SYDNEY AND NEW CALEDONIA
Osa and I were sure, after our first adventure in Malekula, that we had
had enough of cannibals to last us for the rest of our natural lives.
But when we reached Sydney, on our way home, and had our films
developed, we began to weaken. Our pictures were so good that we almost
forgot the risk we had taken to get them. The few feet I had managed to
grind out on Malekula were no “staged” pictures of savage life. They
were so real and convincing that Osa declared her knees went wobbly
every time she saw them.
Before many months, Nagapate was scowling out of the screen at audiences
in New York and Paris and London, and villagers who would never go a
hundred miles from home were meeting him face to face in the Malekula
jungle. The public wanted more—and so did we. Early in 1919, about a
year after our first adventure in the Malekula bush, we were again in
Sydney, preparing for a second visit to the land of the Big Numbers—the
trip out of which this book has grown.
As we sailed into Sydney harbor on the S.S. Ventura, we met, sailing
out, the Pacifique, the little steamer of the Messageries Maritimes that
had taken us to the New Hebrides on our former visit. That meant we
should have four weeks to wait before embarking on our journey to
Malekula. We were impatient to be off, but we knew that the four weeks
would pass quickly enough, for many things remained to be done before we
should be ready for a long sojourn in the jungle.
We took up our abode with the Higginses, in their house on Darling Point
Road overlooking the harbor. Ernie Higgins had handled my films for me
on my previous trip, and I had found him to be the best laboratory man I
had ever met with, so I was glad to be again associated with him.
The house was an old-fashioned brick house of about twelve or fourteen
rooms. I fitted up one of the second-story rooms to serve as a workroom.
I had electricity brought in and set up my Pathéscope projector, so that
I could see the pictures I happened to be working on. Having this
projector meant that the work of cutting and assembling films would be
cut in two. I put up my rewinds, and soon had everything in apple-pie
order.
[Illustration: A BEACH SCENE]
From the window of my workroom, I could look over Sydney harbor. Osa and
I never tired of watching the ships going in and out. We would consult
the sailing lists in the newspapers, and try to identify the vessels
that we saw below us. There were steamers from China and Japan and the
Straits Settlements; little vessels from the various South Seas groups;
big, full-rigged ships from America; steamers from Africa and Europe;
little schooners from the islands; coastal boats to and from New Zealand
and Tasmania, and almost every day big ships came in with returned
soldiers. In the course of a week we saw boats of every description
flying the flags of almost every nation on the globe.
Osa put in long days in the harbor, fishing from Mr. Higgins’s little
one-man dinghy, that was nearly swamped a dozen times a day in the wash
from the ferry-boats, while I worked like a slave at my motion-picture
apparatus. The public thinks that a wandering camera-man’s difficulties
begin with putting a roll of film in the camera and end with taking it
out. If I were telling the true story of this trip, I should start with
my grilling weeks of preparation in New York. But my troubles in Sydney
will perhaps give sufficient idea of the unromantic back-of-the-scenes
in the life of a motion-picture explorer. I had troubles by the score.
My cameras acted up. They scratched the film; they buckled. When I had
remedied these and a dozen other ailments, I found that my pictures were
not steady when they were projected. The fault we at last located in Mr.
Higgins’s printer. We repaired the printer. Then we found that the
developer produced a granulated effect on the film. It took us two weeks
to get the proper developer. But our troubles were not over. Great spots
came out on the pictures—grease in the developing tanks. And the racks
were so full of old chemicals that they spoiled the film that hung over
them. I had new racks and new tanks made. They were not made according
to specifications. I had them remade twice and then took them apart and
did the work myself.
After I thought that my troubles were over, I found that my Pathéscope
projector, which had been made for standard film, had several parts
lacking. This was most serious, for it spoiled a plan that I had had in
the back of my head ever since I had first seen my Malekula pictures. I
wanted to show them to Nagapate and his men. It was an event that I had
looked forward to ever since I had decided to revisit the island. It
would be almost comparable to setting up a movie show in the Garden of
Eden. Luckily, I was able to have the missing parts made in Sydney, and
my apparatus was at last in order.
Then I had to collect as much information as I could about the New
Hebrides and their inhabitants, so I trotted around morning after
morning, to interview traders and steamship officials and missionaries.
Another task, in which Osa helped me, was to ransack the second-hand
clothing stores for old hats and coats and vests to serve as presents
for the natives. Other trade-stuffs, such as tobacco, mirrors, knives,
hatchets, and bright-colored calico, I planned to get in Vila, the
principal port and capital of the New Hebrides.
The four weeks had gone by like a flash, but the Pacifique had not yet
put in an appearance. She came limping into harbor at the end of another
week. She had been delayed by engine trouble and by quarantines; for the
influenza was raging through the South Seas. It was announced that she
would sail in five days, but the sailing date was postponed several
times, and it was the 18th of June before we finally lifted anchor.
It seemed good to get out of the flu-infested city, where theaters and
schools and churches were closed, every one was forced to wear a mask,
and the population was in a blue funk. We both loved Sydney and its
hospitable people, but we were not sorry to see the pretty harbor, with
its green slopes dotted with red-tiled roofs, fade into the distance.
Osa and I have often said that we like the Pacifique better than any
ship we have ever traveled on. It is a little steamer—only one thousand
nine hundred tons. We do not have bunks to sleep in, but comfortable
beds. Morning coffee is served from five to eleven o’clock. It is an
informal meal. Every one comes up for it in pajamas. Breakfast is at
half-past eleven. Dinner is ready at half-past six and lasts until
half-past eight. It is a leisurely meal, of course after course, with
red wine flowing plentifully. After dinner, the French officers play on
the piano and sing.
Most of the officers were strangers to us on this voyage, for our old
friends were all down with the flu in Sydney. The doctor and the
wireless operator were both missing, and the captain, Eric de Catalano,
assumed their duties. He was a good wireless operator, for we got news
from New Zealand each night and were in communication with Nouméa long
before we sighted New Caledonia. How efficient he was as a doctor, I
cannot say. But he had a big medicine chest and made his round each day
among the sick, and though many of the passengers came down with
influenza, none of them died. He was a handsome man, quiet and
intelligent, and a fine photographer. He had several cameras and a
well-fitted dark room and an enlarging apparatus aboard, and had made
some of the best island pictures I had ever seen. He seemed to be a man
of many talents, for the chief engineer told me that he had an
electrician’s papers and could run the engines as well as he himself
could.
We were a polyglot crowd aboard. We had fifteen first-class and five
second-class passengers, French, Australian, English, Scotch, and Irish,
and one Dane, with Osa and myself to represent America. In the steerage
were twenty-five Japanese, and up forward there was a Senegalese negro
being taken to the French convict settlement at Nouméa. Our officers
were all French—few could speak English. Our deck crew was composed of
_libérés_—ex-convicts from Nouméa. The cargo-handlers were native New
Caledonians with a sprinkling of Loyalty Islanders. The firemen were
Arabs, the dish-washers in the galley, New Hebrideans. The bath steward
was a Fiji Islander, the cabin steward a Hindu, the second-class cabin
steward hailed from the Molucca Islands, and our table steward was a
native of French Indo-China.
Three days out from Sydney we passed Middleton Reef, a coral atoll,
about five miles long and two across, with the ocean breaking in foam on
its reef and the water of its lagoon as quiet as a millpond. The atoll
is barely above water, and many ships have gone aground there. We sailed
so close that I could have thrown a stone ashore, and saw the hull of a
big schooner on the reef.
As we stood by the rail looking at her, one of our fellow-passengers, a
trader who knew the islands well, came up to us and told us her story.
“She went ashore three years ago, in a big wind,” he said. “All hands
stuck to the ship until she broke in two. Then they managed to reach
land—captain and crew and the captain’s wife and two children. They had
some fresh water and a little food. They rationed the water carefully,
and there was rain. But the food soon gave out. For days they had
nothing. The crew went crazy with hunger, and killed one of the children
and ate it. For two days, the mother held the other child in her arms.
Then she threw it into the sea so that they could not eat it. Then three
of the men took one of the ship’s boats. They could not manage it in the
rough sea, but by a lucky chance they were washed up on the beach. They
were still alive, but the captain’s wife had lost her mind.”
We reached Nouméa on the morning of June 23d. The pilot met us outside
the reef, in accordance with regulations, but he refused to come on
board when he found that we had several passengers down with the
influenza, so we towed him in. We were not allowed to land, but were
placed in quarantine off a small island about two miles from Nouméa,
between the leper settlement and Île Nou, the convict island. We were
avoided as though we had leprosy. Each day a launch came with fresh meat
and fresh vegetables, the French engineer and black crew all masked and
plainly anxious not to linger in our vicinity any longer than necessary,
and each day the doctor came and took our temperatures.
We passed our time in fishing from the deck. We had excellent luck and
our catches made fine eating. Osa, of course, caught more fish than any
one else, principally because she was up at sunrise and did not quit
until it was time to go to bed. I relieved the monotony in the evenings
by showing my pictures. I set up the Pathéscope in the saloon, and each
night I gave a performance. My audience was most critical. Every one on
board knew the New Hebrides and Nouméa well, and many of the passengers
were familiar with the Solomons and other groups in which I had taken
pictures. But my projector worked finely; I had as good a show as could
be seen in any motion-picture house, and every one was satisfied.
We had been surprised, as we steamed into the harbor, to see the
Euphrosyne lying at anchor there. The sight of her had made us realize
that we were indeed nearing the Big Numbers territory. Strangely enough,
the thought aroused no fear in us—only excitement and eagerness to get
to work, and resentment against the delay that kept us inactive in
Nouméa harbor.
Not until four days had passed was our quarantine lifted. On the evening
of June 27th, the launch brought word that peace had been signed, and
that, if no more cases of flu had developed, we would be allowed to land
on the following day and take part in the peace celebration.
New Caledonia does not much resemble the other islands of the South
Pacific. It has a white population of twenty thousand—about two thirds
as great as the native population. Its capital, Nouméa, is an industrial
city of fifteen thousand white inhabitants—the Chicago of the South
Seas. In and around it are nickel-smelters, meat-canneries, sugar-works,
tobacco and coconut-oil and soap factories. New Caledonia is rich in
minerals. It has large deposits of coal and kaolin, chrome and cobalt,
lead and antimony, mercury, cinnabar, silver, gold and copper and gypsum
and marble. In neighboring islands are rich guano beds. Agriculture has
not yet been crowded off the island by industry. The mountain slopes
make good grazing grounds and the fertile valleys are admirably fitted
for the production of coffee, cotton, maize, tobacco, copra, rubber, and
cereals. Yet there is little of South Seas romance about the islands.
And Nouméa is one of the ugliest, most depressing little towns on the
face of the earth.
We docked there early on the morning of Saturday, the 28th of June. The
wharf was packed with people, but none of them would come on board. We
might have been a plague ship. As we went ashore, we looked for signs of
the peace celebration. A few half-hearted firecrackers and some flags
hanging limp in the heat were all. The real celebration, we were told,
would take place on Monday.
In the evening, we were invited to attend one of those terrible
home-talent performances that I had thought were a product only of
Kansas, but, I now learned, were as deadly in the South Seas as in the
Middle West. A round little Frenchman read a paper in rapid French that
we could not understand, but the expression of polite interest on the
faces of the audience told us that it must be like the Fourth-of-July
orations in our home town. Then came a duet, by a man and woman who
could not sing. Another paper. Then an orchestra of three men and four
girls arranged themselves with much scraping of chairs on the funny
little stage and wheezed a few ancient tunes.
On Sunday night we went to the Peace Ball in the town hall. Most of
Nouméa’s fifteen thousand inhabitants were there, so dancing was next to
impossible. It was like a Mack Sennet comedy ball. Ancient finery had
been hauled out for the occasion, and, though most of the men appeared
in full dress, scarcely one had evening clothes that really fitted.
Under the too loose and too tight coats, however, there were warm and
hospitable hearts, and we were treated royally. After the ball, we were
entertained at supper by the governor and his suite.
Governor Joulia was a little, bald-headed man of about fifty years of
age, always smiling, always polite, and always dressed in the most
brilliant of brilliant uniforms, covered with decorations that he had
won during campaigns in Senegal, Algeria and India. His wife was a
pretty, plump woman of about thirty—she and Osa took to each other at
once. They spoke no English, and our French is awful, but we struck out
like drowning persons, and managed to understand each other after a
fashion.
On Monday, the “real celebration” of the peace consisted in closing the
stores and sleeping most of the day. In the afternoon, the governor and
his wife came to the ship for us and took us to their beautiful summer
place, about five miles from the city. A great park, with deer feeding
under the trees, fine gardens, tennis courts, well-tended walks—and the
work all done by numbered convicts.
There are convicts everywhere in and about Nouméa—convicts and
_libérés_. Their presence makes the ugly little town seem even more
unprepossessing than it is. The pleasantest spot anywhere around is Île
Nou, the convict island that I have often heard called a hell on earth.
On this green little island are about five hundred convicts—all old men,
for France has not deported any of her criminals to New Caledonia since
1897. They are all “lifers.” Indeed, I was told of one old man who is in
for two hundred years; he has tried to escape many times, and, according
to a rule of the settlement, ten years are added to a man’s sentence for
each attempt at escape.
We visited Île Nou in company with Governor Joulia and Madame Joulia;
the Mayor of Nouméa; the manager of the big nickel mines; the Governor
of the prison settlement, and a lot of aides-de-something. We saw the
old prisoners, in big straw hats and burlap clothing, each with his
number stamped on his back, all busy doing nothing. We were taken
through the cells where, in former times, convicts slept on bare boards,
with their feet through leg-irons. We were locked in dark dungeons, and,
for the benefit of my camera, the guillotine was brought out and, with a
banana stalk to take the place of a man, the beheading ceremony was gone
through with. We were taken in carriages over the green hills to the
hospitals and to the insane asylum, where we saw poor old crazy men,
with vacant eyes, staring at the ceilings. Here we met the king of the
world, who received us with great pomp from behind the bars of a strong
iron cage, and a pitiful old inventor, who showed us a perpetual-motion
machine which he had just perfected. It was made from stale bread.
[Illustration: LOOKING SEAWARD]
Yet Île Nou is better than Nouméa, with its ugly streets full of broken
old _libérés_. While most of the convicts were sent out for life, some
were sent for five years. At the end of that time, they were freed from
Île Nou and permitted to live in New Caledonia on parole, and if they
had committed no fresh offense, at the end of another five years they
were given their ticket back to France. Any one sentenced to a longer
term than five years, however, never saw France again. He regained his
freedom, but was destined to lifelong exile. Some of the _libérés_ have
found employment and have become responsible citizens of New Caledonia,
but many of them drift through the streets of Nouméa, broken old men who
sleep wherever they can find a corner to crawl into and pick their food
from the gutters.
I was glad, while in Nouméa, to renew my acquaintance with Commissioner
King of the New Hebrides, who had come to New Caledonia to have the
Euphrosyne repaired. I talked over with him my proposed expedition to
Malekula, and received much valuable advice. He could not give me the
armed escort I had hoped to secure from him, for he had no police boys
to spare. He promised, however, to pick us up at Vao, in about a month’s
time, and take us for a cruise through the group in the Euphrosyne. I
wanted him, and the New Caledonian officials as well, to see some of my
work, so I decided to show my films in the Grand Cinéma, the leading
motion-picture house of Nouméa. I gave the proprietor the films free of
charge, under condition that I got fifty seats blocked off in the center
of the house. We invited fifty guests, and the remainder of the house
was packed with French citizens of Nouméa, Chinese and Japanese coolies
and native New Caledonians. I showed the five reels called “Cannibals of
the South Seas.” Then I showed my four reels of Malekula film, and ended
up with a one-reel subject, Nouméa. We were given an ovation, and both
Osa and I had to make speeches—understood by few of those present. The
French have a passion for speeches whether they can understand them or
not. The next morning, we found ourselves celebrities as we walked
through the streets of Nouméa.