In the Track of the Trades
by Lewis R. Freeman · English · Gutenberg #43824 · 647,144 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: In the Track of the Trades
Author: Lewis R. Freeman
Release date: September 27, 2013 [eBook #43824]
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE TRACK OF THE TRADES ***
[Illustration: A QUIET INLET ON THE COAST OF SAMOA]
IN THE
TRACKS OF THE TRADES
THE ACCOUNT OF A FOURTEEN THOUSAND
MILE YACHTING CRUISE TO THE HAWAIIS,
MARQUESAS, SOCIETIES, SAMOAS AND FIJIS
BY
LEWIS R. FREEMAN
Author of "Many Fronts," "Stories of the Ships,"
"Sea-Hounds," "To Kiel in
the 'Hercules.'"
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
BY THE AUTHOR
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1920,
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.
VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY
BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK
TO
THE MEMORY OF
'THE COMMODORE'
THE LATE H. H. SINCLAIR
"THE TRACKS OF THE TRADES"
Take me back, take me back to the Tracks of the Trade!
Let me wander again in the coco palms' shade,
Where the drums of the ocean, in pulsating roar,
Beat time for the waltz of the waves on the shore;
Where sunlight and starlight and moonlight conspire
To speed the gay hours on the Wings of Desire;
Let me clamber again through the orchid-bright glade--
Take me back, take me back to the Tracks of the Trade!
Oh, the hot flame of sunset, the tremulous light
When the afterglow fades to the velvet of night!
The star-stencilled headland in blank silhouette
Where the moonbeams are meshed in the flamboyant's net!
Oh, the purple of midnight, the grey mists of dawn,
And the amber flood after the darkness has gone!
The slow-heaving ocean of gold-spangled jade,
When the sun wakes the day in the Tracks of the Trade!
Let my heart thrill again as the tom-tom's dull boom
Floats out from the bush in the flower-fragrant gloom,
And the shriek of the conches, the _hi-mi-ne's_ swell,
Brings word of the feast in the depths of the dell.
Lead my footsteps again to that forest crypt dim,
Where firelight throws shadows on bosom and limb
Of the billowing forms of the trim tropic maids,
When the song wakes the dance in the Tracks of the Trades!
Let my hands close again on the hard-kicking wheel,
As the schooner romps off on a rollicking reel,
To the humming of back-stay and sharp-slatting sail,
And the hiss of the comber that smothers the rail.
Oh, the cadenced lament of the chorusing shroud,
As the spindrift sweeps aft in a feathery cloud!
Oh, the storm-tumbled sea-ways traversed unafraid,
As the squalls spin the spume down the Tracks of the Trade!
Take me back, take me back to the Tracks of the Trade!
For 'tis weary I am of the city's parade,
Of the dust of the traffic, the grey cheerless skies,
And the long lines of people with spiritless eyes.
Take me back to my green sunny islands again,
Away from this treadmill of sorrow and pain,
Away from this tinsel and gilt masquerade--
Let me live, let me die in the Tracks of the Trade!
L. R. F.
Pasadena,
July, 1920.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I SAN PEDRO TO HILO AND HONOLULU 1
II HONOLULU TO TAIO-HAIE 26
III THE MARQUESAS TODAY 52
IV HUNTING IN THE MARQUESAS 72
V THE PASSION PLAY AT UAHUKA 99
VI TAIO-HAIE TO PAPEETE 110
VII CIRCLING TAHITI 134
VIII SOCIETY IN THE SOCIETIES 151
IX THE SONG AND DANCE IN TAHITI 160
X BY THE ABSINTHE ROUTE 182
XI PAPEETE TO PAGO PAGO 195
XII IN PAGO PAGO BAY 212
XIII SAMOAN CRICKET: FAUGA-SA
V. PAGO PAGO 232
XIV A VISIT TO APIA 246
XV KAVA AND THE SIVA 262
XVI PAGO PAGO TO SUVA 283
XVII IN SUVA AND MBAU 296
XVIII "SHARKS" 320
XIX "HIS WONDERS TO PERFORM" 334
XX SUVA TO HONOLULU 357
XXI HONOLULU TO SAN PEDRO 368
ILLUSTRATIONS
A quiet inlet on the coast of Samoa _Frontispiece_
PAGE
_Lurline_ in drydock before sailing 8
"The Commodore laboriously squinted out his
first sights" 9
"Full-and-by" 9
Waiohae Beach, Island of Hawaii 20
Hula dancer with Eukalele 21
"All of the images were covered with moss" 62
"A hardened old offender who preferred white
man to native meat" 63
The best surviving example of Marquesan
tattooing 68
"Into it were thrown the bones of the victims
after the feast was over" 69
"The part of Christ is taken by a native
called Lurau" 102
Marquesan mother and child 103
"Pontius Pilate has been played for twenty
years by an old chief--a quondam cannibal" 108
"Just in time to respond to his 'cue' in the
John the Baptist tableau" 109
"Hatiheu, the most sublime combination
of mountain, vale and sea that my eyes
have ever rested on" 112
A Marquesan fisherman of Hatiheu 113
Native woman washing on the beach,
Tahiti 158
A Mission bathing suit. Before the
bath--and after 159
The inevitable end of every South Sea
trading schooner 200
A Tahitian couple 201
"A naval station at Pago Pago has placed
the United States, strategically, in the
strongest position in western Polynesia" 214
Chief Tufeli in the uniform of a sergeant
of _Fita-fitas_ 215
Faa-oo-pea, chieftainess of Pago Pago,
making _kava_ 222
Seuka, _taupo_ of Pago Pago, illustrating
a movement in the _Siva_ 223
A Samoan house in the course of
construction 226
"Chief Tufeli came over for the express
purpose of buying the yacht" 227
"Chief Mauga squared away to face the
bowling of Chief Malatoba" 236
To-a, who made the best score for Pago
Pago, facing the bowler 237
"Whirling and yelling like dervishes they
made a circuit of the ground" 244
"A sinewy brown figure starts clambering
up the tree" 245
_Lurline_ at anchor in Bay of Apia, Samoa 250
"The London Missionary Society steamer,
_John Williams_, lay near us" 251
Maid of honour to the _Taupo_ of Apia 258
A Samoan sunset 259
The sitting _Sivas_ are essentially dances
of the arms 274
"Never were seen such arms as in Samoa" 275
Fanua, who danced the swimming _Siva_
by the light of the phosphorescent waves 280
Dancer with head knife 281
Forty years ago the Fijis were in a
complete state of savagery 298
A Fijian head hunting canoe 299
"_Lurline's_ cutter finished a
poor second" 304
"Thakambau's great war canoe, over
a hundred feet in length, formerly
launched over human bodies" 305
Shark on the beach at Mbau 324
Fijian boys boxing 325
Weaving the walls of a Fijian house 342
Interior of a Fijian house, showing
how it is bound together with coco
fibre 343
A Fijian warrior 362
Reefing the mainsail 363
Untying a reef in the mainsail 363
IN THE TRACKS OF THE TRADES
IN THE TRACKS OF THE TRADES
CHAPTER I
SAN PEDRO TO HILO AND HONOLULU
The Weather Bureau, which for several weeks had been issuing bulletins
of the "Possibly Showers" order, came out unequivocally with "Rain" on
the morning of February 4th, and this, no less than the lead-coloured
curtain that veiled the Sierra Madres and the windy shimmers in
the tails of the clouds that went rushing across the zenith before
the gushing east wind, made it plain that the elements, not to be
outdone by our amiable friends, were getting together for a special
demonstration on their own account in honour of _Lurline's_ departure.
The nature of this elemental diversion developed in good time.
Personal good-byes began at the Pasadena station and continued down
through Los Angeles to the San Pedro quay. From there, out through
the inner harbour, bon voyages became general, and from the engineer
of the government dredge, who blew his whistle off with the force of
his farewell toots, to the deck hand on a collier who, in lieu of a
handkerchief, waved the shirt he was washing, everybody took a hand in
the parting demonstration.
Rounding the jetty opposite Deadman's Island, _Lurline_ was sighted
lying a half mile to the westward in the backsweep of the outer bay.
The crew stood at attention as the Commodore, with a score or more
of friends who had come off for a final farewell, stepped aboard,
immediately to turn to stowing the small mountain of hand luggage
which had come off with the launch. Soon visitors began arriving
from the other yachts of the South Coast fleet, and these, reinforced
by several press representatives and a number of shore visitors from
San Pedro, swelled the farewell party to a size that taxed the standing
room capacity of quarter deck and cabin to the utmost.
Just before the sailing hour arrived presentation was made to the
Commodore of a large silver loving cup, and this being filled, each
visitor, ere he stepped down the gangway, proposed some appropriate
toast and drank to a prosperous voyage and safe return.
Meanwhile the sail covers had been removed and the stops cast off, and
as the last of the visitors stepped back aboard their waiting launches,
all hands tailed on to the main throat and peak halyards and the big
sail was smartly hoisted and swayed to place. Foresail, forestay-sail
and jib followed. Finally the anchor, clinging tenaciously to the last
California mud it was destined to hook its flukes into for many months,
was broken out, and, close-hauled on the starboard tack to a light
breeze, _Lurline_ swung off past the breakwater and out of the harbour.
At four o'clock Point Firmin Light, distant five miles, bore N.W. by
W., and at the same hour the barometer, which had risen rapidly since
noon, registered 30.40, about the normal for the southern California
coast. The gentle southerly breeze cleared the western sky toward
evening and a warm hued sunset blazed out in defiance of the
threatening signs of the morning. The yacht slipped easily through
the light swell of the channel, her regular curtesies serving only to
spangle her glossy sides with sparkling drops of brine and to
punctuate her wake at even intervals with swelling knots of foam
like the marks on a trailed sounding line.
"Fairweather sunset," said the mate; "but--" and he finished by shaking
his head dubiously and proceeding to give orders for swinging the boats
inboard and adding extra lashings to the spare spars and water-butts on
the forward deck.
Early in the first watch, and not long after the thin wisp of a new
moon had slipped down behind the jagged peaks of Catalina, the wind
hauled suddenly to the southeast. Blowing with steadily increasing
force, it drove a heavy pall of sooty clouds before it. This, quickly
spreading out across the sky, rendered the night so dark that, beyond
the ghostly reflections from the binnacle lamps, nothing was visible
save the phosphorescent crests of the rapidly rising seas. With this
slant of wind the best that we could do on the starboard tack was dead
east, and this direction was held until the imminent loom of Point San
Juan, and a not-overly-distant roar of breakers, warned us to put about
and head off southwesterly between San Clemente and Catalina.
At midnight the barometer was well below 30, and the wind and sea were
still rising. The mainsail and foresail were single reefed when the
watch came on deck, and while sail was being shortened a heavy sea
came aboard just forward of the beam and crashed through the galley
skylight. The water rushed in with the roar of a miniature Niagara, but
beyond washing the Japanese cook off the transom on which he had
composed himself for sleep and bouncing him against the stove, no
serious harm was done.
At two in the morning, with no abatement of force, the wind went
back to S.S.W., and with Clemente rising darkly ahead the yacht was
again put about. The barometer was down to 29.80, and the half-gale
that met us as we came out from under the lee of the island quickly
made it evident that further shortening of sail was imperative. The
watch was called, and with no little difficulty two more reefs were
tied in the mainsail, bringing it down almost to the proportions of
a storm trysail. The foreboom was being hauled amidships preparatory
to close-reefing the foresail, when a solid wall of green water came
combing over the port bow and swept the deck like an avalanche. One
of the sailors--Gus, a big Swede--who had been bracing a foot against
the lee rail, lost his balance in the sudden lurch and, missing a
frantic clutch at a shroud, went over the side. A rush was made
for the life-buoys, but, before one could be thrown over, the lost
man reappeared, coolly drawing himself in, hand over hand, on the
foresheet, a bight of which he had carried with him in his fall.
"_Mein Gott_, der rain he stop not yet, _hein_!" was his only comment
as he returned to the interrupted attack on the flopping foreboom.
One would have thought that he had been gone ten hours instead of ten
seconds.
After subduing and triple-reefing the threshing foresail the watch
went below, but only to be called again almost immediately to take the
bonnet out of the staysail, a measure made necessary by the fierce
southwesterly squalls which kept winding into the now fully developed
"sou'easter." Finally, as the storm showed no signs of abating, the
forestay-sail was hauled to windward and, head-reaching, the yacht
made good weather of the last hours of the night.
Day broke, cold and cloudy, and showed the bare, brown, rounded hills
of Clemente ten miles distant on the starboard quarter. Towering,
weighty seas, unbroken now by the islands, came charging up out of
the southwest in billowing ranks, but so buoyant was the schooner
under her shortened sail that the grey light of the morning showed the
brine of the last wave that had swept her decks before she was put to
head-reaching spangled in frost-like _repouseé_ along the lee scuppers.
Toward midday the wind shifted suddenly to northwest, and though still
blowing a gale it was deemed best to risk a little more sail in an
endeavour to get away from the islands before night closed down again.
Accordingly, the reefs were shaken out of foresail and forestay-sail,
and under these and a close-reefed mainsail twenty-four miles were
run off in the afternoon watch. At four o'clock, when the barometer
touched its minimum of 29.60, a nasty swell from the northeast, due to
another shifting of the wind, began to make itself felt, and, though
nothing carried away, the vicious twist of the cross surges made so bad
a seaway that we were forced to reef down again and ride out the night
head-reaching in a southwesterly direction.
By morning of the 6th the gale had blown itself out, and at the change
of watch all the reefs were untied and the yacht appeared under all
plain lower sail for the first time since the evening of departure.
Toward noon the clouds began to break up and let filter through
streaks of pale sunlight to dapple the olive-green hollows of the sea
with vagrant patches of golden yellow. The chill of the air gradually
melted away as the day advanced, and the opportunity to open
skylights and portholes was warmly welcomed by the Mater and
Claribel who had been kept to the cabin for nearly two days. A couple
of the light sails were set at noon and carried until a heavy squall,
working around from the northwest just before dark, was responsible
for sending them down by the run. The runs to noon of the 5th and 6th,
respectively, were sixty-three and ninety miles, in a course that
approximated W.S.W.
Fair weather and light breezes were taken advantage of on the morning
of the 7th to install a much-needed safety device in the form of a wire
rail run all the way round the yacht at a height of eighteen inches
above the main rail, a precaution the imperative necessity of which had
been shown when one of the sailors had been thrown overboard during
the storm. The yacht's rail, only two feet in height, while of some
protection at the bows and stern, was almost useless amidships, where
the deckhouse, separated from it by only a narrow passage, rose to an
equal height. Three-quarter inch steel stanchions were set at intervals
of eight feet along the rail, and through these a quarter-inch wire
cable was run. The stanchions were fastened by a bolt on the under side
of the rail in such a manner as to be easily removed, thus permitting
the whole affair to be expeditiously taken down and stowed while in
port. This simple and inexpensive precaution proved of incalculable
value in insuring the safety of the decks on stormy nights, a
usefulness which was put to the test many times in the course of the
months that followed.
Clearing skies and a smoothing sea on the third day out brought the
Mater and Claribel--two pathetic bundles of rugs--up on deck, where the
sun and fresh air began the slow task of reviving in them an interest
in life. All day they drooped in hollow-eyed wretchedness with their
white faces turned toward the paradise of a terra firma beyond the
eastern horizon which every moment was receding farther away. Through
all of the bright noontide and the sparkling afternoon they kept their
ceaseless vigil, and even when twilight came, with a freshening wind
and heavier seas, they still refused to go below. Day and night were
all the same to them now, they said. An hour later a black-visaged
squall came boring down out of the night ahead, and the raindrops and
the driving spray began to drum a duet to the accompaniment of the
rising blasts of the wind.
"You'll be shivering with cold before long if you stay here,"
admonished the Commodore gently; "best get up and go below now."
"There is no heat or cold any more," one muttered listlessly, and they
both drew their rugs closer and curled the tighter into the curve of
the transoms.
A high-headed maverick of a comber came crashing over the weather rail
and swept the muffled figures into a vortex of spinning foam where a
ton of green water washed about the cockpit. We sprang to help them,
but they only shuddered resignedly back into the wash of the clearing
scuppers and disdained to move.
"You're both soaking wet," protested the Commodore; "please go below
now and get into some dry clothes."
"There is no wet nor dry any more," bubbled the starboard bundle; "let
us alone."
"A wave like that last one has been known to kill a strong man,"
ventured the Commodore weakly, at his wit's end for an argument that
would have some effect. "Here's another coming now. Please--"
"There is no life nor death any more," broke in a sputter from the port
bundle; "and even if there was we wouldn't--"
We picked up the two dripping bundles and bore them gently below just
as a second comber, running wildly amuck, banged its head off against
the rail and turned the cockpit into another maelstrom.
Save for shortening periods of introspective languor induced by whiffs
from the galley or the clink of dishes, matters were better the next
day, and the day following the sufferers were sufficiently revived
to begin unpacking and--as they called it--"putting things trig and
shipshape below." After that things began falling into the even
routine which, save for its occasional disturbance in stormy weather,
characterized our life at sea to the end of the voyage. But there never
came a time when, for the Mater and Claribel, the first three or four
days out of port did not hold the menace of that chaotic state in which
there was no night or day, heat or cold, wetness or dryness, and in
which if there was to have been a choosing between life and death the
latter would have been the less bitter portion. A Pacific yachting
cruise is not all an idyllic pleasaunce to the _mal-de-mer_ subject, for
the ocean which has not been pacific for many hours at a time since
the day it was discovered and christened does not temper its moods
for the small craft.
[Illustration: _Lurline_ IN DRYDOCK BEFORE
SAILING]
[Illustration: "THE COMMODORE LABORIOUSLY
SQUINTED OUT HIS FIRST SIGHTS"]
[Illustration: "FULL-AND-BY"]
In spite of restricted quarters, the days which followed seemed never
long enough to do all we laid out for them. The Commodore was the
busiest of us. To him it became evident before we were fairly out of
sight of land that his pleasure cruise was going to have to be enjoyed
to the accompaniment of a lot of hard work, for _Lurline's_ former
sailing master--whom he had shipped as mate and whom he subsequently
let go in Honolulu--was absolutely incompetent as a navigator and only
fairly so in the actual sailing of the yacht. This came as a very
disconcerting surprise, for the man had been well recommended, and
his incompetence meant that all of the work--to say nothing of the
responsibility--of navigating the yacht through some of the stormiest
and worst charted latitudes of the Seven Seas was to be thrown on the
Commodore, whose deep-sea sailoring had been confined to a voyage
around the Horn on a clipper when he was in his teens.
I have still a vivid mind picture of the Commodore when, after he had
laboriously squinted out his first sights and was ready to try to
figure the position of the yacht, he disappeared into his cabin behind
an armful of tables and books on navigation and slammed and locked the
door. The iterated luncheon call elicited only a grunt of impatience
from the depths of the sanctum, and likewise the summons to tea and
dinner. The Mater's timid knocking at bedtime brought no answer at all,
and we were gathered in perplexed colloquy on deck as to what the next
move would be, when a booming "Got it!" thundered out from the locked
cabin, and a moment later the door was burst open by a pajama-clad
figure, waving a slip of paper above its towel-bound head.
"Observation checks Dead-reckoning at last," cried the Commodore. "Give
me some dinner."
Between mouthfuls he explained to us that the first time he worked
out the sights they showed the yacht to be somewhere in Tibet. All
the rest of the morning she kept turning up in various parts of Asia,
Africa, Australia and Europe, the only time she was in the water being
after a reckoning which gave the latitude and longitude of Victoria
Nyanza. Shortly after noon the figuring in of some allowances hitherto
neglected jumped the elusive craft into the Western Hemisphere, but as
near as might be to a perch on the summit of Aconcagua. Tea time had
her in the Klondike, and several other Canadian points were visited
before Nebraska was reached at the call for dinner. An hour later she
was actually in the Pacific, but floundering helplessly off the coast
of Peru, from where she worked north in an encouraging fashion until a
sudden jump landed her in the Colorado desert. She was perilously near
being stranded on Catalina at the end of the second dog-watch, and it
was the reckoning after this one--magnetic variation and a few other
essentials being finally included--that checked with the Dead-reckoning
and put the poor wanderer where she belonged. Day by day, navigation
became simpler work after that titanic struggle, until, the morning we
sighted the island of Hawaii, I saw the Commodore take and work out in
ten minutes an observation which told him in which direction the
harbour of Hilo was located.
Besides navigating and directing the sailing of the yacht, the
Commodore always stood one of the night watches and at other times
held himself ready to appear on deck at any emergency. It was a stiff
undertaking, having suddenly to face the prospect of eight or ten
months of day and night work on a small schooner in the treacherous
South Pacific; but the Commodore buckled down to it with the enthusiasm
of a youngster and carried it through with flying colours, as will be
seen.
My own work was confined to the nominal duties of Volunteer Weather
Observer for the U. S. Hydrographic Office,--a branch of the Bureau
of Equipment of the Navy--occasional tricks at the wheel, and falling
into line now and then at the tail of a sheet or halyard when "all
hands and the cook" failed to muster sufficient power amongst them.
As Weather Observer I became for eight months a small cog in the very
comprehensive system by which the Hydrographic Office is gathering data
on currents, winds, clouds, waves, storms, temperatures, etc., from
all of the sailed-in sea-ways of the world to assist in perfecting
its monthly weather charts on which--as the result of the accumulated
observations of many years--the probable meteorological conditions
likely to prevail at any given point are recorded. Twice a day I took
the temperature of the air and water, recorded the direction and
force of the wind--the latter on a scale of 1 to 10, from a calm to
a full gale--the set and height of the seas, and on a circular chart
of the heavens indicated which of the various kinds of clouds--nimbus,
cirrus, cumulus, etc.--prevailed at the time in each of the twelve
divisions into which it was divided. The difference between the
position of the yacht by Dead-reckoning--that is, figured by the log
and compass--and the position by Observation gave the direction
and speed of the ocean current at that point. These data were set
down in a little booklet, containing a page for each day of the month,
which, when filled, was mailed to the San Francisco branch of the
Hydrographic Office. (The monthly weather charts for the Pacific, with
which we had been supplied through the courtesy of this office, proved
most valuable for those latitudes which were crossed by regular trade
routes, and in which, as a consequence, comprehensive observations
extending over some years had been taken; but in the little-sailed
latitudes of the South Pacific--many stretches of which are still
unploughed by a keel for years at a time--they were, naturally,
fragmentary and of little practical use.)
We often have been asked if time did not hang very heavily on our hands
in the long, unbroken fifteen, twenty and even thirty day intervals
between ports. Perhaps this will be as good a place as any to answer
that question. For the Commodore and myself I will register an emphatic
"No," while a partial list of the activities of the ladies, will, I
think, answer for the balance of the passengers.
In comparison with Claribel, once those dreadful spells of post-departure
indisposition had trailed away into bad memories, every one on the
yacht--not excepting the cook and the Commodore--was a drone and
loafer. Her quenchless energy found expression in musical, linguistic,
literary, culinary and manual activities throughout the voyage. A guitar
and a banjo held the boards to Hawaii, where a _eukelele_ was
annexed and mastered, after which, group by group and island by island,
every form of native musical instrument from hollow-tree tom-toms and
war conches to coco shell rattles and shark's hide tambourines was
taken up in turn and blown, beaten, shaken or twanged into yielding
its full capacity of soul-stirring harmony. Most of these instruments
she even rebuilt or imitated with good success. Vocally (Claribel has
a really fine voice) simple ballads of the "tenderness-and-pathos,
pull-at-the-heart-strings" type were favoured until our arrival at
Hilo, where "Aloha-oe" and various swinging _hulas_ had their turn;
these giving way to plaintive Marquesan sonatas, rollicking Tahitian
_himines,_ lilting Samoan serenades and booming Fijian war-chants,
as, one after another, these various isles of enchantment were put
behind us. Her terpsichorean achievements were equally varied and
multitudinous, for there were few poses in the primer postures of the
_hula-hula_ and the _siva-siva_ that she did not imitate and embroider
upon in a manner to awaken the envy of the nimble Fof-iti, the
_première danseuse_ of the court of King Pomare, or even of the sinuous
Seuka, the peerless _taupo_ who led the dance in the thatch palace of
Chief Mauga at Pago-Pago.
When I mention that in addition to these things the indefatigable
Claribel also set up a "native crafts" shop in the starboard lifeboat,
where she produced wooden gods, shark-tooth necklaces, tortoise-shell
combs (genuine shell), war clubs and axes, carved coco shells, tappa
cloth and similar "tourist" curios of a character to defy detection
(by us) and at a cost (figuring her time as worth nothing) effectively
to defy native competition; that she read Goethe and Heine (complete)
in German, and all of the 200 or more volumes in the yacht's library,
including several works on navigation, ship-building and astronomy, as
well; that she made herself a dozen or more tropical dresses (not
native, but full-sized garments); that she mastered the technique of
my typewriter and wrote a voluminous journal upon it, manifolding some
scores of copies to send to friends at home; that she played the
gramophone for us whenever the yacht was steady enough to allow that
sensitive instrument to keep an even keel;--when I mention all of
these various spheres of activity in which Claribel circulated, and
then admit that I have still left the list incomplete for want of
space, it will readily be seen that time had little chance to hang
heavily on her nimble hands and that she had scant opportunity to
learn the meaning of that hackneyed term, "the monotony of the voyage."
The Mater, when she was not being whirled in the back-wash of the
comet-like wake of Claribel's multudinous activities, spent her time
in quiet dignity with knitting or embroidery, reading and solitaire;
but when the demon of _ennui_ threatened to raise its Gorgon head in
the form of an interval of idleness, the both of them would turn to
and write "items of interest" for the "Ladies' Log," a diurnal record
of feminine _impressions de voyage_ which spared no one in the cabin,
galley or fo'c'sl'--not even the editors themselves--in its trenchant
columns of comment. I shall have occasion, doubtless, not infrequently
to quote from its scintillant pages.
On the run from San Pedro to Hawaii our course was at first directed
somewhat more southerly than the straight one to Hilo in the hope of
the sooner intercepting the Northeast Trades, which, according to the
government weather charts, should ordinarily be met with somewhere in
the vicinity of the 27th parallel. During the morning watch of the 8th
our expectations appeared to be realized. Just as the rising sun broke
through a shoal of silver clouds a crackling breeze from the E.N.E.
came humming over the taffrail, and, heeling the yacht over until the
hissing brine curled off by her forefoot kissed the starboard rail,
sent her spinning through the water at a good ten-knot gait.
"Northeast Trades!" chuckled the starboard watch to the port watch as
the latter came on deck; "Northeast Trades--cheer up, the Hilo girls
have got the tow-line!"
"Northeast Trades--now for a big day's run!" bellowed the mate to the
Commodore, as he ordered the kites run up and the backstays set and
tautened; and "Northeast Trades!" mused the cook to the bacon; and
"Northeast Trades" chirped the ladies to their mirrors; and "Northeast
Trades" hummed the sails to the sheets and the halyards to the shrouds.
The air was vibrant with the good news, the sea was a-dance because of
it, and the sun, when he awoke to a full realization of the import of
what was on, broke into a smile so expansive and warm that the hovering
mists of the morning took up their tents and hurried away.
This felicitous state of affairs lasted until eight o'clock, when the
wind veered around through east and south, finally to settle itself
comfortably so near S.S.W. that it kept the headsails flapping and the
mainsails a-shiver at the mast to hold the yacht's head up to W.S.W.,
a good two points north of a course which, normally, we should have
sailed "wing-and-wing." And that was the last we saw of the
much-vaunted Northeast Trades until, five months afterwards on the
run back to Hawaii from Fiji, they met us at the equator and headed
us all the way to Honolulu.
For the remainder of the run the breeze, except in occasional squalls,
blew steadily and with moderate force from all points between southeast
and southwest. Several times, for a few hours at a stretch, it hauled
around as far as W.S.W., and even west, on which occasions the booms
were jibed to port and a few miles of the much-needed southing
run off. A half dozen times we ran free for an hour or two when a
favourable slant of wind offered, but oftener it was "full-and-by," or
"by-the-wind," with the booms almost amidships in an endeavour to steal
the last fraction of a point from the obstinate turncoat of a wind.
Most of the time the yacht was too close to the wind to admit of the
advantageous use of the main topmast staysail, but either our large or
small sail of that class, as well as the club and jib topsails, were
used whenever opportunity offered.
Runs of close to 190 miles were made on the 9th, 13th and 14th, and
on the 19th the best run of the passage, 198 miles, was logged. On
the 16th and 21st frequent squalls and light baffling airs were
responsible for the shortest runs, fifty-seven and seventy-seven miles
respectively. The average for the other days was in the vicinity of
130 miles. The general direction of the currents encountered was
unfavourable, the prevailing one, which had a northeasterly set of
about ten miles a day, having apparently hooked up with the
contrary winds to cut down our southing and westing. Long before
entering the torrid zone, which was done on the night of the 19th,
the weather in its fitful uncertainty as well as in its mildness,
savoured strongly of the tropics. There was no fog nor even the
shortest periods in which the sky was completely overcast. There was
only one occasion when the zenith was sufficiently obscured to make a
latitude sight impossible at noonday, and no day whose morning was too
cloudy for a longitude observation but which made amends with a clear
afternoon.
No heavy seas were encountered after the storm of the first two days
had been left astern. This was principally due to the fact that the
constantly shifting wind never blew up a sea from one direction
before it veered off to another and beat it down again. The resulting
succession of cross swells was annoying, but never heavy enough really
to be troublesome. The temperature of the water increased slowly but
with almost absolute regularity as we approached the lower latitudes,
while that of the air, though likewise increasing, was more variable,
tending to jump up and down incessantly in the intervals of sunshine
and squalls.
On the morning of the 15th a striking and unusual arrangement of clouds
on the western horizon was responsible for no small excitement. A dull,
dark line of stratus, hanging low above the water, was topped by a
vivid, clean-lined triangle of frosty-white cirro-cumulus, producing
an effect so wonderfully like a snow-capped mountain that the mate,
without stopping to reflect that our position at noon of the previous
day left us still almost a thousand miles from Hawaii, the nearest
charted point where even so much as a rock pushed above the bosom of
the Pacific, burst forth with a lusty cry of "Land on the starboard
bow!" The look the Commodore gave the mate when, aroused from one of
his short spells of sleep, he rushed on deck to discover this nebulous
"landfall," was more eloquent than vocal expression. It was my
impression that nothing was said, but I find that the "Ladies' Log"
records that "Some words passed between the officers, most of them
going in one direction." So it is just possible that the Commodore
was not able to restrain his pent-up feelings after all.
The next day Claribel set to music a verse of Henry Lawson, the New
Zealand poet, which goes something like this:
For the Southeast lands are dread lands
To the sailor in the shrouds,
When the low clouds loom like headlands,
And the headlands blur like clouds;
choosing the time of the mate's watch to come out upon the quarter deck
and practise it. Wolfe, blushing furiously, retreated to the lee of
the foresail for shelter, not to reappear until the watch was called
at noon. He could never see a white cloud near the horizon after that
without looking ashamed, which was very awkward in the tropics where it
was cloudy all the time; yet our real landfall came in form so similar
to the cloud island which had so completely deceived that functionary
a week previously that every one--including the Commodore--gazed,
silent and mistrustful, and waited for some one else to shout the news.
Our Dead-reckoning showed us to be a hundred miles off shore at
daybreak, and it seemed impossible that even the mountain tops could
show so clearly at so great a distance. But as the morning sun gained
strength the opaque sheets of strati along the horizon began to thin,
and gradually out of the dissolving mists, clear as cut alabaster
against the brilliant turquoise of the tropic sky, the funicular cone
of a great snow-capped volcano took unmistakable shape, and we knew it
for the mighty Mauna Kea, famous as one of the loftiest island mountain
peaks in the world.
"Could we make Hilo by dark?" was now the question. The mate answered
in the negative and advised proceeding under half sail and standing
off-and-on till daybreak. But the Commodore, noting the strengthening
breeze which since midnight had been working back into the east where
it belonged, deemed the effort worth making, and accordingly ordered
the sheets slacked off and more sail set. Up fluttered the big main
topmast staysail, up the jib topsail and the flying jib, and up the
main and fore gaff-topsails, every one of them drawing beautifully in
the steady breeze that came gushing over the starboard quarter, and
each after the other, as it was hoisted and filled, doing its full
measure of work in forcing the yacht's lee rail deeper into the yeasty
run of foam churned up by her lunging bows and driving her faster
toward her goal.
When the great turtle-backed Mauna Loa, lying to the south of and
beyond Mauna Kea, was sighted at noon we had been bowling along for
three hours at a gait that had brought the black lava belts under the
snowline above the horizon, and below these, still dim and indistinct
as the figures on ancient tapestry, the perspectives of the gently
undulating lower reaches of the windward slope of the largest of the
Hawaiian Islands.
All through the afternoon watch the wind freshened until, from an
average of ten knots in the morning, we increased to eleven in each
of the hours from twelve to two, ran just over twelve knots from
two to three, and but slightly under thirteen from three to four.
Fortunately such sea as was running was with us, and though there was
a constant smoke of spray about the bows, and though the sails, filled
hard as sand bags, strained on the masts till the backstays sang like
over-strung fiddles, no green water came aboard and nothing carried
away.
At four-thirty the masts of ships were sighted a couple of points off
the port bow, and taking in the light sails we headed up for what we
knew must be Hilo harbour. Ten minutes after the course was altered
a black squall which had been chasing the yacht passed astern of her
and broke upon the land, its course being as clearly traceable across
the velvet verdance of the rippling cane fields as across the heavens.
Down the coast it raced us, gradually passing inland and leaving behind
it a wake of freshness that glistened like a green satin ribbon in
the last rays of the sun that was setting behind a shoulder of the
towering Mauna Kea. There are several experiences in life that mark
with indelible impression the pages of memory, but none to compare with
the sensations that throng upon one at his first close-in sight of a
tropical island.
[Illustration: WAIOHAE BEACH, ISLAND OF HAWAII]
[Illustration: HULA DANCER WITH EUKALELE]
As the yacht stood into the entrance of Hilo harbour, which is little
more than an open roadstead partially protected by the submerged
Broom Reef, the wind hauled to the south and several short tacks
were necessary to make a favourable anchorage that offered a couple
of cables' length to the landward of a big 12,000-ton steamer of the
American-Hawaiian fleet which was loading sugar. The anchor was let go
in seven fathoms of water at a few minutes before six o'clock, the log,
which had been taken in at the entrance of the harbour, registering
2,430 miles from San Pedro breakwater.
* * * * *
The praises of Hilo itself, of its kind and hospitable people, its
unique and picturesque Japanese quarter, its avenues of palms and
mangoes and its streams and waterfalls, have been sung so often and
so well that I reluctantly forego more than the briefest mention
here. Further along on the cruise there were occasions when we met
with more sumptuous entertainment, saw harbours more picturesque and
better protected, and mountains clothed in an even more reckless riot
of tropical vegetation; but we found no place that ever seriously
rivalled Hilo for first place in our hearts. It was our first love;
our first tropical experience; the gateway to those mystical latitudes
of enchantment, the South Pacific. During the ten days which _Lurline_
lay in Hilo Bay visits were made to Kilauea, the largest active volcano
in the world, to the peerless Onomea Gulch and to several interesting
sugar mills and plantations. Our stay was a continuous round of _luaus_
or native feasts, luncheons, dinners, teas and drives. On the yacht we
evening of fireworks and music, and an afternoon sail, the latter event
being recorded in the irreverent "Ladies' Log" as a "Mal de Mer Party."
Early in the afternoon of the 26th two of the sailors, pulling ashore
to bring off some visitors, ran into a nasty combination of surf and
tide rip at the bar of the Wiluki River and upset. One of the men was
caught under the boat, and but for the timely assistance of a Japanese
who had been fishing from his sampan nearby, would undoubtedly have
been drowned. While the plucky Jap was endeavouring to secure the
painter of the overturned boat, his sampan drifted inside the breakers
and was on the verge of being itself upset when rescued by a tug sent
out from the landing stage.
At four A. M. of March 2nd anchor was tripped and sail made for the run
to Honolulu. The wind at first was light and baffling, as a result of
which but twenty-one miles up the coast of the island were run off by
noon. After passing Alea Point, however, the change of course made it
possible to slack off the sheets, and under all plain lower sail the
yacht bowled along at a nine-knot gait until well after dark. For the
next three or four hours heavy squalls were encountered, but midnight
showed a clear sky, with the opaque mass of Maui, looming darkly,
abeam to starboard. This big island, the second in size of the Hawaiian
group, is famous for its extinct volcano of Haleakala, the crater of
which, ten miles in diameter and with rims that rise in places to an
altitude of 10,000 feet, is believed to be the largest that has existed
in any era of the world's geological history.
Morning of the 3rd showed the gaunt, forbidding cliffs of Molokai on
the port beam, and our glasses readily located the spot where, shut in
by unscalable rock walls behind and cut off by cordons of breakers in
front, the unfortunate inhabitants of the leper settlement of Kalaupapa
drag out their sad existences.
The island of Oahu was sighted at nine, and shortly afterward we
headed into Molokai Channel, said to be one of the deepest places in
the Pacific Ocean, and, in the matter of baffling winds and waves and
currents, undoubtedly one of the most treacherous and uncertain, as we
were to learn on the return voyage. A strong breeze increased to a half
gale by noon, and under double-reefed main and foresails the yacht made
not any too good weather of it in the vicious cross tumble of waters
that assailed her. About noon the smooth, round summit of Coco Head
began to peer above the foam-tipped crests of the in-racing seas, and
an hour later the sharp, incisive outline of Diamond Head showed clear
against the northeastern skyline. As we brought its tall lighthouse
abeam the beach and reef of Waikiki, with rows of white hotels and
bungalows, and the odd looking crater of the Punchbowl tilted above
Honolulu in the background, began to open up beyond. The Jack at the
fore brought the pilot boat, rowed by a crew of stalwart, bare-chested
Kanakas, out from the Head through a tortuous passage in the Reef, and,
watching his chance, the pilot leapt to a footing on the ladder and
clambered aboard without absorbing so much as a drop of the swinging
comber which at the same instant swept and half swamped his plunging
cutter.
Our next three miles to the entrance of Honolulu Harbour was over the
regular track of the transpacific liners, and the unfolding panorama,
like the unrolling of an ever-changing piece of rich Oriental brocade,
has furnished the inspiration for descriptions,--good, bad and
indifferent,--by every traveller not abashed by its beauty and grandeur
who has sailed that way since the time of Cook. I throw up my hands
and admit the futility of adequate description at the outset; but none
the less eagerly love to turn back the pages of memory to a
picture--blurred and impressionistic in detail, but unfading in the
brilliancy of its colours--of that leeward stretch of Oahu between
Diamond Head and Honolulu as it appeared on that gusty afternoon
of our first arrival, a harmony in blues and greens--the sombre indigo
of the cloud-shadowed sea, the lapis-lazuli above the coils of the
hidden reefs, the sheeny verdancy of the palms and bananas along the
foreshore, the _verte emaraude_ of the slope up to where Tantalus and
the Pali were lost in their crowns of cumulus and nimbus; and above
all the transparent azure of the tropic sky.
The pilot took _Lurline_ in through the narrow reef which constitutes
the entrance to Honolulu Harbour under foresail and jib, handling her
with consummate skill in the maze of cross currents and eddies which
make the passage a dangerous one even for steamers. Immediately on
gaining still water we were boarded by the harbour-master, who moored
us neatly and expeditiously in a natural slip in the reef called
"Rotten Row," scarce a cable's length from the docks of the Pacific
Mail and the Australian liners. Here the yacht lay for three weeks,
provisioning and refitting for the arduous months ahead in some of
the almost unsailed corners of the South Pacific, while we--the Mater,
Claribel, the Commodore and myself--lived ashore, enjoying to our
utmost the hospitality of the gayest, richest, loveliest and most
fascinating of all the Pacific island capitals.
CHAPTER II
HONOLULU TO TAIO-HAIE
With 2,000 miles of salt water stretching between its windward shores
and the western coast of North America, with twice that distance
separating it from Asia, and with more or less open water rolling
limitlessly away to the Arctic and the Antarctic, it is only natural
that Hawaii should harbour a race of sea-loving people. A hundred years
ago the Hawaiians, bred true to their Samoan progenitors, fearlessly
embarked in their sliver-like, cinnet-sewed canoes on voyages that
today would be deemed hazardous for hundred-ton schooners; and a half
century or more back they were hailed throughout the Seven Seas as the
most daring whalers that ever drove lances or hurled harpoons. So in
assuming at the beginning of this century the title of "The Yachting
Centre of the Pacific," Hawaii is not attaining to a new distinction,
but merely claiming in a modernized form a heritage of ancient days.
Honolulu, judged by the "timber and lines" of the men behind the sport
there, is the peer of any yachting centre in the world, and the Royal
Hawaiian Yacht Club is composed of as clean-cut, whole-souled a lot of
gentlemen and sportsmen as one will meet east or west, north or south,
in whatever country or under whatever burgee.
Kaleakaua, last king of the Hawaiians, was the first commodore of the
yacht club, and at the time of our visit the late Prince Cupid, the
Territory's representative in Washington and once in line of succession
to the throne, was an active member. And only in the Yacht Club, of all
Hawaiian organizations, have royalist and reactionary met on terms of
frank and open friendship. The memories of the stirring days of the
revolution are dimmed by the mists of more than a score of years, but
still clear and distinct in island society is drawn the line of
demarcation between the ever-loyal one-time adherents of Kaleakaua and
those who were active in, or in sympathy with, his overthrow. Yet with
the yachtsmen, even in the days of the by-no-means bloodless revolution,
animosities, political, social and personal, were ever left ashore, and
one saw leaders of the rival factions bending their backs and chorusing
together as they broke out the same anchor, or, shoulder to shoulder
and foot to foot, swayed up the same mainsail.
One of the stock stories they tell you at the yacht club is of an
incident which occurred back in the days immediately preceding the
revolution, a time when rumours of plots flew thick and fast and
royalist and republican passed each other in highway and byway with
distrustful sidelong glances, each with the fingers of his left hand
raised to his hat in courteous salutation and the fingers of his
right hand twitching on the butt of the stubby "forty-four" in his
hip pocket. It chanced at this time that Sanford B. Dole, prominent
from boyhood in island affairs and then at the head of the conspiracy
to overthrow the monarchy, and Clarence McFarlane, brother of the
King's Master of Ceremonies and a staunch upholder of the throne,
were sailing mates on the old _Aloha_, a trim forty-foot sloop
designed and built by Fife and brought out to the Islands on the deck
of a sailing ship by way of the Horn. On the occasion in question
_Aloha_ had just cleared the passage and sheets were being slacked
away for the run before the blustering Northeast Trade down to Maui.
A sudden lurch of the boat caused Dole to lose his hitch on the bit,
the sheet was jerked from his hand, and in lunging forward to regain
his hold his patriarchal beard--nearly two feet in length and then,
as now, his most distinguishing feature--whisked into the block and
started to wind upon the whirling sheave. Slammed to the deck and
in imminent danger of serious injury the moment his chin met the
block, Dole's most frantic efforts had hardly more than checked the
run of the sheet, when McFarlane leaped forward, jammed his limp
fingers in above the sheave, and at the expense of a badly lacerated
hand stopped its deadly rotation until Lorrin Thurston, at the wheel,
brought the yacht's head to the wind and put an end to the danger.
Two days later the revolution began which made Dole President,
Thurston Minister to Washington, and left McFarlane and the rest
of the royalists, politically, in obscurity. Yet these three still
sail together now and then, and during our stay in Honolulu we of
_Lurline_, both ashore and afloat, enjoyed their joint yachting
reminiscences on many memorable occasions.
To read over a membership list of the Royal Hawaiian Yacht Club from
its early days is to con a roster of the men who have made Hawaii
what it is; and not a man who has held the tiller of the Insular ship
of state and guided it through the storms that have threatened to
engulf it so often during the last three decades but has owed
something of the steadiness of his head and hand to the training of
his yachting days.
_Gentlemen of the Royal Hawaiian Yacht Club, I salute you! Here's to
your summer seas, and your summer winds, and your summer skies,
and the summer in your hearts. May you always have_--I was going to
say fair weather and other things to match, but I pause in time. Yours
are the natures that make fair weather out of any storm that blows.
So--_here's to a sail above you, a plank beneath you, the blue-green
Pacific about you, and the boisterous Trade wind blowing you on_.
* * * * *
Honolulu hospitality is of so wide a fame that I will not lay myself
open to the charge of trying to "gild refined gold or paint the
rainbow" by telling here of the details of our sojourn in what is so
happily called the "Pearl of the Pacific"; and yet--there was one
incident that is so characteristic of the innate courtesy and gentility
of the Hawaiian host that I may be pardoned for setting it down.
It was but a few days after our arrival in Honolulu that we were
invited to attend a _luau_ or native feast at the home of Col. Sam
Parker, a prominent planter of the Islands and a relative of the late
King Kaleakaua. The affair was to be informal, we were told, and the
feast was to be spread on the _lanai_ or open veranda. On the strength
of these assurances, and because the night was a hot and sultry one,
the Commodore and I thought that our duck yachting uniforms would
fulfil all the requirements of the occasion, and proceeded to attend
thus accoutred. Imagine our feelings, then, on finding the genial
Colonel Parker waiting to receive us in full evening dress, and
observing that every one of the hundred and fifty other guests were
likewise impeccably garbed. Two white doves in a flock of ravens
could not have been more conspicuous or out of place, and our
discomfiture was no whit lessened on being led to the head of the long
table and placed in the seats of honour beside Colonel Parker's
step-daughters, the lovely Princess Kawanakoa and the no less
beautiful Alice Campbell. Not till we were seated did I notice that our
host's place was vacant.
For ten minutes the Commodore and I munched shamedly at our _poi_ and
boiled seaweed and avoided the I-told-you-so glances of the Mater
and Claribel who, resplendent in "full racing rig," seemed palpably
endeavouring to impress the assembled company with the fact that they
had no connection whatever with the two ill-at-ease nautical-looking
gentlemen in the duck jackets. The Princess and her sister were
the souls of wit, tact and amiability, but we continued droopy and
unresponsive even under the stimuli of their spirited sallies.
There was only one thing that could happen to restore our shattered
equanimity, and that--thanks to the inspiration which had doubtless
seized upon our genial host the moment our mis-garbed figures had hove
above his horizon--was the very thing that did happen. We were just
passing from _poi_ in calabashes to mullet boiled in _ti_ leaves, when
in breezed the Colonel, with only a quickened heaving of his ample
chest indicating the lightning change he had been making, garbed in
the undress uniform of a Commodore of the Royal Hawaiian Yacht Club,
a position which he had held during the reign of the late King Kaleakaua.
It was a most gracious act of kindly courtesy, and I was not in the
least surprised to hear the Commodore spent most of the rest of the
evening trying to persuade all the Parkers, root and branch, to get
their things together and join us for our cruise in the South Pacific.
In my own thankfulness, I distinctly remember offering several times
to make a present of the yacht to both the Princess Kawanakoa and her
sister before I pulled myself together sufficiently to realize that it
was not mine to give.
* * * * *
The only unpleasant feature about letting go anchor in Honolulu Harbour
is having to break it out again. After our week of scheduled stop had
stretched out to two weeks, and finally to three, the realization
that our reluctance to leave was but growing with every day that the
inevitable moment was deferred brought us at length to the arbitrary
setting of a sailing hour. Toward this we inflexibly directed the
current of our resolutions, with the result that we really did get away
in the end.
On the morning of sailing we were pleasantly surprised to receive word
from the Spreckels Company--John D. Spreckels was the original owner
of _Lurline_--that it was sending its big tug, _Fearless_, to tow us
out of the passage and beyond the lee of the island to the breeze-swept
channel. A little later a note came out from Governor Carter informing
us that he was sending the Royal Hawaiian Band on the _Fearless_ to
pipe paeans of farewell.
We were not sailing until three o'clock on the afternoon of the 24th of
March, but soon after daybreak boats commenced coming off laden with
boxes and bags and parcels, remembrances from our kindly Island
friends, and toward noon the tide of flowers set in--these mostly in the
form of _leis_ or garlands to be worn about the neck. By two o'clock
the cabin was like the shipping room of a department store at the
climax of the Christmas rush, and the deck a cross between a fruitstand
and a conservatory. Nor was the forecastle unremembered. The sailors,
too, appeared to have formed attachments. As the bluff bow of the
_Fearless_ came nosing out into the stream from under the stern of the
big _Siberia_ and all hands turned to on the anchor, we were treated to
the spectacle of four brawny seamen, garlanded and festooned in
trailing _leis_ from head to heel, bending and swaying in unison and
heaving up the chain to a chantey that was nothing more or less than
an improvisation from a rollicking native _hula_.
The line from _Fearless_ was passed aboard and made fast, and as the
anchor was broken out the white-coated band, grouped picturesquely on
the forward deck of the tug, struck up the opening bars of a familiar
air, and Puilani Molina, the sweetest singer in all of the Hawaiias,
advanced to the rail, tossed a bright-hued _lei_ upon the water and
began singing that most plaintive and tenderly sweet of all the world's
songs of farewell, "Aloha-oe."
"Ha-a-heo ka-u-a-ina pa--li--."
Liquid silver, the full, clear notes floated out to us across the
unrippling water, and from reef to shore the whole bay fell silent as
she sang through the first verse. At the opening words of the chorus
a score or more of friends clustered on the hurricane deck of the tug
joined in. Instantly the air was taken up by the deep-voiced
bandsmen; then by the deckhands and grimy stokers gathered at the
door of the engine room, and then by the boatmen as they lay on
their oars in the offing, until finally it reached the shore, to come
back to us in broken snatches from the throats of the crowd that
lined the quays and landings.
"Aloha-oe, Aloha-oe,
E-ke o-na-o-na no-ho i-ka li--po,
A fond embrace--A ho-i a-e-au,
Until we meet again."
Then the screw of the _Fearless_ began revolving, her tautening hawser
swung _Lurline_ into line astern, and out through the narrow passage
in the reef we were trailed in the bubbling wake of the tug. An hour
later, with Coco Head abeam and Diamond Head bearing N.E. by N., five
miles distant, sail was hoisted, the tow-line cast off, and _Lurline_,
wing-and-wing to a light northwest breeze, curtesied gracefully to the
rising swells of the channel and took her first mincing steps in the
long dance to the Marquesas.
As we filled away, dipping our flag in a farewell salute, we saw the
band, which since leaving the harbour had been doing its bravest
to lift the sodden pall of parting with rollicking Kanaka airs and
stirring patriotic selections, again stiffen to attention, and down the
wind, despairingly, appealingly, soothingly by turns, as though wafted
by the tug's broadside of fluttering handkerchiefs, came for the last
time the strains of "Aloha-oe." There are many forms and fashions of
the sweet sorrow of parting of which the poet sings, but for a long,
long pull, with a yo-heave-ho, at the heart strings, nothing like that
which steals over you as you listen to "Aloha-oe" with the tow-line
in the water, the odor of _Ilima leis_ heavy in the nostrils, and the
skyline of fair Hawaii blurring dim through a mist of tears.
The course from Honolulu to the Marquesan island of Nukahiva is about
S.E. by E., but in order to run as little chance as possible of being
headed by the Southeast Trades after crossing the Line, it was deemed
best to lay our course a couple of points to the east of this until
the latitudes of this southern wind were reached and its prevailing
direction at that season more accurately determined. This course we
found we had managed to approximate at the end of two weeks' sailing,
but only at the expense of being constantly on the wind; then to
discover that the Trades in the South Pacific blow steadily between
E.S.E. and east for nearly all of the year. This meant that we had
put ourselves to a good deal of unnecessary trouble and made but a
moderately good run where we might have made a very speedy one by
heading directly for our destination. That from Hawaii to the Marquesas
is one of the few long traverses in the Pacific where the most direct
course is also the fastest.
The bleak rock of Lanaii loomed abeam to windward for several hours
on the night of the 24th, and morning showed the dim blur of Maui's
great crater, Haleakala, blotting out the eastern sky. At noon the
snowy peaks of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa detached themselves from the
fleecy cloud-racks down to E.S.E., and steadily loomed higher as the
sun declined. In the first watch the wind began falling lighter,
by midnight it was only coming in fluky puffs, and at daybreak
_Lurline_ found herself in the most windlessly somnolent patch of
salt water in all the length and breadth of the Pacific, the lee of the
two great 13,000-foot volcanoes that form the backbone of the island
of Hawaii.
Probably no other place in the world presents such striking contrasts
of meteorological conditions between almost contiguous points as those
furnished by the windward and leeward sides of Hawaii. The lofty
summits of its volcanoes tower so far above the raincloud line that
practically no moisture whatever is able to pass to a large belt of
country on the southwest side of the island, and where the annual
precipitation in the vicinity of Hilo is occasionally in excess of two,
and even three hundred inches, that of the Kona or leeward coast ranges
from absolutely nothing to five or six. The rank tropical verdure of
the windward slopes is unknown in this windless and rainless belt, and
save in places where streams from the perpetual snows form thread-like
oases, this leeward region is largely desert.
The windless area behind the volcanic barrier of Hawaii may be roughly
defined as a triangle, sixty miles wide at its base, tapering off to an
apex a hundred miles or more to leeward. It was well down toward the
base of this triangle that we were trying to cross in an ill-advised
effort to avoid the alternative of sailing the longer course to the
windward of the island.
Morning of the 26th found us in a clear, mirror-like, unrippling sea,
the surface of which, in its absence of motion, might have passed for
that of a great freshwater lake. Scarcely a suggestion of a swell
underran the satiny sheen of the level sea, and for all the motion
of her decks the yacht might have been chocked up in a dry dock for
repairs. The booms, hauled in amidship, lay as though spiked to the
deck; and even the drowsy slatting of the lazy-lines and the brisk
tattoo of the reef points--twin lullabies of the so-called calms of
livelier seas--were unheard. The log, as though in emulation of a
sounding lead, hung perpendicularly from the taffrail, its brass
blades showing no less clearly in the lucent, unwinking depths
than the feathery weed that fringed the motionless rudder.
Toward noon a few faint leakings of wind came edging in around the
north shoulder of Mauna Kea, and for some time we had steerage way
enough to allow the yacht to drift along at a mile or so an hour,
the booms out now on one side and now on the other in an effort to
intercept the elusive airs. At six o'clock even these vagrant puffs
had ceased, and as twilight followed the sinking of the sun behind
a ruled-line horizon calm succeeded to calmer, until the sails were
finally taken in and we floated, lazily waiting, on the heavily
breathing bosom of the deep; for now the shadow of a swell was running
and imparting just enough motion to the yacht to set her decks rocking
drowsily to and fro in accord with the somnolent peacefulness of the
tropic night.
The afterglow kindled and faded in pale tints of amber and amethyst
and dusky olive, and almost up to the zenith a filmy mass of cirrus
cloud, torn by conflicting air currents too high to make themselves at
sea level, flamed up in the reflected light for an instant and then
broke and scattered into bits, like paper rose-leaves showered into a
shaft of red calcium. Across the still expanse of the sea east nodded
to west, north nodded to south, the sky stars blinked at the sea stars,
and the sea stars blinked crookedly back; and under all ran the
indolent ebony swells, gently rolling the yacht till she rocked like a
sleepy old beldame, drowsing and catching herself and drowsing
again.
Early in the middle watch a light breeze stole out again from
landward--this time apparently coming from the Mauna Loa slope of the
island--and by daylight we were twenty miles nearer the southerly
deadline of the windless triangle. Then the puffs began falling light
again, and for an hour or two we drifted without steerage way ten or a
dozen miles off the entrance of the beautiful little bay of Kealakekua.
With eyes straining through our glasses some of us fancied that we
discerned the outlines of a tall shaft of white shining through the
brown boles of the coconut palms, and told each other that we were
gazing on the monument that marked the spot where Captain Cook, after
innumerable hair-breadth escapes in every important island group of the
Pacific, fell under the clubs of the warlike Hawaiians, fighting no
less desperately to save the lives of his comrades than for his own.
One would have to cruise the Pacific for a lifetime to begin to come
to an adequate appreciation of what the Great Navigator did, for the
more one sees the more stupendous seems the sum of his achievement.
From where the sub-Arctic waters wash the shores of Cook's Inlet,
Alaska, to Cooktown in the lap of the Antipodean tropics, and Mount
Cook raising its glacier-seamed sides above the bleak bluffs of New
Zealand, there is hardly an important island whose strand his tireless
foot did not press, and scarce a lump of coral rearing its head above
the restless Pacific surges that his keen eye did not sweep. Nasty
sailing, you think it, in these days of charts and steamers, when the
lifeboats are swept from the hurricane deck off Cook's Inlet on your
run to Nome; and "A frightful hole!" you say, when your "N.Y.K."
steamer anchors every night as she feels her way along down the
Great Barrier Reef; and every minute is your last, perhaps you think,
when your "A and A" steamer is hove to in a Fijian hurricane, or you're
locked in the cabin of your "A.U.S.N." packet in a spell of "southeast"
weather between Dunedin and Sydney. Distinctly bad, you think all this;
you on your 6,000-ton steamer that is equipped with every precautionary
and emergency device known to science, with a powerful beacon on
every headland and the bottom of the sea mapped out like a block of
lower Broadway. Just try and imagine, then, if you please, what these
same places must have been to Cook, who spent years among them in
crazy old wooden ships, scarcely a one of which but ended by piling up
on some rocky shore or coral beach. Columbus, Vespucci, and the rest
of the deep-water navigators, simply turned the noses of their ships
west and sailed till they got to somewhere--and then sailed back again.
Cook spent years with a man at the masthead looking for hidden reefs,
and with the sounding lead going every hour of the twenty-four.
In my own mind there are grave doubts as to whether any of us really
saw the Cook monument during that long forenoon in which we lay
becalmed off the leeward coast of Hawaii--in fact, I have since been
told that it is not visible from the sea at all; but the sight of
Kealakekua--yes, even at a distance of a dozen miles or more--is
ample excuse for this slight tribute to one to whom no man that has
ever sailed the Pacific will deny the title of "The Greatest Navigator
of History."
_Captain James Cook, sailor, diplomat and gentlemen:--Here's long and
unbroken rest for your watch below in that quiet haven where you let
go Life's anchor in the shadow of the towering Mauna Loa and within
sound of the lap of the waves of that Pacific, so many of whose tracks
you were the first to sail. Sleep sound, Master Mariner, for your work
is done; and may your dreams bring you the messages of gratitude that
arise from the hearts of those whose ways have been made easier and
safer because of the dangers you braved and the sacrifices you made.
Accept this acknowledgment of the obligation of one of those to whom
you showed the way, James Cook._
* * * * *
A fluky three to five-knot breeze drew in from the E.S.E. about
mid-day, every puff of which was taken advantage of to struggle on
out of the lee of the blanketing island. Freshening slightly after
nightfall, it carried us along at a little better than a four-mile gait
during each hour of the first watch, near the end of which it hauled
ahead and forced the yacht off to southwest until enough southing had
been run to allow her to be put about on the other tack without danger
of butting her nose into the volcanic bluffs of Hawaii.
Shortly after midnight the mate awakened the Commodore to report a
reflection on the sky off to the northeast, an announcement which
brought every one tumbling out on deck in short order. There was
the reflection, surely enough; a dull red glare on our port quarter
that shone and dulled and shone again like a blowed-on ember. The
light was on a line with the point where the opaque mass of Hawaii
blotted out the tail of the Great Bear, and because there was no sign
of fire on the water we had about arrived at the conclusion that the
glare might come from a ship or sugar mill burning on the windward
side of the island, when the reflection suddenly flared from a dull
cherry to a vivid flame-red, immediately to be quenched in tumbling
masses of smoke or steam which went shooting into the air as though
driven by the force of a mighty explosion.
"She's a steamer!" yelled the mate. "Them's her boilers a-bustin'!"
Whereupon we all fell to speculating as to what particular steamer it
might be. And it was not until six or seven minutes later when a great,
deep-toned reverberation reached us--a sound so mighty that all of the
steamers in the Pacific blowing up together would have passed unnoticed
beside it--that light finally burst in upon us and we broke out in
chorus with "Kilauea! in eruption again."
The actuality of this eruption--only a slight one as it chanced--we
verified six weeks later when our file of San Francisco papers was
received in Tahiti. In referring since to this most spectacular piece
of volcanic pyrotechnics, we have always done so in the words of
Claribel, then a recently emancipated prisoner from the grip of _mal
de mer_. In the sentiently suffusing light the sea rolled a dark pit
of ox-blood and the heavens arched a vault of purple-black studded
with pale emeralds, the stars. The half-filled sails were hangings of
amethyst silk, and the masts lances of fire grounded in patches of
living flame where the polished brass work threw back the rosy
glow of the Northeast.
"Look! look!" cried the sufferer, clapping her hands with excitement
as the twisting pillar on the eastern flank of Mauna Loa took the
momentary seeming of a colossal figure in the throes of a serpentine.
"Isn't it worth being sea-sick all the way around the world to see?
There's Madame Pelée dancing a _hula_! It's Kilauea's 'Aloha' to the
_Lurline_!"
And "Kilauea's 'Aloha' to the _Lurline_" it has always been to us since.
Light and baffling southerly breezes made progress slow for the first
two days after clearing the calm patch in the lee of Hawaii, and when
on the 29th these suddenly straightened out into a blustering easterly
blow the immediate necessity of proceeding under shortened canvas
offset the advantage of the long-desired wind. For two days the yacht
was close-hauled on a course which approximated southeast, bobbing up
and down to the seas and making only moderately good weather under
double-reefed mainsail and foresail.
Sea and wind were still heavy at noon of the 31st, but the latter
had by then come up to northeast, allowing us to sail a point or two
free on a course of S.E. by E. Under all plain lower sail we pounded
into the hard-heaving seas all afternoon and through the night of the
31st, the decks constantly smothered in volleys of spray and more than
a little green water finding its way aboard in some of the heavier
plunges, yet averaging close to eight miles an hour all the time. Day
broke on a sea of wind-tossed pampas plumes, the onslaughts of waves
beneath which were responsible for a substantial shortening of sail
when the morning watch was called. At ten o'clock, with the glass
down to 29.70 and the wind increased to half a gale, the canvas was
still further reduced, leaving the yacht doing a comfortable six knots
under double-reefed mainsail and foresail, and with the jib taken in
and the bonnet out of the foresail.
For two days, with the glass hovering about 29.60 and the wind blowing
fiercely but steadily from E.N.E., we jolted along, full-and-by, at
from five to seven knots an hour, logging 129 miles on the 2nd of
April and 159 miles on the 3rd. By this time the torn, fussy seas of
the first day of the gale had lengthened out to viciously-running
combers, with a resistless power under their swinging upheaves and
a decided sting in the blows of their hissing crests. The big third
reef was tied into the mainsail at dawn of the 4th, after a top-heavy
wall of reeling water had bumped its head on the starboard boat in an
apparent endeavour to salute the rising sun, leaving that indispensable
adjunct to our life-saving service wallowing in its slackened lashing
with a started plank. This, with a stove-in galley sky-light, made
up about the sum total of the damage inflicted by what would have
been a really troublesome storm if there had been any land about to
look out for. In the open waters of the Pacific the hardest kind
of a straight blow is of little moment to a staunch schooner, even
though--like the _Lurline_--it may have been built as much for racing
as cruising. Where the real danger lurks for any kind of a craft is
in the twisting hurricanes and the sudden and terrific squalls which
attack unexpectedly among the islands. At sea, as on land, most of the
menace is in the unforeseen, striking instances of which truth we had
ample opportunity to observe before the voyage was over.
The wind began abating in strength shortly after daybreak of the 4th,
and during the day the yacht was gradually restored to all plain sail.
We must have passed under the sun at about 6° N. late in the forenoon
of this day, for it inclined to the north when the noon sight showed
our latitude to be 5° 57'. The air and water which had been showing a
diurnal increase of temperature of about half a degree, Fahrenheit,
registered 81° and 79°, respectively. There was no suggestion of
oppressiveness in the air and a windsail was not necessary to keep the
cabin fresh and cool.
In the early morning of the 5th the wind began to fall light and
fluky, finally resolving itself into a tumultuous series of squalls,
the last of which, though it drove the yacht off to the west of south
at a terrific pace, fortunately abated before anything carried away.
When it had passed the wind settled itself contentedly into E.S.E.,
from which point it continued amiably to purr--except on three notable
occasions--through most of the four months which we spent south of the
Line. We had literally run from the Northeast to the Southeast Trades
in a single squall.
As we neared the Line the only indication of equatorial weather was
in the ever-livelier butterfly chases of the sunshine and showers.
The winds, except for increasingly fierce squalls which we began
experiencing regularly in the early watches, were fresh and steady from
E.S.E., and so far as any signs of being in the hated "horse-latitudes"
were concerned, we might have been sailing through a week-long
September afternoon off the Golden Gate. Considering the freshness of
the wind, the sea was very light indeed, and we were able to carry
most of the kites to good advantage as long as there was sufficient
daylight to permit watching the approach of the ever-imminent
squalls.
On the 7th, at three o'clock, in longitude 139° 50', we crossed the
equator, just two weeks to an hour after weighing anchor in Honolulu.
Air and water were slightly cooler than for some days--each registering
79°, Fahrenheit--and so fresh was the steady breeze from the southeast
that we stood uncovered in the sun at noonday and in the shade of the
sails felt no discomfort in a rug.
By this time we had made easting sufficient to place us well to the
windward of our destination in any probable shift of wind. Sheets were
slacked off, therefore, and freed from the griping luff under which she
had chafed almost incessantly for the last fortnight, _Lurline_ slipped
away on a course of due south at a gait which ran up close to 190
miles on the log for the day ending at noon of the 9th. At this time,
with 240 miles--part of it down a narrow island channel beset with
swift currents and variable winds--remaining to be covered before we
would begin to open up the bay of Taiohaie, Nukahiva, all practicable
canvas was crowded on in an endeavour to make port the following day.
Eight and nine knots we made all afternoon; good speed considering the
force of the wind, yet hardly what might have been desired under the
circumstances. But the breeze was stiffening as twilight came on, and
realizing that failure to make anchorage before another evening would
mean a night of standing off-and-on in a scant sea-way and uncertain
winds, the Commodore, for the first time since entering those
capricious latitudes, allowed the light sails to be carried into the
darkness.
Sailing like a witch in the freshening breeze, _Lurline_ reeled off
a shade under twenty miles in the second dog watch, and 10.6, 10.8,
11.3 and 11.8 were successively run up on the log as the hours of the
first watch slipped away. The night was balmy soft, the breeze a stream
of warm milk, and in the air was discernible that faint, indefinable
odour of something which heralds the presence of land to nostrils
grown sensitive from inhaling for weeks the untainted atmosphere of
the open sea. The heavens, save for a few hurriedly marching squads of
the ever-shifting cirro-cumulus, were clear and unobscured, and the
easy-running swells were as gentle as the night itself.
The yacht continued to reel off the miles like a liner during the early
hours of the middle watch, but toward morning the appearance of several
menacing turrets of cloud up to windward was the signal for the hurried
taking in of the light sails and an easing off of the sheets. For a
while it appeared that all of the three rapidly advancing squalls were
going to pass astern of us, and so, in fact, two of them did. The third
one took an unexpected spin at the last moment and came charging up
after the yacht like a mad bull. There was just time hastily to furl
the jib and station men at the fore and mainsail halyards before it
broke upon the yacht with the explosive roar of a bursting bomb, and
the timely letting go of those halyards as she hove down before the
terrific force of the wind undoubtedly saved some canvas if nothing
more.
The mainsail was checked half way in its run and the very considerable
portion of it that fell overside went hopping and skipping along on the
water like a great wounded bird as the yacht smoked away before the
squall. For ten minutes, perhaps, we ran thus, half smothered in air
and water; then the rain began falling, the wind fell lighter, and the
squall, so far as we were concerned, had spent itself. Five minutes
later the main boom had been hauled inboard, the sail hoisted, and
_Lurline_ was gliding off down to south'ard no whit worse for her rough
raking. The main topmast staysail was run up when the morning watch was
called, and dawn found her doing a comfortable nine knots an hour with
the situation well in hand.
As the sun rose the somewhat vague land smell which we had noted during
the night increased to a delicate but unmistakable odour of flowers,
a perfume which we later learned is due to the presence in the air of
the blown pollen of the _cassi_, a low bush-like plant which carpets
the islands of the Marquesas and blooms perennially. So pungent and
far-reaching is this odour that it has become a common saying with
trading captains who sail these latitudes that you can smell the
Marquesas farther than you can see them, a statement which is certainly
literally true anywhere to the leeward of the group.
Shortly after eight o'clock the shattered peaks of the island of Uahuka
were sighted dead ahead, and at nine the course was altered to S.W. by
W. After an hour or so the dim outline of Nukahiva began taking shape
in the dissolving mist, and when the scarped and buttressed summit of
Cape Maartens came edging out from behind the abrupt heads to
north'ard, we had something definite to go by, and promptly trimmed
in sheets and headed up to clear a forbidding point of black basalt
which our Directions told us jutted out into the sea to cut off the
surges from the inner loop of the bay of Taio-haie.
Along the rugged coast we slipped, now close in to a sinister dirk-like
point which reached out to divide and scatter the onrushing seas, and
again standing across the opening of a bay or inlet which receded to a
snowy beach backed by a lucent lagoon and a chasm full of unfathomable
verdure. Beyond the furrowed brow of Cape Maartens a narrow bay, well
protected and smooth as a mirror, ran inland beyond eye-scope, piercing
the island like a sliver of silver. From where it disappeared in a
dense mass of palms and pandanus a high-walled valley wound back among
the serried ribs of the mountains, apparently to end abruptly against
a lofty cliff, the sheer side of the towering backbone range of the
island.
Here and there up the valley patches of dancing light, shining
through the sombre green of the riot of trees and creepers, told
of a swiftly-running stream, and down the face of the great cliff,
literally leaping from the clouds to the earth in a single bound, was a
waterfall. Lucent, glittering green it must have been up where it began
its dizzy plunge in the heart of the murky mass of drifting nimbus
which veiled its source, but white--snow-white--it gleamed where it
appeared under the dark cloud line to fall in a brocade of shimmering
satin into the misty depth below. We did not learn about it until the
next day; but this fall was Typee Fall, the stream was Typee River, and
the valley was Typee Valley, the scene of that most idyllic of all South
Sea idylls, Herman Melville's "Typee."
We never attained nearer than five miles to the great fall during our
stay in the Marquesas, and accurate figures regarding its height were
not obtainable. Findlay's Directory gives it at 2,165 feet, which is
probably too much; but the fact remains that it is one of the highest
waterfalls in the world, and without a rival on any island whatever.
At four in the afternoon we doubled the gaunt black point toward which
we had been steering for some hours, suddenly to find the panorama of
the beautiful bay of Taio-haie unfolding before us. Pursuant to the
instructions in the Sailing Directory, we ran up the Jack to the fore
and stood off across the entrance waiting for the pilot, without whom,
so we read, there was a heavy penalty for endeavouring to enter. Then
we went about and ran back past the little island at the end of the
point, all without awakening a sign of life along the drowsy shore
where nestled the village. After repeating this manoeuvre twice more,
the Commodore ordered the sheets slacked off and gave the man at the
wheel his bearing for the first leg of the run in.
"Perhaps the pilot has overslept on his _siesta_ today," he remarked
dryly; "and if that's the case our anchor gun may wake him up."
We went in neatly and expeditiously. "Keep the eastern outer bluff on
the starboard," read the Directions, "rounding the island off it within
a cable's length. All the eastern shores of the bay are steep-to and
free from danger, and the wind will always lead off." And that was
about all there was to it. We let go the anchor a few minutes after
five, a quarter mile off the rickety wharf, in seven fathoms. Our time
from Honolulu was just over seventeen days, the quickest passage of
which there was any record. Had we sailed a course to avoid the
windless area in the lee of Hawaii, and then headed directly for
Nukahiva it is probable that the run would have been made in the
vicinity of twelve or thirteen days.
The firing of our little signal cannon might have been the setting off
of a mine under the village, so electric was the effect. Dark forms
sprang up from nowhere and began darting hither and thither and yon,
and following the appearance of a corpulent figure in pajamas at the
door of what seemed to be the official residence, the tri-colour of
France went jerking up to its flag-pole. Down the front street shortly
came lumbering a ponderous figure in a brass-bound helmet and white
uniform, followed by a trailing sword and a half dozen natives carrying
oars on their shoulders. Two other white men, also white-clad and
sun-helmeted, joined the procession as it passed what appeared to be a
trading store, and the three proceeded together down to the wharf and
put off in a big whaleboat.
Driven by the erratic but powerful strokes of the big natives, the boat
was quickly alongside the yacht, and the official-looking gentleman
came puffing up the ladder which had been hastily lowered for him. He
was Brigadier Bouillard, the Harbour Master, Warden of the Prison and
Chief of Police, he announced between gasps in broken English, and the
other gentlemen following him over the rail were, respectively, Mr.
Cramer, a German trader, and Mr. McGrath, a Canadian trader. Of the
latter, one of the most interesting characters we met in the course of
our whole cruise, we were destined to see much during our stay in
Nukahiva.
"By the way," Monsieur le Capitaine, "where's your pilot?" asked the
Commodore after the large official had examined our papers and admitted
the yacht to practique. "Hasn't he overslept this afternoon?"
"Zee pilate! _Mon Dieu_, he ees no"--And at this point, with wild
rollings of the eyes and swift gestures of uncertain import, the
Brigadier relapsed into French so voluble and excited as to prove quite
unintelligible to our untrained ears.
"The Brigadier," explained the blond Cramer in his exact Teutonic
English, as the excited Frenchman paused for breath, "is trying to
tell you, in effect, that the last pilot but one was killed and eaten
by relatives of a trading schooner's crew who were drowned when that
boat was piled up on the beach because the pilot had taken too much
absinthe and mistook a firefly on the bowsprit for the light on the
wharf. A similar fate also overtook his successor, apparently for no
other reason than that the office had become an unpopular one with the
natives. Since then," he added, "the government has been unable to find
any one willing to accept the position under any inducements."
"Hardly to be wondered at," mused the Commodore. "But, I say, can any
of you gentlemen tell me if this--er--antipathy of the Marquesan
natives toward pilots extends to skippers who bring in their own ships?
It's a little late for working out of the harbour before dark but the
wind's fair most of the way and, anyhow, I'd rather be drowned than
eaten."
The natives had always respected visiting yachts, they asseverated
earnestly, and--as we learned later--truthfully. The Commodore took
courage on hearing this and decided to chance it for a day or two.
It was not until our arrival in Tahiti, a fortnight later, that we
learned that perhaps the forbearance of the natives in the matter of
visiting yachts may have been partly due to the fact that, previously
to _Lurline's_ coming, only three craft of that class had ever been to
the Marquesas.
In the "Ladies Log" of this date I find the following entry:
"We sailed in ourselves and fired off our signal gun to wake up the
pilot. Found out shortly that nothing of less calibre than Gabriel's
Trumpet would have been equal to that task."
CHAPTER III
THE MARQUESAS TODAY
It is a strange anomaly that the Marquesan, by long odds the fastest
disappearing of the Polynesian races, is made up of individuals of
incomparably finer physique than those of any other of the islands of
the South Pacific. Of a dozen natives picked at random from the beach
of Taio-haie, there would probably be not over three or four who would
not show more or less of his dark head above the end of a six-foot
tape, and the breadth and muscling of each would be in proportion. The
women are likewise of good size and figure, and, when undisfigured
with tattooing, of considerable beauty as well. Both sexes accomplish
prodigious feats of walking, swimming and rowing, and both invariably
bear up remarkably under hardship and privation such as that incident
to being cast away to sea for weeks in an open boat.
As a matter of fact, the startling decrease in the population of the
Marquesan group, except for occasional epidemics, is due to scarcity
of births and a lack of vitality in the children rather than to an
abnormal number of deaths among the adults. This condition is largely
traceable to the existence of a number of more or less active forms of
blood disease introduced by the whites of the Pacific whaling fleet
of half a century ago, and to certain vicious practices in connection
with the prevention of child-bearing prevalent in the over-populous
days of the group. Cannibalism and intertribal wars have frequently
been assigned as potent factors in the decimation, but it is notable
that neither has had such effect in the Solomon or New Hebridean
groups, where both are prevalent today.
The early explorers estimated the population of the island of Nukahiva
at from 30,000 to 40,000. In 1804 there was believed to be not over
18,000 on the island, and in 1836 but 8,000. A French census in 1856
enumerated but 2,960, which number had fallen to 800 by 1880. In
1889 +Stevenson found Taio-haie a lively village with a club, barracks,
hotel, numerous stores and a considerable colony of French officials;
Hatiheu and Anaho were villages of upwards of a hundred natives each.
At the time of our visit in the _Lurline_ there remained in Taio-haie
but three French officials, a single German trader, three or four
missionaries and a native population just short of ninety. The villages
of Hatiheu and Anaho had but a few over a hundred inhabitants between
them.
In the veins of the Nukahivan of today course two strains of foreign
blood of widely diverse origin. During the latter part of the 16th, and
for most of the 17th century, the island was a rendezvous for a large
colony of buccaneers who had chosen that location for the advantages
it gave them in preying upon the Spanish galleons plying between Peru
and the Isthmus of Panama, as well as in raiding settlements on the
intervening coast of South America. These pirates, after some years of
fighting, brought the natives of the Taio-haie and Hatiheu districts
into a state of complete subjection, while their relations with the
tribes of the interior appeared to have been in the nature of an
armed neutrality. The subject natives were employed at sea as sailors
and boatmen, and on land as gardeners and herdsmen. The cattle,
pigs and goats brought to the island by the freebooters must have
been the progenitors of the wild animals of these species which
abound there today. With the natives of the interior some trading
for food was carried on at times when the drought on the coast
made short crops of coconuts, breadfruit and bananas.
When the streams of Incan gold from Peru began to run low and
buccaneering became unprofitable as a consequence, the Nukahivan
pirate colonies gradually changed back to native villages. After the
last of the strangers had died, their descendants, through
intermarriage with pure-blooded natives, reverted little by little to
the predominating type, until the evidences of the blood of white
men in their veins survived only in straighter hair and features,
harder eyes, a sharper and more uncertain temper and an increased
arrogance. They were a handsomer people physically, and a keener
one mentally than the original Marquesan, but withal a race whose
morals were in rags and tatters.
For some decades in the middle of the last century Nukahiva was the
main base of a large portion of the Pacific whaling fleet. Ships spent
months at a time at Taio-haie, refitting and reprovisioning, and the
island gained many new and undesirable inhabitants through desertions
from their crews. The worst epidemic of smallpox ever recorded in
the South Pacific was started in Nukahiva by a maroon from a whaler,
and the present-day prevalence of blood and skin disease is directly
traceable to similar sources. The women were carried off to the ends
of the earth on the whalers and few indeed of them ever found their
way back; for the good of future generations it would have been
better had none of them done so.
The moral laxity of the Marquesan of the present day is undoubtedly a
legacy of these two occupations of the principal island by the lowest
of the sea's riff-raff, pirates and whalers. In Nukahiva chastity
is quite unknown to any class, and a century of work on the part of
the French missionaries has left little mark upon the morals of the
people. They are prone to throw themselves at every opportunity into
the most unlicensed debauchery, and they know no law save that of the
appetites. The feasts of the present generation of Nukahivans--aside
from cannibalism, which is still practised whenever the chances for
escaping detection are favourable--are howling orgies of two and three
days' duration, their riotous excesses uninterrupted even by intervals
of singing and dancing, as in Samoa, Tahiti and Fiji. The song and the
dance, which represent to the Polynesian about all that religion, music
and the drama combined do to us, have died out in the Marquesas even
faster than the people.
The Marquesans of a century ago were the most completely and
artistically tattooed people in the Pacific, and the practice is
carried on among them to a certain extent even today. The really fine
pieces of work, however, such as the famous right leg of the late
Queen Vaekehu over which Stevenson waxed so enthusiastic, are
confined entirely to the very old, and, what with wrinkles, deformities
and the wear and tear of time, these have lost most of their original
sharpness of colour and outline. None of the new generation appears
to have the fortitude to endure the exquisite pain incident to having
a whole limb picked out in a network of geometric design or the face
barred and circled like a coarse spider's web.
Women are rarely tattooed at all now, and most of the young men are
satisfied with a broad band of solid black--not unlike a highwayman's
mask in effect--which reaches across the face from ear to ear, giving
to their never overly-mild countenances an expression of amazing
ferocity. That the art, and a certain pride connected with it, are not
yet lost to the Marquesans, however, was amusingly shown by an
incident which occurred the day after _Lurline's_ arrival in Taio-haie.
On this occasion, in testing some newly-opened shells, we fired ten
or a dozen shots in rapid succession from the yacht's brass signal
cannon. At the first report a bevy of Marquesan damsels, who had
come off to sell sandalwood and shark-tooth necklaces, stampeded
to their canoes and could not be induced to return until all activity
in the firing line had ceased.
Then they all clambered gleefully aboard again, and one of them so
far forgot herself as to sit down on the deck and lean languidly back
with her plump brown shoulder against the sizzling hot breech of the
signal gun. That was the last languid movement she made for some
time. Came the sharp hiss of singed flesh and then, with the scream
of a frightened wildcat, the girl cleared the low rail as though thrown
from a catapult, swam half a hundred feet under water, to go lunging
straight off for the shore the instant her head rose above the surface.
Now it chanced that across the breech of our little cannon was engraved
the name "LURLINE," picked out in ornamental scrolleries, and beneath
it, in rich reposé, the figure of a puffy dolphin in the act of gulping
down a buxom mermaid. Such of this bas-relief as had come in contact
with the fair Marquesienne's shoulder left its mark, which striking
design was no sooner seen by the tribal tattooist than he needs must
perpetuate what he feared, no doubt, was but an ephemeral impression.
So fishbone needles and black gum were hastily brought into play, and
several days later, when the inflammation had subsided sufficiently to
enable her to be about, the proud and grateful young beauty brought
the decoration off for us to see. "RLINE" we read in wobbly reversed
letters, and beneath, floundering desperately across a shoulder blade,
a stub-tailed mermaid could be discerned in the act of disappearing
into the impressionistic but unmistakable head of a dolphin. A half
dozen of the now distinguished young person's girl friends
accompanied her, and every one of the envious minxes persisted in
embracing, leaning against and sitting upon that now cool but still
ornamental signal-gun breech in anxious endeavours to get patterns
of their own to take back to the village tattooist.
But the cunningest picture ever executed upon the body of any
Marquesan, living or dead, pales to insignificance when compared to
the amazing hieroglyphic record depicted upon the skin of a living
Marqueso-American, John Hilyard. Readers of Stevenson may recall the
tattooed man, who was the first resident of Taio-haie to discover the
appearance of the strange schooner in the introductory chapter of
"The Wreckers." A bit of the history of that strange character is also
hinted at, I believe, but, according to the present-day gossip of the
"beach" of Taio-haie, it is all wrong. For the real story I am indebted
to our friend, McGrath, the trader of Hatiheu, who once nursed Hilyard
through a spell of fever and attained to more of that queer outcast's
confidence than any one else on the island. From Hilyard himself--now
a man of about seventy, with his grotesquely figured body fully
clothed and as much as possible of his face obscured with a bushy
beard,--absolutely nothing can be learned, and I was considered to have
done remarkably well in holding him during a ten-minute discussion of
shark baits. I will outline here in a single paragraph a story which,
measured in pangs of soul and body, would tax the compass of a modern
novel adequately to depict.
Deserting from the American whaler, _Nancy Dawson_, when that ship was
careened at Anaho in the 60's for calking, was a raw youth of twenty,
who had run away from his home in a California mining camp and signed
on in San Francisco. White men were scarce in the Marquesas, and
after working for a while in a trading store in Taio-haie, he shortly
became supercargo on a trading schooner, and at length the owner of a
concession and boats of his own. It was at the height of his prosperity
that he met and fell captive to the charms of Mariva, who was reputed
beautiful and undoubtedly was coquettish, as the sequel shows. She
accepted Hilyard's presents, but told him that, while she liked his
personality well enough, she detested the sight of his white skin. Let
the village tattooer remedy that and perhaps--The love lorn wretch was
off to put himself under the needle before she had finished. Mariva
dropped in occasionally upon the session of torture which followed
and, now by criticism, now by approval, urged on the flagging artists
to renewed effort. When geometric whorls and bands and parallelograms
were exhausted, Mariva herself dipped a dainty forefinger in the
black _kuki_-soot gum and began improvising designs. "That broad chest
was made by nature to support a clump of bananas." "What could be
daintier than some fat pigs gorging on mangoes in the hollow of that
back?" She and an invited bevy of friends sang _himines_ to drown
Hilyard's groans while he was conscious, and when he fainted with the
pain and lay in a stupor they seized spare needles and tried their own
hands at tattooing. At the end of the second day, with designs two and
three deep all over the body of the unconscious trader, they desisted,
less from exhaustion than from a lack of further skin that would take
an impression. Hilyard lay in a swoon all night, and in the morning
was carried to the mission house with a raging fever. That night the
faithless Mariva eloped with a half-caste missionary preacher, took
possession of one of Hilyard's schooners, sailed it to the Paumotos,
where they ultimately set up in trading on their own account and, as
far as any one knows, lived happily ever afterwards. That Hilyard did
not die from blood-poisoning was miraculous. As it was he hovered
between life and death for a month, finally to pass from the kindly
care of the missionaries so broken in mind and body that he was
never again able to return to his trading business. The honest
French Residente disposed of Hilyard's interests for a sum sufficient,
when placed in a bank at Tahiti, to give the unlucky victim of love's
madness enough to live comfortably upon, and for the last forty
years he has done just that and nothing more, just existed--an
object of scorn to the natives and of pity to the whites--upon the
"beach" of Taio-haie.
Scenically the Marquesas are incomparably more beautiful than any of
the other island groups of the Pacific, Hawaii not excepted. It is
usual to hear the traveller who has covered Polynesia by the steamer
route speak in similar terms of the Society Islands--especially Moorea
and Tahiti--Samoa and Fiji, whichever may have chanced to tickle his
fancy, quite losing sight of the fact that the route of his boat has
been laid out along the lines of commerce irrespective of scenery. Not
one steamer--save an occasional gunboat--goes to the Marquesas in a
decade, the mail of the islands being carried to and from Tahiti every
three or four months in a trading schooner. In the last twenty years
scarce that number of strangers have visited the group, and a dozen or
more of these came on the only three yachts that have ever found their
way there. How little, therefore, the average South Sea tourist really
knows of these islands may readily be seen.
The rock walls and cliffs of Moorea would be lost in the shadows of
the great 4,000-foot spires that tower above the bay of Hatiheu;
the 600-foot fall of Faatua, in Tahiti, might be shut from sight in
the spray of the 2,000-foot fall of the Typee in Nukahiva; and the
great cliff of Bora-Bora, the creeper-tapestried walls of the bay of
Pago-Pago and the great gorge of the upper Rewa, in Fiji, could be
hidden away in corners of the stupendous Atouna valley of Hiva-oa
so effectually that they would pass unnoticed.
In the matter of riotous tropical growth, the Marquesas, being nearer
the Line than any other of the South Sea islands that may lay claim to
scenic beauty, have also all the best of the comparison. Nukahiva is
an almost impenetrable jungle of lantana, burao, acacia, banana, guava
and scores of other trees and bushes, nearly all of them flowering and
fruit bearing. Indigenous to the island is the _cassi_ plant, a thick
shrub which covers patches of the lower hills in dense masses and
which blossoms out in tiny yellow balls of almost solid pollen. The
latter has a perfume of most penetrating sweetness, and in flowering
time is blown by the Trades many leagues to the leeward of the island.
This is the odour which I mentioned that we noted in the air while the
yacht was still a hundred miles or more from land. Beating into the
incomparable bay of Hatiheu at night with this perfumed breeze sweeping
the deck, the wake a comet of golden-green light and the surf bursting
in vivid spurts of phosphorescence along the silver-bright band of the
beach, is to anticipate the approach to the mystical Islands of the
Blest.
At a number of widely-separated points in the South Pacific--notably
at Easter Island, Tahiti and Kusaie, of the Caroline group--are to
be found great images of stone, the ruins of huge temples and other
evidences of the existence of prehistoric races who, at least as
builders, were far in advance of the Polynesian of today. French
scientists had noted that in the Marquesas some of the abandoned
house-foundations or _pai-pais_, contained far larger blocks of stone
than any of those of later construction, but not until very recently
was it known that there were works in the group not unworthy of
comparison with the stone gods of Easter Island.
Just previous to our visit to Nukahiva, our friend McGrath, the trader
of Hatiheu, while following up a wounded boar in the Typee Valley,
chanced on an ancient Marquesan "Olympus," containing nine large stone
images in a comparatively good state of preservation. Though this most
interesting discovery lies within 300 yards of the main trail up the
Typee Valley, no native on the island, either by actual knowledge or
through tradition, has been able to shed light on its origin, purpose
or probable age.
McGrath conducted our party to his "Goddery," as he facetiously called
it, when we were crossing the island to pay a visit to the Queen of
Hatiheu, and the several films which I exposed in a driving rainstorm
resulted in what are undoubtedly the first photographs of these strange
Marquesan images. The ancient shrine--for such it must have been--is
situated on a terrace in the steeply-sloping side hill, and though
the underbrush thins out somewhat in its immediate vicinity, the
overarching bows of _maupé_ and _hau_ trees form so dense a screen that
the heavens are completely obscured. Though it was full noonday when
we visited the place, the light--partly, no doubt, on account of the
rain--was as dim as that of an old cathedral, and my films, which were
exposed four minutes each, would have turned out much better with ten.
The images, which had been set at regular intervals around an open
stone-paved court, were from six to eight feet in height and averaged
about three feet in thickness. We estimated each to contain from forty
to sixty cubic feet of hard basaltic stone, the weight of which must
have been several tons. As raising so great a weight up the sixty or
seventy per cent. incline from the valley would have been almost
impossible, and as no outcroppings of stone of similar nature appeared
nearby, we were forced to the conclusion that the material for the
images must have been quarried out at some point higher up the mountain
and laboriously lowered to the terrace prepared for them.
[Illustration: "ALL OF THE IMAGES WERE COVERED
WITH MOSS"]
[Illustration: "A HARDENED OLD OFFENDER WHO
PREFERRED WHITE MAN TO NATIVE MEAT"]
All of the images were covered with an inch or more of solid moss, and
on one which I photographed it was necessary to scrape some of this
away to bring out the features. The figures were much alike in design,
and, in a general way, of a not unremote resemblance to the Buddhas of
the ancient Javan temples. Eleven of them were still in their original
positions; one was blocked half way in its fall by the trunk of a _hau_
tree, and one was prostrate and overgrown with moss and creepers. A
search will undoubtedly reveal others now entirely covered with earth
and undergrowth, as there are several unoccupied niches still remaining.
That this shrine is of considerable age is evidenced by the fact that a
_hau_ tree, three feet in diameter, has forced apart the heavy paving
stones and is growing in the middle of the court. Trees of even greater
size are growing out of the ruins of a small nearby building, which
might once have been the foundation of the domicile of the attendant
priests. Some of the roughly squared rocks in the foundation of the
shrine are approximately three by three by ten feet in dimension, and
must have taken a small army of men to move and set in place.
The Marquesas are the only islands of the eastern groups of the South
Pacific where cannibalism has not long since ceased. This does not mean
that one is likely to be pounced on and eaten as soon as he sets foot
ashore--as I must frankly admit we all feared when we first heard of
the fate of the late pilots of Taio-haie--but only that under certain
favourable conditions, when there is small chance of its being brought
to the attention of the French authorities, this barbarity is still
resorted to. The French and the missionaries have been active in
suppressing cannibalism and its attendant rites, but, principally on
account of certain religious significances which appear to attach to
it, the practice persists in bobbing up perennially. The dead in their
tribal fights are still eaten when the opportunity offers, but only one
white man and a Chinaman (the two pilots were half-castes) are known
to have been eaten in the last decade.
Accuse a Marquesan of being a cannibal, and he will ordinarily deny
the soft impeachment much after the manner of a school girl taxed with
being a flirt. Some will brazen it out, however, and of such was a
hardened old offender who explained to the _Lurline_ forecastle one
night that, of the various classes of "long-pig," he preferred white
man to native because the meat of the latter was saltier and of a more
pronounced flavour. Chinaman he had never eaten, he said, but--and
here he cast an appraising look to where our recently shipped cook was
shuddering at the door of the galley--he was going to try one at his
first opportunity. The terrified Si-ah would not even go ashore to do
the marketing during the remainder of our stay in Taio-haie.
The practice of cannibalism undoubtedly originated in the
over-populated days of the island when, in the seasons of famine, the
bodies of those killed in the intertribal raids were eaten by the
survivors to escape starvation. Its survival into a period when the
islands produce food a thousand-fold in excess of consumption, and in
the face of the active opposition of the French, can be due only to
certain superstitious attributes, such as the belief that the strength
of a dead foe enters into the body of him who eats the flesh.
Human flesh is eaten in the Marquesas today only when the conditions
are such that the chances of detection are the slightest, and never
under any circumstances with the ceremonies which attended the rites
of three or four decades ago. The "long-pig"--the polite euphemism by
which man-meat is designated--may be quietly cut up and distributed
among a hundred families in a half dozen different villages, each of
which will partake of its precious tidbit in private and strictest
secrecy. Again, the body may be buried after only a small portion has
been reserved for eating. Just previous to our arrival in Nukahiva a
body from which only the hands were missing was washed ashore at
Anaho during a heavy southwester. Investigation showed it to be that
of one Teona, a resident of Hatiheu, a native who, three days
previously, had, according to the story of his companions, fallen from
their canoe and been drowned. The latter, after four days' confinement
in a dark cell at Taio-haie--the extremest torture to which the
superstitious Marquesan may be subjected--confessed that they had
killed Teona during a coconut wine debauch, and after cutting off his
hands and eating them, had weighted the body with stones and dropped it
out to sea. They were given the extreme penalty--two weeks' confinement
in the dark, to be followed by a year of weed-cutting on the village
street. One died of hysteria before the first week was out, and the
ther, at the end of ten days, killed himself by gashing his wrist on a
jagged corner of the sheet iron wall of his prison.
The Marquesan's terror of the dark is so extreme that it is not a rare
thing for men, women and children to die of fright during eclipses.
In view of this, there seems some ground for the contention that the
French practice of confining convicted, and occasionally suspected,
murderers and cannibals in windowless sheet iron cells is scarcely less
barbarous than the crimes for which punishment is being meted out.
The great cannibal feast grounds of Nukahiva and Hiva-oa are not
only not used at the present time, but are even so strictly _tabu_
that no native can be found who will venture within their forbidden
confines. Stevenson writes of visiting the Hatiheu "high-place" in
company with a French priest and a native boy; but on the occasion of
our visit we held out every conceivable inducement in an endeavour
to secure native guides to the same feast-ground, and quite in vain.
Not even among the converts of the Catholic fathers could be found
one who held the _tabu_ lightly enough to dare to violate it. The
best we could do was to persuade several of them to accompany us to
the line of the _tabu_, and there to await our return, while we went
over the ruins with McGrath. The following description is from notes
taken by Claribel on this occasion, and subsequently amplified under
the direction of McGrath, who, in the fifteen years he has maintained
a trading store at Hatiheu, has missed no opportunity to push
enquiries amongst the older natives regarding what is unquestionably
the most interesting ruin of its kind in the South Pacific:
"On the seaward side of a spur of the mountain a level space, oval in
general shape, had been partly excavated, partly built up, so that
there was a smooth floor about 300 feet long by 200 feet wide. In a
semi-circle, with the chief's house in the centre, were the little
'feast-houses' of the court dignitaries and the special guests. Beneath
the posts of each house excavations have disclosed a number of human
bones which bear witness to the sacrifice which accompanied the setting
of every pillar. In these little booths the guests remained during the
feasts, some of which, when food was plenty or some especially great
event was to be celebrated, lasted over a week. Each guest brought some
contribution to the feast, and when it was over he was privileged to
gather up and carry home any fragments that he liked.
"The 'dining-room' was the space in front of the houses, and there,
spread on the huge leaves of the banana and taro, the feast was laid.
Meat was handled with big four-tined forks of wood; poi and other
soft dishes in calabashes of coco shell and shallow wooden platters.
The drinking cups, in which were served a fiery wine made from the
juice of the tender shoots of the coconut, were the hollow shells of
nuts. The food, in addition to human flesh or 'long-pig,' included
the meat of the wild cattle, goats and pigs, roasted, boiled, fried and
salted raw, and served with _miti-hari_, a most piquant sauce still in
use and which is composed of a mixture of lime juice and the
pressed-out milk of grated coconuts. Bananas and plantains, cooked
and uncooked, were served; also taro in balls which looked like mud
and tasted like sago and brown sugar; breadfruit, avocados, seaweed,
squid, prawns and shrimps and an endless variety of indigenous
tropical fruits.
"The general plan of the place was, roughly, as follows: Beginning
at the right and running in a seaward direction, there was first the
private stairway for an official who might be designated as the Captain
of the Guard, a curving four-foot passage, the steps of which were
cut into the earth and faced with stones. This stairway led up to the
box where the Captain presided during the festivities, and was for
his private use. Next came the main approach to the feast level, a
stairway two paces in width, terminating between two round towers in
which soldiers with clubs were stationed to welcome bona fide guests
and intercept intruders. A functionary who stood at the head of the
stairs greeted each guest on his arrival with a loud shout of welcome
and a blast from a _pao_ or conch trumpet, announcing him immediately
afterwards to the company with a flowery recital of his personal career.
"Farther on was the stairway for the cooks, provision bearers and
the human victims. This led to the 'kitchen,' where the firestones
and chopping blocks were located. The firestones lined a circular
depression in the earth, and after this had been thoroughly heated,
the meat and fruit, all wrapped in _ti_ leaves, were laid sociably
together to cook. The blackened stones of this old cannibal oven are
still in place, and a half-hour's work with an ax and cutlass would
put it in shape for service.
[Illustration: THE BEST SURVIVING EXAMPLE OF
MARQUESAN TATTOOING]
[Illustration: "INTO IT WERE THROWN THE BONES
OF THE VICTIMS AFTER THE FEAST WAS OVER"]
"Back of the kitchen was the 'larder,' a round, deep hole where the
'long-pig' was kept until ready for the oven. Directly over the mouth
of this hole, and about forty feet above it, was the horizontally
projecting limb of the sacred banyan, the only tree, by the way, which
was permitted to grow within the walls. Over this limb hung a stout
rope braided of the fibrous bark of the _hau_ tree. When the call
for more meat came from the 'kitchen,' the noosed end of this rope
was lowered over the head of the victim next in order, and he was
pushed over the brink of the hole, the fall usually breaking his neck.
Dismemberment, according to prescribed rules, followed, the choice
bits, such as the hands and eyes and ears, being laid aside for the
chiefs.
"Beyond the oven, and not far from the chief's house, was what might be
called the 'bone-hole,' a rock-lined, well-like sort of an affair about
nine feet in diameter and twenty feet deep. Into it were thrown the
bones of the victims after the feast was over, and above these gruesome
remnants the priests performed certain ceremonies calculated to protect
the living from the spirits of the outraged dead. Cutting around the
rim of this hole with our cutlasses, we managed, after an hour of
tugging and hauling, to dislodge and remove a great mass of creepers,
disclosing a huge pile of human bones. A couple of pieces of mahogany,
which must have been taken from some ship, were lying near the top of
the heap, and led us to wonder how many of the bones mouldering in
the pile beneath were those of white men.
"After the keen edges of their appetites had worn off, the feasters
adjourned to the 'dance hall,' a rectangular subterranean chamber of
about thirty by fifty feet. The most of this great room was a natural
cave which pierced the mountain immediately under the feast ground,
but to seaward a considerable extension of masonry had been added
to give more space. The latter had been destroyed in a freshet and
hurricane which occurred about two years previous to our visit, but the
cave portion was still in a fair state of preservation. This had been
roughly squared with walls of fitted boulders, and off from it opened
numerous little retiring rooms which connected with private stairways
with the group of guest-houses above. The floor of this chamber was
covered with a cement made of coral lime and a puttylike clay, and
still remains as smooth and hard as concrete.
"The hall was lighted with torches of _kukui_ nuts, the sooty stains
of which on the walls the seepages of years have not entirely effaced.
Fantastic indeed must have been the barbaric assemblage as revealed in
their flickering light: the hideously tattooed dancers in head-dresses
fashioned in imitation of the forms of birds and animals and fishes;
the musicians drumming on the hollow trunks of _burao_ and _hau_,
shaking shell and bone rattles, tooting conches and blowing shrill cane
whistles; the packed ranks of the spectators, shouting and clapping
encouragement and tossing off _epu_ after _epu_ of the fiery coconut
wine. Hour after hour the dancers reeled in the delirious abandon of
the Marquesan _hula_; now gliding, with a sinuous, snaky motion,
their oil-glistening bodies bent almost to the floor; now leaping wildly
into the air, with shouts and shrill screams, lunging with their war
clubs at imaginary foes; now seated on long woven mats of pandanus
fibre before the dais where royalty reclined, bending and swaying their
supple forms in a series of graceful, rhythmic motions, accompanied
only by a song, the clappings of hands or the beating of the wooden
drums. The boom of the drums, the shrilling of the whistles, the
shouts of the spectators, the shrieks of the dancers and the swishings
of their bare feet upon the floor--how it all must have stirred and
amazed even those roistering old pirate and whaling captains when it
struck upon their ears for the first time!"
CHAPTER IV
HUNTING IN THE MARQUESAS
The French have never actually prohibited the carrying of arms in the
Marquesas, as have the British in the Solomons; but the possession and
use of guns has been so hedged about with restrictions as practically
to accomplish the same purpose. This is about the way it goes: Coming
to the islands with a gun, a permit must first be secured before it may
be landed. This allows you to take it to your domicile but not to take
it out again. If you would carry it with you on the street, a "Port des
Armes" is required, which allows you, however, to fire it only in your
own backyard, and when that sanctum is enclosed with a metre-high
stone wall. If you desire to fire it anywhere else, a "Permit de Chasse"
must be obtained. Finally, if you come to the conclusion that the
possession of a gun in the Marquesas imposes too many burdens, and
decide to dispose of it, a permit to sell is required; and if, later,
you regret your action and want to get it back again, a permit to
purchase will have to be taken out before the deal can be consummated.
Each of these permits costs a good, stiff fee, and it is largely this
which is responsible for the fact that the Marquesan native hunts today
much after the fashion of ancient times--with his wits and his hands. A
hunt of this kind comes nearer being real sport--that is, of giving the
quarry as good a chance to take the hunter's life as the latter has to
take that of the quarry--than any form of the chase since the days of
the troglodytes, and lucky indeed may the white man esteem himself who
is allowed to join one of them. I eliminated a good deal of the sporting
element on both the occasions on which I went out by carrying, and
using, a rifle or revolver, but as neither of these weapons--through no
fault of mine, however--figured seriously in the final dénouements, I
shall always tell myself that for once in my life at least, I have seen
real hunting--hunting in which the hunter has a legitimate right to be
proud of the game he brings to earth. But first something of a form of
Marquesan hunting which--largely because the white man with his
modern weapons enters into it--is as shameless as the old native
"cave-man" method is admirable.
One may hunt wild cattle, wild boar and wild goats in the Marquesas,
but the pursuit of the latter, however one goes at it, is not worthy
of the name of sport. Unlike the mountain goat of the Cascades and the
Canadian Rockies, the Marquesan animal of that name is neither hard
to find nor hard to kill; so that if one goes out after him with an
intelligent guide it is usually a matter of doing a lot of shooting at
easy range and letting the natives gather up and bring in the meat.
It is about comparable on the score of excitement to shooting seals
in their rookeries or starving cariboo in the Arctic. Goat-hunting
with beaters, as it is done in Nukahiva, cannot be complained of on
the score of lacking excitement, but, on account of the unspeakable
barbarity of its inevitable sequel, is not to be contemplated without a
shudder, even when the drive is undertaken--as it often is--to
exterminate animals that have been ravaging the village gardens.
I had heard in Hawaii that a goat-drive, next to a cannibal feast,
was the greatest attraction the Marquesas had to offer, and one of
the first inquiries I made after my "battery" had run the gauntlet of
French officialdom was regarding the chances for arranging one. The
Residente promised at once to lend aid in the form of all the prisoners
in the island jail to act as beaters, saying that the goats had become
very numerous and troublesome since the last drive and that he would
be glad indeed of a chance to get rid of a few of them; but when I
broached the subject to the trader, McGrath, who had already become our
court of first and last instance in the filling up of the program for
our Marquesan stay, he frowned and shook his head dubiously.
"If you're half the sportsman I take you for you would be sorry for
it," he said. "You wouldn't engage in one of your California rabbit
drives for sport, would you? No. Well, a Marquesan goat drive is just
about like one of those--and then some. I'll have to tell you about the
first one I took part in, I think, and then if you still feel that you
want to go ahead we will see what can be done."
We drew out a couple of canvas deck chairs to a breeze-swept corner of
the front veranda of Cramer's trading store, where McGrath, sipping now
and then at the long glass of absinthe and water which is the approved
drink in that corner of the Pacific, told his story.
"Up at the top of that cliff--it's a thousand feet in the sheer"--he
began, pointing to a towering basaltic buttress that reared its black
bulk abruptly from the northern loop of the bay, "there is a narrow
but fairly level and open table-land. The opposite side drops down
to Typee Inlet in the same way, and you will remember how it tapers
off to a knife-edge at the outer point. The objective of every goat-drive
is the open space upon that point, for from it there is no escape save
across the narrow landward neck which is held by the beaters and
hunters. There is another escape, if you want to call it that. Imagine
an almost solid stream of white furry patches, five hundred feet wide,
rushing out over the edge of that table-land there and falling down
the face of the cliff like a cataract in flood; and then imagine--but I
anticipate.
"The goats were particularly active when I first came to Nukahiva--I
was a missionary then, and lived here in Taio-haie--and one night they
brought their depredations to a climax by tramping down the thorn fence
of the Residency garden and making a clean sweep of all the vegetables.
How much of a luxury truck garden stuff is upon a tropical island
unserved by steamers and totally lacking in cold storage facilities,
only one who has lived under such conditions can appreciate. Probably
you're beginning to come to some appreciation of it already. The
Residente was, naturally, furious over his loss, and plans were set
afoot that afternoon for a big drive to rid the immediate vicinity of
as many as possible of the obnoxious animals. I didn't know what a
Marquesan goat-drive was then, and readily consented to take part.
"On the morrow at daybreak, mustering between officials, soldiers,
trading store employés and officers from schooners in the harbour,
ten or a dozen mounted men, and between the "trusties" from the
prison and other natives drawn in by the opportunity of obtaining
fresh meat, fifty or sixty beaters, we set out in a long line that
reached from sea to sea across the landward end of the peninsula.
"All morning we scared up the frightened animals and drove them on
before us until, at noon, we had a herd that must have numbered some
thousands cornered upon the open table-land at the extremity of the
point. On three sides of the heaving mass of white the cliffs fell
sheer to the sea for a thousand feet, while to landward escape was cut
off by the hunt, its armed riders drawn up in front, and the beaters,
now shoulder to shoulder, bringing up the rear in a solid double line.
"Twice the terrified band, led by a squad of patriarchal old 'billies,'
charged down upon us in a wild break for freedom, only to fall back
each time before the rain of bullets and the deafening roar from the
hard-pumped repeaters and automatics. Even once more they massed and,
blindly, desperately, madly, made their last rush to break our lines.
Falling by scores, they still braved the rifle fire until the last
gun was empty, broke through between the horsemen and, but for the
close-packed ranks of the beaters, would have gained their freedom in
thousands instead of a few scattered twos and threes.
"But the heavily-swung war clubs and the ear-splitting yells of
the natives checked the force of the rush, and suddenly, as though
simultaneously possessed of a common impulse, every one of the
survivors turned, rushed to the edge of that great black cliff yonder,
and went lunging off into space. For a few moments, rising above
the dull roar of the surf against the base of the cliff, we heard the
thud and splash of the bodies striking rocks and water, and then,
save for the bleating of the wounded at our feet, all was quiet. Not
a goat had faltered; not an unhurt animal remained on the plateau.
"For several long moments no one moved or spoke, but each, with his
horse reined sharply in, glanced guiltily at the man on his left and on
his right, and then let his eyes fall shamedly to the ground. Even the
natives were awed and silent. Finally the Residente, shaking his heavy
shoulders like one who would rid himself of the effects of a bad dream,
dismounted, gave his horse to a native, and picked his way out to the
edge of the cliff, the rest of us following suit. And then it was that
we were given to see the full enormity of the thing which we had done,
for the horror that had already befallen was only the preliminary of a
still grimmer tragedy, for the final act of which the curtain was just
being rung up.
"Lucky indeed--as luck went that day--were the goats that had been
killed on the plateau or had mercifully plunged to instant death on the
rocks. Many of the animals, due to their falls having been broken by
striking the yielding mass formed by the bodies of their mates, were
still alive, and for the hundreds of these that were floundering in
the water a worse fate was reserved. The reek of blood which welled up
from below, and the piteous bleats that assailed our ears, smote also
on keener senses than our own, and at even our first glance there were
revealed to us the black dorsals of countless lurking tiger sharks,
cutting the water from every direction and converging in a deadly focus
on the spot where the helpless little wisps of white were floating
at their mercy. They came and came, and still kept coming, until it
seemed that the whole Pacific was giving up the sharks of the ages
gone by to join in the bloody carnival. The sea along the foreshore
for hundreds of yards was literally alive with great brown-black forms
that slashed and fought and piled upon one another in frantic fury,
while the water, five minutes before us limpid as a woodland pool,
was dyed to a deep crimson, and its foam-lines in the eddies frothed
up a ghastly pink. I have surveyed the remains of several cannibal
feasts since that sickening noontide at the brink of that great cliff,
but never again have I known anything to approach the overpowering
feeling of mingled horror, awe, disgust and regret that I then
experienced."
McGrath straightened up with a long breath and gulped the last of his
glass of absinthe and water.
"Thus my first goat-drive," he concluded; "and thus are the goat-drives
of today. It's just as well you should know what they are beforehand,
for, if you're anything like me, you would never forgive yourself for
getting drawn into one. However, goat-driving doesn't exhaust the
possibilities of Nukahiva by any means. I shall be able to arrange a
pig hunt for tomorrow or next day without any trouble, I think, and, if
there is any way of getting the natives keyed up to it, I will get them
to take you out after a wild bull before you go. You'll see something
you never saw before in either case."
* * * * *
It may be largely coincidence, but it is a fact at any rate, that in
nearly every place in the world where the wild pig is found it is not
considered quite the sporting thing to hunt it with guns. There is no
hard and fast rule against it, of course, but in these places shooting
a wild boar, except as a _dernier ressort_, is considered about on a
par with potting ducks or pheasant. Thus, in Germany, Austria and
the Balkans it is customary for the keenest sportsman still to take
his chance with a boar on foot, and armed only with a spear; in
India the British army officers ride that animal down in the jungle
and dispatch it with a short lance, and in Africa the sporting thing
to do is for the hunter to endeavour to give the _coup de grace_
with a native _assegai_. In North America, for some reason, this
custom is honoured only in the breach, and the Texas peccary and
the Mexican _javelin_--neither of which is much more than an
oversized razor-back hog--are dispatched on sight with rifle and
shotgun.
Boar-hunting with a spear or _assegai_,--or even according to the
Indian practice of killing from the saddle, which requires the
greatest steadiness of seat, hand and nerve,--are certainly not open
to criticism on the ground of being un-sporting; but the Marquesan
native, in attacking the boar of his islands with a two-foot cutlass
or _macheté_, which has been made for slashing underbrush and opening
coconuts--for cutting, not thrusting--unquestionably goes all of them
one better on the score of taking chances, for he works literally at
arm's length and with his body unprotected even by the lightest of
clothes.
A Marquesan boar hunt, with no other weapons than knives or cutlasses,
is as exciting and hazardous an undertaking as the most adventurous can
desire. The pigs are scared up in the bush by dogs and men, headed off in
their flight along the narrow run-ways in the guava scrub, and dispatched
by a knife-thrust between the base of the neck and the shoulder. Killing a
large boar in this manner is an extremely nice piece of work, as a
difference of an inch to the right or the left in plunging the knife means
that the thrust will be almost harmless and leaves the hunter open to the
deadly sweep of one of the scimitar-like tusks of the powerful animal.
The commonest scar one sees on the body of a Marquesan is a long
diagonal welt of white where the flesh of calf or thigh has been laid open
to the bone by the tusk of a charging boar. If, as occasionally happens
when the boar is a large one, the slash is across the abdomen, the hunter
rarely survives to bear the scar.
McGrath was as good as his word in the matter of arranging the pig hunt
he had promised, but unfortunately, through being called to Hatiheu to
look after the loading of one of his schooners, was unable to go along
himself.
"Be content to remain a spectator," was his parting injunction; "and
don't think because it looks easy for a native to drop a charging boar
with a cutlass and a twist of the wrist that you can do it yourself.
That was the way I got this limp of mine--it comes from a tendon that
was cut by a side-swipe from a tusk of the first--and the last--boar I
ever tried to stick. Best take your six-shooter along, but don't use
it unless you have to. It might serve to turn a boar that was charging
you; but it also might make one that was running away swing around
and come back. There are only two or three small spots on a wild pig
in which a pistol bullet--or a half dozen of them, for that matter--will
prove fatal, and these you would hardly be able to locate with the
animal at a run."
McGrath laid special stress on my adhering to the spectator rôle,
and I set out with that injunction firmly impressed on my mind. But
the sticking trick looked so ridiculously easy after I had seen it
performed once or twice that it was not long before I began to tell
myself that it was a case of "once bitten, twice shy" with my trader
friend, and that he had probably lost his nerve on account of his
unpropitious initial experience. And so it chanced--but I had best tell
something of the way of a Marquesan with a pig before obtruding my
own troubles.
We set out from Taio-haie on foot in the first flush of a heliotrope
and daffodil sunrise--a dozen or more natives, about twice that
number of dogs, and myself--followed the Typee trail for a mile up
the mountain through the endless ruins of the old Marquesan villages,
finally to branch off by a barely discernible foot path into the
veritable carpet of low scrub which belts the island at the 500-foot
level. Guava and lantana it was for the most part, the former heavy
with lucious yellow-red fruit and the latter bright with tiny golden
flowers. As we fared farther from the main travelled trail, dim runways
through the bush began to appear, and these, gradually converging as
they led down toward the neck of a rolling little valley which opened
up beyond a sharp ridge we had crossed, formed a narrow but well
marked path.
Four of the natives and I headed for a point where two jutting walls
of rock formed a natural gateway, which was scarcely a dozen feet
wide between the cliffs and choked with several giant trees and a maze
of lianas and brush. Through this opening ran the runway we were
following, the only path by which pigs going back and forth between
the upper and lower valley could pass. The others, with the dogs still
held in leash by strands of light liana, circled to the upper hills
preliminary to swinging around and beating back down the valley. I
was led, gently but firmly, up to a natural "grandstand" in the angle
of the buttressed roots of a big _maupé_ tree, one of the natives--a
servant of McGrath's who was evidently acting under orders--stopping
alongside in case I showed a disposition to "stray." My three other
companions--strapping bronze giants with the muscles of
gladiators--took their stands in the centre of the runway. One behind
the other, at ten or twelve-foot intervals, they lined up--there was no
chance in the narrow, bush-walled passage for anything in the nature
of a three-abreast, Horatius-at-the-Bridge formation--each with his
cutlass hand resting lightly on his hip, like a fencer standing at ease.
Cool, alert, ready, they waited, three living, breathing incarnations
of deadly efficiency. So had I seen a puma waiting, patiently tense,
upon the limb of a tree above a path where deer were wont to come
on their way to water; so have I since seen sharks lurking in
quivering readiness among the coral spines where ventured the
divers for pearls.
Ten minutes passed, in which occasional stifled yelps, now from
this side, now from that, told that the dogs, still in leash, were
being spread out as quietly as possible across the upper valley. Only
occasional sharp crashes in the scrub gave evidence of an increasing
current of uneasiness among the pigs. Tebu, who stood at "Number 1,"
broke into a low crooning chant, with a throaty kluck and a queer
chesty roll to it, which my "guard" translated as an invitation to the
pigs to come down and join our party. Presently the other two
natives took up the air, the three of them swaying gently to the
rhythm of the barbaric chant.
The dogs appeared to have been released upon a preconcerted signal, for
their choruses of baying broke out all the way across the valley at the
same time, accompanied by the ringing shouts of the men and the shrill
ululations of a bevy of women and girls who had trailed along after us
and had now joined the hunt.
Tebu hushed his singing and froze to attention as the underbrush
began to crackle, and I knew by the flash of blood-lust in his eyes
the instant he sighted the first pig. This animal, which was startled
but not aroused, lunged back into the scrub before he reached the
"gateway," and two or three other half-hearted mavericks did likewise
before one arrived on the scene who really had his mind made up about
going through to the lower valley. Singleness of purpose showed in
every line of the flying black mass that came dashing down the runway
and headed straight for the "gate." Possibly the fear of the dogs
was in his heart, but he looked more mad than frightened as, without
a pause or a side-glance of indecision, he hurled himself upon the
motionless bronze figure that blocked the way. On he came, like a bull
at a gate, and even as I gasped to myself that a regiment of soldiers
couldn't block his flight, he dashed against the lone human barrier
and the miracle was enacted. The impassive giant hardly seemed to
move. There was sharp tensing of the powerful frame, a flash of
sunlight glinting across the golden muscles, a quick movement of the
wrist that might almost have been a caress--and the flying mass of
bone and sinew was quivering at the gladiator's feet. There was not a
squeal or a kick. It was almost as though the bronze Titan had waved
his hand and muttered "Alive! Dead! Presto! Change!" and that thus it
had come to pass. The swift transition from life to death reminded me
of the wilting of a steer under the touch of the "killer" in an
Uruguayan _matadero_, where they slay by severing the spinal cord at
the base of the horns with a knife thrust. But there the twinkle of
the wrist snuffed the life spark in the body of a passive animal,
while here the same easy, effortless movement had smothered it while
it flared at full power in a quarter of a ton of flying flesh and bone
that was itself a Bolt of Death.
Another and yet another charging monster was crumpled to earth while I
was still lost in speculation respecting the manner of the passing of
the first, and it was not until the fourth or fifth fugitive appeared
that I gathered my wits together for a dispassionate study of the way
the wonder was wrought. Then I quickly came to the conclusion that it
was the almost absolute "evenness" of the charge that made the thing
possible at all. The surface of the runway was smooth and sloped but
slightly, while its narrowness and straightness at the "gate" held
the pig to an undeviating course whether he wished it or not. Though
he came at a great speed, the huge body advanced almost as evenly
as though running on a track, making it possible for a man with a
steady hand and nerve to locate to a nicety that little three-inch-wide
spot between the neck and shoulder where the point of knife must
enter to be effective. That vulnerable point would be covered by the
upward toss of the head that the boar has timed to make at the
moment of impact, and the whole success of the thrust depends
upon a quick forward step and a lunge that anticipates that toss
by the hundredth part of a second.
While he is waiting the native receiving the charge scrapes a shallow
depression in the path--something similar to a sprinter's starting
holes--into which the toes of his left foot are set for a firm grip on
the earth. At the psychologic moment the right foot is advanced half a
pace, the left leg straightened into a brace, the right arm, with its
extended cutlass, stiffened to a bar of steel--and the thing is done.
The keen two-foot blade, slipping between the shoulder blade and the
first rib, shores its way through heart and lungs, and its point may
even penetrate to the abdominal cavity. If the stroke is true the blade
and handle of the knife are buried to the wrist of the arm that drives
it and the charging animal crumples up into an inert mass without
uttering a sound. If the vital spot is missed, what happens depends
largely upon the extent of the error. If the point of the knife meets
a bone squarely--as rarely happens, however--the man behind it may be
thrown backward or to one side by the impact, and escape unscathed.
The usual miss, however, comes through having the point of the knife
deflected by the toss of the boar's head, and the result is a glancing
thrust which will probably leave the hunter still in the path of the
charge and exposed to the deadly side-swipe of the great back-curving
tusks.
It is not often that there is more than one wound--a charging boar
rarely returns to the attack once his impetus has carried him clear of
his enemies--and the consequences of this depend largely upon its
location. If a thigh is cut deeply enough the wounded man will bleed
to death; and if the slash is across the abdomen, though he may
linger, it is rarely indeed that blood-poisoning fails ultimately to
claim him for a victim. Because the wild pig is so foul a feeder,
there is also grave danger of blood-poisoning from the superficial
wounds on the arms and legs, but most of these, it is said, are
recovered from.
Tebu dropped another pig or two with the same easy nonchalance that
had marked his manner from the outset, and then, reluctantly, gave
place to the man next in line. This one was called Maro, and he was
reputed the champion pig-sticker of the leeward side of the island. As
first "backer-up," he had been chafing under the enforced inactivity
for some minutes and complaining that Tebu was taking the cream of
the sport for himself. The new "Number 1" was less massive of build
than his predecessor, but was muscled with the fluent undulations of
swift-running water--a man compact of watchsprings, a human tiger-cat.
Deftly and easily he dropped his first pig--a rangy boar--slapped a
flying half-grown shote contemptuously with the flat of his cutlass as
beneath his notice, and had just got well "set" on his toes again, when
that bane of the Marquesan pigsticker, a "double"--two boars running
close together--came charging down.
By all the rules of the game this twin terror should have been allowed
to go by unmolested, for successfully to stick a "double" is a feat
as rare as a triple play in baseball or the "hat trick" in cricket--a
thing to be talked about for years after it has happened. But it chanced
to come at the moment when the shifty Maro was just "on edge"--nicely
warmed up and steadied by his first pig and yet not wearied by
successive efforts--and then there was the Beretani--the white man--who
had to be shown what a Marquesan could really do in a pinch. Probably
the latter was the more powerful incentive. At any rate, without a
gesture or a glance of hesitation, he settled the toes of his left foot
firmly into their hole, poised for an instant in quivering readiness,
and then, with the swiftness of a striking cobra, lurched forward in
two lightning passes.
The first thrust, which was delivered at the full extension of his
reach, appeared barely to brush the neck of the foremost boar, but the
next--driven home with a short-arm jab like a pugilist's close-in hook
at an opponent's solar plexus--buried the full length of the knife in
the shoulder of the second boar, and brought it down in a heap, Maro
himself being tripped and half-buried under the inert body. That the
first boar had been more than scratched seemed impossible; yet there
he lay, almost at my feet, giving what appeared to be his dying kicks.
Tebu and his mate were extricating Maro from under the body of the
second boar, and it struck me that the humane thing to do would be to
put the wounded beast out of his agony. Accordingly, without taking
especial care to aim accurately, I directed a couple of bullets from my
".38" automatic at a spot behind one of the ears which appeared to be
vulnerable.
Just where the bullets struck I never found out, for the well-meant
shots awakened something besides the echoes of the rock-girt gorge. At
the touch of the lead the apparently dying boar scrambled to his feet
and made a dive for the lower end of the "gate." Tebu struck viciously
as the animal passed him, but only landed a harmless slash, and the
cutlass of the other native, flung on the chance of severing a rear
tendon, went wide of its mark. The fugitive, running blind but strong,
disappeared among the mazes of trails that led into the lower valley,
followed by the wails of Maro, who saw the feat of a lifetime marred by
the interference of a meddlesome outsider who had been too cowardly to
take a hand in the dangerous part of the game himself. Shouting
something in voluble Marquesan in my direction, he leapt back into
the runway as a renewed crashing broke out above, and stood savagely
on guard.
"What did he say?" I asked McGrath's boy, Tavu, who had stuck closely
to my side through all the excitement.
"He say he kill pig dead. You shoot gun, wake him up. Maro damn mad.
He say now he kill three pigs, all one time. Maybe he mean 'long-pig.'
Maro bad fella b'long Anaho," and he touched his eye with a finger as
a sign that it would be well to be on guard.
The good fellow probably did Maro an injustice in charging him with
harbouring the intention of converting my anatomy into that most
recherché of Marquesan delicacies, "long-pig"; but if there was any
doubt of his willingness, in his anger and disappointment, to tackle
three pigs at once it was effectually dispelled by the events of the
next few moments. The shouts of the beaters and the barking of the
dogs had been growing louder all the time, and the crashings in the
underbrush told that the pigs were now coming in increasing numbers.
Three or four of them shortly came tearing into view, and then--all of
a sudden--the path was packed with bristling black figures, the first
few running hard and free and the rest crowding and stumbling.
The rush of pigs as the beaters closed in was always to be expected in
this particular _cul de sac_, and McGrath had warned me regarding it.
"Get out of the way and sit tight," he had said; "and don't worry about
the boys. They'll take care of themselves."
I appeared to be sufficiently out of the way already, and Tebu and
the third native, as soon as they had caught sight of the impending
avalanche, came over and joined me on the roots of the big tree. I
watched them clamber up to safety and then turned to see the river of
pigs sweep by--and there was that sullen, scowling tiger-cat of a Maro
standing his ground in the middle of the runway. Of course, the proper
thing to have done would have been for some self-sacrificing soul to
leap down and snatch the would-be suicide from "under the wheels," a
task for which the powerful Tebu was admirably fitted by nature. I'm
not sure that the duty of indulging in this form of self-sacrifice
is included in the Marquesan ethical code, but even if it had been,
there was no time to put it into practice. Maro dropped his first pig
and made a pass at the second even as I looked. The two animals were
running almost neck-and-neck, so that the second thrust was hardly more
than a slight slash upon the flying brute's shoulder. It served to turn
Maro in his tracks, however, and not all of his super-feline quickness
could bring him around again in time to meet the rush. The shoulder of
the next pig sent him tottering sidewise as the animal passed, and in
another moment he had fallen fairly across the upraising head of a huge
boar in the van of the ruck. For an instant the shining bronze body
ceased to flash against the heaving black background, and then, as a rat
is tossed by a terrier, it was flung cleanly into the air, to come
slamming down against the gnarled roots of our _maupê_ tree and collapse
into a lifeless heap. The body seemed to have struck the tree hard enough
to break half of its bones; yet the worst injury, I told myself, must
have come from the terrific toss that had sent it catapulting through
the air.
After the rush was over we lost no time in clambering down to "view the
remains." Tebu was smiling sardonically, apparently not greatly shocked
by the tragedy and perhaps secretly pleased at having the only man in
the island who was held his equal in pig-sticking prowess put out of
the running. The other two natives seemed a little more upset, and Tavu
was muttering to himself the ancient Marquesan proverb which translates
literally as "Wild pig--'long-pig.'" This has lost its meaning since
cannibalism became practically extinct, but in the old days it
signified that when the men went out to get the meat of the wild pig,
there was likely also to be man meat to eat at the feast that was held
when the hunt was over.
The body lay on its back, inert as the carcasses of the pigs that
littered the sides of the runway. Tebu and I picked it up and turned it
over to reveal the wound which we knew must have been inflicted when it
was tossed into the air--and lo, beyond some bluing bruises, there was
no wound! We could only guess how so seemingly impossible a thing as
a man's being tossed ten feet by a wild boar without being slashed to
ribbons could have happened; but the most probable explanation seemed
to be that Maro had fallen sidewise across the head of the animal,
behind the tusks, so that the upward thrust of the powerful neck had
only resulted in a mighty push. No bones appeared to be broken. A welt
on the back of the head where it had struck the tree accounted for the
senseless condition of the scrappy pig-sticker, and this, as far as we
could discover, was the extent of the injuries. A dash of water from the
nearby stream brought Maro back to life again, but too dazed, for the
time being at least, to recall the resentment he had harboured against
me on the score of the pig I had "waked up" with my pistol shots.
The natives now cleared a space of brush with their cutlasses and we
prepared to rest and lunch in the shadow of the big tree. A fire was
started to heat stones for roasting a young pig that had been captured,
breadfruit and plantain were put to cooking, coconuts were opened and
guavas, mangoes and a lucious array of other tropical fruits were laid
out on the broad leaves of the _taro_ plant. And then came the women
to our Eden, and with them the Serpent.
McGrath had given the strictest orders that nothing in the form of
toddy should be brought along on the hunt, and this injunction had
apparently been heeded as far as the hunters themselves were concerned.
But the dozen or more girls who had come on later to help as beaters
and share in the division of the meat, claimed to have heard nothing
of the prohibition. Possibly it was a "frame-up" on the part of the men,
or perhaps it just happened. At any rate, when the beating brigade began
to straggle in, it became apparent at once that tippling had been going
on, and shortly I saw the bruised and battered Maro taking a long draught
from a calabash that was being held to his lips by a star-eyed minx with
a red hibiscus blossom behind her ear and a rakish chaplet of fern frond
tilted across her comely brow.
"Coco toddy," muttered Tavu, half in alarm, half in anticipative
ecstasy. "Plenty coco toddy b'long _vahine_."
It would be churlish, I told myself, to attempt to forbid the ambrosia
to any of the tired gladiators when the common herd of the beaters
had already been cheering themselves with it. Then--fatal mistake--I
nodded my head in acquiescence when an _epu_ was held up for Tavu, my
guardian, to quaff, and--but I had already taken a gulp of the liquid
fire from a calabash that a bronze, flower-crowned Hebe, with arms that
were symphonies of rippling loveliness and eyes that were twin wells
of limpid light, had brought and hung about my neck. Another brought a
wreath for my brow and a flower for my ear, and thus crowned the king
of the Bacchic revel it became all the more difficult to inaugurate a
temperance program among my festive subjects. There wasn't enough of
the toddy to put them in a cannibalistic mood, I argued; and, anyhow,
they were bound to have all they wanted, and at my expense, as soon as
they got back to Taio-haie.
At any rate, the "women did offer us of the wine to drink, and we did
drink," and it was all a very merry little "hunting breakfast." It is
not my purpose to write here of the imp who lurks in the depths of the
coco toddy calabash to spring out upon the unwary one who uncovers
him, as I shall have more to say of him later on in Tahiti. On this
occasion such mischief as was wrought was only indirectly traceable
to him, and it is by no means impossible that it might not have
occurred anyway.
This was how it came about: From time to time some of the dogs that
had strayed would come straggling in, and in nearly every case driving
a pig or two ahead of them. As the animals appeared, now one and now
another of the natives would jump up, intercept the fugitive in the
runway and bring him to earth with that easy, effortless neck-thrust
that, to the beholder, was more like a caress than a stab. But because
they had drunken of the insidious toddy and there were many spectators,
the stickers were more than ordinarily nonchalant in their motions,
and--possibly because I, also, had partaken of the toddy--the trick
kept looking easier and easier every time it was done. And probably
it was because Maro had been stimulating his dazed faculties with the
toddy that the recollection of the "double" I had spoiled for him
reawakened, and he began to tell the party how it happened. I didn't
need to know Marquesan to understand the fluent gestures which pictured
me resting comfortably in the tree while the killing was going on, and
showed how I didn't even dare to shoot off my pistol at anything but
a dead pig; and as for having the courage to stand before one with a
knife--the scorn of his "let-me-forget-it" expression was positively
effacive.
In my own action I have always told myself that toddy played no part;
but that delectable beverage certainly _was_ responsible for the fact
that Tavu, who was under the strictest orders from McGrath to keep
me out of mischief, only nodded approbatively when I picked up Tebu's
big cutlass from the grass and strode out into the runway to "make my
honour white." Tebu, with a roar of delight, seized another cutlass and
came out to "back up" for me, but I waved him indignantly aside,
resolved to do the trick alone. The good fellow stepped aside
obediently, but, unluckily for himself, "stood by" against an emergency.
Flower-crowned and sword in hand! I have called up that incongruous
picture in memory many times since, and always to caption it with some
classic title. Of these, "Bacchus in the Rôle of Ajax Defying the
Lightning" has seemed to me rather the most appropriate.
The crowd fell silent as a crashing and the barking of dogs in the bush
above told that another fugitive was approaching, for they scented
trouble with the Residente in case anything happened to the Beretani
who had been put into their charge. (I learned later that the natives
hunting with a French official who had been killed trying to shoot a
wild bull the year before had been seriously punished.) Thanks again to
the toddy, however, no one made a move to interfere.
It was an uncommonly unkind trick of Fate to have held up the only
really large boar that appeared in the course of that hunt until I, the
greenest of green novices, had set myself so defiantly in the middle of
his path that there was no graceful way of getting out of it. Also, it
was harshly ordered that, whereas the other animals had come charging
down as evenly as though strung on trolleys, this monster, with two
dogs nipping his heels, should be plunging and reeling like a ship in a
gale.
I had clearly in mind everything that needed to be done, even to
kicking the toe-hole for my left foot, and I kept repeating to myself
the words of my old 'varsity baseball coach to his batters--"Step out
and meet it." These words had been recalled to me repeatedly during
the morning as Tebu or Maro delivered his deadly thrust with a quick
forward step, and that, with keeping the eye on the vulnerable spot
between the neck and shoulder, seemed to me to be the crucial points
upon which the turning of the trick depended. I have since been told
that this is quite correct. But this procedure was calculated to be
followed in the case of the regulation direct-charging boar; what to
do in the case of a brute that was tossing his head in spirals, as now
this flank, and now that, was nipped by a pursuing dog, I didn't--and I
still don't--know just what to do.
Because I felt that I knew just what to do, and just how to do it, I
had myself perfectly in hand until, sudden as a lightning flash, came
the realization that the spot that I must strike between the neck and
the shoulder was not keeping on an even plane. I had experienced some
fairly exciting close-in work with grizzly and silver tip on a couple
of occasions previous to that morning, and since then I have stopped
the charge of a South American jaguar with a revolver and known what
it is to see a Bengal tiger clawing the howdah of an elephant I was
riding; but never have I known anything to approach the "all gone"
feeling which accompanied the realization that I was not going to be
able to locate the spot which _had_ to be located if I was to avoid a
collision that would make that of Maro's a friendly jostle in
comparison.
The instant the message "You can't do it!" was flashed to my brain,
the charging pig ceased to be a pig, so far as I was concerned, and
became a Car of Juggernaut, a Bolt of Wrath, the incarnation of
everything that was Swift, Terrible and Inevitable. Before I knew it
I had dropped the useless cutlass, snatched out my automatic pistol
and was discharging it wildly at the approaching monster. The rattle
of shots was answered by a burst of savage snarls mingled with quick
yelps of pain, and then, as the hammer snapped down on unresponding
steel after the last cartridge was fired, I sprang blindly to one side
and plunged headlong into the brush. That I dove into the unsympathetic
depths of some kind of a fishhook thorn bush, which took ample toll for
the intrusion when I was dragged out by the heels a minute later, was
only an incident in the light of the fact that--thanks to an instinct
for preservation that not even coco toddy had drugged to sleep--I had
avoided so much as a brush from the charging boar.
A roar of agony and shouts of consternation told me, even before I
was released from the tentacles of the thorn bush, that some one else
had got in the way of the charge that I had declined to meet; then
the noise of the pursuit passed on and died out beyond the "gate."
My pigskin puttees were about the only things I had on that did not
remain, wholly or in part, in the embrace of the thorns, but my own
scratches were quickly forgotten at the sight of the other victim of
the charge. There were two other victims, in fact--one a dog that had
been raked by a soft-nosed bullet from my pistol, and the other the
stout-hearted old gladiator, Tebu, who, leaping to take up the
challenge I had side-stepped, had fallen afoul of the boar itself. His
bulldog courage--or the toddy--had impelled him to undertake on
short notice the job the Beretani had shirked, and, with no chance
to locate the vital spot for his thrust, had lunged wildly and taken
the consequences.
The dog was dead, and it looked for a while as though Tebu, with a
foot-long gash across his thigh and bleeding like one of the pigs
that lay beside him, would follow suit. It transpired presently,
however, that no arteries were severed; so after staunching the flow as
effectually as possible with a torniquet and bandages that left several
members of the party nearly in a state of nature after giving up their
_pareos_ for the wherewithal, they rigged up a rough litter of boughs
and lianas and set off, not untenderly, to bear the wounded warrior
back to Taio-haie. There, thanks to the skilful and kind care of the
sisters at the Mission, he was soon on his way to recovery.
A month later, in Tahiti, I received a letter from Cramer, the German
trader of Taio-haie. After going on to tell how our friend McGrath had
been blown away in his cutter during a hurricane and was given up for
lost, he wrote:
"I saw Tebu today. He is still very lame, and probably always will
be, but he has been going out every day since he left the mission
hospital to hunt the big boar that cut him up so the time he was
out with you. He says he is going to keep on hunting it until he
kills the boar or the boar kills him."
To this letter was added a postscript, written several days later,
which read:
"Tebu brought in the big boar last night. He says he knows it by
the cut he gave it on the shoulder. As we found no bullet marks on
the body we have thought he is probably mistaken."
To this I replied:
"Probably Tebu is right. I cannot swear that I was looking down
the sights of my pistol when I fired those shots."
* * * * *
Thus pig-sticking in the Marquesas. It is bloody and cruel, as is
the killing of all animals; but, because the quarry is nearly always
dropped in its tracks, it is far less open to criticism on that score
than most other forms of hunting. But the finest thing--I may well
say, the grandest thing--about it is the fact that it is a strictly
man-to-beast, give-and-take affair, with the hunter meeting his quarry
more nearly on equal terms than in any other form of hunting practised
since the days of the Cave Men.
Of the wild cattle hunt which McGrath, after infinite trouble, arranged
for one of the final days of our stay in Nukahiva, I have written
elsewhere.
CHAPTER V
THE PASSION PLAY AT UAHUKA
The decennial Passion Play at Oberammergau is, perhaps, the most
written and talked about theatrical performance that has ever been
staged, and even the annual pageants put on during Holy Week in certain
of the Italian, Spanish and South American theatres have attained to
considerable publicity in other parts of the world; the Passion Play
of the French mission at Uahuka, an island of the Marquesan group, has
been witnessed by less than half a dozen non-resident white men, and as
a consequence the fame of it, except such hazy versions as have found
their way to France through the channels of the missionary society
records, scarcely reaches beyond the coral reefs that fringe the rocky
Uahukan shores.
Vague rumours of a strange Marquesan Passion Play had come to us before
we sailed from Hawaii, and on the arrival of the yacht in Taio-haie,
the capital of that group, we were assured that such a performance
was "staged" annually. The interest of this announcement was tempered
by the news that the last performance had taken place a fortnight
previously and that another would not be put on until Holy Week of
the following year. We did not make our projected visit to Uahuka,
therefore, and I was consequently unable to secure firsthand data
regarding this unique event. The somewhat fragmentary and frivolous
account I am writing smacks strongly, I fear, of the sources from which
my information was gathered, this or that trader and skipper of the
"beaches" of Taio-haie and Tahiti, and especially a fascinating renegade
by the name of Bruce Manners, who came off to the yacht one night in
Papeete and smoked a half dozen of the Commodore's Perfectos while
spinning us yarns of his lurid career in the Marquesas and Paumotos.
* * * * *
All through the South Pacific missionary work follows closely the
lines of nationality, with the London Missionary Society dominant in
the British possessions, and French organizations, both Protestant and
Catholic, monopolizing the field in the islands over which the jaunty
tri-colour of France whips itself to tatters in the whistling Southeast
Trades. As the United States holds only a naval station at Pago Pago,
Samoa, and Germany is now out of the Pacific altogether, missionaries
of American and Teutonic extraction are a negligible quantity. This
alignment gives the aggressive British society most of the reclamation
work west of the 180th meridian, and the French the territory to
the east. The headquarters of the French missionary system is that
country's capital in the South Seas, Papeete, Tahiti, in the Society
group; but the active zone, the "firing line," so to speak, is in the
barbaric and cannibalistic Marquesas, and centres in the big island of
the north group, Uahuka.
The Passion Play at Uahuka has been presented, it is said, every
Easter for the last fifty years. It was inaugurated by the Catholic
mission, and in its initial presentation all the rôles were taken by
French missionaries, these being gathered from various parts of the
Paumotos, Societies and Marquesas and brought to the scene of the
performance in a specially chartered fleet of trading schooners. The
following year numerous minor parts were given to natives as rewards
for becoming converts to Catholicism--the competition between
Romanist and Protestant was very keen at this time--and before many
seasons had gone by even the leading rôles came to be filled by the
savages, the missionaries contenting themselves with such positions
as stage manager, musical director, mistress of the wardrobe and the
like.
This Passion Play serves admirably the purpose for which it was
originally designed, that of bringing home by tableaux to the simple
natives a more graphic realization of the dramatic events surrounding
the life and death of Christ than would be possible by mere words
and pictures, and while its tone would scarcely be characterized
as "dignified" by a dispassioned white man from the outside world,
its moral effect upon the natives,--temporarily, at least--is most
favourable.
The Passion Play is still presented in the same place that the
first performance by the missionaries was put on, a sort of natural
ampitheatre in the very heart of the Catholic reserve on the outskirts
of the village of Uahuka. The mission buildings, low rambling
structures of coral and galvanized iron, flank two sides of the
pentagonal enclosure. Two other sides are shut in by close-set rows of
banyans of such size that their roots and down-reaching branches mingle
to form almost solid lines of irregular wooden terraces upon which
hundreds of spectators may find seats without crowding. The stage is a
hard-packed piece of ground sloping gently down to a crystal clear
stream of water which meanders past, sparkling in the sunbeams like
a row of footlights, the position of which it approximately occupies.
Behind the stage is a creeper-covered wall of rock, with a face so
unbroken and sheer that the direction "exit rear" must necessarily
be eliminated from all performances. To the left is spoken of as
"down Ta-roo-la,"--the name of the little stream--and to the right is
"up Ta-roo-la." Actors waiting in either wings are screened from
the sight of the audience by the last of the rows of banyans which
run down close to the stream on either side.
The music is furnished by a slightly wheezy organ, a clarionet and
a lot of hollow-tree tom-toms, and to the stirring strains of the
Marseillaise played by this orchestra the opening curtain is rung
up upon the tableau of "Christ and the Children." Of course there
is no curtain and no ringing up; Christ simply strolls in from "up
Ta-roo-la," and the children troop in from "down Ta-roo-la," and they
meet in the middle of the stage. Then Christ pats them all on the head,
and they all file off behind Him as He exits "down Ta-roo-la." There is
no stage setting, and little is attempted in the way of make-ups.
The children are simply children and the part of Christ is taken by a
native called Lurau. Lurau is the greatest pearl diver and shark fisher
in all the Marquesas. With his hair and beard neatly oiled and combed,
and dressed in a trailing robe of snowy muslin, Lurau makes a far more
acceptable-looking Christus than one sees in many of the South
American presentations of the Passion Play. There is little in his
disposition off the stage to fit him for his exalted rôle, and before he
became a fixture in the leading part of the Passion Play he was a
veritable rubber ball in the way in which he bounced back and forth
between the Protestants and Catholics. He owes the distinguished
honour that has come to him to his beard rather than to his histrionic
abilities; he is the only native in the Marquesas--and, as far as is
known, in all the South Pacific as well--with a growth of hair on his
face.
[Illustration: "THE PART OF CHRIST IS TAKEN BY A NATIVE
CALLED LURAU"]
[Illustration: MARQUESAN MOTHER AND CHILD]
The simple white robe worn by Lurau is in good keeping with his part,
but this can hardly be said of a very tangible halo that has apparently
been cut from a square of shiny biscuit tin, a piece of literalness,
however, in which the simple islanders seem to see no trace of
incongruity. In fact, this item of make-up was added, it is said, at
the suggestion of a native who, after one of the early performances
of the Play, led the stage-manager to a coloured print in the mission
chapel and pointed out that the stage Christ had no such "fire-face"
as distinguished the one in the lithograph. He suggested obtaining
the halo effect by having the actor wear a lot of little _kukui_ nut
torches in his hair, but the cautious fathers, while acknowledging the
realistic possibilities of this expedient, decided on the jagged rim of
bright biscuit tin as safer.
During the week of the Play, both on and off the stage, Lurau is
quiet, dignified and a general paragon of virtue in every particular;
afterwards--he is just like all the rest of his brothers and sisters
of the Marquesas, prone to excesses. Lurau's post-Passion Play
spree is listed with the hurricane season as one of the regular
annual disturbances in those latitudes.
The second scene of the Play is that of the "Redemption of the
Magdalen." The latter, dressed in a bright red _holakau_ or
wrapper--the symbol of her sinfulness--comes strolling in from the
upstream side and discovers Christ resting on a niche of the rock
which forms the back wall. Her repentance and forgiveness follow,
after which Christ presents her with a pure white _holakau_ which he
chances to have tucked under his arm. She receives a blessing, trips
off down stream, changes _holakaus_ in the wink of an eye behind the
friendly trunk of a bread-fruit tree, and the "curtain" follows her
disappearance upstream in the trailing robe of white.
The Magdalen has been played by a different person almost every year.
The one who took that part in the last presentation was, so Bruce
Manners assured us, far better in the "red _holakau_" than in the
"white _holakau_" part of her rôle, her work as a repentant sinner
having been decidedly marred through a persistent tendency to ogle a
group of young trading schooner officers who occupied a proscenium
banyan.
For the "Supper" scene, no endeavour is made to reproduce a tableau
patterned on the famous painting of Leonardo da Vinci. Historic
truthfulness is not attempted even to the extent of a table. A
bountiful repast of bread-fruit, plantains, yams and coconuts is spread
out upon a cover of banana leaves, and everybody sits down cross-legged
and eats for fully ten minutes before a word is spoken. Supper over,
the remnants are gathered up and thrown into the convenient
Ta-roo-la, the waters of which carry them away in a jiffy. Then follows
the washing of the feet of the disciples. Lurau wades over into the
stream, seats himself on a convenient boulder, and as each of the
disciples comes out in turn, gives both of the latter's feet a vigorous
scrubbing with a brush of coco husk and a piece of soap. After
receiving a blessing, the disciple heads for the bank, and as each lifts
the skirt of his robe to clear the stream a well-defined "high-water
mark," running in graceful undulations around his lower calf, is
usually disclosed to the eyes of the audience.
The scene of "Christ Healing the Lepers" as presented at Uahuka is,
perhaps, the most realistic tableau, in one particular at least, that
is staged in any of the Passion Plays. Real lepers appear on the stage.
In the early days of the Play these parts were taken by entirely
whole and healthy people, but the missionaries were never able to
persuade the natives that, with so many real lepers ready to hand, any
make-believe in this particular need be indulged in. Finally several
of the lepers themselves--Christian converts--came to the Fathers and
asked what was the use of curing a lot of well people in the Play when
there were so many sick ones about that really needed curing. This
was hard to answer--to the satisfaction of the questioners--and the
upshot of the matter was that a half dozen of the cases least liable
to spread the dread disease were allowed upon the stage at the next
performance. Following the week of the Play it is said that a very
marked improvement was evident for several months in the condition
of every one of the unfortunates that appeared during its continuance.
Since that occasion the good missionaries have not had the heart to
refuse the prayers of any of those who have come to them at
Eastertide, until now it is necessary to divide them off into squads of
a score or so each, and allow a different squad to appear each night.
The government doctor at Uahuka claims that there has been a marked
decrease in the leper mortality of the island since this strange practice
has been inaugurated, and that no serious consequences have followed
the extraordinary mixing of the sick and the well at this season. No
unnecessary chances are taken, however, and the good Lurau who, in
his rôle of Christ, is more exposed than any of the others, receives
special attention after each performance in the shape of a
formaldehyde fumigation at the hands of the doctor.
One of the most interesting characters in the Play is Judas. From the
first it has been the aim of the Fathers to impress the natives as
strongly as possible with the real goodness or badness of the various
characters, and to this end, in the case of Judas, the natives who have
played the rôle have been repeatedly taken, on a temporary reprieve,
from the convict settlement. Judas has always been a bad man, actually
as well as artistically, and it is recorded that no less than half a
dozen of him have endeavoured to steal the thirty pieces of silver--in
this case Mexican or Chilean dollars, which pass current in the
island--with which he has been bribed. Of late years the thoughtful
Fathers have removed this temptation by binding the bargain with a
tinkling bagful of broken crockery.
The Judas of five or six years ago--one John Bascard, the half-caste
son of an Australian trader and a native wife, who was serving a term
for robbing a pearler--turned out almost as badly as his notorious
original, for he looted the mission on the second night of the Play,
rowed off with the Magdalen to a trading cutter anchored in the bay,
surprised the solitary watchman, threw him overboard, and sailed
the little boat off single-handed for the Paumotos, leaving the Play
to limp on to a finish with half-trained understudies in two of the
leading parts.
The part of Pontius Pilate has been played for nearly twenty years by
an old chief--a quondam cannibal--named Rauga. His costume is a
frogged military coat and a silk hat, the idea of the Fathers being to
effect a combination that will make the deepest impression on the
natives as symbolical of constituted power. The missionary and the
French soldier are the two most august personages which their simple
minds can conceive of, and the two most striking features of the costume
of each, united upon one person, make an impression incomparably
more profound than would a Roman toga topped off with an
eagle-crowned helmet, or any of the other combinations that are worn
by Pilate in the more pretentious Passion Plays. Rauga is inordinately
proud of his part, and the honour of appearing in it has held him
steadfastly Catholic in the face of active efforts by the Protestants
to swing him, temporarily at least, over to their side.
The costume of John the Baptist is, as might be expected, that of a
native novitiate--a black robe and a shovel hat. If Manners is to
be believed, the unfortunate individual who was cast for that part
a half dozen years back made a transient appearance in a somewhat
modified garb. This was a "Brand-from-the-Burning" called Ma-woo, who
had been converted a few months previously when the Fathers secured
his parole from prison, where he had been serving a five-year sentence
for illicit pearling. His most salient characteristic was an inordinate
fondness for coco toddy, a circumstance which was taken advantage
of by a couple of local traders to play a practical joke upon the
missionaries, with whom their kind, in the Marquesas as elsewhere,
have always been at open warfare. The present of a calabash of toddy
to Ma-woo, with the promise of another later, putting him in a
cheerfully obliging mood, he was rigged out in a ribbon-wide
breech-clout, an old dress coat and a battered silk hat, and with a
bulky volume of Sailing Directions under his arm was quietly
conducted to the "stage entrance" of the banyan theatre just in time
to respond to his "cue" in the John the Baptist tableau.
Manners gave me a photograph of unlucky Ma-woo, taken by one of the
traders before they "sent him on his mission," and if it is really
true, as is claimed, that John the Baptist appeared thus accoutred in
his tableau in the Passion Play, one can easily believe our friend's
assertion that two of the sisters fainted and that the Fathers caused
the culprit to be thrown back into prison to serve the remainder of his
sentence.
Ruth Ingalls, who has played the part of Mary, the Mother, for the
last three years, is a half-white girl of unknown parentage. She is
said to have a Junoesque figure, a face of rare beauty and a manner
of real charm. She is about twenty-five years of age--fifteen years
younger than Lurau, whose mother she is supposed to be in the
Play--and has been directly under the care of the missionaries since
the time when, a child of five, she was cast up on the beach of one of
the Paumotos with the wreckage of a Tahitian trading schooner. She
is supposed to be the illegitimate daughter of a French count--a
fugitive from justice in Tahiti a quarter of a century ago--and the
queen of the neighbouring island of Bora-Bora, a lady whose marital
responsibilities appear to have rested as lightly upon her as blown
foam upon the bosom of the Southeast Trade. But whatever her origin,
Ruth Ingalls is, according to all accounts, a young person of unlimited
balance and poise, has a good education, both as to languages and
music, and is possessed of a quiet and modest disposition. She is,
moreover, a good Christian in the highest sense of the name, and her
work in the mission school has been of incalculable value to the
Fathers. Her interpretation of the character of the Madonna is
doubtless somewhat naïve, but is said, withal, to be surprisingly
effective; her work in this part, indeed, being generally rated as the
only thing in the Play worthy of the name of acting.
Mlle. Ingalls, it is claimed, is heart whole and fancy free, though
they tell you in Papeete and Taio-haie that she has received offers of
marriage from every bachelor missionary, sailor, official and trader
that has ever come to Uahuka.
[Illustration: "PONTIUS PILATE HAS BEEN PLAYED
FOR TWENTY YEARS BY AN OLD CHIEF--A
QUONDAM CANNIBAL"]
[Illustration: "JUST IN TIME TO RESPOND TO HIS
'CUE' IN THE JOHN THE BAPTIST TABLEAU"]
CHAPTER VI
TAIO-HAIE TO PAPEETE
Before leaving Nukahiva the four of us from the _Lurline_, under
the guidance of our good friend McGrath, journeyed on pony-back
across the island to visit Queen Mareu of Hatiheu. The road led over
two 3,000-foot mountain passes and along the whole length of the
incomparable Typee Valley, immortalized by Herman Melville, and
though something like eight inches of rain fell during the nine hours
we were in the saddle, there were ample intervals between cataclysms
in which to glimpse the beauties by the way. Lovely as we had found
Taio-haie and Typee, however, the glamour of their charms paled before
the supreme grandeur of the bay of Hatiheu, the most sublime
combination of mountain, vale, and sea that my eyes have ever
rested on.
The cliff-girt bay of Hatiheu, like those others of Nature's
superlatives, the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, the Victoria Falls of
the Zambesi and the Himalayas from Darjeeling, is one of the kind of
things that makes a man feel foolish to attempt to describe, and I pay
my silent tribute in the thrill which never fails to stir my heart
at the mention of the name. My photograph gives a suggestion--just a
suggestion--of what a single _coup d'oeil_ reveals.
Hatiheu was McGrath's headquarters where, in addition to conducting a
trading business with the natives, he appeared to act as a sort of "Lord
Chamberlain" to the Queen. Her Highness seemed very fond of the
attractive young Canadian, and told us that she never took action in
important "affairs of state" without first securing his advice. His word
appeared to be law in the village, and I never heard him give an order
that was not instantly carried out. He told off a body servant to look
after each of us during our visit to Hatiheu, the one allotted to
Claribel being a grizzled old cannibal, with a black band like a
highwayman's mask tattooed across his face, who gave her a stone
knife which he swore he had himself used in carving "long-pig," and
who wept disconsolately on her departure.
One morning McGrath took us down to the beach and showed us with
justifiable pride a half-completed cutter--an open boat of about
thirty feet in length designed to be rigged as a sloop--which he was
building to use in picking up copra from other villages along the coast
of the island. All of the wood used had been hewed from trees felled
within a hundred feet of the beach, he told us, and all of the work
was being done with his own hands. The Commodore discoursed
learnedly on the lines and construction of the little craft, and the
rest of us commended its builder for his industry and ingenuity. No
one of us dreamed that we were looking at the frame of a boat which
was destined shortly to make a voyage that must be rated for all time
as one of the miracles of deep sea sailing.
Our intercourse with Queen Mareu was somewhat restricted as a result
of having to be carried on through the medium of an interpreter. We
found her a most personable young lady of about twenty-five, with a
striking face and figure and a glint of sombre fire slumbering in the
depths of her dark eyes that indicated temper or temperament, and
probably both. She had ascended the "throne" a year previously, after
her father, the late King, had slipped on a ripe mango in endeavouring
to elude the charge of a wild bull he was hunting. Her manifest
determination to rule her home as well as her people was responsible,
it was said, for the flight to Tahiti of her husband--a young half-caste
of little account--a month or two later. Since then she had ruled alone.
Of what mind she was in the matter of taking a "Prince Consort," we
were unable to learn; but a tender light in the sloe eyes when "Lord
Chamberlain" McGrath was about might have furnished a clue to the
trend of her intentions. Whatever these might have been, however,
Fate, as far as the near future was concerned, had other plans
incubating for the slender, blue-eyed trader to whom every one that
came in contact with him seemed to become so much attached.
The print _holakau_ or Mother Hubbard wrapper--which descended
upon the South Seas with the missionaries--would ordinarily hardly
be rated as a regal garment; but Mareu, with the sweeping lines of
her Dianesque figure softly outlined by the clinging calico, carried
hers as if it was a Grecian robe, and was distinctly--well, I noted
that even the Commodore was keeping his weather eye lifting
whenever she hove above the horizon. But she was at her best
when, in a bathing suit improvised from a _pareo_, she sported
with the gay abandon of a porpoise in a natural pool of pink and
blue coral where the beach curved up to the base of the great cliff,
or, perched cross-legged in the stern of her little out-rigger canoe,
sent that slender craft, a sliver of shining silver, speeding through
the surf-swept mazes of the outer reef. She was indeed a
consummate canoeist--quite the best I have ever seen--and in the
light of subsequent events I have often recalled the words with
which McGrath once referred to her skill with the paddle.
[Illustration: "HATIHEU, THE MOST SUBLIME
COMBINATION OF MOUNTAIN, VALE AND SEA
THAT MY EYES HAVE EVER RESTED UPON"]
[Illustration: A MARQUESAN FISHERMAN OF
HATIHEU]
We watched from the thatched roofed veranda of McGrath's quarters one
dewy-fresh morning when the whistling Trade had whipped up a more
than usually stiff sea outside, the course of Mareu's canoe where, with
Claribel as a passenger, she was shooting the breakers as they came
booming in across the reef. Suddenly the even line of the horizon was
blotted out by the loom of a roller of huge bulk and weight--"the
Seventh Son of a Seventh Son," as the sailors call it when they don't
use a stronger term.
"She'll hardly try that one," muttered McGrath decisively; "it's big
enough to founder a war canoe." And then, as the helio flashes from the
blade of a swiftly plied paddle told him his surmise was wrong, "Good
God, there she goes!"
The canoe gathered momentum, hung for a few moments on the back of the
mounting comber, and then "caught on" and commenced to race. Slowly the
wave gathered itself together and, as the water shallowed above the
edge of the reef, curled over and broke with a roar that rattled the
glasses on the arms of our chairs. For an instant nothing was visible
but foam and spray and tossing waters; then, clinging tenaciously to
the comber's flying mane--as a panther, teeth in neck and safe from
the animal's horns, rides the stag he has tackled--appeared the little
canoe. On it darted like the flash of a sunbeam, a smoke of spray
rising from its bows and the floundering out-rigger trailing like a
broken wing. Twice or thrice, as the tossing waters gave way beneath
the prow and the slender craft seemed on the point of "somersaulting"
over the breaker's brink, there came the flash of a steadying paddle
and the equilibrium was restored. Now the roughest of the ride was over
and a swift dash of a hundred yards remained before still water was
reached. Claribel, game but chastened, still lay low in an instinctive
endeavour to keep the centre of gravity down near the keel where it
belonged; but Mareu, mad with the ecstasy of swift motion, leapt up to
a hair-poised balance and, swathed in sheets of flying spray, finished
the run after the fashion of that other Venus who was born of the
sea-foam where the breakers travailed on the Cyprean coast.
I saw the Commodore lower his glass with a gesture of relief where he
had watched with the Mater from the veranda of the Queen's "palace,"
but McGrath was only smiling.
"If there was a reef and a surf hedging in the jaws of hell, that girl
would try and shoot the passage with never a thought for what she was
going into beyond," he said evenly as he watched her beach the canoe
and help Claribel to alight.
Absorbed in his thoughts, but still with his eye on the girl, McGrath
poured himself another glass of absinthe. Disdaining the aid of a
couple of her boat-pullers, she dumped the water from the canoe and
hauled it up to its shelter of thatch above high-tide mark; then, like
a spaniel that has finished its swim, she gave herself a vigorous shake,
so that her wealth of glistening blue-black hair came tumbling down
and swathed her spray-wet body to the knees.
"And by God!--" McGrath gave vocal expression to the thoughts that
were in his eyes--"with Mareu at the paddle I'd run the jaws of hell
myself!"
I had no inkling at the time of the struggle that was going on in the
man's heart, but later events, coupled with a recollection of those
sudden passionate words, brought me to something of an understanding.
On the last day of our visit to Hatiheu the Queen gave a great feast
to all of her subjects, the members of our party being the guests of
honour. The food consisted of the usual run of Marquesan delicacies,
but the _piece de resistance_ was the great bull secured on the wild
cattle hunt which McGrath finally succeeded in arranging at the last
moment. It was cooked whole in a huge underground oven lined with
stones, from which it was drawn in a condition to suit the taste of an
epicure. Like the Mexican _barbecue_, this method of cooking results
in meat that is delicious enough to counteract the dis-appetizing
effects of the disgusting methods of handling it. McGrath kept a
careful eye on the toddy calabashes, so that the feast, as Marquesan
feasts go, was a very prim and proper affair. Claribel, who was in
splendid voice, sang several English and Hawaiian songs, and finally,
the Marseillaise, from the "palace" veranda. The latter, with which
many of the natives appeared to be familiar, was received with
tumultuous applause.
At the Queen's command a bevy of very comely misses from the mission
school started a _himine_ or hymn, to the tune of a couple of tom-toms
and a concertina. Others joined in, and by imperceptible degrees the air
was changed until, almost before we knew what had happened, it had
become a rollicking _hula_. The frantic protests of the Mother Superior
passed unnoticed in the excitement, and not until that outraged
individual had seized one of the recalcitrants (who, yielding to the
delirious abandon of the seductive air, had begun to dance), and led her
off by the ear was she able to re-establish her authority. The indignant
Mareu, who had no love for the missionaries and who said she was just
getting in a mood to dance herself, promptly declared in favour of
bringing the spirited little singers back by force and letting the
festivities go on; but the diplomatic McGrath, scenting "civil war" in
the kingdom of Hatiheu, suggested that, as we all were to start at
daybreak for the long ride back to Taio-haie, it might be well to turn
in and get a few hours' sleep. The Queen continued obdurate and would
probably have carried her point had not a heavy squall come roaring in
from the ocean and driven the whole company to shelter.
My opportunities for studying the _hula_ in Nukahiva, which was once
famous as the home of the greatest dancers in the South Pacific, were
so limited that it would be presumptuous of me to dogmatise. I might
record the impression, however, that it is a spirited and soul-stirring
performance, and has this in common with modern "ragging" and "jazzing"
and "shimmy-ing," that it leaves nothing to the imagination on the
points to which it is endeavouring to give expression. For this
reason, if for no other, it may be worth preserving against the time
when the Pampas, the Sahara and the Barbary Coast of California are
incapable longer of giving a wriggle or a "writhe" sufficiently
suggestive to stir the jaded soul of Society. Pulses that have long
refused to throb a beat faster in the tangle of the "tango," may yet
have the life to quicken in the sensuous abandon of the Marquesan
_hula_. And in fancy cannot one hear it all over again? "The 'Hatiheu
Hug' and the 'Taio-haie Throttle'--who says they're disgusting? If one
_wants_ to dance them disgustingly, of course--" How long will it
be, I wonder?
* * * * *
Queen Mareu and her retinue, Her Highness in a flowing habit of print
and tapa and sitting an imported French side-saddle, accompanied us
back to Taio-haie, and on the evening preceding our departure came
off to the yacht for dinner and fireworks. Queen Taone of Anaho, who
chanced to be visiting in Taio-haie, was another of the distinguished
guests on this occasion. Besides royalty, invitations had been sent to
every one of foreign blood on the island, and all, with the exception
of John Hilyard, the tattooed man, had responded. French officialdom,
brave in gold lace and with straggles of orders acros
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