the Marquesas will be discovered afresh. When that time comes, France
will have people knocking at her door and demanding to know why she
debars all other nationalities from acquiring land that she does not
attempt to develop herself.
Already there is a movement afoot in England to establish a colony in
the Marquesas. Permission has somehow been obtained from the French
Government--a process comparable with the extraction of a particularly
obstinate winkle from its shell--to purchase blocks of land, and
distribute them amongst intending settlers who already number over a
thousand.
"Lucky thousand!" say I, "and good luck to them!"
*THE PAUMOTU ISLANDS*
_The people of the atolls--including Mr. Mumpus_
[Illustration: Chapter X headpiece]
*CHAPTER X*
_The people of the atolls--including Mr. Mumpus_
From the moment I first set eyes on an atoll it fascinated me, and its
lure has not departed with the years.
Think of any place in the world that you have seen, and an atoll is
different. It is the fairy ring of the sea. Out of the depths it
comes, rearing a vegetation and people of its own, and often into the
depths it goes, leaving no trace. How? Why? Scientists murmur
something about the coral polyp; but, not being a scientist, I prefer my
theory of the fairy ring. That was how it looked to me many years ago,
and that was how it looked again from the masthead of the dream ship.
We had left the Marquesas seven days previously, and were now becalmed
in that maze of atolls known as the Paumotu or Low Archipelago.
Imagine a circular beach of glistening coral sand and green vegetation
from five to fifty yards wide, thrust up through the sea for all the
world like a hedge, and enclosing a garden of coral fronds submerged
under water so still and clear as to be hardly visible, and you have an
atoll as I saw it from the masthead.
And there were myriads of them--big atolls, little atolls, fat and thin
atolls--fading away into the shimmering heat haze of the horizon. The
fairies must have been mighty busy down this way.
I descended to the deck and things mundane. What to do when becalmed in
a network of coral reefs and seven-knot currents was the problem that
confronted us. I had no text book on the subject, but by some miracle
the monstrosity was persuaded to fire on two cylinders.
Imagine yourself, then, passing through the narrow gateway in the
hedge--I should say, passage in the reef--and coming to anchor in the
garden--I mean lagoon.
It is sunrise, and already the pearling canoes are putting out from the
village and scurrying to the fishing grounds over the glassy surface of
the lagoon.
A fine people, these of the atolls--upstanding, deep of chest, a race of
mermen if ever there was one. From birth up, if they are not in the
water they are on it or as close to it as they can get. Take them
inland and they die. So they squat on their canoe outriggers, smoking,
chatting, laughing, until the spirit moves them (nothing else will), and
one of their number drops from sight, feet first, with hardly a ripple.
You look down and you see him, as though through green-tinted glass,
crouched on the sloping floor of the lagoon. He is plucking oysters as
one would gather flowers in a garden. There is no haste in his
movements, nothing to indicate that there is any time limit to his
remaining down there, under anything from five to fifteen fathoms of
water.
A minute passes, two minutes; still he pursues his leisurely way,
plucking to right and left and thrusting the shells into a network bag
about his neck.
The man of the atolls is in a world of his own where none but his kind
can follow, and they still squat on their outriggers, chatting and
laughing like a crowd of boys at a swimming pool.
One alone seems interested in the diver's movements: his mate, a
fair-skinned woman, with streaming blue-black hair, leans over the
gunwale of the canoe, looking down through a kerosene tin water-glass.
The diver's dark figure against the pale-green coral becomes more
blurred; a stream of silver air bubbles floats upward. Three minutes by
the watch have come and gone. To the landsman it seems incredible; and
even then there is no haste, no shooting to the surface and gasps for
breath.
The dark body becomes clearer in outline as it emerges from the depths,
and slowly, quite slowly, floats upward until a jet-black head breaks
water and the diver clings to the gunwale of the canoe, inhaling deep
but unhurried breaths and exhaling with a long-drawn whistle peculiarly
his own.
In what way this whistle helps matters it is impossible to say, but
whether a habit, a pose, or an aid in the regaining of breath, it is
universal throughout the Paumotus; so much so that a busy afternoon with
the pearlers sounds more like a tin-whistle band than anything else.
With the people of the atolls the ability to remain under water for long
periods is more than an art; it is second nature. Instinctively, they
do just those things that make one breath suffice for three minutes and
sometimes four.
Preparatory to a descent they do not take a deep breath and hold it
until the surface is reached again. They fill their lungs with a normal
amount of air, which lasts them about a minute and a half; the other
minute and a half is occupied in its exhalation. Then, too, every
movement below water is made with the utmost conservation of energy; yet
a good diver can bring up a hundred and fifty kilos of shell in a day,
which means in the neighbourhood of six hundred francs.
And it is just these same nimble francs that tempt the Paumotan to abase
his talents, even as others are tempted the world over. For the sake of
a few more shells, another cluster a little farther down, he remains
below just that trifle longer than is good for him, and in time it
tells. The eyes become bloodshot and start from the head, he goes deaf,
or paralysis seizes him.
"But the women are the worst," a sun-baked trader informed me; "the
worst or the best, as you like to put it," he added, grinning. "They'll
go on till they burst, or pretty near it. Bargain-counter instinct, I
guess. We call it the 'bends.'"
'"The bends?'"
"Yes, one of 'em goes down, and down; sees some more shell a bit lower,
and some more a bit lower than that. Then she's reaching out for one
last flutter at something like twenty fathoms when they get her the
'bends,' I mean. You can see her fighting against them, but it's no
good; they bring her knees to her chin, and she can't straighten up, and
she drops the last lot of shell she's gathered, and hates that worse
than the 'bends'."
"What does she do?"
"Nothing, except lie there crumpled up until her mate fetches her up and
massages her back to life. Then she's no sooner conscious than she's
down again.
"Water never kills this crowd; it takes dry land to do that. Why,
there's a diver close on fifty years old here, paralyzed clean down one
side. He can't walk, but he can swim. He gets them to carry him down
to the reef and heave him in; says it's the only place he can get any
comfort."
"How about sharks?"
"Oh, there are sharks all right, but the diver's mate looks after that;
gives the signal, and they're all in after him double quick."
"Finish him off with knives, eh?"
The sun-baked trader smiled reminiscently.
"Well, hardly," he said. "A dead shark makes a square meal for the
others, and that's all. What they need is an example, and they get it.
They're cruising about sometime when they come on one of their number
with no tail, one fin, and sundry other decorations that wouldn't
exactly please the S.P.C.A. He is not nice to look at, and they clear
out of a place where such things are possible.
"When an island's thrown open for pearlings, we spend weeks mutilating
sharks before the divers'll go down, and small blame to them, I say.
Sharks are--well, sharks."
The casual reader picks up a good deal of information about "gold
rushes" and such-like romantic undertakings from the plethora of novels
on the subject; but who has ever heard of a pearl-rush? Yet they occur
every year in the Paumotus.
The group belongs to the French, and is administered from the local seat
of government at Papeete, Tahiti. Here a heterogeneous collection of
humanity awaits the opening of the pearling season like a hovering cloud
of mosquitoes.
There are pearl buyers from Paris and London, representatives of
shell-buying concerns from Europe and America; British, Chinese, and
Indian traders, speculative schooner skippers and supercargoes, not to
mention the riff-raff of the beaches, all intent on pickings from the
most prolific pearling islands in the South Pacific.
[Illustration: Shark, pearl diver]
And this is the law of the group--infringed, circumvented, broken, but
still the law--that although under French Government, the Paumotus and
all they produce belong to the Paumotans.
Still further to protect the native, diving apparatus is banned
throughout the group. The oyster, as he brings it from the water, is
the diver's property. He must open the shell aboard his canoe before
touching land, remove the flesh, and, after testing it for pearls
(usually by kneading it so thoroughly between finger and thumb as to
crush the life out of it), throw it back into the lagoon to propagate
its species. Should he find a pearl, it is his also.
It is then up to the cloud of "mosquitoes" before mentioned to get both
shell and pearl out of him as best it can. One can imagine the buzzing
and biting that ensue.
From the buyer's point of view, the sooner and the deeper he gets a good
diver into his debt the better. He then has some hold. Consequently, he
spoon-feeds his selected divers like the infants that they are. Tinned
delicacies of all sorts, Prince Albert suits of unbelievable thickness
and cut, silk socks, and stockings are a good diver's for the asking
during the closed season.
With shell at one thousand dollars a ton in Philadelphia (the largest
consumer at the present time), and pearls soaring to apparently
limitless heights, all will be well when work starts.
And the diver? From long experience of "mosquitoes," he is by no means
slow. Shortly before the season opens he is presented with a bill that
would cause most of us to register apoplexy. He looks at it, grins, and
proceeds to dive. He also proceeds to make caches of shell on the floor
of the lagoon, only bringing up half of what he collects in payment of
his debts. At night he retrieves his cache and sells for cash to the
smaller "mosquitoes" who infest the beach. As for pearls, from the
moment the diver's finger and thumb encounter foreign matter in the
flesh of the oyster, he becomes about as communicative on the subject as
his catch. Should the truth leak out, his find will promptly be
confiscated in payment of his everlasting debts, or the wily pearl-buyer
will use threats of exposure to reduce the price.
No, the diver, if he is up to snuff, will work his passage to Papeete on
a schooner, sell to a Chinaman, who neither asks questions nor tells
tales, and proceed to enjoy himself according to his lights.
Blossoming into a Prince Albert suit, a red tie, and silk socks, he will
hire a car, load it up with lady friends and execrable rum, and vanish
into thin air for a fortnight, at the end of which time he has somehow
contrived to get rid of all he possessed and is perfectly prepared to
return to his atolls and his debts. He has lived like a white man and
cheated the "mosquitoes"; what more can Paumotan heart desire?
The thing we call progress has slain the picturesque in most industries
of this world, but not so with pearling in the Paumotus. During the
season, the beach of one of these atolls resembles an Old-World fair
more than anything I can call to mind.
A crazy merry-go-round brays and rocks in the shade of the palms, luring
the adventurous to invest three pearl shells in a ride on a
broken-necked camel. The ubiquitous movie "palace" has reared its
unlovely head, and for more shell or five cocoanuts one may witness on
the shores of a South Sea lagoon the battered remnants of a love affair
enacted not far from Los Angeles. I have often wondered what happens to
all the worn-out films in the world. Now I know.
This season, and for the first time, the people of the atolls are to be
initiated into the mysteries of ice-cream. Truly, the "mosquito" stops
at nothing.
It was down in this part of the world that I met Mr. Mumpus, though that
is not his name. To reach him you must pick your way with the motor
auxiliary through a maze of reefs, lie off and on, because there is no
pass into his lagoon, and plod through blazing sand in a temperature of
ninety in the shade, which there is not. But it is worth it.
You will probably find him in the pearl orchard, a green-lined umbrella
in one hand and a dripping oyster shell in the other. He will stare
fixedly at you for upward of half a minute and then say: "How the devil
did you get here?" with a brusqueness that is alarming until you get
used to it.
In my own case I indicated the dream ship, looking particularly smart in
her recent coat of white paint.
"What! In that thing?" remarked Mr. Mumpus.
I was smitten to silence for a space.
"I heard you were making pearls," I told him on regaining something of
my equanimity, "and thought you might be so good as to tell me about
it."
"Come up to the house," he barked, and led the way to a rambling
erection of corrugated iron and palm leaves containing, as far as I
could make out, a gaping "boy" of uncertain origin, some empty soap
boxes, and a microscope.
"There's nothing new in what I'm doing here," he told me over two
brimming shells of cocoanut milk, "nothing that the Chinese have not
been doing for centuries. The pearl is a disease of the oyster;
introduce the disease and you will get a pearl."
"Quite," said I.
"No one has succeeded up to the present," continued Mr. Mumpus, "but
there is no reason why it should not be done in time, no reason at all.
I am appreciably nearer than I was a year ago, for instance. In the
meantime, I am producing the ordinary blisters, or half pearls, with
various foundations. You see, the cestoid----"
But I cannot hope to set down here all that this amazing man told me in
scientific jargon, as he strode back and forth across his mat-strewn
floor.
He was a doctor by profession, had tired of it, and come to the islands
to pursue his hobby of pearl culture. He takes an oyster from the
lagoon, opens it very carefully by the slow insertion of a wooden wedge,
and places a pilule of beeswax against the main muscle. The mantle of
the oyster then covers it with mother-of-pearl, and in the course of a
few months our friend cuts from the shell a very fair imitation of a
half pearl.
But, as most people are aware, the real pearl comes from the flesh of
the oyster, and it is on the production of the genuine article that Mr.
Mumpus centres his efforts. He breeds oysters in the lagoon and
dissects them under the microscope for signs of the parasite that
undoubtedly causes the pearl. He injects into the flesh of others all
manner of foreign matter.
Down there on his speck of an atoll he treats the oyster as a surgeon
treats an interesting case and--who knows?--some day there may burst
upon an astonished world the name of a man who can make pearls, and that
name will not be Mr. Mumpus.
*PAPEETE, TAHITI*
_Tahiti: its pleasures and problems_
[Illustration: Chapter XI headpiece]
*CHAPTER XI*
_Tahiti: its pleasures and problems_
Although the Paumotus fully deserve their subtitle of "Low Archipelago,"
they have a marked effect on the southeast winds that are so prevalent
in these latitudes, and so much relied upon by sailing craft.
The law of the "trades" is simplicity itself, and as a matter of general
interest is perhaps worthy of mention here.
"Fickle as the winds" is a synonym that does not apply at certain
seasons and in certain areas, and these areas, through mariners'
reports, have been definitely located and recorded in the British
Admiralty and United States Hierographic Office wind charts. A schooner
skipper may now lay a course from, say, San Francisco to Sydney, and
know to within a couple of points from which direction the wind will
come for the entire voyage. He will be careful to "hug the trades"--the
northeast down to the Equator, and the southeast beyond--and the reason
of these steadfast and accommodating winds is that the hot air of the
Equator naturally rises, leaving a vacuum that the cooler airs of north
and south rush in to fill.
The Paumotus, however, with the intense heat generated in their mighty
lagoons, form a miniature Equator of their own, and completely
disorganize the "trades" thereabouts, with the result that weather
conditions between this group and the Societies are notoriously
unreliable.
A greater contrast between two islands a bare forty-eight hours apart
can hardly be imagined than between the last of the Paumotus with its
coral reef invisible at ten miles, and the cloud-capped volcanic peaks
of Tahiti. It is like approaching another world. It _is_ another
world.
At the pass in the barrier reef off Papeete, a genial French pilot took
charge, and secured us the best berth in the harbour. Here the coral
wall that forms the beach is so sheer that it is possible to make fast
to the trunk of a flamboyant, as though to a bollard on a quay, and walk
ashore on a gangplank--which we of the dream ship promptly did and dined
in splendour at the best hotel.
With unaccustomed collars chafing our leathern necks, and perspiring
freely under the burden of clothes after a regime of towel and sola
topi, we consumed iced _vin rouge, poulet roti_ with salad, and omelette
_a la maitre d'hotel_. Papeete was a pleasant place in that hour.
Indeed, Papeete is a pleasant place at any hour. It is the metropolis
of the south-eastern Pacific islands, just as Honolulu is of the
northeastern, attracting as varied an assortment of humanity as any in
the world.
Here we have the planter of vanilla and cocoanuts, the trader in
anything from copra to silk stockings, the pearl buyer, the schooner
skipper, and the ubiquitous adventurer on their native heath--and under
conditions to make it possible for each to live and prosper.
The French may be wrong from our iron-bound, Anglo-Saxon point of view,
but they certainly have the knack of making life a more enjoyable affair
under their administration than under any other at the present time.
It was at Papeete that we of the dream ship lost our cook. It may be
remembered that in the Galapagos Islands, five thousand miles back on
our tracks, we rescued an exquisite Ecuadorean Government official from
a delicate position by christening him "Bill" and installing him in our
culinary department, where he was expected to work his passage to
Australia.
He proved to be an expert cigarette smoker and little more, so that when
he approached us after the first night in Papeete and intimated that he
found it "necessary" to leave, we were neither surprised nor pained.
[Illustration: _Pearl-diver About to Descend_]
And so you may see to this day Bill, of the biscuit-coloured socks and
passionate tie, leaning gracefully over the soft-goods counter of a
French store, extolling the virtues of a new line in underwear or
gallantly escorting a bevy of Tahitian beauty to the movies of an
evening.
Bill has found his niche in the scheme of things, and who can say more?
"If you manage to get past here without trouble aboard, you'll be the
first yachting party to do it."
So spake that kindliest of men, the acting British Consul of Papeete,
and although we of the dream ship were fortunate enough to succeed where
others had failed, I recognize the truth of his words. Right down from
Bligh of _Bounty_ mutiny fame to the most recent of pleasure cruises
there is a succession of enterprises that have found their quietus at
Papeete. There is something peculiarly demoralizing about the place.
It invites to a laxity of mind and muscle unequalled in the Pacific,
which perhaps accounts for its fatal fascination.
[Illustration: _Pearl-divers in a Paumotan Lagoon;
Mr. Mumpus's Blisters_]
How everyone lives, including a goodly sprinkling of whites, is a
mystery that intrigues. I know a man hereabouts living in a
twelve-by-fourteen corrugated iron shed furnished with empty crates and
kerosene tins. At any odd hour that he chances to awaken from a more or
less permanent state of torpor, he lounges into town and pays the
smaller stores a visit. He pays nothing else. Starting at one end of a
counter, with its sample edibles outspread, he systematically talks and
eats his way to the other, and by the time the process is complete he
leaves with a parting _bon mot_, and a full stomach.
He is a type of the present-day beach-comber, hardly such a romantic
figure as his prototype of the "good old days," but in his way
interesting. His is the art of getting something for nothing, and who
amongst us shall say he has never essayed the feat?
I cannot let this gentleman pass without enlarging upon him, if only to
illustrate the mental processes by which a cultured man may descend to
the status of a beach-comber.
He had never worked, and declared that he never would, both of which
statements I could readily believe. Why should he work? To make a
living? He has one without it. To make money for the mere sake of
making money? Such a pastime did not attract him. To save himself from
boredom? He was never bored. Were not sunsets and cloud effects, and
all the strange living things of the beach (including store-keepers)
provided for his entertainment? To retain his self-respect? Not at
all. If others found it necessary to plan and strive in order to retain
their self-respect, let them proceed! Personally, he did not find it
necessary, that was all; and he fell to gouging his foul nails with a
jackknife.
"Of course," I ventured to murmur, "there is self-respect _and_
self-respect."
"Quite," he agreed, cheerfully.
But the man's real secret, the canker at the back of his diseased mind,
was revealed to me--as I have no doubt it has been to many others--in
the most startling fashion. Suddenly, and apropos of nothing either of
us had said, he sprang to his feet and struck an attitude in front of
the rusty hurricane lantern standing on an empty fruit crate.
"Do you notice anything?" he asked me.
All I noticed was an elderly gentleman, inclining to corpulence and
baldness, with rather a fine profile terminating in a Vandyke beard,
standing rigidly with folded arms and an air of imperiousness that
struck me as out of place.
"You see no resemblance?" he suggested, incredulously.
I saw none in particular, and said so. He took his seat with an air of
disappointment.
"Then perhaps I may help you," he said. "My mother was lady-in-waiting
to Queen Victoria when King Edward was Prince of Wales. Does that
convey anything to you?"
Naturally, it did, and I was forced to admit a resemblance that had
escaped me.
Touched? Perhaps.
Taking this unworthy as the lowest rung of the white Tahitian social
ladder, one comes next to the clerks of the larger stores, who, after a
year or two with their firm, are marooned in charge of a trading station
on some distant island at a wage that makes honesty and prosperity
incompatible.
Then comes the store manager in crackling white drills and a luxuriant
office, who welcomes you with a winning smile, and speeds you with a
staggering bill; the schooner skipper, a genial soul possessed of an
enviable independence that empowers him to tell his "owners" to go to
the devil for three months of a hurricane season each year, the while
his ship lies in port, and he disports himself and his latest yarn over
variegated drinks on the balcony of the Bougainville Club; the French
Government official, as awe-inspiring in business hours as he is
charming out of them.
[Illustration: Island inhabitants]
As for the natives, they are to-day a relic--rather a sad relic when one
comes to think of it--of a once-superb race. White man's blight has
descended upon them and they have withered like so many of their
brothers throughout the milky-way of the Pacific.