We have just met thePotii Ravaravahere at Hao. She is going to Rutiaro within a few weeks, so I am sending your sea chest by her. Sorry I left you in that God-forsaken hole; but I was tight that evening, and pretty mad at the way you upset my plans with your marble-playing foolishness. Next morning, when I sobered up, I felt like going back for you. But we had a fair wind, and I had my cargo to think of. The price of copra is on the down grade, and I've got to get back to Papeete with mine before the bottom falls out of the market. You said once you wanted to see all you could of life in the Paumotus. Well, I guess you'll have your chance at Rutiaro. If I was you I would come back on thePotii Ravarava. She only carries twenty-seven tons cargo, so she'll probably go direct to Papeete from there. I am also sending you an empty three-gallon demijohn. Fill this withwater before you leave, if you come back on theP. R.Miti, her skipper, is a good sailor, but all he knows about navigation you could write on a postage stamp. I met him once about twenty miles south of Fakahina. He was cruising around looking for Angatau, which was seventy miles to the northeast. Well, he can't miss Tahiti if he gets within a hundred miles of it, so you better take a chance and come back with him. But don't forget to carry your own supply of fresh water. Sometimes these little native boats get becalmed, and it's no joke being thirsty at sea.Yours,Tino.P. S.—Miti has a big bunch of letters for you, from your friend Nordhoff. I saw the packet. It looks as though it had been traveling some. Nordhoff, he says, is in Tahiti again. I'll probably see him there and will tell him to wait for you.Give my regards to all the marble players.
We have just met thePotii Ravaravahere at Hao. She is going to Rutiaro within a few weeks, so I am sending your sea chest by her. Sorry I left you in that God-forsaken hole; but I was tight that evening, and pretty mad at the way you upset my plans with your marble-playing foolishness. Next morning, when I sobered up, I felt like going back for you. But we had a fair wind, and I had my cargo to think of. The price of copra is on the down grade, and I've got to get back to Papeete with mine before the bottom falls out of the market. You said once you wanted to see all you could of life in the Paumotus. Well, I guess you'll have your chance at Rutiaro. If I was you I would come back on thePotii Ravarava. She only carries twenty-seven tons cargo, so she'll probably go direct to Papeete from there. I am also sending you an empty three-gallon demijohn. Fill this withwater before you leave, if you come back on theP. R.Miti, her skipper, is a good sailor, but all he knows about navigation you could write on a postage stamp. I met him once about twenty miles south of Fakahina. He was cruising around looking for Angatau, which was seventy miles to the northeast. Well, he can't miss Tahiti if he gets within a hundred miles of it, so you better take a chance and come back with him. But don't forget to carry your own supply of fresh water. Sometimes these little native boats get becalmed, and it's no joke being thirsty at sea.
Yours,
Tino.
P. S.—Miti has a big bunch of letters for you, from your friend Nordhoff. I saw the packet. It looks as though it had been traveling some. Nordhoff, he says, is in Tahiti again. I'll probably see him there and will tell him to wait for you.
Give my regards to all the marble players.
Good old Tino! He did me nothing but good turns. Late that night when the rest of the villagers had crossed the pass I pried open the lid of the chest—having lost the key—and found my belongings just as I had left them—my camera; my binoculars and charts; and, most important of all, in the bottom of the chest, wrapped in a pair of trousers, my pocketbook. I didn't pay Moy until just before the departure of the schooner, and staged the final episode at an hour when his shop was filled with loungers. I came away with his receipted bill, one hundred and twenty francs, and the consciousness of having adequately safeguarded tradition.
We left Rutiaro the following day. I did not realize until the moment of leave-taking how painful the farewells would be. As soon as they were over I went on board, crawled into the little cabin and, despite the cockroaches and copra bugs, remained there until the schooner had left the pass and was well out to sea.
After our separation at Papeete, Nordhoff went on to the southwest. He wrote me from an island he called Ahu Ahu, and from there, apparently, he took passage to Rarotonga, the principal island of the Cook group. Long before the discovery of New Zealand Rarotonga was the goal of Polynesian mariners from the north and west—fearless explorers traveling in their double canoes across hundreds of leagues of ocean, guided by sun and stars, some of them arriving at their destination, many others, doubtless, perishing in search of it.
From Samoa—in the early centuries of our era—came the Karika family to reign in Rarotonga down to the present day; and Samoa is believed to have been the principal starting point of the voyagers which peopled the eastern Pacific. In the language of those old-time voyagers,tongameant south, and they gave that name to the Friendly Islands. Farther to the west and south they came upon the Cook group—in those days, no doubt, the southernmost ends of the earth—and the high island of this group, the faint blot on the horizon which led the canoes to land, they called Rarotonga (Under the South).
Under the South
Boat
The
THE hurricane season ended in a fortnight of calm before the trade came up from the southeast, announcing its arrival with a three days' gale that caught our schooner among the outer islands of the group. It was by no means a great storm, yet the constant fury of the wind, unbroken by lull or gust, and the lines of huge breaking seas running under a cloudless sky impressed me more than anything I have experienced in ships. By day we lived in a world of blue-and-white—pale-blue sky; sea of a dark, angry blue; acres of white foam. To go on deck by night and watch the leaping ridges of salt water rear up to windward—formless, threatening, fringed with wan phosphorescence—was to revise any beliefs one might have had regarding the friendliness of nature.
On the evening of the second day we were laid-to under a rag of foresail, riding the seas obliquely, a few points off the wind. The schooner took them like an eider duck; it was so thick in the cabin that I slid back the hatch and squeezed through into the clean turmoil above. The mood of the Pacific was too impressive for pleasure, but I was glad at least of the fresh air and able to derive a species of awed enjoymentfrom what went on about me. It may have been fatigue, or carelessness, or inexperience—at any rate, the man at the wheel suddenly allowed the schooner to bear off; she was climbing the slope of a sea at the time—the crest of it caught her weather side with a crash and next instant a rush of solid water swept the decks. Thin and faint as the voices of sea birds above the roaring of the wind, the cries of native passengers drifted back, "Aue! Aue!"; the hatch slid back abruptly; the skipper burst on deck—bristling, gesticulating, clad in a waistcloth—to deliver an address in passionate Mangaian, insulting and only partially audible.
Under the swinging lamp in the cabin I found Tari—our singular and philosophic supercargo, whose calm no ordinary gale could disturb—bending over his books, a bottle and a glass in racks at his elbow. A mat was spread on the floor and on it—huddled under a quilt of bright patchwork—lay Apakura, his young native wife. Her feet were bound in apareuand the quilt pulled over her head, for the cockroaches were everywhere. I entered my stateroom to lie down. A large cockroach, insolent and richly perfumed, trotted along the springs of the upper berth and halted just above my face. Waves of the hand had no effect on him—I had reasons for not wishing to crush him in his tracks. One of his comrades began a tentative nibbling at my hair—something tickled my foot—I started convulsively. The sudden rolls of the schooner flung me against her side; it was useless to try to sleep. As I sat down beside him, Tari closed his books and motioned me to fill a glass.
A faint noise of shouting came from on deck; theengine-room bell sounded a sudden and peremptory signal. The hatch opened with a gust of spray—the head of the skipper appeared dimly in the swaying light. "Atitu," he shouted; "I'm going to run into the lee and stand off and on till this blows over." The engine started and Tari and I went on deck for a glimpse of the land, looming close and vague in the starlight. Presently, as we took our seats in the cabin, the schooner ceased her violent pitching and began to ride a long, easy swell. Tari rose, stepped to where his wife lay sleeping, picked up the slender bundle in the quilt, and disappeared into his stateroom; next moment he was beside me again, uncorking a fresh bottle of rum.
"She's had a bad time of it," he said, "with a berth on the weather side; she was spilled on the floor half a dozen times before she gave up and came out here. I shouldn't have let her come along—I had my doubts of the weather, but it was a chance to see the relatives she's got scattered through the group. They're constantly visiting one another; blood means a lot down here where they recognize degrees of consanguinity absurdly farfetched to our minds. First cousins are like brothers, second and third cousins considered members of one's immediate family, and so on through the descendants of remote ancestors. When you stop to think of it, this respect for ties of blood—in the isolated communities of Polynesia—rests on a solid base."
I asked him a question concerning the end of these island people—whether they will fade away and disappear, like our own Narragansett and Seminole, without leaving their mark on the supplanting race orwhether they will be absorbed gradually, developing in the process of absorption a new type. Tari set down his glass.
"One thing is certain," he replied—"if left to themselves they would soon be extinct. Wherever you go among the islands you will find couple after couple of full-blooded natives—young, strong, wholesome, and childless. No doubt the white man is partially to blame, but, for myself, I believe the race is worn out with isolation and old age. They are justified in their dread of being childless, but an infusion of European blood—however small—works a miracle; you must have noticed this, to me a most striking and significant fact. It is the cross of white and brown that is repopulating the islands to-day; one can venture a glimpse into the future and see the process of absorption complete—the Polynesian is not fated to disappear without leaving a trace behind ... and perhaps it will be more than a trace, for half-caste children cling strongly to the distaff side.
"The question of half-castes is an interesting one, particularly to men like me—but it is a waste of time to struggle against nature; in the end the solution is nearly always the same. Varana's children furnish the best example I have run across—you've never been to Rimarutu, I fancy; it is not often visited nowadays; probably you've never heard of Varana. And yet he was an extraordinary man, his life an almost unique study in extremes. Like everything real, the story has no beginning, unless one were able to trace back the strain that gifted the man with his exceptional temperament; as for an end, that is still working itself out on Rimarutu. It is, in fact, no story at all, but a bit oflife itself—unmarked by any dominating situation, haphazard, inconclusive, grimly logical. No one can know the whole of it—the play of motives, the decisions, the pure chance—but I worked with Varana for years and have patched his story together after a fashion. Now and then, when the mood struck him, he used to speak of himself; sometimes at night when we were working his schooner from island to island; sometimes by day, as we lay smoking under the palms of a remote atoll, while the canoes of the divers dotted the lagoon. On those occasions I had glimpses of a man not to be judged by the standards of everyday life—a man actuated by motives as simple as they were incomprehensible to those about him. His death, if he is dead—But I will speak of that in its place.
"His real name was Warner—a big, blue-eyed man, slow-spoken and a little dreamy in manner, with an immense blond mustache and a serenity nothing could disturb. I never knew him to hesitate in making a decision or to speak unless he had something to say. All decent men liked him, and the natives, who were better able than a white man to fathom his simplicity, took to him from the first. He had been miserably out of place in England—squeezed through Cambridge, which he detested, unhappily married, done out of a fortune by the defaulting brother-in-law whose last debt he paid, and divorced just before he came out here.
"It is often observed that when an Englishman's feelings are hurt he travels, and in this respect Varana was not exceptional. One day, a little more than a generation ago, he stepped off the mail boat at Papeete—a rather typical English tourist, I fancy—dressed intropical costumes from Bond Street and accompanied by an extraordinary quantity of luggage. At the club he ran across Jackson of the Atoll Trading Company—the old man liked him from the first and they used to spend the evenings together, lingering over their glasses, talking a little in low tones. A fortnight later Varana left as quietly as he had come—outbound in one of Jackson's schooners for a cruise through the Paumotus.
"It was the year of the hurricane at Motutangi. Varana's boat, commanded by a native skipper, had drifted through the group in a desultory way, touching at an island here and there to pick up a few tons of copra or a bit of shell. One can imagine the effect on a newcomer of those early days among the atolls—long sunlit days when gentle breezes filled the sails of the vessel skirting the shores of the lagoons—waters of unearthly peace and loveliness, bordered by leagues of green. And the nights ashore, when the moon rose at the end of a path of rippling silver, and the people gathered before their thatched houses to sing.... It was not long before Varana realized that he had found his anodyne.
"At home he had been a yachtsman of sorts; by the time they reached Motutangi the brown skipper was leaving a good part of the working of the schooner to his guest. They were diving in the lagoon that year at the end of a longrahuion the shell—a sort of closed season, scrupulously respected by the natives; half a dozen schooners were anchored off the village, where every house overflowed with people from the surrounding islands, and by day their canoes blackened the water above the patches of shell.
"The hurricane gave ample warning of its approach—Varanatold me as much as that. He had spent the night ashore with a trader, whose old glass rose and fell spasmodically, sinking always a little lower, until it stood at a figure which sent the trader off, white and cursing, to break open a fresh case of gin. None of the divers went out at daybreak; with the other people, they stood in little frightened groups before the houses. The older men were already beginning to hack off the tops of the stout palms in which they planned to roost. By the time Varana came off in a canoe the schooners were double anchored, the wind was shifting uneasily in sharp gusts, and a tremendous surf was thundering on the outer beach. The native skipper, like the people ashore, knew perfectly well what was coming and, like most of his kind, his spirit broke in the face of a large emergency—before the feeling that the forces of nature were about to overwhelm him. Well, I've been through one hurricane—I can't say that I blame him much! Varana found him not exactly in a funk, but in a state of passive resignation, hoping vaguely that his two anchors would let him ride it out inside. The crew was clustered on the after deck, exchanging scared whispers. Varana, who had the instinct of a deep-water sailor, took in the situation at a glance, and next moment he had taken command of the schooner.
"Without a word of protest the men reefed, got sail on her, heaved up one anchor, and cut the other cable. Varana had very little to say about the rest—how he edged out through the pass and managed to claw off just as the cyclone struck Motutangi—but afterward the story went the rounds of every group. All the other schooners in the lagoon, as well as most of thepeople ashore, were lost. How Varana weathered it, without piling up his vessel on any one of half a dozen atolls, is a sort of miracle.
"A week later, when he had sailed his battered schooner—the only survivor of the disaster at Motutangi—into Papeete harbor, he found himself famous by nightfall, for the native captain gave him entire credit for the achievement. Old Jackson's imagination was touched, or perhaps it was the destruction of so many rival schooners in the shell and copra trade—at any rate, he acted on impulse for once in his life, sent for Varana, and offered him a remarkably good berth with a fat screw attached. But the wanderer only smiled and shook his head—he had had a taste of the outer islands. It shakes one's faith in Providence to realize that most men die without finding the place in life for which they were designed.
"It was old Jackson who told him of Rimarutu—probably during one of their almost silent evenings at the club. It was a mistake—Jackson thought—to believe that a man could shut himself off from the world; the mood would pass in time, but if Varana wished seriously to try it, he would find no better place than Rimarutu. There was some copra to be had and a little shell in the lagoon; the people numbered about two hundred, a quiet, pleasant lot, not given to wandering from their island. Varana had salvaged a few thousand pounds from the wreck of his affairs at home; Jackson helped him pick up a schooner at a bargain and load her with what was needed; there was some difficulty about a crew, but his uncanny gift with the natives got him three men content to follow his fortunes. On the morning when he shook hands withthe old man, stepped aboard his boat, and sailed out of the harbor, Varana severed the last tie with the world he had known.
"I could tell you a good deal about his life on the island—I worked with him for nearly ten years. He began by renting a bit of land—for his store and copra shed—from the chief and setting himself to learn the language. The Polynesian is a shrewd judge of character; they saw that this man was just, kindly, fearless, and to be trusted. Those who had traveled a little declared Varana a phenomenon—a white trader who respected women and never lay on his veranda in a stupor, surrounded by empty bottles. He seemed to know instinctively the best way to take these people, with whom, from the very first, he found himself on terms of a mutual understanding. They regarded him with a mixture of liking and respect, not accorded us, perhaps, as often as we are apt to think; he worked with them, he played with them, and finally took a daughter of the island as his wife—yet it was characteristic that he never permitted himself to run barefoot and that even after twenty years of friendship the native entering Varana's house took off his hat. I remember Tupuna as a woman of thirty—tall, robust, and grave, with delicate hands and masses of bright, rippling hair; the years were kind to her—even in middle life she did not lose a certain quiet charm. Make no mistake—they were happily mated, this man, turned out by what Englishmen believe the highest civilization in the world, and the daughter of an island chief whose father had been a savage and an eater of men. She was not spoiled like so many traders' wives; when they had been on the reef she walked homebehind, carrying the torches and the fish—but he felt for her an affection deep as it was undemonstrative, a strong attachment, proven at the end in his own extreme and romantic way.
"During the early years of his life on Rimarutu, Varana had enough to do with his store, his occasional trips for supplies, and his work for the betterment of the island people. He found them living on fish and coconuts, depending for all their luxuries on a dwindling production of copra. He showed them how to thin their palms, how to select nuts for new plantings, how to dry their copra with a minimum of effort. The shell in the lagoon was nearly exhausted; he persuaded the chiefs of the two villages to forbid diving for a term of years. After experiments conducted with Tupuna's aid he set the men to catching flying fish, which swarmed in the waters about the island, and taught the women to split them, rub in salt, and dry them on lines in the sun. Rimarutu is high, as atolls go—five or six yards above the sea in spots; he laid out beds ofpuraka taro, and had pits dug on the high portions of the island, lined the bottoms with rock to keep the taproots from salt water, filled them with humus and topsoil—scraped up in handfuls—and planted breadfruit, mango, and lime, brought from the high islands to the north. At long intervals, when in need of something that only civilization could supply—paint, rigging, or a new set of sails—he went north with a cargo of copra and dried fish and took on a brief charter with Jackson. On these trips he visited scores of islands, and came to know the people of a thousand miles of ocean.
"It was not until his son was born that Varanabegan to think seriously of money. His daughters had given him no concern; he explained to me once his peculiar philosophy as to their future. Perhaps he was right. With their happiness in mind, he preferred to bring them up as island girls—without education or knowledge of the outside world and no greater prospects than those of their full-blooded playmates—rather than give them the chances of the usual half-caste: half-educated and partially Europeanized, whose most brilliant hope is marriage with a white man of the inferior sort. But the birth of Terii set the father to thinking.
"The child was about ten when I saw him first, a fine strong boy, very fair for a half-caste, with his father's eyes, a high carriage of the head, and skin touched with a faint bloom of the sun. Tupuna was immensely proud of him. I was a youngster then and new to the islands, but I had heard of Varana before Jackson introduced me to him. It was at Jackson's place, on the upper veranda, that he told me how he had leased Fatuhina; some one had spoken of my work. I had operated diving machines? He needed a man familiar with them, for he had leased an atoll with some big shell patches in the lagoon, and machines would be necessary to work the deeper portions. I was doing nothing at the time. I liked what I had heard of Varana, and I liked the man better still. In an hour we had come to an understanding. I worked with him, off and on, from that time until the beginning of the war.
"Without caring in the least for wealth, Varana had set out to make himself rich. Long before I knew him he had decided the question of his son: Terii was tohave the same chances that his father had had before him—was to see both sides and choose for himself.
"Even Varana's friends spoke of his luck; to my mind his success was inevitable. Regarded with an almost superstitious affection by the people of widely scattered groups, he possessed channels of information closed forever to the ordinary man. It was in this way that he learned of the shell in Fatuhina lagoon; perhaps he did not know that the native who approached him, one evening on a distant atoll, to speak casually of the matter and stroll away, had paddled across twelve miles of sea with no other object than to bring the news to Varana. When theGaviotawas beached he was the first to learn of it—that affair alone brought him a neat fortune; and when men had fine pearls to sell they saw him before they went to the Jews. By the time his son was twelve Varana was a rich man.
"I was on Rimarutu when he left to take the boy to England. Tupuna shed a few tears, but there was no scene—she knew he would return. 'I go to take our son to my own land,' he told her; 'there will be six moons before I come.' Five months later I was waiting with the schooner when he stepped off the mail boat. That night, as he lay on a mat on the afterdeck, dressed in apareuand a pair of slippers, he spoke of England briefly in the midst of our talk on island matters. 'Damned senseless treadmill,' he remarked; 'I can't think how I stood it so many years.' The ordinary man, who had left home under a cloud of misfortune to return twenty years later, after wanderings in distant lands, with a fortune and a beautiful child, would have lingered not without a certain relish. But Varana was different; he grudged everymoment spent in civilization and lived only for the day when he would again take the wheel of his schooner and watch the ridges of Tahiti sink beneath the horizon.
"The years passed rapidly and tranquilly on Rimarutu. The days of Varana's activity were over; he was no longer young, though he kept his store and took the schooner out at long intervals for supplies. Then came the outbreak of the war.
"I was in Gallipoli when the letter reached me, written in the native language by Varana's old mate. It told a story fantastically unreal—incredible from the viewpoint of everyday life—and yet to me who knew him, as to the people of his island, the end of Varana seemed a natural thing, in keeping with what had gone before. Tupuna had fallen ill (the old man wrote) and had died suddenly and peacefully, as natives do. Varana stood beside her grave with no great display of grief, returned to his house and spent three days putting his affairs in order. On the fourth day he gave the mate a thick envelope of documents, called together the people of the island and bade each one of them farewell. When he turned to leave they did not disperse; the women had begun to sob—they felt already the desolation of a final parting. It was the hour of sunset, when the trade wind dies away and the lagoon lies like a mirror under an opalescent sky.... I can see in imagination those simple and friendly islanders, standing in little groups before the settlement—raising no voice in protest, moving no hand in restraint—while the man they loved walked to the ocean beach, launched a tiny canoe in the surf, and paddled out to the west. The nearest land in thatdirection is distant six hundred miles. When he had passed the breakers—they say—Varana did not once turn his head; the watchers stood motionless while the sky faded, their eyes fixed on the dot that was his canoe—a dwindling dot, swallowed up at last in the night."
Tari ceased to speak. He was sitting propped on the lounge, arms folded, legs stretched out, eyes staring at the table. Without seeming aware of what he did, he filled his glass, raised it to his lips, and drank. Presently he emerged from his revery to light a pipe.
"In due time," he went on, "I had word from the lawyers, inclosing a copy of the will and informing me that I had been named executor with old Jackson, who seemed to have discovered the secret of eternal life. There was also a letter from Varana, written after Tupuna's death—a friendly and casual note, with a mere line at the end, asking me to do what I could for his boy. The land Tupuna had brought him was to be divided equally among his daughters; all the rest was for Terii, saving his parting gift to me. Only one condition was attached—Terii must visit Rimarutu before inheriting the property of his father; once he had set foot on the island, he would be his own master, free to choose his path in life.
"The boy was nineteen when the war broke out; he joined up at once as a cadet in the Flying Corps. During the second year I began to hear of Lieutenant Warner—he had shot down a German plane near Zeebrugge; he had been wounded; he had received the Military cross. Once I saw his picture in theSphere—a handsome lad, very smart in the old uniformof the R. F. C., with a jaunty cap over one eye and ribbons on his breast. This was the little savage whose shrill cries I used to hear at dawn, when he raced with his half-naked companions on the beach! At the end of the war he was Captain Terry Warner, a celebrity in a small way.... I felt a certain pride in him, of course. We had done our best to meet, but something always happened to prevent my getting a glimpse of him.
"I ran across him as I was homeward bound, leaving San Francisco for the islands. I had already gone aboard and was standing by the rail, watching the last of the luggage swing over the side in nets, when a motor drove up to discharge a party of men and women—fashionables of the city, from their looks. One of them, a lean, tanned boy, with the overcoat of a British officer over his civilian clothes, was saying good-by to the others, shaking hands and smiling very attractively. A little later, when the lines were being cast off, I saw him close beside me at the rail. A girl in blue was standing on the dock, waving up at him. 'Good-by, Terry!' she called. I looked closely; there could be no doubt—it was the son of Varana.
"We had long talks on the voyage south; the lad had not forgotten me. The memory of the old life—of the island, of his mother, of his father—would always be fresh in his mind, but he regarded those days as a distant and beautiful episode, now forever closed. He was going to visit Rimarutu for the last time—to bid farewell to those who remembered him. He had not forgotten the friends of his boyhood; there were many little presents in his boxes, and he told me that the schooner—reported sound as on the day of her launching—wouldbe his gift to Varana's old mate. Afterward he would return to San Francisco, where opportunities had been offered him; he had brought letters to America and had been well received.
"The schooner was in port when we arrived. Varana's mate met us on the dock; there were tears in the old man's eyes as he took the boy's hands in his own and murmured in a trembling voice, 'O Terii iti e.' The tourists descending the gangplank looked with interest at the spectacle of Captain Warner, almost embracing an old barefootkanaka, dressed in dungarees and a faded shirt, wrinkled brown face working with emotion. As Terii shook hands with the crew—some of them boys with whom he had played in childhood—I noticed that a phrase or two of the native came to his lips—twelve years had not been sufficient to blot out all memory of his mother's tongue.
"We had a long passage south, beating against the trade; Varana had installed an engine in the schooner, but time is cheaper than petrol in this part of the world. Terii delighted in handling the boat; there was salt water in his blood; and his father had seen to his training in navigation and the ways of the sea. With each new day I perceived symptoms of a change in the boy. White suits and canvas slippers gave way to pajamas and bare feet; finally the pajamas were replaced by apareu, taken from the trade-room stock. The summers at home had not been wasted; I used to watch him at the wheel, working the schooner to windward, an eye on the canvas aloft, steering with the easy certain movements of a seaman born. He was in love with the schooner before we had been out a week, and he had reason—Frisco-built for the lastof the pelagic sealing, Varana's boat was the fastest thing of her tonnage in the South Seas. More than once in our talks Terii seemed to forget the plans he had confided to me.... She needed a new foresail; the set of this one did not please him; he was going to have her copper renewed in places; she was getting dingy below; the cabin needed a touch of paint. At times, speaking of these things, he stopped short in the midst of a sentence and changed the talk to other subjects. The language came back to him surprisingly; he was able to understand and make himself understood before we raised the palms of Rimarutu.
"The mate took her in through the pass. It was late afternoon, cool and cloudless, with a gentle sea nuzzling at the reef. The island was like the memory of a dream—fresh green palms, snowy beaches, cat's-paws ruffling the lagoon in long, blue streaks—so beautiful that the sight of it made one's heart ache and the breath catch in one's throat. A dozen canoes put out to meet us from the first settlement; there were greetings from friends and relatives—embraces and tears. Terii lay silent, propped on his elbows and staring ahead, as we slipped across the lagoon; the island people spoke in tones so low that I could hear the crisp sound of the schooner's bows parting the landlocked water. The other village lay beyond the beach ahead of us, Varana's village, where Terii had been born—a place of dreams in the mystery of the evening light. It was not difficult to guess at the boy's thoughts—the moment was one of those which make up the memories of a lifetime. Every man has known them—rapture, pain, the enjoyment of supreme beauty, the flavor of exotic and unrepeatable experience; but notevery man is permitted to taste such contrasts as this boy had known in twenty-four years of life.... I was a little envious, I think, of the rarity of that poignant home-coming.
"On the first evening, when we had greeted the people of the village, Terii was led away by his old aunt, Tupuna's sister. Just before bedtime I saw them at his mother's grave—a lonely shrine, roofed over in island fashion, where the light of a lamp shone on stunted bushes of frangipani. My eccentricities were not forgotten; they had spread my mat under the palms before Varana's house, and toward midnight Terii came quietly and lay down close by. I was wakeful in a revery, living over the old days with my friend, wondering, with the usual idle and somber doubt, if we were destined to meet again. Low over the palm tops a planet glimmered like a shaded lamp; the Milky Way arched overhead through a sky powdered with fixed stars—remote suns, about which revolve myriads of worlds like ours.... I rebelled at the thought that the strong soul of Varana should be snuffed out. Terii said nothing for a long time; I thought he had dropped off to sleep, but suddenly I heard his voice: 'I have the strangest feeling to-night,' he said, thoughtfully; 'if my father were here I could believe that I had never been away, that everything since I left—England, school, my friends, the war—was no more than a dream. I can't explain to you, but somehow this island seems the most real thing in the world. I've been talking with my aunt—I'd almost forgotten her name, you know—and I managed to understand a good bit of what she had to say.... There is no doubt she believes it herself. My fathercomes to her every now and then, she says, for a talk on family matters; last night he told her we would come to-day, and that I would stop here to take his old place among the people. It seems they are good enough to want me to stay—I almost wish I could.'...
"The drums were going at daybreak—the feast in Terii's honor was the greatest the island had known since heathen days. The entire population was on hand; the beach black with canoes; dozens of good-humored babies on mats under the trees, with small brothers and sisters stationed to fan the flies away. The people sat in long rows in the shade, strings of shell about their necks, their heads wreathed in hibiscus and sweet fern. Terii was placed between the chief of the other village and Tehina, the chief's daughter, a full-blooded Rimarutu girl of sixteen, barefoot, dressed in a white frock, with gold pendants in her ears and a thick, shining braid of hair. There is an uncommon charm about the women of that island—a stamp of refinement, a delicacy of frame and feature, remarked as long ago as the days of Spanish voyaging in the Pacific. Blood counts for something in Polynesia, and one needed only a glance at Tehina to know that the best blood of the island flowed in her veins; her ancestor—if tradition may be credited—was in the long canoe with Penipeni when the god pulled Rimarutu up from the bottom of the sea. I like those people, and in spite of the night's depression I managed to enjoy the fun—I even danced a bit! Finally I saw that the dancers were taking their seats; voices were lowered, heads were turned.
"Tehina was dancing alone to the rhythm of ahundred clapping hands. In twenty years of the islands I have never seen a girl step more daintily. Little by little she moved toward Terii until she stood directly before him, inviting him to dance, hands fluttering, swaying with an unconscious grace, smiling into his eyes. Every head turned; there were smiles, good-humored chuckles, nudges; they were proud of this girl and anxious that the son of Varana should dance with her. They had not long to wait. Next moment Terii had leaped to his feet and was dancing, with more enthusiasm than skill, to a long burst of cheers and clapping.
"When the canoes put off at nightfall I noticed that Tehina did not leave; she had stopped to visit her uncle, the parson of the village church. I saw Terii with her often during the days that followed—fishing on the lagoon, swimming in the cove, lying on mats in the moonlight where groups of young people were telling their interminable stories of the past. He seemed a little shy of me, and no longer exchanged confidences in the hour which precedes sleep. One evening, smoking and strolling alone after dinner, I passed the parson's house and became aware of the vague figure of Terii, walking to and fro impatiently beside the veranda. He stopped—I heard the rattle of a coral pebble on the roof. A moment later Tehina glided like a phantom around the corner of the house, and they went off arm in arm along the path to the sea. I thought to myself that the lad was not doing badly after his twelve years away from the island, but the blood was in him, of course—there was instinct in his manner of tossing the pebble and in the unhesitating way he had led the girl toward the outerbeach: the haunt of dreadful presences, a place no ordinary islander would visit after dark. I fancied him sitting there—the rumble of the surf in his ears, watching the lines of breakers rear up under the moon—with Tehina beside him, admiring and afraid. When his eye was not on her she would glance right and left along the beach and back toward the bush, half expecting to see some monstrous thing, crouched and watching with fiery eyes. As for the boy, one could only guess at the troubled flow of his thoughts, stirred by cross-currents of ancestry and experience. In her own environment Tehina was a girl to make any man look twice; for him, with his mother's blood and the memories of his childhood, she must have possessed a powerful appeal—the touch of her hand; her voice, soft and low-pitched, murmuring the words of a half-forgotten tongue; her dark eyes shining in the moonlight; the scent of the strange blossoms in her hair. It was the test, the final conflict Varana had foreseen. I had my own opinion of the result, and yet the other life pulled hard.
"The days passed in pleasant island fashion; the loading of the schooner went on; there was no mention of a change in plans. The chief came to take his daughter home, and when she had gone Terii spoke to me, not too convincingly, of his return to civilization. My trip to Rimarutu was a matter of pleasure alone; I was already planning to take this berth, and was not sorry when Terii announced one morning that we would sail north that afternoon. One seems perpetually saying good-by down here—these islands are havens of a brief call, of sad farewells, of lingering and regretful memory. Our parting from the people ofRimarutu was more than usually painful; they had hoped to the last that Terii would leave some word, some promise; but he remained silent, though I could see that the leave-taking was not without effect.
"Finally the last canoe put off for shore; the anchor came up, the motor started, and Terii steered across the lagoon for the pass. The sails were still furled, for there was a light head wind. I watched his face as he stood in silence at the wheel; there was a look in his eyes which made me sorry for the boy. We crossed the lagoon, glided past green islets, and drew abreast of the other village. The people lined the shore, fluttering handkerchiefs, shouting good wishes and farewells.
"Beyond the settlement the pass led out, blue and deep, between sunken piers of coral, where the surf thundered in patches of white. All at once the old mate sang out and pointed—a dot was on the water ahead of us, a swimmer moving out from land to cut us off. The son of Varana turned the wheel; the schooner swung inshore; I heard a quick command and felt the speed of the engine slacken.
"Terii was staring ahead with a strange intensity—instinct or premonition was at work. I looked again as we drew near; a cloud of dark hair floated behind the swimmer's head; it was a woman—Tehina! Terii sprang to the rail. A moment later she had been lifted over the side and was standing beside him in the cockpit, dripping, trembling a little with cold and fear, doing her best to smile. The mate was pulling at Terii's arm and pointing back toward the village. A whaleboat had put out from shore and was heading for us at the top speed of the rowers; it was the chiefhimself, I believe, who stood in the stern and whose shouts were beginning to reach our ears.
"At that moment Terii proved that he was his father's son. He glanced back once, and then, without the smallest interval of hesitation, his arm went about the wet shoulder of Tehina.
"'Full speed ahead,' he ordered in a cool voice."
Tari poured rum into my glass, and tilted the last of the bottle into his own. The schooner was taking it easily with her engine at half speed, riding a gentle swell. The ship's bell rang twice, paused, and rang again—a sharp and mellow sound. It was long past midnight.
"If you ever get down to Rimarutu," said Tari, as he rose to go on deck, "you will find Terii there—he bids fair to leave the island even less than Varana did."
I
I was close to beginning this letter with a little fun at your expense; you would have been mystified—perhaps convinced that my haunted friends of Ahu Ahu were just a bit uncanny. It is really a pity not to do it! I should have begun with a vivid glimpse of a séance; the quiet moonlight outside, seen through an open door; the glimmer of a turned-down lamp in the house, revealing the rapt sightless face of the medium; the summoning of old Rakamoana from her sleeping place in themarae; the unnatural voice proclaiming the coming of the spirit.
Then I would have told how a message from the visitor was announced—for the strange white man vouched for by the mother of Apakura. "I see an island," the ghostly voice might have gone on—"a little land surrounding a great lagoon. It is Nukuhina, in the far-off Sea of Atolls. A schooner lies at anchor in the calm water off the settlement; she does not move, for the lagoon is very still. A boat is putting off for shore, and in the stern sits a dear friend of the white man—a slender man, who gazes eagerly toward the shore with dark eyes like the eyes of our people. A crowd is gathered on the beach; the girls carry giftsof necklaces and wreaths; and in the village the old women are preparing a feast. The man in the boat believes that this welcome is for the captain of the schooner, not knowing that this people was once a race of warriors, and that they are gathered to givehimwelcome—the first soldier from the army of France to visit their island since the war. The keel of the boat grates on the sand; a score of men seize her to pull her up; the women crowd about the stranger (Aué!They are good to look upon these girls of Nukuhina!), to throw their necklaces over his head and crown him with wreaths of flowers and shell. His face grows red; the old men smile; the girls laugh aloud. One, bolder than the rest, runs at him suddenly, puts her arms about him, and kisses him after the fashion of the white man. His face grows redder still; at that, the old men, too, laugh aloud. One after another, pushing and pulling to be first, the girls scramble to kiss him; he is overwhelmed, suffocated, and now his face is like fire, but he is not angry, for he smiles."
Well, what do you think of Ahu Ahu magic? I really ought to refrain from telling you the truth, which—like the stuff of most spirit messages—is simple, unexpected, and disillusioning. When we got to Avarua I found S— there, over from Tahiti to buy cattle; before his departure theAlouettehad turned up from the Paumotus, bringing word of your reception on Nukuhina.
I fancy you haven't had much time, in your progress through the Low Archipelago, for the pursuits of a landsman, so I'll give you an idea of how I've frittered away the days on Rarotonga.
Soon after our arrival there was a great stir over the coming of a shipload of parliamentary visitors from New Zealand, making a tour of the Cook Islands; a feast of welcome was to be given in Avarua, scores of pigs and hundreds of chickens were set aside for fattening, and the dancers of each village were to be seen rehearsing in the evenings. We drove to Avarua on the appointed day and found the government boat already anchored in the roadstead off the town—an anchorage dreaded by skippers, for unless the anchor strikes exactly on the summit of a sharp submerged peak, it will slide clean off soundings. Long before we reached the settlement the air had been vibrant with the sound of drums, the visitors were coming ashore, the dancing was in full swing.
The performance, of course, was a perfectly sophisticated one—like Papeete, Avarua is a small ocean metropolis, the capital of a group—but it interested me to see that the people, in spite of the efforts of the missionaries to make them ashamed of everything pertaining to heathen days, were not entirely without pride in the past. Each village was represented by a corps of dancers, men and women equally divided, and had its own drums and drummers, who furnished the sole music of the dance. The drums are of three varieties. The smallest are merely hollow sticks—six inches in diameter and a yard long—open on one side, and producing a loud, resonant click when struck with a bit of wood. There are others of medium size, standing on short legs and beaten with the hand, but the huge oldtime drums, suspended from the limbs of trees, interested me most of all. Imagine a five-foot section of the trunk of a bigBarringtonia, carefullyhollowed out and smoothed, with the skins of wild goats stretched over the ends, and sides decorated with outlandish painting.
The big drums are struck with the heel of the hand—with such furious energy that the drummer streams perspiration and is soon exhausted. The deep pulsing sound of them carries for miles in still air; sometimes at night, when there was dancing in the villages, I have heard it far and near, rising, falling, throbbing, from Arorangi, from Titikaveka, and from Ngatangiia, whence the ancients set out on their thousand-league voyages to the south.
I wish I could make you feel, as I have felt, the quality of this savage drumming. Monotonous and rhythmic sound, reduced almost to its simplest form, it is the ancestor of all music, toward which, perhaps, our modern dance music is a reversion. There is syncopation in it when the big drum halts at irregular intervals, and the time is carried by the clicking of hollow wood; but it is solemn and ominous—anything but the meretricious syncopation of ragtime. One feels in it an appeal to the primitive emotions, at once vague and charged with meaning; fear and madness are there, with cruelty, lust, triumph, and a savage melancholy.
Except in the case of the contingent from Manihiki—an atoll far off to the north—there was little variation in the dances, for which one can only say that they showed evidence of careful drilling. The women performed a variety of the dance common to all branches of their race—basically the same whether calledhula,hura, orura—but their motions were awkward and stiff, without the abandon and graceful movements of the arms to be seen in Hawaii or the Society Islands.The men, who carried long staves like spears, were freer in their motions, leaping, thrusting out their arms, and clattering their sticks in unison.
The costumes—unfortunately for the eye of a sensitive spectator—were slipped on over the wearer's best European clothes; a concession to the missionary point of view; but the beauty of some of the kilts, tunics and headdresses, and the trouble evidently taken in braiding them, showed that the Rarotongans have not wholly forgotten the past.
The dance was followed by speeches, and the speeches by a feast—all very conventional and uninteresting. I wonder if you are heartily fed up on baked pig. One needs a dash of Island blood to appreciate it after the twentieth time! Any other sort of meat would be welcome here where bully beef and pork are the staples. The need of a change of diet drives one to the lagoon; fishing becomes a practical as well as a sporting proposition.
During the proper phases of the moon we lead a most irregular life, for the hours from 3 to 5a.m.are often the ones most profitable to spend on the reef, and the evenings are occupied with a search for hermit crabs. You have probably made the acquaintance of the hermit crab, but in case you have been too busy to give him the notice he deserves, I'll venture to dwell for a bit on his eccentricities. It was not a pure love of natural history that turned my attention to him; I have been obliged to study him—at least superficially—by the fact that he is the dainty preferred by all the fish of this lagoon, and his capture, therefore, an indispensable preliminary to every fishing expedition.
There must be several varieties of hermit crab—Ihave counted three already: the ordinary small brown one calledkakara, the huge red one found in deep water, and the black, hairy kind, whose pounded-up body is mixed with grated coconut to extract the oil. This latter is calledunga; in the old days the lowest class of Rarotonga society was known by the same name—meaning, I suppose, that all of their property could be carried on their backs. The common variety is a good deal like the robber crab in habits; the natives go so far as to say that it is the same creature, in different stages of its existence. I doubt this theory, for while there are plenty of the littlekakaraon the volcanic islands, the robber crab is very rare; he lives on the atolls, and to my mind it is incredible that he should journey from island to island, through leagues of deep sea. Like his formidable relative, thekakaraspends most of his time ashore, frequenting the bush along the water's edge, where he lies hidden throughout the day in a hole or under a pile of leaves. His first duty of the evening is a trip to salt water, for he seems to need a thorough wetting once in each twenty-four hours. After his bath he heads back for the bush to begin his nightly search for food—nearly any kind of edible refuse—a dead fish on the beach, the fallen fruit of a pandanus, a coconut, opened by rat or flying fox, and containing a few shreds of meat.
The size of thekakaracan be judged from his shell, which may be as small as a thimble or as large as an orange. The creature inside is marvelously adapted to the life he leads. His soft and muscular body curls into the spiral of the shell and is securely anchored by a twist of the tail. The fore-end of the crab, which protrudes from the shell when he is in motion, remindsone of a tiny lobster; the same stalk eyes, the same legs, the same strong claws. When alarmed he snaps back into his mobile fortress, and you perceive that legs and claws fold into a flat armored barrier, sealing up perfectly the entrance of the shell. Sit still and watch him; presently the claws unfold cautiously and he emerges little by little, feelers waving and eyes peering about in a ludicrously apprehensive manner. Finally he gathers courage and starts off for the bush at his curious rolling gait.
One might suppose the hermit crab the least social of living things, but in reality he is gregarious and seems to enjoy the company of his friends. They wander in little bands; very often one finds two or three small ones perched on the back of a larger comrade and enjoying an effortless trip across the beach to the lagoon. One afternoon I came upon three of them traveling in single file; the last member of the party—a frail little chap—crunched under the heel of my boot before I saw him. I stopped a moment in regret and saw that the two other crabs were also stopping—warned, by I know not what obscure sense, that all was not well with their friend. They drew together as they halted, and went through a hasty and obviously anxious exchange of ideas—face to face, with feelers waving nervously. One was reminded irresistibly of a pair of fussy little old gentlemen, halted in the street to decide which should do an unpleasant errand. At length one of the two settled himself to wait, while the other faced about and shambled off briskly to the rear. A few seconds brought him to what was left of his unfortunate comrade; his eyes seemed to start from his head as he felt over the crushed wreck. A momentlater he turned and hastened back even faster than he had come. His arrival had an air of palpitating excitement; I fancied I felt transmitted to me a tiny thrill of horror at the news about to be communicated. This time the four antennæ fairly vibrated—I imagined the conversation going on an inch above the ground.
"My God!" announced the bearer of ill tidings, breathlessly. "Poor Bill is dead!"
"Bill dead!" exclaimed the other, shocked in spite of his incredulity; "but no, you must be wrong—what could have killed him?"
"I don't know; he's dead all the same—crushed and mangled—it upset me fearfully."
"Come, come—you've been seeing things; he must have taken a short cut to the beach."
"I tell you he's dead; come and have a look if you don't believe me." So off they went together for a look at the corpse, and I left them to mourn their friend—perhaps to eat him.
If you want to see a curious sight get a hermit crab some day and pick up half a dozen empty shells of the size to fit him. Lay the shells on the sand in a circle a few inches across, extract the crab without hurting him from his house, and set him down naked among the empty shells. To get him out, by the way, is not so easy as it sounds, but you can do it by taking hold of his claws and maintaining a steady, gentle pull; in time the muscles of his tail will tire and his grip relax. You will be amused when you see his first attempts to walk without his shell, which weighs three or four times as much as the tenant; it is precisely as a man might act, set down on some planet where gravity is weaker than on our earth. Naked, helpless, and worried—très,très inquiet—the crab makes a dash for one of the shells, gives it a hasty inspection with his feelers, finds something not quite right, and hobbles off to the next one. Perhaps this suits him. He faces about, in goes his tail to take a grip on the whorls, he snaps in and out a few times as if trying the strategic possibilities of the new quarters, and next moment you will see him ambling off blissfully toward the bush.
The chase of the hermit crab is tame sport, no doubt, but not entirely without interest. One evening we set out just after dark, bucket and torch in hand—not the old South Sea torch of coconut leaf, but the modern tube of galvanized iron, filled with kerosene and plugged with burlap, which acts as a wick. The high beach is best at this hour, for one's quarry is beginning to emerge from the bush for the evening dip, and those that have passed will leave spoor in the soft coral sand. Here is the track of a small one, winding toward the water in eccentric curves and zigzags; follow it and you find him, motionless in the torchlight, hoping to escape notice. He goes into the pail with a clang—you can hear his feet scratching vainly at the smooth sides. There were not many about on this stretch of beach; they are uncertain in their habits and seem to be great wanderers. Here is the track of a monster, broad and corrugated like the trail of a miniature Whippet Tank; the spoor leads to the lagoon—no signs of him at the water's edge—he has doubled back. Lift up that rotten coconut frond ... anunga, black, hairy, armed with a vicious pair of claws; you can hear him raging in the pail, a noise halfway between a whine and a growl—a crab with a voice!
A stroll of an hour or two along the beach usually procures enough bait for a day's fishing, and one turns inland to follow the road home. Sometimes, when the new moon has set behind the Avarua peaks and thick darkness settles over the bush—when the surf murmurs almost inaudibly in a stillness broken by the plunge of a fish in the lagoon, or the grating screech of a flying-fox, quarreling with his mates in the palm tops—one is not sorry when the lights of the plantation begin to glimmer through the trees.
We went to bed early that evening, for we had to be up long before daylight to catch the first of the flood tide, but these island nights are not meant for sleep—I was soon up again, to spend a couple of hours alone on the veranda. The feel of the air was like a caress; neither hot nor cold, and perfumed with the scents of strange flowers—waxenTiaré Tahiti, sweet and heady frangipani, languorous Queen of the Night. In the mango tree behind the house a mynah twittered—a drowsy overture to one of their abrupt nocturnal choruses. They are quaint birds, the mynahs; introduced to the Islands many years ago, they have increased amazingly in this friendly environment, where they live in a state of half-domesticated familiarity with mankind. One sees them everywhere, hopping fearlessly about the streets of villages, fluttering to the table to finish the bread crumbs left after a meal, perched on the backs of cattle in the coconut groves. They are intensely gregarious, gathering in large flocks at sunset to roost in some thick-foliaged tree—orange, mango, or alligator pear. From time to time during the night, with an abruptness and perfect unison that make one suspect the presence of a featheredleader of the orchestra, the two or three hundred members of the colony burst into deafening song—a chorus which lasts perhaps twenty seconds, and stops as suddenly as it began.
At last I knocked the ashes out of my pipe and turned in; at intervals, before sleep came, I heard the far-off thud of a ripe coconut, or the faint slither and crash of an old frond, falling from a palm. We were awakened at three o'clock by the cook's announcement that coffee was ready; it is a pleasure to live where dressing is only a matter of slipping on a fresh singlet and hitching thepareutight about one's waist. Each man carried a pair of old shoes, for even the leathery feet of a native must be protected before he ventures on the live coral. Half a dozen plantation boys followed us to the beach, along a path leading down an avenue of coconuts, the slender boles illuminated by the glare of torchlight. In five minutes we were under the dark ironwoods at the water's edge, where the canoes are hauled up; without waiting for us, the boys plunged into the lagoon—half swimming, half wading toward the reef—torches held aloft in their left hands.
The tide was very low; we had only a short paddle to the shallow water on the inner side of the barrier. It was dead calm—ideal weather for the spear—but there had been a storm somewhere to the south; lines of tall glassy combers, faintly visible in the starlight, were curling with the splitting reports of field artillery—crashing down on the reef until the coral beneath us seemed to tremble at each shock. The eastern sky had not yet begun to pale—the constellations glimmered with the soft glow of the tropics: the Southern Cross, Orion, and the Pleiades.
When the water was only knee-deep we moored the canoe to a coral mushroom and went overboard in bare legs and tucked-uppareus. Wading slowly, about twenty feet apart—the lagoon so still and clear that it was not easy to tell where air ended and water began—nothing moving in the circle of torchlight could escape notice. It was necessary to watch the bottom and walk warily; the reef is a honeycomb of holes and passages through which the sea boils in at certain tides. Many of these holes, only a few feet in diameter at the surface, lead deep down and out into the caverns lining the edges of the pass—the haunts of octopus and the man-eating rock-cod calledtonu. A faint ripple revealed a big blue parrot fish skulking in the shadow of a bowlder; one of the native boys slipped his spear close before he thrust with a skill that needs years to acquire. He killed the fish with a stab just where the head joins the body, and strung it on the strip of hibiscus bark at his waist.
These lagoons swarm with strange forms of life unknown in northern waters; until one learns one's way about there is a certain amount of danger in wading through the shallows along the reef. A sea scorpion passed close by us—a wicked-looking thing, all feelers and enormous fins; a touch of those spines would give you a nasty leg. An even more poisonous fish is found here—though fortunately not often: thenoo, which lies buried in patches of coral sand. I have never seen one, and do not know its name in English, but the spines of its dorsal fin are said to be hollow like the fangs of a rattlesnake, and to inject a poison—when stepped on—that is apt to kill or cripple for life. Thetotara, or sea porcupine, is another oddcreature, but not at all to be feared; at the approach of danger he blows himself up like a football, and once inflated, is proof against almost anything—I've seen a man hurl a heavy stone on one a dozen times without being able to burst him open. In a different way, the conger eels are nearly as hard to kill, particularly the big ones, which are no joke to handle when one is wading barelegged. One must be on the alert every moment—torch blazing, spear poised. One moment you jump on a mushroom of coral to avoid a pair of sea snakes, long, slender and spotted—active, fearless creatures whose bite is said to be a serious matter; a moment later you are slipping and scrambling at top speed to cut off some large fish, working his way through the shallows. One of the boys bagged apatuki—a youngtonu; I was glad to have a look at the ugly little brute. He was only a foot long—a marvel of protective coloring, irregularly spotted and blotched so as to be nearly invisible against a background of coral. The size of the mouth, the power of the jaws, and the rows of cruel little teeth, convinced me that the full-grown fish must deserve the bad name given him by the pearl divers.
The light was gray and the cloud banks along the eastern horizon flushing pale rose when the boys extinguished their torches and set out across the lagoon, each one trailing a heavy string of fish. My host had had enough sport for once, but I love to be on the water at dawn, so when I had landed him I paddled out to the pass to fish fortitiara. The current was slack and not a breath of wind stirred the lagoon. The light grew stronger; the contours of the island developed in sharp serrations against the sky; presently the sun rose.
I anchored the canoe in a fathom of water at the edge of the pass, allowing her to swing out over the depths. Through my water-glass I could examine the precipitous walls of the channel—fifty feet high, overhanging in places, seamed, pitted, broken by the dark mouths of caverns. Shoals of fish moved leisurely along the face of the coral—appearing and disappearing like nesting swallows, seen from a cliff-top: swinish parrot fish, bright blue and long as a man's arm;taputapu, spangled orange and black—stopping to nibble at the coral; slender pipefish; swiftnanue; fish of extraordinary form and coloring—indescribable, perhaps undescribed. At last I saw what I was after—a school oftitiara, working in from the sea.
I wonder if you know this fish; it is new to me, though I have been told that it exists in the northern Pacific. It is of the true game type—swift and rapacious—with the conformation of a mackerel, and related, I should say, to the pompano of American waters. The young ones, eight to ten inches long, and appearing at certain times of year, in great schools, are calledaturi. When medium-sized—running from two pounds up to twelve—it is known astitiarain the Cook Islands;paiherein Tahiti and to the east. The fully grown fish, which attains a weight of a hundred pounds or more, is calledurua. These different names for stages in the life of the same fish are interesting to me, for they illustrate the richness, in certain directions, of a language so poor in others. We have such terms in English, but they are rapidly becoming obsolete; I doubt, for example, if the average man at home knows that a young salmon is called a grilse, and a still younger one, a parr.
One's outfit for this kind of fishing consists of a pail of hermit crabs, a couple of stones for crushing them, a hundred feet of stout cotton line, a single hook on a length of piano wire, and several dozen pebbles, to be used as sinkers. First of all you smash the shells of a few crabs, tear off the soft bodies for bait, and crush the claws and legs to a paste. This chum is thrown overboard little by little to attract the fish and keep them about the canoe. When a glance through the water-glass shows that the fish you want are gathered beneath you, a pebble is attached to the line by means of a special hitch, which can be undone by a jerk. Now you lower the line over the side until the bait is in the required position; a sharp pull frees the sinker, and you are ready for the first client. The theory of the detachable sinker is that it enables one to fish at a distance from the boat without having the hook rest on the bottom, where it is apt to foul in the coral.
On this occasion my sport was ruined by one of those tantalizing incidents which lend charm to every variety of angling. I had caught two fish and was lowering my line to try for a third, when the small fry gobbling my chum suddenly scattered and disappeared. Next moment a monstroustitiara—almost in theuruaclass—loomed up from the depths, seized my bait, and made off so fast that the line fairly scorched my fingers. My tackle was not designed for such game as this—there was nothing to do but try to play him; but when only a yard of line remained in my hands I was forced to check the rush. A powerful wrench, the line slackened dead, he was off, the light hook had snapped at the bend—and I had no other! The old, old story—it is never the fingerlings that get away.
Cut into filets and soaked for six hours in lime juice, my two fish made a rawhors-d'œuvreof the most delicate kind. I took a plate of it to the house of a neighbor who had asked me to dinner, and this old-timer in the South Seas pronounced it of the very first order. You would enjoy knowing him: he has been in this part of the world since the 'seventies—supercargo, skipper, trader on islands seldom visited even to-day. Now he is retired and lives on a small plantation which represents the savings of a lifetime. After dinner, as we sat on his wide veranda with pipes going and glasses on the table between us, he told me a tale so curious that I cannot resist repeating it to you—the story of an island far away to the north and west—an island I shall callAriri.
Atolls are by nature lonely places, but of all atolls in the Pacific, Ariri is perhaps the loneliest—never visited, far off from any group, out of the paths of navigation. Not very many years ago Ariri was a bit of no man's land; though marked on the chart, its existence was ignored by the Powers—it had never been inhabited, no flag had ever been raised above its beaches of dazzling coral sand. At that time, as for centuries before, the sea birds nested undisturbed on the islets within the reef, where all day long the water flashed blue in the sunlight and the trade wind hummed a song of loneliness among the palm tops.
Then a day came when two Frenchmen—shrewd traders and planters of coconuts in the Tuamotu—spoke of Ariri. Here was an island capable of an annual hundred tons of copra, and claimed by no man; they would plant it and reap the rewards of enterprise. The chief difficulty was to find a superintendent totake charge of the project; it needed a white man, but white men willing to undertake a task of such poignant loneliness were not to be found every day in Papeete. As it chanced, their man was at hand.
The natives called him Tino—perhaps his name had once been King. Years among the islands had obliterated whatever stamp of nationality he might have possessed; it was rumored that he was English by birth, and also that he had held a commission in the Confederate navy. Tall, strong, and of fine presence, with a full blond beard and eyes of reckless blue, a great singer and dancer—always the merriest at a feast and the idol of the women, a remarkable linguist and story-teller, drunken, brave, witty, and unprincipled—Tino was of a type which thrives in Polynesia.
When they offered him the position of superintendent at Ariri the two Frenchmen were not without misgivings. He was on the beach at the time, though the only sign of that condition was an unusual laxity in returning the favor when a friend invited him to drink. Tino had no money, but that was his sole limitation; each of a dozen native families vied for the honor of transferring his mat and camphorwood box to their house; when evening came he had his choice of a dozen invitations to dine, and a dozen girls competed for the joy of doing his laundry and making hats for him. But this easy-going philosophy and lack of worry over a situation scarcely respectable in the eyes of Papeete's business men were calculated to sow distrust. In the case of Ariri, however, it was difficult to see how he could go astray; there would be no liquor—they would see to that—and with no visitors and no means ofleaving the island there seemed little chance of trouble, Tino was a famous handler of native labor.
The agreement was made and in due time a schooner sailed into the Ariri lagoon to land Tino and a score of Raiatea boys with their wives. The Frenchmen took care to leave no boat capable of putting out to sea, but as there were houses and sheds to build they left a considerable variety of tools and gear, in addition to a year's supply of medicine, food, and clothing. A day or two later the schooner sailed away.
The superintendent called his men together and appointed a foreman. The main island was to be cleared, rows staked out, and the nuts brought for seed to be planted in such a manner. Before this work began, a house was to be built for each family. That was all, except that Tino needed five men at once for special work of his own—let them be those most skilled in woodworking. With that he seems to have dismissed the business of planting coconuts from his mind.
There was a certain amount of hibiscus on the island, as well as the trees calledtouandpuka. In seven months' time, with the help of his men, Tino cut down trees, sawed out timbers and planking, and built a forty-foot cutter—sturdy, fast, and seaworthy. Her mast was the smoothed-down trunk of an old coconut palm; her sails a patchwork of varied fabrics; her cordage of cinnet, twisted and braided coconut fiber—the work of women, incredibly skillful and patient. For anchor, she carried a grooved coral bowlder, and her water tanks were five-gallon kerosene tins. At the end of the seventh month this improbable vessel was launched, rigged, and provisioned. Tino bade his menfarewell and set sail—promising to return—to the westward, fearless and alone. His only instrument was a compass, and yet he made the passage to Fiji—twelve hundred miles—in fifteen days.