_Islands and Adventures--What about the Missionary?--The Lotus
Eaters--How to hunt the Robber-Crab--The Ship that would not
sail--Proper Place of a Passenger--One Way to get wrecked--The Pirate
and the Pearls._
MAUKE, Manuwai, and Takutea still remained to be seen, before the
_Duchess_ could spread her wings for Raratonga again. We sailed from one
to another in the course of a few days. There was no hurry, and a day
wasted here or there troubled none of us.
Sometimes the “trades,” which are very fickle about here, came up and
caught our towering canvas in a cool embrace; then the great hollows of
the sails hummed with the music that the ocean wanderer loves, and the
_Duchess_ skimmed the rolling blue hills like a flying-fish. Sometimes
the wind fell, and the booms swung and creaked lazily above the burning
deck; then we trolled for albacore and bonito, shrieking with savage joy
when our bit of long-desired fresh food came flapping and fighting over
the rail; or we watched the crew hook devil-faced grey sharks, which,
“took charge” of the deck when captured, hitting terrible blows with
their tails, and snapping stout ropes with their savage teeth; or we got
out boats, and rowed them for miles between the double furnaces of the
blazing sun and the glowing sea, coming back to the ship scorched into
cinders, stiff with exertion, but happy. At night the Southern Cross
burned white in the velvet sky, and the coral rocks about the lagoons
showed in shimmering pale blue underneath fifty feet or more of clear,
moonlit water. Lying on the poop, like seals on sand, the little knot
of passengers, captain, and mate, “yarned” for hour after hour--strange,
wild tales of frontier life in new lands; of adventures in unknown seas;
of fights, and more fights, and fights yet again--literature in the
rough, a very gallery of vivid pictures wasted unseen... and yet, what
should any man who had the rich reality care about its pale shadow,
Story? “Do you care much for reading?” “Well, no,” answers the
bare-footed officer lying with his head in a coil of rope; “books
aren’t very interesting, are they?”
I, watching the mizzen truck swing among the stars, look back over the
long, long trail--long both in distance and in time--that separates this
small heaving deck in the midst of the tropic seas from the rush of the
wintry Strand, Nights in islands of ill reputation, when I slept with
“one eye open” and one hand within touch of my revolver (for there are
incidents of my wanderings that I have not told, and only those who know
the Eastern Pacific may guess at them); days when only a fifty-to-one
chance kept the little schooner from piling her bones on a spouting
coral reef in mid-ocean--rough fare, hard lodging, and long fatigue,
sometimes, all to be “eaten as helped,” without comment or complaint,
for that is the rule of island life--the pungent taste of danger, now
and then, gratefully slaking some deep, half-conscious thirst derived
from fiercer centuries; the sight of many lands and many peoples--these,
and other pictures, painted themselves among the little gold stars swept
by the rocking masts, as I lay^ remembering. I thought of the pile of
untouched “shockers” in my cabin; of grey London and its pyramids of
books and armies of writers; of the mirror that they hold up to life,
and the “magic web of colours gay” they weave, always looking, like
the Lady of Shalott, in the mirror, and seldom joining the merry
rout outside, where no one cares a pin for coloured tapestries, and
looking-glasses are left to half-grown girls. No, truly; “books are not
interesting,” when you can have life instead.
Upon which some one proposed “Consequences” in the cabin, and I made
haste to climb down.
Another day, gold and blue as are almost all the days of the “winter”
season, and another island, burning white and blazing green, and another
tumbling reef to jump, with the help of a powerful boat-holder, who
stands in the midst of the surf, and drags the dinghy forward at the
right moment. This is Mauke: we are getting on with the group, and begin
to realise that some time or other, even in these timeless regions, will
actually see us back at Raratonga.
Mauke proves to be a pretty little place, some six miles in
circumference, “low” in type, but park-like and gardenlike and dainty
enough to wake covetous desires in the heart of almost any traveller. It
has the finest oranges in the group--growing completely wild--and we
are greeted on the shore by the usual crowd of flower-wreathed natives,
bearing splendid branches of rich yellow fruit, which they present
to every one with eager generosity. There are only three hundred and
seventy natives in the island, and much of the land lies waste, though
it is exceedingly fertile. The Mauke folk take things easy on the whole,
and are not keen on trading. They export some oranges, some copra, a few
bunches of dried bananas, and they buy a fair amount of cotton cloth,
and shirts, and cutlery, from the white trader’s store. But no one, so
far, has grown fat on what Mauke makes or buys.
There were, at the time of my visit, only one or two whites in the
place. The greater portion of the land available for planting lay
unused. Probable rents, on long leases, were quoted to me as a shilling
or so an acre.
The call at Mauke was short, and I saw little of the island. The natives
insisted, however, that I should come up to the village and look at
their church, of which they are very proud, so I headed the inevitable
procession through the orange and lime and guava groves, to the little
group of houses, partly thatch and reed, partly whitewashed concrete,
that made up the settlement. The church was, of course, much the least
interesting thing in the island. South Sea churches, with one or two
happy exceptions, are blots in a world of beauty, monuments of bad
taste, extravagance, and folly, that do very little credit to the
religions they represent. In the days when most of them were built, the
one idea of the missionary was the assimilation of the native to
white men’s ways and customs, as far as was possible, by any means
conceivable--wise, or otherwise. In building churches for the new
converts, the pattern followed was that set by Europeans for use in
a cold climate, on sites that had a distinct money value per yard.
Consequently, while South Sea houses, for coolness, are made almost all
window and door, or else built, native fashion, in such a way that
the air blows through the walls, South Sea churches are almost without
ventilation, and (because the style of architecture selected is that of
the whitewashed barn description) quite without beauty of any kind.
In most cases, they have cost the islands appalling sums to build, and
continue to demand a good deal to keep them in repair. There are happy
exceptions here and there. Niué, of which place I have more to say later
on, possesses a church built with exquisite taste and perfect regard to
convenience, and the Catholic cathedral in Samoa is designed with much
consideration as to climate, and appearance as well.
Mauke’s church, however, is not one of the exceptions, being exceedingly
bald and ugly, and it is furthermore disfigured by the most horrible
lapse of taste to be seen in almost any island church--the decoration of
the pulpit and communion rails with silver dollars nailed on in rows. I
told the crowd of natives, eager to hear the praises of their wonderful
church, that I had never seen anything like it in my life--which seemed
to afford them much gratification. I did not add what I thought--that I
sincerely hoped I might never see anything like it again.
A statement made only once or twice is fairly sure to miss the
observation of the average reader, so I make no apology for saying here,
as I have said in other parts of this book, that I am not one of those
people who are opposed to mission work, or indifferent to religion;
neither am I inclined to minimise the effects of the work done by
missionaries in converting and civilising the Pacific generally. That
the missionaries are infallible and always wise, however, in their
methods of dealing with the natives, I do deny--which is only equivalent
to saying that they are human, like the people at home. Nor do I think
that, in these days, the missionary who takes up work in the Southern
and Eastern Pacific has any need to wear the martyr aureole which is so
persistently fitted on to the heads of all who go to “labour” in the
island world. We are not in the days of Cook: cannibalism, over most of
the Pacific, is dead and forgotten, violence to white people of any kind
is unheard of, the climates are usually excellent, the islands
beautiful, fertile, and happy, and the missionary’s work is much the
same as that of any country clergyman at home, save for the fact that
his congregation are infinitely more submissive than whites would be,
and incline to regard their teacher as a sovereign, not only spiritual,
but temporal. The mission house is always much the finest building on
the island, and the best furnished and provided. The missionary’s
children are usually sent away to be educated at good home or colonial
boarding schools, and afterwards return to take up their parents’ work,
or possibly to settle in the islands in other capacities. The life,
though busy, is devoid of all stress and strain, and there is no
apparent difficulty in “making both ends meet”--and overlap. In the
Southern and Eastern Pacific, the missionaries are conveyed from group
to group in a mission steamer that is little inferior to the yacht of a
millionaire, for comfort and elegance. They are constantly assisted by
gifts of all kinds, and treated with consideration wherever they go, and
in most cases enjoy a social position much better than that originally
possessed at home. It is hard to see why a profession, which is so
pleasant and profitable, should be exalted over the work of thousands of
struggling pastors and clergymen at home, who too often know the pinch
of actual want, and are in many cases obliged to lead lives of the
greyest and narrowest monotony.
What is the moral? That one should not give money to missions? Certainly
not. But if I were a millionaire, and had thousands to give in such
a cause, I would give them carefully, with inquiry, directed to more
sources than one, and would distribute them so that they should be used,
if possible, in adding to the numbers of the Christian Church, rather
than in teaching geography and English grammar and dressmaking to
amiable brown people who are, and have been for generations, a good deal
more Christian than ninety in a hundred whites. I believe firmly that
most of the older missions in the Pacific could be continued perfectly
well with the aid of native teachers, at one-twentieth the present
cost--much as the teaching of outlying far-away islands, where residence
is unpleasant for white families, is carried on to-day, with the aid
of a yearly visit or so. That the present system will ever be modified,
however, I do not believe. The reasons for such a conclusion are too
obvious to need discussion.
I have wandered a good way from the church at Mauke. But there are many
points on this subject of island missions, nevertheless, on which I have
not touched.
Some of the men of Mauke were very busy on the shore, when our party
passed down again to the boat. They made a bright picture, in their gay
pareos of scarlet and yellow, and the snowy coronets of scented island
flowers that they had twined about their heads. But the most picturesque
thing about them was their occupation, which was neither more nor less
than sand-castle building! There they sat, those big grown men, with
never a child among them to make excuse for their play, building up
churches and houses of the milk-white coral sand, scooping dark windows
in the edifices, training green creepers up them, and planting out odd
little gardens of branching coral twigs off the reef, in the surrounding
pleasances. They had bundles of good things tied up in green leaves,
lying somewhere in the shade of the guava bushes, and they had brought a
pile of husked cocoanuts down to the shore with them, to drink when they
pleased. They may have been waiting for a native boat, or they may have
been simply making a day of it. In any case, they were sublimely happy.
_(Cold rain on the miry road; faint gold sunset fading to stormy grey;
wet leaves a-shiver in the dusk--and the long, long way before the tired
feet. A day of toil, a comfortless night. A handful of coppers in the
pocket; food and fire that must be bought with silver; freedom, rest,
enjoyment, that cost unattainable gold. The sacred right of labour;
a white man’s freedom. O, brown half-naked islanders, playing at
sand-castles on your sun-bathed shore, with unbought food lying among
the unpurchased fruits beside you, what would you give to be one of the
master race?)_
Takutea we did not call at, since it was uninhabited, but the _Duchess_,
under her daring little pirate of a captain, made no bones about running
as close to anything, anywhere, as her passengers might desire, so we
saw the fascinating place at fairly close quarters. In 1904, when I saw
it, it was a real “desolate island,” being twelve miles out in the open
sea from the nearest land (Atiu), and totally uninhabited. Its extent
is four or five hundred acres; it is thickly wooded with cocoanuts-, and
has a good spring of water. The beautiful “bo’sun bird,” whose long red
and white tail feathers have a considerable commercial value, is common
on the island. No one had visited it for a long time when we sailed by;
the wide white beach was empty, the cocoanut palms dropped their nuts
unheeded into earth that received them gladly, and set them forth
again in fountain-like sprays of green. The surf crumbled softly on
the irregular fringing reef; the ripples of the lagoon laid their ridgy
footsteps along the empty strand, and no Man Friday came to trample
them out-with a step of awful significance. I wanted Takutea very badly
indeed, all for myself; but I shall not have it now, neither will the
reader, for some one else has bought it, and it is to be turned into a
cocoanut plantation.
Manuwai, better known as Hervey Island, is not many miles away, but we
took a day or more to reach it, partly because the winds were contrary,
partly because (with apologies to the Admiralty Surveys) it was wrongly
charted, and could not be found, at first, in a slight sea-fog. Manuwai
has changed its ownership and its use, of late, but in 1904 it was a
penal settlement and a copra plantation combined, being used as a
place of punishment for sinful Cook Islanders, who were compulsorily
let out as labourers to the Company renting the two islets of which this
so-called group is composed.
The islands between them cover about fifteen hundred acres, according
to the estimate given me. They have no permanent inhabitants, and when
first taken up for planting, were quite desolate of life. A far-away,
melancholy little place looked Manuwai, under the rays of the declining
sun, as we came up to the reef. The two low islands, with their thick
pluming of palms, are enclosed in the same lagoon, sheltered by a reef
of oval form. There were a couple of drying-huts on the beach, and some
heaps of oily smelling copra, when our boat pulled in. About twenty men,
some convicts, some hired labourers, were gathered on the shore, fairly
dancing with excitement, and the rest of the population--one white
overseer, and one half-caste--were waiting on the very edge of the
water, hardly less agitated. No ships ever called except the _Duchess_,
and she was long overdue.
I stepped on shore, and was immediately shaken hands with, and
congratulated on being the first white woman to set foot on the island.
Then we all went for a walk, while the native crew fell into the arms of
the labourers, and with cries of joy began exchanging gossip, tobacco,
hats, and shirts, bartering oranges from the ship for cocoanut crabs
from the island, and eagerly discussing the question of who was going
home in the _Duchess_, and who would have to stop over till her next
call, perhaps six months hence.
Manuwai is not one of the most beautiful of the islands, but anything
in the way of solid ground was welcome after the gymnastics of the
too-lively _Duchess_. The cocoa-nut plantations, and the new clearings,
where the bush was being burned away, interested the officials from
Raratonga, and the “boulevard” planted by the overseer--a handsome
double row of palms, composing an avenue that facetiously began in
nothing, and led to nowhere, received due admiration. We heard a
good deal about the depredations of the cocoanut crabs, and as these
creatures are among the strangest things that ever furnished food for
travellers’ tales, I shall give their history as I gathered it, both in
Manuwai and other places.
One must not, by the way, believe all that one hears, or even half,
among the “sunny isles of Eden.” Flowers of the imagination flourish
quite as freely as flowers and fruits of the earth, and are much less
satisfactory in kind. Also, it is a recognised sport to “spin yarns” to
a newcomer, with the pious object of seeing how much he--or she--will
swallow; and where so much is strange, bizarre, and almost incredible,
among undoubted facts, it is hard to sift out the fictions of the
playful resident.
However, the cocoanut crab is an undeniable fact, with which many a
planter has had to wrestle, much to his loss. It must be confessed that
I had expected something very exciting indeed, when I heard in Tahiti
that cocoanut or robber crabs were still to be found in some parts of
the Cook Group. One of the most grisly bugbears of my youth had been
the descriptions of the terrible cocoanut crab that attacked the “Swiss
Family Robinson” on their wonderful island. It was described, if my
memory serves me, as “about the size of a turtle.” and was dark blue in
colour; it descended rapidly backwards down a tree, and immediately went
to the attack of a Robinson youth, who repulsed it at the peril of his
life.... On the whole, I thought it would make things interesting, if it
really was in the Cook Group.
I never was more disappointed in my life than when I really saw one. It
was dead, and cured in formalin, and only brought down from an island
house as a show, but that was not the trouble. It was not more than two
and a half feet long, lobster tail and all; it was not in the least like
a turtle, and any small boy armed with a good stick could have faced it
without fear, at its worst. No, decidedly the terrible crab was not up
to the travellers’ tales that had been told about it.
Still, it was worth seeing, for it was like nothing on the earth or in
the sea that I had ever encountered. It had been excellently preserved,
and looked wonderfully alive, when laid on the sand at the foot of a
cocoanut palm. Its colour, as in life, was a gay mixture of red and
blue. It had a long body like a colossal lobster, and two claws, one
slight and thin, the other big enough to crack the ankle-bone of a man.
It was an ugly and a wicked-looking thing, and I was not surprised to
hear that it fights fiercely, if caught away from its hole, sitting up
and threatening man or beast with its formidable claw, and showing no
fear whatever.
In the daylight, however, it is very seldom seen abroad. We walked
through groves that were riddled with its holes that afternoon,
but never even heard the scuffle of a claw. The creature lives in
rabbit-like burrows at the foot of palm-trees, and the natives can
always tell the size of the inmate by a glance at the diameter of the
hole by which it enters its burrow. At night it comes out, climbs the
nearest palm, and gets in among the raffle of young and old leaves,
fibre, stalks, and nuts, in the crown, there it selects a good nut, nips
the stalk in two with its claw, and lets the booty drop with a thump
to the earth, seventy or eighty feel below. Then the marauder backs
cautiously down the tree, finds the nut, and proceeds to rip and rend
the tough husk until the nut as we know it at home is laid bare. A
cocoanut shell is no easy thing to crack, as most people know, but the
robber crab with its huge claws makes nothing more of it than we should
make of an egg, and in a minute the rich oily meat is at the mercy
of the thief, and another fraction of a ton of copra is lost to the
planter. It goes without saying that any stray nuts lying on the ground
have been opened and destroyed, before the crab will trouble itself to
climb.
Cocoanut crab is very good eating, and as it is mostly found in barren
coral islands where little or nothing will grow but palms, the natives
are always keen on hunting the “robber.” Sometimes he is secured by
thrusting a lighted torch down a hole which possesses two exits--the
crab hurrying out at the unopposed side as soon as the flame invades his
dwelling. Sometimes the islanders secure him by the simple process of
feeling for him in his burrow, and stabbing him at the end of it with
a knife. This is decidedly risky, however, and may result in a smashed
hand or wrist for the invader. A favourite plan is the following: Slip
out in the dark, barefoot and silent, and hide yourself in a cocoanut
grove till you see or hear a crab making his way up a tree. Wait till
he is up at the top, and then climb half-way up, and tie a band of grass
round the trunk. Now hurry down and pile a heap of rough coral stones
from the beach at the foot of the tree. Slip away into the shadow again,
and wait. The crab will start to come down presently, backing carefully,
tail first, for he has a bare and unprotected end to his armoured body,
and uses it to inform himself of his arrival on the safe ground below.
Half-way down the tree he touches your cunning band of grass. “Down so
soon?” he remarks to himself, and lets go. Crack! he has shot down forty
feet through air, and landed smashingly on the pile of stones that you
carefully prepared for his reception.
He is badly injured, ten to one, and you will have little trouble in
finishing him off with your knife, and carrying home a savoury supper
that is well worth the’ waiting for. That is the native way of hunting
robber crabs.
When one lives on a cocoanut plantation, on an island that contains
practically nothing else, one comes in time to know everything that is
to be known about cocoanuts in general. But even the manager of Manuwai
could not solve for me a problem that had been perplexing me ever since
I had first seen a cocoanut palm--a problem, indeed, that after several
more years of island travel, remains unanswered yet.
Why is no one ever killed by a cocoanut?
The question seems an idle one, if one thinks of cocoa-nuts as they are
seen in British shops--small brown ovals of little weight or size--and
if one has never seen them growing, or heard them fall. But when one
knows that, the smallest nuts alone reach England (since they are sold
by number, not by weight) and that the ordinary nut, in its husk and on
its native tree, is as big as one’s own head, and as heavy as a solid
lump of hard wood--that most trees bear seventy or eighty nuts a year,
and that every one of those nuts has the height of a four-storey house
to drop before it reaches the ground--that native houses are usually
placed in the middle of a palm grove, and that every one in the islands,
brown or white, walks underneath hundreds of laden cocoanut trees every
day in the year--it then becomes a miracle of the largest kind that no
one is ever killed, and very rarely injured, by the fall of the nuts.
Nor can the reason be sought in the fact that the nuts cannot hurt. One
is sure to see them fall from time to time, and they shoot down from
the crown of the palm like flying bomb-shells, making a most portentous
thump as they reach the earth. So extremely rare are accidents, however,
that in nearly three years I did not hear of any mishap, past or
present, save the single case of a man who was struck by a falling nut
in the Cook Islands, and knocked insensible for an hour or two. This is
certainly not a bad record for a tour extending over so many thousand
miles, and including most of the important island groups--every one
of which grows cocoanut palms by the thousand, in some cases, by the
hundred thousand.
Travellers are often a little nervous at first, when riding or walking
all day long through woods of palm, heavily laden with ponderous nuts.
But the feeling never lasts more than a few days. One does not know
why one is never hit by these cannon-balls of Nature--but one never is,
neither is anybody else, so all uneasiness dies out very quickly, and
one acquiesces placidly in the universal miracle.
Planters say that most of the nuts fall at night, when the dew has
relaxed the fibres of the stalks. This would be an excellent reason,
but for the fact that the nuts don’t fall any more at night than in the
daytime, if one takes the trouble to observe, and that damp, or dew,
tightens up fibres of all kind, instead of relaxing them. If one asks
the natives, the usual answer is: “It just happens that way”; and I
fancy that is as near as any one is likely to get to a solution.
Manuwai, since I saw it, has been purchased outright by a couple of
adventurous young Englishmen, who are working it as a copra plantation.
Takutea has, therefore, a neighbour in the Robinson Crusoe business, and
is not likely to be quite so solitary as in times past.
The tour of the group was now ended, and the Government officials were
conveyed back to Raratonga with all possible despatch--which is not
saying very much, after all. There followed a luxurious interval of real
beds and real meals, and similar Capuan delights, in the pretty island
bungalow where my lot for the time had been cast. Then the _Duchess_
began to start again, and peace was over. A sailing vessel does not
start in the same way as a steamer. She gives out that she will leave
on such a day, at such an hour, quite like the steamer; but there the
resemblance ends. When you pack your cabin trunk, and have it taken
down at 11 a.m., you find there is no wind, so you take it back and call
again next day. There is a wind now, but from the one quarter that makes
it practically impossible to get out of port.’ You are told you had
better leave your trunk, in case of the breeze shifting. You do, and
go back for the second time to the hostess from whom you have already
parted twice. The verandah (every one lives on verandahs, in the
islands) is convulsed to see you come back, and tells you this is the
way the ship always does “get off.” You spend a quiet evening, and go
to bed. At twelve o’clock, just as you are in the very heart of your
soundest sleep, a native boy comes running up to the house to say that
the captain has sent for the passenger to come down at once, for the
wind is getting up, and he will sail in a quarter of an hour! You
scramble into your clothes, run down to the quay, get rowed out to
the ship, and finish your sleep in your cabin to the accompaniment of
stamping feet and the flapping sails; and behold, at eight o’clock, the
bo’sun thunders on your door, and tells you that breakfast is in, but
the breeze is away again, and the ship still in harbour! After breakfast
you sneak up the well-known avenue again, feeling very much as if you
had run away from school, and were coming back in disgrace. This time,
the verandah shrieks until the natives run to the avenue gate to see
what is the matter with the man “papalangis,” and then console you with
the prophecy that the schooner won’t get away for another week.
She does, though. In the middle of the afternoon tea, the captain
himself arrives, declines to have a cup, and says it is really business
this time, and he is away. You go down that eternal avenue again,
followed by cheerful cries of “No goodbye! we’ll keep your place at
dinner,” and in half an hour the green and purple hills of lovely
Raratonga are separated from you by a widening plain of wind-ruffled
blue waves, and the _Duchess_ is fairly away to Savage Island.
“Miss G--------, have you nearly done your book?”
“Pretty nearly--why?” I ask, looking up from the pages of “John
Herring.”
We are a day or two out from Raratonga, but not even one hundred of the
six hundred miles that lie between the Cook Group and lonely Niué is
compassed as yet. The winds have been lightest of the light, and from
the wrong quarter too, until this morning, when we have “got a slant” at
last. Now the _Duchess_ is rolling along in her usual tipsy fashion
at seven or eight knots an hour, and the china-blue sea is ruffled and
frilled with snow. It is hot, but not oppressively so, and I have
been enjoying myself most of the morning lounging on a pile of locker
cushions against the deck-house, alternately reading, and humming to
myself something from Kipling about:
Sailing south on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
Sliding south on the long trail, the trail that is always new.
The pirate captain has been at the wheel for the last two hours, but I
have not taken much note of the fact. Our only mate left us in the Cook
Group, for a reason not absolutely new in the history of the world (a
pretty little reason she was, too); and our bo’sun, who has been giddily
promoted to a rank that he describes as “chief officer,” is not exactly
a host in himself, though he is a white man. In consequence, the pirate
and he have been keeping watch and watch since we sailed--four hours on
and four hours off--and, as one or two of our best A.B.s declined to go
down to Niué, and most of the others are bad helmsmen, the two whites
have been at the wheel during the greater part of their watches.
I have grown quite accustomed to seeing one or other standing aft of
the little companion that leads down to the cabin, lightly shifting the
spokes in his hands hour after hour. It never occurred to me, however,
that I was personally interested in the matter.
But we are in the South Pacific, and I have still a good many things to
find out about the “way they do things at sea,” here where the ocean is
the ocean, and no playground for globe-trotting tourists.
“Are you nearly done?” asks the pirate again, shifting half a point, and
throwing a glance at the clouds on the windward side. They are harmless
little clouds, and only suggest a steady breeze.
“I have about half an hour’s reading left,” I answer.
“Then you’d better chuck the book into your cabin, for it’s almost eight
bells, and that begins your trick at the wheel,” says the pirate calmly.
“My _what?_”
“Your trick. Your turn. Time you have to steer, see?”
“But, good heavens! I never had a wheel in my hand in my life--I don’t
know how!”
“That’s your misfortune, not your fault,” says the pirate kindly.
“You’ll never have to say that again.. There’s eight bells now--come
along. J------ and I have had too much of the wheel, and now we’re well
away from land is your time to learn.”
And from thenceforth until we made the rocky coast of Niué, more than a
week later, I spent a portion of every day with the polished spokes of
the wheel in my hands, straining my eyes on the “lubber’s point,” or
anxiously watching the swelling curves of the sails aloft in the windy
blue, ready to put the wheel up the instant an ominous wrinkle began
to flap and writhe upon the marble smoothness of the leaning canvas. At
night, the smallest slatting of sail upon the mast would start me out of
my sleep, with an uneasy fear that I was steering, and had let her get
too, close to the wind; and I deposed most of my prayers in favour of
an evening litany that began: “North, north by east, nor’-nor’-east,
nor’-east by north, nor’-east,” and turned round upon itself to go
backward in the end, like a spell said upside down to raise a storm.
Withal, the good ship left many a wake that would have broken the back
of a snake, for the first day or two of my lessons, and the native A.B.s
used to come and stand behind me when an occasional sea made the wheel
kick, under the evident impression that they would be wanted before
long. But I learned to steer--somehow--before we got to Niué, and I
learned to lower away boats, and to manage a sixteen foot steer-oar,
when we got becalmed, and spent the day rowing about among the
mountainous swells, out of sheer boredom. And for exercise and sport,
I learned to go up into the cross-trees and come down again by the
ratlines or the back-stay, whichever seemed the handiest, wearing the
flannel gymnasium dress I had brought for mountaineering excursions.
It was very pleasant up there on a bright, salt-windy morning, when the
_Duchess_ swung steadily on her way with a light favouring breeze, her
little white deck lying below me like a tea-tray covered with walking
dolls, her masts at times leaning to leeward until my airy seat was
swung far out across the water. Having a good head, I was never troubled
with giddiness, and used to do a good deal of photographing from
aloft, when the ship was steady enough to allow of it. That was seldom,
however, for the _Duchess_ had been built in New Zealand, where the good
schooners do not come from, and had no more hold on the water than
a floating egg. More than one sailing vessel turned out by the same
builders had vanished off the face of the ocean, in ways not explained,
by reason of the absence of survivors, but dimly guessed at, all the
same; and I cannot allow that the pirate captain had any just cause
of annoyance--even allowing for a master’s pride in his ship--when I
recommended him to have the schooner’s name painted legibly on her keel
before he should leave Auckland on his next northward journey, just “in
case.”
We were about a hundred and fifty miles off Niué, when the pirate came
to me one windy morning, and asked me if I wanted to see something that
had only been once seen before.
There was, of course, only one reply possible.
“Then keep a look-out, and you’ll see it,” said the pirate. “We’re going
to run right by Beveridge Reef, and it’s been only once sighted. What’s
more, it’s wrong charted, and I’m going to set it right. You’ve no idea
what a lot of wrecks there have been on that d-------- that dangerous
place. Not a soul ever got away from one of them to tell what happened,
either. They’d only know when things began drifting down to Niué, weeks
after--timber and cargo, and so on--why, a lot of the houses in Niué
are built out of wreckage--and then people would say that there’d been
another wreck on Beveridge Reef. Some fool reported it as a coral island
two miles across, once upon a time, but I’ll bet he never saw it. If it
had been, it wouldn’t have been as destructive as it is.”
Late in the day we sighted it. The pirate was aloft, swinging between
heaven and earth, with a glass in his hand, calling out observations to
the chief-officer-boatswain below. The crew were attending exclusively
to the horizon, and letting the ship look after herself, according to
the amiable way of Maories when there is anything interesting afoot. The
weather was darkening down, and heavy squalls of rain swept the sea now
and then. But there it was, clearly enough to be seen in the intervals
of the squalls, a circle of white foam enclosing an inner patch of livid
green, clearly marked off from the grey of the surrounding ocean. Here
and there a small black tooth of rock projected from the deadly ring of
surf, and--significant and cruel sight--two ships’ anchors were plainly
to be seen through the glass, as we neared the reef, lying fixed among
the rock, so low in the water as only to be visible at intervals.
“A wicked place,” said the captain, who had come down from his eyrie,
and was giving orders for the preparation of a boat. “Couldn’t see a bit
of it at night--couldn’t see it in broad daylight, if there was a big
sea on. And wrong charted too. Think of the last minutes of those poor
chaps the anchors belonged to!”
The sea and sky were really beginning to look nasty, and I did not want
to think of it. But the pirate went discoursing pleasantly of deaths and
wrecks, while the men were putting various things into the whaleboat,
and getting ready to lower away. He did not often have a passenger, but
when he did, he evidently thought it his duty to keep her entertained.
We were very near to the reef now--so close that I was able to take a
photograph of it, a little marred by the rainy weather. Meantime,
the boat was being swung out, and the men were getting in. And now
“a strange thing happened.” Out of nowhere at all eight sharks
appeared--large ones, too--and began to cruise hungrily about the
_Duchess’s_ hull, their lithe yellowish bodies sharply outlined in the
dark blue water, their evil eyes fixed on me, as I overhung the rail to
look at them. “If only!” they said as plainly as possible, with those
hideously intelligent green orbs. “If only------”
“What has brought those horrible brutes about us?” I asked.
“Those? oh, they’re waiting to be fed, I suppose. Pretty much all the
ships that came this way before us have given them a good dinner. I bet
they say grace before meat now every time they see a sail, which isn’t
often. Here, you Oki, put in that keg of beef.”
“Where are you going?” I demanded with considerable interest, for the
pirate captain never did things like any one else, and I scented an
adventure.
“Going to find out what the inside of that lagoon is really like. No
one ever put a boat into it yet. No, you can’t be in it this time: very
sorry, but----”
“What?”
“Well, you see, one isn’t absolutely sure of getting back again, in a
place like this. Didn’t you see me put in grub and water and a compass?
I don’t think you’d like a boat voyage down to Niué, if we happened to
miss the train. The mate has the course, and could take her on, if I
came to grief. No, it isn’t any use asking, I just can’t. Lower away.”
They lowered and------
Well, if the pirate had been a shade less determined about the number in
the boat, there would have been a pretty little tragedy of the sea, that
gusty afternoon. One more in the boat had certainly turned the scale.
For the wind was continually getting up, and the wretched _Duchess_ was
rolling like a buoy, and the boat as she touched the water, with the
captain and three men in her, was caught by the top of a wave, and
dashed against the side of the ship. In a flash she was overturned,
with a badly damaged thwart, and was washing about helplessly among the
waves, with the four men clinging to her keel. The sea took her past the
schooner like a rag. I had only time to run to the stern, before she was
swept out of hearing, but I heard the pirate call as he disappeared in
the trough of a wave, “Get out your camera, here’s the chance of your
life!” Then the boat was gone, and for a moment the mate and I thought
it was all over. “The sharks will have ’em if they don’t sink!”
declared that officer, straining over the rail, while the Maori crew ran
aimlessly about the deck, shouting with excitement.
What happened during the next half-hour has never been very clear in my
memory. The wind kept rising, and the afternoon grew late and dark. The
overturned boat, with the four heads visible about her keel, drifted
helplessly in the trough of the seas, at the mercy of waves and sharks.
(I heard, afterwards, that the men had all kicked ceaselessly to keep
them away, and that they expected to be seized any moment.) The wind
screamed in the rigging, and drifts of foam flew up on deck, and the
Maories ran about and shouted, and got in each other’s way, and tried
to heave ropes, and missed, and tried to launch a boat under the mate’s
direction, and somehow did not--I cannot tell why. And right in the
middle of the play, when we seemed to be making some attempt to bear
down upon the drifting wreck, a grey old man who had come on with us
from the Cook Islands, but had kept to his berth through illness most
of the time, burst out on deck with an astonishing explosion of sea
language, and told us that we were nearly on to the reef. Which, it
seems, every one had forgotten!
After that, things grew so lively on the poop that I got up on the top
of the deck-house to keep out of the way, and reflect upon my sins. It
seemed a suitable occasion for devotional exercises. The white teeth
of the reef were unpleasantly near, the water was growing shoal. “Put a
leadsman in the chains this minute!” yelled the grizzled passenger (who
had been at sea in his time, and knew something of what was likely to
happen when you got a nasty reef on your lee side, with the wind working
up). The auxiliary engine, meant for use on just such occasions, had
been sick for some time. There was a very strong tide running, the wind
had shifted while the ship’s company were intent on the fate of the
boat, and on the whole it looked very much as if the decorations already
possessed by the notorious reef were likely to be increased by another
pair of best quality British made anchors--_ours_.
A good many things happen on sailing ships--Pacific ships
especially--that one does not describe in detail, unless one happens to
be writing fiction. This is not fiction, so the occurrences of the next
quarter of an hour must be passed over lightly. The ancient passenger
took command of the ship. We got away from the reef by an unpleasantly
close shave and bore down upon the boat, which the pirate captain had
impossibly contrived to right by this time, paddling it along with one
oar, while the men baled constantly. We got the captain and the men
and the damaged boat on board, and a few “free opinions, freely
expressed”--as a certain famous lady novelist would put it--were
exchanged. Then the pirate, who was quite fresh, and very lively,
demanded the second boat, and said he was bound to get into that place
anyhow, and wouldn’t leave till he did.
I rather think we mutinied at this juncture. I am sure I did, because
I had been thinking over my sins for some time, and had come to the
conclusion that there really were not many of them, and that I wanted a
chance to accumulate a few more, preferably of an agreeable kind, before
I faced the probability of decorating any Pacific coral reef with my
unadorned and unburied skeleton. The grey-haired passenger and the mate
mutinied too, upon my example, and the pirate, seeing that we were
three to one, and moreover, that it was growing dusk, made a virtue of
necessity, and went off for a shift of clothes, giving orders to make
all sail at once. And so we left the reef in the growing dusk, and no
man has to this day disturbed the virgin surface of its stormy little
lagoon with profanely invading oar.
Was there a fortune lying concealed beneath those pale green waves
within the foaming jaws of the reef? I never heard. But there were some
among our native crew who came from the far-off island of Penrhyn, where
the pearl fisheries are, and they were strong in asserting their belief
that the pirate might have been well paid for his exploration. It was
just that sort of reef, said the pearl-island men, that most often
contained good shell, and produced the biggest pearls, the first time
of looking. An old, undisturbed atoll, where no one had ever thought of
looking for shell, was the place where big pearls got a chance to grow.
The first comer scooped in the prizes; afterwards, the shell itself and
the smaller pearls were all that any one was likely to get.
However that might be, the talk, on the rest of the way down to Niué,
ran much on pearls and pearl-shell, and I learned a good deal about
these gold-mines of the Pacific--always making allowance for the
inevitable Pacific exaggeration. Any man who can live a year among the
islands, and restrain himself, in the latter part of his stay, from
lying as naturally and freely as he breathes, deserves a D.S.O.
Stripped of flowers of fiction, the romance of the pearling trade was
still interesting and fascinating enough. Pearls, in the Pacific, are
obtained from a large bivalve that has a good deal of value in itself,
being the material from which mother-o’-pearl is made. Prices,
of course, fluctuate very much, as the shell is used in so many
manufactures that depend on the vagaries of fashion; but the value
may run to £200 a ton or over. When it gets down to £40 or less, it is
hardly worth the expense of lifting and carrying. For the most part,
however, it is worth a good deal more than this, and when it is at the
highest, fortunes can be, and have been, made out of small beginnings,
in a very short time. The pearls are an “extra,” and not to be relied
upon. There may be almost none in a big take of shell, there may be a
few small ones, there may be a number of fine ones that will make the
fortune of the lucky fisher. It is all a gamble, and perhaps none the
less fascinating for that. Much of the best shell and the finest pearls
in the Pacific, come from the Paumotus, which are French. Thursday
Island, off the north of Queensland, was the great centre of the
fishery, until lately, but it has been almost fished out. The Solomons
were reported to have a good deal of shell, and a rush took place to
that part not long ago, but the yield was much exaggerated. There are
a good many atolls about the Central Pacific in general, which contain
more or less shell, and are generally owned and fished by Australian
syndicates. Outlying reefs and islets, where no one goes, now and then
turn out to be valuable. The news of a find travels apparently on
the wings of the seagulls from group to group, for no such place ever
remains secret for more than a very short time, and then, if the owner’s
title is not secure (a thing that may easily happen, in the case of an
island that does not lie within the geographical limits of any of the
annexed groups) there is sometimes trouble. Pearl-poaching is easy and
profitable, if not very safe; and who is to tell ugly tales, a thousand
miles from anywhere, out in the far Pacific?
_(The swift-winged schooner and the racing seas: decks foam-white
beneath a burning sky: salt wind on the lips, and the fairy-voiced
enchantress Adventure singing ever from beyond the prow! “O dreamers in
the man-stifled town,” do you hear the wide world calling?)_
And so the pirate captain brought us up to Niué, and left me there, and
sailed away with the ship to Auckland, where he gave over the command,
and went (so it was said) to aid in the instruction of sea-going youth,
somewhere further south. The Cook Islands shrieked with joyous amusement
when they heard of the pirate’s new rôle as the guide and mentor of
tender boyhood--but I do not know, after all. The pirate was as full of
mischief as an egg is full of meat, as full of fight as a sparrow-hawk,
gifted with an uncanny faculty for plunging into every kind of risk
that the wide seas of the earth could hold, and coming out unscathed and
asking for more. He was assuredly not to be numbered among the company
of the saints, but neither is the average “glorious human boy”--and on
the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief, the pirate’s new rôle
may well have turned out a success.
We came up to Niué graced by a last touch of the piratical spirit.
There was some blusterous weather as we neared the great island with its
iron-bound, rocky coasts, towards which we had been making for so many
days, but we swept up towards the land with every rag of canvas set,
for that was the pirate captain’s custom, and he would not break
it. By-and-by, as I was standing on the main deck, holding on to the
deckhouse, while I looked at the looming mass of blue ahead, the main
square-sail gave way with a report like a gun, and began to thrash the
foremast with streamers of tattered canvas. The pirate had it down in a
twinkling, and got the men to bend on a new sail immediately. It went
up to the sound of yelling Maori chants (for the crew liked this sort of
excitement), and once more the ship fled on towards Niué with every
sail straining against the gusty wind. Half-an-hour, and crack!--the
new square-sail was gone too, and half of it away to leeward like a huge
grey bird in a very great hurry. And the pirate, as we began to draw
inshore, raged up and down the deck, like a lion baulked of its prey. To
come up to Niué without every sail set was a disgrace that he had never
yet encountered, and it evidently hit him hard that he had not another
sail in the locker, and was forced to “carry on” as best he could
without it.
Niué, or Savage Island, is no joke to approach. It is about forty miles
round, and almost every yard of the whole forty is unapproachable, by
reason of the precipitous cliffs, guarded by iron spears of coral rock,
that surround it on every side. There are one or two places where an
approach can be made, in suitable weather, with care, but it is quite a
common thing for sailing vessels to beat on and off as much as a week,
before they succeed in landing passengers and goods. We came up on a
very gusty day, with the blow-holes in the cliffs spouting like whales
as we went by, but the pirate captain ran us into the anchorage below
Alofi as easily as if it had been perfect weather and an excellent
harbour, and we put out a boat to land our goods, including myself. The
pirate had not an ounce of caution in his body, but, as an old Irishman
on one of the islands declared: “The divil takes care of his own, let
him alone for that, and it’s not the Pirate that he’s goin’ to let into
any houle till he lets him into the biggest wan of all--mind that!”