CHAPTER IIITHE THRESHOLD OF CANNIBAL-LAND
We left New Caledonia at midnight on July 3d, and steamed over a calm sea to Vila.
Vila is the commercial center as well as the capital of the New Hebrides and its harbor is one of the finest in the South Seas. On our right, as we steamed in, was the island of Irriki, a mountain peak rising out of the sea, on the highest point of which Mr. King has built his house. Vila is a typical South Seas town—a rambling mixture of tropical and European architecture and no architecture at all. Its public buildings, French and British, its churches, and the well-kept British settlement, with the parade grounds and barracks for the native police, make it more imposing than the run of the pioneer villages of Melanesia, but it seemed strange to us that it should be the metropolis for the white people of thirty islands. We spent a day in Vila looking up old acquaintances and laying in supplies. Among the acquaintances we found good old Father Prin who had been retired from active duty on Vao and had come to Vila to spend his declining days. Hewas glad to see us, but shook his head when he heard that we were again going to try our luck among the Big Numbers.
“Big Numbers plenty bad,” he warned us inbêche-de-mer. And Osa and I replied in the same tongue, “Me no fright.”
I bought nearly a thousand dollars’ worth of food and trade-stuffs from the four trading stores of Vila, but could not get a schooner or any native boys to take us on our trip around Malekula. So I decided to go on to the island of Espiritu Santo, two hundred miles to the north. We stopped at Api, to leave mail and supplies and to take on copra. In the harbor there, we again saw the old Snark at anchor. It was a black and shabby ship, manned by a black crew and used for recruiting labor for work in the white man’s sugar and copra plantations.
We found Segond Channel, off Southeastern Santo, filled with cutters and schooners, every one of which had white men aboard, who had been waiting a couple of weeks for the news and supplies brought by the Pacifique. In no time at all, I made arrangements for three schooners with big crews to accompany me on my visit to the tribe of the Big Numbers. Mr. Thomas, of Hog Harbor, promisedhe would send his boat to Vao in a week with as many boys as he could spare. Mr. Perrole, an experienced French recruiter, also agreed to charter a schooner and bring boys. We obtained a third schooner from a young Frenchman, Paul Mazouyer, one of the most picturesque dare-devils I have ever met. A giant in size and strength, boiling with energy, always singing, sometimes dancing with his boys, he did not understand the meaning of fear. He was a match for three white men, and he took chances on the beach that no other recruiter would dream of taking. I asked him once inbêche-de-mer—the only language in which we could converse—if the savages did not sometimes make him a little anxious.
“Ah,” he said, shifting his huge frame and stretching his arms, “my word! Suppose fifty men he come, me no fright!”
I believed him. He was a two-fisted adventurer of the old type, with the courage of unbeaten youth. He knew, as every white man in the New Hebrides knows, that he might expect short shrift once the natives got him in their power, but he trusted to fate and took reckless chances.
The captain of the Pacifique agreed to take us toVao, although it was fifty miles off his course. We dropped anchor off the island just at daylight and were surrounded almost immediately by canoes filled with naked savages. The Pacifique was a marvel to the natives. She was one of the smallest steamers I had ever been aboard, but they had never in all their lives seen so large a vessel. The imposing size of the ship and the impressive quantity of my baggage—sixty-five trunks, crates and boxes—gave me a great deal of importance in their eyes. As we stood on the beach watching the unloading of the ship’s boat, they crowded about, regarding us with furtive curiosity. From time to time they opened their huge, slobbering mouths in loud guffaws, though there was apparently no cause for laughter.
When my things were all unloaded, the captain and officers shook hands with us and put off for the ship. In twenty minutes the Pacifique was steaming away. Before she gained speed, a big American flag was hoisted between the masts, and the engineer tooted encouragement to us. As she grew small in the distance, the flag at the stern of the vessel was dipped three times. We sat on the beach among our boxes and watched her until she was just a cloud of smoke on the horizon. We felt very lonely and verymuch shut off from our kind there, surrounded by a crowd of jabbering, naked savages, who stared at us with all the curiosity shown by people back home toward the wild man in a sideshow.
With a show of cheerfulness, we set about making ourselves comfortable for the weeks to come. The huts of the seventeen converts were deserted, and rapidly going to pieces: the former occupants had forsaken the lonely clearing for the crowded villages. But the little stone house in which Father Prin had lived was still standing, though one corner of the roof had fallen in. A proffer of tobacco secured me many willing black hands to repair the roof and thatch it with palm leaves. Other natives brought up our trunks and boxes. They cut big poles and lashed the boxes to them with vines, and, ten to twenty natives to a box, they carried the luggage from the beach in no time. By noon we had everything stored away safe from the weather. We spent the afternoon in unpacking the things needed for immediate use, and soon Osa and I had our little three-room dwelling shipshape.
We had learned a lesson from our first trip, with the result that, on this second expedition, we had brought with us every possible comfort and evensome luxuries—from air-cushions and mattresses to hams, bacons, and cheeses specially prepared for us in Sydney. With a clear-flamed Primus stove and Osa to operate it, we were fairly certain of good food. Having promulgated the law of the New Hebrides and Solomons, that every native coming upon the clearing must leave his gun behind him and cover his nakedness with calico, we settled down for a long stay.
Vao is a very small island, no more than two miles in diameter, lying several miles off the northeast shore of Malekula. It is rimmed on the Malekula side by a broad, beautiful beach. Three small villages are hidden in the low, scrub jungle, but the only signs of habitation are three canoe houses that jut out from the fringe of bushes and hundreds of canoes drawn up in a careful line upon the beach.
About four hundred savages live in the three villages of Vao. Their huts—mere shelters, not high enough to permit a man to stand erect—contain nothing but a few bits of wood to feed the smoldering fires. Pigs wander freely in and out. Oftentimes these animals seem to be better favored than the human inmates, who are a poor lot, many of them afflicted with dreadful sores and weak eyes.
Many of the inhabitants of Vao are refugees from the big island of Malekula, who were vanquished in battle and literally driven off the earth by their enemies. Soon after our arrival, a powerful savage named Tethlong, one of the Small Numbers people, arrived on Vao with twenty of his men. All the remaining men of his tribe had been killed and the women and children had been taken captive. The natives of Vao received the newcomers as a welcome addition to their fighting force, and Tethlong set about to insure his position among his new neighbors. He invited the entire population to a feast, and at once sent his men to neighboring islands to buy up pigs and chickens for the occasion. The devil-devils—great, hollowed logs, carved roughly to represent human faces, which are erected everywhere in the New Hebrides to guard against evil spirits—were consulted to find a propitious time for the feasting, and on the appointed day the celebration began with much shouting and singing and dancing and beating of tom-toms. It lasted for several days. Before it was over, seven hundred and twenty pigs had been slaughtered. The island had never before seen such a feast. As a result of his political strategy, Tethlong became the Big Chiefof Vao, taking precedence over the chiefs already there.
I got some fine pictures of Tethlong’s feast, but they were the only pictures I took for some days. For one thing, I was too busy for camera work; for the job of checking over our supplies and fortifying our place against a heavy rain kept us busy. For another, I was anxious to keep our savage neighbors at a distance, so long as we were alone.
Though they got over their curiosity concerning us and our effects within a few days, about half a dozen loafers continued to appear every morning and beg for tobacco. They were too lazy to work, and their constant presence annoyed us. They were in the way, and, besides, they grew cheekier day by day. The limit was reached one evening when Osa was playing her ukulele. Several natives wandered over from the village to listen. It was pretty music—I liked it a lot—and Osa was flattered when some of the boys came to talk to us about it. But it soon developed that they were demanding tobacco as compensation for listening!
DANCE OF TETHLONG’S MEN
DANCE OF TETHLONG’S MEN
DANCE OF TETHLONG’S MEN
We managed to get hold of a fairly trustworthy boy—Arree by name—to help with the housework. He claimed to have gone to the Catholic mission school at Vila, and, strange to say, he did not approve of the ways of his own people, though he was never absent from one of their festivals. He always told us the local gossip. It was from him that we learned what had happened to the mission boy who had worked for us on our former visit. He had aroused the ill-will of a neighbor and two weeks before our arrival had died from poison placed in hislap-lap, a pudding made of coconuts and fish.
Osa could write volumes regarding the difficulties of training her scrubby native recruit to the duties of housework. He spoke goodbêche-de-mer, butbêche-de-meris a language capable of various interpretations. Osa spoke it better than I, but even she could not make simple orders clear to our muddle-brained black slavey. One morning, she told Arree to heat an iron for her. She waited for a long time to get it, and then went after it. She found Arree crouched before the fire, gravely watching the iron boiling in a pot.
Arree murdered the King’s English in a way that must have made old Webster turn over in his grave. He never said “No.” His negative was always “No more,” and his affirmative was an emphatic “Yes-yes.” When I called for warm water in the morning, he would reply, blandly, “Hot water, he cold fellow,”and I would have to wait until, in his leisured way, Arree built the fire and heated the water. He had a sore leg, which I healed with a few applications of ointment. A few days later, he came to me with one eye swollen nearly shut, and my medicine kit in his hand. “Me gottem sore leg along eye-eye,” he informed me. Sometimes he achieved triumphs. I asked him once to tell another native to bring me the saw from Osa. In order to air his knowledge of English, Arree said: “You go along Mary (woman) belong Master catchem one fellow something he brother belong ackus (axe), pullem he come, pushem he go.” And then he translated the command, for his admiring, wide-eyed brother, into the native dialect.
Osa and I often caught ourselves falling into this queer English even when there were no natives around. It gets into the blood like baby-talk.