Among the Gilbert Group--that chain of low-lying sandy atolls annexed
by the British Government two years ago--there is one island that may be
said to be both fertile and beautiful; yet for all this Kuria--for so
it is called by the natives of the group generally--has remained almost
uninhabited for the past forty years. Together with the lagoon island
of Aranuka, from which it is distant about six miles, it belongs to the
present King of Apamama, a large and densely populated atoll situated
half a degree to the eastward. Thirty years ago, however, the
grandfather of the lad who is now the nominal ruler of Apamama had cause
to quarrel with the Kurians, and settled the dispute by invading their
island and utterly destroying them, root and branch. To-day it is
tenanted only by the young king's slaves.
Of all the many groups and archipelagoes that stud the North and South
Pacific from the rocky, jungle-covered Bonins to Juan Fernandez,
the islands of the Gilbert Group are--save for this Kuria--the most
uninviting and monotonous in appearance. They are for the most part but
narrow strips of sandy soil, densely clothed, it is true, with countless
thousands of stately cocoanut palms varied with groves of pan-danus and
occasional patches of stunted scrub, but flat and unpleasing to the
eye. Seldom exceeding two miles in width--although, as is the case at
Drummond's Island, or Taputeouea, they sometimes reach forty in the
length of their sweeping curve--but few present a continuous and
unbroken stretch of land, for the greater number consist of perhaps
two or three score of small islands, divided only by narrow and shallow
channels, through which at high water the tide sweeps in from the ocean
to the calm waters of the lagoons with amazing velocity. These strips
of land, whether broken or continuous, form the eastern or windward
boundaries of the lagoons; on the western or lee side lie barrier reefs,
between whose jagged coral walls there are, at intervals widely apart,
passages sufficiently deep for a thousand-ton ship to pass through in
safety, and anchor in the transparent depths of the lagoon within its
protecting arms.
*****
Years ago, in the days when the whaleships from Nantucket, and Salem,
and Martha's Vineyard, and New Bedford cruised northward towards the
cold seas of Japan and Tchantar Bay, and the smoky glare of their
tryworks lit up the ocean at night, the Gilberts were a wild place, and
many a murderous scene was enacted on white beach and shady palm grove.
Time after time some whaler, lying to in fancied security outside the
passage of a lagoon, with half her crew ashore intoxicated with sour
toddy, and the other half on board unsuspicious of danger, would be
attacked by the ferocious brown people. Swimming off at night-time, with
knives held between their teeth, a desperate attempt would be made to
cut off the ship. Sometimes the attempt succeeded; and then canoe after
canoe would put out from the shore, and the wild people, swarming up the
ship's side, would tramp about her ensanguined decks and into the cabins
seeking for plunder and fiery New England rum. Then, after she had been
gutted of everything of value to her captors, as the last canoe pushed
off, smoke and then flames would arise, and the burning ship would
drift away with the westerly current, and the tragedy of her fate, save
to the natives of the island, and perhaps some renegade white man who
had stirred them to the deed, would never be known.
*****
In those days--long ere the advent of the first missionary to the
isolated equatorial atolls of Polynesia and Melanesia--there were
many white men scattered throughout the various islands of the Ellice,
Gilbert, and Marshall groups. Men, these, with a past that they cared
not to speak of to the few strangers they might chance to meet in their
savage retreats. Many were escaped convicts from Van Diemen's Land and
New South Wales, living, not in dread of their wild native associates,
but in secret terror of recapture by a man-of-war and a return to the
horrors of that dreadful past. Casting away the garb of civilisation
and tying around their loins the _airiri_ or grass girdle of the Gilbert
Islanders, they soon became in appearance, manners, language, and
thoughts pure natives. For them the outside world meant a life of
degradation, possibly a shameful death. And as the years went by and
the bitter memories of the black days of old, resonant with the clank
of fetters and the warder's harsh cry, became dulled and faint, so died
away that once for-ever-haunting fear of discovery and recapture. In
Teaké, the bronzed, half-naked savage chief of Maiana, or Mési, the
desperate leader of the natives that cut off the barque _Addie Passmore_
at Marakei, the identity of such men as “Nuggety” Jack West and Macy
O'Shea, once of Van Diemen's Land or Norfolk Island, was lost for ever.