THE Great Western ducked in the heavy swell, shipping her regular deck-load of salt-water every six minutes. Now the Great Western was nothing more nor less than a seventeen-ton schooner, two hours out from Tahiti. She was built like an old shoe, and shovelled in a head sea as though it was her business.
It was something like sea life, wading along her submerged deck from morning till night, with a piece of raw junk in one hand and a briny biscuit in the other; we nevercouldkeep a fire inthatgalley, and as for hard tack, the sooner it got soaked through the sooner it was off our minds, for we knew to this complexion it must shortly come.
Two hours out from Tahiti we settled our course, wafting a theatrical kiss or two toward the gloriously green pyramid we were turning our backs on, as it slowly vanished in the blue desert of the sea.
A thousand palm-crowned and foam-girdled reefs spangle the ocean to the north and east ofTahiti. This train of lovely satellites is known as the Dangerous Archipelago, or, more commonly in that latitude, the Pomotou Islands. It's the very hot-bed of cocoa-nut oil, pearls, half-famished Kanakas, shells, and shipwrecks. The currents are rapid and variable; the winds short, sharp, and equally unreliable. If you would have adventure, the real article and plenty of it, make your will, bid farewell to home and friends, and embark for the Pomotous. I started on this principle, and repented knee-deep in the deck-breakers, as we butted our way through the billows, bound for one of the Pomotous on a pearl hunt.
Three days I sat in sackcloth and salt water. Three nights I swashed in my greasy bunk, like a solitary sardine in a box with the side knocked out. In my heart of hearts I prayed for deliverance: you see there is no backing out of a schooner, unless you crave death in fifty fathoms of phosphorescent liquid and a grave in a shark's maw. Therefore I prayed for more wind from the right quarter, for a sea like a boundless mill-pond; in short, for speedy deliverance on the easiest terms possible. Notwithstanding, we continued to bang away at the great waves that crooked their backs under us and hissed frightfully as they enveloped the Great Western with spray until the fourth night out, when the moon gladdened us and promised much while we held our breath in anxiety.
We were looking for land. We'd been lookingfor three hours, scarcely speaking all that time. It's a serious matter raising a Pomotou by moonlight.
"Land!" squeaked a weak voice about six feet above us. A lank fellow, with his legs corkscrewed around the shrouds, and his long neck stretched to windward, where it veered like a weather-cock in a nor'wester, chuckled as he sung out "Land!" and felt himself a little lower than Christopher Columbus thereafter. "Where away?" bellowed our chunky little captain, as important as if he were commanding a grown-up ship. "Two points on the weather-bow!" piped the lookout, with the voice of one soaring in space, but unhappily choked in the last word by a sudden lurch of the schooner that brought him speedily to the deck, where he lost his identity and became a proper noun, second person, singular, for the rest of the cruise.
Now, "two points" is an indefinite term that embraces any obstacle ahead of anything; but the "weather-bow" has been the salvation of many a craft in her distress; so we gave three cheers for the "weather-bow," and proceeded to sweep the horizon with unwinking gaze. We could scarcely tell how near the land might lie; fancied we could already hear the roar of surf-beaten reefs, and every wave that reared before us seemed the rounded outline of an island. Of course we shortened sail, not knowing at what moment we might find ourselves close upon some low sea-gardennestling under the rim of breakers that fenced it in, and being morally averse to running it down without warning.
It was scarcely midnight; the moon was radiant; we were silently watching, wrapped in the deep mystery that hung over the weather-bow.
The wind suddenly abated; it was as though it sifted through trees and came to us subdued with a whisper of fluttering leaves and a breath of spice. We knew what it meant, and our hearts leaped within us as over the bow loomed the wave-like outline of shadow that sank not again like the other waves, neither floated off cloud-like, but seemed to be bearing steadily down upon us,—a great whale hungry for a modern Jonah.
What a night it was! We heard the howl of waters now; saw the palm boughs glisten in the moonlight, and the glitter and the flash of foam that fringed the edges of the half-drowned islet.
It looked for all the world like a grove of cocoa-trees that had waded out of sight of land, and didn't know which way to turn next. This was the Ultima Thule of the Great Western's voyage, and she seemed to know it, for she behaved splendidly at last, laying off and on till morning in fine style, evidently as proud as a ship-of-line.
I went below and dozed, with the low roar of the reef quite audible; a fellow gets used to such dream-music, and sleeps well to its accompaniment.
At daybreak we began beating up against wind and tide, hoping to work into smooth water by sunrise, which we did easily enough, shaking hands all around over a cup of thick coffee and molasses as three fathoms of chain whizzed overboard after a tough little anchor that buried itself in a dim wilderness of corals and sea-grass.
Then and there I looked about me with delighted eyes. The Great Western rode at anchor in a shallow lake, whose crystal depths seemed never to have been agitated by any harsher breath than at that moment kissed without ruffling its surface. Around us swept an amphitheatre of hills, covered with a dense growth of tropical foliage and cushioned to the hem of the beach with thick sod of exquisite tint and freshness. The narrow rim of beach that sloped suddenly to the tideless margin of the lake was littered with numberless slender canoes drawn out of the water like so many fish, as though they would navigate themselves in their natural element, and they were, therefore, not to be trusted alone too near it. Around the shore, across the hills, and along the higher ridges waved innumerable cocoa-palms, planted like a legion of lances about the encampment of some barbaric prince.
As for the very blue sky and the very white scud that shot across it, they looked windy enough; moreover we could all hear the incoherent booming of the sea upon the reef that encircled ournest. But we forgot the wind and the waves in the inexpressible repose of that armful of tropical seclusion. It was a drop of water in a tuft of moss, on a very big scale; that's just what it was.
In a few moments, as with one impulse, the canoes took to water with a savage or two in each, all gravitating to the schooner, which was for the time being the head-centre of their local commerce; and for an hour or more we did a big business in the exchange of fish-hooks and fresh fruit.
The proportion of canoes at Motu Hilo (Crescent Island) to the natives of said fragment of Eden was as one to several; but the canoeless could not resist the superior attraction of a foreign invader, therefore the rest of the inhabitants went head-first into the lake, and struck out for the middle, where we peacefully swung at anchor.
The place was sharky, but a heavy dirk full twenty inches tall was held between the teeth of the swimmers; and if the smoke-colored dorsal of any devil of a shark had dared to cut the placid surface of the water that morning, he would speedily have had more blades in him than a farrier's knife. A few vigorous strokes of the arms and legs in the neighborhood, a fatal lunge or two, a vermilion cloud in a sea churned to a cream, and a dance over the gaping corpse of some monster who has sucked human blood more than once, probably, does the business in that country.
It was a sensation for unaccustomed eyes, that inland sea covered, littered, I might say, with woolly heads, as though a cargo of cocoa-nuts had been thrown overboard in a stress of weather. They gathered about as thick as flies at a honey-pot, all talking, laughing, and spouting mouthfuls of water into the air like those impossible creatures that do that sort of thing by the half-dozen in all high-toned and classical fountains.
Out of this amphibious mob one gigantic youth, big enough to eat half our ship's crew, threw up an arm like Jove's, clinched the deck-rail with lithe fingers, and took a rest, swinging there with the utmost satisfaction.
I asked him aboard, but he scorned to forsake his natural element: waterisas natural as air to those natives. Probably he would have suffered financially had he attempted boarding us, for his thick back hair was netted with a kind of spacious nest and filled with eggs on sale. It was quite astonishing to see the ease with which he navigated under his heavy deck-load.
This colossal youth having observed that I was an amateur humanitarian, virtue received its instant reward (which it doesn't in all climates), for he at once offered me three of his eggs in a very winning and patronizing manner.
I took the eggs because I like eggs, and then I was anxious to get his head above water if possible; therefore I unhesitatingly took the eggs, offering him in return a fish-hook, a tenpenny nail, and a dilapidated key-ring.
These temptingcurioshe spurned, at the same moment reaching me another handful of eggs. His generosity both pleased and alarmed me. I saw with joy that his chin was quite out of water in consequence of his charity, even when he dropped back into the sea, floating for a few moments so as to let the blood circulate in his arm again; but whether this was his magnanimous gift, or merely a trap to involve me in hopeless debt, I was quite at a loss to know, and I paused with my hands full of eggs, saying to myself, There is an end to fish-hooks in the South Pacific, and dilapidated key-rings are not my staple product!
In the midst of my alarm he began making vows of eternal friendship. This was by no means disagreeable to me. He was big enough to whip any two of his fellows, and one likes to be on the best side of the stronger party in a strange land.
I reciprocated!
I leaned over the stern-rail of the Great Western in the attitude of Juliet in the balcony scene, assuring that egg-boy that my heart was his if he was willing to take it at second-hand.
He liked my sentiments, and proposed touching noses at once (a barbarous greeting still observed in the most civilized countries with even greater license, since with Christians it is allowable to touch mouths).
We touched noses, though I was in danger of sliding headlong into the sea. After this ceremonial he consented to board the Great Western, which having accomplished with my help, he deposited his eggs at my feet, offered me his nose once more, and communicated to me his name, asking in the same breath for mine.
He was known as Hua Manu, or Bird's Egg. Every native in the South Sea gets named by accident. I knew a fellow whose name was "Cock-eye"; he was a standing advertisement of his physical deformity. A fellow that knew me rejoiced in the singular cognomen of "Thrown from a horse." Fortunately he doesn't spell it with so many letters in his tongue. His christening happened in this wise: A bosom friend of his mother was thrown from a horse and killed the day of his birth. Therefore the bereaved mother reared that child, an animated memorial, who in after years clove to me, and was as jolly as though his earthly mission wasn't simply to keep green the memory of his mother's bosom friend sailing through the air with a dislocated neck.
I turned to my new-found friend. "Hua Manu," said I, "for my sake you have made a bird's-nest of your back hair. You have freely given me your young affection and your eggs. Receive the sincere thanks of yours truly, together with these fish-hooks, these tenpenny nails, this key-ring." Hua Manu smiled and accepted, burying the fish-hooks in his matted forelock, and inserting a tenpenny nail and a key-ring in either ear, thereby making himself the envy of the entire population of Motu Hilo, and feeling himself as grand as the best chief in the archipelago.
So we sat together on the deck of the Great Western, quite dry for a wonder, exchanging sheep's-eyes and confidences, mutually happy in each other's society. Meanwhile the captain was arranging his plans for an immediate purchase of such pearls as he might find in possession of the natives, and for a fresh search for pearl oysters at the earliest possible hour. There were no pearls on hand. What are pearls to a man who has as many wives, children, and cocoa-nuts as he can dispose of? Pearls are small and colorless. Give them a handful of gorgeous glass beads, a stick of sealing-wax, or some spotted beans, and keep your pale sea-tears, milky and frozen and apt to grow sickly yellow and die if they are not cared for.
Motu Hilo is independent. No man has squatted there to levy tax or toll. We were each one of us privileged to hunt for pearls and keep our stores separate. I said to Hua Manu, "Let's invest in a canoe, explore the lagoon for fresh oyster-beds, and fill innumerable cocoa-nut shells with these little white seeds. It will be both pleasant and profitable, particularly for me." We were scarcely five minutes bargaining for our outfit, and we embarked at once, having agreed to return ina couple of days for news concerning the success of the Great Western and her probable date of sailing.
Seizing a paddle, Hua Manu propelled our canoe with incredible rapidity out of the noisy fleet in the centre of the lake, toward a green point that bounded it, one of the horns of the crescent. He knew a spot where the oyster yawned in profusion, a secret cave for shelter, a forest garden of fruits, a never-failing spring, etc. Thither we would fly and domesticate ourselves. The long, curved point of land soon hid the inner waters from view. We rose and sank on the swell between the great reef and the outer rim of the island, while the sun glowed fiercely overhead and the reef howled in our ears. Still on we skimmed, the water hissing along the smooth sides of the canoe, that trembled at every fierce stroke of Hua Manu's industrious paddle. No chart, no compass, no rudder, no exchange of references, no letter of introduction, yet I trusted that wild Hercules who was hurrying me away, I knew not whither, with an earnestness that forced the sweat from his naked body in living streams.
At last we turned our prow and shot through a low arch in a cliff, so low we both ducked our heads instinctively, letting the vines and parasites trail over our shoulders and down our backs.
It was a dark passage into an inner cave lit from below,—a cave filled with an eternal andsunless twilight that was very soothing to our eyes as we came in from the glare of sea and sky.
"Look!" said Hua Manu. Overhead rose a compressed dome of earth, a thick matting of roots, coil within coil. At the side innumerable ledges, shelves and seams lined with nests, and never a nest without its egg, often two or more together. Below us, in two fathoms of crystal, sunlit and luminous bowers of coral, and many an oyster asleep with its mouth open, and many a prismatic fish poising itself with palpitating gills, and gauzy fins fanning the water incessantly.
"Hua Manu!" I exclaimed in rapture, "permit me to congratulate you. In you I behold a regular South Sea Monte Christo, and no less magnificent title can do you justice." Thereat Hua Manu laughed immoderately, which laugh having run out we both sat in our canoe and silently sucked eggs for some moments.
A canoe-length from where we floated, a clear rill stole noiselessly from above, mingling its sweet waters with the sea; on the roof of our cavern fruits flourished, and we were wholly satisfied. After such a lunch as ours it behooved us to cease idling and dive for pearls. So Hua Manu knotted his long hair tightly about his forehead, cautiously transferred himself from the canoe to the water, floated a moment, inhaling a wonderfully long breath, and plunged under. How he struggled to get down to the gaping oysters, literally climbingdown head-first! I saw his dark form wrestling with the elements that strove to force him back to the surface, crowding him out into the air again. He seized one of the shells, but it shut immediately, and he tugged and jerked and wrenched at it like a young demon till it gave way, when he struck out and up for air. All this seemed an age to me. I took full twenty breaths while he was down. Reaching the canoe, he dropped the great, ugly-looking thing into it, and hung over the outrigger gasping for breath like a man half hanged. He was pale about the mouth, his eyes were suffused with blood, blood oozed from his ears and nostrils; his limbs, gashed with the sharp corals, bled also. The veins of his forehead looked ready to burst, and as he tightened the cords of hair across them it seemed his only salvation.
I urged him to desist, seeing his condition and fearing a repetition of his first experience; but he would go once more; perhaps there was no pearl in that shell; he wanted to get me a pearl. He sank again and renewed his efforts at the bottom of the sea. I scarcely dared to count the minutes now, nor the bubbles that came up to me like little balloons with a death-message in each. Suppose he were to send his last breath in one of those transparent globes, and I look down and see his body snared in the antlers of coral, stained with his blood? Well, he came up all right, and I postponed the rest of my emotion for a later experience.
Some divers remain three minutes under water, but two or three descents are as many as they can make in a day. The ravages of such a life are something frightful.
No more pearl-hunting after the second dive that day; nor the next, because we went out into the air for a stroll on shore to gather fruit and stretch our legs. There was a high wind and a heavy sea that looked threatening enough, and we were glad to return after an hour's tramp. The next day was darker, and the next after that, when a gale came down upon us that seemed likely to swamp Motu Hilo. A swell rolled over the windward reef and made our quarters in the grotto by no means safe or agreeable. It was advisable for us to think of embarking upon that tempestuous sea, or get brained against the roof of our retreat.
Hua Manu looked troubled, and my heart sank. I wished the pearl oysters at the bottom of the sea, the Great Western back at Tahiti, and I loafing under the green groves of Papeete, never more to be deluded abroad.
I observed no visible changes in the weather after I had been wishing for an hour and a half. The swell rather increased; our frail canoe was tossed from side to side in imminent danger of upsetting.
Now and then a heavy roller entirely filled the mouth of our cavern, quite blinding us with spray;having spent its fury it subsided with a concussion that nearly deafened us, and dragged us with fearful velocity toward the narrow mouth of the cave, where we saved ourselves from being swept into the sea by grasping the roots overhead and within reach.
"Could I swim?" asked Hua Manu. Alas, no! That we must seek new shelter at any risk was but too evident. "Let us go on the next wave," said Hua, as he seized a large shell and began clearing the canoe of the water that had accumulated. Then he bound his long hair in a knot to keep it from his eyes, and gave me some hasty directions as to my deportment in the emergency.
The great wave came. We were again momentarily corked up in an air-tight compartment. I wonder the roof was not burst open with the intense pressure that nearly forced the eyes out of my head and made me faint and giddy. Recovering from the shock, with a cry of warning from Hua, and a prayer scarcely articulated, we shot like a bomb from a mortar into the very teeth of a frightful gale.
Nothing more was said, nothing seen. The air was black with flying spray, the roar of the elements more awful than anything I had ever heard before. Sheets of water swept over us with such velocity that they hummed like circular saws in motion.
We were crouched as low as possible in thecanoe, yet now and then one of these, the verybladeof the wave, struck us on the head or shoulders, cutting us like knives. I could scarcely distinguish Hua's outline, the spray was so dense, and as for him, what could he do? Nothing, indeed, but send up a sort of death-wail, a few notes of which tinkled in my ear from time to time, assuring me how utterly without hope we were.
One of those big rollers must have lifted us clean over the reef, for we crossed it and were blown into the open sea, where the canoe spun for a second in the trough of the waves, and was cut into slivers by an avalanche of water that carried us all down into the depths.
*****
I suppose I filled at once, but came up in spite of it (almost every one has that privilege), when I was clutched by Hua Manu and made fast to his utilitarian back-hair. I had the usual round of experiences allotted to all half-drowned people: a panoramic view of my poor life crammed with sin and sorrow and regret; a complete biography written and read through inside of ten seconds. I was half strangled, call it two thirds, for that comes nearer the truth; heard the water singing in my ears, which wasnotsweeter than symphonies, nor beguiling, nor in the least agreeable. I deny it! In the face of every corpse that ever was drowned I emphatically deny it!
Hua had nearly stripped me with one or twotugs at my thin clothing, because he didn't think that worth towing off to some other island, and he was willing to float me for a day or two, and run the risk of saving me.
When I began to realize anything, I congratulated myself that the gale was over. The sky was clear, the white caps scarce, but the swell still sufficient to make me dizzy as we climbed one big, green hill, and slid off the top of it into a deep and bubbling abyss.
I found Hua leisurely feeling his way through the water, perfectly self-possessed and apparently unconscious that he had a deck passenger nearly as big as himself. My hands were twisted into his hair in such a way that I could rest my chin upon my arms, and thus easily keep my mouth above water most of the time.
My emotions were peculiar. I wasn't accustomed to travelling in that fashion. I knew it had been done before. Even there I thought with infinite satisfaction of the Hawaiian woman who swam for forty hours in such a sea, with an aged and helpless husband upon her back. Reaching land at last she tenderly drew her burden to shore and found him—dead! The fact is historical, and but one of several equally marvellous.
We floated on and on, cheering each other hour after hour; the wind continuing, the sea falling, and anon night coming like an ill omen,—night, that buried us alive in darkness and despair.
I think I must have dozed, or fainted, or died several times during the night, for it began to grow light long before I dared to look for it, and then came sunrise,—a sort of intermittent sunrise that gilded Hua's shoulder whenever we got to the top of a high wave, and went out again as soon as we settled into the hollows.
Hua Manu's eyes were much better than mine; he seemed to see with all his five senses, and the five told him thatthere was sand not far off! I wouldn't believe him; I think I was excusable for questioning his infallibility then and there. The minute he cried out "Land!" I gave up and went to sleep or to death, for I thought he was daft, and it was discouraging business, and I wished I could die for good. Hua Manu, what a good egg you were, though it's the bad that usually keep atop of the water, they tell me!
*****
Hua Manu was right! he walked out of the sea an hour later and stood on a mound of coarse sand in the middle of the ocean, with my miserable, water-logged body lying in a heap at his feet.
The place was as smooth and shiny and desolate as anybody's bald head. That's a nice spot to be merry in, isn't it? Yet he tried to make me open my eyes and be glad.
He said he knew the Great Western would be coming down that way shortly; she'd pick us off the shoal, and water and feed us.
Perhaps she might! Meantime we hungered and thirsted as many a poor castaway had before us. That was a good hour for Christian fortitude: beached in the middle of the ocean; shelterless under a sun that blistered Hua's tough skin; eyes blinded with the glare of sun and sea; the sand glowing like brass and burning into flesh already irritated with salt water; a tongue of leather cleaving to the roof of the mouth, and no food within reach, nor so much as a drop of fresh water for Christ's sake!
Down went my face into the burning sand that made the very airhopabove it.... Another night, cool and grateful; a bird or two flapped wearily overhead, looking like spirits in the moonlight. Hua scanned earnestly our narrow horizon, noting every inflection in the voices of the wind and waves,—voices audible to him, but worse than dumb to me,—mocking monotones reiterated through an agonizing eternity.
A wise monitor was Hua Manu, shaming me to silence in our cursed banishment. Toward the morning after our arrival at the shoal, an owl fluttered out of the sky and fell at our feet quite exhausted. It might have been blown from Motu Hilo, and seemed ominous of something, I scarcely knew what. When it had recovered from its fatigue, it sat regarding us curiously. I wanted to wring its short, thick neck, and eat it, feathers and all. Hua objected; there was a superstition thatgave that bland bird its life. It might continue to ogle us with one eye as long as it liked. How the lopsided thing smirked! how that stupid owl-face, like a rosette with three buttons in it, haunted me! It was enough to craze any one; and, having duly cursed him and his race, I went stark mad and hoped I was dying forever....
There are plenty of stars in this narrative. Stars, and plenty of them, cannot account for the oblivious intervals, suspended animation, or whatever it was, that came to my relief from time to time. I cannot account for them myself. Perhaps Hua Manu might; he seemed always awake, always on the lookout, and ever so patient and painful. A dream came to me after that owl had stared me into stone,—a dream of an island in a sea of glass; soft ripples lapping on the silver shores; sweet airs sighing in a star-lit grove; some one gathering me in his arms, hugging me close with infinite tenderness; I was consumed with thirst, speechless with hunger; like an infant I lay in the embrace of my deliverer, who moistened my parched lips and burning throat with delicious and copious draughts. It was an elixir of life; I drank health and strength in every drop; sweeter than mother's milk flowed the warm tide unchecked, till I was satisfied and sank into a deep and dreamless sleep....
The Great Western was plunging in her old style, and I swashed in my bunk as of yore. Thecaptain sat by me with a bottle in his hand and anxiety in his countenance.
"Where are we?" I asked.
"Two hours out from Tahiti, inward bound."
"How! What! When!" etc.; and my mind ran up and down the record of the last fortnight, finding many blots and some blanks.
"As soon as I got into my right mind I could hear all about it"; and the captain shook his bottle, and held on to the side of my bunk to save himself from total wreck in the lee-corners of the cabin.
"Why, wasn't I right-minded? I could tell a hawk from a hernshaw; and, speaking of hawks, where was that cursed owl?"
The captain concluded I was bettering, and put the physic into the locker, so as to give his whole attention to keeping right side up. Well, this is how it happened, as I afterward learned: The Great Western suffered somewhat from the gale at Motu Hilo, though she was comparatively sheltered in that inner sea. Having repaired, and given me up as a deserter, she sailed for Tahiti. The first day out, in a light breeze, they all saw a man apparently wading up to his middle in the sea. The fellow hailed the Great Western, but as she could hardly stand up against the rapid current in so light a wind, the captain let her drift past the man in the sea, who suddenly disappeared. A consultation of officers followed. Evidentlysome one was cast away and ought to be looked after; resolved to beat up to the rock, big turtle, or whatever it might be that kept that fellow afloat, provided the wind freshened sufficiently; wind immediately freshened; Great Western put about and made for the spot where Hua Manu had been seen hailing the schooner. But when that schooner passed he threw himself upon the sand beside me and gave up hoping at last, and was seen no more.
What did he then? I must have asked for drink. He gave it me from an artery in his wrist, severed by the finest teeth you ever saw. That's what saved me. On came the little schooner, beating up against the wind and tide, while I had my lips sealed to that fountain of life.
The skipper kept banging away with an old blunderbuss that had been left over in his bargains with the savages, and one of these explosions caught the ears of Hua. He tore my lips from his wrist, staggered to his feet, and found help close at hand. Too late they gathered us up out of the deep and strove to renew our strength. They transported us to the little cabin of the schooner, Hua Manu, myself, and that mincing owl, and swung off into the old course. Probably the Great Western never did better sailing since she came from the stocks than that hour or two of beating that brought her up to the shoal. She seemed to be emulating it in the home run, for wewent bellowing through the sea in a stiff breeze and the usual flood-tide on deck.
I lived to tell the tale. I should think it mighty mean of me not to live after such a sacrifice. Hua Manu sank rapidly. I must have nearly drained his veins, but I don't believe he regretted it. The captain said when he was dying, his faithful eyes were fixed on me. Unconsciously I moved a little; he smiled, and the soul went out of him in that smile, perfectly satisfied. At that moment the owl fled from the cabin, passed through the hatchway, and disappeared.
Hua Manu lay on the deck, stretched under a sail, while I heard this. I wondered if a whole cargo of pearls could make me indifferent to his loss. I wondered if there were many truer and braver than he in Christian lands. They call him a heathen. Itwasheathenish to offer up his life vicariously. He might have taken mine so easily, and perhaps have breasted the waves back to his own people, and been fêted and sung of as the hero he truly was.
Well, if he is a heathen, out of my heart I would make a parable, its rubric bright with his sacrificial blood, its theme this glowing text: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for a friend."
THINK of a sea and sky of such even and utter blueness, that any visible horizon is out of the question. In the midst of this pellucid sphere the smallest of propellers trailing two plumes of sea-foam, like the tail-feathers of a bird of paradise, and over it all a league of floating crape,—for so seem the heavy folds of smoke that hang above us.
Thus we pass out of our long hours of idleness in that grove of eight thousand cocoa-palms by the sea-shore,—the artist and I seeking to renew ourdolce far nientein some new forest of palms by any shore whatever. Enough that it is sea-washed, and hath a voice and an eternal song.
Now turn to the stone-quarry darkened with the groups of the few faithful friends and many islanders. They are so ready to kill time in the simplest manner; why not in staring our awkward little steamer out of sight?
One glimpse of the white handkerchiefs, fluttering like a low flight of doves, and then with all thesublime resignation of the confessed lounger, we await the approach of twilight and the later hours that shall presently pass silver-footed over this tropic sea.
Four,P. M., and the roar of the reef lost to us voyagers. The sun an hour high. The steams of dinner appealing to us through the yawning hatches,—everything yawning in this latitude, animate and inanimate,—and the world as hot as Tophet. We lie upon our mattresses, brought out of the foul cabin into the sweet air, and pass the night half intoxicated with romance and cigarettes. The natives cover the deck of our little craft in lazy and laughing flocks. Some of them regard us tenderly; they are apt to love at sight, though Heaven knows there is little in our untrimmed exteriors to attract any one under the stars.
We hear, now and then, the sharp click of flint and steel, and after it see the flame, and close to the flame a dark face, grotesque it may be, like an antique water-spout with dust in its jaws. But some are beautiful, with glorious eyes that shine wonderfully in the excitement of lighting the pipe anew.
Voices arise at intervals from among the groups of younger voyagers. We hear the songs of our own land worded in oddly and rather prettily broken English. "Annie Laurie," "When the Cruel War is over," and other equally ambitious and proportionately popular ballads ring in good time and tunefrom the lips of the young bloods, but the girls seldom join to any advantage. How strange it all seems, and how we listen!
With the first and deepest purple of the dawn, the dim outlines of Molokai arise before us. It is an island of cliffs and cañons, much haunted of the King, but usually out of the tourist's guide-book.
It is hinted one may turn back this modern page of island civilization, and with it the half-christianized and wholly bewildered natures of the uncomprehending natives, and here find all of the old superstitions in their original significance, the temples, and the shark-god, and thehula-hulagirls, beside whose weird and maddening undulations yourcan-candancers are mere jumping-jacks.
Listen for faint music of the wandering minstrels! No, we are too far out from shore: then it is the wrong end of the day for such festivals.
A brief siesta under the opening eyelids of the morn, and at sunrise we dip our colors abreast charming little Lahaina, drowsy and indolent, with its two or three long, long avenues overhung with a green roof of leaves, and its odd summer-houses and hammocks pitched close upon the white edge of the shore.
We wander up and down these shady paths an hour or two, eat of the fruits, luscious and plentiful, and drink of its liquors, vile and fortunately scarce, and get us hats plaited of the coarsest straw and of unbounded rim, making ourselves stillmore hideous, if indeed we have not already reached the acme of the unpicturesque.
Now for hours and hours we hug the shore, slowly progressing under the insufficient shadow of the palms, getting now and then glimpses of valleys folded inland, said to be lovely and mystical. Then there are mites of villages always half-grown and half-starved looking, and always close to the sea. These islanders are amphibious. The little bronze babies float like corks before they can walk half the length of a bamboo-mat.
Another night at sea, in the rough channel this time, and less enjoyable for the rather stiff breeze on our quarter, and some very sour-looking clouds overhead. All well by six, however, when we hear the Angelus rung from the low tower of a long coral church in another sea-wedded hamlet. Think of the great barn-like churches, once too small for the throngs that gathered about them, now full of echoes, and whose doors, if they still hang to their hinges, will soon swing only to the curious winds!
In and out by this strange land, marking all its curvatures with the fidelity of those shadow lines in the atlas, and so lingering on till the evening of the second day, when, just at sunset, we turn suddenly into the bay that saw the last of Captain Cook, and here swing at anchor in eight fathoms of liquid crystal over a floor of shining white coral, and clouds of waving sea-moss. From the deck behold the amphitheatre wherein was enacted thetragedy of "The Great Navigator, or the Vulnerable god." The story is brief and has its moral.
The approach of Captain Cook was mystical. For generations the islanders had been looking with calm eyes of faith for the promised return of a certain god. Where should they look but to the sea, whence came all mysteries and whither retreated the being they called divine?
So the white wings of the Resolution swept down upon the life-long quietude of Hawaii like a messenger from heaven, and the signal gun sent the first echoes to the startled mountains of the little kingdom.
They received this Jupiter, who carried his thunders with him and kindled fires in his mouth. He was the first smoker they had seen, though they are now his most devout apostles. Showing him all due reverence, he failed to regard their customs and traditions, which was surely ungodlike, and it rather weakened the faith of their sages.
A plot was devised to test the divinity of the presuming captain.
While engaged in conversation, one of the chiefs was to rush at Cook with a weapon; should he cry out or attempt to run, he was no god, for the gods are fearless; and if he was no god, he deserved death for his deception. But if a god, no harm could come of it, for the gods are immortal.
So they argued, and completed their plans. It came to pass in the consummation of them thatCook did run, and thereupon received a stab in the back. Being close by the shore he fell face downward in the water and died a half-bloody, half-watery, and wholly inglorious death. His companions escaped to the ship and peppered the villages by the harbor, till the inhabitants, half frantic, were driven into the hills.
Then they put to sea, leaving the body of their commander in the hands of the enemy, and with flag at half-mast were blown sullenly back to England, there to inaugurate the season of poems, dirges, and pageants in honor of the Great Navigator.
His bones were stripped of flesh, afterwards bound withkapa, the native cloth, and laid in one of the hundred natural cells that perforate the cliff in front of us, and under whose shadow we now float. Which of the hundred is the one so honored is quite uncertain. What does it matter, so long as the whole mountain is a catacomb of kings? No commoners are buried there. It was a kind and worthy impulse that could still venerate so far the mummy of an idol of such palpable clay as his.
Many of these singular caverns are almost inaccessible. One must climb down by ropes from the cliff above. Rude bars of wood are laid across the mouths of some of them. It is the oldtabunever yet broken. But a few years back it was braving death to attempt to remove them.
Cook's flesh was most likely burned. It was then a custom. But his heart was left untouched of the flames of this sacrifice. What a salamander the heart is that can withstand the fires of a judgment!
The story of this heart is the one shocking page in this history: some children discovered it afterward, and, thinking it the offal of an animal, devoured it. Whoever affirms that the "Sandwich-Islanders eat each other," has at least this ground for his affirmation. Natives of the South Sea Islands have been driven as far north as this in their frail canoes. They were cannibals, and no doubt were hungry, and may have eaten in their fashion, but it is said to have been an acquired taste, and was not at all popular in this region. Dramatic justice required some tragic sort of revenge, and this was surely equal to the emergency.
Our advance guard, in the shape of a month-earlier tourist, gave us the notes for doing this historical nook in the Pacific. A turned-down page, it is perhaps a little too dog-eared to be read over again, but we all like to compare notes. So we noted the items of the advance guard, and they read in this fashion:—
OBJECTS OF INTEREST RELATING TO CAPTAIN COOK.ItemI.The tree where Cook was struck."II.The rock where Cook fell."III.The altar on the hill-top."IV.The riven palms."V.The sole survivor,—the boy that ran."VI.A specimen sepulchre in the cliff.
OBJECTS OF INTEREST RELATING TO CAPTAIN COOK.
Until dark the native children have been playing about us in the sea, diving for very smooth "rials," and looking much as frogs must look to wandering lilliputians. The artist cares less for these wild and graceful creatures than one would suppose, for he confesses them equal in physical beauty to the Italian models. All sentiment seemed to have been dragged out of him by much travel. At night we sit together on the threshold of our grass house, and not twenty feet from the rock—under water only at high tide—where Cook died. We sit talking far into the night, with the impressive silence broken only by the plash of the sea at our very door.
By and by the moon looks down upon us from the sepulchre of the kings. We are half clad, having adopted the native costume as the twilight deepened and our modesty permitted. The heat is still excessive. All this low land was made to God's order some few centuries ago. We wonder if He ever changes his mind; this came down red-hot from the hills yonder, and cooled at high-water mark. It holds the heat like an oven-brick, and we find it almost impossible to walk upon it at noontime, even our sole-leather barely preservingour feet from its blistering surface. The natives manage to hop over it now and then; they are about half leather, anyhow, and the other half appetite.
We come first upon No. II. in the list of historic haunts.
Let us pass down to the rock, and cool ourselves in the damp moss that drapes it. It is almost as large as a dinner-table, and as level. You can wade all around it, count a hundred little crabs running up and down over the top of it. So much for one object of interest, and the artist draws his pencil through it. At ten,P. M., we are still chatting, and have added a hissing pot of coffee over some live coals to our housekeeping. Now down a little pathway at our right comes a native woman, with a plump and tough sort of pillow under each arm. These she implores us to receive and be comfortable. We refuse to be comforted in this fashion, we despise luxuries, and in true cosmopolitan independence hang our heads over our new saddle-trees, and sleep heavily in an atmosphere rank with the odor of fresh leather; but not till we have seen our humane visitor part of the way home. Back by the steep and winding path we three pass in silence. She pauses a moment in the moonlight at what seems a hitching-post cased in copper. It is as high as our hip, and has some rude lettering apparently scratched with a nail upon it. We decipher with some difficulty this legend:—
+Near this spotfellCAPTAIN JAMES COOK, R. N.,theRenowned Circumnavigator,whodiscovered these islands,A. D.1778.His Majesty's ShipImogene,Oct. 17, 1837.
So No. I. of our list is checked off, and no lives lost.
"Aloha!" cries a soft voice in the distance. Our native woman has left us in our pursuit of knowledge under difficulties, and now there is no visible trace of her and her pillows,—only that voice out of the darkness crying, "Love to you!" She lives in memory,—this warm-heartedWaihine; so do her pillows.
Returning to our lodgings, we discover a square heap of broken lava rocks. It seems to be the foundation for some building; and such it is, for here the palace of Kamehameha I. stood,—a palace of grass like this one we are sleeping in. Nothing but the foundation remains now. Half a dozen rude stairs invite the ghosts of the departed courtiers to this desolate ruin.
They are all Samaritans in this kingdom. By sunrise a boy with fresh coffee and a pail of muffins rides swiftly to our door. He came from over the hill. Our arrival had been reported, and we are summoned to a late breakfast in the manner of the Christians. We are glad of it. Our fruit diet of yesterday, the horrors of a night in the saddle—a safe and pretty certain mode of dislocating the neck—make us yearn for a good old-fashioned meal. Horses are at our service. We mount after taking our muffins and coffee in the centre of a large and enthusiastic gathering of villagers. They came to see us eat, and to fumble the artist's sketches, and wonder at his amazing skill.
Up the high hill with the jolliest sun shining full in our eyes, brushing the heavy and dew-filled foliage on both sides of the trail, and under the thick webs spun in the upper branches, looking like silver laces this glorious morning,—on, till we reach the hill-top.
Here the guide pauses and points his horse's nose toward a rudecorral. The horses seem to regard it from habit,—we scarcely with curiosity. A wall half in ruins in the centre, rising from a heap of stones tumbled together, a black, weather-stained cross, higher than our heads as we sit in the saddle. It is the altar of sacrifice. It is here that the heart of the great navigator survived the flames.
No. III. scored off. At this rate we shall finishby noon easily. The sequel of an adventurous life is soon told.
After breakfast, to horse again, and back to the little village by the sea. We ride into a cluster of palms, our guide leading the way, and find two together, each with a smooth and perfectly round hole through its body, about three feet from the roots, made by the shot of Cook's avengers. A lady could barely thrust her hand through them; they indicate rather light calibre for defence nowadays, but enough to terrify these little villages, when Cook's men sent the balls hissing over the water to bite through the grit and sap of these slender shafts. They still live to tell the tale in their way. So much for No. IV.
We pause again in the queer little straggling alleys of the village, planned, I should think, after some spider's web. They are about as regular in their irregularity. It is No. V. this time. A bit of withered humanity doubled up in the sun, as though some one had set him up on that wall to bake. He is drawn all together; his chin sunk in between his knees, his knees hooped together with his dreadfully slim arms, a round head, sleek and shining as an oiled gourd;sansteeth; eyes like the last drops in desert wells; the skeleton sharply protruding; no motion; apparently no life beyond the quick and incessant blinking of the eyelids,—the curtains fluttering in the half-shut windows of the soul.Isit a man and a brother?Yes, verily! When the uncaptured crew of the Resolution poured their iron shot into the tents of the adversary, this flickering life was young and vigorous, and he ran like a good fellow. Better to have died in his fiery youth than to have slowly withered away in this fashion. For here is the philosophy of mammon left to itself: when you get to be an old native, it is your business to die; if you don't know your business, you are left to find it out: what are you good for but to bury?
Let us slip over the smooth bay, for we must look into one of these caverns. Cross in this canoe, so narrow that we cannot get into it at all, but balance ourself on its rim and hold our breath for fear of upsetting. These odd-looking out-riggers are honest enough in theory, but treacherous in practice; and a shark has his eye on us back yonder. Sharks are mesmeric in their motions through the water, and corpse-colored.
A new guide helps us to the most easily reached cave, and with the lad and his smoking torch we climb into the dusky mouth.
There is dust everywhere and cobwebs as thick as cloth, hanging in tatters. An almost interminable series of small cells, just high enough to straighten one's back in, leads us farther and farther into the mountain of bones. This cave has been pillaged too often to be very ghostly now. We find a little parcel of bones here. It might have been a hand and an arm once, cunning anddexterous. It is nothing now but a litter. Here is an infant's skull, but broken, thin and delicate as a sea-shell, and full of dust. Here is a tougher one, whole and solid; the teeth well set and very white; no sign of decay in any one of these molars. Perhaps it is because so little of their food is even warm when they eat it. This rattles as we lift it. The brain and the crumbs of earth are inseparably wedded. Come with us, skull. You look scholarly, and shall lie upon our desk,—a solemn epistle to the living. But the cave is filled with the vile smoke of our torch, and we are choked with the heat and dust. Let us out as soon as possible. The Great Navigator's skeleton cannot be hidden in this tomb. Down we scramble into the sand and shadow by the water, and talk of departing out of this place of relics.
We are to cross the lava southward where it is frescoed with a wilderness of palm-trees: for when the mountain came down to the sea, flowing red-hot, but cooling almost instantly, it mowed down the forests of palms, and the trunks were not consumed, but lay half buried in the cooling lava, and now you can mark every delicate fibre of the bark in the lava, as firm as granite.
Still farther south lies the green slope that was so soon to be shaken to its foundations. I wonder if we could discover any of the peculiar loveliness that bewitched us the evening we crossed it in silence. There was something in the air thatsaid, "Peace, peace"; and we passed over the fatal spot without speaking. But the sea spoke under the cliffs below us, and the mountain has since replied.
This place is named prettily,Kealekakua. You see that mountain? There are paths leading to it. Thither the gods journeyed in the days of old. So the land is called "the path of the gods."
It is a cool, green spot up yonder; the rain descends upon it in continual baptism. The natives love these mountains and the sea. They are the cardinal points of their compass. Every direction given you is either toward the mountain or toward the sea.
There is much truth in the Arabian tale, and it is time to acknowledge it. Mountains are magnetic. The secret of their magnetism may lie in the immobility of their countenances. Praise them to their face, and they are not flattered; forget them for a moment: but turn again, and see their steadfast gaze! You feel their earnestness. It is imposing, and you cannot think lightly of it. Who forgets the mountains he has once seen? It is quite probable the mountain cares little for your individuality: but it has given part of itself to the modelling of your character; it has touched you with the wand of its enchantment; you are under the spell. Somewhere in the recesses of this mountain are locked the bones of the Great Navigator, but these mountains have kept the secret.