ammunition down to the cutter, which he proceeded to ballast with cases
of tobacco. It was while engaged in this that a hideous, skinless thing
came out of the house and ran screaming down the beach till it fell in
the sand and mowed and gibbered under the scorching sun. Mauki looked
toward it and hesitated. Then he went over and removed the head, which
he wrapped in a mat and stowed in the stern locker of the cutter.
So soundly did the kanakas sleep through that long hot day that they
did not see the cutter run out through the passage and head south,
close-hauled on the southeast trade. Nor was the cutter ever sighted on
that long tack to the shores of Ysabel, and during the tedious head-beat
from there to Malaita. He landed at Port Adams with a wealth of rifles
and tobacco such as no one man had ever possessed before. But he did
not stop there. He had taken a white man's head, and only the bush could
shelter him. So back he went to the bush villages, where he shot old
Fanfoa and half a dozen of the chief men, and made himself the chief
over all the villages. When his father died, Mauki's brother ruled
in Port Adams, and joined together, salt-water men and bushmen, the
resulting combination was the strongest of the ten score fighting tribes
of Malaita.
More than his fear of the British government was Mauki's fear of the
all-powerful Moongleam Soap Company; and one day a message came up
to him in the bush, reminding him that he owed the Company eight and
one-half years of labor. He sent back a favorable answer, and then
appeared the inevitable white man, the captain of the schooner, the
only white man during Mauki's reign, who ventured the bush and came out
alive. This man not only came out, but he brought with him seven hundred
and fifty dollars in gold sovereigns--the money price of eight years
and a half of labor plus the cost price of certain rifles and cases of
tobacco.
Mauki no longer weighs one hundred and ten pounds. His stomach is
three times its former girth, and he has four wives. He has many
other things--rifles and revolvers, the handle of a china cup, and an
excellent collection of bushmen's heads. But more precious than the
entire collection is another head, perfectly dried and cured, with sandy
hair and a yellowish beard, which is kept wrapped in the finest of fibre
lava-lavas. When Mauki goes to war with villages beyond his realm,
he invariably gets out this head, and alone in his grass palace,
contemplates it long and solemnly. At such times the hush of death falls
on the village, and not even a pickaninny dares make a noise. The
head is esteemed the most powerful devil-devil on Malaita, and to the
possession of it is ascribed all of Mauki's greatness.
“YAH! YAH! YAH!”
He was a whiskey-guzzling Scotchman, and he downed his whiskey neat,
beginning with his first tot punctually at six in the morning, and
thereafter repeating it at regular intervals throughout the day till
bedtime, which was usually midnight. He slept but five hours out of the
twenty-four, and for the remaining nineteen hours he was quietly and
decently drunk. During the eight weeks I spent with him on Oolong Atoll,
I never saw him draw a sober breath. In fact, his sleep was so short
that he never had time to sober up. It was the most beautiful and
orderly perennial drunk I have ever observed.
McAllister was his name. He was an old man, and very shaky on his pins.
His hand trembled as with a palsy, especially noticeable when he poured
his whiskey, though I never knew him to spill a drop. He had been
twenty-eight years in Melanesia, ranging from German New Guinea to the
German Solomons, and so thoroughly had he become identified with that
portion of the world, that he habitually spoke in that bastard lingo
called “bech-de-mer.” Thus, in conversation with me, SUN HE COME UP
meant sunrise; KAI-KAI HE STOP meant that dinner was served; and BELLY
BELONG ME WALK ABOUT meant that he was sick at his stomach. He was
a small man, and a withered one, burned inside and outside by ardent
spirits and ardent sun. He was a cinder, a bit of a clinker of a man, a
little animated clinker, not yet quite cold, that moved stiffly and by
starts and jerks like an automaton. A gust of wind would have blown him
away. He weighed ninety pounds.
But the immense thing about him was the power with which he ruled.
Oolong Atoll was one hundred and forty miles in circumference. One
steered by compass course in its lagoon. It was populated by five
thousand Polynesians, all strapping men and women, many of them standing
six feet in height and weighing a couple of hundred pounds. Oolong was
two hundred and fifty miles from the nearest land. Twice a year a
little schooner called to collect copra. The one white man on Oolong was
McAllister, petty trader and unintermittent guzzler; and he ruled Oolong
and its six thousand savages with an iron hand. He said come, and they
came, go, and they went. They never questioned his will nor judgment.
He was cantankerous as only an aged Scotchman can be, and interfered
continually in their personal affairs. When Nugu, the king's daughter,
wanted to marry Haunau from the other end of the atoll, her father said
yes; but McAllister said no, and the marriage never came off. When the
king wanted to buy a certain islet in the lagoon from the chief priest,
McAllister said no. The king was in debt to the Company to the tune of
180,000 cocoanuts, and until that was paid he was not to spend a single
cocoanut on anything else.
And yet the king and his people did not love McAllister. In truth, they
hated him horribly, and, to my knowledge, the whole population, with the
priests at the head, tried vainly for three months to pray him to death.
The devil-devils they sent after him were awe-inspiring, but since
McAllister did not believe in devil-devils, they were without power over
him. With drunken Scotchmen all signs fail. They gathered up scraps of
food which had touched his lips, an empty whiskey bottle, a cocoanut
from which he had drunk, and even his spittle, and performed all kinds
of deviltries over them. But McAllister lived on. His health was superb.
He never caught fever; nor coughs nor colds; dysentery passed him by;
and the malignant ulcers and vile skin diseases that attack blacks and
whites alike in that climate never fastened upon him. He must have been
so saturated with alcohol as to defy the lodgment of germs. I used to
imagine them falling to the ground in showers of microscopic cinders as
fast as they entered his whiskey-sodden aura. No one loved him, not even
germs, while he loved only whiskey, and still he lived.
I was puzzled. I could not understand six thousand natives putting up
with that withered shrimp of a tyrant. It was a miracle that he had not
died suddenly long since. Unlike the cowardly Melanesians, the people
were high-stomached and warlike. In the big graveyard, at head and feet
of the graves, were relics of past sanguinary history--blubber-spades,
rusty old bayonets and cutlasses, copper bolts, rudder-irons, harpoons,
bomb guns, bricks that could have come from nowhere but a whaler's
trying-out furnace, and old brass pieces of the sixteenth century that
verified the traditions of the early Spanish navigators. Ship after
ship had come to grief on Oolong. Not thirty years before, the whaler
BLENNERDALE, running into the lagoon for repair, had been cut off with
all hands. In similar fashion had the crew of the GASKET, a sandalwood
trader, perished. There was a big French bark, the TOULON, becalmed off
the atoll, which the islanders boarded after a sharp tussle and wrecked
in the Lipau Passage, the captain and a handful of sailors escaping in
the longboat. Then there were the Spanish pieces, which told of the
loss of one of the early explorers. All this, of the vessels named, is
a matter of history, and is to be found in the SOUTH PACIFIC SAILING
DIRECTORY. But that there was other history, unwritten, I was yet to
learn. In the meantime I puzzled why six thousand primitive savages let
one degenerate Scotch despot live.
One hot afternoon McAllister and I sat on the veranda looking out over
the lagoon, with all its wonder of jeweled colors. At our backs, across
the hundred yards of palm-studded sand, the outer surf roared on the
reef. It was dreadfully warm. We were in four degree south latitude and
the sun was directly overhead, having crossed the Line a few days before
on its journey south. There was no wind--not even a catspaw. The season
of the southeast trade was drawing to an early close, and the northwest
monsoon had not yet begun to blow.
“They can't dance worth a damn,” said McAllister.
I had happened to mention that the Polynesian dances were superior to
the Papuan, and this McAllister had denied, for no other reason than
his cantankerousness. But it was too hot to argue, and I said nothing.
Besides, I had never seen the Oolong people dance.
“I'll prove it to you,” he announced, beckoning to the black New Hanover
boy, a labor recruit, who served as cook and general house servant.
“Hey, you, boy, you tell 'm one fella king come along me.”
The boy departed, and back came the prime minister, perturbed, ill at
ease, and garrulous with apologetic explanation. In short, the king
slept, and was not to be disturbed.
“King he plenty strong fella sleep,” was his final sentence.
McAllister was in such a rage that the prime minister incontinently
fled, to return with the king himself. They were a magnificent pair,
the king especially, who must have been all of six feet three inches in
height. His features had the eagle-like quality that is so frequently
found in those of the North American Indian. He had been molded and born
to rule. His eyes flashed as he listened, but right meekly he obeyed
McAllister's command to fetch a couple of hundred of the best dancers,
male and female, in the village. And dance they did, for two mortal
hours, under that broiling sun. They did not love him for it, and little
he cared, in the end dismissing them with abuse and sneers.
The abject servility of those magnificent savages was terrifying. How
could it be? What was the secret of his rule? More and more I puzzled
as the days went by, and though I observed perpetual examples of his
undisputed sovereignty, never a clew was there as to how it was.
One day I happened to speak of my disappointment in failing to trade for
a beautiful pair of orange cowries. The pair was worth five pounds
in Sydney if it was worth a cent. I had offered two hundred sticks
of tobacco to the owner, who had held out for three hundred. When I
casually mentioned the situation, McAllister immediately sent for the
man, took the shells from him, and turned them over to me. Fifty sticks
were all he permitted me to pay for them. The man accepted the tobacco
and seemed overjoyed at getting off so easily. As for me, I resolved to
keep a bridle on my tongue in the future. And still I mulled over the
secret of McAllister's power. I even went to the extent of asking
him directly, but all he did was to cock one eye, look wise, and take
another drink.
One night I was out fishing in the lagoon with Oti, the man who had
been mulcted of the cowries. Privily, I had made up to him an additional
hundred and fifty sticks, and he had come to regard me with a respect
that was almost veneration, which was curious, seeing that he was an old
man, twice my age at least.
“What name you fella kanaka all the same pickaninny?” I began on him.
“This fella trader he one fella. You fella kanaka plenty fella too
much. You fella kanaka just like 'm dog--plenty fright along that fella
trader. He no eat you, fella. He no get 'm teeth along him. What name
you too much fright?”
“S'pose plenty fella kanaka kill 'm?” he asked.
“He die,” I retorted. “You fella kanaka kill 'm plenty fella white man
long time before. What name you fright this fella white man?”
“Yes, we kill 'm plenty,” was his answer. “My word! Any amount! Long
time before. One time, me young fella too much, one big fella ship he
stop outside. Wind he no blow. Plenty fella kanaka we get 'm canoe,
plenty fella canoe, we go catch 'm that fella ship. My word--we catch 'm
big fella fight. Two, three white men shoot like hell. We no fright.
We come alongside, we go up side, plenty fella, maybe I think fifty-ten
(five hundred). One fella white Mary (woman) belong that fella ship.
Never before I see 'm white Mary. Bime by plenty white man finish. One
fella skipper he no die. Five fella, six fella white man no die. Skipper
he sing out. Some fella white man he fight. Some fella white man he
lower away boat. After that, all together over the side they go. Skipper
he sling white Mary down. After that they washee (row) strong fella
plenty too much. Father belong me, that time he strong fella. He throw
'm one fella spear. That fella spear he go in one side that white Mary.
He no stop. My word, he go out other side that fella Mary. She finish.
Me no fright. Plenty kanaka too much no fright.”
Old Oti's pride had been touched, for he suddenly stripped down his
lava-lava and showed me the unmistakable scar of a bullet. Before I
could speak, his line ran out suddenly. He checked it and attempted to
haul in, but found that the fish had run around a coral branch. Casting
a look of reproach at me for having beguiled him from his watchfulness,
he went over the side, feet first, turning over after he got under and
following his line down to bottom. The water was ten fathoms. I leaned
over and watched the play of his feet, growing dim and dimmer, as they
stirred the wan phosphorescence into ghostly fires. Ten fathoms--sixty
feet--it was nothing to him, an old man, compared with the value of a
hook and line. After what seemed five minutes, though it could not have
been more than a minute, I saw him flaming whitely upward. He broke
surface and dropped a ten pound rock cod into the canoe, the line and
hook intact, the latter still fast in the fish's mouth.
“It may be,” I said remorselessly. “You no fright long ago. You plenty
fright now along that fella trader.”
“Yes, plenty fright,” he confessed, with an air of dismissing the
subject. For half an hour we pulled up our lines and flung them out in
silence. Then small fish-sharks began to bite, and after losing a hook
apiece, we hauled in and waited for the sharks to go their way.
“I speak you true,” Oti broke into speech, “then you savve we fright
now.”
I lighted up my pipe and waited, and the story that Oti told me in
atrocious bech-de-mer I here turn into proper English. Otherwise, in
spirit and order of narrative, the tale is as it fell from Oti's lips.
“It was after that that we were very proud. We had fought many times
with the strange white men who live upon the sea, and always we had
beaten them. A few of us were killed, but what was that compared with
the stores of wealth of a thousand thousand kinds that we found on the
ships? And then one day, maybe twenty years ago, or twenty-five, there
came a schooner right through the passage and into the lagoon. It was a
large schooner with three masts. She had five white men and maybe forty
boat's crew, black fellows from New Guinea and New Britain; and she
had come to fish beche-de-mer. She lay at anchor across the lagoon from
here, at Pauloo, and her boats scattered out everywhere, making camps
on the beaches where they cured the beche-de-mer. This made them weak
by dividing them, for those who fished here and those on the schooner at
Pauloo were fifty miles apart, and there were others farther away still.
“Our king and headmen held council, and I was one in the canoe that
paddled all afternoon and all night across the lagoon, bringing word
to the people of Pauloo that in the morning we would attack the fishing
camps at the one time and that it was for them to take the schooner. We
who brought the word were tired with the paddling, but we took part
in the attack. On the schooner were two white men, the skipper and the
second mate, with half a dozen black boys. The skipper with three boys
we caught on shore and killed, but first eight of us the skipper killed
with his two revolvers. We fought close together, you see, at hand
grapples.
“The noise of our fighting told the mate what was happening, and he put
food and water and a sail in the small dingy, which was so small that
it was no more than twelve feet long. We came down upon the schooner, a
thousand men, covering the lagoon with our canoes. Also, we were blowing
conch shells, singing war songs, and striking the sides of the canoes
with our paddles. What chance had one white man and three black boys
against us? No chance at all, and the mate knew it.
“White men are hell. I have watched them much, and I am an old man now,
and I understand at last why the white men have taken to themselves all
the islands in the sea. It is because they are hell. Here are you in
the canoe with me. You are hardly more than a boy. You are not wise,
for each day I tell you many things you do not know. When I was a little
pickaninny, I knew more about fish and the ways of fish than you know
now. I am an old man, but I swim down to the bottom of the lagoon, and
you cannot follow me. What are you good for, anyway? I do not know,
except to fight. I have never seen you fight, yet I know that you are
like your brothers and that you will fight like hell. Also, you are a
fool, like your brothers. You do not know when you are beaten. You will
fight until you die, and then it will be too late to know that you are
beaten.
“Now behold what this mate did. As we came down upon him, covering the
sea and blowing our conches, he put off from the schooner in the small
boat, along with the three black boys, and rowed for the passage. There
again he was a fool, for no wise man would put out to sea in so small
a boat. The sides of it were not four inches above the water. Twenty
canoes went after him, filled with two hundred young men. We paddled
five fathoms while his black boys were rowing one fathom. He had no
chance, but he was a fool. He stood up in the boat with a rifle, and he
shot many times. He was not a good shot, but as we drew close many of us
were wounded and killed. But still he had no chance.
“I remember that all the time he was smoking a cigar. When we were forty
feet away and coming fast, he dropped the rifle, lighted a stick of
dynamite with the cigar, and threw it at us. He lighted another and
another, and threw them at us very rapidly, many of them. I know now
that he must have split the ends of the fuses and stuck in match heads,
because they lighted so quickly. Also, the fuses were very short.
Sometimes the dynamite sticks went off in the air, but most of them went
off in the canoes. And each time they went off in a canoe, that canoe
was finished. Of the twenty canoes, the half were smashed to pieces. The
canoe I was in was so smashed, and likewise the two men who sat next
to me. The dynamite fell between them. The other canoes turned and ran
away. Then that mate yelled, Yah! Yah! Yah!' at us. Also he went at us
again with his rifle, so that many were killed through the back as they
fled away. And all the time the black boys in the boat went on rowing.
You see, I told you true, that mate was hell.
“Nor was that all. Before he left the schooner, he set her on fire,
and fixed up all the powder and dynamite so that it would go off at one
time. There were hundreds of us on board, trying to put out the fire,
heaving up water from overside, when the schooner blew up. So that all
we had fought for was lost to us, besides many more of us being killed.
Sometimes, even now, in my old age, I have bad dreams in which I hear
that mate yell, Yah! Yah! Yah!' In a voice of thunder he yells, Yah!
Yah! Yah!' But all those in the fishing camps were killed.
“The mate went out of the passage in his little boat, and that was the
end of him we made sure, for how could so small a boat, with four men in
it, live on the ocean? A month went by, and then, one morning, between
two rain squalls, a schooner sailed in through our passage and dropped
anchor before the village. The king and the headmen made big talk, and
it was agreed that we would take the schooner in two or three days. In
the meantime, as it was our custom always to appear friendly, we went
off to her in canoes, bringing strings of cocoanuts, fowls, and pigs, to
trade. But when we were alongside, many canoes of us, the men on board
began to shoot us with rifles, and as we paddled away I saw the mate who
had gone to sea in the little boat spring upon the rail and dance and
yell, Yah! Yah! Yah!'
“That afternoon they landed from the schooner in three small boats
filled with white men. They went right through the village, shooting
every man they saw. Also they shot the fowls and pigs. We who were not
killed got away in canoes and paddled out into the lagoon. Looking back,
we could see all the houses on fire. Late in the afternoon we saw many
canoes coming from Nihi, which is the village near the Nihi Passage in
the northeast. They were all that were left, and like us their village
had been burned by a second schooner that had come through Nihi Passage.
“We stood on in the darkness to the westward for Pauloo, but in the
middle of the night we heard women wailing and then we ran into a big
fleet of canoes. They were all that were left of Pauloo, which likewise
was in ashes, for a third schooner had come in through the Pauloo
Passage. You see, that mate, with his black boys, had not been drowned.
He had made the Solomon Islands, and there told his brothers of what we
had done in Oolong. And all his brothers had said they would come and
punish us, and there they were in the three schooners, and our three
villages were wiped out.
“And what was there for us to do? In the morning the two schooners from
windward sailed down upon us in the middle of the lagoon. The trade wind
was blowing fresh, and by scores of canoes they ran us down. And the
rifles never ceased talking. We scattered like flying fish before the
bonita, and there were so many of us that we escaped by thousands, this
way and that, to the islands on the rim of the atoll.
“And thereafter the schooners hunted us up and down the lagoon. In the
nighttime we slipped past them. But the next day, or in two days or
three days, the schooners would be coming back, hunting us toward
the other end of the lagoon. And so it went. We no longer counted nor
remembered our dead. True, we were many and they were few. But what
could we do? I was in one of the twenty canoes filled with men who were
not afraid to die. We attacked the smallest schooner. They shot us down
in heaps. They threw dynamite into the canoes, and when the dynamite
gave out, they threw hot water down upon us. And the rifles never ceased
talking. And those whose canoes were smashed were shot as they swam
away. And the mate danced up and down upon the cabin top and yelled,
'Yah! Yah! Yah!'”
“Every house on every smallest island was burned. Not a pig nor a fowl
was left alive. Our wells were defiled with the bodies of the slain, or
else heaped high with coral rock. We were twenty-five thousand on Oolong
before the three schooners came. Today we are five thousand. After the
schooners left, we were but three thousand, as you shall see.
“At last the three schooners grew tired of chasing us back and forth. So
they went, the three of them, to Nihi, in the northeast. And then they
drove us steadily to the west. Their nine boats were in the water as
well. They beat up every island as they moved along. They drove us,
drove us, drove us day by day. And every night the three schooners and
the nine boats made a chain of watchfulness that stretched across the
lagoon from rim to rim, so that we could not escape back.