awake when my fishing companions

came to get me; a little ahead of time, for, like me, they had been

unable to sleep. We would wait on the reef, they suggested, where it

was sure to be cool, until the tide was right.

"We were sitting on the dry coral, smoking. I had just looked at my

watch, I remember; it lacked a few minutes to one o'clock. Our canoes

were hauled up on one side of the Arutunga Passage--the western pass, by

the way. There was no moon. Suddenly one of the boys touched me.

'What is that?' he exclaimed, in a startled voice. I looked up; the

others were rising to their feet. Two flaring lights were moving across

the lagoon toward us--together and very swiftly. Nearer and nearer they

came, until they revealed the outlines of a canoe larger than any built

in the islands nowadays--a canoe of the old time, with a flaming torch

set at prow and stern. While we stood there, staring in silence, it

drew abreast of us, moving with the rush of a swift motor boat, and

passed on--out to sea. I was too amazed to think clearly until I heard

one of the boys whisper to another, '_Kua mate te ariki_--the chief is

dead; the great canoe bears him out to the west.' We launched our

canoes and crossed the lagoon to the village. Women were wailing; yes,

the old man was dead--he had drawn his last breath a little before one

o'clock. Remember that I saw this thing myself.... Perhaps it was a

dream--if so, we all dreamed alike."

It was late. The singing died away; the lights in the village went out

one by one. The passage in the Ahu Ahu reef is a bad place by

daylight--the chances were that no canoes would risk it till dawn. Tari

struck a match for an instant and lay down on the mat beside his wife.

In the little flare of light I saw her sleeping in the unconscious

manner of a child.

I know their story--a pretty one, in pleasant contrast to the usual

ignoble and transitory loves of white and brown. Apakura is the

daughter of the principal family of this island--her mother and father

for many years the warm friend of Tari. He had petted the child from

the time she was three; she was always on the beach to meet the canoe

that brought him ashore, and he, for his part, never forgot the small

gifts for which she waited with sparkling eyes. On his rambles about

the island the little girl followed Tari with the devotion of a dog;

many a time, clambering along the base of the cliffs at dawn, his first

knowledge of her presence came with the shrill cry of, "_Tiake mai,

Tari!_" and he waited while his small follower managed some difficult

pile of coral in the rear. Their friendship had only Tari's two or

three visits a year to feed on, but neither forgot, and in the course of

time, as the child learned to read and write, a correspondence

began--very serious on her side, pleased and amused on his. When he

went away to the war she was eleven--a slim, dark-eyed child; when he

returned she was sixteen, and a woman, though he did not know it.

On this occasion, in the evening, when the rest of the family had gone

to bed, he sat talking with Apakura's mother--or, rather, listening

while the old woman told one of her stories of life on Ahu Ahu, equally

fascinating and long drawn out. It is not difficult to reconstruct the

scene in imagination--Tari comfortable in bare feet and a _pareu_, half

reclining against the wall as he smoked his pipe in absent-minded puffs;

the woman cross-legged on the floor, leaning forward in earnest

speech--her voice rising, falling, and dying to a whisper in the

extraordinary manner of the Polynesian teller of tales; her hands from

time to time falling simultaneously with a loud slap to her knees, in

emphasis of some point in the narrative. The story ended, little by

little the mother led the conversation to the subject of her daughter.

Tari began to praise the girl.

"What do you think of her," asked the old woman, "now that you have been

away these five years?"

"There is no other girl like her," said Tari.

"Since that is so, take her with you; we shall be pleased, all of us--I

in particular, who look on you as a son. She is a good girl; she can

sew, she can cook, and the young men say that she is beautiful."

"You propose that I take her as a wife?" exclaimed the astonished Tari,

to whom, in truth, the idea had not occurred.

"Yes. Why not? You need a wife, now that the little affair of Tukonini

has blown over."

"But think, mamma--I am forty and the child is sixteen; it is not

fitting."

"Young wives are best if they are faithful; Apakura will never look at

another man."

"I will think it over," said Tari; "let us leave it so. Not this year,

at any rate--she is too young."

As he bade her good night and turned to go to his sleeping place the old

woman spoke again.

"Bear one thing in mind," she said, with a smile; "it will help you to

decide. Consider, now and then, the thought of my daughter married to

another."

In the end, as is often the case, it was Apakura who settled the matter.

Next morning Tari was busy with some stock taking and did not board the

schooner till the last moment, or notice--in his preoccupation--the

mysterious smiles with which the crew greeted him. They were a dozen

miles offshore before he folded the last of his papers, lit a pipe, and

went on deck for a breath of air. The old woman's last words stuck

unpleasantly in his mind, I fancy, as he stood there smoking, with his

back to the companionway. All at once he saw the helmsman--an Ahu Ahu

boy he had known since childhood--lift his eyes from the binnacle and

grin from ear to ear; at the same moment Tari felt a hand slip into his

own, and heard a small, familiar voice say, "I am here." It was

Apakura--more serious than usual and a little frightened, but not to be

put off longer. They were married in Tahiti a fortnight later.

It was Apakura's voice that awakened me. She was leaning over the

bulwark in eager conversation with her mother, who had come off in the

first canoe. The air was fresh with the cool of dawn; in the east the

sky was flushing behind scattered banks of trade-wind clouds, tinted in

wonderfully delicate shades of terra cotta. A dozen big outrigger

canoes, of the type peculiar to this island, were coming out through the

passage, each paddled by four men, who shouted as their heavy craft

dashed through the breakers.

Little by little, not at all after the manner of traditional dawn in the

tropics, the light increased, until Ahu Ahu lay fully revealed before

us--the smoking reef, the shallow lagoon, and the cliffs, their summits

plumed with coconut palms. A crowd of islanders was already gathering

on the reef, and I could see others making their way down the steep path

from the settlement. As the sun rose the colors of the scene grew

stronger--green palms, gray cliffs, white walls of the village, pale

blue of the sky, azure of the sea water. There is no color in the

world--that I have seen--like the blue of the water off the Ahu Ahu

reef; so vivid, so intense, one felt that a tumbler of it, held up to

the sun, would be a mass of sapphire, or that a handkerchief dipped in

it would emerge strongly dyed.

Apakura was going ashore with her mother. Standing in the narrow canoe,

she directed the stowing of her luggage--a mat, a bright patchwork

quilt, a box of cedar wood. Tari was awaiting the coming of the

traders, for the schooner was stocked with good Tahiti rum, and the

rites of welcome would take place on board.

"There they are," he said, pointing to two white figures wading gingerly

across the shallow lagoon to the reef; "you're going to meet a pair of

rare ones--they've been hard doers in their time!"

The distant figures reached the edge of the boat passage and I could see

a boy beckoning them into a waiting canoe, but now they stopped and

seemed to argue, with many gestures. Tari chuckled.

"No use trying to hurry them," he told me; "they are discussing the loss

of the _Esperanza_. She went ashore here in the late 'nineties--a

full-rigged ship. Peter was one of her crew; Charley had just come here

to trade, and saw the whole thing. They've spent twenty years thrashing

out the question of whether or not the wreck might have been avoided.

Every morning, after breakfast, Charley strolls across to Peter's house

to smoke a pipe and discuss some of the fine points; every evening,

after tea, Peter returns the visit, and the argument goes on till

bedtime. Charley's an American--an old man now, close to seventy. He

put in thirty years on Hiva Oa, in the Marquesas, before he came to Ahu

Ahu; I'd like to have some of his memories. Notice his arms if he pulls

his sleeves up. He has sixteen children on Hiva Oa and fourteen

here--all numbered; he says he never can remember their heathen names.

When his wife died in the north he gave all his land to the children and

left on the first schooner. She touched at Papeete, but he didn't go

ashore. Then she made Ahu Ahu, where he landed and established himself

a second time. He has never seen a motor car, a telephone, or an

electric light."

Presently the canoe came dancing alongside, and the two old men

clambered painfully over the rail--Peter thin, hatchet faced, and

stooping; Charley the ruin of a magnificent man. He towered above any

of us on the deck--this ancient dweller among cannibals--still erect,

his head still carried proudly, but the flesh hanging loose and withered

on his bones. It was easy to fancy the admiration he must have inspired

forty years ago among the wild people, in whose eyes physical strength

and perfection were the great qualities of a man. In the cabin, while

the cook squeezed limes for the first of many rum punches, Charley took

off his tunic of white drill, and as he sat there in his singlet I saw

that his arms and chest, like his face, were tanned to an indelible dull

brown, and that patterns in tattooing ran from wrist to

shoulder--greenish blue and barbaric.

I never learned his history--it must have been a thing to stir the

imagination. Once, as we sat drinking, Tari mentioned Stevenson, and

the old man's face brightened.

"_E_," he said, slowly, in native fashion, "I remember him well; he came

to Hiva Oa with the _Casco_. A funny fellow he was ... thin! There was

nothing to him but skin and bones. And questions--he'd ask you a

hundred in a minute! I didn't take to him at first, but he was all

right. He didn't care how he dressed; one day I saw him walking on the

beach with nothing on but a pair of drawers."

The cook plied back and forth, removing empty glasses and bringing full

ones. As each tray was set on the table, Peter--typical of a lively and

garrulous old age--seized his glass and held it up.

"Hurrah!" he exclaimed. "Down she goes," drawled Charley, and Tari

murmured, "Cheerio!" At the end of two hours Charley's eyes were

beginning to glaze, and Peter was mumbling vaguely of the _Esperanza_.

Tari rose and beckoned to me.

"Make yourselves at home," he said to the old men; "I've got to go

ashore. Akatara will give you lunch whenever you want it."

As our canoe made for the reef my companion told me there was to be a

feast in his honor, and that his wife wished me to be present. We shot

into the passage without a wetting; the people crowded about Tari,

laughing, shaking his hand, speaking all at once--an unmistakable warmth

of welcome.

The settlement, reached by a short, steep trail, lies at the base of a

break in the cliffs. At the door of her mother's house Apakura met

us--turned out, as becomes a supercargo's wife, in the choicest of trade

finery. She wore heavy golden earrings; bands of gold were on her

fingers, and her loose frock was of pale embroidered silk. Her

mother--the keen-eyed old woman I had seen in the canoe--made me

welcome.

In the afternoon, when the feast was over and we rose stiffly, crammed

with fish and taro and baked pig, I asked Tari if he knew a youngster

who would show me the best path to the interior of the island. A boy of

ten was soon at the door--a dark-skinned child with a great shock of

hair, and legs disfigured by the scars of old coral cuts.

A twisting path, cobbled, and wide enough to walk two abreast, led us to

the summit. The stones were worn smooth by the passage of bare feet,

for, excepting fish, all the food of the village is brought over this

road from the plantations to the sea. There could be no doubt that the

ring of cliffs on which we stood was an ancient reef; in places one

could recognize the forms of coral, imbedded, with shells of many

varieties, in the metamorphosed rock. Here and there one found pockets

of a material resembling marble, veined and crystalline--formed from the

coral by processes impossible to surmise. The bulk of the rock is the

fine-grained white limestone called _makatea_ in the eastern Pacific.

The level summit of the cliffs, over which, in centuries gone by, the

sea had washed and thundered, forms a narrow plain, sparsely wooded and

cultivated in spots where a thin soil has gathered in the hollows.

We halted under the palms crowning the inner brink. The trail wound

down giddily ahead--so steep in places that ladders had been fastened to

the rock. To right and left of us the cliffs were sheer walls of

limestone, rising from a level little above that of the sea. The low

hills of the interior, volcanic and fern covered, draining in every

direction toward the foot of the _makatea_, have formed a circling belt

of swamp land, on which all the taro of the island was grown. One could

look down on the beds from where we stood, a mosaic of pale green, laid

out by heathen engineers in days beyond the traditions of men.

Another time, perhaps, I will tell you of that afternoon--how we climbed

down the trail and walked the dikes among the taro; how my escort

increased to a merry company as the people began to come after food for

the evening meal; of a boisterous swim in a pool beneath a waterfall; of

how I found the remains of an ancient house, built of squared stone so

long ago that over one end of it the wooded earth lay two yards deep.

Toward evening, in the bush at the edge of the taro swamps, I came upon

a large house, built of bamboo and pandanus in the native fashion. A

man was standing framed in the doorway--a tall, white man, dressed in

pajamas of silk. His gold-rimmed spectacles, gray beard, and expression

of intelligent kindliness were vaguely academic--out of place as the

cultivated voice which invited me to stop. The boys and girls escorting

me squatted on their heels outside; a brace of pretty children, shy and

half naked, scurried past as I entered the house. My host waved his

hand toward a mat. There was only one chair in the room, standing

before a table on which I saw a small typewriter and a disordered heap

of manuscript. Otherwise the place was unfurnished except for books,

ranged in crude bookcases, tier upon tier, stacked here and there in

precarious piles, standing in rows along the floor.

"I am glad to see you," he said, as he offered me a cigarette from a

case of basketwork silver; "it is not often that a European passes my

house."

I shall not give his name, or attempt to disguise him with a fictitious

one; it is enough to say that he is one of the handful of real scholars

who have devoted their lives to Polynesian research. I had read his

books, published long before, and wondered--more than once--whether he

still lived and where he hid himself. The years of silence had been

spent (he told me) in a comparative study of the ocean dialects through

which he hoped to solve the riddle of the Pacific--to determine whence

came the brown and straight-haired people of the islands. Now, with the

material in hand, he had chosen Ahu Ahu as a place of solitude, where he

might complete his task of compilation undisturbed.

"On the whole," he said, with agreeable readiness to speak of his work,

"I am convinced that they came from the west. The Frenchman's theory

that the race originated in New Zealand, like the belief that they

migrated westward from the shores of America, is more picturesque, more

stirring to the imagination; but the evidence is too vague. If one

investigates the possibilities of an eastward migration, on the other

hand, one finds everywhere in the western islands the traces of their

passage. Far out in the Orient, in isolated groups, off the coast of

Sumatra, about Java and Celebes, and in the Arafura Sea, I can show you

people of the true Polynesian type. Even in such places, where the last

migration must have passed nearly two thousand years ago, scraps of

evidence remain--a word, a curious custom, the manner of carrying a

basket. These things might seem coincidences if the trail did not grow

warmer as one travels east.

"Though no trace of their blood is left, New Guinea must at one time

have been a halting place in the migration. Papua it is called, and one

finds the word current in Polynesia, meaning a garden, a rich land. The

natives of New Guinea are as unlike the people of the eastern Pacific, I

should say, as the average American or Englishman, and yet throughout

New Guinea there is a most curious cropping out of Polynesian words,

pointing to a very ancient intercourse between the races. Consider the

word for woman among the Polynesians. In Rarotonga, it is _vaine_; in

Tahiti, _vahine_; in the Marquesas, _vehine_; in Hawaii, _wahine_; in

Samoa, _fafine_. The same root runs through the dialects of Papua. In

Motu, woman is _habine_; in Kerepunu, _vavine_; in Aroma, _babine_; and

in Motumotu it is _ua_, which in this part of the Pacific means,

variously, female, seed, and rain. I could cite you dozens of similar

examples. Now and then one comes across something that sets one's

imagination to work ... as you must know, the word for sun in the

islands is _ra_, but in Tahiti they have another word, _mahana_. In New

Guinea, thirty-five hundred miles away, and with all Melanesia between,

the tribes of the South Cape call the sun _mahana_. What a puzzle it

is!

"Though it may be the merest coincidence, that _ra_ has a flavor of

Egypt. I wonder if there could be a connection? I used to know a girl

in Tahiti whose strange and rather beautiful name--hereditary as far

back as the records of her family went--was that of a queen of Egypt who

ruled many hundreds of years before Christ. But I mustn't ride my hobby

too fast.

"It is a pity you can't stop on Ahu Ahu for a time--there are not many

islands so unspoiled. I've grown very fond of the place; I doubt if I

ever leave it permanently. If you are interested in ghosts, you had

better change your mind. I have a fine collection here; the house is

built on the site of a tumble-down _marae_. There is our white rooster,

the spirit of an old chief, which appears during the new moon--perfectly

harmless and friendly, but the people rather dread him. Then we have a

ghostly pig, very bad indeed; and a pair of malignant women, who walk

about at night with arms and long hair entwined, and are suspected of

ghastly appetites. I shall not say whether or not I have seen any of

these; perhaps it is living too much alone, but I am not so skeptical as

I was...."

It was not easy to part with such a host, but the sun was low over the

_makatea_, and the prospect of crossing the dikes among the taro and

scaling the cliff by dark drove me at last to take reluctant leave.

Lamps were shining in the village when I returned; in some of the houses

I heard the voice of the father, reading aloud solemnly from the Bible

in the native tongue; in others, the people were assembled to chant

their savage and melancholy hymns. Tari was alone on the veranda,

smoking in his absent-minded fashion, and motioned me to sit down beside

him. I told him how I had spent the afternoon. When I had finished he

puffed on in silence for a time.

"It is a strange place, Ahu Ahu," he said at last "My mother-in-law has

finished her prayers, sung her _himines_, and put away the family Bible.

Now she has gone to the house of one of her pals for a session with old

Rakamoana. Like the land itself, the people are relics of an elder

time--pure heathen at heart."

*CHAPTER V*

*A Memory of Mauke*

We sighted Mauke at dawn. The cabin lamp was still burning when the boy

brought my coffee; I drank it, lit a cigarette, and went on deck in a

_pareu_. The skipper himself was at the wheel; half a dozen men were in

the shrouds; the native passengers were sitting forward, cross-legged in

little groups, munching ship's biscuit and gazing ahead for the expected

land.

The day broke wild and gray, with clouds scudding low over the sea, and

squalls of rain. Since we had left Mangaia, the day before, it had

blown heavily from the southeast; a big sea was running, but in spite of

sixty tons of copra the schooner was reeling off the knots in racing

style, running almost free, with the wind well aft of the beam, rising

interminably on the back of each passing sea, and taking the following

slope with a swoop and a rush. We had no log; it was difficult to guess

our position within a dozen miles; the low driving clouds, surrounding

us like a curtain, made it impossible to see more than a few hundred

yards. Until an observation could be obtained, the landfall was a

matter of luck and guesswork. Our course had been laid almost due

north-northeast--to pass a little to the west of Mauke--which gave us

the chance of raising Mitiaro or Atiu if we missed the first island; but

ocean currents are uncertain things, and with a horizon limited to less

than half a mile, nothing would be easier than to slip past the trio of

low islands and into the stretch of lonely ocean beyond. Every trading

skipper is accustomed to face such situations; one can only maintain a

sharp lookout and hold on one's course until there is an opportunity to

use the sextant, or until it becomes obvious that the land has been

passed.

A squall of rain drove down on us; for five minutes, while we shivered

and the scuppers ran fresh water, our narrow circle of vision was

blotted out. Then suddenly, with the effect of a curtain drawn aside,

the clouds broke to the east, flooding the sea with light. A shout went

up. Close ahead and to starboard, so near that we could see the white

of breakers on the reef, was Mauke--densely wooded to the water's edge,

a palm top rising here and there above the thick bush of iron woods.

Next moment the curtain descended; gray clouds and rearing seas

surrounded us; it was as though we had seen a vision of the land, unreal

as the blue lakes seen at midday on the desert. But the skipper was

shouting orders in harsh Mangaian; the schooner was swinging up into the

wind, the blocks were clicking and purring as half a dozen boys swayed

on the mainsheet.

Presently the land took vague form through the mist of squalls; we were

skirting the reef obliquely, drawing nearer the breakers as the

settlement came in view. A narrow boat passage, into which an ugly surf

was breaching, had been blasted through the hard coral of the reef; a

path led up the sloping land beyond, between a double row of canoe

houses to the bush. A few people were gathering by the canoe houses; it

was evident that we had just been sighted, and that it would be some

time before a boat could put out, if, indeed, the boatmen were willing

to risk the surf. Meanwhile we could only stand off and on until they

came out to us, for the skipper had no intention of risking his ship's

boat and the lives of his men on such a forbidding shore. "_Arari!_" he

sang out, dwelling long on the last syllable of this Cook Island version

of "hard alee." The schooner rounded in to the wind with a ponderous

deliberation calculated to make the nerves of a fair-weather sailor

twitch; she seemed to hesitate, like a fat and fluttering grandmother;

at last, after an age of bobbing and ducking into the head sea, while

boom tackles were made fast and headsails backed, she made up her mind,

and filled away on the port tack.

Riley, the American coconut planter, who was recruiting labor for the

season on his island, turned to me with a wink. "If this old hooker was

mine," he remarked in a voice meant to reach the skipper's ears, "I'd

start the engine every time I came about; she can't sail fast enough to

keep steerageway!"

The skipper sniffed a British sniff; they are old friends. "If this

damn fine schooner was yours," he observed, without turning his head,

"she'd have been piled up long ago--like as not in broad daylight, on an

island a thousand feet high."

Riley chuckled. "Too early for an argument," he said. "Let's go below

and have a drink."

I have not often run across a more interesting man than Riley. Thrown

together, as he and I have been, in circumstances which make for an

unusual exchange of confidence, I have learned more of him in two months

than one knows of many an old acquaintance at home. At thirty-five

years of age he is a living object lesson for those who bewail the old

days of adventure and romance, and wish that their lives had been cast

in other times. His blood is undiluted Irish; he has the humor, the

imagination, the quick sympathy of the race, without the Irish heritage

of instability. Born in South Boston and reared with only the sketchiest

of educations, he set out to make his way in the world at an age when

most boys are playing marbles and looking forward with dread to the

study of algebra. For fifteen years he wandered, gathering a varied

background of experience. He worked in mills; he drifted west and

shipped as cabin boy on vessels plying the Great Lakes; he drifted

farther west to become a rider of the range. Finally he reached San

Francisco and took to the sea. He has been a sealer, an Alaska

fisherman, an able-bodied seaman on square-riggers sailing strange seas.

He has seen Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope; he speaks of the ports

of India, China, Africa, the Java Sea, as you would speak of Boston or

New York.

In the days when a line of schooners ran from San Francisco to Tahiti,

touching at the Marquesas on the way, he felt a call to the South Seas,

and shipped for a round trip before the mast. When he returned to San

Francisco a change seemed to have come over him; the old, wandering life

had lost its charm--had gone flat and stale. Like many another, he had

eaten of the wild plantain unaware. The evenings of carousal ashore no

longer tempted him; even the long afternoons of reading (for reading has

always been this curious fellow's chief delight), stretched on his bed

in a sailor's boarding house, had lost their flavor--the print blurred

before his eyes, and in its place he saw lands of savage loveliness

rising from a warm blue sea; shadowy and mysterious valleys, strewn with

the relics of a forgotten race; the dark eyes of a girl in Tai-o-Hae.

Remember that Riley was both a sailor and an Irishman--a rough idealist,

keenly susceptible to beauty and the sense of romance. It is stated

that the men who live romance are seldom aware of it; this may be true,

though I doubt it--certainly in Riley's case the theory does not work

out. He is the most modest of men, untainted by a trace of egoism; in

his stories, superbly told with the Irish gift for circumstantial detail

and dramatic effect, the teller's part is always small. And yet as one

listens, thrilled by the color and artistry of the tale, one is all the

while aware that this man appraises his memories at their full

value--reviews them with a ripened gusto, an ever-fresh appreciation.

In short, he is one of those fortunate, or unfortunate, men for whom

realities, as most of us know them, do not exist; men whose eyes are

incapable of seeing drab or gray, who find mystery and fresh beauty in

what we call the commonplace.

It is scarcely necessary to say that Riley was aboard the next schooner

bound south for the islands. Nukuhiva knew him for a time, but the gloom

and tragedy of that land--together with an episode of domestic

infelicity--were overpowering to a man of his temperament. From the

Marquesas he went to Tahiti, and his wanderings ended in the Cook group,

six hundred miles to the West. Perhaps the finding of his journey's end

wrought the change, perhaps it was due to his rather practical Tahitian

wife--in any case, the wanderer ceased to rove, the spendthrift began to

save and plan. In the groups to the eastward he had picked up a

smattering of coconut lore; it was not long before he got a berth as

superintendent of a small plantation. With a native wife and the

Irishman's knack for languages, he soon mastered the dialect of his

group; he is one of a very few men who speak it with all the finer

shadings. This accounts in part for his success with labor--the chief

difficulty of the planter throughout Polynesia. To one interested as I

am in the variations of this oceanic tongue, it is a genuine pleasure to

talk with Riley. In school he learned to read and write; beyond that he

is entirely self-educated. A good half of his earnings, I should say,

in the days when he followed the sea, were spent on books; a native

intelligence enabled him to criticize and select; he has read

enormously, and what he has read he has remembered. Each time a new

subject attracted him he hastened to the book shops of San Francisco, or

Liverpool, or Singapore, and gathered a little forecastle library of

reference. Like most intelligent men in this part of the world, he has

grown interested in the subject of Polynesian research; it is odd to

hear him discuss--with a strong accent of South Boston and the manner of

a professor of ethnology--some question of Maori chronology, or the

variations in a causative prefix. Once he made clear to me a matter

often referred to in print, but which I had never properly understood.

He was speaking of the language of Tahiti.

"When you hear a Tahitian talk," he said, "it sounds different, but

really it's the same as Hawaiian, or Marquesan, or Rarotongan, or New

Zealand Maori. Tahiti is the oldest settled place, and the language has

kind of rotted away there. Nowadays the Tahitian has lost the strong,

harsh sounds of the old lingo, the _k_ and _ng_; in place of them there

is simply a catch between two vowels. If you know Rarotongan and

understand the system of change, you can get on all right in Tahiti.

Take our word _akatangi_--to play a musical instrument. _Tangi_ means

'wail' or 'weep'; _aka_ is the old causative prefix; the combination

means 'cause to weep.' Now let's figure that word out in Tahitian.

First we've got to take out the _k_ and _ng_; that leaves a bad

start--it doesn't sound good, so the Tahitians stick on an _f_ at the

beginning. That's all there is to it; _fa'ata'i_ is the word. It makes

me laugh to think of when I first came down here. I was working in

Tahiti, and when I came home in the evening my girl would look up from

her sewing and sing out, 'O Riley!' 'For the love of Mike,' I'd tell

her, 'don't you know my name yet? It's Riley, not O'Riley!' Finally I

caught on; I'd been fooled on the same proposition as Cook and all the

rest of them. You remember they called the island Otahiti. That O is

simply a special form of the verb used before personal pronouns and

proper nouns. The old navigators, when the canoes came out to meet

them, pointed to the land and asked its name. 'O Tahiti' said the

natives ('It is Tahiti'). My girl didn't mean to call me O'Riley at

all; she was simply saying, 'It's Riley.'"

A serious white man, particularly when he is able to recruit and handle

native labor, is always in demand in the islands; it was not long before

Riley's talents were recognized; now he is manager and part owner of an

entire atoll. I have listened with a great deal of interest to his

accounts of the life there. Every year, at about Christmas time, a

schooner comes to load his copra and take his boys back to their

respective islands. Not a soul is left on the atoll; Riley boards the

schooner with his wife and takes passage to Papeete for a couple of

months of civilization. When the time is up he makes a tour of the Cook

group to recruit twenty or thirty boys for the new season, and is landed

on his island with a nine months' supply of medicine, provisions, and

reading matter. He is the only white man on the atoll; one would

suppose such a life deadly monotonous and lonely, but just now he is

pining to get back. It is really the pleasantest of lives, he says;

enough routine in keeping the men properly at work, superb fishing when

one desires a touch of sport, plenty of time to read and think, the

healthiest climate in the world, and a bit of trouble now and then to

give the spice a true Irishman needs.

Riley is a man of medium size, with thick brown hair and eyes of Celtic

dark blue, perpetually sparkling with humor. I have never seen a

stronger or more active man of his weight; on his atoll he spends an

hour every day in exercise, running, jumping, working with dumbbells and

Indian clubs. From head to foot he is burnt a deep, ruddy brown--a full

shade darker than the tint of his native wife. Sometimes, he says, he

works himself into such a pink of condition that he aches to pick a

fight with the first comer, but I fancy he finds trouble enough to

satisfy another man. Once a huge, sullen fellow from the Gambier group

attempted to spear him, and Riley called all of his men in from their

work, appointed the foreman referee, and beat the

two-hundred-and-twenty-pound native fierce and lithe and strong as a

tiger--slowly and scientifically, to a pulp. On another occasion, a

half-savage boy, from a far-off island of the southern Paumotus, took a

grudge against the manager and bided his time with the cunning of a wild

animal. The chance came one afternoon when Riley was asleep in the

shade behind his house. The Paumotan stole up with a club and put him

still sounder asleep with a blow on the head that laid his scalp open

and nearly fractured his skull. Half a dozen kicks from the ball of a

toughened foot stove in the ribs on one side of his chest; with that,

the native left his victim, very likely thinking him dead. Riley's wife,

from whom I got the story, was asleep in the house at the time; toward

evening she went to look for her husband, and found him stretched out,

bloody and unconscious, on the sand. In spite of her agitation--her

kind are not much use in a crisis--she managed to get him to the house

and revive him. Riley's first act was to drink half a tumbler of whisky;

his second, to send for the foreman. The Paumotan boy had disappeared;

overcome by forebodings of evil, he had taken a canoe and paddled off to

hide himself on an uncleared islet across the lagoon. Riley gave the

foreman careful instructions; early in the morning he was to take all

the boys and spend the day, if necessary, in running down the fugitive,

who under no circumstances was to be injured or roughly handled.

They brought the boy in at noon--deadly afraid at first, sullen and

relieved when he learned his punishment was no worse than to stand up to

the manager before the assembled plantation hands. It must have been a

grievous affair; Tetua could scarcely describe it without tears. Riley

was still sick and dizzy; his ribs were taped so tightly that he could

breathe with only half his lungs, and a two-inch strip of plaster

covered the wound on his head. The Paumotan was fresh and unhurt; he

outweighed his antagonist by twenty pounds, and fought with confidence

and bitterness. The Kanaka is certainly among the strongest men of the

world, a formidable adversary in a rough-and-tumble fight. It went

badly with Riley for a time; the boy nearly threw him, and a blow on his

broken ribs almost made him faint, but in the end--maddened by pain and

the thought of the treacherous attack--he got his man down and might

have killed him if the foreman and half a dozen others had not

intervened.

Riley's island is a true atoll--a broad lagoon inclosed by an oval sweep

of reef along which are scattered islets of varying size. Many people

must have lived on it in the past; everywhere there are traces of man's

occupation. A dozen inhabitants were there within the memory of living

men, but the dead outnumbered the living too heavily--the place became

unbearable to them, and in the end a schooner took them away.

The outlying Cook Islands are places full of interest. I determined,

when I began this letter, to give you a real account of Mauke--the

island itself, its people, the number of tons of copra produced

annually, and other enlightening information. But somehow, when one

begins to write of this part of the world it seems a hopeless task to

stick to a train of facts--there are too many diverging lines of fancy;

too many intangible stimuli to thought, stirring to the imagination.

Our landing on Mauke was a ticklish business, Like Mangaia, Mitiaro, and

Atiu, this island is of mixed volcanic and raised-coral origin--the

pinnacle of a submerged peak, ringed with millions of tons of coral, and

without any lagoon worthy of the name. The polyps have built a sort of

platform around the land, low inshore and highest--as seems usually the

case--just before it drops off into the sea. Breaching across the outer

ridge, the surf fills a narrow belt of shallows between it and the

shore; the result is a miniature edition of a lagoon--a place of rocky

pools where children wade knee-deep, on the lookout for crayfish and

baby octopus. On the outer edge the reef is steep, too, dropping off

almost at the perpendicular. It is difficult to realize, when one has

been brought up on the friendly coasts of America, that if a boat

capsizes off these reefs one must swim offshore and wait to be picked

up--that it is wiser to chance the sharks than to attempt a landing in

the surf, for the sea is breaking along the summit of a sunken

cliff--jagged and sharp as broken glass, poisonous as the venom of a

snake.

They came out to us in a whaleboat; Riley, the supercargo, and I were

the first to go ashore. As we pulled away from the schooner a

high-pitched argument began. One of the principal men of the island had

come out as a passenger and was sitting beside me. He insisted that as

they had got off safely from the boat passage it was best to return the

same way. The boat steerer disagreed; it was all very well to put out

from the passage, with a score of men to hold the boat until the moment

came, and launch her out head-on to the breakers, but now the situation

was different; the passage was narrow; it must be entered just so, and a

mishap might have unpleasant consequences in such a surf. The steersman

had the best of it; he took us a quarter of a mile beyond the passage,

and let his men rest on their oars off a place where the reef seemed a

little lower than elsewhere.

Each time we swung up to the crest of a swell I got a look at the surf,

and the prospect was not reassuring. Once or twice, as the backwash

poured off in a frothy cascade, I caught a glimpse of the

coral--reddish-black, jagged and forbidding. Little by little we drew

near the land until the boat lay just where the waves began to tower for

the final rush; the oarsmen backed water gently--the boat steerer turned

his head nervously this way and that, glancing at the reef ahead and at

the rearing water behind. I thought of a day, many years before, when

my father had taken me for a first experience of the "chutes," and our

little boat seemed to pause for an instant at the summit of the tower

before it tilted forward and flew down the steep slope to the

water--infinitely far off and below. The feeling was the same--fear

mingling with delight, an almost painful exhilaration.

All of us, saving the watchful figure in the stern, were waiting for a

signal which would make the oarsmen leap into activity, the passengers

clench their teeth and grip the rail. Suddenly it came--a harsh shout.

Six oars struck the water at once; the whaleboat gathered way; a big sea

rose behind us, lifted us gently on its back, and swept us toward the

reef. Next moment I saw that we had started a breath too late. We were

going like the wind, it was true, but not tilted forward on the crest as

we should have been; the wave was gradually passing beneath us. Riley

glanced at me and shook his head with a humorous turndown of the mouth.

It was too late to stop--the men were pulling desperately, their long

oars bending at every stroke. When the sea broke we were slipping down

into the trough behind; as we passed over the edge of the reef the wave

was beginning its backward wash. There were shouts; I found myself up

to my waist in a foaming rush of water, struggling with might and main

to keep my footing and to hold the boat from slipping off into the sea.

We stopped her just on the brink; her keel grated on the coral; another

sea was coming at us, towering high above our heads. Riley, the

supercargo, and I leaped aboard in response to a sharp command. The

boys held her stern-on to the last; as they scrambled over the sides the

sea caught us, half swamping the boat and lifting her stern high in the

air. She tilted wildly as her bow crashed on the coral, but a rare

piece of luck saved her from turning broadside on. Next moment we were

over the reef and gliding smoothly into the shallow water beyond. As I

drew a long, satisfying breath I heard Riley chuckle. "I think I'll get

a job diving for shell," he remarked. "I'll swear I haven't breathed

for a good three minutes!"

When we stood on the beach a dozen men came forward, smiling, to greet

their friend Rairi. With a decently pronounceable name--from the native

standpoint--Riley has got off easily; I never tire of wondering what

these people will call a white man. They seem to prefer the surname if

it can be pronounced; if not, they try the given name, and Charley

becomes Teari, or Johnny, Tioni. If this fails, or if they take a

dislike to one, the fun begins. I have a friend who, unless he leaves

the islands, will be called Salt Pork all his life; and I know another

man--a second-rate colonial of the intolerant kind--who goes blissfully

about his business all unaware that hundreds of people know him by no

other name than Pig Dung. No doubt you have noticed another thing down

here--the deceptive simplicity of address. In these eastern islands the

humblest speaks to the most powerful without any title of respect, with

nothing corresponding to our "mister" or "sir." At first one is

inclined to believe that here is the beautiful and ideal democracy--the

realization of the communist's dream--and there are other things which

lead to the same conclusion. Servants, for one example, are treated with

extraordinary consideration and kindliness; when the feast is over the

mistress of the household is apt as not to dance with the man who feeds

her pigs, or the head of the family to take the arm of the girl who has

been waiting on his guests. The truth is that this impression of

equality is false; there are not many places in the world where a more

rigid social order exists--not of caste, but of classes. In the

thousand or fifteen hundred years that they have inhabited the islands

the Polynesians have worked out a system of human relationships nearer

the ultimate, perhaps, than our own idealists would have us believe.

Wealth counts for little, birth for everything; it is useless for an

islander to think of raising himself in a social way--where he is born

he dies, and his children after him. On the other hand, except for the

abstract pleasure of position, there is little to make the small man

envious of the great; he eats the same food, his dress is the same, he

works as little or as much, and the relations between the two are of the

pleasantest. There is a really charming lack of ostentation in these

islands, where everything is known about everyone, and it is useless to

pretend to be what one is not. That is at the root of it all--here is

one place in the world, at least, where every man is sure of himself.

We were strolling up the path between the canoe houses when Riley

stopped me. "Come and have a look," he said; "this is the only island I

know of where you can see an old-fashioned double canoe."

There were two of them in the shed we entered, under a roof of battered

galvanized iron--long, graceful hulls fashioned from the trunks of

trees, joined in pairs by timbers of ironwood laid across the gunwales

and lashed down with sinnet. They were beautifully finished--scraped

smooth and decorated with carving. In these craft, my companion told me,

the men of Mauke still voyage to Atiu and Mitiaro, as they had done for

generations before Cook sailed through the group. There is an ancient

feud between Mauke and Atiu; it is curious how hard such grudges die.

The men of Atiu were the most warlike of all the Cook Islanders; even in

these times of traders and schools and missionaries no firearms are

allowed on the island. Time after time, in the old days, they raided

Mauke, stealing by night upon the sleeping villages, entering each house

to feel the heads of the sleepers. When they felt the large head of a

warrior they seized his throat and killed him without noise; the

children and women--the small heads and the heads with long hair--were

taken back alive to Atiu. Terrible scenes have been enacted under the

old ironwoods of Mauke, when the raiders, maddened with the heat of

killing, danced in the firelight about the opened ovens and gorged on

the bodies of the slain; for the Cook-Islanders, excepting perhaps the

people of Aitutaki, were cannibals as fierce as the Maoris of New

Zealand or the tawny savages of the Marquesas. Why should Aitutaki have

bred a gentler and finer people? The group is not widely scattered as

islands go; there must have been fighting and intermarriage for ages

past. Yet any man who has been here long can tell you at a glance from

which island a native hails; even after my few weeks I am beginning to

have an eye for the differences. The Mangaian is certainly the most

distinct, recognizable at once by his dark skin, his wide, ugly mouth,

his uncouth and savage manner. The full-blooded Rarotongan, who will

soon be a rarity, is another type--handsome in a square-cut leonine way,

with less energy and far more dignity of presence. The people of

Aitutaki are different still--fair as the average Tahitian, and pleasing

in features and manner; I have seen girls from that island who would be

called beautiful in any country. These differences are not easy to

account for, it seems to me, when one considers that the islanders are

all of one race, tracing their ancestry back to common sources and

speaking a common tongue.

The trader, a friend of Riley's, took us to his house for lunch. The

day was Sunday and a feast was already preparing, so we were spared the

vocal agonies of the pig. Times must be changing--I have seen very few

traders of the gin-drinking type one expects to find in the South Seas;

nowadays they seem to be rather quiet, reflective men, who like to read

and play their phonographs in the evening, and drink excellent whisky

with soda from a sparklet bottle. This one was no exception; I found

him full of intelligence and a dreamy philosophy which kept him content

in this forgotten corner of the world. He was young and English; there

were cricket bats and blazers in his living room, and shelves filled

with the kind of books one can read over and over again. He was

pessimistic over Riley's chances of getting men--the people of Mauke

were growing lazier each year, he said, and seemed to get along with

less and less of the European things for which, at one time, they had

worked. As for copra, they no longer bothered much with it; the nuts

were left to sprout under the palms. The taro patches were running

down; the coffee and breadfruit dropped off the trees unpicked; the

oranges, which brought a good price when a vessel came to take them off,

were allowed to drop and rot.

As we sat smoking after lunch, a native boy came in, with a vague air of

conspiracy, to hold a whispered conversation with Riley. When he had

gone the American winked at our host and turned to me.

"There's a beer tub going full blast out in the bush," he said. "I

think I'll drop in on them and see if I can pick up a man or two. You'd

better come along."

Liquor is prohibited to the natives throughout the Cook Islands; even

the white man must buy it from the government in quantities regulated by

the judgment of the official in charge. The manufacture of anything

alcoholic is forbidden, but this latter law is administered with a

certain degree of tolerance. Fortunately for everyone concerned, the art

of making palm toddy has never been introduced; when the Cook-Islander

feels the need of mild exhilaration he takes to the bush and brews a

beverage known as orange beer. The ingredients are sugar, orange juice,

and yeast--the recipe would prove popular, I fancy, in our own

orange-growing states. The story goes that when the Cook Island boys

went overseas to war they found a great drought prevailing in their

eastern field of action--Palestine, I think it was. But there were

oranges in plenty, and these untutored islanders soon showed the Tommies

a trick that brought them together like brothers. I have tasted orange

beer at all stages (even the rare old vintage stuff, bottled two or

three months before) and found it not at all difficult to take; there

are worse varieties of tipple, though this one is apt to lead to

fighting, and leaves its too-enthusiastic devotee with a headache of

unusual severity.

We found fifteen or twenty men assembled under an old utu tree; a dance

ended as we drew near, and the cup was being passed. Two five-gallon

kerosene tins, with the tops cut off and filled with the bright-yellow

beer, stood in the center of the group. Women are never present on

these occasions, which correspond, in a way, to Saturday evenings in a

club at home. A sort of rude ceremonial--a relic, perhaps, of

kava-drinking days--is observed around the beer tub. The oldest man

present, armed with a heavy stick, is appointed guardian of the peace,

to see that decency and order are preserved; the natives realize, no

doubt, that any serious disturbance might put an end to their fun. The

single cup is filled and passed to each guest in turn; he must empty it

without taking breath. After every round one of the drinkers is

expected to rise and entertain the company with a dance or a song.

Riley was welcomed with shouts; he was in a gay mood and when we had had

our turns at the cup he stripped off his tunic for a dance. He is a

famous dancer; unhampered by the native conventions, he went through the

figures of _heiva_, _otea_, and _ura_--first the man's part, then the

woman's--while the men of Mauke clapped their hands rhythmically and

choked with laughter. No wonder Riley gets on with the people; there is

not an ounce of self-consciousness in him--he enters into a bit of fun

with the good-natured abandon of a child. As for dancing, he is

wonderful; every posture was there, every twist and wriggle and flutter

of the hands--what old Bligh called, with delightful, righteous gusto,

the "wanton gestures" of the _heiva_.

Riley had told his friends on the beach that he was on the lookout for

labor; by this time, probably, the whole island knew he was on his way

to the atoll and that he needed men. Before we took leave of the

drinkers three of them had agreed to go with my companion. The sea was

calmer now, and, since Riley's wife was on the schooner, we decided to

go aboard for dinner. Four more recruits were waiting by the canoe

houses to sign on--it was odd to see their response to the Irishman's

casual offer when half the planters of the group declare that labor is

unobtainable.

The whaleboat was waiting in the passage. It was evening. The wind had

dropped; the sky overhead was darkening; out to the west the sun had set

behind banks of white cloud rimmed with gold. The oarsmen took their

places; friendly hands shot us out in a lull between two breakers; we

passed the surf and pulled offshore toward where the schooner was riding

an easy swell, her lights beginning to twinkle in the dusk.

*Rutiaro*

[Illustration: Woodcut]

*CHAPTER VI*

*Rutiaro*

Chance began to move of set purpose in Papeete, on the day I was to sail

with the one-hundred-and-ten-ton schooner, _Caleb S. Winship_, for the

Cloud of Islands. I was on my way to the water front, and, having

plenty of time, walked leisurely, thinking of the long journey so nearly

at hand, of the strange and lonely islands I was to see, and wondering,

as an Anglo-Saxon must when presented with a piece of good fortune, what

I had done to merit it. Oro, the cabin boy of the _Winship_, was

following with my luggage. He kept at some distance, a mark of respect,

as I thought, until I saw him sublet his contract to a smaller boy.

Then he retired to spend the unearned increment in watermelon and a

variety of cakes sold at the Chinese stalls along the street. Not

wanting him to think that I begrudged him his last little fling on

shore, I became interested of a sudden in the contents of a shop window,

and there I saw a boxful of marbles. In a moment Oro was forgotten.

Papeete faded from view, and the warm air, fragrant with the odors of

vanilla and roasting coffee, became more bracing. There was a tang in

it, like that of early April, in Iowa, for example, at the beginning of

the marble-playing season. Fifteen years dropped lightly from my

shoulders and I was back at the old rendezvous in the imagination,

almost as really as I had ever been in the flesh. The lumber yard of S.

M. Brown & Son lay on the right hand and the Rock Island Railroad tracks

on the left. Between, on a stretch of smooth cinder right of way, a

dozen games were in full swing. There were cries of, "Picks and vents!"

"Bunchers!" "Sneakers!" "Knucks down!" the sharp crack of expert shots;

the crunch of cinders under bare and yet tender feet. Meadow larks were

singing in a nearby pasture, and from afar I heard the deep whistle of

the Rocky Mountain Limited as it came down the Mitchellville grade.

I bought the marbles--the whole box of them. They cost fifty francs,

about four dollars American, as the exchange was then, but I considered

the investment a good one. I knew that, no matter where I might be, to

lift the lid of my box was to make an immediate and inexpensive journey

back to one of the pleasantest periods of boyhood. Oro was awaiting me

at the quay, and carried my small sea chest on board with an air of

spurious fatigue. I gave him my purchase and told him to stow it away

for me in the cabin, which he did with such care that I did not find it

again until we were within view of Rutiaro. The _Caleb S. Winship_ was

homeward bound then, from Tanao, where we had left Crichton, the English

planter. Rutiaro lying on our course, it was decided to put in there in

the hope that we might be able to replace our lost deck cargo of copra,

washed overboard in a squall a few days previously.

Neither Findlay's _South Pacific Directory_ nor the _British Admiralty

Sailing Directions_ had much to say about the atoll. Both agreed that

the lagoon is nine miles long by five broad, and that on June 29, 1887,

the French surveying vessel, _St. Etienne_, found the tide running

through a narrow pass at two knots per hour, the flood as swift as the

ebb. It was further stated that in 1889 Her Majesty's ship, _Prince

Edward_, anchored in eight fathoms, three hundred yards from shore in

front of the village, which is situated on the most westerly island; and

that a few pigs and chickens were purchased at a nominal price from the

inhabitants. With this information I had to be content in so far as my

reading was concerned. There was nothing of a later date in either

volume, and the impression I had was that the atoll, having been charted

and briefly described, had remained unvisited, almost forgotten, for a

period of thirty-one years.

This, of course, was not the case. Tinned beef and kerosene oil had

followed the flag there as elsewhere in the world. Religion, in fact,

had preceded it, leaving a broad wake of Bibles and black

mother-hubbards still in evidence among the older generation. But

skippers of small trading schooners are rarely correspondents of the

hydrographic associations, and the "reports from the field" of itinerant

missionaries are buried in the dusty files of the religious journals, so

that Rutiaro is as little known to the world at large as it has always

been. Findlay's general remarks about it were confined to a single

sentence, "A lonely atoll, numbering a population of between

seventy-five and one hundred inhabitants." It certainly looked lonely

enough on the chart, far out on the westerly fringe of the archipelago,

more than six hundred miles from the nearest steamship route, and that

one infrequently traveled. I sought further information from

Tino-a-Tino, the supercargo, a three-quarters American despite his

Tahitian name. He had been trading in the Low Islands for twenty years,

and during that time had created a voluminous literature with reference

to their inhabitants. But it was all of an occupational nature and

confined to the ledgers of the Inter-Island Trading Company. I found

him at his usual task in the cabin, where he gave me some specimen

compositions for criticism.

"I wish you'd look them over," he said. "These copra bugs drive a man

wild. They get in your eyes, in your liquor, in your mouth--Lord! What

a life!"

The cabin was filled with unsacked copra to the level of the upper tier

of bunks. One had to crawl in on hands and knees. The copra bugs were

something of a nuisance, and the smell and heat oppressive. I had

traveled on more comfortable vessels, with tennis courts on the boat

decks and Roman swimming baths below--but they didn't touch at Rutiaro.