THE MARQUESAS ISLANDSThe real South Seas—Big-game shootingextraordinary—A case of thwarted ambition[image]Chapter IX headpieceCHAPTER IXThe real South Seas—Big-game shootingextraordinary—A case of thwarted ambitionWe of the dream ship were "watering," or rather transferring, three hundred gallons of a doubtful-looking fluid from the beach reservoir of Cristobal to the ship's tanks by means of kerosene tins, a rickety landing-stage swarming with sand flies, and an equally rickety dinghy.We were, in fact, enjoying a spell, to the accompaniment of vast quantities of cocoanut milk, before setting sail for the Marquesas, three thousand miles distant, and were in no mood for an interruption, which is probably why it came. A pigmy figure on the landing was apparently dancing a hornpipe and emitting strange cries."Who is it, and what the —— does he want?" I queried with customary amiability."It's thecomisario," said Steve, with binocular upheld in one hand and a brimming cocoanut shell in the other, "and he's probably found that we need a bill of health or clearance or something."I believe I sighed. I have a notion that Steve swore, and I am quite sure that we rowed ashore and interviewed thecomisario, the handsome youth whose silk socks and passionate tie contrasted strangely with his surroundings. He still danced."He says that it is necessary that he should accompany us," Steve translated."To the Marquesas?""To anywhere.""Really? And where does the necessity come in?"After still further variations of the hornpipe and a prodigious outflow of Ecuadorean Spanish, the following was evolved: They were after him—a trifling indiscretion in the matter of issuing grog licenses to the peons. The Ecuadorean Government was to blame. They expected an official to live on twenty dollars a month and nothing else! How was it possible? Moreover, the President himself, elected on a wage basis of forty-dollars-a-month-and-bring-your-own-blankets, would be getting the boot in a short three months, and with him went everyone—everyone!What was then to happen to the officials he had placed in power? More important still, what was to happen to this particular official? He must accompany us. It was the only possible solution. He would work.Carramba, how he would work! and for nothing but his passage to anywhere—anywhere!Steve and I exchanged glances. The entire crew of the dream ship was, as I think I have before mentioned, exceedingly tired of cooking. Thecomisarioseized on our silence.Maybe we thought he could not work?With a dramatic gesture he tore from his neck the passionate tie, from his feet the silk socks, from his back a virulently striped shirt, and stood revealed in a natty line of undervests."Poor devil!" said I, thinking of the dream ship's fo'c's'le in a seaway."Poor nothing!" said Steve. "He wants work; let him have it."And that was how Señor ——, hereafter known as Bill, came to join the dream ship.We sailed, and continued to sail before a steady southeast "trade" for twenty-two days, during which thecomisariosuffered alternately from seasickness, homesickness, and sheer inability to do anything but smoke cigarettes and sleep; our water tanks, under the magic wand of the Galapagos beach reservoir, transformed themselves into aquariums of energetic animalcules; and our entire biscuit supply crumbled to dust under the onslaughts of a particularly virulent red ant.But these be incidentals to life aboard dream ships, and, at the first sight of Nukuhiva they faded to little more than amusing memories.We had reached our goal! The South Sea Islands were ours! It was hard to realize. At the sight of gorgeous Nukuhiva gliding toward us over the sparkling blue water I remember looking round at the good old ship that had slowly but steadfastly carried us all these thousands of miles, and wondering what she thought of it all. I am aware that the idea of a ship having thoughts savours of senile decay, but that is what passed through my mind at the time, and has passed through it a hundred times since.More nonsense has probably been written about the South Sea Islands than about any other part of the world. The library novelist, the globe-trotting journalist, and a reading public athirst for exotic romance have all contributed to this end: so that here, at the outset of attempting to describe what we of the dream ship saw there, I find myself at a loss. In short, "these few remarks" may be taken as an apology and a warning.I have nothing to offer on a par with the standard article, such as struggles with sharks, conflicts with cannibals, or philandering with princesses. My line, I fear, is facts as I find them.A fine island is Nukuhiva—as fine an example of volcanic formation as one will find anywhere. Sheer walls of cloud-capped rock six thousand feet high, some literally overhanging the crystal-clear water, and all embossed and engraved with strangely patterned basalt. There are pillars, battlements, turrets, so that with half-closed eyes it seems one is approaching a temple, a mediæval castle, a mosque of the East. And the valleys—deep, river-threaded, verdure-choked valleys fading away into mysterious purple mists. But it is little better than an impertinence to attempt a description of Nukuhiva after Melville's "Typee."**See Appendix.For once the monstrosity in our engine-room was induced to exert three of its four cylinders, and we entered the harbour of Tai o Hae in style. It was as well, for a trim trading schooner flying the French flag was at anchor close inshore, and her entire crew lined the rail to see what manner of insect had invaded her privacy."Where are you from?" hailed a surprisingly English voice as soon as our anchor-chain had ceased its clamour."London," we chorused."Well, I'm damned!" came a response, evidently not intended for our ears, but audible nevertheless.In rather less than three minutes a whaleboat-load of visitors was aboard the dream ship, and the silent bay echoed to a fusillade of question and counter-question.Followed a dinner at the trading station on a wide, cool veranda, where, under the influence of oysters, California asparagus, fowl, bush pig, taro root, and French champagne, we became better acquainted with our hosts—two as amiable Frenchmen as ever I met. They represented a trading company of Papeete and Paris, and lived as only Frenchmen appear to know how to live.The Marquesans, we gathered over coffee and cigars, were dying rapidly. Consumption. Introduced in the form of Panama fever by labourers returning from canal construction. The fever afterward developed into the white plague by reason of the natives' unresisting, if not acquiescent, nature. And when all were gone, what then? Chinese.The Chinese appear to be the answer to most questions in the South Pacific to-day. They come; it costs them but fifty dollars to land; and after that they grow—mon Dieu, how they grow!And can nothing be done? A shrug of the shoulders and the offer of a refilled glass are the answers of the Frenchman. But a short time now and he personally will be in a position to return to his beloved Paris, or Marseilles, or Brittany.But we had lately returned from dealing with the Boche; so had our hosts. We drank respectively to the Royal Field Artillery, the Mitrailleurs, the Machine-gun Corps, and the incomparable French Infantry. What of it, if we continue the sport on the morrow, among the wild cattle and goats of Nukuhiva? To-morrow, then, at five o'clock.The schooner, scheduled at daylight to load copra worth five hundred dollars a ton, was cheerfully detained for the trip, and loaded to capacity with bottled beer, coughing Marquesans, and a varied armoury of firearms.We sailed down a coast that it is a sore temptation to describe and landed by whaleboat on a surf-pounded beach. Thereafter we plodded, crawled, and stumbled over as vicious a country as it is possible to imagine—crumbling shale, razor-edged ledges, and deceptive tableland of knee-high grass that only served to hide the carpet of keen-edged volcanic rocks beneath.And the heat! But a representative of the incomparable infantry led the way; and who would not follow to the death, out of very shame? At each halting place theélanof this same representative seemed to increase. Sitting crosslegged on a rock in the meagre shade of a scrub tree, he would discourse on any subject under the sun, while his audience gasped, emptied the perspiration out of their boots, and cursed thecantine(a gigantic native bearing an almost as gigantic sack of bottled beer) for lagging.I was under the impression that the game was to have been wild; hence my surprise when a herd of something like a hundred and fifty goats of all ages, from the bearded and maned veteran, or "stinker," down to the daintiest kid, cavorted up to our resting-place and sniffed at us inquisitively. It was necessary to fling stones to keep some of the more daring at bay.So much for goat-hunting in the Marquesas. It is evident that these beasts are so "wild" that they know nothing of man; who shall say they have missed much in consequence?[image]The Dream Ship Passes from Atlantic to Pacific;At St. Lucia, West IndiesThe cattle are a different matter. Shy as deer, they must be warily stalked and shot mostly on the run, at anything from a hundred to a hundred and fifty yards; also, they have an engaging habit of turning when wounded and giving the huntsman the worst possible time in their power, which in the case of a hefty bull or cow with calf is not inconsiderable.[image]Launching Outrigger Canoe in the Marquesas;Pascal, the Pearl-diving Non-starterThere must have been a herd of something like fifty grazing on the precipitous hillside, and the first shot, fired by an over-anxious Marquesan, against strict orders, sent them scuttling like antelope out of the valley and over the ridge. One fine bull received his medicine from my trusty little Winchester on the very brink, collapsed, and rolled like an avalanche of meat to the bottom.We bagged four of this herd, and the Marquesans fell on them, quartering and selecting with extraordinary skill, and finally carrying one hundred pounds each of solid meat to the beach five miles below. How this last feat was accomplished by a band of ramping consumptives I have no notion, though I saw it done. I only know that after carrying two rifles and a gun over the same country I literally tumbled on to the beach, bruised and bleeding and trembling from sheer fatigue. Even the representative of incomparable infantry admitted to being tired, and, thank heaven, he looked it!It had been a successful day, I was given to understand, and there followed in consequence song and dance aboard the dream ship until dawn touched the peaks of Tai o Hae.A native dance is a dreary and monotonous affair to the average white man, because he does not take the trouble to understand. He sees before him an assembly of posturing, howling natives, and seldom realizes that he is witnessing a pageant of history that has never been written or read.The performance opened with a pantomimic representation of the cruise of the dream ship. According to the actors' ideas, all aboard suffered acutely from seasickness, were utterly unable to stand upright, and continually looked for land under the shade of an upraised hand. Our vigour in battling with storms was extraordinary; we stumbled over rope-ends, clung to the rigging, nearly capsized, and one of us fell overboard, to be rescued, amid shrieks of laughter, by means of a boat-hook and the seat of his pants.We were a joke, there was no doubt about that, and any one who takes a ten-thousand-mile journey in a twenty-three-ton yacht to the Marquesas and wants to be taken seriously had better go elsewhere.From such trivialities the performers passed on to what was evidently their stock repertoire—the history of the Marquesas as handed down from father to son. It was all there in gesture and chant—mighty battles with their neighbours the Paumotans, cannibalism, peace, the advent of the white man with his rum, the plague that still consumes them, and all enacted without resentment.That is the most astounding thing, that these people who were living their own lives, and surely as happy lives as ours, bear no ill will for the incredible sufferings our civilization has brought among them. Perhaps they do not think, and if so it is as well.Conceive yourself, if you can, oh, denizen of Park Lane, Fifth Avenue, or Champs Elysées, a healthy, upstanding, unclad savage of-the South Seas, and living your own life.You may be a cannibal; and are there no cannibals, and worse, west of Suez? You will be a warrior and fight for your country and your womenfolk. Is there anything wrong about that?You will have a stricter moral code than most white folk, but that cannot be helped. You will hunt and fish and gather fruit for your family—in fact, you will live in the only way you know how to live, in contentment.One day an extraordinary-looking object called a white man presents himself and informs you that you are not living in the right way at all. A much better way, according to this gentleman, is to exchange a ton of your cocoanuts for a bottle of rum or a death-dealing instrument made of rusty iron.You are a tolerant sort of person, and you listen and drink his rum. The next day you have an insufferable headache, and, logically concluding that he has poisoned you, you kill him.But that is not the end. Replicas of him keep arriving, and you find you need his rum and his rusty iron, the one for its elevating properties, the other for its dispatch in dealing with enemies. Still more replicas arrive, but of a different order. Many of them are kindly, well-meaning men, and great talkers. They tell you that they have found a God—the only God—and you must worship him in their way. The trouble is that each has a different way, but they are all right, and they all prove it by the same book.Preserve me from the futilities of theological argument; but I met at Tai o Hae a Seventh Day Adventist missionary, an earnest, clean-living, kindly man, without a spark of humour in his composition. He was consumed by a genuine and mighty fervour to demonstrate to the native Marquesan that he was keeping the Sabbath on the wrong day."Does that matter so very much?" I asked him, and that was all I had a chance to ask. Apparently it did matter. And he was getting converts. Why? Because the native is not slow to discover that by embracing Seventh Day Adventism he gets two days of rest in the week.Elsewhere I have met Roman Catholic, Mormon, Latter-Day Saint, Presbyterian, and Anglican Church missionaries, all at work in the same field, all earnest, well-meaning men, and each convinced that he is right.Is it any wonder, then, that after listening to them all the dazed South Sea Island native asks himself what all the pother is about, and, finding no satisfactory answer to the conundrum, turns to his tangible rum bottle?To revert to safer topics, there is pearl shell in the Marquesas. The representative of incomparable infantry told us so while we sat on his incomparable veranda one morning, consuming large quantities ofpapia, rolls, honey, and coffee, each in his particular brand of pyjamas.The information brought upon our serene lives at Tai o Hae the white man's blight of avariciousness. Was this thing possible, with shell at one thousand dollars a ton delivered at Philadelphia? Yes; he, the incomparable, had seen it through a water-glass, in anything from five to fifteen fathoms, between the islands of Hivaoa and Tahuata.Why had it not been prospected? It was doubtful if any but he and the natives knew of its existence. Undoubtedly it was worth looking into. He made us a present of the information to do with as we willed. His cook was an old Paumotan diver, who would no doubt accompany us—Pascal!—accompany us to the island, a bare ninety miles distant. We could take samples of shell to the company in Papeete, and no doubt make arrangements—Pascal!—arrangements with them to advance working capital in return for a lien on the shell—Pascal!!!"Monsieur." An enormous Paumotan native stood in the doorway smiling benignly.He would accompany us. He would cook, and he would dive.We sailed that evening, the deck being littered with green bananas, live chickens tied by the leg to bulwark stanchions, a rabbit, firewood, a stove composed of a kerosene tin half filled with earth, and—Pascal.There was apparently nothing this extraordinary man could not do. He knew every island of the Marquesas like the palm of his hand. He could produce savoury messes from a kerosene tin, remain under water three minutes, discourse entertainingly in pidgin-English, French, German, Marquesan, and Paumotan, and secure a ship's provisions without the annoying triviality of paying for them."But whom do we owe for all this?" I asked him, eyeing the menagerie that surrounded us.Pascal smiled and waved a hand."Rabbit no money," he informed us; "chickens, bananas, all no money. Me get um."Here surely is a solution of the high-cost-of-living problem. Take Pascal to the profiteering areas and the thing is done.Dawn revealed to us Tahuata close abeam. Each island of this group seems more lovely than the last: waterfalls pouring three thousand feet to the sea, blow-holes at the base of rocky cliffs that spray the air with spindrift and miniature rainbows, deep bays with coral beaches at their head.But the beauties of nature were not for us on this occasion; we were prospecting. It was a serious business. There might be money in it. After this I can scarce believe that in Paradise itself the white man will not be dogged by the curse of opportunism.Leaving the dream ship at anchor a cable's length from shore, we took to the dinghy and explored the floor of the ocean thereabouts through water-glasses, consisting of wooden boxes with glass bottoms. This was the place, Pascal informed us, and, sure enough, there was shell, old barnacle-encrusted shell, but widely scattered.What of a few samples? Pascal grinned and shook his head. "Shark," he muttered, apologetically; which, being interpreted, meant that he refused to dive.[image]Men with water-glasses in boatHe pointed out that in the Paumotus it was different. In the Paumotus there was always a reef-surrounded lagoon where few sharks found entrance. In the Paumotus men dived in couples as a safeguard. In the Paumotus——In vain we pointed out that we happened to be in the Marquesas and not the Paumotus; that he had been hired to dive in the Marquesas; that we were really very angry—in the Marquesas. He grinned.[image]A Man of the AtollsIn rather less than half an hour, and to Pascal's utter amazement, we had put him and his belongings ashore, paid him his wages, and were under way for Tahiti.Ah, Monsieur of the incomparable infantry, I rather suspect you of pulling our legs. Or was it that your innate enthusiasm ran away with you? Or that we should have been less hasty? I do not know. All I know is that you spoke truth; there is shell in the Marquesas—and it is likely to remain there.[image]Off Nukuhiva, Marquesas IslandsAs the South Pacific Islands become more widely known, which they are rapidly doing, the Marquesas are bound to attract the attention they deserve. Apart from their scenic grandeur and healthful climate, they are as fertile a group as any in the Pacific, and more so than most. It has been proved that cotton of the best quality flourishes there, as well as sugar cane and every other tropical product, and there are thousands of acres of knee-high, well-watered pastures for the stockman.Since this visit to the Marquesas I have been living in France, to which country the group belongs, and I have not yet met a Frenchman who knows of their existence. In fact, the average Frenchman's ignorance of his own possessions is nothing short of amazing.Some day the congested areas of this queer old world will overflow, and the Marquesas will be discovered afresh. When that time comes, France will have people knocking at her door and demanding to know why she debars all other nationalities from acquiring land that she does not attempt to develop herself.Already there is a movement afoot in England to establish a colony in the Marquesas. Permission has somehow been obtained from the French Government—a process comparable with the extraction of a particularly obstinate winkle from its shell—to purchase blocks of land, and distribute them amongst intending settlers who already number over a thousand."Lucky thousand!" say I, "and good luck to them!"THE PAUMOTU ISLANDSThe people of the atolls—including Mr. Mumpus[image]Chapter X headpieceCHAPTER XThe people of the atolls—including Mr. MumpusFrom the moment I first set eyes on an atoll it fascinated me, and its lure has not departed with the years.Think of any place in the world that you have seen, and an atoll is different. It is the fairy ring of the sea. Out of the depths it comes, rearing a vegetation and people of its own, and often into the depths it goes, leaving no trace. How? Why? Scientists murmur something about the coral polyp; but, not being a scientist, I prefer my theory of the fairy ring. That was how it looked to me many years ago, and that was how it looked again from the masthead of the dream ship.We had left the Marquesas seven days previously, and were now becalmed in that maze of atolls known as the Paumotu or Low Archipelago.Imagine a circular beach of glistening coral sand and green vegetation from five to fifty yards wide, thrust up through the sea for all the world like a hedge, and enclosing a garden of coral fronds submerged under water so still and clear as to be hardly visible, and you have an atoll as I saw it from the masthead.And there were myriads of them—big atolls, little atolls, fat and thin atolls—fading away into the shimmering heat haze of the horizon. The fairies must have been mighty busy down this way.I descended to the deck and things mundane. What to do when becalmed in a network of coral reefs and seven-knot currents was the problem that confronted us. I had no text book on the subject, but by some miracle the monstrosity was persuaded to fire on two cylinders.Imagine yourself, then, passing through the narrow gateway in the hedge—I should say, passage in the reef—and coming to anchor in the garden—I mean lagoon.It is sunrise, and already the pearling canoes are putting out from the village and scurrying to the fishing grounds over the glassy surface of the lagoon.A fine people, these of the atolls—upstanding, deep of chest, a race of mermen if ever there was one. From birth up, if they are not in the water they are on it or as close to it as they can get. Take them inland and they die. So they squat on their canoe outriggers, smoking, chatting, laughing, until the spirit moves them (nothing else will), and one of their number drops from sight, feet first, with hardly a ripple.You look down and you see him, as though through green-tinted glass, crouched on the sloping floor of the lagoon. He is plucking oysters as one would gather flowers in a garden. There is no haste in his movements, nothing to indicate that there is any time limit to his remaining down there, under anything from five to fifteen fathoms of water.A minute passes, two minutes; still he pursues his leisurely way, plucking to right and left and thrusting the shells into a network bag about his neck.The man of the atolls is in a world of his own where none but his kind can follow, and they still squat on their outriggers, chatting and laughing like a crowd of boys at a swimming pool.One alone seems interested in the diver's movements: his mate, a fair-skinned woman, with streaming blue-black hair, leans over the gunwale of the canoe, looking down through a kerosene tin water-glass.The diver's dark figure against the pale-green coral becomes more blurred; a stream of silver air bubbles floats upward. Three minutes by the watch have come and gone. To the landsman it seems incredible; and even then there is no haste, no shooting to the surface and gasps for breath.The dark body becomes clearer in outline as it emerges from the depths, and slowly, quite slowly, floats upward until a jet-black head breaks water and the diver clings to the gunwale of the canoe, inhaling deep but unhurried breaths and exhaling with a long-drawn whistle peculiarly his own.In what way this whistle helps matters it is impossible to say, but whether a habit, a pose, or an aid in the regaining of breath, it is universal throughout the Paumotus; so much so that a busy afternoon with the pearlers sounds more like a tin-whistle band than anything else.With the people of the atolls the ability to remain under water for long periods is more than an art; it is second nature. Instinctively, they do just those things that make one breath suffice for three minutes and sometimes four.Preparatory to a descent they do not take a deep breath and hold it until the surface is reached again. They fill their lungs with a normal amount of air, which lasts them about a minute and a half; the other minute and a half is occupied in its exhalation. Then, too, every movement below water is made with the utmost conservation of energy; yet a good diver can bring up a hundred and fifty kilos of shell in a day, which means in the neighbourhood of six hundred francs.And it is just these same nimble francs that tempt the Paumotan to abase his talents, even as others are tempted the world over. For the sake of a few more shells, another cluster a little farther down, he remains below just that trifle longer than is good for him, and in time it tells. The eyes become bloodshot and start from the head, he goes deaf, or paralysis seizes him."But the women are the worst," a sun-baked trader informed me; "the worst or the best, as you like to put it," he added, grinning. "They'll go on till they burst, or pretty near it. Bargain-counter instinct, I guess. We call it the 'bends.'"'"The bends?'""Yes, one of 'em goes down, and down; sees some more shell a bit lower, and some more a bit lower than that. Then she's reaching out for one last flutter at something like twenty fathoms when they get her the 'bends,' I mean. You can see her fighting against them, but it's no good; they bring her knees to her chin, and she can't straighten up, and she drops the last lot of shell she's gathered, and hates that worse than the 'bends'.""What does she do?""Nothing, except lie there crumpled up until her mate fetches her up and massages her back to life. Then she's no sooner conscious than she's down again."Water never kills this crowd; it takes dry land to do that. Why, there's a diver close on fifty years old here, paralyzed clean down one side. He can't walk, but he can swim. He gets them to carry him down to the reef and heave him in; says it's the only place he can get any comfort.""How about sharks?""Oh, there are sharks all right, but the diver's mate looks after that; gives the signal, and they're all in after him double quick.""Finish him off with knives, eh?"The sun-baked trader smiled reminiscently."Well, hardly," he said. "A dead shark makes a square meal for the others, and that's all. What they need is an example, and they get it. They're cruising about sometime when they come on one of their number with no tail, one fin, and sundry other decorations that wouldn't exactly please the S.P.C.A. He is not nice to look at, and they clear out of a place where such things are possible."When an island's thrown open for pearlings, we spend weeks mutilating sharks before the divers'll go down, and small blame to them, I say. Sharks are—well, sharks."The casual reader picks up a good deal of information about "gold rushes" and such-like romantic undertakings from the plethora of novels on the subject; but who has ever heard of a pearl-rush? Yet they occur every year in the Paumotus.The group belongs to the French, and is administered from the local seat of government at Papeete, Tahiti. Here a heterogeneous collection of humanity awaits the opening of the pearling season like a hovering cloud of mosquitoes.There are pearl buyers from Paris and London, representatives of shell-buying concerns from Europe and America; British, Chinese, and Indian traders, speculative schooner skippers and supercargoes, not to mention the riff-raff of the beaches, all intent on pickings from the most prolific pearling islands in the South Pacific.[image]Shark, pearl diverAnd this is the law of the group—infringed, circumvented, broken, but still the law—that although under French Government, the Paumotus and all they produce belong to the Paumotans.Still further to protect the native, diving apparatus is banned throughout the group. The oyster, as he brings it from the water, is the diver's property. He must open the shell aboard his canoe before touching land, remove the flesh, and, after testing it for pearls (usually by kneading it so thoroughly between finger and thumb as to crush the life out of it), throw it back into the lagoon to propagate its species. Should he find a pearl, it is his also.It is then up to the cloud of "mosquitoes" before mentioned to get both shell and pearl out of him as best it can. One can imagine the buzzing and biting that ensue.From the buyer's point of view, the sooner and the deeper he gets a good diver into his debt the better. He then has some hold. Consequently, he spoon-feeds his selected divers like the infants that they are. Tinned delicacies of all sorts, Prince Albert suits of unbelievable thickness and cut, silk socks, and stockings are a good diver's for the asking during the closed season.With shell at one thousand dollars a ton in Philadelphia (the largest consumer at the present time), and pearls soaring to apparently limitless heights, all will be well when work starts.And the diver? From long experience of "mosquitoes," he is by no means slow. Shortly before the season opens he is presented with a bill that would cause most of us to register apoplexy. He looks at it, grins, and proceeds to dive. He also proceeds to make caches of shell on the floor of the lagoon, only bringing up half of what he collects in payment of his debts. At night he retrieves his cache and sells for cash to the smaller "mosquitoes" who infest the beach. As for pearls, from the moment the diver's finger and thumb encounter foreign matter in the flesh of the oyster, he becomes about as communicative on the subject as his catch. Should the truth leak out, his find will promptly be confiscated in payment of his everlasting debts, or the wily pearl-buyer will use threats of exposure to reduce the price.No, the diver, if he is up to snuff, will work his passage to Papeete on a schooner, sell to a Chinaman, who neither asks questions nor tells tales, and proceed to enjoy himself according to his lights.Blossoming into a Prince Albert suit, a red tie, and silk socks, he will hire a car, load it up with lady friends and execrable rum, and vanish into thin air for a fortnight, at the end of which time he has somehow contrived to get rid of all he possessed and is perfectly prepared to return to his atolls and his debts. He has lived like a white man and cheated the "mosquitoes"; what more can Paumotan heart desire?The thing we call progress has slain the picturesque in most industries of this world, but not so with pearling in the Paumotus. During the season, the beach of one of these atolls resembles an Old-World fair more than anything I can call to mind.A crazy merry-go-round brays and rocks in the shade of the palms, luring the adventurous to invest three pearl shells in a ride on a broken-necked camel. The ubiquitous movie "palace" has reared its unlovely head, and for more shell or five cocoanuts one may witness on the shores of a South Sea lagoon the battered remnants of a love affair enacted not far from Los Angeles. I have often wondered what happens to all the worn-out films in the world. Now I know.This season, and for the first time, the people of the atolls are to be initiated into the mysteries of ice-cream. Truly, the "mosquito" stops at nothing.It was down in this part of the world that I met Mr. Mumpus, though that is not his name. To reach him you must pick your way with the motor auxiliary through a maze of reefs, lie off and on, because there is no pass into his lagoon, and plod through blazing sand in a temperature of ninety in the shade, which there is not. But it is worth it.You will probably find him in the pearl orchard, a green-lined umbrella in one hand and a dripping oyster shell in the other. He will stare fixedly at you for upward of half a minute and then say: "How the devil did you get here?" with a brusqueness that is alarming until you get used to it.In my own case I indicated the dream ship, looking particularly smart in her recent coat of white paint."What! In that thing?" remarked Mr. Mumpus.I was smitten to silence for a space."I heard you were making pearls," I told him on regaining something of my equanimity, "and thought you might be so good as to tell me about it.""Come up to the house," he barked, and led the way to a rambling erection of corrugated iron and palm leaves containing, as far as I could make out, a gaping "boy" of uncertain origin, some empty soap boxes, and a microscope."There's nothing new in what I'm doing here," he told me over two brimming shells of cocoanut milk, "nothing that the Chinese have not been doing for centuries. The pearl is a disease of the oyster; introduce the disease and you will get a pearl.""Quite," said I."No one has succeeded up to the present," continued Mr. Mumpus, "but there is no reason why it should not be done in time, no reason at all. I am appreciably nearer than I was a year ago, for instance. In the meantime, I am producing the ordinary blisters, or half pearls, with various foundations. You see, the cestoid——"But I cannot hope to set down here all that this amazing man told me in scientific jargon, as he strode back and forth across his mat-strewn floor.He was a doctor by profession, had tired of it, and come to the islands to pursue his hobby of pearl culture. He takes an oyster from the lagoon, opens it very carefully by the slow insertion of a wooden wedge, and places a pilule of beeswax against the main muscle. The mantle of the oyster then covers it with mother-of-pearl, and in the course of a few months our friend cuts from the shell a very fair imitation of a half pearl.But, as most people are aware, the real pearl comes from the flesh of the oyster, and it is on the production of the genuine article that Mr. Mumpus centres his efforts. He breeds oysters in the lagoon and dissects them under the microscope for signs of the parasite that undoubtedly causes the pearl. He injects into the flesh of others all manner of foreign matter.Down there on his speck of an atoll he treats the oyster as a surgeon treats an interesting case and—who knows?—some day there may burst upon an astonished world the name of a man who can make pearls, and that name will not be Mr. Mumpus.PAPEETE, TAHITITahiti: its pleasures and problems[image]Chapter XI headpieceCHAPTER XITahiti: its pleasures and problems
THE MARQUESAS ISLANDS
The real South Seas—Big-game shootingextraordinary—A case of thwarted ambition
[image]Chapter IX headpiece
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Chapter IX headpiece
CHAPTER IX
The real South Seas—Big-game shootingextraordinary—A case of thwarted ambition
We of the dream ship were "watering," or rather transferring, three hundred gallons of a doubtful-looking fluid from the beach reservoir of Cristobal to the ship's tanks by means of kerosene tins, a rickety landing-stage swarming with sand flies, and an equally rickety dinghy.
We were, in fact, enjoying a spell, to the accompaniment of vast quantities of cocoanut milk, before setting sail for the Marquesas, three thousand miles distant, and were in no mood for an interruption, which is probably why it came. A pigmy figure on the landing was apparently dancing a hornpipe and emitting strange cries.
"Who is it, and what the —— does he want?" I queried with customary amiability.
"It's thecomisario," said Steve, with binocular upheld in one hand and a brimming cocoanut shell in the other, "and he's probably found that we need a bill of health or clearance or something."
I believe I sighed. I have a notion that Steve swore, and I am quite sure that we rowed ashore and interviewed thecomisario, the handsome youth whose silk socks and passionate tie contrasted strangely with his surroundings. He still danced.
"He says that it is necessary that he should accompany us," Steve translated.
"To the Marquesas?"
"To anywhere."
"Really? And where does the necessity come in?"
After still further variations of the hornpipe and a prodigious outflow of Ecuadorean Spanish, the following was evolved: They were after him—a trifling indiscretion in the matter of issuing grog licenses to the peons. The Ecuadorean Government was to blame. They expected an official to live on twenty dollars a month and nothing else! How was it possible? Moreover, the President himself, elected on a wage basis of forty-dollars-a-month-and-bring-your-own-blankets, would be getting the boot in a short three months, and with him went everyone—everyone!
What was then to happen to the officials he had placed in power? More important still, what was to happen to this particular official? He must accompany us. It was the only possible solution. He would work.Carramba, how he would work! and for nothing but his passage to anywhere—anywhere!
Steve and I exchanged glances. The entire crew of the dream ship was, as I think I have before mentioned, exceedingly tired of cooking. Thecomisarioseized on our silence.
Maybe we thought he could not work?
With a dramatic gesture he tore from his neck the passionate tie, from his feet the silk socks, from his back a virulently striped shirt, and stood revealed in a natty line of undervests.
"Poor devil!" said I, thinking of the dream ship's fo'c's'le in a seaway.
"Poor nothing!" said Steve. "He wants work; let him have it."
And that was how Señor ——, hereafter known as Bill, came to join the dream ship.
We sailed, and continued to sail before a steady southeast "trade" for twenty-two days, during which thecomisariosuffered alternately from seasickness, homesickness, and sheer inability to do anything but smoke cigarettes and sleep; our water tanks, under the magic wand of the Galapagos beach reservoir, transformed themselves into aquariums of energetic animalcules; and our entire biscuit supply crumbled to dust under the onslaughts of a particularly virulent red ant.
But these be incidentals to life aboard dream ships, and, at the first sight of Nukuhiva they faded to little more than amusing memories.
We had reached our goal! The South Sea Islands were ours! It was hard to realize. At the sight of gorgeous Nukuhiva gliding toward us over the sparkling blue water I remember looking round at the good old ship that had slowly but steadfastly carried us all these thousands of miles, and wondering what she thought of it all. I am aware that the idea of a ship having thoughts savours of senile decay, but that is what passed through my mind at the time, and has passed through it a hundred times since.
More nonsense has probably been written about the South Sea Islands than about any other part of the world. The library novelist, the globe-trotting journalist, and a reading public athirst for exotic romance have all contributed to this end: so that here, at the outset of attempting to describe what we of the dream ship saw there, I find myself at a loss. In short, "these few remarks" may be taken as an apology and a warning.
I have nothing to offer on a par with the standard article, such as struggles with sharks, conflicts with cannibals, or philandering with princesses. My line, I fear, is facts as I find them.
A fine island is Nukuhiva—as fine an example of volcanic formation as one will find anywhere. Sheer walls of cloud-capped rock six thousand feet high, some literally overhanging the crystal-clear water, and all embossed and engraved with strangely patterned basalt. There are pillars, battlements, turrets, so that with half-closed eyes it seems one is approaching a temple, a mediæval castle, a mosque of the East. And the valleys—deep, river-threaded, verdure-choked valleys fading away into mysterious purple mists. But it is little better than an impertinence to attempt a description of Nukuhiva after Melville's "Typee."*
*See Appendix.
For once the monstrosity in our engine-room was induced to exert three of its four cylinders, and we entered the harbour of Tai o Hae in style. It was as well, for a trim trading schooner flying the French flag was at anchor close inshore, and her entire crew lined the rail to see what manner of insect had invaded her privacy.
"Where are you from?" hailed a surprisingly English voice as soon as our anchor-chain had ceased its clamour.
"London," we chorused.
"Well, I'm damned!" came a response, evidently not intended for our ears, but audible nevertheless.
In rather less than three minutes a whaleboat-load of visitors was aboard the dream ship, and the silent bay echoed to a fusillade of question and counter-question.
Followed a dinner at the trading station on a wide, cool veranda, where, under the influence of oysters, California asparagus, fowl, bush pig, taro root, and French champagne, we became better acquainted with our hosts—two as amiable Frenchmen as ever I met. They represented a trading company of Papeete and Paris, and lived as only Frenchmen appear to know how to live.
The Marquesans, we gathered over coffee and cigars, were dying rapidly. Consumption. Introduced in the form of Panama fever by labourers returning from canal construction. The fever afterward developed into the white plague by reason of the natives' unresisting, if not acquiescent, nature. And when all were gone, what then? Chinese.
The Chinese appear to be the answer to most questions in the South Pacific to-day. They come; it costs them but fifty dollars to land; and after that they grow—mon Dieu, how they grow!
And can nothing be done? A shrug of the shoulders and the offer of a refilled glass are the answers of the Frenchman. But a short time now and he personally will be in a position to return to his beloved Paris, or Marseilles, or Brittany.
But we had lately returned from dealing with the Boche; so had our hosts. We drank respectively to the Royal Field Artillery, the Mitrailleurs, the Machine-gun Corps, and the incomparable French Infantry. What of it, if we continue the sport on the morrow, among the wild cattle and goats of Nukuhiva? To-morrow, then, at five o'clock.
The schooner, scheduled at daylight to load copra worth five hundred dollars a ton, was cheerfully detained for the trip, and loaded to capacity with bottled beer, coughing Marquesans, and a varied armoury of firearms.
We sailed down a coast that it is a sore temptation to describe and landed by whaleboat on a surf-pounded beach. Thereafter we plodded, crawled, and stumbled over as vicious a country as it is possible to imagine—crumbling shale, razor-edged ledges, and deceptive tableland of knee-high grass that only served to hide the carpet of keen-edged volcanic rocks beneath.
And the heat! But a representative of the incomparable infantry led the way; and who would not follow to the death, out of very shame? At each halting place theélanof this same representative seemed to increase. Sitting crosslegged on a rock in the meagre shade of a scrub tree, he would discourse on any subject under the sun, while his audience gasped, emptied the perspiration out of their boots, and cursed thecantine(a gigantic native bearing an almost as gigantic sack of bottled beer) for lagging.
I was under the impression that the game was to have been wild; hence my surprise when a herd of something like a hundred and fifty goats of all ages, from the bearded and maned veteran, or "stinker," down to the daintiest kid, cavorted up to our resting-place and sniffed at us inquisitively. It was necessary to fling stones to keep some of the more daring at bay.
So much for goat-hunting in the Marquesas. It is evident that these beasts are so "wild" that they know nothing of man; who shall say they have missed much in consequence?
[image]The Dream Ship Passes from Atlantic to Pacific;At St. Lucia, West Indies
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The Dream Ship Passes from Atlantic to Pacific;At St. Lucia, West Indies
The cattle are a different matter. Shy as deer, they must be warily stalked and shot mostly on the run, at anything from a hundred to a hundred and fifty yards; also, they have an engaging habit of turning when wounded and giving the huntsman the worst possible time in their power, which in the case of a hefty bull or cow with calf is not inconsiderable.
[image]Launching Outrigger Canoe in the Marquesas;Pascal, the Pearl-diving Non-starter
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Launching Outrigger Canoe in the Marquesas;Pascal, the Pearl-diving Non-starter
There must have been a herd of something like fifty grazing on the precipitous hillside, and the first shot, fired by an over-anxious Marquesan, against strict orders, sent them scuttling like antelope out of the valley and over the ridge. One fine bull received his medicine from my trusty little Winchester on the very brink, collapsed, and rolled like an avalanche of meat to the bottom.
We bagged four of this herd, and the Marquesans fell on them, quartering and selecting with extraordinary skill, and finally carrying one hundred pounds each of solid meat to the beach five miles below. How this last feat was accomplished by a band of ramping consumptives I have no notion, though I saw it done. I only know that after carrying two rifles and a gun over the same country I literally tumbled on to the beach, bruised and bleeding and trembling from sheer fatigue. Even the representative of incomparable infantry admitted to being tired, and, thank heaven, he looked it!
It had been a successful day, I was given to understand, and there followed in consequence song and dance aboard the dream ship until dawn touched the peaks of Tai o Hae.
A native dance is a dreary and monotonous affair to the average white man, because he does not take the trouble to understand. He sees before him an assembly of posturing, howling natives, and seldom realizes that he is witnessing a pageant of history that has never been written or read.
The performance opened with a pantomimic representation of the cruise of the dream ship. According to the actors' ideas, all aboard suffered acutely from seasickness, were utterly unable to stand upright, and continually looked for land under the shade of an upraised hand. Our vigour in battling with storms was extraordinary; we stumbled over rope-ends, clung to the rigging, nearly capsized, and one of us fell overboard, to be rescued, amid shrieks of laughter, by means of a boat-hook and the seat of his pants.
We were a joke, there was no doubt about that, and any one who takes a ten-thousand-mile journey in a twenty-three-ton yacht to the Marquesas and wants to be taken seriously had better go elsewhere.
From such trivialities the performers passed on to what was evidently their stock repertoire—the history of the Marquesas as handed down from father to son. It was all there in gesture and chant—mighty battles with their neighbours the Paumotans, cannibalism, peace, the advent of the white man with his rum, the plague that still consumes them, and all enacted without resentment.
That is the most astounding thing, that these people who were living their own lives, and surely as happy lives as ours, bear no ill will for the incredible sufferings our civilization has brought among them. Perhaps they do not think, and if so it is as well.
Conceive yourself, if you can, oh, denizen of Park Lane, Fifth Avenue, or Champs Elysées, a healthy, upstanding, unclad savage of-the South Seas, and living your own life.
You may be a cannibal; and are there no cannibals, and worse, west of Suez? You will be a warrior and fight for your country and your womenfolk. Is there anything wrong about that?
You will have a stricter moral code than most white folk, but that cannot be helped. You will hunt and fish and gather fruit for your family—in fact, you will live in the only way you know how to live, in contentment.
One day an extraordinary-looking object called a white man presents himself and informs you that you are not living in the right way at all. A much better way, according to this gentleman, is to exchange a ton of your cocoanuts for a bottle of rum or a death-dealing instrument made of rusty iron.
You are a tolerant sort of person, and you listen and drink his rum. The next day you have an insufferable headache, and, logically concluding that he has poisoned you, you kill him.
But that is not the end. Replicas of him keep arriving, and you find you need his rum and his rusty iron, the one for its elevating properties, the other for its dispatch in dealing with enemies. Still more replicas arrive, but of a different order. Many of them are kindly, well-meaning men, and great talkers. They tell you that they have found a God—the only God—and you must worship him in their way. The trouble is that each has a different way, but they are all right, and they all prove it by the same book.
Preserve me from the futilities of theological argument; but I met at Tai o Hae a Seventh Day Adventist missionary, an earnest, clean-living, kindly man, without a spark of humour in his composition. He was consumed by a genuine and mighty fervour to demonstrate to the native Marquesan that he was keeping the Sabbath on the wrong day.
"Does that matter so very much?" I asked him, and that was all I had a chance to ask. Apparently it did matter. And he was getting converts. Why? Because the native is not slow to discover that by embracing Seventh Day Adventism he gets two days of rest in the week.
Elsewhere I have met Roman Catholic, Mormon, Latter-Day Saint, Presbyterian, and Anglican Church missionaries, all at work in the same field, all earnest, well-meaning men, and each convinced that he is right.
Is it any wonder, then, that after listening to them all the dazed South Sea Island native asks himself what all the pother is about, and, finding no satisfactory answer to the conundrum, turns to his tangible rum bottle?
To revert to safer topics, there is pearl shell in the Marquesas. The representative of incomparable infantry told us so while we sat on his incomparable veranda one morning, consuming large quantities ofpapia, rolls, honey, and coffee, each in his particular brand of pyjamas.
The information brought upon our serene lives at Tai o Hae the white man's blight of avariciousness. Was this thing possible, with shell at one thousand dollars a ton delivered at Philadelphia? Yes; he, the incomparable, had seen it through a water-glass, in anything from five to fifteen fathoms, between the islands of Hivaoa and Tahuata.
Why had it not been prospected? It was doubtful if any but he and the natives knew of its existence. Undoubtedly it was worth looking into. He made us a present of the information to do with as we willed. His cook was an old Paumotan diver, who would no doubt accompany us—Pascal!—accompany us to the island, a bare ninety miles distant. We could take samples of shell to the company in Papeete, and no doubt make arrangements—Pascal!—arrangements with them to advance working capital in return for a lien on the shell—Pascal!!!
"Monsieur." An enormous Paumotan native stood in the doorway smiling benignly.
He would accompany us. He would cook, and he would dive.
We sailed that evening, the deck being littered with green bananas, live chickens tied by the leg to bulwark stanchions, a rabbit, firewood, a stove composed of a kerosene tin half filled with earth, and—Pascal.
There was apparently nothing this extraordinary man could not do. He knew every island of the Marquesas like the palm of his hand. He could produce savoury messes from a kerosene tin, remain under water three minutes, discourse entertainingly in pidgin-English, French, German, Marquesan, and Paumotan, and secure a ship's provisions without the annoying triviality of paying for them.
"But whom do we owe for all this?" I asked him, eyeing the menagerie that surrounded us.
Pascal smiled and waved a hand.
"Rabbit no money," he informed us; "chickens, bananas, all no money. Me get um."
Here surely is a solution of the high-cost-of-living problem. Take Pascal to the profiteering areas and the thing is done.
Dawn revealed to us Tahuata close abeam. Each island of this group seems more lovely than the last: waterfalls pouring three thousand feet to the sea, blow-holes at the base of rocky cliffs that spray the air with spindrift and miniature rainbows, deep bays with coral beaches at their head.
But the beauties of nature were not for us on this occasion; we were prospecting. It was a serious business. There might be money in it. After this I can scarce believe that in Paradise itself the white man will not be dogged by the curse of opportunism.
Leaving the dream ship at anchor a cable's length from shore, we took to the dinghy and explored the floor of the ocean thereabouts through water-glasses, consisting of wooden boxes with glass bottoms. This was the place, Pascal informed us, and, sure enough, there was shell, old barnacle-encrusted shell, but widely scattered.
What of a few samples? Pascal grinned and shook his head. "Shark," he muttered, apologetically; which, being interpreted, meant that he refused to dive.
[image]Men with water-glasses in boat
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Men with water-glasses in boat
He pointed out that in the Paumotus it was different. In the Paumotus there was always a reef-surrounded lagoon where few sharks found entrance. In the Paumotus men dived in couples as a safeguard. In the Paumotus——
In vain we pointed out that we happened to be in the Marquesas and not the Paumotus; that he had been hired to dive in the Marquesas; that we were really very angry—in the Marquesas. He grinned.
[image]A Man of the Atolls
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A Man of the Atolls
In rather less than half an hour, and to Pascal's utter amazement, we had put him and his belongings ashore, paid him his wages, and were under way for Tahiti.
Ah, Monsieur of the incomparable infantry, I rather suspect you of pulling our legs. Or was it that your innate enthusiasm ran away with you? Or that we should have been less hasty? I do not know. All I know is that you spoke truth; there is shell in the Marquesas—and it is likely to remain there.
[image]Off Nukuhiva, Marquesas Islands
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Off Nukuhiva, Marquesas Islands
As the South Pacific Islands become more widely known, which they are rapidly doing, the Marquesas are bound to attract the attention they deserve. Apart from their scenic grandeur and healthful climate, they are as fertile a group as any in the Pacific, and more so than most. It has been proved that cotton of the best quality flourishes there, as well as sugar cane and every other tropical product, and there are thousands of acres of knee-high, well-watered pastures for the stockman.
Since this visit to the Marquesas I have been living in France, to which country the group belongs, and I have not yet met a Frenchman who knows of their existence. In fact, the average Frenchman's ignorance of his own possessions is nothing short of amazing.
Some day the congested areas of this queer old world will overflow, and the Marquesas will be discovered afresh. When that time comes, France will have people knocking at her door and demanding to know why she debars all other nationalities from acquiring land that she does not attempt to develop herself.
Already there is a movement afoot in England to establish a colony in the Marquesas. Permission has somehow been obtained from the French Government—a process comparable with the extraction of a particularly obstinate winkle from its shell—to purchase blocks of land, and distribute them amongst intending settlers who already number over a thousand.
"Lucky thousand!" say I, "and good luck to them!"
THE PAUMOTU ISLANDS
The people of the atolls—including Mr. Mumpus
[image]Chapter X headpiece
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Chapter X headpiece
CHAPTER X
The people of the atolls—including Mr. Mumpus
From the moment I first set eyes on an atoll it fascinated me, and its lure has not departed with the years.
Think of any place in the world that you have seen, and an atoll is different. It is the fairy ring of the sea. Out of the depths it comes, rearing a vegetation and people of its own, and often into the depths it goes, leaving no trace. How? Why? Scientists murmur something about the coral polyp; but, not being a scientist, I prefer my theory of the fairy ring. That was how it looked to me many years ago, and that was how it looked again from the masthead of the dream ship.
We had left the Marquesas seven days previously, and were now becalmed in that maze of atolls known as the Paumotu or Low Archipelago.
Imagine a circular beach of glistening coral sand and green vegetation from five to fifty yards wide, thrust up through the sea for all the world like a hedge, and enclosing a garden of coral fronds submerged under water so still and clear as to be hardly visible, and you have an atoll as I saw it from the masthead.
And there were myriads of them—big atolls, little atolls, fat and thin atolls—fading away into the shimmering heat haze of the horizon. The fairies must have been mighty busy down this way.
I descended to the deck and things mundane. What to do when becalmed in a network of coral reefs and seven-knot currents was the problem that confronted us. I had no text book on the subject, but by some miracle the monstrosity was persuaded to fire on two cylinders.
Imagine yourself, then, passing through the narrow gateway in the hedge—I should say, passage in the reef—and coming to anchor in the garden—I mean lagoon.
It is sunrise, and already the pearling canoes are putting out from the village and scurrying to the fishing grounds over the glassy surface of the lagoon.
A fine people, these of the atolls—upstanding, deep of chest, a race of mermen if ever there was one. From birth up, if they are not in the water they are on it or as close to it as they can get. Take them inland and they die. So they squat on their canoe outriggers, smoking, chatting, laughing, until the spirit moves them (nothing else will), and one of their number drops from sight, feet first, with hardly a ripple.
You look down and you see him, as though through green-tinted glass, crouched on the sloping floor of the lagoon. He is plucking oysters as one would gather flowers in a garden. There is no haste in his movements, nothing to indicate that there is any time limit to his remaining down there, under anything from five to fifteen fathoms of water.
A minute passes, two minutes; still he pursues his leisurely way, plucking to right and left and thrusting the shells into a network bag about his neck.
The man of the atolls is in a world of his own where none but his kind can follow, and they still squat on their outriggers, chatting and laughing like a crowd of boys at a swimming pool.
One alone seems interested in the diver's movements: his mate, a fair-skinned woman, with streaming blue-black hair, leans over the gunwale of the canoe, looking down through a kerosene tin water-glass.
The diver's dark figure against the pale-green coral becomes more blurred; a stream of silver air bubbles floats upward. Three minutes by the watch have come and gone. To the landsman it seems incredible; and even then there is no haste, no shooting to the surface and gasps for breath.
The dark body becomes clearer in outline as it emerges from the depths, and slowly, quite slowly, floats upward until a jet-black head breaks water and the diver clings to the gunwale of the canoe, inhaling deep but unhurried breaths and exhaling with a long-drawn whistle peculiarly his own.
In what way this whistle helps matters it is impossible to say, but whether a habit, a pose, or an aid in the regaining of breath, it is universal throughout the Paumotus; so much so that a busy afternoon with the pearlers sounds more like a tin-whistle band than anything else.
With the people of the atolls the ability to remain under water for long periods is more than an art; it is second nature. Instinctively, they do just those things that make one breath suffice for three minutes and sometimes four.
Preparatory to a descent they do not take a deep breath and hold it until the surface is reached again. They fill their lungs with a normal amount of air, which lasts them about a minute and a half; the other minute and a half is occupied in its exhalation. Then, too, every movement below water is made with the utmost conservation of energy; yet a good diver can bring up a hundred and fifty kilos of shell in a day, which means in the neighbourhood of six hundred francs.
And it is just these same nimble francs that tempt the Paumotan to abase his talents, even as others are tempted the world over. For the sake of a few more shells, another cluster a little farther down, he remains below just that trifle longer than is good for him, and in time it tells. The eyes become bloodshot and start from the head, he goes deaf, or paralysis seizes him.
"But the women are the worst," a sun-baked trader informed me; "the worst or the best, as you like to put it," he added, grinning. "They'll go on till they burst, or pretty near it. Bargain-counter instinct, I guess. We call it the 'bends.'"
'"The bends?'"
"Yes, one of 'em goes down, and down; sees some more shell a bit lower, and some more a bit lower than that. Then she's reaching out for one last flutter at something like twenty fathoms when they get her the 'bends,' I mean. You can see her fighting against them, but it's no good; they bring her knees to her chin, and she can't straighten up, and she drops the last lot of shell she's gathered, and hates that worse than the 'bends'."
"What does she do?"
"Nothing, except lie there crumpled up until her mate fetches her up and massages her back to life. Then she's no sooner conscious than she's down again.
"Water never kills this crowd; it takes dry land to do that. Why, there's a diver close on fifty years old here, paralyzed clean down one side. He can't walk, but he can swim. He gets them to carry him down to the reef and heave him in; says it's the only place he can get any comfort."
"How about sharks?"
"Oh, there are sharks all right, but the diver's mate looks after that; gives the signal, and they're all in after him double quick."
"Finish him off with knives, eh?"
The sun-baked trader smiled reminiscently.
"Well, hardly," he said. "A dead shark makes a square meal for the others, and that's all. What they need is an example, and they get it. They're cruising about sometime when they come on one of their number with no tail, one fin, and sundry other decorations that wouldn't exactly please the S.P.C.A. He is not nice to look at, and they clear out of a place where such things are possible.
"When an island's thrown open for pearlings, we spend weeks mutilating sharks before the divers'll go down, and small blame to them, I say. Sharks are—well, sharks."
The casual reader picks up a good deal of information about "gold rushes" and such-like romantic undertakings from the plethora of novels on the subject; but who has ever heard of a pearl-rush? Yet they occur every year in the Paumotus.
The group belongs to the French, and is administered from the local seat of government at Papeete, Tahiti. Here a heterogeneous collection of humanity awaits the opening of the pearling season like a hovering cloud of mosquitoes.
There are pearl buyers from Paris and London, representatives of shell-buying concerns from Europe and America; British, Chinese, and Indian traders, speculative schooner skippers and supercargoes, not to mention the riff-raff of the beaches, all intent on pickings from the most prolific pearling islands in the South Pacific.
[image]Shark, pearl diver
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Shark, pearl diver
And this is the law of the group—infringed, circumvented, broken, but still the law—that although under French Government, the Paumotus and all they produce belong to the Paumotans.
Still further to protect the native, diving apparatus is banned throughout the group. The oyster, as he brings it from the water, is the diver's property. He must open the shell aboard his canoe before touching land, remove the flesh, and, after testing it for pearls (usually by kneading it so thoroughly between finger and thumb as to crush the life out of it), throw it back into the lagoon to propagate its species. Should he find a pearl, it is his also.
It is then up to the cloud of "mosquitoes" before mentioned to get both shell and pearl out of him as best it can. One can imagine the buzzing and biting that ensue.
From the buyer's point of view, the sooner and the deeper he gets a good diver into his debt the better. He then has some hold. Consequently, he spoon-feeds his selected divers like the infants that they are. Tinned delicacies of all sorts, Prince Albert suits of unbelievable thickness and cut, silk socks, and stockings are a good diver's for the asking during the closed season.
With shell at one thousand dollars a ton in Philadelphia (the largest consumer at the present time), and pearls soaring to apparently limitless heights, all will be well when work starts.
And the diver? From long experience of "mosquitoes," he is by no means slow. Shortly before the season opens he is presented with a bill that would cause most of us to register apoplexy. He looks at it, grins, and proceeds to dive. He also proceeds to make caches of shell on the floor of the lagoon, only bringing up half of what he collects in payment of his debts. At night he retrieves his cache and sells for cash to the smaller "mosquitoes" who infest the beach. As for pearls, from the moment the diver's finger and thumb encounter foreign matter in the flesh of the oyster, he becomes about as communicative on the subject as his catch. Should the truth leak out, his find will promptly be confiscated in payment of his everlasting debts, or the wily pearl-buyer will use threats of exposure to reduce the price.
No, the diver, if he is up to snuff, will work his passage to Papeete on a schooner, sell to a Chinaman, who neither asks questions nor tells tales, and proceed to enjoy himself according to his lights.
Blossoming into a Prince Albert suit, a red tie, and silk socks, he will hire a car, load it up with lady friends and execrable rum, and vanish into thin air for a fortnight, at the end of which time he has somehow contrived to get rid of all he possessed and is perfectly prepared to return to his atolls and his debts. He has lived like a white man and cheated the "mosquitoes"; what more can Paumotan heart desire?
The thing we call progress has slain the picturesque in most industries of this world, but not so with pearling in the Paumotus. During the season, the beach of one of these atolls resembles an Old-World fair more than anything I can call to mind.
A crazy merry-go-round brays and rocks in the shade of the palms, luring the adventurous to invest three pearl shells in a ride on a broken-necked camel. The ubiquitous movie "palace" has reared its unlovely head, and for more shell or five cocoanuts one may witness on the shores of a South Sea lagoon the battered remnants of a love affair enacted not far from Los Angeles. I have often wondered what happens to all the worn-out films in the world. Now I know.
This season, and for the first time, the people of the atolls are to be initiated into the mysteries of ice-cream. Truly, the "mosquito" stops at nothing.
It was down in this part of the world that I met Mr. Mumpus, though that is not his name. To reach him you must pick your way with the motor auxiliary through a maze of reefs, lie off and on, because there is no pass into his lagoon, and plod through blazing sand in a temperature of ninety in the shade, which there is not. But it is worth it.
You will probably find him in the pearl orchard, a green-lined umbrella in one hand and a dripping oyster shell in the other. He will stare fixedly at you for upward of half a minute and then say: "How the devil did you get here?" with a brusqueness that is alarming until you get used to it.
In my own case I indicated the dream ship, looking particularly smart in her recent coat of white paint.
"What! In that thing?" remarked Mr. Mumpus.
I was smitten to silence for a space.
"I heard you were making pearls," I told him on regaining something of my equanimity, "and thought you might be so good as to tell me about it."
"Come up to the house," he barked, and led the way to a rambling erection of corrugated iron and palm leaves containing, as far as I could make out, a gaping "boy" of uncertain origin, some empty soap boxes, and a microscope.
"There's nothing new in what I'm doing here," he told me over two brimming shells of cocoanut milk, "nothing that the Chinese have not been doing for centuries. The pearl is a disease of the oyster; introduce the disease and you will get a pearl."
"Quite," said I.
"No one has succeeded up to the present," continued Mr. Mumpus, "but there is no reason why it should not be done in time, no reason at all. I am appreciably nearer than I was a year ago, for instance. In the meantime, I am producing the ordinary blisters, or half pearls, with various foundations. You see, the cestoid——"
But I cannot hope to set down here all that this amazing man told me in scientific jargon, as he strode back and forth across his mat-strewn floor.
He was a doctor by profession, had tired of it, and come to the islands to pursue his hobby of pearl culture. He takes an oyster from the lagoon, opens it very carefully by the slow insertion of a wooden wedge, and places a pilule of beeswax against the main muscle. The mantle of the oyster then covers it with mother-of-pearl, and in the course of a few months our friend cuts from the shell a very fair imitation of a half pearl.
But, as most people are aware, the real pearl comes from the flesh of the oyster, and it is on the production of the genuine article that Mr. Mumpus centres his efforts. He breeds oysters in the lagoon and dissects them under the microscope for signs of the parasite that undoubtedly causes the pearl. He injects into the flesh of others all manner of foreign matter.
Down there on his speck of an atoll he treats the oyster as a surgeon treats an interesting case and—who knows?—some day there may burst upon an astonished world the name of a man who can make pearls, and that name will not be Mr. Mumpus.
PAPEETE, TAHITI
Tahiti: its pleasures and problems
[image]Chapter XI headpiece
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Chapter XI headpiece
CHAPTER XI
Tahiti: its pleasures and problems