THE THRESHOLD OF CANNIBAL-LAND
We left New Caledonia at midnight on July 3d, and steamed over a calm
sea to Vila.
Vila is the commercial center as well as the capital of the New Hebrides
and its harbor is one of the finest in the South Seas. On our right, as
we steamed in, was the island of Irriki, a mountain peak rising out of
the sea, on the highest point of which Mr. King has built his house.
Vila is a typical South Seas town—a rambling mixture of tropical and
European architecture and no architecture at all. Its public buildings,
French and British, its churches, and the well-kept British settlement,
with the parade grounds and barracks for the native police, make it more
imposing than the run of the pioneer villages of Melanesia, but it
seemed strange to us that it should be the metropolis for the white
people of thirty islands. We spent a day in Vila looking up old
acquaintances and laying in supplies. Among the acquaintances we found
good old Father Prin who had been retired from active duty on Vao and
had come to Vila to spend his declining days. He was glad to see us, but
shook his head when he heard that we were again going to try our luck
among the Big Numbers.
“Big Numbers plenty bad,” he warned us in _bêche-de-mer_. And Osa and I
replied in the same tongue, “Me no fright.”
I bought nearly a thousand dollars’ worth of food and trade-stuffs from
the four trading stores of Vila, but could not get a schooner or any
native boys to take us on our trip around Malekula. So I decided to go
on to the island of Espiritu Santo, two hundred miles to the north. We
stopped at Api, to leave mail and supplies and to take on copra. In the
harbor there, we again saw the old Snark at anchor. It was a black and
shabby ship, manned by a black crew and used for recruiting labor for
work in the white man’s sugar and copra plantations.
We found Segond Channel, off Southeastern Santo, filled with cutters and
schooners, every one of which had white men aboard, who had been waiting
a couple of weeks for the news and supplies brought by the Pacifique. In
no time at all, I made arrangements for three schooners with big crews
to accompany me on my visit to the tribe of the Big Numbers. Mr. Thomas,
of Hog Harbor, promised he would send his boat to Vao in a week with as
many boys as he could spare. Mr. Perrole, an experienced French
recruiter, also agreed to charter a schooner and bring boys. We obtained
a third schooner from a young Frenchman, Paul Mazouyer, one of the most
picturesque dare-devils I have ever met. A giant in size and strength,
boiling with energy, always singing, sometimes dancing with his boys, he
did not understand the meaning of fear. He was a match for three white
men, and he took chances on the beach that no other recruiter would
dream of taking. I asked him once in _bêche-de-mer_—the only language in
which we could converse—if the savages did not sometimes make him a
little anxious.
“Ah,” he said, shifting his huge frame and stretching his arms, “my
word! Suppose fifty men he come, me no fright!”
I believed him. He was a two-fisted adventurer of the old type, with the
courage of unbeaten youth. He knew, as every white man in the New
Hebrides knows, that he might expect short shrift once the natives got
him in their power, but he trusted to fate and took reckless chances.
The captain of the Pacifique agreed to take us to Vao, although it was
fifty miles off his course. We dropped anchor off the island just at
daylight and were surrounded almost immediately by canoes filled with
naked savages. The Pacifique was a marvel to the natives. She was one of
the smallest steamers I had ever been aboard, but they had never in all
their lives seen so large a vessel. The imposing size of the ship and
the impressive quantity of my baggage—sixty-five trunks, crates and
boxes—gave me a great deal of importance in their eyes. As we stood on
the beach watching the unloading of the ship’s boat, they crowded about,
regarding us with furtive curiosity. From time to time they opened their
huge, slobbering mouths in loud guffaws, though there was apparently no
cause for laughter.
When my things were all unloaded, the captain and officers shook hands
with us and put off for the ship. In twenty minutes the Pacifique was
steaming away. Before she gained speed, a big American flag was hoisted
between the masts, and the engineer tooted encouragement to us. As she
grew small in the distance, the flag at the stern of the vessel was
dipped three times. We sat on the beach among our boxes and watched her
until she was just a cloud of smoke on the horizon. We felt very lonely
and very much shut off from our kind there, surrounded by a crowd of
jabbering, naked savages, who stared at us with all the curiosity shown
by people back home toward the wild man in a sideshow.
With a show of cheerfulness, we set about making ourselves comfortable
for the weeks to come. The huts of the seventeen converts were deserted,
and rapidly going to pieces: the former occupants had forsaken the
lonely clearing for the crowded villages. But the little stone house in
which Father Prin had lived was still standing, though one corner of the
roof had fallen in. A proffer of tobacco secured me many willing black
hands to repair the roof and thatch it with palm leaves. Other natives
brought up our trunks and boxes. They cut big poles and lashed the boxes
to them with vines, and, ten to twenty natives to a box, they carried
the luggage from the beach in no time. By noon we had everything stored
away safe from the weather. We spent the afternoon in unpacking the
things needed for immediate use, and soon Osa and I had our little
three-room dwelling shipshape.
We had learned a lesson from our first trip, with the result that, on
this second expedition, we had brought with us every possible comfort
and even some luxuries—from air-cushions and mattresses to hams, bacons,
and cheeses specially prepared for us in Sydney. With a clear-flamed
Primus stove and Osa to operate it, we were fairly certain of good food.
Having promulgated the law of the New Hebrides and Solomons, that every
native coming upon the clearing must leave his gun behind him and cover
his nakedness with calico, we settled down for a long stay.
Vao is a very small island, no more than two miles in diameter, lying
several miles off the northeast shore of Malekula. It is rimmed on the
Malekula side by a broad, beautiful beach. Three small villages are
hidden in the low, scrub jungle, but the only signs of habitation are
three canoe houses that jut out from the fringe of bushes and hundreds
of canoes drawn up in a careful line upon the beach.
About four hundred savages live in the three villages of Vao. Their
huts—mere shelters, not high enough to permit a man to stand
erect—contain nothing but a few bits of wood to feed the smoldering
fires. Pigs wander freely in and out. Oftentimes these animals seem to
be better favored than the human inmates, who are a poor lot, many of
them afflicted with dreadful sores and weak eyes.
Many of the inhabitants of Vao are refugees from the big island of
Malekula, who were vanquished in battle and literally driven off the
earth by their enemies. Soon after our arrival, a powerful savage named
Tethlong, one of the Small Numbers people, arrived on Vao with twenty of
his men. All the remaining men of his tribe had been killed and the
women and children had been taken captive. The natives of Vao received
the newcomers as a welcome addition to their fighting force, and
Tethlong set about to insure his position among his new neighbors. He
invited the entire population to a feast, and at once sent his men to
neighboring islands to buy up pigs and chickens for the occasion. The
devil-devils—great, hollowed logs, carved roughly to represent human
faces, which are erected everywhere in the New Hebrides to guard against
evil spirits—were consulted to find a propitious time for the feasting,
and on the appointed day the celebration began with much shouting and
singing and dancing and beating of tom-toms. It lasted for several days.
Before it was over, seven hundred and twenty pigs had been slaughtered.
The island had never before seen such a feast. As a result of his
political strategy, Tethlong became the Big Chief of Vao, taking
precedence over the chiefs already there.
I got some fine pictures of Tethlong’s feast, but they were the only
pictures I took for some days. For one thing, I was too busy for camera
work; for the job of checking over our supplies and fortifying our place
against a heavy rain kept us busy. For another, I was anxious to keep
our savage neighbors at a distance, so long as we were alone.
Though they got over their curiosity concerning us and our effects
within a few days, about half a dozen loafers continued to appear every
morning and beg for tobacco. They were too lazy to work, and their
constant presence annoyed us. They were in the way, and, besides, they
grew cheekier day by day. The limit was reached one evening when Osa was
playing her ukulele. Several natives wandered over from the village to
listen. It was pretty music—I liked it a lot—and Osa was flattered when
some of the boys came to talk to us about it. But it soon developed that
they were demanding tobacco as compensation for listening!
[Illustration: DANCE OF TETHLONG’S MEN]
We managed to get hold of a fairly trustworthy boy—Arree by name—to help
with the housework. He claimed to have gone to the Catholic mission
school at Vila, and, strange to say, he did not approve of the ways of
his own people, though he was never absent from one of their festivals.
He always told us the local gossip. It was from him that we learned what
had happened to the mission boy who had worked for us on our former
visit. He had aroused the ill-will of a neighbor and two weeks before
our arrival had died from poison placed in his _lap-lap_, a pudding made
of coconuts and fish.
Osa could write volumes regarding the difficulties of training her
scrubby native recruit to the duties of housework. He spoke good
_bêche-de-mer_, but _bêche-de-mer_ is a language capable of various
interpretations. Osa spoke it better than I, but even she could not make
simple orders clear to our muddle-brained black slavey. One morning, she
told Arree to heat an iron for her. She waited for a long time to get
it, and then went after it. She found Arree crouched before the fire,
gravely watching the iron boiling in a pot.
Arree murdered the King’s English in a way that must have made old
Webster turn over in his grave. He never said “No.” His negative was
always “No more,” and his affirmative was an emphatic “Yes-yes.” When I
called for warm water in the morning, he would reply, blandly, “Hot
water, he cold fellow,” and I would have to wait until, in his leisured
way, Arree built the fire and heated the water. He had a sore leg, which
I healed with a few applications of ointment. A few days later, he came
to me with one eye swollen nearly shut, and my medicine kit in his hand.
“Me gottem sore leg along eye-eye,” he informed me. Sometimes he
achieved triumphs. I asked him once to tell another native to bring me
the saw from Osa. In order to air his knowledge of English, Arree said:
“You go along Mary (woman) belong Master catchem one fellow something he
brother belong ackus (axe), pullem he come, pushem he go.” And then he
translated the command, for his admiring, wide-eyed brother, into the
native dialect.
Osa and I often caught ourselves falling into this queer English even
when there were no natives around. It gets into the blood like
baby-talk.