Also, his young men were too frightened to sign on with the recruiting
vessels. That was why Fanfoa ordered his slave, Mauki, to be carried
down and signed on for half a case of tobacco advance, along with
knives, axes, calico, and beads, which he would pay for with his toil
on the plantations. Mauki was sorely frightened when they brought him on
board the schooner. He was a lamb led to the slaughter. White men were
ferocious creatures. They had to be, or else they would not make a
practice of venturing along the Malaita coast and into all harbors, two
on a schooner, when each schooner carried from fifteen to twenty blacks
as boat's crew, and often as high as sixty or seventy black recruits. In
addition to this, there was always the danger of the shore population,
the sudden attack and the cutting off of the schooner and all hands.
Truly, white men must be terrible. Besides, they were possessed of such
devil-devils--rifles that shot very rapidly many times, things of iron
and brass that made the schooners go when there was no wind, and boxes
that talked and laughed just as men talked and laughed.
Ay, and he had heard of one white man whose particular devil-devil was
so powerful that he could take out all his teeth and put them back at
will.
Down into the cabin they took Mauki. On deck, the one white man kept
guard with two revolvers in his belt. In the cabin the other white man
sat with a book before him, in which he inscribed strange marks and
lines. He looked at Mauki as though he had been a pig or a fowl, glanced
under the hollows of his arms, and wrote in the book. Then he held out
the writing stick and Mauki just barely touched it with his hand, in so
doing pledging himself to toil for three years on the plantations of the
Moongleam Soap Company. It was not explained to him that the will of
the ferocious white men would be used to enforce the pledge, and that,
behind all, for the same use, was all the power and all the warships of
Great Britain.
Other blacks there were on board, from unheard-of far places, and when
the white man spoke to them, they tore the long feather from Mauki's
hair, cut that same hair short, and wrapped about his waist a lava-lava
of bright yellow calico.
After many days on the schooner, and after beholding more land and
islands than he had ever dreamed of, he was landed on New Georgia, and
put to work in the field clearing jungle and cutting cane grass. For the
first time he knew what work was. Even as a slave to Fanfoa he had not
worked like this. And he did not like work. It was up at dawn and in at
dark, on two meals a day. And the food was tiresome. For weeks at a time
they were given nothing but sweet potatoes to eat, and for weeks at
a time it would be nothing but rice. He cut out the cocoanut from the
shells day after day; and for long days and weeks he fed the fires
that smoked the copra, till his eyes got sore and he was set to
felling trees. He was a good axe-man, and later he was put in the
bridge-building gang. Once, he was punished by being put in the
road-building gang. At times he served as boat's crew in the whale
boats, when they brought in copra from distant beaches or when the white
men went out to dynamite fish.
Among other things he learned beche-de-mer English, with which he could
talk with all white men, and with all recruits who otherwise would have
talked in a thousand different dialects. Also, he learned certain things
about the white men, principally that they kept their word. If they told
a boy he was going to receive a stick of tobacco, he got it. If they
told a boy they would knock seven bells out of him if he did a certain
thing, when he did that thing, seven bells invariably were knocked out
of him. Mauki did not know what seven bells were, but they occurred
in beche-de-mer, and he imagined them to be the blood and teeth that
sometimes accompanied the process of knocking out seven bells. One other
thing he learned: no boy was struck or punished unless he did wrong.
Even when the white men were drunk, as they were frequently, they never
struck unless a rule had been broken.
Mauki did not like the plantation. He hated work, and he was the son
of a chief. Furthermore, it was ten years since he had been stolen from
Port Adams by Fanfoa, and he was homesick. He was even homesick for the
slavery under Fanfoa. So he ran away. He struck back into the bush, with
the idea of working southward to the beach and stealing a canoe in which
to go home to Port Adams.
But the fever got him, and he was captured and brought back more dead
than alive.
A second time he ran away, in the company of two Malaita boys. They got
down the coast twenty miles, and were hidden in the hut of a Malaita
freeman, who dwelt in that village. But in the dead of night two white
men came, who were not afraid of all the village people and who knocked
seven bells out of the three runaways, tied them like pigs, and
tossed them into the whale boat. But the man in whose house they had
hidden--seven times seven bells must have been knocked out of him from
the way the hair, skin, and teeth flew, and he was discouraged for the
rest of his natural life from harboring runaway laborers.
For a year Mauki toiled on. Then he was made a house-boy, and had good
food and easy times, with light work in keeping the house clean and
serving the white men with whiskey and beer at all hours of the day and
most hours of the night. He liked it, but he liked Port Adams more. He
had two years longer to serve, but two years were too long for him in
the throes of homesickness. He had grown wiser with his year of service,
and, being now a house-boy, he had opportunity. He had the cleaning of
the rifles, and he knew where the key to the store room was hung. He
planned to escape, and one night ten Malaita boys and one boy from San
Cristoval sneaked from the barracks and dragged one of the whale boats
down to the beach. It was Mauki who supplied the key that opened the
padlock on the boat, and it was Mauki who equipped the boat with a dozen
Winchesters, an immense amount of ammunition, a case of dynamite with
detonators and fuse, and ten cases of tobacco.
The northwest monsoon was blowing, and they fled south in the night
time, hiding by day on detached and uninhabited islets, or dragging
their whale boat into the bush on the large islands. Thus they gained
Guadalcanar, skirted halfway along it, and crossed the Indispensable
Straits to Florida Island. It was here that they killed the San
Cristoval boy, saving his head and cooking and eating the rest of him.
The Malaita coast was only twenty miles away, but the last night a
strong current and baffling winds prevented them from gaining across.
Daylight found them still several miles from their goal. But daylight
brought a cutter, in which were two white men, who were not afraid of
eleven Malaita men armed with twelve rifles. Mauki and his companions
were carried back to Tulagi, where lived the great white master of all
the white men. And the great white master held a court, after which,
one by one, the runaways were tied up and given twenty lashes each,
and sentenced to a fine of fifteen dollars. They were sent back to New
Georgia, where the white men knocked seven bells out of them all around
and put them to work. But Mauki was no longer house-boy. He was put in
the road-making gang. The fine of fifteen dollars had been paid by the
white men from whom he had run away, and he was told that he would have
to work it out, which meant six months' additional toil. Further, his
share of the stolen tobacco earned him another year of toil.
Port Adams was now three years and a half away, so he stole a canoe one
night, hid on the islets in Manning Straits, passed through the
Straits, and began working along the eastern coast of Ysabel, only to
be captured, two-thirds of the way along, by the white men on Meringe
Lagoon. After a week, he escaped from them and took to the bush. There
were no bush natives on Ysabel, only salt-water men, who were all
Christians. The white men put up a reward of five-hundred sticks of
tobacco, and every time Mauki ventured down to the sea to steal a canoe
he was chased by the salt-water men. Four months of this passed, when,
the reward having been raised to a thousand sticks, he was caught and
sent back to New Georgia and the road-building gang. Now a thousand
sticks are worth fifty dollars, and Mauki had to pay the reward himself,
which required a year and eight months' labor. So Port Adams was now
five years away.
His homesickness was greater than ever, and it did not appeal to him to
settle down and be good, work out his four years, and go home. The
next time, he was caught in the very act of running away. His case was
brought before Mr. Haveby, the island manager of the Moongleam Soap
Company, who adjudged him an incorrigible. The Company had plantations
on the Santa Cruz Islands, hundreds of miles across the sea, and there
it sent its Solomon Islands' incorrigibles. And there Mauki was sent,
though he never arrived. The schooner stopped at Santa Anna, and in the
night Mauki swam ashore, where he stole two rifles and a case of tobacco
from the trader and got away in a canoe to Cristoval. Malaita was now to
the north, fifty or sixty miles away. But when he attempted the passage,
he was caught by a light gale and driven back to Santa Anna, where
the trader clapped him in irons and held him against the return of the
schooner from Santa Cruz. The two rifles the trader recovered, but the
case of tobacco was charged up to Mauki at the rate of another year. The
sum of years he now owed the Company was six.
On the way back to New Georgia, the schooner dropped anchor in Marau
Sound, which lies at the southeastern extremity of Guadalcanar. Mauki
swam ashore with handcuffs on his wrists and got away to the bush. The
schooner went on, but the Moongleam trader ashore offered a thousand
sticks, and to him Mauki was brought by the bushmen with a year and
eight months tacked on to his account. Again, and before the schooner
called in, he got away, this time in a whale boat accompanied by a case
of the trader's tobacco. But a northwest gale wrecked him upon Ugi,
where the Christian natives stole his tobacco and turned him over to the
Moongleam trader who resided there. The tobacco the natives stole meant
another year for him, and the tale was now eight years and a half.
“We'll send him to Lord Howe,” said Mr. Haveby. “Bunster is there, and
we'll let them settle it between them. It will be a case, I imagine, of
Mauki getting Bunster, or Bunster getting Mauki, and good riddance in
either event.”
If one leaves Meringe Lagoon, on Ysabel, and steers a course due north,
magnetic, at the end of one hundred and fifty miles he will lift the
pounded coral beaches of Lord Howe above the sea. Lord Howe is a ring of
land some one hundred and fifty miles in circumference, several hundred
yards wide at its widest, and towering in places to a height of ten feet
above sea level. Inside this ring of sand is a mighty lagoon studded
with coral patches. Lord Howe belongs to the Solomons neither
geographically nor ethnologically. It is an atoll, while the Solomons
are high islands; and its people and language are Polynesian, while the
inhabitants of the Solomons are Melanesian.
Lord Howe has been populated by the westward Polynesian drift which
continues to this day, big outrigger canoes being washed upon its
beaches by the southeast trade. That there has been a slight Melanesian
drift in the period of the northwest monsoon, is also evident.
Nobody ever comes to Lord Howe, or Ontong-Java as it is sometimes
called. Thomas Cook & Son do not sell tickets to it, and tourists do not
dream of its existence. Not even a white missionary has landed on its
shore. Its five thousand natives are as peaceable as they are primitive.
Yet they were not always peaceable. The Sailing Directions speak of
them as hostile and treacherous. But the men who compile the Sailing
Directions have never heard of the change that was worked in the hearts
of the inhabitants, who, not many years ago, cut off a big bark and
killed all hands with the exception of the second mate. The survivor
carried the news to his brothers. The captains of three trading
schooners returned with him to Lord Howe. They sailed their vessels
right into the lagoon and proceeded to preach the white man's gospel
that only white men shall kill white men and that the lesser breeds must
keep hands off. The schooners sailed up and down the lagoon, harrying
and destroying. There was no escape from the narrow sand-circle, no
bush to which to flee. The men were shot down at sight, and there was
no avoiding being sighted. The villages were burned, the canoes smashed,
the chickens and pigs killed, and the precious cocoanut trees chopped
down. For a month this continued, when the schooner sailed away; but the
fear of the white man had been seared into the souls of the islanders
and never again were they rash enough to harm one.
Max Bunster was the one white man on Lord Howe, trading in the pay of
the ubiquitous Moongleam Soap Company. And the Company billeted him
on Lord Howe, because, next to getting rid of him, it was the most
out-of-the-way place to be found. That the Company did not get rid of
him was due to the difficulty of finding another man to take his place.
He was a strapping big German, with something wrong in his brain.
Semi-madness would be a charitable statement of his condition. He was
a bully and a coward, and a thrice-bigger savage than any savage on the
island.
Being a coward, his brutality was of the cowardly order. When he
first went into the Company's employ, he was stationed on Savo. When a
consumptive colonial was sent to take his place, he beat him up with his
fists and sent him off a wreck in the schooner that brought him.
Mr. Haveby next selected a young Yorkshire giant to relieve Bunster. The
Yorkshire man had a reputation as a bruiser and preferred fighting to
eating. But Bunster wouldn't fight. He was a regular little lamb--for
ten days, at the end of which time the Yorkshire man was prostrated by a
combined attack of dysentery and fever. Then Bunster went for him, among
other things getting him down and jumping on him a score or so of times.
Afraid of what would happen when his victim recovered. Bunster fled away
in a cutter to Guvutu, where he signalized himself by beating up a young
Englishman already crippled by a Boer bullet through both hips.
Then it was that Mr. Haveby sent Bunster to Lord Howe, the falling-off
place. He celebrated his landing by mopping up half a case of gin and by
thrashing the elderly and wheezy mate of the schooner which had brought
him. When the schooner departed, he called the kanakas down to the beach
and challenged them to throw him in a wrestling bout, promising a case
of tobacco to the one who succeeded. Three kanakas he threw, but was
promptly thrown by a fourth, who, instead of receiving the tobacco, got
a bullet through his lungs.
And so began Bunster's reign on Lord Howe. Three thousand people lived
in the principal village; but it was deserted, even in broad day, when
he passed through. Men, women, and children fled before him. Even the
dogs and pigs got out of the way, while the king was not above hiding
under a mat. The two prime ministers lived in terror of Bunster, who
never discussed any moot subject, but struck out with his fists instead.
And to Lord Howe came Mauki, to toil for Bunster for eight long years
and a half. There was no escaping from Lord Howe. For better or worse,
Bunster and he were tied together. Bunster weighed two hundred pounds.
Mauki weighed one hundred and ten. Bunster was a degenerate brute. But
Mauki was a primitive savage. While both had wills and ways of their
own.
Mauki had no idea of the sort of master he was to work for. He had had
no warnings, and he had concluded as a matter of course that Bunster
would be like other white men, a drinker of much whiskey, a ruler and a
lawgiver who always kept his word and who never struck a boy undeserved.
Bunster had the advantage. He knew all about Mauki, and gloated over the
coming into possession of him. The last cook was suffering from a broken
arm and a dislocated shoulder, so Bunster made Mauki cook and general
house-boy.
And Mauki soon learned that there were white men and white men. On the
very day the schooner departed he was ordered to buy a chicken from
Samisee, the native Tongan missionary. But Samisee had sailed across
the lagoon and would not be back for three days. Mauki returned with
the information. He climbed the steep stairway (the house stood on piles
twelve feet above the sand), and entered the living room to report.
The trader demanded the chicken. Mauki opened his mouth to explain the
missionary's absence. But Bunster did not care for explanations. He
struck out with his fist. The blow caught Mauki on the mouth and lifted
him into the air. Clear through the doorway he flew, across the narrow
veranda, breaking the top railing, and down to the ground.
His lips were a contused, shapeless mass, and his mouth was full of
blood and broken teeth.
“That'll teach you that back talk don't go with me,” the trader shouted,
purple with rage, peering down at him over the broken railing.
Mauki had never met a white man like this, and he resolved to walk small
and never offend. He saw the boat boys knocked about, and one of
them put in irons for three days with nothing to eat for the crime of
breaking a rowlock while pulling. Then, too, he heard the gossip of the
village and learned why Bunster had taken a third wife--by force, as was
well known. The first and second wives lay in the graveyard, under the
white coral sand, with slabs of coral rock at head and feet. They had
died, it was said, from beatings he had given them. The third wife was
certainly ill-used, as Mauki could see for himself.
But there was no way by which to avoid offending the white man who
seemed offended with life. When Mauki kept silent, he was struck and
called a sullen brute. When he spoke, he was struck for giving back
talk. When he was grave, Bunster accused him of plotting and gave him a
thrashing in advance; and when he strove to be cheerful and to smile,
he was charged with sneering at his lord and master and given a taste of
stick. Bunster was a devil.
The village would have done for him, had it not remembered the lesson
of the three schooners. It might have done for him anyway, if there had
been a bush to which to flee. As it was, the murder of the white men,
of any white man, would bring a man-of-war that would kill the offenders
and chop down the precious cocoanut trees. Then there were the boat
boys, with minds fully made up to drown him by accident at the first
opportunity to capsize the cutter. Only Bunster saw to it that the boat
did not capsize.
Mauki was of a different breed, and escape being impossible while
Bunster lived, he was resolved to get the white man. The trouble was
that he could never find a chance. Bunster was always on guard. Day
and night his revolvers were ready to hand. He permitted nobody to pass
behind his back, as Mauki learned after having been knocked down several
times. Bunster knew that he had more to fear from the good-natured, even
sweet-faced, Malaita boy than from the entire population of Lord Howe;
and it gave added zest to the programme of torment he was carrying out.
And Mauki walked small, accepted his punishments, and waited.
All other white men had respected his tambos, but not so Bunster.
Mauki's weekly allowance of tobacco was two sticks. Bunster passed them
to his woman and ordered Mauki to receive them from her hand. But this
could not be, and Mauki went without his tobacco. In the same way he was
made to miss many a meal, and to go hungry many a day. He was ordered to
make chowder out of the big clams that grew in the lagoon. This he could
not do, for clams were tambo. Six times in succession he refused to
touch the clams, and six times he was knocked senseless. Bunster knew
that the boy would die first, but called his refusal mutiny, and would
have killed him had there been another cook to take his place.
One of the trader's favorite tricks was to catch Mauki's kinky locks and
bat his head against the wall. Another trick was to catch Mauki unawares
and thrust the live end of a cigar against his flesh. This Bunster
called vaccination, and Mauki was vaccinated a number of times a week.
Once, in a rage, Bunster ripped the cup handle from Mauki's nose,
tearing the hole clear out of the cartilage.
“Oh, what a mug!” was his comment, when he surveyed the damage he had
wrought.
The skin of a shark is like sandpaper, but the skin of a ray fish is
like a rasp. In the South Seas the natives use it as a wood file in
smoothing down canoes and paddles. Bunster had a mitten made of ray fish
skin. The first time he tried it on Mauki, with one sweep of the hand
it fetched the skin off his back from neck to armpit. Bunster was
delighted. He gave his wife a taste of the mitten, and tried it out
thoroughly on the boat boys. The prime ministers came in for a stroke
each, and they had to grin and take it for a joke.
“Laugh, damn you, laugh!” was the cue he gave.
Mauki came in for the largest share of the mitten. Never a day passed
without a caress from it. There were times when the loss of so much
cuticle kept him awake at night, and often the half-healed surface
was raked raw afresh by the facetious Mr. Bunster. Mauki continued his
patient wait, secure in the knowledge that sooner or later his time
would come. And he knew just what he was going to do, down to the
smallest detail, when the time did come.
One morning Bunster got up in a mood for knocking seven bells out of
the universe. He began on Mauki, and wound up on Mauki, in the interval
knocking down his wife and hammering all the boat boys. At breakfast he
called the coffee slops and threw the scalding contents of the cup into
Mauki's face. By ten o'clock Bunster was shivering with ague, and half
an hour later he was burning with fever. It was no ordinary attack. It
quickly became pernicious, and developed into black-water fever. The
days passed, and he grew weaker and weaker, never leaving his bed. Mauki
waited and watched, the while his skin grew intact once more. He ordered
the boys to beach the cutter, scrub her bottom, and give her a general
overhauling. They thought the order emanated from Bunster, and they
obeyed. But Bunster at the time was lying unconscious and giving no
orders. This was Mauki's chance, but still he waited.
When the worst was past, and Bunster lay convalescent and conscious, but
weak as a baby, Mauki packed his few trinkets, including the china
cup handle, into his trade box. Then he went over to the village and
interviewed the king and his two prime ministers.
“This fella Bunster, him good fella you like too much?” he asked.
They explained in one voice that they liked the trader not at all. The
ministers poured forth a recital of all the indignities and wrongs
that had been heaped upon them. The king broke down and wept. Mauki
interrupted rudely.
“You savve me--me big fella marster my country. You no like 'm this
fella white marster. Me no like 'm. Plenty good you put hundred
cocoanut, two hundred cocoanut, three hundred cocoanut along cutter.
Him finish, you go sleep 'm good fella. Altogether kanaka sleep m good
fella. Bime by big fella noise along house, you no savve hear 'm that
fella noise. You altogether sleep strong fella too much.”
In like manner Mauki interviewed the boat boys. Then he ordered
Bunster's wife to return to her family house. Had she refused, he would
have been in a quandary, for his tambo would not have permitted him to
lay hands on her.
The house deserted, he entered the sleeping room, where the trader lay
in a doze. Mauki first removed the revolvers, then placed the ray fish
mitten on his hand. Bunster's first warning was a stroke of the mitten
that removed the skin the full length of his nose.
“Good fella, eh?” Mauki grinned, between two strokes, one of which swept
the forehead bare and the other of which cleaned off one side of his
face. “Laugh, damn you, laugh.”
Mauki did his work throughly, and the kanakas, hiding in their houses,
heard the “big fella noise” that Bunster made and continued to make for
an hour or more.