South Sea Tales...................................................................................................................................................1

Despite the heavy clumsiness of her lines, the Aorai handled easily in the light breeze, and her captain ran her

well in before he hove to just outside the suck of the surf. The atoll of Hikueru lay low on the water, a circle

of pounded coral sand a hundred yards wide, twenty miles in circumference, and from three to five feet above

highwater mark. On the bottom of the huge and glassy lagoon was much pearl shell, and from the deck of

the schooner, across the slender ring of the atoll, the divers could be seen at work. But the lagoon had no

entrance for even a trading schooner. With a favoring breeze cutters could win in through the tortuous and

shallow channel, but the schooners lay off and on outside and sent in their small boats.

The Aorai swung out a boat smartly, into which sprang half a dozen brownskinned sailors clad only in

scarlet loincloths. They took the oars, while in the stern sheets, at the steering sweep, stood a young man

garbed in the tropic white that marks the European. The golden strain of Polynesia betrayed itself in the

sungilt of his fair skin and cast up golden sheens and lights through the glimmering blue of his eyes. Raoul

he was, Alexandre Raoul, youngest son of Marie Raoul, the wealthy quartercaste, who owned and managed

half a dozen trading schooners similar to the Aorai. Across an eddy just outside the entrance, and in and

through and over a boiling tiderip, the boat fought its way to the mirrored calm of the lagoon. Young Raoul

leaped out upon the white sand and shook hands with a tall native. The man's chest and shoulders were

magnificent, but the stump of a right arm, beyond the flesh of which the agewhitened bone projected several

inches, attested the encounter with a shark that had put an end to his diving days and made him a fawner and

"Have you heard, Alec?" were his first words. "Mapuhi has found a pearlsuch a pearl. Never was there one

like it ever fished up in Hikueru, nor in all the Paumotus, nor in all the world. Buy it from him. He has it now.

And remember that I told you first. He is a fool and you can get it cheap. Have you any tobacco?"

Straight up the beach to a shack under a pandanus tree Raoul headed. He was his mother's supercargo, and his

business was to comb all the Paumotus for the wealth of copra, shell, and pearls that they yielded up.

He was a young supercargo, it was his second voyage in such capacity, and he suffered much secret worry

from his lack of experience in pricing pearls. But when Mapuhi exposed the pearl to his sight he managed to

suppress the startle it gave him, and to maintain a careless, commercial expression on his face. For the pearl

had struck him a blow. It was large as a pigeon egg, a perfect sphere, of a whiteness that reflected opalescent

lights from all colors about it. It was alive. Never had he seen anything like it. When Mapuhi dropped it into

his hand he was surprised by the weight of it. That showed that it was a good pearl. He examined it closely,

through a pocket magnifying glass. It was without flaw or blemish. The purity of it seemed almost to melt

into the atmosphere out of his hand. In the shade it was softly luminous, gleaming like a tender moon. So

translucently white was it, that when he dropped it into a glass of water he had difficulty in finding it. So

straight and swiftly had it sunk to the bottom that he knew its weight was excellent.

"Well, what do you want for it?" he asked, with a fine assumption of nonchalance.

"I want" Mapuhi began, and behind him, framing his own dark face, the dark faces of two women and a

girl nodded concurrence in what he wanted. Their heads were bent forward, they were animated by a

"I want a house," Mapuhi went on. "It must have a roof of galvanized iron and an octagondropclock. It

must be six fathoms long with a porch all around. A big room must be in the centre, with a round table in the

middle of it and the octagondropclock on the wall. There must be four bedrooms, two on each side of the

big room, and in each bedroom must be an iron bed, two chairs, and a washstand. And back of the house must

be a kitchen, a good kitchen, with pots and pans and a stove. And you must build the house on my island,

Young Raoul laughed. He laughed long and heartily. But while he laughed he secretly performed problems in

mental arithmetic. He had never built a house in his life, and his notions concerning house building were

hazy. While he laughed, he calculated the cost of the voyage to Tahiti for materials, of the materials

themselves, of the voyage back again to Fakarava, and the cost of landing the materials and of building the

house. It would come to four thousand French dollars, allowing a margin for safetyfour thousand French

dollars were equivalent to twenty thousad francs. It was impossible. How was he to know the value of such a

pearl? Twenty thousand francs was a lot of moneyand of his mother's money at that.

"I want the house," he said. "It must be six fathoms long with a porch all around"

"Yes, yes," Raoul interrupted. "I know all about your house, but it won't do. I'll give you a thousand Chili

"What good will the house do you?" Raoul demanded. "The first hurricane that comes along will wash it

"Not on Fakarava," said Mapuhi. "The land is much higher there. On this island, yes. Any hurricane can

sweep Hikueru. I will have the house on Fakarava. It must be six fathoms long with a porch all around"

And Raoul listened again to the tale of the house. Several hours he spent in the endeavor to hammer the house

obsession out of Mapuhi's mind; but Mapuhi's mother and wife, and Ngakura, Mapuhi's daughter, bolstered

him in his resolve for the house. Through the open doorway, while he listened for the twentieth time to the

detailed description of the house that was wanted, Raoul saw his schooner's second boat draw up on the

beach. The sailors rested on the oars, advertising haste to be gone. The first mate of the Aorai sprang ashore,

exchanged a word with the onearmed native, then hurried toward Raoul. The day grew suddenly dark, as a

squall obscured the face of the sun. Across the lagoon Raoul could see approaching the ominous line of the

"Captain Raffy says you've got to get to hell outa here," was the mate's greeting. "If there's any shell, we've

got to run the risk of picking it up later onso he says. The barometer's dropped to twentynineseventy."

The gust of wind struck the pandanus tree overhead and tore through the palms beyond, flinging half a dozen

ripe cocoanuts with heavy thuds to the ground. Then came the rain out of the distance, advancing with the

roar of a gale of wind and causing the water of the lagoon to smoke in driven windrows. The sharp rattle of

"A thousand Chili dollars, cash down, Mapuhi," he said. "And two hundred Chili dollars in trade."

He flung out of the house, and, side by side with the mate, fought his way down the beach toward the boat.

They could not see the boat. The tropic rain sheeted about them so that they could see only the beach under

their feet and the spiteful little waves from the lagoon that snapped and bit at the sand. A figure appeared

"Mapuhi is a fool!" was the answering yell, and the next moment they were lost to each other in the

Half an hour later, HuruHuru, watching from the seaward side of the atoll, saw the two boats hoisted in and

the Aorai pointing her nose out to sea. And near her, just come in from the sea on the wings of the squall, he

saw another schooner hove to and dropping a boat into the water. He knew her. It was the OROHENA,

owned by Toriki, the halfcaste trader, who served as his own supercargo and who doubtlessly was even then

in the stern sheets of the boat. HuruHuru chuckled. He knew that Mapuhi owed Toriki for trade goods

The squall had passed. The hot sun was blazing down, and the lagoon was once more a mirror. But the air

was sticky like mucilage, and the weight of it seemed to burden the lungs and make breathing difficult.

"Have you heard the news, Toriki?" HuruHuru asked. "Mapuhi has found a pearl. Never was there a pearl

like it ever fished up in Hikueru, nor anywhere in the Paumotus, nor anywhere in all the world. Mapuhi is a

fool. Besides, he owes you money. Remember that I told you first. Have you any tobacco?"

And to the grass shack of Mapuhi went Toriki. He was a masterful man, withal a fairly stupid one. Carelessly

he glanced at the wonderful pearlglanced for a moment only; and carelessly he dropped it into his pocket.

"You are lucky," he said. "It is a nice pearl. I will give you credit on the books."

"Six fathoms your grandmother!" was the trader's retort. "You want to pay up your debts, that's what you

want. You owed me twelve hundred dollars Chili. Very well; you owe them no longer. The amount is

squared. Besides, I will give you credit for two hundred Chili. If, when I get to Tahiti, the pearl sells well, I

will give you credit for another hundredthat will make three hundred. But mind, only if the pearl sells well.

Mapuhi folded his arms in sorrow and sat with bowed head. He had been robbed of his pearl. In place of the

"You are a fool," said Nauri, his mother. "Why did you let the pearl into his hand?"

"What was I to do?" Mapuhi protested. "I owed him the money. He knew I had the pearl. You heard him

yourself ask to see it. I had not told him. He knew. Somebody else told him. And I owed him the money."

She was twelve years old and did not know any better. Mapuhi relieved his feelings by sending her reeling

from a box on the ear; while Tefara and Nauri burst into tears and continued to upbraid him after the manner

HuruHuru, watching on the beach, saw a third schooner that he knew heave to outside the entrance and drop

a boat. It was the Hira, well named, for she was owned by Levy, the German Jew, the greatest pearl buyer of

them all, and, as was well known, Hira was the Tahitian god of fishermen and thieves.

"Have you heard the news?" HuruHuru asked, as Levy, a fat man with massive asymmetrical features,

stepped out upon the beach. "Mapuhi has found a pearl. There was never a pearl like it in Hikueru, in all the

Paumotus, in all the world. Mapuhi is a fool. He has sold it to Toriki for fourteen hundred ChiliI listened

outside and heard. Toriki is likewise a fool. You can buy it from him cheap. Remember that I told you first.

And while Levy and Toriki drank absinthe and chaffered over the pearl, HuruHuru listened and heard the

It was at this time that both the OROHENA and the Hira, running in close to the shore, began firing guns and

signalling frantically. The three men stepped outside in time to see the two schooners go hastily about and

head off shore, dropping mainsails and flying jibs on the run in the teeth of the squall that heeled them far

"They'll be back after it's over," said Toriki. "We'd better be getting out of here."

He was a whitebearded seacaptain, too old for service, who had learned that the only way to live on

comfortable terms with his asthma was on Hikueru. He went inside to look at the barometer.

"Great God!" they heard him exclaim, and rushed in to join him at staring at a dial, which marked

Again they came out, this time anxiously to consult sea and sky. The squall had cleared away, but the sky

remained overcast. The two schooners, under all sail and joined by a third, could be seen making back. A

veer in the wind induced them to slack off sheets, and five minutes afterward a sudden veer from the opposite

quarter caught all three schooners aback, and those on shore could see the boomtackles being slacked away

or cast off on the jump. The sound of the surf was loud, hollow, and menacing, and a heavy swell was setting

in. A terrible sheet of lightning burst before their eyes, illuminating the dark day, and the thunder rolled

Toriki and Levy broke into a run for their boats, the latter ambling along like a panicstricken hippopotamus.

As their two boats swept out the entrance, they passed the boat of the Aorai coming in. In the stern sheets,

encouraging the rowers, was Raoul. Unable to shake the vision of the pearl from his mind, he was returning

He landed on the beach in the midst of a driving thunder squall that was so dense that he collided with

"Too late," yelled HuruHuru. "Mapuhi sold it to Toriki for fourteen hundred Chili, and Toriki sold it to

Levy for twentyfive thousand francs. And Levy will sell it in France for a hundred thousand francs. Have

Raoul felt relieved. His troubles about the pearl were over. He need not worry any more, even if he had not

got the pearl. But he did not believe HuruHuru. Mapuhi might well have sold it for fourteen hundred Chili,

but that Levy, who knew pearls, should have paid twentyfive thousand francs was too wide a stretch. Raoul

decided to interview Captain Lynch on the subject, but when he arrived at that ancient mariner's house, he

"What do you read it?" Captain Lynch asked anxiously, rubbing his spectables and staring again at the

"I should say not!" snorted the captain. "Fifty years boy and man on all the seas, and I've never seen it go

They stood for a moment, while the surf rumbled and shook the house. Then they went outside. The squall

had passed. They could see the Aorai lying becalmed a mile away and pitching and tossing madly in the

tremendous seas that rolled in stately procession down out of the northeast and flung themselves furiously

upon the coral shore. One of the sailors from the boat pointed at the mouth of the passage and shook his head.

"I guess I'll stay with you tonight, Captain," he said; then turned to the sailor and told him to haul the boat out

"Twentynine flat," Captain Lynch reported, coming out from another look at the barometer, a chair in his

He sat down and stared at the spectacle of the sea. The sun came out, increasing the sultriness of the day,

Miles in length, carrying tens of thousands of tons in weight, its impact shook the frail atoll like an

"But there is no wind," Raoul persisted. "I could understand it if there was wind along with it."

The two men sat on in silence. The sweat stood out on their skin in myriads of tiny drops that ran together,

forming blotches of moisture, which, in turn, coalesced into rivulets that dripped to the ground. They panted

for breath, the old man's efforts being especially painful. A sea swept up the beach, licking around the trunks

"Way past high water mark," Captain Lynch remarked; "and I've been here eleven years." He looked at his

A man and woman, at their heels a motley following of brats and curs, trailed disconsolately by. They came

to a halt beyond the house, and, after much irresolution, sat down in the sand. A few minutes later another

family trailed in from the opposite direction, the men and women carrying a heterogeneous assortment of

possessions. And soon several hundred persons of all ages and sexes were congregated about the captain's

dwelling. He called to one new arrival, a woman with a nursing babe in her arms, and in answer received the

This was the highest spot of land in miles, and already, in many places on either hand, the great seas were

making a clean breach of the slender ring of the atoll and surging into the lagoon. Twenty miles around

stretched the ring of the atoll, and in no place was it more than fifty fathoms wide. It was the height of the

diving season, and from all the islands around, even as far as Tahiti, the natives had gathered.

"There are twelve hundred men, women, and children here," said Captain Lynch. "I wonder how many will

The sea water churned about them three inches deep under the chairs. A low wail of fear went up from the

many women. The children, with clasped hands, stared at the immense rollers and cried piteously. Chickens

and cats, wading perturbedly in the water, as by common consent, with flight and scramble took refuge on the

roof of the captain's house. A Paumotan, with a litter of newborn puppies in a basket, climbed into a

cocoanut tree and twenty feet above the ground made the basket fast. The mother floundered about in the

And still the sun shone brightly and the dead calm continued. They sat and watched the seas and the insane

pitching of the Aorai. Captain Lynch gazed at the huge mountains of water sweeping in until he could gaze

no more. He covered his face with his hands to shut out the sight; then went into the house.

In his arm was a coil of small rope. He cut it into twofathom lengths, giving one to Raoul and, retaining one

for himself, distributed the remainder among the women with the advice to pick out a tree and climb.

A light air began to blow out of the northeast, and the fan of it on his cheek seemed to cheer Raoul up. He

could see the Aorai trimming her sheets and heading off shore, and he regretted that he was not on her. She

would get away at any rate, but as for the atollA sea breached across, almost sweeping him off his feet,

and he selected a tree. Then he remembered the barometer and ran back to the house. He encountered Captain

"Twentyeighttwenty," said the old mariner. "It's going to be fair hell around herewhat was that?"

The air seemed filled with the rush of something. The house quivered and vibrated, and they heard the

thrumming of a mighty note of sound. The windows rattled. Two panes crashed; a draught of wind tore in,

striking them and making them stagger. The door opposite banged shut, shattering the latch. The white door

knob crumbled in fragments to the floor. The room's walls bulged like a gas balloon in the process of sudden

inflation. Then came a new sound like the rattle of musketry, as the spray from a sea struck the wall of the

house. Captain Lyncyh looked at his watch. It was four o'clock. He put on a coat of pilot cloth, unhooked the

barometer, and stowed it away in a capacious pocket. Again a sea struck the house, with a heavy thud, and

the light building tilted, twisted, quarter around on its foundation, and sank down, its floor at an angle of ten

Raoul went out first. The wind caught him and whirled him away. He noted that it had hauled around to the

east. With a great effort he threw himself on the sand, crouching and holding his own. Captain Lynch, driven

like a wisp of straw, sprawled over him. Two of the Aorai'S sailors, leaving a cocoanut tree to which they had

been clinging, came to their aid, leaning against the wind at impossible angles and fighting and clawing every

The old man's joints were stiff and he could not climb, so the sailors, by means of short ends of rope tied

together, hoisted him up the trunk, a few feet at a time, till they could make him fast, at the top of the tree,

fifty feet from the ground. Raoul passed his length of rope around the base of an adjacent tree and stood

looking on. The wind was frightful. He had never dreamed it could blow so hard. A sea breached across the

atoll, wetting him to the knees ere it subsided into the lagoon. The sun had disappeared, and a leadcolored

twilight settled down. A few drops of rain, driving horizontally, struck him. The impact was like that of

leaden pellets. A splash of salt spray struck his face. It was like the slap of a man's hand. His cheeks stung,

and involuntary tears of pain were in his smarting eyes. Several hundred natives had taken to the trees, and he

could have laughed at the bunches of human fruit clustering in the tops. Then, being Tahitianborn, he

doubled his body at the waist, clasped the trunk of his tree with his hands, pressed the soles of his feet against

the near surface of the trunk, and began to walk up the tree. At the top he found two women, two children,

From his eyrie he waved his hand to Captain Lynch, and that doughty patriarch waved back. Raoul was

appalled at the sky. It had approached much nearerin fact, it seemed just over his head; and it had turned

from lead to black. Many people were still on the ground grouped about the bases of the trees and holding on.

Several such clusters were praying, and in one the Mormon missionary was exhorting. A weird sound,

rhythmical, faint as the faintest chirp of a far cricket, enduring but for a moment, but in the moment

suggesting to him vaguely the thought of heaven and celestial music, came to his ear. He glanced about him

and saw, at the base of another tree, a large cluster of people holding on by ropes and by one another. He

could see their faces working and their lips moving in unison. No sound came to him, but he knew that they

Still the wind continued to blow harder. By no conscious process could he measure it, for it had long since

passed beyond all his experience of wind; but he knew somehow, nevertheless, that it was blowing harder.

Not far away a tree was uprooted, flinging its load of human beings to the ground. A sea washed across the

strip of sand, and they were gone. Things were happening quickly. He saw a brown shoulder and a black head

silhouetted against the churning white of the lagoon. The next instant that, too, had vanished. Other trees

were going, falling and crisscrossing like matches. He was amazed at the power of the wind. His own tree

was swaying perilously, one woman was wailing and clutching the little girl, who in turn still hung on to the

The man, holding the other child, touched Raoul's arm and pointed. He looked and saw the Mormon church

careering drunkenly a hundred feet away. It had been torn from its foundations, and wind and sea were

heaving and shoving it toward the lagoon. A frightful wall of water caught it, tilted it, and flung it against half

a dozen cocoanut trees. The bunches of human fruit fell like ripe cocoanuts. The subsiding wave showed

them on the ground, some lying motionless, others squirming and writhing. They reminded him strangely of

ants. He was not shocked. He had risen above horror. Quite as a matter of course he noted the succeeding

wave sweep the sand clean of the human wreckage. A third wave, more colossal than any he had yet seen,

hurled the church into the lagoon, where it floated off into the obscurity to leeward, halfsubmerged,

He looked for Captain Lynch's house, and was surprised to find it gone. Things certainly were happening

quickly. He noticed that many of the people in the trees that still held had descended to the ground. The wind

had yet again increased. His own tree showed that. It no longer swayed or bent over and back. Instead, it

remained practically stationary, curved in a rigid angle from the wind and merely vibrating. But the vibration

was sickening. It was like that of a tuningfork or the tongue of a jew'sharp. It was the rapidity of the

vibration that made it so bad. Even though its roots held, it could not stand the strain for long. Something

Ah, there was one that had gone. He had not seen it go, but there it stood, the remnant, broken off halfway

up the trunk. One did not know what happened unless he saw it. The mere crashing of trees and wails of

human despair occupied no place in that mighty volume of sound. He chanced to be looking in Captain

Lynch's direction when it happened. He saw the trunk of the tree, halfway up, splinter and part without

noise. The head of the tree, with three sailors of the Aorai and the old captain sailed off over the lagoon. It did

not fall to the ground, but drove through the air like a piece of chaff. For a hundred yards he followed its

flight, when it struck the water. He strained his eyes, and was sure that he saw Captain Lynch wave farewell.

Raoul did not wait for anything more. He touched the native and made signs to descend to the ground. The

man was willing, but his women were paralayzed from terror, and he elected to remain with them. Raoul

passed his rope around the tree and slid down. A rush of salt water went over his head. He held his breath and

clung desperately to the rope. The water subsided, and in the shelter of the trunk he breathed once more. He

fastened the rope more securely, and then was put under by another sea. One of the women slid down and

joined him, the native remaining by the other woman, the two children, and the cat.

The supercargo had noticed how the groups clinging at the bases of the other trees continually diminished.

Now he saw the process work out alongside him. It required all his strength to hold on, and the woman who

had joined him was growing weaker. Each time he emerged from a sea he was surprised to find himself still

there, and next, surprised to find the woman still there. At last he emerged to find himself alone. He looked

up. The top of the tree had gone as well. At half its original height, a splintered end vibrated. He was safe.

The roots still held, while the tree had been shorn of its windage. He began to climb up. He was so weak that

he went slowly, and sea after sea caught him before he was above them. Then he tied himself to the trunk and

He felt very lonely in the darkness. At times it seemed to him that it was the end of the world and that he was

the last one left alive. Still the wind increased. Hour after hour it increased. By what he calculated was eleven

o'clock, the wind had become unbelievable. It was a horrible, monstrous thing, a screaming fury, a wall that

smote and passed on but that continued to smite and pass ona wall without end. It seemed to him that he

had become light and ethereal; that it was he that was in motion; that he was being driven with inconceivable

velocity through unending solidness. The wind was no longer air in motion. It had become substantial as

water or quicksilver. He had a feeling that he could reach into it and tear it out in chunks as one might do

with the meat in the carcass of a steer; that he could seize hold of the wind and hang on to it as a man might

The wind strangled him. He could not face it and breathe, for it rushed in through his mouth and nostrils,

distending his lungs like bladders. At such moments it seemed to him that his body was being packed and

swollen with solid earth. Only by pressing his lips to the trunk of the tree could he breathe. Also, the

ceaseless impact of the wind exhausted him. Body and brain became wearied. He no longer observed, no

longer thought, and was but semiconscious. One idea constituted his consciousness: SO THIS WAS A

HURRICANE. That one idea persisted irregularly. It was like a feeble flame that flickered occasionally.

From a state of stupor he would return to itSO THIS WAS A HURRICANE. Then he would go off into

The height of the hurricane endured from eleven at night till three in the morning, and it was at eleven that

the tree in which clung Mapuhi and his women snapped off. Mapuhi rose to the surface of the lagoon, still

clutching his daughter Ngakura. Only a South Sea islander could have lived in such a driving smother. The

pandanus tree, to which he attached himself, turned over and over in the froth and churn; and it was only by

holding on at times and waiting, and at other times shifting his grips rapidly, that he was able to get his head

and Ngakura's to the surface at intervals sufficiently near together to keep the breath in them. But the air was

mostly water, what with flying spray and sheeted rain that poured along at right angles to the perpendicular.

It was ten miles across the lagoon to the farther ring of sand. Here, tossing tree trunks, timbers, wrecks of

cutters, and wreckage of houses, killed nine out of ten of the miserable beings who survived the passage of

the lagoon. Halfdrowned, exhausted, they were hurled into this mad mortar of the elements and battered into

formless flesh. But Mapuhi was fortunate. His chance was the one in ten; it fell to him by the freakage of fate.

Ngakura's left arm was broken; the fingers of her right hand were crushed; and cheek and forehead were laid

open to the bone. He clutched a tree that yet stood, and clung on, holding the girl and sobbing for air, while

At three in the morning the backbone of the hurricane broke. By five no more than a stiff breeze was

blowing. And by six it was dead calm and the sun was shining. The sea had gone down. On the yet restless

edge of the lagoon, Mapuhi saw the broken bodies of those that had failed in the landing. Undoubtedly Tefara

and Nauri were among them. He went along the beach examining them, and came upon his wife, lying half in

and half out of the water. He sat down and wept, making harsh animal noises after the manner of primitive

grief. Then she stirred uneasily, and groaned. He looked more closely. Not only was she alive, but she was

Of the twelve hundred alive the night before but three hundred remained. The mormon missionary and a

gendarme made the census. The lagoon was cluttered with corpses. Not a house nor a hut was standing. In the

whole atoll not two stones remained one upon another. One in fifty of the cocoanut palms still stood, and they

There was no fresh water. The shallow wells that caught the surface seepage of the rain were filled with salt.

Out of the lagoon a few soaked bags of flour were recovered. The survivors cut the hearts out of the fallen

cocoanut trees and ate them. Here and there they crawled into tiny hutches, made by hollowing out the sand

and covering over with fragments of metal roofing. The missionary made a crude still, but he could not distill

water for three hundred persons. By the end of the second day, Raoul, taking a bath in the lagoon, discovered

that his thirst was somewhat relieved. He cried out the news, and thereupon three hundred men, women, and

children could have been seen, standing up to their necks in the lagoon and trying to drink water in through

their skins. Their dead floated about them, or were stepped upon where they still lay upon the bottom. On the

third day the people buried their dead and sat down to wait for the rescue steamers.

In the meantime, Nauri, torn from her family by the hurricane, had been swept away on an adventure of her

own. Clinging to a rough plank that wounded and bruised her and that filled her body with splinters, she was

thrown clear over the atoll and carried away to sea. Here, under the amazing buffets of mountains of water,

she lost her plank. She was an old woman nearly sixty; but she was Paumotanborn, and she had never been

out of sight of the sea in her life. Swimming in the darkness, strangling, suffocating, fighting for air, she was

struck a heavy blow on the shoulder by a cocoanut. On the instant her plan was formed, and she seized the

nut. In the next hour she captured seven more. Tied together, they formed a lifebuoy that preserved her life

while at the same time it threatened to pound her to a jelly. She was a fat woman, and she bruised easily; but

she had had experience of hurricanes, and while she prayed to her shark god for protection from sharks, she

waited for the wind to break. But at three o'clock she was in such a stupor that she did not know. Nor did she

know at six o'clock when the dead calm settled down. She was shocked into consciousness when she was

thrown upon the sand. She dug in with raw and bleeding hands and feet and clawed against the backwash

She knew where she was. This land could be no other than the tiny islet of Takokota. It had no lagoon. No

Hikueru was fifteen miles away. She could not see Hikueru, but she knew that it lay to the south. The days

went by, and she lived on the cocoanuts that had kept her afloat. They supplied her with drinking water and

with food. But she did not drink all she wanted, nor eat all she wanted. Rescue was problematical. She saw

the smoke of the rescue steamers on the horizon, but what steamer could be expected to come to lonely,

From the first she was tormented by corpses. The sea persisted in flinging them upon her bit of sand, and she

persisted, until her strength failed, in thrusting them back into the sea where the sharks tore at them and

devoured them. When her strength failed, the bodies festooned her beach with ghastly horror, and she

By the tenth day her last cocoanut was gone, and she was shrivelling from thirst. She dragged herself along

the sand, looking for cocoanuts. It was strange that so many bodies floated up, and no nuts. Surely, there were

more cocoanuts afloat than dead men! She gave up at last, and lay exhausted. The end had come. Nothing

Coming out of a stupor, she became slowly aware that she was gazing at a patch of sandyred hair on the

head of a corpse. The sea flung the body toward her, then drew it back. It turned over, and she saw that it had

no face. Yet there was something familiar about that patch of sandyred hair. An hour passed. She did not

exert herself to make the identification. She was waiting to die, and it mattered little to her what man that

But at the end of the hour she sat up slowly and stared at the corpse. An unusually large wave had thrown it

beyond the reach of the lesser waves. Yes, she was right; that patch of red hair could belong to but one man

in the Paumotus. It was Levy, the German Jew, the man who had bought the pearl and carried it away on the

Hira. Well, one thing was evident: The Hira had been lost. The pearl buyer's god of fishermen and thieves

She crawled down to the dead man. His shirt had been torn away, and she could see the leather money belt

about his waist. She held her breath and tugged at the buckles. They gave easier than she had expected, and

she crawled hurriedly away across the sand, dragging the belt after her. Pocket after pocket she unbuckled in

the belt and found empty. Where could he have put it? In the last pocket of all she found it, the first and only

pearl he had bought on the voyage. She crawled a few feet farther, to escape the pestilence of the belt, and

examined the pearl. It was the one Mapuhi had found and been robbed of by Toriki. She weighed it in her

hand and rolled it back and forth caressingly. But in it she saw no intrinsic beauty. What she did see was the

house Mapuhi and Tefara and she had builded so carefully in their minds. Each time she looked at the pearl

she saw the house in all its details, including the octagondropclock on the wall. That was something to live

She tore a strip from her ahu and tied the pearl securely about her neck. Then she went on along the beach,

panting and groaning, but resolutely seeking for cocoanuts. Quickly she found one, and, as she glanced

around, a second. She broke one, drinking its water, which was mildewy, and eating the last particle of the

meat. A little later she found a shattered dugout. Its outrigger was gone, but she was hopeful, and, before the

day was out, she found the outrigger. Every find was an augury. The pearl was a talisman. Late in the

afternoon she saw a wooden box floating low in the water. When she dragged it out on the beach its contents

rattled, and inside she found ten tins of salmon. She opened one by hammering it on the canoe. When a leak

was started, she drained the tin. After that she spent several hours in extracting the salmon, hammering and

Eight days longer she waited for rescue. In the meantime she fastened the outrigger back on the canoe, using

for lashings all the cocoanut fibre she could find, and also what remained of her ahu. The canoe was badly

cracked, and she could not make it watertight; but a calabash made from a cocoanut she stored on board for

a bailer. She was hard put for a paddle. With a piece of tin she sawed off all her hair close to the scalp. Out of

the hair she braided a cord; and by means of the cord she lashed a threefoot piece of broom handle to a

On the eighteenth day, at midnight, she launched the canoe through the surf and started back for Hikueru. She

was an old woman. Hardship had stripped her fat from her till scarcely more than bones and skin and a few

stringy muscles remained. The canoe was large and should have been paddled by three strong men.

But she did it alone, with a makeshift paddle. Also, the canoe leaked badly, and onethird of her time was

devoted to bailing. By clear daylight she looked vainly for Hikueru. Astern, Takokota had sunk beneath the

sea rim. The sun blazed down on her nakedness, compelling her body to surrender its moisture. Two tins of

salmon were left, and in the course of the day she battered holes in them and drained the liquid. She had no

time to waste in extracting the meat. A current was setting to the westward, she made westing whether she

In the eary afternoon, standing upright in the canoe, she sighted Hikueru Its wealth of cocoanut palms was

gone. Only here and there, at wide intervals, could she see the ragged remnants of trees. The sight cheered

her. She was nearer than she had thought. The current was setting her to the westward. She bore up against it

and paddled on. The wedges in the paddle lashing worked loose, and she lost much time, at frequent

intervals, in driving them tight. Then there was the bailing. One hour in three she had to cease paddling in

By sunset Hikueru bore southeast from her, three miles away. There was a full moon, and by eight o'clock the

land was due east and two miles away. She struggled on for another hour, but the land was as far away as

ever. She was in the main grip of the current; the canoe was too large; the paddle was too inadequate; and too

much of her time and strength was wasted in bailing. Besides, she was very weak and growing weaker.

She breathed a prayer to her shark god, slipped over the side, and began to swim. She was actually refreshed

by the water, and quickly left the canoe astern. At the end of an hour the land was perceptibly nearer. Then

came her fright. Right before her eyes, not twenty feet away, a large fin cut the water. She swam steadily

toward it, and slowly it glided away, curving off toward the right and circling around her. She kept her eyes

on the fin and swam on. When the fin disappeared, she lay face downward in the water and watched. When

the fin reappeared she resumed her swimming. The monster was lazyshe could see that. Without doubt he

had been well fed since the hurricane. Had he been very hungry, she knew he would not have hesitated from

making a dash for her. He was fifteen feet long, and one bite, she knew, could cut her in half.

But she did not have any time to waste on him. Whether she swam or not, the current drew away from the

land just the same. A half hour went by, and the shark began to grow bolder. Seeing no harm in her he drew

closer, in narrowing circles, cocking his eyes at her impudently as he slid past. Sooner or later, she knew well

enough, he would get up sufficient courage to dash at her. She resolved to play first. It was a desperate act

she meditated. She was an old woman, alone in the sea and weak from starvation and hardship; and yet she,

in the face of this sea tiger, must anticipate his dash by herself dashing at him. She swam on, waiting her

chance. At last he passed languidly by, barely eight feet away. She rushed at him suddenly, feigning that she

was attacking him. He gave a wild flirt of his tail as he fled away, and his sandpaper hide, striking her, took

off her skin from elbow to shoulder. He swam rapidly, in a widening circle, and at last disappeared.

In the hole in the sand, covered over by fragments of metal roofing, Mapuhi and Tefara lay disputing.

"If you had done as I said," charged Tefara, for the thousandth time, "and hidden the pearl and told no one,

"But HuruHuru was with me when I opened the shellhave I not told you so times and times and times

"And now we shall have no house. Raoul told me today that if you had not sold the pearl to Toriki"

"that if you had not sold the pearl, he would give you five thousand French dollars, which is ten thousand

"He has been talking to his mother," Mapuhi explained. "She has an eye for a pearl."

"Toriki is dead," she cried. "They have heard no word of his schooner. She was lost along with the Aorai and

the Hira. Will Toriki pay you the three hundred credit he promised? No, because Toriki is dead. And had you

found no pearl, would you today owe Toriki the twelve hundred? No, because Toriki is dead, and you cannot

"But Levy did not pay Toriki," Mapuhi said. "He gave him a piece of paper that was good for the money in

Papeete; and now Levy is dead and cannot pay; and Toriki is dead and the paper lost with him, and the pearl

is lost with Levy. You are right, Tefara. I have lost the pearl, and got nothing for it. Now let us sleep."

He held up his hand suddenly and listened. From without came a noise, as of one who breathed heavily and

"Good woman," he said in faltering tones, striving to disguise his vice, "I know your son well. He is living on

From without came the sound of a sigh. Mapuhi began to feel elated. He had fooled the ghost.

"Since when has Tefara bedded in a strange house?" came Nauri's voice through the matting.

Mapuhi looked fear and reproach at his wife. It was her voice that had betrayed them.

"No, no, I have notMapuhi has not denied you," he cried. "I am not Mapuhi. He is on the east end of the

One end of the matting lifted. Tefara tried to dive under the blankets, but Mapuhi held on to her. He had to

hold on to something. Together, struggling with each other, with shivering bodies and chattering teeth, they

gazed with protruding eyes at the lifting mat. They saw Nauri, dripping with sea water, without her ahu, creep

in. They rolled over backward from her and fought for Ngakura's blanket with which to cover their heads.

And together they kicked out Ngakura from under the blanket. A minute later, peeping, Mapuhi saw the ghost

drinking. When it reached out a shaking hand and laid it on his, he felt the weight of it and was convinced

that it was no ghost. Then he emerged, dragging Tefara after him, and in a few minutes all were listening to

Nauri's tale. And when she told of Levy, and dropped the pearl into Tefara's hand, even she was reconciled to

"In the morning," said Tefara, "you will sell the pearl to Raoul for five thousand French."

"He will build the house," Tefara answered. "He ways it will cost four thousand French. Also will he give one

"Then give me something to eat, for I am hungry," said Nauri, complacently. "And after that we will sleep,

for I am weary. And tomorrow we will have more talk about the house before we sell the pearl. It will be

better if we take the thousand French in cash. Money is ever better than credit in buying goods from the

It was in the early days in Fiji, when John Starhurst arose in the mission house at Rewa Village and

announced his intention of carrying the gospel throughout all Viti Levu. Now Viti Levu means the "Great

Land," it being the largest island in a group composed of many large islands, to say nothing of hundreds of

small ones. Here and there on the coasts, living by most precarious tenure, was a sprinkling of missionaries,

traders, b chedemer fishers, and whaleship deserters. The smoke of the hot ovens arose under their

windows, and the bodies of the slain were dragged by their doors on the way to the feasting.

The Lotu, or the Worship, was progressing slowly, and, often, in crablike fashion. Chiefs, who announced

themselves Christians and were welcomed into the body of the chapel, had a distressing habit of backsliding

in order to partake of the flesh of some favorite enemy. Eat or be eaten had been the law of the land; and eat

or be eaten promised to remain the law of the land for a long time to come. There were chiefs, such as Tanoa,

Tuiveikoso, and Tuikilakila, who had literally eaten hundreds of their fellow men. But among these gluttons

Ra Undreundre ranked highest. Ra Undreundre lived at Takiraki. He kept a register of his gustatory exploits.

A row of stones outside his house marked the bodies he had eaten. This row was two hundred and thirty

paces long, and the stones in it numbered eight hundred and seventytwo. Each stone represented a body.

The row of stones might have been longer, had not Ra Undreundre unfortunately received a spear in the small

of his back in a bush skirmish on Somo Somo and been served up on the table of Naungavuli, whose

The hardworked, feverstricken missionaries stuck doggedly to their task, at times despairing, and looking

forward for some special manifestation, some outburst of Pentecostal fire that would bring a glorious harvest

of souls. But cannibal Fiji had remained obdurate. The frizzleheaded maneaters were loath to leave their

fleshpots so long as the harvest of human carcases was plentiful. Sometimes, when the harvest was too

plentiful, they imposed on the missionaries by letting the word slip out that on such a day there would be a

killing and a barbecue. Promptly the missionaries would buy the lives of the victims with stick tobacco,

fathoms of calico, and quarts of trade beads. Natheless the chiefs drove a handsome trade in thus disposing of

It was at this juncture that John Starhurst proclaimed that he would carry the Gospel from coast to coast of

the Great Land, and that he would begin by penetrating the mountain fastnesses of the headwaters of the

The native teachers wept softly. His two fellow missionaries strove to dissuade him. The King of Rewa

warned him that the mountain dwellers would surely kaikai himkaikai meaning "to eat"and that he,

the King of Rewa, having become Lotu, would be put to the necessity of going to war with the mountain

dwellers. That he could not conquer them he was perfectly aware. That they might come down the river and

sack Rewa Village he was likewise perfectly aware. But what was he to do? If John Starhurst persisted in

going out and being eaten, there would be a war that would cost hundreds of lives.

Later in the day a deputation of Rewa chiefs waited upon John Starhurst. He heard them patiently, and argued

patiently with them, though he abated not a whit from his purpose. To his fellow missionaries he explained

that he was not bent upon martyrdom; that the call had come for him to carry the Gospel into Viti Levu, and

To the traders who came and objected most strenuously of all, he said: "Your objections are valueless. They

consist merely of the damage that may be done your businesses. You are interested in making money, but I

John Starhurst was not a fanatic. He would have been the first man to deny the imputation. He was eminently

He was sure that his mission would result in good, and he had private visions of igniting the Pentecostal spark

in the souls of the mountaineers and of inaugurating a revival that would sweep down out of the mountains

and across the length and breadth of the Great Land from sea to sea and to the isles in the midst of the sea.

There were no wild lights in his mild gray eyes, but only calm resolution and an unfaltering trust in the

One man only he found who approved of his project, and that was Ra Vatu, who secretly encouraged him and

offered to lend him guides to the first foothills. John Starhurst, in turn, was greatly pleased by Ra Vatu's

conduct. From an incorrigible heathen, with a heart as black as his practices, Ra Vatu was beginning to

emanate light. He even spoke of becoming Lotu. True, three years before he had expressed a similar

intention, and would have entered the church had not John Starhurst entered objection to his bringing his four

wives along with him. Ra Vatu had had economic and ethical objections to monogamy. Besides, the

missionary's hairsplitting objection had offended him; and, to prove that he was a free agent and a man of

honor, he had swung his huge war club over Starhurst's head. Starhurst had escaped by rushing in under the

club and holding on to him until help arrived. But all that was now forgiven and forgotten. Ra Vatu was

coming into the church, not merely as a converted heathen, but as a converted polygamist as well. He was

only waiting, he assured Starhurst, until his oldest wife, who was very sick, should die.

John Starhurst journeyed up the sluggish Rewa in one of Ra Vatu's canoes. This canoe was to carry him for

two days, when, the head of navigation reached, it would return. Far in the distance, lifted into the sky, could

be seen the great smoky mountains that marked the backbone of the Great Land. All day John Starhurst gazed

Sometimes he prayed silently. At other times he was joined in prayer by Narau, a native teacher, who for

seven years had been Lotu, ever since the day he had been saved from the hot oven by Dr. James Ellery

Brown at the trifling expense of one hundred sticks of tobacco, two cotton blankets, and a large bottle of

painkiller. At the last moment, after twenty hours of solitary supplication and prayer, Narau's ears had heard

John Starhurst had hailed him with sober delight. Truly, the Lord was with him thus to spur on so

"I am indeed without spirit, the weakest of the Lord's vessels," Narau explained, the first day in the canoe.

Another canoe journeyed up the Rewa that day. But it journeyed an hour astern, and it took care not to be

seen. This canoe was also the property of Ra Vatu. In it was Erirola, Ra Vatu's first cousin and trusted

henchman; and in the small basket that never left his hand was a whale tooth. It was a magnificent tooth, fully

six inches long, beautifully proportioned, the ivory turned yellow and purple with age. This tooth was

likewise the property of Ra Vatu; and in Fiji, when such a tooth goes forth, things usually happen. For this is

the virtue of the whale tooth: Whoever accepts it cannot refuse the request that may accompany it or follow

it. The request may be anything from a human life to a tribal alliance, and no Fijian is so dead to honor as to

deny the request when once the tooth has been accepted. Sometimes the request hangs fire, or the fulfilment

High up the Rewa, at the village of a chief, Mongondro by name, John Starhurst rested at the end of the

second day of the journey. In the morning, attended by Narau, he expected to start on foot for the smoky

mountains that were now green and velvety with nearness. Mongondro was a sweettempered,

mildmannered little old chief, shortsighted and afflicted with elephantiasis, and no longer inclined toward

the turbulence of war. He received the missionary with warm hospitality, gave him food from his own table,

and even discussed religious matters with him. Mongondro was of an inquiring bent of mind, and pleased

John Starhurst greatly by asking him to account for the existence and beginning of things. When the

missionary had finished his summary of the Creation according to Genesis, he saw that Mongondro was

deeply affected. The little old chief smoked silently for some time. Then he took the pipe from his mouth and

"It cannot be," he said. "I, Mongondro, in my youth, was a good workman with the adze. Yet three months

did it take me to make a canoea small canoe, a very small canoe. And you say that all this land and water

"It is the same thing," Mongondro went on, "that all the land and all the water, the trees, the fish, and bush

and mountains, the sun, the moon, and the stars, were made in six days! No, no. I tell you that in my youth I

was an able man, yet did it require me three months for one small canoe. It is a story to frighten children

"True, you are a man. But it is not given to my dark understanding to know what you believe."

It was not until after John Starhurst and Narau had gone off to bed that Erirola crept into the chief's house,

The old chief held the tooth in his hands for a long time. It was a beautiful tooth, and he yearned for it. Also,

he divined the request that must accompany it. "No, no; whale teeth were beautiful," and his mouth watered

In the early dawn John Starhurst was afoot, striding along the bush trail in his big leather boots, at his heels

the faithful Narau, himself at the heels of a naked guide lent him by Mongondro to show the way to the next

village, which was reached by midday. Here a new guide showed the way. A mile in the rear plodded Erirola,

the whale tooth in the basket slung on his shoulder. For two days more he brought up the missionary's rear,

offering the tooth to the village chiefs. But village after village refused the tooth. It followed so quickly the

missionary's advent that they divined the request that would be made, and would have none of it.

They were getting deep into the mountains, and Erirola took a secret trail, cut in ahead of the missionary, and

reached the stronghold of the Buli of Gatoka. Now the Buli was unaware of John Starhurst's imminent

arrival. Also, the tooth was beautifulan extraordinary specimen, while the coloring of it was of the rarest

order. The tooth was presented publicly. The Buli of Gatoka, seated on his best mat, surrounded by his chief

men, three busy flybrushers at his back, deigned to receive from the hand of his herald the whale tooth

presented by Ra Vatu and carried into the mountains by his cousin, Erirola. A clapping of hands went up at

the acceptance of the present, the assembled headman, heralds, and flybrushers crying aloud in chorus:

"A! woi! woi! woi! A! woi! woi! woi! A tabua levu! woi! woi! A mudua, mudua, mudua!'

"Soon will come a man, a white man," Erirola began, after the proper pause. "He is a missionary man, and he

will come today. Ra Vatu is pleased to desire his boots. He wishes to present them to his good friend,

Mongondro, and it is in his mind to send them with the feet along in them, for Mongondro is an old man and

his teeth are not good. Be sure, O Buli, that the feet go along in the boots. As for the rest of him, it may stop

The delight in the whale tooth faded out of the Buli's eyes, and he glanced about him dubiously. Yet had he

"No, a little thing like a missionary does not matter," the Buli answered, himself again. "Mongondro shall

have the boots. Go, you young men, some three or four of you, and meet the missionary on the trail. Be sure

Breaking through the thicket of brush, John Starhurst, with Narau close on his heels, strode upon the scene.

The famous boots, having filled in wading the stream, squirted fine jets of water at every step. Starhurst

looked about him with flashing eyes. Upborne by an unwavering trust, untouched by doubt or fear, he exulted

in all he saw. He knew that since the beginning of time he was the first white man ever to tread the mountain

The grass houses clung to the steep mountain side or overhung the rushing Rewa. On either side towered a

mighty precipice. At the best, three hours of sunlight penetrated that narrow gorge. No cocoanuts nor bananas

were to be seen, though dense, tropic vegetation overran everything, dripping in airy festoons from the sheer

lips of the precipices and running riot in all the crannied ledges. At the far end of the gorge the Rewa leaped

eight hundred feet in a single span, while the atmosphere of the rock fortress pulsed to the rhythmic thunder

"It is a new name in Viti Levu," the Buli grinned. "Of what islands, villages, or passes may he be chief?"

"He is the chief over all islands, all villages, all passes," John Starhurst answered solemnly. "He is the Lord

"Your chief is either a niggard, or you are a fool, to come emptyhanded into the mountains. Behold, a more

"It is the whale tooth of Ra Vatu," he whispered to Starhurst. "I know it well. Now are we undone."

"A gracious thing," the missionary answered, passing his hand through his long beard and adjusting his

But Narau groaned again, and backed away from the heels he had dogged so faithfully.

"Ra Vatu is soon to become Lotu," Starhurst explained, "and I have come bringing the Lotu to you."

"I want none of your Lotu," said the Buli, proudly. "And it is in my mind that you will be clubbed this day."

The Buli nodded to one of his big mountaineers, who stepped forward, swinging a club. Narau bolted into the

nearest house, seeking to hide among the woman and mats; but John Starhurst sprang in under the club and

threw his arms around his executioner's neck. From this point of vantage he proceeded to argue. He was

"It would be an evil thing for you to kill me," he told the man. "I have done you no wrong, nor have I done

So well did he cling to the neck of the one man that they dared not strike with their clubs. And he continued

"I am John Starhurst," he went on calmly. "I have labored in Fiji for three years, and I have done it for no

profit. I am here among you for good. Why should any man kill me? To kill me will not profit any man."

The missionary was surrounded by a mass of naked savages, all struggling to get at him. The death song,

which is the song of the oven, was raised, and his expostulations could no longer be heard. But so cunningly

did he twine and wreathe his body about his captor's that the death blow could not be struck. Erirola smiled,

"Away with you!" he cried. "A nice story to go back to the coasta dozen of you and one missionary,

"Wait, O Buli," John Starhurst called out from the thick of the scuffle, "and I will overcome even you. For

"Come to me, then," the Buli answered, "for my weapon is only a poor miserable club, and, as you say, it

The group separated from him, and John Starhurst stood alone, facing the Buli, who was leaning on an

"Even so will I come to you and overcome you," John Starhurst made answer, first wiping his spectacles and

And to every point he made the same reply, at the same time watching the missionary closely in order to

forestall that cunning runin under the lifted club. Then, and for the first time, John Starhurst knew that his

death was at hand. He made no attempt to run in. Bareheaded, he stood in the sun and prayed aloudthe

mysterious figure of the inevitable white man, who, with Bible, bullet, or rum bottle, has confronted the

amazed savage in his every stronghold. Even so stood John Starhurst in the rock fortress of the Buli of

"Forgive them, for they know not what they do," he prayed. "O Lord! Have mercy upon Fiji. Have

compasssion for Fiji. O Jehovah, hear us for His sake, Thy Son, whom Thou didst give that through Him all

men might also become Thy children. From Thee we came, and our mind is that to Thee we may return. The

land is dark, O Lord, the land is dark. But Thou art mighty to save. Reach out Thy hand, O Lord, and save

"Now will I answer thee," he muttered, at the same time swinging his club with both hands.

Narau, hiding among the women and the mats, heard the impact of the blow and shuddered. Then the death

song arose, and he knew his beloved missionary's body was being dragged to the oven as he heard the words:

"Gone to report!" the hundred voices bellowed back. "Gone to report! Gone to report!"

Narau groaned in anguish of spirit. The words of the old song were true. He was the coward, and nothing

He weighed one hundred and ten pounds. His hair was kinky and negroid, and he was black. He was

peculiarly black. He was neither blueblack nor purpleblack, but plumblack. His name was Mauki, and he

was the son of a chief. He had three tambos. Tambo is Melanesian for taboo, and is first cousin to that

Polynesian word. Mauki's three tambos were as follows: First, he must never shake hands with a woman, nor

have a woman's hand touch him or any of his personal belongings; secondly, he must never eat clams nor any

food from a fire in which clams had been cooked; thirdly, he must never touch a crocodile, nor travel in a

Of a different black were his teeeth, which were deep black, or, perhaps better, LAMPblack. They had been

made so in a single night, by his mother, who had compressed about them a powdered mineral which was dug

from the landslide back of Port Adams. Port Adams is a saltwater village on Malaita, and Malaita is the

most savage island in the Solomonsso savage that no traders or planters have yet gained a foothold on it;

while, from the time of the earliest b chedemer fishers and sandalwood traders down to the latest labor

recruiters equipped with automatic rifles and gasolene engines, scores of white adventurers have been passed

out by tomahawks and softnosed Snider bullets. So Malaita remains today, in the twentieth century, the

stamping ground of the labor recruiters, who farm its coasts for laborers who engage and contract themselves

to toil on the plantations of the neighboring and more civilized islands for a wage of thirty dollars a year. The

natives of those neighboring and more civilized islands have themselves become too civilized to work on

Mauki's ears were pierced, not in one place, nor two places, but in a couple of dozen places. In one of the

smaller holes he carried a clay pipe. The larger holes were too large for such use. The bowl of the pipe would

have fallen through. In fact, in the largest hole in each ear he habitually wore round wooden plugs that were

an even four inches in diameter. Roughly speaking, the circumference of said holes was twelve and onehalf

inches. Mauki was catholic in his tastes. In the various smaller holes he carried such things as empty rifle

cartridges, horseshoe nails, copper screws, pieces of string, braids of sennit, strips of green leaf, and, in the

cool of the day, scarlet hibiscus flowers. From which it will be seen that pockets were not necessary to his

wellbeing. Besides, pockets were impossible, for his only wearing apparel consisted of a piece of calico

several inches wide. A pocket knife he wore in his hair, the blade snapped down on a kinky lock. His most

prized possession was the handle of a china cup, which he suspended from a ring of turtleshell, which, in

But in spite of embellishments, Mauki had a nice face. It was really a pretty face, viewed by any standard,

and for a Melanesian it was a remarkably goodlooking face. Its one fault was its lack of strength. It was

softly effeminate, almost girlish. The features were small, regular, and delicate. The chin was weak, and the

mouth was weak. There was no strength nor character in the jaws, forehead, and nose. In the eyes only could

be caught any hint of the unknown quantities that were so large a part of his makeup and that other persons

could not understand. These unknown quantities were pluck, pertinacity, fearlessness, imagination, and

cunning; and when they found expression in some consistent and striking action, those about him were

Mauki's father was chief over the village at Port Adams, and thus, by birth a saltwater man, Mauki was half

amphibian. He knew the way of the fishes and oysters, and the reef was an open book to him. Canoes, also,

he knew. He learned to swim when he was a year old. At seven years he could hold his breath a full minute

and swim straight down to bottom through thirty feet of water. And at seven years he was stolen by the

bushmen, who cannot even swim and who are afraid of salt water. Thereafter Mauki saw the sea only from a

distance, through rifts in the jungle and from open spaces on the high mountain sides. He became the slave of

old Fanfoa, head chief over a score of scattered bushvillages on the rangelips of Malaita, the smoke of

which, on calm mornings, is about the only evidence the seafaring white men have of the teeming interior

population. For the whites do not penetrate Malaita. They tried it once, in the days when the search was on

for gold, but they always left their heads behind to grin from the smoky rafters of the bushmen's huts.

When Mauki was a young man of seventeen, Fanfoa got out of tobacco. He got dreadfully out of tobacco. It

was hard times in all his villages. He had been guilty of a mistake. Suo was a harbor so small that a large

schooner could not swing at anchor in it. It was surrounded by mangroves that overhung the deep water. It

was a trap, and into the trap sailed two white men in a small ketch. They were after recruits, and they

possessed much tobacco and trade goods, to say nothing of three rifles and plenty of ammunition. Now there

were no saltwater men living at Suo, and it was there that the bushmen could come down to the sea. The

ketch did a splendid traffic. It signed on twenty recruits the first day. Even old Fanfoa signed on. And that

same day the score of new recruits chopped off the two white men's head, killed the boat's crew, and burned

the ketch. Thereafter, and for three months, there was tobacco and trade goods in plenty and to spare in all the

bush villages. Then came the manofwar that threw shells for miles into the hills, frightening the people out

of their villages and into the deeper bush. Next the manofwar sent landing parties ashore. The villages

The cocoanuts and bananas were chopped down, the taro gardens uprooted, and the pigs and chickens killed.

It taught Fanfoa a lesson, but in the meantime he was out of tobacco. Also, his young men were too

frightened to sign on with the recruiting vessels. That was why Fanfoa ordered his slave, Mauki, to be carried

down and signed on for half a case of tobacco advance, along with knives, axes, calico, and beads, which he

would pay for with his toil on the plantations. Mauki was sorely frightened when they brought him on board

the schooner. He was a lamb led to the slaughter. White men were ferocious creatures. They had to be, or else

they would not make a practice of venturing along the Malaita coast and into all harbors, two on a schooner,

when each schooner carried from fifteen to twenty blacks as boat's crew, and often as high as sixty or seventy

black recruits. In addition to this, there was always the danger of the shore population, the sudden attack and

the cutting off of the schooner and all hands. Truly, white men must be terrible. Besides, they were possessed

of such devildevilsrifles that shot very rapidly many times, things of iron and brass that made the

schooners go when there was no wind, and boxes that talked and laughed just as men talked and laughed.

Ay, and he had heard of one white man whose particular devildevil was so powerful that he could take out

Down into the cabin they took Mauki. On deck, the one white man kept guard with two revolvers in his belt.

In the cabin the other white man sat with a book before him, in which he inscribed strange marks and lines.

He looked at Mauki as though he had been a pig or a fowl, glanced under the hollows of his arms, and wrote

in the book. Then he held out the writing stick and Mauki just barely touched it with his hand, in so doing

pledging himself to toil for three years on the plantations of the Moongleam Soap Company. It was not

explained to him that the will of the ferocious white men would be used to enforce the pledge, and that,

behind all, for the same use, was all the power and all the warships of Great Britain.

Other blacks there were on board, from unheardof far places, and when the white man spoke to them, they

tore the long feather from Mauki's hair, cut that same hair short, and wrapped about his waist a lavalava of

After many days on the schooner, and after beholding more land and islands than he had ever dreamed of, he

was landed on New Georgia, and put to work in the field clearing jungle and cutting cane grass. For the first

time he knew what work was. Even as a slave to Fanfoa he had not worked like this. And he did not like

work. It was up at dawn and in at dark, on two meals a day. And the food was tiresome. For weeks at a time

they were given nothing but sweet potatoes to eat, and for weeks at a time it would be nothing but rice. He

cut out the cocoanut from the shells day after day; and for long days and weeks he fed the fires that smoked

the copra, till his eyes got sore and he was set to felling trees. He was a good axeman, and later he was put

in the bridgebuilding gang. Once, he was punished by being put in the roadbuilding gang. At times he

served as boat's crew in the whale boats, when they brought in copra from distant beaches or when the white

Among other things he learned bechedemer English, with which he could talk with all white men, and with

all recruits who otherwise would have talked in a thousand different dialects. Also, he learned certain things

about the white men, principally that they kept their word. If they told a boy he was going to receive a stick

of tobacco, he got it. If they told a boy they would knock seven bells out of him if he did a certain thing,

when he did that thing, seven bells invariably were knocked out of him. Mauki did not know what seven bells

were, but they occurred in bechedemer, and he imagined them to be the blood and teeth that sometimes

accompanied the process of knocking out seven bells. One other thing he learned: no boy was struck or

punished unless he did wrong. Even when the white men were drunk, as they were frequently, they never

Mauki did not like the plantation. He hated work, and he was the son of a chief. Furthermore, it was ten years

since he had been stolen from Port Adams by Fanfoa, and he was homesick. He was even homesick for the

slavery under Fanfoa. So he ran away. He struck back into the bush, with the idea of working southward to

But the fever got him, and he was captured and brought back more dead than alive.

A second time he ran away, in the company of two Malaita boys. They got down the coast twenty miles, and

were hidden in the hut of a Malaita freeman, who dwelt in that village. But in the dead of night two white

men came, who were not afraid of all the village people and who knocked seven bells out of the three

runaways, tied them like pigs, and tossed them into the whale boat. But the man in whose house they had

hiddenseven times seven bells must have been knocked out of him from the way the hair, skin, and teeth

flew, and he was discouraged for the rest of his natural life from harboring runaway laborers.

For a year Mauki toiled on. Then he was made a houseboy, and had good food and easy times, with light

work in keeping the house clean and serving the white men with whiskey and beer at all hours of the day and

most hours of the night. He liked it, but he liked Port Adams more. He had two years longer to serve, but two

years were too long for him in the throes of homesickness. He had grown wiser with his year of service, and,

being now a houseboy, he had opportunity. He had the cleaning of the rifles, and he knew where the key to

the store room was hung. He planned to escape, and one night ten Malaita boys and one boy from San

Cristoval sneaked from the barracks and dragged one of the whale boats down to the beach. It was Mauki

who supplied the key that opened the padlock on the boat, and it was Mauki who equipped the boat with a

dozen Winchesters, an immense amount of ammunition, a case of dynamite with detonators and fuse, and ten

The northwest monsoon was blowing, and they fled south in the night time, hiding by day on detached and

uninhabited islets, or dragging their whale boat into the bush on the large islands. Thus they gained

Guadalcanar, skirted halfway along it, and crossed the Indispensable Straits to Florida Island. It was here that

they killed the San Cristoval boy, saving his head and cooking and eating the rest of him. The Malaita coast

was only twenty miles away, but the last night a strong current and baffling winds prevented them from

gaining across. Daylight found them still several miles from their goal. But daylight brought a cutter, in

which were two white men, who were not afraid of eleven Malaita men armed with twelve rifles. Mauki and

his companions were carried back to Tulagi, where lived the great white master of all the white men. And the

great white master held a court, after which, one by one, the runaways were tied up and given twenty lashes

each, and sentenced to a fine of fifteen dollars. They were sent back to New Georgia, where the white men

knocked seven bells out of them all around and put them to work. But Mauki was no longer houseboy. He

was put in the roadmaking gang. The fine of fifteen dollars had been paid by the white men from whom he

had run away, and he was told that he would have to work it out, which meant six months' additional toil.

Port Adams was now three years and a half away, so he stole a canoe one night, hid on the islets in Manning

Straits, passed through the Straits, and began working along the eastern coast of Ysabel, only to be captured,

twothirds of the way along, by the white men on Meringe Lagoon. After a week, he escaped from them and

took to the bush. There were no bush natives on Ysabel, only saltwater men, who were all Christians. The

white men put up a reward of fivehundred sticks of tobacco, and every time Mauki ventured down to the sea

to steal a canoe he was chased by the saltwater men. Four months of this passed, when, the reward having

been raised to a thousand sticks, he was caught and sent back to New Georgia and the roadbuilding gang.

Now a thousand sticks are worth fifty dollars, and Mauki had to pay the reward himself, which required a

His homesickness was greater than ever, and it did not appeal to him to settle down and be good, work out his

four years, and go home. The next time, he was caught in the very act of running away. His case was brought

before Mr. Haveby, the island manager of the Moongleam Soap Company, who adjudged him an incorrigible.

The Company had plantations on the Santa Cruz Islands, hundreds of miles across the sea, and there it sent its

Solomon Islands' incorrigibles. And there Mauki was sent, though he never arrived. The schooner stopped at

Santa Anna, and in the night Mauki swam ashore, where he stole two rifles and a case of tobacco from the

trader and got away in a canoe to Cristoval. Malaita was now to the north, fifty or sixty miles away. But when

he attempted the passage, he was caught by a light gale and driven back to Santa Anna, where the trader

clapped him in irons and held him against the return of the schooner from Santa Cruz. The two rifles the

trader recovered, but the case of tobacco was charged up to Mauki at the rate of another year. The sum of

On the way back to New Georgia, the schooner dropped anchor in Marau Sound, which lies at the

southeastern extremity of Guadalcanar. Mauki swam ashore with handcuffs on his wrists and got away to the

bush. The schooner went on, but the Moongleam trader ashore offered a thousand sticks, and to him Mauki

was brought by the bushmen with a year and eight months tacked on to his account. Again, and before the

schooner called in, he got away, this time in a whale boat accompanied by a case of the trader's tobacco. But

a northwest gale wrecked him upon Ugi, where the Christian natives stole his tobacco and turned him over to

the Moongleam trader who resided there. The tobacco the natives stole meant another year for him, and the

"We'll send him to Lord Howe," said Mr. Haveby. "Bunster is there, and we'll let them settle it between them.

It will be a case, I imagine, of Mauki getting Bunster, or Bunster getting Mauki, and good riddance in either

If one leaves Meringe Lagoon, on Ysabel, and steers a course due north, magnetic, at the end of one hundred

and fifty miles he will lift the pounded coral beaches of Lord Howe above the sea. Lord Howe is a ring of

land some one hundred and fifty miles in circumference, several hundred yards wide at its widest, and

towering in places to a height of ten feet above sea level. Inside this ring of sand is a mighty lagoon studded

with coral patches. Lord Howe belongs to the Solomons neither geographically nor ethnologically. It is an

atoll, while the Solomons are high islands; and its people and language are Polynesian, while the inhabitants

Lord Howe has been populated by the westward Polynesian drift which continues to this day, big outrigger

canoes being washed upon its beaches by the southeast trade. That there has been a slight Melanesian drift in

Nobody ever comes to Lord Howe, or OntongJava as it is sometimes called. Thomas Cook Son do not sell

tickets to it, and tourists do not dream of its existence. Not even a white missionary has landed on its shore.

Its five thousand natives are as peaceable as they are primitive. Yet they were not always peaceable. The

Sailing Directions speak of them as hostile and treacherous. But the men who compile the Sailing Directions

have never heard of the change that was worked in the hearts of the inhabitants, who, not many years ago, cut

off a big bark and killed all hands with the exception of the second mate. The survivor carried the news to his

brothers. The captains of three trading schooners returned with him to Lord Howe. They sailed their vessels

right into the lagoon and proceeded to preach the white man's gospel that only white men shall kill white men

and that the lesser breeds must keep hands off. The schooners sailed up and down the lagoon, harrying and

destroying. There was no escape from the narrow sandcircle, no bush to which to flee. The men were shot

down at sight, and there was no avoiding being sighted. The villages were burned, the canoes smashed, the

chickens and pigs killed, and the precious cocoanut trees chopped down. For a month this continued, when

the schooner sailed away; but the fear of the white man had been seared into the souls of the islanders and

Max Bunster was the one white man on Lord Howe, trading in the pay of the ubiquitous Moongleam Soap

Company. And the Company billeted him on Lord Howe, because, next to getting rid of him, it was the most

outoftheway place to be found. That the Company did not get rid of him was due to the difficulty of

finding another man to take his place. He was a strapping big German, with something wrong in his brain.

Semimadness would be a charitable statement of his condition. He was a bully and a coward, and a

Being a coward, his brutality was of the cowardly order. When he first went into the Company's employ, he

was stationed on Savo. When a consumptive colonial was sent to take his place, he beat him up with his fists

Mr. Haveby next selected a young Yorkshire giant to relieve Bunster. The Yorkshire man had a reputation as

a bruiser and preferred fighting to eating. But Bunster wouldn't fight. He was a regular little lambfor ten

days, at the end of which time the Yorkshire man was prostrated by a combined attack of dysentery and fever.

Then Bunster went for him, among other things getting him down and jumping on him a score or so of times.

Afraid of what would happen when his victim recovered. Bunster fled away in a cutter to Guvutu, where he

signalized himself by beating up a young Englishman already crippled by a Boer bullet through both hips.

Then it was that Mr. Haveby sent Bunster to Lord Howe, the fallingoff place. He celebrated his landing by

mopping up half a case of gin and by thrashing the elderly and wheezy mate of the schooner which had

brought him. When the schooner departed, he called the kanakas down to the beach and challenged them to

throw him in a wrestling bout, promising a case of tobacco to the one who succeeded. Three kanakas he

threw, but was promptly thrown by a fourth, who, instead of receiving the tobacco, got a bullet through his

And so began Bunster's reign on Lord Howe. Three thousand people lived in the principal village; but it was

deserted, even in broad day, when he passed through. Men, women, and children fled before him. Even the

dogs and pigs got out of the way, while the king was not above hiding under a mat. The two prime ministers

lived in terror of Bunster, who never discussed any moot subject, but struck out with his fists instead.

And to Lord Howe came Mauki, to toil for Bunster for eight long years and a half. There was no escaping

from Lord Howe. For better or worse, Bunster and he were tied together. Bunster weighed two hundred

pounds. Mauki weighed one hundred and ten. Bunster was a degenerate brute. But Mauki was a primitive

Mauki had no idea of the sort of master he was to work for. He had had no warnings, and he had concluded as

a matter of course that Bunster would be like other white men, a drinker of much whiskey, a ruler and a

lawgiver who always kept his word and who never struck a boy undeserved. Bunster had the advantage. He

knew all about Mauki, and gloated over the coming into possession of him. The last cook was suffering from

a broken arm and a dislocated shoulder, so Bunster made Mauki cook and general houseboy.

And Mauki soon learned that there were white men and white men. On the very day the schooner departed he

was ordered to buy a chicken from Samisee, the native Tongan missionary. But Samisee had sailed across the

lagoon and would not be back for three days. Mauki returned with the information. He climbed the steep

stairway (the house stood on piles twelve feet above the sand), and entered the living room to report. The

trader demanded the chicken. Mauki opened his mouth to explain the missionary's absence. But Bunster did

not care for explanations. He struck out with his fist. The blow caught Mauki on the mouth and lifted him

into the air. Clear through the doorway he flew, across the narrow veranda, breaking the top railing, and

His lips were a contused, shapeless mass, and his mouth was full of blood and broken teeth.

"That'll teach you that back talk don't go with me," the trader shouted, purple with rage, peering down at him

Mauki had never met a white man like this, and he resolved to walk small and never offend. He saw the boat

boys knocked about, and one of them put in irons for three days with nothing to eat for the crime of breaking

a rowlock while pulling. Then, too, he heard the gossip of the village and learned why Bunster had taken a

third wifeby force, as was well known. The first and second wives lay in the graveyard, under the white

coral sand, with slabs of coral rock at head and feet. They had died, it was said, from beatings he had given

But there was no way by which to avoid offending the white man who seemed offended with life. When

Mauki kept silent, he was struck and called a sullen brute. When he spoke, he was struck for giving back talk.

When he was grave, Bunster accused him of plotting and gave him a thrashing in advance; and when he

strove to be cheerful and to smile, he was charged with sneering at his lord and master and given a taste of

The village would have done for him, had it not remembered the lesson of the three schooners. It might have

done for him anyway, if there had been a bush to which to flee. As it was, the murder of the white men, of

any white man, would bring a manofwar that would kill the offenders and chop down the precious

cocoanut trees. Then there were the boat boys, with minds fully made up to drown him by accident at the first

opportunity to capsize the cutter. Only Bunster saw to it that the boat did not capsize.

Mauki was of a different breed, and escape being impossible while Bunster lived, he was resolved to get the

white man. The trouble was that he could never find a chance. Bunster was always on guard. Day and night

his revolvers were ready to hand. He permitted nobody to pass behind his back, as Mauki learned after having

been knocked down several times. Bunster knew that he had more to fear from the goodnatured, even

sweetfaced, Malaita boy than from the entire population of Lord Howe; and it gave added zest to the

programme of torment he was carrying out. And Mauki walked small, accepted his punishments, and waited.

Mauki's weekly allowance of tobacco was two sticks. Bunster passed them to his woman and ordered Mauki

to receive them from her hand. But this could not be, and Mauki went without his tobacco. In the same way

he was made to miss many a meal, and to go hungry many a day. He was ordered to make chowder out of the

big clams that grew in the lagoon. This he could not do, for clams were tambo. Six times in succession he

refused to touch the clams, and six times he was knocked senseless. Bunster knew that the boy would die

first, but called his refusal mutiny, and would have killed him had there been another cook to take his place.

One of the trader's favorite tricks was to catch Mauki's kinky locks and bat his head against the wall. Another

trick was to catch Mauki unawares and thrust the live end of a cigar against his flesh. This Bunster called

vaccination, and Mauki was vaccinated a number of times a week. Once, in a rage, Bunster ripped the cup

The skin of a shark is like sandpaper, but the skin of a ray fish is like a rasp. In the South Seas the natives use

it as a wood file in smoothing down canoes and paddles. Bunster had a mitten made of ray fish skin. The first

time he tried it on Mauki, with one sweep of the hand it fetched the skin off his back from neck to armpit.

Bunster was delighted. He gave his wife a taste of the mitten, and tried it out thoroughly on the boat boys.

The prime ministers came in for a stroke each, and they had to grin and take it for a joke.

Mauki came in for the largest share of the mitten. Never a day passed without a caress from it. There were

times when the loss of so much cuticle kept him awake at night, and often the halfhealed surface was raked

raw afresh by the facetious Mr. Bunster. Mauki continued his patient wait, secure in the knowledge that

sooner or later his time would come. And he knew just what he was going to do, down to the smallest detail,

One morning Bunster got up in a mood for knocking seven bells out of the universe. He began on Mauki, and

wound up on Mauki, in the interval knocking down his wife and hammering all the boat boys. At breakfast he

called the coffee slops and threw the scalding contents of the cup into Mauki's face. By ten o'clock Bunster

was shivering with ague, and half an hour later he was burning with fever. It was no ordinary attack. It

quickly became pernicious, and developed into blackwater fever. The days passed, and he grew weaker and

weaker, never leaving his bed. Mauki waited and watched, the while his skin grew intact once more. He

ordered the boys to beach the cutter, scrub her bottom, and give her a general overhauling. They thought the

order emanated from Bunster, and they obeyed. But Bunster at the time was lying unconscious and giving no

When the worst was past, and Bunster lay convalescent and conscious, but weak as a baby, Mauki packed his

few trinkets, including the china cup handle, into his trade box. Then he went over to the village and

They explained in one voice that they liked the trader not at all. The ministers poured forth a recital of all the

indignities and wrongs that had been heaped upon them. The king broke down and wept. Mauki interrupted

"You savve meme big fella marster my country. You no like m this fella white marster. Me no like m.

Plenty good you put hundred cocoanut, two hundred cocoanut, three hundred cocoanut along cutter. Him

finish, you go sleep m good fella. Altogether kanaka sleep m good fella. Bime by big fella noise along house,

you no savve hear m that fella noise. You altogether sleep strong fella too much."

In like manner Mauki interviewed the boat boys. Then he ordered Bunster's wife to return to her family

house. Had she refused, he would have been in a quandary, for his tambo would not have permitted him to

The house deserted, he entered the sleeping room, where the trader lay in a doze. Mauki first removed the

revolvers, then placed the ray fish mitten on his hand. Bunster's first warning was a stroke of the mitten that

"Good fella, eh?" Mauki grinned, between two strokes, one of which swept the forehead bare and the other of

Mauki did his work throughly, and the kanakas, hiding in their houses, heard the "big fella noise" that

When Mauki was done, he carried the boat compass and all the rifles and ammunition down to the cutter,

which he proceeded to ballast with cases of tobacco. It was while engaged in this that a hideous, skinless

thing came out of the house and ran screaming down the beach till it fell in the sand and mowed and gibbered

under the scorching sun. Mauki looked toward it and hesitated. Then he went over and removed the head,

So soundly did the kanakas sleep through that long hot day that they did not see the cutter run out through the

passage and head south, closehauled on the southeast trade. Nor was the cutter ever sighted on that long tack

to the shores of Ysabel, and during the tedious headbeat from there to Malaita. He landed at Port Adams

with a wealth of rifles and tobacco such as no one man had ever possessed before. But he did not stop there.

He had taken a white man's head, and only the bush could shelter him. So back he went to the bush villages,

where he shot old Fanfoa and half a dozen of the chief men, and made himself the chief over all the villages.

When his father died, Mauki's brother ruled in Port Adams, and joined together, saltwater men and

bushmen, the resulting combination was the strongest of the ten score fighting tribes of Malaita.

More than his fear of the British government was Mauki's fear of the allpowerful Moongleam Soap

Company; and one day a message came up to him in the bush, reminding him that he owed the Company

eight and onehalf years of labor. He sent back a favorable answer, and then appeared the inevitable white

man, the captain of the schooner, the only white man during Mauki's reign, who ventured the bush and came

out alive. This man not only came out, but he brought with him seven hundred and fifty dollars in gold

sovereignsthe money price of eight years and a half of labor plus the cost price of certain rifles and cases

Mauki no longer weighs one hundred and ten pounds. His stomach is three times its former girth, and he has

four wives. He has many other thingsrifles and revolvers, the handle of a china cup, and an excellent

collection of bushmen's heads. But more precious than the entire collection is another head, perfectly dried

and cured, with sandy hair and a yellowish beard, which is kept wrapped in the finest of fibre lavalavas.

When Mauki goes to war with villages beyond his realm, he invariably gets out this head, and alone in his

grass palace, contemplates it long and solemnly. At such times the hush of death falls on the village, and not

even a pickaninny dares make a noise. The head is esteemed the most powerful devildevil on Malaita, and

He was a whiskeyguzzling Scotchman, and he downed his whiskey neat, beginning with his first tot

punctually at six in the morning, and thereafter repeating it at regular intervals throughout the day till

bedtime, which was usually midnight. He slept but five hours out of the twentyfour, and for the remaining

nineteen hours he was quietly and decently drunk. During the eight weeks I spent with him on Oolong Atoll,

I never saw him draw a sober breath. In fact, his sleep was so short that he never had time to sober up. It was

McAllister was his name. He was an old man, and very shaky on his pins. His hand trembled as with a palsy,

especially noticeable when he poured his whiskey, though I never knew him to spill a drop. He had been

twentyeight years in Melanesia, ranging from German New Guinea to the German Solomons, and so

thoroughly had he become identified with that portion of the world, that he habitually spoke in that bastard

lingo called "bechdemer." Thus, in conversation with me, SUN HE COME UP meant sunrise; KAIKAI

HE STOP meant that dinner was served; and BELLY BELONG ME WALK ABOUT meant that he was sick

at his stomach. He was a small man, and a withered one, burned inside and outside by ardent spirits and

ardent sun. He was a cinder, a bit of a clinker of a man, a little animated clinker, not yet quite cold, that

moved stiffly and by starts and jerks like an automaton. A gust of wind would have blown him away. He

But the immense thing about him was the power with which he ruled. Oolong Atoll was one hundred and

forty miles in circumference. One steered by compass course in its lagoon. It was populated by five thousand

Polynesians, all strapping men and women, many of them standing six feet in height and weighing a couple

of hundred pounds. Oolong was two hundred and fifty miles from the nearest land. Twice a year a little

schooner called to collect copra. The one white man on Oolong was McAllister, petty trader and

unintermittent guzzler; and he ruled Oolong and its six thousand savages with an iron hand. He said come,

and they came, go, and they went. They never questioned his will nor judgment. He was cantankerous as only

an aged Scotchman can be, and interfered continually in their personal affairs. When Nugu, the king's

daughter, wanted to marry Haunau from the other end of the atoll, her father said yes; but McAllister said no,

and the marriage never came off. When the king wanted to buy a certain islet in the lagoon from the chief

priest, McAllister said no. The king was in debt to the Company to the tune of 180,000 cocoanuts, and until

And yet the king and his people did not love McAllister. In truth, they hated him horribly, and, to my

knowledge, the whole population, with the priests at the head, tried vainly for three months to pray him to

death. The devildevils they sent after him were aweinspiring, but since McAllister did not believe in

devildevils, they were without power over him. With drunken Scotchmen all signs fail. They gathered up

scraps of food which had touched his lips, an empty whiskey bottle, a cocoanut from which he had drunk, and

even his spittle, and performed all kinds of deviltries over them. But McAllister lived on. His health was

superb. He never caught fever; nor coughs nor colds; dysentery passed him by; and the malignant ulcers and

vile skin diseases that attack blacks and whites alike in that climate never fastened upon him. He must have

been so saturated with alcohol as to defy the lodgment of germs. I used to imagine them falling to the ground

in showers of microscopic cinders as fast as they entered his whiskeysodden aura. No one loved him, not

I was puzzled. I could not understand six thousand natives putting up with that withered shrimp of a tyrant. It

was a miracle that he had not died suddenly long since. Unlike the cowardly Melanesians, the people were

highstomached and warlike. In the big graveyard, at head and feet of the graves, were relics of past

sanguinary historyblubberspades, rusty old bayonets and cutlasses, copper bolts, rudderirons, harpoons,

bomb guns, bricks that could have come from nowhere but a whaler's tryingout furnace, and old brass

pieces of the sixteenth century that verified the traditions of the early Spanish navigators. Ship after ship had

come to grief on Oolong. Not thirty years before, the whaler BLENNERDALE, running into the lagoon for

repair, had been cut off with all hands. In similar fashion had the crew of the GASKET, a sandalwood trader,

perished. There was a big French bark, the TOULON, becalmed off the atoll, which the islanders boarded

after a sharp tussle and wrecked in the Lipau Passage, the captain and a handful of sailors escaping in the

longboat. Then there were the Spanish pieces, which told of the loss of one of the early explorers. All this, of

the vessels named, is a matter of history, and is to be found in the SOUTH PACIFIC SAILING

DIRECTORY. But that there was other history, unwritten, I was yet to learn. In the meantime I puzzled why

One hot afternoon McAllister and I sat on the veranda looking out over the lagoon, with all its wonder of

jeweled colors. At our backs, across the hundred yards of palmstudded sand, the outer surf roared on the

reef. It was dreadfully warm. We were in four degree south latitude and the sun was directly overhead, having

crossed the Line a few days before on its journey south. There was no windnot even a catspaw. The season

of the southeast trade was drawing to an early close, and the northwest monsoon had not yet begun to blow.

I had happened to mention that the Polynesian dances were superior to the Papuan, and this McAllister had

denied, for no other reason than his cantankerousness. But it was too not to argue, and I said nothing.

"I'll prove it to you," he announced, beckoning to the black New Hanover boy, a labor recruit, who served as

cook and general house servant. "Hey, you, boy, you tell 'm one fella king come along me."

The boy departed, and back came the prime minister, perturbed, ill at ease, and garrulous with apologetic

McAllister was in such a rage that the prime minister incontinently fled, to return with the king himself. They

were a magnificent pair, the king especially, who must have been all of six feet three inches in height. His

features had the eaglelike quality that is so frequently found in those of the North American Indian. He had

been molded and born to rule. His eyes flashed as he listened, but right meekly he obeyed McAllister's

command to fetch a couple of hundred of the best dancers, male and female, in the village. And dance they

did, for two mortal hours, under that broiling sun. They did not love him for it, and little he cared, in the end

The abject servility of those magnificent savages was terrifying. How could it be? What was the secret of his

rule? More and more I puzzled as the days went by, and though I observed perpetual examples of his

One day I happened to speak of my disappointment in failing to trade for a beautiful pair of orange cowries.

The pair was worth five pounds in Sydney if it was worth a cent. I had offered two hundred sticks of tobacco

to the owner, who had held out for three hundred. When I casually mentioned the situation, McAllister

immediately sent for the man, took the shells from him, and turned them over to me. Fifty sticks were all he

permitted me to pay for them. The man accepted the tobacco and seemed overjoyed at getting off so easily.

As for me, I resolved to keep a bridle on my tongue in the future. And still I mulled over the secret of

McAllister's power. I even went to the extent of asking him directly, but all he did was to cock one eye, look

One night I was out fishing in the lagoon with Oti, the man who had been mulcted of the cowries. Privily, I

had made up to him an additional hundred and fifty sticks, and he had come to regard me with a respect that

was almost veneration, which was curious, seeing that he was an old man, twice my age at least.

"What name you fella kanaka all the same pickaninny?" I began on him. "This fella trader he one fella. You

fella kanaka plenty fella too much. You fella kanaka just like 'm dogplenty fright along that fella trader. He

no eat you, fella. He no get 'm teeth along him. What name you too much fright?"

"He die," I retorted. "You fella kanaka kill 'm plenty fella white man long time before. What name you fright

"Yes, we kill 'm plenty," was his answer. "My word! Any amount! Long time before. One time, me young

fella too much, one big fella ship he stop outside. Wind he no blow. Plenty fella kanaka we get 'm canoe,

plenty fella canoe, we go catch 'm that fella ship. My wordwe catch 'm big fella fight. Two, three white

men shoot like hell. We no fright. We come alongside, we go up side, plenty fella, maybe I think fiftyten

(five hundred). One fella white Mary (woman) belong that fella ship. Never before I see 'm white Mary. Bime

by plenty white man finish. One fella skipper he no die. Five fella, six fella white man no die. Skipper he sing

out. Some fella white man he fight. Some fella white man he lower away boat. After that, all together over

the side they go. Skipper he sling white Mary down. After that they washee (row) strong fella plenty too

much. Father belong me, that time he strong fella. He throw 'm one fella spear. That fella spear he go in one

side that white Mary. He no stop. My word, he go out other side that fella Mary. She finish. Me no fright.

Old Oti's pride had been touched, for he suddenly stripped down his lavalava and showed me the

unmistakable scar of a bullet. Before I could speak, his line ran out suddenly. He checked it and attempted to

haul in, but found that the fish had run around a coral branch. Casting a look of reproach at me for having

beguiled him from his watchfulness, he went over the side, feet first, turning over after he got under and

following his line down to bottom. The water was ten fathoms. I leaned over and watched the play of his feet,

growing dim and dimmer, as they stirred the wan phosphorescence into ghostly fires. Ten fathomssixty

feetit was nothing to him, an old man, compared with the value of a hook and line. After what seemed five

minutes, though it could not have been more than a minute, I saw him flaming whitely upward. He broke

surface and dropped a ten pound rock cod into the canoe, the line and hook intact, the latter still fast in the

"It may be," I said remorselessly. "You no fright long ago. You plenty fright now along that fella trader."

"Yes, plenty fright," he confessed, with an air of dismissing the subject. For half an hour we pulled up our

lines and flung them out in silence. Then small fishsharks began to bite, and after losing a hook apiece, we

I lighted up my pipe and waited, and the story that Oti told me in atrocious bechdemer I here turn into

proper English. Otherwise, in spirit and order of narrative, the tale is as it fell from Oti's lips.

"It was after that that we were very proud. We had fought many times with the strange white men who live

upon the sea, and always we had beaten them. A few of us were killed, but what was that compared with the

stores of wealth of a thousand thousand kinds that we found on the ships? And then one day, maybe twenty

years ago, or twentyfive, there came a schooner right through the passage and into the lagoon. It was a large

schooner with three masts. She had five white men and maybe forty boat's crew, black fellows from New

Guinea and New Britain; and she had come to fish bechedemer. She lay at anchor across the lagoon from

here, at Pauloo, and her boats scattered out everywhere, making camps on the beaches where they cured the

bechedemer. This made them weak by dividing them, for those who fished here and those on the schooner

"Our king and headmen held council, and I was one in the canoe that paddled all afternoon and all night

across the lagoon, bringing word to the people of Pauloo that in the morning we would attack the fishing

camps at the one time and that it was for them to take the schooner. We who brought the word were tired with

the paddling, but we took part in the attack. On the schooner were two white men, the skipper and the second

mate, with half a dozen black boys. The skipper with three boys we caught on shore and killed, but first eight

of us the skipper killed with his two revolvers. We fought close together, you see, at hand grapples.

"The noise of our fighting told the mate what was happening, and he put food and water and a sail in the

small dingy, which was so small that it was no more than twelve feet long. We came down upon the

schooner, a thousand men, covering the lagoon with our canoes. Also, we were blowing conch shells, singing

war songs, and striking the sides of the canoes with our paddles. What chance had one white man and three

"White men are hell. I have watched them much, and I am an old man now, and I understand at last why the

white men have taken to themselves all the islands in the sea. It is because they are hell. Here are you in the

canoe with me. You are hardly more than a boy. You are not wise, for each day I tell you many things you do

not know. When I was a little pickaninny, I knew more about fish and the ways of fish than you know now. I

am an old man, but I swim down to the bottom of the lagoon, and you cannot follow me. What are you good

for, anyway? I do not know, except to fight. I have never seen you fight, yet I know that you are like your

brothers and that you will fight like hell. Also, you are a fool, like your brothers. You do not know when you

are beaten. You will fight until you die, and then it will be too late to know that you are beaten.

"Now behold what this mate did. As we came down upon him, covering the sea and blowing our conches, he

put off from the schooner in the small boat, along with the three black boys, and rowed for the passage. There

again he was a fool, for no wise man would put out to sea in so small a boat. The sides of it were not four

inches above the water. Twenty canoes went after him, filled with two hundred young men. We paddled five

fathoms while his black boys were rowing one fathom. He had no chance, but he was a fool. He stood up in

the boat with a rifle, and he shot many times. He was not a good shot, but as we drew close many of us were

"I remember that all the time he was smoking a cigar. When we were forty feet away and coming fast, he

dropped the rifle, lighted a stick of dynamite with the cigar, and threw it at us. He lighted another and

another, and threw them at us very rapidly, many of them. I know now that he must have split the ends of the

fuses and stuck in match heads, because they lighted so quickly. Also, the fuses were very short. Sometimes

the dynamite sticks went off in the air, but most of them went off in the canoes. And each time they went off

in a canoe, that canoe was finished. Of the twenty canoes, the half were smashed to pieces. The canoe I was

in was so smashed, and likewise the two men who sat next to me. The dynamite fell between them. The other

canoes turned and ran away. Then that mate yelled, Yah! Yah! Yah!' at us. Also he went at us again with his

rifle, so that many were killed through the back as they fled away. And all the time the black boys in the boat

"Nor was that all. Before he left the schooner, he set her on fire, and fixed up all the powder and dynamite so

that it would go off at one time. There were hundreds of us on board, trying to put out the fire, heaving up

water from overside, when the schooner blew up. So that all we had fought for was lost to us, besides many

more of us being killed. Sometimes, even now, in my old age, I have bad dreams in which I hear that mate

yell, Yah! Yah! Yah!' In a voice of thunder he yells, Yah! Yah! Yah!' But all those in the fishing camps were

"The mate went out of the passage in his little boat, and that was the end of him we made sure, for how could

so small a boat, with four men in it, live on the ocean? A month went by, and then, one morning, between

two rain squalls, a schooner sailed in through our passage and dropped anchor before the village. The king

and the headmen made big talk, and it was agreed that we would take the schooner in two or three days. In

the meantime, as it was our custom always to appear friendly, we went off to her in canoes, bringing strings

of cocoanuts, fowls, and pigs, to trade. But when we were alongside, many canoes of us, the men on board

began to shoot us with rifles, and as we paddled away I saw the mate who had gone to sea in the little boat

"That afternoon they landed from the schooner in three small boats filled with white men. They went right

through the village, shooting every man they saw. Also they shot the fowls and pigs. We who were not killed

got away in canoes and paddled out into the lagoon. Looking back, we could see all the houses on fire. Late

in the afternoon we saw many canoes coming from Nihi, which is the village near the Nihi Passage in the

northeast. They were all that were left, and like us their village had been burned by a second schooner that

"We stood on in the darkness to the westward for Pauloo, but in the middle of the night we heard women

wailing and then we ran into a big fleet of canoes. They were all that were left of Pauloo, which likewise was

in ashes, for a third schooner had come in through the Pauloo Passage. You see, that mate, with his black

boys, had not been drowned. He had made the Solomon Islands, and there told his brothers of what we had

done in Oolong. And all his brothers had said they would come and punish us, and there they were in the

"And what was there for us to do? In the morning the two schooners from windward sailed down upon us in

the middle of the lagoon. The trade wind was blowing fresh, and by scores of canoes they ran us down. And

the rifles never ceased talking. We scattered like flying fish before the bonita, and there were so many of us

that we escaped by thousands, this way and that, to the islands on the rim of the atoll.

"And thereafter the schooners hunted us up and down the lagoon. In the nighttime we slipped past them. But

the next day, or in two days or three days, the schooners would be coming back, hunting us toward the other

end of the lagoon. And so it went. We no longer counted nor remembered our dead. True, we were many and

they were few. But what could we do? I was in one of the twenty canoes filled with men who were not afraid

to die. We attacked the smallest schooner. They shot us down in heaps. They threw dynamite into the canoes,

and when the dynamite gave out, they threw hot water down upon us. And the rifles never ceased talking.

And those whose canoes were smashed were shot as they swam away. And the mate danced up and down

"Every house on every smallest island was burned. Not a pig nor a fowl was left alive. Our wells were defiled

with the bodies of the slain, or else heaped high with coral rock. We were twentyfive thousand on Oolong

before the three schooners came. Today we are five thousand. After the schooners left, we were but three

"At last the three schooners grew tired of chasing us back and forth. So they went, the three of them, to Nihi,

in the northeast. And then they drove us steadily to the west. Their nine boats were in the water as well. They

beat up every island as they moved along. They drove us, drove us, drove us day by day. And every night the

three schooners and the nine boats made a chain of watchfulness that stretched across the lagoon from rim to

"They could not drive us forever that way, for the lagoon was only so large, and at last all of us that yet lived

were driven upon the last sand bank to the west. Beyond lay the open sea. There were ten thousand of us, and

we covered the sand bank from the lagoon edge to the pounding surf on the other side. No one could lie

down. There was no room. We stood hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder. Two days they kept us there, and

the mate would climb up in the rigging to mock us and yell, Yah! Yah! Yah!' till we were well sorry that we

had ever harmed him or his schooner a month before. We had no food, and we stood on our feet two days and

nights. The little babies died, and the old and weak died, and the wounded died. And worst of all, we had no

water to quench our thirst, and for two days the sun beat down on us, and there was no shade. Many men and

women waded out into the ocean and were drowned, the surf casting their bodies back on the beach. And

there came a pest of flies. Some men swam to the sides of the schooners, but they were shot to the last one.

And we that lived were very sorry that in our pride we tried to take the schooner with the three masts that

"On the morning of the third day came the skippers of the three schooners and that mate in a small boat. They

carried rifles, all of them, and revolvers, and they made talk. It was only that they were weary of killing us

that they had stopped, they told us. And we told them that we were sorry, that never again would we harm a

white man, and in token of our submission we poured sand upon our heads. And all the women and children

set up a great wailing for water, so that for some time no man could make himself heard. Then we were told

our punishment. We must fill the three schooners with copra and bechedemer. And we agreed, for we

wanted water, and our hearts were broken, and we knew that we were children at fighting when we fought

with white men who fight like hell. And when all the talk was finished, the mate stood up and mocked us, and

yelled, Yah! Yah! Yah!' After that we paddled away in our canoes and sought water.

"And for weeks we toiled at catching bechedemer and curing it, in gathering the cocoanuts and turning

them into copra. By day and night the smoke rose in clouds from all the beaches of all the islands of Oolong

as we paid the penalty of our wrongdoing. For in those days of death it was burned clearly on all our brains

"By and by, the schooners full of copra and bechedemer and our trees empty of cocoanuts, the three

skippers and that mate called us all together for a big talk. And they said they were very glad that we had

learned our lesson, and we said for the tenthousandth time that we were sorry and that we would not do it

again. Also, we poured sand upon our heads. Then the skippers said that it was all very well, but just to show

us that they did not forget us, they would send a devildevil that we would never forget and that we would

always remember any time we might feel like harming a white man. After that the mate mocked us one more

time and yelled, Yah! Yah! Yah!' Then six of our men, whom we thought long dead, were put ashore from

one of the schooners, and the schooners hoisted their sails and ran out through the passage for the Solomons.

"The six men who were put ashore were the first to catch the devildevil the skippers sent back after us."

"A great sickness came," I interrupted, for I recognized the trick. The schooner had had measles on board,

"Yes, a great sickness," Oti went on. "It was a powerful devildevil. The oldest man had never heard of the

like. Those of our priests that yet lived we killed because they could not overcome the devildevil. The

sickness spread. I have said that there were ten thousand of us that stood hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder

on the sandbank. When the sickness left us, there were three thousand yet alive. Also, having made all our

"That fella trader," Oti concluded, "he like 'm that much dirt. He like 'm clam he die KAIKAI (meat) he

stop, stink 'm any amount. He like 'm one fella dog, one sick fella dog plenty fleas stop along him. We no

fright along that fella trader. We fright because he white man. We savve plenty too much no good kill white

man. That one fella sick dog trader he plenty brother stop along him, white men like 'm you fight like hell.

We no fright that damn trader. Some time he made kanaka plenty cross along him and kanaka want 'm kill m,

kanaka he think devildevil and kanaka he hear that fella mate sing out, Yah! Yah! Yah!' and kanaka no kill

Oti baited his hook with a piece of squid, which he tore with his teeth from the live and squirming monster,

His line jerked savagely. He pulled it in rapidly, hand under hand, and landed a big gasping rock cod in the

"Sun he come up, I make 'm that dam fella trader one present big fella fish," said Oti.

I met him first in a hurricane; and though we had gone through the hurricane on the same schooner, it was not

until the schooner had gone to pieces under us that I first laid eyes on him. Without doubt I had seen him with

the rest of the kanaka crew on board, but I had not consciously been aware of his existence, for the Petite

Jeanne was rather overcrowded. In addition to her eight or ten kanaka seamen, her white captain, mate, and

supercargo, and her six cabin passengers, she sailed from Rangiroa with something like eightyfive deck

passengers Paumotans and Tahitians, men, women, and children each with a trade box, to say nothing of

The pearling season in the Paumotus was over, and all hands were returning to Tahiti. The six of us cabin

passengers were pearl buyers. Two were Americans, one was Ah Choon (the whitest Chinese I have ever

It had been a prosperous season. Not one of us had cause for complaint, nor one of the eightyfive deck

passengers either. All had done well, and all were looking forward to a restoff and a good time in Papeete.

Of course, the Petite Jeanne was overloaded. She was only seventy tons, and she had no right to carry a tithe

of the mob she had on board. Beneath her hatches she was crammed and jammed with pearl shell and copra.

Even the trade room was packed full with shell. It was a miracle that the sailors could work her. There was no

In the night time they walked upon the sleepers, who carpeted the deck, I'll swear, two deep. Oh! And there

were pigs and chickens on deck, and sacks of yams, while every conceivable place was festooned with strings

of drinking cocoanuts and bunches of bananas. On both sides, between the fore and main shrouds, guys had

been stretched, just low enough for the foreboom to swing clear; and from each of these guys at least fifty

It promised to be a messy passage, even if we did make it in the two or three days that would have been

required if the southeast trades had been blowing fresh. But they weren't blowing fresh. After the first five

hours the trade died away in a dozen or so gasping fans. The calm continued all that night and the next

dayone of those glaring, glassy, calms, when the very thought of opening one's eyes to look at it is

The second day a man diedan Easter Islander, one of the best divers that season in the lagoon.

Smallpoxthat is what it was; though how smallpox could come on board, when there had been no known

cases ashore when we left Rangiroa, is beyond me. There it was, thoughsmallpox, a man dead, and three

There was nothing to be done. We could not segregate the sick, nor could we care for them. We were packed

like sardines. There was nothing to do but rot and diethat is, there was nothing to do after the night that

followed the first death. On that night, the mate, the supercargo, the Polish Jew, and four native divers

sneaked away in the large whale boat. They were never heard of again. In the morning the captain promptly

That day there were two deaths; the following day three; then it jumped to eight. It was curious to see how we

took it. The natives, for instance, fell into a condition of dumb, stolid fear. The captainOudouse, his name

was, a Frenchmanbecame very nervous and voluble. He actually got the twitches. He was a large fleshy

man, weighing at least two hundred pounds, and he quickly became a faithful representation of a quivering

The German, the two Americans, and myself bought up all the Scotch whiskey, and proceeded to stay drunk.

The theory was beautifulnamely, if we kept ourselves soaked in alcohol, every smallpox germ that came

into contact with us would immediately be scorched to a cinder. And the theory worked, though I must

confess that neither Captain Oudouse nor Ah Choon were attacked by the disease either. The Frenchman did

It was a pretty time. The sun, going into northern declination, was straight overhead. There was no wind,

except for frequent squalls, which blew fiercely for from five minutes to half an hour, and wound up by

deluging us with rain. After each squall, the awful sun would come out, drawing clouds of steam from the

The steam was not nice. It was the vapor of death, freighted with millions and millions of germs. We always

took another drink when we saw it going up from the dead and dying, and usually we took two or three more

drinks, mixing them exceptionally stiff. Also, we made it a rule to take an additional several each time they

We had a week of it, and then the whiskey gave out. It is just as well, or I shouldn't be alive now. It took a

sober man to pull through what followed, as you will agree when I mention the little fact that only two men

did pull through. The other man was the heathenat least, that was what I heard Captain Oudouse call him

at the moment I first became aware of the heathen's existence. But to come back.

It was at the end of the week, with the whiskey gone, and the pearl buyers sober, that I happened to glance at

the barometer that hung in the cabin companionway. Its normal register in the Paumotus was 29.90, and it

was quite customary to see it vacillate between 29.85 and 30.00, or even 30.05; but to see it as I saw it, down

to 29.62, was sufficient to sober the most drunken pearl buyer that ever incinerated smallpox microbes in

I called Captain Oudouse's attention to it, only to be informed that he had watched it going down for several

hours. There was little to do, but that little he did very well, considering the circumstances. He took off the

light sails, shortened right down to storm canvas, spread life lines, and waited for the wind. His mistake lay in

what he did after the wind came. He hove to on the port tack, which was the right thing to do south of the

Equator, ifand there was the rubIF one were NOT in the direct path of the hurricane.

We were in the direct path. I could see that by the steady increase of the wind and the equally steady fall of

the barometer. I wanted him to turn and run with the wind on the port quarter until the barometer ceased

falling, and then to heave to. We argued till he was reduced to hysteria, but budge he would not. The worst of

it was that I could not get the rest of the pearl buyers to back me up. Who was I, anyway, to know more about

the sea and its ways than a properly qualified captain? was what was in their minds, I knew.

Of course, the sea rose with the wind frightfully; and I shall never forget the first three seas the Petite Jeanne

shipped. She had fallen off, as vessels do at times when hove to, and the first sea made a clean breach. The

life lines were only for the strong and well, and little good were they even for them when the women and

children, the bananas and cocoanuts, the pigs and trade boxes, the sick and the dying, were swept along in a

The second sea filled the Petite Jeanne'S decks flush with the rails; and, as her stern sank down and her bow

tossed skyward, all the miserable dunnage of life and luggage poured aft. It was a human torrent. They came

head first, feet first, sidewise, rolling over and over, twisting, squirming, writhing, and crumpling up. Now

and again one caught a grip on a stanchion or a rope; but the weight of the bodies behind tore such grips

One man I noticed fetch up, head on and square on, with the starboard bitt. His head cracked like an egg. I

saw what was coming, sprang on top of the cabin, and from there into the mainsail itself. Ah Choon and one

of the Americans tried to follow me, but I was one jump ahead of them. The American was swept away and

over the stern like a piece of chaff. Ah Choon caught a spoke of the wheel, and swung in behind it. But a

strapping Raratonga vahine (woman)she must have weighed two hundred and fiftybrought up against

him, and got an arm around his neck. He clutched the kanaka steersman with his other hand; and just at that

The rush of bodies and sea that was coming along the port runway between the cabin and the rail turned

abruptly and poured to starboard. Away they wentvahine, Ah Choon, and steersman; and I swear I saw Ah

Choon grin at me with philosophic resignation as he cleared the rail and went under.

The third seathe biggest of the threedid not do so much damage. By the time it arrived nearly everybody

was in the rigging. On deck perhaps a dozen gasping, halfdrowned, and halfstunned wretches were rolling

about or attempting to crawl into safety. They went by the board, as did the wreckage of the two remaining

boats. The other pearl buyers and myself, between seas, managed to get about fifteen women and children

into the cabin, and battened down. Little good it did the poor creatures in the end.

Wind? Out of all my experience I could not have believed it possible for the wind to blow as it did. There is

no describing it. How can one describe a nightmare? It was the same way with that wind. It tore the clothes

off our bodies. I say TORE THEM OFF, and I mean it. I am not asking you to believe it. I am merely telling

something that I saw and felt. There are times when I do not believe it myself. I went through it, and that is

enough. One could not face that wind and live. It was a monstrous thing, and the most monstrous thing about

Imagine countless millions and billions of tons of sand. Imagine this sand tearing along at ninety, a hundred,

a hundred and twenty, or any other number of miles per hour. Imagine, further, this sand to be invisible,

impalpable, yet to retain all the weight and density of sand. Do all this, and you may get a vague inkling of

Perhaps sand is not the right comparison. Consider it mud, invisible, impalpable, but heavy as mud. Nay, it

goes beyond that. Consider every molecule of air to be a mudbank in itself. Then try to imagine the

multitudinous impact of mudbanks. No; it is beyond me. Language may be adequate to express the ordinary

conditions of life, but it cannot possibly express any of the conditions of so enormous a blast of wind. It

would have been better had I stuck by my original intention of not attempting a description.

I will say this much: The sea, which had risen at first, was beaten down by that wind. 'more: it seemed as if

the whole ocean had been sucked up in the maw of the hurricane, and hurled on through that portion of space

Of course, our canvas had gone long before. But Captain Oudouse had on the Petite Jeanne something I had

never before seen on a South Sea schoonera sea anchor. It was a conical canvas bag, the mouth of which

was kept open by a huge loop of iron. The sea anchor was bridled something like a kite, so that it bit into the

water as a kite bites into the air, but with a difference. The sea anchor remained just under the surface of the

ocean in a perpendicular position. A long line, in turn, connected it with the schooner. As a result, the Petite

The situation really would have been favorable had we not been in the path of the storm. True, the wind itself

tore our canvas out of the gaskets, jerked out our topmasts, and made a raffle of our running gear, but still we

would have come through nicely had we not been square in front of the advancing storm center. That was

what fixed us. I was in a state of stunned, numbed, paralyzed collapse from enduring the impact of the wind,

and I think I was just about ready to give up and die when the center smote us. The blow we received was an

Remember that for hours we had been at terrific muscular tension, withstanding the awful pressure of that

wind. And then, suddenly, the pressure was removed. I know that I felt as though I was about to expand, to

fly apart in all directions. It seemed as if every atom composing my body was repelling every other atom and

was on the verge of rushing off irresistibly into space. But that lasted only for a moment. Destruction was

In the absence of the wind and pressure the sea rose. It jumped, it leaped, it soared straight toward the clouds.

Remember, from every point of the compass that inconceivable wind was blowing in toward the center of

calm. The result was that the seas sprang up from every point of the compass. There was no wind to check

them. They popped up like corks released from the bottom of a pail of water. There was no system to them,

no stability. They were hollow, maniacal seas. They were eighty feet high at the least. They were not seas at

They were splashes, monstrous splashesthat is all. Splashes that were eighty feet high. Eighty! They were

more than eighty. They went over our mastheads. They were spouts, explosions. They were drunken. They

fell anywhere, anyhow. They jostled one another; they collided. They rushed together and collapsed upon one

another, or fell apart like a thousand waterfalls all at once. It was no ocean any man had ever dreamed of, that

hurricane center. It was confusion thrice confounded. It was anarchy. It was a hell pit of sea water gone mad.

The Petite Jeanne? I don't know. The heathen told me afterwards that he did not know. She was literally torn

apart, ripped wide open, beaten into a pulp, smashed into kindling wood, annihilated. When I came to I was

in the water, swimming automatically, though I was about twothirds drowned. How I got there I had no

recollection. I remembered seeing the Petite Jeanne fly to pieces at what must have been the instant that my

own consciousness was buffeted out of me. But there I was, with nothing to do but make the best of it, and in

that best there was little promise. The wind was blowing again, the sea was much smaller and more regular,

and I knew that I had passed through the center. Fortunately, there were no sharks about. The hurricane had

dissipated the ravenous horde that had surrounded the death ship and fed off the dead.

It was about midday when the Petite Jeanne went to pieces, and it must have been two hours afterwards when

I picked up with one of her hatch covers. Thick rain was driving at the time; and it was the merest chance that

flung me and the hatch cover together. A short length of line was trailing from the rope handle; and I knew

that I was good for a day, at least, if the sharks did not return. Three hours later, possibly a little longer,

sticking close to the cover, and with closed eyes, concentrating my whole soul upon the task of breathing in

enough air to keep me going and at the same time of avoiding breathing in enough water to drown me, it

seemed to me that I heard voices. The rain had ceased, and wind and sea were easing marvelously. Not

twenty feet away from me, on another hatch cover were Captain Oudouse and the heathen. They were

fighting over the possession of the coverat least, the Frenchman was. "Paien noir!" I heard him scream,

Now, Captain Oudouse had lost all his clothes, except his shoes, and they were heavy brogans. It was a cruel

blow, for it caught the heathen on the mouth and the point of the chin, half stunning him. I looked for him to

retaliate, but he contented himself with swimming about forlornly a safe ten feet away. Whenever a fling of

the sea threw him closer, the Frenchman, hanging on with his hands, kicked out at him with both feet. Also,

"For two centimes I'd come over there and drown you, you white beast!" I yelled.

The only reason I did not go was that I felt too tired. The very thought of the effort to swim over was

nauseating. So I called to the kanaka to come to me, and proceeded to share the hatch cover with him. Otoo,

he told me his name was (pronounced otoo ); also, he told me that he was a native of Bora Bora, the most

westerly of the Society Group. As I learned afterward, he had got the hatch cover first, and, after some time,

encountering Captain Oudouse, had offered to share it with him, and had been kicked off for his pains.

And that was how Otoo and I first came together. He was no fighter. He was all sweetness and gentleness, a

love creature, though he stood nearly six feet tall and was muscled like a gladiator. He was no fighter, but he

was also no coward. He had the heart of a lion; and in the years that followed I have seen him run risks that I

would never dream of taking. What I mean is that while he was no fighter, and while he always avoided

precipitating a row, he never ran away from trouble when it started. And it was "Ware shoal!" when once

Otoo went into action. I shall never forget what he did to Bill King. It occurred in German Samoa. Bill King

was hailed the champion heavyweight of the American Navy. He was a big brute of a man, a veritable gorilla,

one of those hardhitting, roughhousing chaps, and clever with his fists as well. He picked the quarrel, and

he kicked Otoo twice and struck him once before Otoo felt it to be necessary to fight. I don't think it lasted

four minutes, at the end of which time Bill King was the unhappy possessor of four broken ribs, a broken

forearm, and a dislocated shoulder blade. Otoo knew nothing of scientific boxing. He was merely a

manhandler; and Bill King was something like three months in recovering from the bit of manhandling he

But I am running ahead of my yarn. We shared the hatch cover between us. We took turn and turn about, one

lying flat on the cover and resting, while the other, submerged to the neck, merely held on with his hands. For

two days and nights, spell and spell, on the cover and in the water, we drifted over the ocean. Towards the

last I was delirious most of the time; and there were times, too, when I heard Otoo babbling and raving in his

native tongue. Our continuous immersion prevented us from dying of thirst, though the sea water and the

sunshine gave us the prettiest imaginable combination of salt pickle and sunburn.

In the end, Otoo saved my life; for I came to lying on the beach twenty feet from the water, sheltered from

the sun by a couple of cocoanut leaves. No one but Otoo could have dragged me there and stuck up the leaves

for shade. He was lying beside me. I went off again; and the next time I came round, it was cool and starry

We were the sole survivors of the Petite Jeanne. Captain Oudouse must have succumbed to exhaustion, for

several days later his hatch cover drifted ashore without him. Otoo and I lived with the natives of the atoll for

a week, when we were rescued by the French cruiser and taken to Tahiti. In the meantime, however, we had

performed the ceremony of exchanging names. In the South Seas such a ceremony binds two men closer

together than blood brothership. The initiative had been mine; and Otoo was rapturously delighted when I

"It is well," he said, in Tahitian. "For we have been mates together for two days on the lips of Death."

"It was a brave deed you did, master," he replied, "and Death was not vile enough to speak."

"Why do you 'master' me?" I demanded, with a show of hurt feelings. "We have exchanged names. To you I

am Otoo. To me you are Charley. And between you and me, forever and forever, you shall be Charley, and I

shall be Otoo. It is the way of the custom. And when we die, if it does happen that we live again somewhere

beyond the stars and the sky, still shall you be Charley to me, and I Otoo to you."

"What does it matter what my lips utter?" he argued. "They are only my lips. But I shall think Otoo always.

Whenever I think of myself, I shall think of you. Whenever men call me by name, I shall think of you. And

beyond the sky and beyond the stars, always and forever, you shall be Otoo to me. Is it well, master?"

We parted at Papeete. I remained ashore to recuperate; and he went on in a cutter to his own island, Bora

Bora. Six weeks later he was back. I was surprised, for he had told me of his wife, and said that he was

"All the world," was my answer"all the world, all the sea, and all the islands that are in the sea."

I never had a brother; but from what I have seen of other men's brothers, I doubt if any man ever had a

brother that was to him what Otoo was to me. He was brother and father and mother as well. And this I know:

I lived a straighter and better man because of Otoo. I cared little for other men, but I had to live straight in

Otoo's eyes. Because of him I dared not tarnish myself. He made me his ideal, compounding me, I fear,

chiefly out of his own love and worship and there were times when I stood close to the steep pitch of hell, and

would have taken the plunge had not the thought of Otoo restrained me. His pride in me entered into me, until

it became one of the major rules in my personal code to do nothing that would diminish that pride of his.

Naturally, I did not learn right away what his feelings were toward me. He never criticized, never censured;

and slowly the exalted place I held in his eyes dawned upon me, and slowly I grew to comprehend the hurt I

For seventeen years we were together; for seventeen years he was at my shoulder, watching while I slept,

nursing me through fever and woundsay, and receiving wounds in fighting for me. He signed on the same

ships with me; and together we ranged the Pacific from Hawaii to Sydney Head, and from Torres Straits to

the Galapagos. We blackbirded from the New Hebrides and the Line Islands over to the westward clear

through the Louisades, New Britain, New Ireland, and New Hanover. We were wrecked three timesin the

Gilberts, in the Santa Cruz group, and in the Fijis. And we traded and salved wherever a dollar promised in

the way of pearl and pearl shell, copra, bechedemer, hawkbill turtle shell, and stranded wrecks.

It began in Papeete, immediately after his announcement that he was going with me over all the sea, and the

islands in the midst thereof. There was a club in those days in Papeete, where the pearlers, traders, captains,

and riffraff of South Sea adventurers forgathered. The play ran high, and the drink ran high; and I am very

much afraid that I kept later hours than were becoming or proper. No matter what the hour was when I left

At first I smiled; next I chided him. Then I told him flatly that I stood in need of no wetnursing. After that I

did not see him when I came out of the club. Quite by accident, a week or so later, I discovered that he still

saw me home, lurking across the street among the shadows of the mango trees. What could I do? I know what

Insensibly I began to keep better hours. On wet and stormy nights, in the thick of the folly and the fun, the

thought would persist in coming to me of Otoo keeping his dreary vigil under the dripping mangoes. Truly,

he made a better man of me. Yet he was not straitlaced. And he knew nothing of common Christian

morality. All the people on Bora Bora were Christians; but he was a heathen, the only unbeliever on the

island, a gross materialist, who believed that when he died he was dead. He believed merely in fair play and

square dealing. Petty meanness, in his code, was almost as serious as wanton homicide; and I do believe that

Concerning me, personally, he objected to my doing anything that was hurtful to me. Gambling was all right.

He was an ardent gambler himself. But late hours, he explained, were bad for one's health. He had seen men

who did not take care of themselves die of fever. He was no teetotaler, and welcomed a stiff nip any time

when it was wet work in the boats. On the other hand, he believed in liquor in moderation. He had seen many

Otoo had my welfare always at heart. He thought ahead for me, weighed my plans, and took a greater interest

in them than I did myself. At first, when I was unaware of this interest of his in my affairs, he had to divine

my intentions, as, for instance, at Papeete, when I contemplated going partners with a knavish

fellowcountryman on a guano venture. I did not know he was a knave. Nor did any white man in Papeete.

Neither did Otoo know, but he saw how thick we were getting, and found out for me, and without my asking

him. Native sailors from the ends of the seas knock about on the beach in Tahiti; and Otoo, suspicious

merely, went among them till he had gathered sufficient data to justify his suspicions. Oh, it was a nice

history, that of Randolph Waters. I couldn't believe it when Otoo first narrated it; but when I sheeted it home

to Waters he gave in without a murmur, and got away on the first steamer to Aukland.

At first, I am free to confess, I couldn't help resenting Otoo's poking his nose into my business. But I knew

that he was wholly unselfish; and soon I had to acknowledge his wisdom and discretion. He had his eyes

open always to my main chance, and he was both keensighted and farsighted. In time he became my

counselor, until he knew more of my business than I did myself. He really had my interest at heart more than

I did. 'mine was the magnificent carelessness of youth, for I preferred romance to dollars, and adventure to a

comfortable billet with all night in. So it was well that I had some one to look out for me. I know that if it had

Of numerous instances, let me give one. I had had some experience in blackbirding before I went pearling in

the Paumotus. Otoo and I were on the beach in Samoawe really were on the beach and hard

agroundwhen my chance came to go as recruiter on a blackbird brig. Otoo signed on before the mast; and

for the next halfdozen years, in as many ships, we knocked about the wildest portions of Melanesia. Otoo

saw to it that he always pulled strokeoar in my boat. Our custom in recruiting labor was to land the recruiter

on the beach. The covering boat always lay on its oars several hundred feet off shore, while the recruiter's

boat, also lying on its oars, kept afloat on the edge of the beach. When I landed with my trade goods, leaving

my steering sweep apeak, Otoo left his stroke position and came into the stern sheets, where a Winchester lay

ready to hand under a flap of canvas. The boat's crew was also armed, the Sniders concealed under canvas

While I was busy arguing and persuading the woollyheaded cannibals to come and labor on the Queensland

plantations Otoo kept watch. And often and often his low voice warned me of suspicious actions and

impending treachery. Sometimes it was the quick shot from his rifle, knocking a nigger over, that was the

first warning I received. And in my rush to the boat his hand was always there to jerk me flying aboard.

Once, I remember, on SANTA ANNA, the boat grounded just as the trouble began. The covering boat was

dashing to our assistance, but the several score of savages would have wiped us out before it arrived. Otoo

took a flying leap ashore, dug both hands into the trade goods, and scattered tobacco, beads, tomahawks,

This was too much for the woollyheads. While they scrambled for the treasures, the boat was shoved clear,

and we were aboard and forty feet away. And I got thirty recruits off that very beach in the next four hours.

The particular instance I have in mind was on Malaita, the most savage island in the easterly Solomons. The

natives had been remarkably friendly; and how were we to know that the whole village had been taking up a

collection for over two years with which to buy a white man's head? The beggars are all headhunters, and

they especially esteem a white man's head. The fellow who captured the head would receive the whole

collection. As I say, they appeared very friendly; and on this day I was fully a hundred yards down the beach

from the boat. Otoo had cautioned me; and, as usual when I did not heed him, I came to grief.

The first I knew, a cloud of spears sailed out of the mangrove swamp at me. At least a dozen were sticking

into me. I started to run, but tripped over one that was fast in my calf, and went down. The woollyheads

made a run for me, each with a longhandled, fantail tomahawk with which to hack off my head. They were

so eager for the prize that they got in one another's way. In the confusion, I avoided several hacks by

Then Otoo arrivedOtoo the manhandler. In some way he had got hold of a heavy war club, and at close

quarters it was a far more efficient weapon than a rifle. He was right in the thick of them, so that they could

not spear him, while their tomahawks seemed worse than useless. He was fighting for me, and he was in a

Their skulls squashed like overripe oranges. It was not until he had driven them back, picked me up in his

arms, and started to run, that he received his first wounds. He arrived in the boat with four spear thrusts, got

his Winchester, and with it got a man for every shot. Then we pulled aboard the schooner, and doctored up.

Seventeen years we were together. He made me. I should today be a supercargo, a recruiter, or a memory, if it

"You spend your money, and you go out and get more," he said one day. "It is easy to get money now. But

when you get old, your money will be spent, and you will not be able to go out and get more. I know, master.

I have studied the way of white men. On the beaches are many old men who were young once, and who could

get money just like you. Now they are old, and they have nothing, and they wait about for the young men like

"The black boy is a slave on the plantations. He gets twenty dollars a year. He works hard. The overseer does

He rides a horse and watches the black boy work. He gets twelve hundred dollars a year. I am a sailor on the

schooner. I get fifteen dollars a month. That is because I am a good sailor. I work hard. The captain has a

double awning, and drinks beer out of long bottles. I have never seen him haul a rope or pull an oar. He gets

one hundred and fifty dollars a month. I am a sailor. He is a navigator. 'master, I think it would be very good

Otoo spurred me on to it. He sailed with me as second mate on my first schooner, and he was far prouder of

"The captain is well paid, master; but the ship is in his keeping, and he is never free from the burden. It is the

owner who is better paidthe owner who sits ashore with many servants and turns his money over."

"True, but a schooner costs five thousand dollarsan old schooner at that," I objected. "I should be an old

"There be short ways for white men to make money," he went on, pointing ashore at the cocoanutfringed

We were in the Solomons at the time, picking up a cargo of ivory nuts along the east coast of Guadalcanar.

"The flat land runs far back. It is worth nothing now. Next yearwho knows?or the year after, men will

pay much money for that land. The anchorage is good. Big steamers can lie close up. You can buy the land

four miles deep from the old chief for ten thousand sticks of tobacco, ten bottles of squareface, and a Snider,

which will cost you, maybe, one hundred dollars. Then you place the deed with the commissioner; and the

I followed his lead, and his words came true, though in three years, instead of two. Next came the grasslands

deal on Guadalcanartwenty thousand acres, on a governmental nine hundred and ninetynine years' lease

at a nominal sum. I owned the lease for precisely ninety days, when I sold it to a company for half a fortune.

Always it was Otoo who looked ahead and saw the opportunity. He was responsible for the salving of the

Doncasterbought in at auction for a hundred pounds, and clearing three thousand after every expense was

We did not go seafaring so much as in the old days. I was too well off. I married, and my standard of living

rose; but Otoo remained the same oldtime Otoo, moving about the house or trailing through the office, his

wooden pipe in his mouth, a shilling undershirt on his back, and a fourshilling lavalava about his loins. I

could not get him to spend money. There was no way of repaying him except with love, and God knows he

got that in full measure from all of us. The children worshipped him; and if he had been spoilable, my wife

The children! He really was the one who showed them the way of their feet in the world practical. He began

by teaching them to walk. He sat up with them when they were sick. One by one, when they were scarcely

toddlers, he took them down to the lagoon, and made them into amphibians. He taught them more than I ever

knew of the habits of fish and the ways of catching them. In the bush it was the same thing. At seven, Tom

knew more woodcraft than I ever dreamed existed. At six, Mary went over the Sliding Rock without a quiver,

and I have seen strong men balk at that feat. And when Frank had just turned six he could bring up shillings

"My people in Bora Bora do not like heathenthey are all Christians; and I do not like Bora Bora

Christians," he said one day, when I, with the idea of getting him to spend some of the money that was

rightfully his, had been trying to persuade him to make a visit to his own island in one of our schoonersa

special voyage which I had hoped to make a record breaker in the matter of prodigal expense.

I say one of OUR schooners, though legally at the time they belonged to me. I struggled long with him to

"We have been partners from the day the Petite Jeanne went down," he said at last. "But if your heart so

wishes, then shall we become partners by the law. I have no work to do, yet are my expenses large. I drink

and eat and smoke in plentyit costs much, I know. I do not pay for the playing of billiards, for I play on

your table; but still the money goes. Fishing on the reef is only a rich man's pleasure. It is shocking, the cost

of hooks and cotton line. Yes; it is necessary that we be partners by the law. I need the money. I shall get it

So the papers were made out and recorded. A year later I was compelled to complain.

"Charley," said I, "you are a wicked old fraud, a miserly skinflint, a miserable land crab. Behold, your share

for the year in all our partnership has been thousands of dollars. The head clerk has given me this paper. It

says that in the year you have drawn just eightyseven dollars and twenty cents."

"It is well," he said. "See that the head clerk keeps good account of it. When I want it, I shall want it, and

"If there is,:" he added fiercely, after a pause, "it must come out of the clerk's wages."

And all the time, as I afterwards learned, his will, drawn up by Carruthers, and making me sole beneficiary,

It occurred in the Solomons, where our wildest work had been done in the wild young days, and where we

were once more principally on a holiday, incidentally to look after our holdings on Florida Island and to

look over the pearling possibilities of the Mboli Pass. We were lying at Savo, having run in to trade for

Now, Savo is alive with sharks. The custom of the woollyheads of burying their dead in the sea did not tend

to discourage the sharks from making the adjacent waters a hangout. It was my luck to be coming aboard in a

tiny, overloaded, native canoe, when the thing capsized. There were four woollyheads and myself in it, or

I was just hailing for a boat when one of the woollyheads began to scream. Holding on to the end of the

canoe, both he and that portion of the canoe were dragged under several times. Then he loosed his clutch and

The three remaining niggers tried to climb out of the water upon the bottom of the canoe. I yelled and cursed

and struck at the nearest with my fist, but it was no use. They were in a blind funk. The canoe could barely

have supported one of them. Under the three it upended and rolled sidewise, throwing them back into the

I abandoned the canoe and started to swim toward the schooner, expecting to be picked up by the boat before

I got there. One of the niggers elected to come with me, and we swam along silently, side by side, now and

again putting our faces into the water and peering about for sharks. The screams of the man who stayed by

the canoe informed us that he was taken. I was peering into the water when I saw a big shark pass directly

beneath me. He was fully sixteen feet in length. I saw the whole thing. He got the woollyhead by the

middle, and away he went, the poor devil, head, shoulders, and arms out of the water all the time, screeching

in a heartrending way. He was carried along in this fashion for several hundred feet, when he was dragged

I swam doggedly on, hoping that that was the last unattached shark. But there was another. Whether it was

one that had attacked the natives earlier, or whether it was one that had made a good meal elsewhere, I do not

know. At any rate, he was not in such haste as the others. I could not swim so rapidly now, for a large part of

my effort was devoted to keeping track of him. I was watching him when he made his first attack. By good

luck I got both hands on his nose, and, though his momentum nearly shoved me under, I managed to keep

him off. He veered clear, and began circling about again. A second time I escaped him by the same

manoeuvre. The third rush was a miss on both sides. He sheered at the moment my hands should have landed

on his nose, but his sandpaper hide (I had on a sleeveless undershirt) scraped the skin off one arm from elbow

By this time I was played out, and gave up hope. The schooner was still two hundred feet away. My face was

in the water, and I was watching him manoeuvre for another attempt, when I saw a brown body pass between

"Swim for the schooner, master!" he said. And he spoke gayly, as though the affair was a mere lark. "I know

I obeyed, swimming slowly on, while Otoo swam about me, keeping always between me and the shark,

"The davit tackle carried away, and they are rigging the falls," he explained, a minute or so later, and then

By the time the schooner was thirty feet away I was about done for. I could scarcely move. They were

heaving lines at us from on board, but they continually fell short. The shark, finding that it was receiving no

hurt, had become bolder. Several times it nearly got me, but each time Otoo was there just the moment before

it was too late. Of course, Otoo could have saved himself any time. But he stuck by me.

I knew that the end had come, and that the next moment I should throw up my hands and go down.

"A little more to the left!" he next called out. "There is a line there on the water. To the left, masterto the

I changed my course and struck out blindly. I was by that time barely conscious. As my hand closed on the

line I heard an exclamation from on board. I turned and looked. There was no sign of Otoo. The next instant

"Otoo!" he called softly. And I could see in his gaze the love that thrilled in his voice.

Then, and then only, at the very last of all our years, he called me by that name.

Then he was dragged under, and I was hauled aboard, where I fainted in the captain's arms.

And so passed Otoo, who saved me and made me a man, and who saved me in the end. We met in the maw of

a hurricane, and parted in the maw of a shark, with seventeen intervening years of comradeship, the like of

which I dare to assert has never befallen two men, the one brown and the other white. If Jehovah be from His

high place watching every sparrow fall, not least in His kingdom shall be Otoo, the one heathen of Bora Bora.

There is no gainsaying that the Solomons are a hardbitten bunch of islands. On the other hand, there are

worse places in the world. But to the new chum who has no constitutional understanding of men and life in

It is true that fever and dysentery are perpetually on the walkabout, that loathsome skin diseases abound,

that the air is saturated with a poison that bites into every pore, cut, or abrasion and plants malignant ulcers,

and that many strong men who escape dying there return as wrecks to their own countries. It is also true that

the natives of the Solomons are a wild lot, with a hearty appetite for human flesh and a fad for collecting

human heads. Their highest instinct of sportsmanship is to catch a man with his back turned and to smite him

a cunning blow with a tomahawk that severs the spinal column at the base of the brain. It is equally true that

on some islands, such as Malaita, the profit and loss account of social intercourse is calculated in homicides.

Heads are a medium of exchange, and white heads are extremely valuable. Very often a dozen villages make

a jackpot, which they fatten moon by moon, against the time when some brave warrior presents a white

All the foregoing is quite true, and yet there are white men who have lived in the Solomons a score of years

and who feel homesick when they go away from them. A man needs only to be careful and luckyto live

a long time in the Solomons; but he must also be of the right sort. He must have the hallmark of the inevitable

white man stamped upon his soul. He must be inevitable. He must have a certain grand carelessness of odds,

a certain colossal selfsatisfaction, and a racial egotism that convinces him that one white is better than a

thousand niggers every day in the week, and that on Sunday he is able to clean out two thousand niggers. For

such are the things that have made the white man inevitable. Oh, and one other thingthe white man who

wishes to be inevitable, must not merely despise the lesser breeds and think a lot of himself; he must also fail

to be too long on imagination. He must not understand too well the instincts, customs, and mental processes

of the blacks, the yellows, and the browns; for it is not in such fashion that the white race has tramped its

Bertie Arkwright was not inevitable. He was too sensitive, too finely strung, and he possessed too much

imagination. The world was too much with him. He projected himself too quiveringly into his environment.

Therefore, the last place in the world for him to come was the Solomons. He did not come, expecting to stay.

A five weeks' stopover between steamers, he decided, would satisfy the call of the primitive he felt

thrumming the strings of his being. At least, so he told the lady tourists on the MAKEMBO, though in

different terms; and they worshipped him as a hero, for they were lady tourists and they would know only the

There was another man on board, of whom the ladies took no notice. He was a little shriveled wisp of a man,

with a withered skin the color of mahogany. His name on the passenger list does not matter, but his other

name, Captain Malu, was a name for niggers to conjure with, and to scare naughty pickaninnies to

righteousness from New Hanover to the New Hebrides. He had farmed savages and savagery, and from fever

and hardship, the crack of Sniders and the lash of the overseers, had wrested five millions of money in the

form of b chedemer, sandalwood, pearlshell and turtleshell, ivory nuts and copra, grasslands, trading

stations, and plantations. Captain Malu's little finger, which was broken, had more inevitableness in it than

Bertie Arkwright's whole carcass. But then, the lady tourists had nothing by which to judge save appearances,

Bertie talked with Captain Malu in the smoking room, confiding to him his intention of seeing life red and

bleeding in the Solomons. Captain Malu agreed that the intention was ambitious and honorable. It was not

until several days later that he became interested in Bertie, when that young adventurer insisted on showing

him an automatic 44caliber pistol. Bertie explained the mechanism and demonstrated by slipping a loaded

"It is so simple," he said. He shot the outer barrel back along the inner one. "That loads it and cocks it, you

see. And then all I have to do is pull the trigger, eight times, as fast as I can quiver my finger. See that safety

clutch. That's what I like about it. It is safe. It is positively foolproof." He slipped out the magazine. "You

As he held it in his hand, the muzzle came in line with Captain Malu's stomach. Captain Malu's blue eyes

"It's perfectly safe," Bertie assured him. "I withdrew the magazine. It's not loaded now, you know."

Captain Malu's voice was flat and metallic and low, but his eyes never left the muzzle until the line of it was

Bertie started to put the muzzle to his own temple with the evident intention of pulling the trigger.

"Just a second," Captain Malu said quietly, reaching out his hand. "Let me look at it."

He pointed it seaward and pulled the trigger. A heavy explosion followed, instantaneous with the sharp click

of the mechanism that flipped a hot and smoking cartridge sidewise along the deck.

"I slipped the barrel back once, didn't I?" he explained. It was silly of me, I must say."

He giggled flabbily, and sat down in a steamer chair. The blood had ebbed from his face, exposing dark

circles under his eyes. His hands were trembling and unable to guide the shaking cigarette to his lips. The

world was too much with him, and he saw himself with dripping brains prone upon the deck

The Commissioner was on board the Makembo, returning from Sydney, and by his permission a stop was

made at Ugi to land a missionary. And at Ugi lay the ketch ARLA, Captain Hansen, skipper. Now the Arla

was one of many vessels owned by Captain Malu, and it was at his suggestion and by his invitation that

Bertie went aboard the Arla as guest for a four days' recruiting cruise on the coast of Malaita. Thereafter the

ARLA would drop him at Reminge Plantation (also owned by Captain Malu), where Bertie could remain for

a week, and then be sent over to Tulagi, the seat of government, where he would become the Commissioner's

guest. Captain Malu was responsible for two other suggestions, which given, he disappears from this

narrative. One was to Captain Hansen, the other to Mr. Harriwell, manager of Reminge Plantation. Both

suggestions were similar in tenor, namely, to give Mr. Bertram Arkwright an insight into the rawness and

redness of life in the Solomons. Also, it is whispered that Captain Malu mentioned that a case of Scotch

would be coincidental with any particularly gorgeous insight Mr. Arkwright might receive. . . . . . . . . . . . .

"Yes, Swartz always was too pigheaded. You see, he took four of his boat's crew to Tulagi to be

floggedofficially, you knowthen started back with them in the whaleboat. It was pretty squally, and the

boat capsized just outside. Swartz was the only one drowned. Of course, it was an accident."

"Was it? Really?" Bertie asked, only halfinterested, staring hard at the black man at the wheel.

Ugi had dropped astern, and the ARLA was sliding along through a summer sea toward the wooded ranges of

Malaita. The helmsman who so attracted Bertie's eyes sported a ten penny nail, stuck skewerwise through his

nose. About his neck was a string of pants buttons. Thrust through holes in his ears were a can opener, the

broken handle of a toothbrush, a clay pipe, the brass wheel of an alarm clock, and several Winchester rifle

On his chest, suspended from around his neck hung the half of a china plate. Some forty similarly appareled

blacks lay about the deck, fifteen of which were boat's crew, the remainder being fresh labor recruits.

"Of course it was an accident," spoke up the ARLA'S mate, Jacobs, a slender, darkeyed man who looked

more a professor than a sailor. "Johnny Bedip nearly had the same kind of accident. He was bringing back

several from a flogging, when they capsized him. But he knew how to swim as well as they, and two of them

were drowned. He used a boat stretcher and a revolver. Of course it was an accident."

"Quite common, them accidents," remarked the skipper. "You see that man at the wheel, Mr. Arkwright? He's

a man eater. Six months ago, he and the rest of the boat's crew drowned the then captain of the ARLA. They

"Just so. I don't mind telling you, in confidence, of course, that they used an axe."

"The other skipper always was too careless," explained the mate. He but just turned his back, when they let

"We haven't any show down here," was the skipper's complaint. "The government protects a nigger against a

white every time. You can't shoot first. You've got to give the nigger first shot, or else the government calls it

Dinner was called, and Bertie and the skipper went below, leaving the mate to watch on deck.

"Keep an eye out for that black devil, Auiki," was the skipper's parting caution. "I haven't liked his looks for

Dinner was part way along, and the skipper was in the middle of his story of the cutting out of the Scottish

"Yes," he was saying, "she was the finest vessel on the coast. But when she missed stays, and before ever she

hit the reef, the canoes started for her. There were five white men, a crew of twenty Santa Cruz boys and

Samoans, and only the supercargo escaped. Besides, there were sixty recruits. They were all kaikai'd.

Kaikai?oh, I beg your pardon. I mean they were eaten. Then there was the James Edwards, a

But at that moment there was a sharp oath from the mate on deck and a chorus of savage cries. A revolver

went off three times, and then was heard a loud splash. Captain Hansen had sprung up the companionway on

the instant, and Bertie's eyes had been fascinated by a glimpse of him drawing his revolver as he sprang.

Bertie went up more circumspectly, hesitating before he put his head above the companionway slide. But

nothing happened. The mate was shaking with excitement, his revolver in his hand. Once he startled, and

"One of the natives fell overboard," he was saying, in a queer tense voice. "He couldn't swim."

"But I say, you know, I heard shots," Bertie said, in trembling eagerness, for he scented adventure, and

"Shots?" said Captain Hansen, dreamily. "Shots? Did you hear any shots, Mr. Jacobs?"

Bertie slept that night in the captain's cabin, a tiny stateroom off the main cabin. The for'ard bulkhead was

decorated with a stand of rifles. Over the bunk were three more rifles. Under the bunk was a big drawer,

which, when he pulled it out, he found filled with ammunition, dynamite, and several boxes of detonators. He

elected to take the settee on the opposite side. Lying conspicuously on the small table, was the Arla's log.

Bertie did not know that it had been especially prepared for the occasion by Captain Malu, and he read

therein how on September 21, two boat's crew had fallen overboard and been drowned. Bertie read between

the lines and knew better. He read how the Arla's whale boat had been bushwhacked at Su'u and had lost

three men; of how the skipper discovered the cook stewing human flesh on the galley fireflesh purchased

by the boat's crew ashore in Fui; of how an accidental discharge of dynamite, while signaling, had killed

another boat's crew; of night attacks; ports fled from between the dawns; attacks by bushmen in mangrove

swamps and by fleets of saltwater men in the larger passages. One item that occurred with monotonous

frequency was death by dysentery. He noticed with alarm that two white men had so diedguests, like

"I say, you know," Bertie said next day to Captain Hansen. "I've been glancing through your log."

"And all that dysentery, you know, that's all rot, just like the accidental drownings," Bertie continued. "What

The skipper openly admired his guest's acumen, stiffened himself to make indignant denial, then gracefully

"You see, it's like this, Mr. Arkwright. These islands have got a bad enough name as it is. It's getting harder

every day to sign on white men. Suppose a man is killed. The company has to pay through the nose for

another man to take the job. But if the man merely dies of sickness, it's all right. The new chums don't mind

disease. What they draw the line at is being murdered. I thought the skipper of the Arla had died of dysentery

"Besides," said Mr. Jacobs, "there's altogether too many accidental drownings anyway. It don't look right. It's

the fault of the government. A white man hasn't a chance to defend himself from the niggers."

"Yes, look at the Princess and that Yankee mate," the skipper took up the tale. "She carried five white men

besides a government agent. The captain, the agent, and the supercargo were ashore in the two boats. They

were killed to the last man. The mate and boson, with about fifteen of the crewSamoans and

Tonganswere on board. A crowd of niggers came off from shore. First thing the mate knew, the boson and

the crew were killed in the first rush. The mate grabbed three cartridge belts and two Winchesters and

skinned up to the crosstrees. He was the sole survivor, and you can't blame him for being mad. He pumped

one rifle till it got so hot he couldn't hold it, then he pumped the other. The deck was black with niggers. He

cleaned them out. He dropped them as they went over the rail, and he dropped them as fast as they picked up

their paddles. Then they jumped into the water and started to swim for it, and being mad, he got half a dozen

"The government said he wasn't justified in shooting after they'd taken to the water," the skipper explained.

Later on in the day he interviewed the black who had been pointed out to him as a cannibal. This fellow's

name was Sumasai. He had spent three years on a Queensland plantation. He had been to Samoa, and Fiji,

and Sydney; and as a boat's crew had been on recruiting schooners through New Britain, New Ireland, New

Guinea, and the Admiralties. Also, he was a wag, and he had taken a line on his skipper's conduct. Yes, he

had eaten many men. How many? He could not remember the tally. Yes, white men, too; they were very

"My word!" he cried, at the recollection. "Me sick plenty along him. 'my belly walk about too much."

Bertie shuddered, and asked about heads. Yes, Sumasai had several hidden ashore, in good condition,

sundried, and smokecured. One was of the captain of a schooner. It had long whiskers. He would sell it for

two quid. Black men's heads he would sell for one quid. He had some pickaninny heads, in poor condition,

Five minutes afterward, Bertie found himself sitting on the companionwayslide alongside a black with a

horrible skin disease. He sheered off, and on inquiry was told that it was leprosy. He hurried below and

washed himself with antiseptic soap. He took many antiseptic washes in the course of the day, for every

As the Arla drew in to an anchorage in the midst of mangrove swamps, a double row of barbed wire was

stretched around above her rail. That looked like business, and when Bertie saw the shore canoes alongside,

armed with spears, bows and arrows, and Sniders, he wished more earnestly than ever that the cruise was

That evening the natives were slow in leaving the ship at sundown. A number of them checked the mate

when he ordered them ashore. "Never mind, I'll fix them," said Captain Hansen, diving below.

When he cam back, he showed Bertie a stick of dynamite attached to a fish hook. Now it happens that a

paperwrapped bottle of chlorodyne with a piece of harmless fuse projecting can fool anybody. It fooled

Bertie, and it fooled the natives. When Captain Hansen lighted the fuse and hooked the fish hook into the tail

end of a native's loin cloth, that native was smitten with so an ardent a desire for the shore that he forgot to

shed the loin cloth. He started for'ard, the fuse sizzling and spluttering at his rear, the natives in his path

taking headers over the barbed wire at every jump. Bertie was horrorstricken. So was Captain Hansen. He

had forgotten his twentyfive recruits, on each of which he had paid thirty shillings advance. They went over

the side along with the shoredwelling folk and followed by him who trailed the sizzling chlorodyne bottle.

Bertie did not see the bottle go off; but the mate opportunely discharging a stick of real dynamite aft where it

would harm nobody, Bertie would have sworn in any admiralty court to a nigger blown to flinders. The flight

of the twentyfive recruits had actually cost the Arla forty pounds, and, since they had taken to the bush,

there was no hope of recovering them. The skipper and his mate proceeded to drown their sorrow in cold tea.

The cold tea was in whiskey bottles, so Bertie did not know it was cold tea they were mopping up. All he

knew was that the two men got very drunk and argued eloquently and at length as to whether the exploded

nigger should be reported as a case of dysentery or as an accidental drowning. When they snored off to sleep,

he was the only white man left, and he kept a perilous watch till dawn, in fear of an attack from shore and an

Three more days the Arla spent on the coast, and three more nights the skipper and the mate drank overfondly

of cold tea, leaving Bertie to keep the watch. They knew he could be depended upon, while he was equally

certain that if he lived, he would report their drunken conduct to Captain Malu. Then the Arla dropped anchor

at Reminge Plantation, on Guadalcanar, and Bertie landed on the beach with a sigh of relief and shook hands

"Now you mustn't be alarmed if some of our fellows seem downcast," Mr. Harriwell said, having drawn him

aside in confidence. "There's been talk of an outbreak, and two or three suspicious signs I'm willing to admit,

"Howhow many blacks have you on the plantation?" Bertie asked, with a sinking heart.

"We're working four hundred just now," replied Mr. Harriwell, cheerfully; but the three of us, with you, of

Bertie turned to meet one McTavish, the storekeeper, who scarcely acknowledged the introduction, such was

"It being that I'm a married man, Mr. Harriwell, I can't very well afford to remain on longer. Trouble is

working up, as plain as the nose on your face. The niggers are going to break out, and there'll be another

"What's a Hohono horror?" Bertie asked, after the storekeeper had been persuaded to remain until the end of

"Oh, he means Hohono Plantation, on Ysabel," said the manager. "The niggers killed the five white men

ashore, captured the schooner, killed the captain and mate, and escaped in a body to Malaita. But I always

said they were careless on Hohono. They won't catch us napping here. Come along, Mr. Arkwright, and see

Bertie was too busy wondering how he could get away to Tulagi to the Commissioner's house, to see much of

the view. He was still wondering, when a rifle exploded very near to him, behind his back. At the same

moment his arm was nearly dislocated, so eagerly did Mr. Harriwell drag him indoors.

"I say, old man, that was a close shave," said the manager, pawing him over to see if he had been hit. "I can't

"They got the other manager that way," McTavish vouchsafed. "And a dashed fine chap he was. Blew his

brains out all over the veranda. You noticed that dark stain there between the steps and the door?"

Bertie was ripe for the cocktail which Mr. Harriwell pitched in and compounded for him; but before he could

"What's the matter now?" the manager asked, after one look at the newcomer's face. "Is the river up again?"

"River be blowedit's the niggers. Stepped out of the cane grass, not a dozen feet away, and whopped at me.

It was a Snider, and he shot from the hip. Now what I want to know is where'd he get that Snider?Oh, I

"Mr. Brown is my assistant," explained Mr. Harriwell. "And now let's have that drink."

"But where'd he get that Snider?" Mr. Brown insisted. "I always objected to keeping those guns on the

Bertie joined the procession into the office, where Mr. Harriwell pointed triumphantly at a big packing case

But just then McTavish lifted the packing case. The manager started, then tore off the lid. The case was

empty. They gazed at one another in horrified silence. Harriwell drooped wearily.

"It does look serious," Harriwell admitted, "but we'll come through it all right. What the sanguinary niggers

need is a shaking up. Will you gentlemen please bring your rifles to dinner, and will you, Mr. Brown, kindly

prepare forty or fifty sticks of dynamite. 'make the fuses good and short. We'll give them a lesson. And now,

One thing that Bertie detested was rice and curry, so it happened that he alone partook of an inviting omelet.

He had quite finished his plate, when Harriwell helped himself to the omelet. One mouthful he tasted, then

"That's the way the bookkeeper went out at Cape March," Brown spoke up. "Died horribly. They said on the

"I'll put the cook in irons," sputtered Harriwell. "Fortunately we discovered it in time."

Bertie sat paralyzed. There was no color in his face. He attempted to speak, but only an inarticulate gurgle

"Yes, I ate it, plenty of it, a whole plateful!" Bertie cried explosively, like a diver suddenly regaining breath.

The awful silence continued half a minute longer, and he read his fate in their eyes.

"Here, you, Wiwi, what name that?" Harriwell bellowed, pointing accusingly at the omelet.

Harriwell filled a spoon with the stuff and jumped for the cook, who fled in panic.

"Mr. Brown, will you please go and put the irons on him?" Harriwell turned cheerfully to Bertie. "It's all

right, old man, the Commissioner will deal with him, and if you die, depend upon it, he will be hanged."

"Sorry, old man, but it's a native poison, and there are no known antidotes for native poisons. Try and

Two sharp reports of a rifle from without, interrupted the discourse, and Brown, entering, reloaded his rifle

"I was just telling Mr. Arkwright that there are no antidotes for native poisons"

"Neat, man, neat," he warned Bertie, who gulped down a tumbler twothirds full of the raw spirits, and

coughed and choked from the angry bite of it till the tears ran down his cheeks.

Harriwell took his pulse and temperature, made a show of looking out for him, and doubted that the omelet

had been poisoned. Brown and McTavish also doubted; but Bertie discerned an insincere ring in their voices.

His appetite had left him, and he took his own pulse stealthily under the table. There was no question but

what it was increasing, but he failed to ascribe it to the gin he had taken. 'mcTavish, rifle in hand, went out on

"They're massing up at the cookhouse," was his report. "And they've no end of Sniders. 'my idea is to sneak

around on the other side and take them in flank. Strike the first blow, you know. Will you come along,

Harriwell ate on steadily, while Bertie discovered that his pulse had leaped up five beats. Nevertheless, he

could not help jumping when the rifles began to go off. Above the scattering of Sniders could be heard the

pumping of Brown's and McTavish's Winchestersall against a background of demoniacal screeching and

"They've got them on the run," Harriwell remarked, as voices and gunshots faded away in the distance.

Scarcely were Brown and McTavish back at the table when the latter reconnoitered.

Thrusting half a dozen sticks each into their pockets and equipping themselves with lighted cigars, they

started for the door. And just then it happened. They blamed McTavish for it afterward, and he admitted that

the charge had been a trifle excessive. But at any rate it went off under the house, which lifted up cornerwise

and settled back on its foundations. Half the china on the table was shattered, while the eightday clock

stopped. Yelling for vengeance, the three men rushed out into the night, and the bombardment began.

When they returned, there was no Bertie. He had dragged himself away to the office, barricaded himself in,

and sunk upon the floor in a ginsoaked nightmare, wherein he died a thousand deaths while the valorous

fight went on around him. In the morning, sick and headachey from the gin, he crawled out to find the sun

still in the sky and God presumable in heaven, for his hosts were alive and uninjured.

Harriwell pressed him to stay on longer, but Bertie insisted on sailing immediately on the Arla for Tulagi,

where, until the following steamer day, he stuck close by the Commissioner's house. There were lady tourists

on the outgoing steamer, and Bertie was again a hero, while Captain Malu, as usual, passed unnoticed. But

Captain Malu sent back from Sydney two cases of the best Scotch whiskey on the market, for he was not able

to make up his mind as to whether it was Captain Hansen or Mr Harriwell who had given Bertie Arkwright

"The black will never understand the white, nor the white the black, as long as black is black and white is

So said Captain Woodward. We sat in the parlor of Charley Roberts' pub in Apia, drinking long Abu Hameds

compounded and shared with us by the aforesaid Charley Roberts, who claimed the recipe direct from

Stevens, famous for having invented the Abu Hamed at a time when he was spurred on by Nile thirstthe

Stevens who was responsible for "With Kitchener to Kartoun," and who passed out at the siege of Ladysmith.

Captain Woodward, short and squat, elderly, burned by forty years of tropic sun, and with the most beautiful

liquid brown eyes I ever saw in a man, spoke from a vast experience. The crisscross of scars on his bald pate

bespoke a tomahawk intimacy with the black, and of equal intimacy was the advertisement, front and rear, on

the right side of his neck, where an arrow had at one time entered and been pulled clean through. As he

explained, he had been in a hurry on that occasionthe arrow impeded his runningand he felt that he

could not take the time to break off the head and pull out the shaft the way it had come in. At the present

moment he was commander of the SAVAII, the big steamer that recruited labor from the westward for the

"Half the trouble is the stupidity of the whites," said Roberts, pausing to take a swig from his glass and to

curse the Samoan barboy in affectionate terms. "If the white man would lay himself out a bit to understand

"I've seen a few who claimed they understood niggers," Captain Woodward retorted, "and I always took

notice that they were the first to be kaikai'd (eaten). Look at the missionaries in New Guinea and the New

Hebridesthe martyr isle of Erromanga and all the rest. Look at the Austrian expedition that was cut to

pieces in the Solomons, in the bush of Guadalcanar. And look at the traders themselves, with a score of years'

experience, making their brag that no nigger would ever get them, and whose heads to this day are

ornamenting the rafters of the canoe houses. There was old Johnny Simonstwentysix years on the raw

edges of Melanesia, swore he knew the niggers like a book and that they'd never do for him, and he passed

out at Marovo Lagoon, New Georgia, had his head sawed off by a black Mary (woman) and an old nigger

with only one leg, having left the other leg in the mouth of a shark while diving for dynamited fish. There

was Billy Watts, horrible reputation as a nigger killer, a man to scare the devil. I remember lying at Cape

Little, New Ireland you know, when the niggers stole half a case of tradetobaccocost him about three

dollars and a half. In retaliation he turned out, shot six niggers, smashed up their war canoes and burned two

villages. And it was at Cape Little, four years afterward, that he was jumped along with fifty Buku boys he

had with him fishing b chedemer. In five minutes they were all dead, with the exception of three boys

who got away in a canoe. Don't talk to me about understanding the nigger. The white man's mission is to farm

the world, and it's a big enough job cut out for him. What time has he got left to understand niggers anyway?"

"Just so," said Roberts. "And somehow it doesn't seem necessary, after all, to understand the niggers. In direct

"And putting the fear of God into the nigger's heart," Captain Woodward blurted out. "Perhaps you're right,

Roberts. Perhaps it's his stupidity that makes him succeed, and surely one phase of his stupidity is his

inability to understand the niggers. But there's one thing sure, the white has to run the niggers whether he

"And of course the white man is inevitableit's the niggers' fate," Roberts broke in. "Tell the white man

there's pearl shell in some lagoon infested by tenthousand howling cannibals, and he'll head there all by his

lonely, with half a dozen kanaka divers and a tin alarm clock for chronometer, all packed like sardines on a

commodious, fiveton ketch. Whisper that there's a gold strike at the North Pole, and that same inevitable

whiteskinned creature will set out at once, armed with pick and shovel, a side of bacon, and the latest patent

rockerand what's more, he'll get there. Tip it off to him that there's diamonds on the redhot ramparts of

hell, and Mr. White Man will storm the ramparts and set old Satan himself to pickandshovel work. That's

"I'm just wondering what the niggers of Malu thought and still must be thinking of the one inevitable white

"That was twenty years ago. Saxtorph was his name. He was certainly the most stupid man I ever saw, but he

was as inevitable as death. There was only one thing that chap could do, and that was shoot. I remember the

first time I ran into himright here in Apia, twenty years ago. That was before your time, Roberts. I was

sleeping at Dutch Henry's hotel, down where the market is now. Ever heard of him? He made a tidy stake

smuggling arms in to the rebels, sold out his hotel, and was killed in Sydney just six weeks afterward in a

"But Saxtorph. One night I'd just got to sleep, when a couple of cats began to sing in the courtyard. It was out

of bed and up window, water jug in hand. But just then I heard the window of the next room go up. Two

shots were fired, and the window was closed. I fail to impress you with the celerity of the transaction. Ten

seconds at the outside. Up went the window, bang bang went the revolver, and down went the window.

Whoever it was, he had never stopped to see the effect of his shots. He knew. Do you follow me?he

KNEW. There was no more cat concert, and in the morning there lay the two offenders, stone dead. It was

marvelous to me. It still is marvelous. First, it was starlight, and Saxtorph shot without drawing a bead; next,

he shot so rapidly that the two reports were like a double report; and finally, he knew he had hit his marks

"Two days afterward he came on board to see me. I was mate, then, on the Duchess, a whacking big

onehundredand fiftyton schooner, a blackbirder. And let me tell you that blackbirders were blackbirders

in those days. There weren't any government protection for US, either. It was rough work, give and take, if

we were finished, and nothing said, and we ran niggers from every south sea island they didn't kick us off

from. Well, Saxtorph came on board, John Saxtorph was the name he gave. He was a sandy little man, hair

sandy, complexion sandy, and eyes sandy, too. Nothing striking about him. His soul was as neutral as his

color scheme. He said he was strapped and wanted to ship on board. Would go cabin boy, cook, supercargo,

or common sailor. Didn't know anything about any of the billets, but said that he was willing to learn. I didn't

want him, but his shooting had so impressed me that I took him as common sailor, wages three pounds per

"He was willing to learn all right, I'll say that much. But he was constitutionally unable to learn anything. He

could no more box the compass than I could mix drinks like Roberts here. And as for steering, he gave me

my first gray hairs. I never dared risk him at the wheel when we were running in a big sea, while fullandby

and closeandby were insoluble mysteries. Couldn't ever tell the difference between a sheet and a tackle,

simply couldn't. The forethroatjig and the jibjig were all one to him. Tell him to slack off the mainsheet,

and before you know it, he'd drop the peak. He fell overboard three times, and he couldn't swim. But he was

always cheerful, never seasick, and he was the most willing man I ever knew. He was an uncommunicative

soul. Never talked about himself. His history, so far as we were concerned, began the day he signed on the

DUCHESS. Where he learned to shoot, the stars alone can tell. He was a Yankeethat much we knew from

"And now we begin to get to the point. We had bad luck in the New Hebrides, only fourteen boys for five

weeks, and we ran up before the southeast for the Solomons. 'malaita, then as now, was good recruiting

ground, and we ran into Malu, on the northwestern corner. There's a shore reef and an outer reef, and a

mighty nervous anchorage; but we made it all right and fired off our dynamite as a signal to the niggers to

come down and be recruited. In three days we got not a boy. The niggers came off to us in their canoes by

hundreds, but they only laughed when we showed them beads and calico and hatchets and talked of the

"On the fourth day there came a change. Fiftyodd boys signed on and were billeted in the mainhold, with

the freedom of the deck, of course. And of course, looking back, this wholesale signing on was suspicious,

but at the time we thought some powerful chief had removed the ban against recruiting. The morning of the

fifth day our two boats went ashore as usualone to cover the other, you know, in case of trouble. And, as

usual, the fifty niggers on board were on deck, loafing, talking, smoking, and sleeping. Saxtorph and myself,

along with four other sailors, were all that were left on board. The two boats were manned with Gilbert

Islanders. In the one were the captain, the supercargo, and the recruiter. In the other, which was the covering

boat and which lay off shore a hundred yards, was the second mate. Both boats were wellarmed, though

"Four of the sailors, including Saxtorph, were scraping the poop rail. The fifth sailor, rifle in hand, was

standing guard by the watertank just for'ard of the mainmast. I was for'ard, putting in the finishing licks on a

new jaw for the foregaff. I was just reaching for my pipe where I had laid it down, when I heard a shot from

shore. I straightened up to look. Something struck me on the back of the head, partially stunning me and

knocking me to the deck. 'my first thought was that something had carried away aloft; but even as I went

down, and before I struck the deck, I heard the devil's own tattoo of rifles from the boats, and twisting

sidewise, I caught a glimpse of the sailor who was standing guard. Two big niggers were holding his arms,

"I can see it now, the watertank, the mainmast, the gang hanging on to him, the hatchet descending on the

back of his head, and all under the blazing sunlight. I was fascinated by that growing vision of death. The

tomahawk seemed to take a horribly long time to come down. I saw it land, and the man's legs give under

him as he crumpled. The niggers held him up by sheer strength while he was hacked a couple of times more.

Then I got two more hacks on the head and decided that I was dead. So did the brute that was hacking me. I

was too helpless to move, and I lay there and watched them removing the sentry's head. I must say they did it

"The rifle firing from the boats had ceased, and I made no doubt that they were finished off and that the end

had come to everything. It was only a matter of moments when they would return for my head. They were

evidently taking the heads from the sailors aft. Heads are valuable on Malaita, especially white heads. They

have the place of honor in the canoe houses of the saltwater natives. What particular decorative effect the

bushmen get out of them I didn't know, but they prize them just as much as the saltwater crowd.

"I had a dim notion of escaping, and I crawled on hands and knees to the winch, where I managed to drag

myself to my feet. From there I could look aft and see three heads on top the cabinthe heads of three

sailors I had given orders to for months. The niggers saw me standing, and started for me. I reached for my

revolver, and found they had taken it. I can't say that I was scared. I've been near to death several times, but it

never seemed easier than right then. I was halfstunned, and nothing seemed to matter.

"The leading nigger had armed himself with a cleaver from the galley, and he grimaced like an ape as he

prepared to slice me down. But the slice was never made. He went down on the deck all of a heap, and I saw

the blood gush from his mouth. In a dim way I heard a rifle go off and continue to go off. Nigger after nigger

went down. 'my senses began to clear, and I noted that there was never a miss. Every time that the rifle went

off a nigger dropped. I sat down on deck beside the winch and looked up. Perched in the crosstrees was

Saxtorph. How he had managed it I can't imagine, for he had carried up with him two Winchesters and I don't

know how many bandoliers of ammunition; and he was now doing the one only thing in this world that he

"I've seen shooting and slaughter, but I never saw anything like that. I sat by the winch and watched the

show. I was weak and faint, and it seemed to be all a dream. Bang, bang, bang, bang, went his rifle, and thud,

thud, thud, thud, went the niggers to the deck. It was amazing to see them go down. After their first rush to

get me, when about a dozen had dropped, they seemed paralyzed; but he never left off pumping his gun. By

this time canoes and the two boats arrived from shore, armed with Sniders, and with Winchesters which they

had captured in the boats. The fusillade they let loose on Saxtorph was tremendous. Luckily for him the

niggers are only good at close range. They are not used to putting the gun to their shoulders. They wait until

they are right on top of a man, and then they shoot from the hip. When his rifle got too hot, Saxtorph changed

"The astounding thing was the rapidity of his fire. Also, he never made a miss. If ever anything was

inevitable, that man was. It was the swiftness of it that made the slaughter so appalling. The niggers did not

have time to think. When they did manage to think, they went over the side in a rush, capsizing the canoes of

course. Saxtorph never let up. The water was covered with them, and plump, plump, plump, he dropped his

bullets into them. Not a single miss, and I could hear distinctly the thud of every bullet as it buried in human

"The niggers spread out and headed for the shore, swimming. The water was carpeted with bobbing heads,

and I stood up, as in a dream, and watched it allthe bobbing heads and the heads that ceased to bob. Some

of the long shots were magnificent. Only one man reached the beach, but as he stood up to wade ashore,

Saxtorph got him. It was beautiful. And when a couple of niggers ran down to drag him out of the water,

"I thought everything was over then, when I heard the rifle go off again. A nigger had come out of the cabin

companion on the run for the rail and gone down in the middle of it. The cabin must have been full of them. I

counted twenty. They came up one at a time and jumped for the rail. But they never got there. It reminded me

of trapshooting. A black body would pop out of the companion, bang would go Saxtorph's rifle, and down

would go the black body. Of course, those below did not know what was happening on deck, so they

"Saxtorph waited a while to make sure, and then came down on deck. He and I were all that were left of the

DUCHESS'S complement, and I was pretty well to the bad, while he was helpless now that the shooting was

over. Under my direction he washed out my scalp wounds and sewed them up. A big drink of whiskey braced

me to make an effort to get out. There was nothing else to do. All the rest were dead. We tried to get up sail,

Saxtorph hoisting and I holding the turn. He was once more the stupid lubber. He couldn't hoist worth a cent,

"When I came to, Saxtorph was sitting helplessly on the rail, waiting to ask me what he should do. I told him

to overhaul the wounded and see if there were any able to crawl. He gathered together six. One, I remember,

had a broken leg; but Saxtorph said his arms were all right. I lay in the shade, brushing the flies off and

directing operations, while Saxtorph bossed his hospital gang. I'll be blessed if he didn't make those poor

niggers heave at every rope on the pinrails before he found the halyards. One of them let go the rope in the

midst of the hoisting and slipped down to the deck dead; but Saxtorph hammered the others and made them

stick by the job. When the fore and main were up, I told him to knock the shackle out of the anchor chain and

let her go. I had had myself helped aft to the wheel, where I was going to make a shift at steering. I can't

guess how he did it, but instead of knocking the shackle out, down went the second anchor, and there we

"In the end he managed to knock both shackles out and raise the staysail and jib, and the Duchess filled away

for the entrance. Our decks were a spectacle. Dead and dying niggers were everywhere. They were wedged

away some of them in the most inconceivable places. The cabin was full of them where they had crawled off

the deck and cashed in. I put Saxtorph and his graveyard gang to work heaving them overside, and over they

went, the living and the dead. The sharks had fat pickings that day. Of course our four murdered sailors went

the same way. Their heads, however, we put in a sack with weights, so that by no chance should they drift on

"Our five prisoners I decided to use as crew, but they decided otherwise. They watched their opportunity and

went over the side. Saxtorph got two in midair with his revolver, and would have shot the other three in the

water if I hadn't stopped him. I was sick of the slaughter, you see, and besides, they'd helped work the

schooner out. But it was mercy thrown away, for the sharks got the three of them.

"I had brain fever or something after we got clear of the land. Anyway, the DUCHESS lay hove to for three

weeks, when I pulled myself together and we jogged on with her to Sydney. Anyway those niggers of Malu

learned the everlasting lesson that it is not good to monkey with a white man. In their case, Saxtorph was

"He drifted into seal hunting and became a crackerjack. For six years he was high line of both the Victoria

and San Francisco fleets. The seventh year his schooner was seized in Bering Sea by a Russian cruiser, and

all hands, so the talk went, were slammed into the Siberian salt mines. At least I've never heard of him since."

"Farming the world," Roberts muttered. "Farming the world. Well here's to them. Somebody's got to do

"I've done my share of it," he said. "Forty years now. This will be my last trip. Then I'm going home to stay."

"I'll wager the wine you don't," Roberts challenged. "You'll die in the harness, not at home."

Captain Woodward promptly accepted the bet, but personally I think Charley Roberts has the best of it.

The Pyrenees, her iron sides pressed low in the water by her cargo of wheat, rolled sluggishly, and made it

easy for the man who was climbing aboard from out a tiny outrigger canoe. As his eyes came level with the

rail, so that he could see inboard, it seemed to him that he saw a dim, almost indiscernible haze. It was more

like an illusion, like a blurring film that had spread abruptly over his eyes. He felt an inclination to brush it

away, and the same instant he thought that he was growing old and that it was time to send to San Francisco

As he came over the rail he cast a glance aloft at the tall masts, and, next, at the pumps. They were not

working. There seemed nothing the matter with the big ship, and he wondered why she had hoisted the signal

of distress. He thought of his happy islanders, and hoped it was not disease. Perhaps the ship was short of

water or provisions. He shook hands with the captain whose gaunt face and careworn eyes made no secret

of the trouble, whatever it was. At the same moment the newcomer was aware of a faint, indefinable smell. It

He glanced curiously about him. Twenty feet away a wearyfaced sailor was calking the deck. As his eyes

lingered on the man, he saw suddenly arise from under his hands a faint spiral of haze that curled and twisted

and was gone. By now he had reached the deck. His bare feet were pervaded by a dull warmth that quickly

penetrated the thick calluses. He knew now the nature of the ship's distress. His eyes roved swiftly forward,

where the full crew of wearyfaced sailors regarded him eagerly. The glance from his liquid brown eyes

swept over them like a benediction, soothing them, rapping them about as in the mantle of a great peace.

"How long has she been afire, Captain?" he asked in a voice so gentle and unperturbed that it was as the

At first the captain felt the peace and content of it stealing in upon him; then the consciousness of all that he

had gone through and was going through smote him, and he was resentful. By what right did this ragged

beachcomber, in dungaree trousers and a cotton shirt, suggest such a thing as peace and content to him and

his overwrought, exhausted soul? The captain did not reason this; it was the unconscious process of emotion

"My name is McCoy," came the answer in tones that breathed tenderness and compassion.

McCoy passed the benediction of his gaze over the tall, heavyshouldered man with the haggard, unshaven

"I am as much a pilot as anybody," was McCoy's answer. "We are all pilots here, Captain, and I know every

"What I want is some of the authorities. I want to talk with them, and blame quick."

Again that insidious suggestion of peace, and his ship a raging furnace beneath his feet! The captain's

eyebrows lifted impatiently and nervously, and his fist clenched as if he were about to strike a blow with it.

"I am the chief magistrate," was the reply in a voice that was still the softest and gentlest imaginable.

The tall, heavyshouldered man broke out in a harsh laugh that was partly amusement, but mostly hysterical.

Both he and the captain regarded McCoy with incredulity and amazement. That this barefooted beachcomber

should possess such highsounding dignity was inconceivable. His cotton shirt, unbuttoned, exposed a

A worn straw hat failed to hide the ragged gray hair. Halfway down his chest descended an untrimmed

patriarchal beard. In any slop shop, two shillings would have outfitted him complete as he stood before them.

"Oh," the captain said, then bethought himself. 'my name is Davenport, and this is my first mate, Mr. Konig."

"And now to business." The captain spoke quickly, the urgency of a great haste pressing his speech. "We've

been on fire for over two weeks. She's ready to break all hell loose any moment. That's why I held for

"Then you made a mistake, Captain, said McCoy. "You should have slacked away for Mangareva. There's a

"But we're here, ain't we?" the first mate demanded. "That's the point. We're here, and we've got to do

"Gammon!" said the mate. "Gammon!" he repeated loudly, as the captain signaled him to be more soft

spoken. "You can't tell me that sort of stuff. Where d'ye keep your own boats, heyyour schooner, or cutter,

McCoy smiled as gently as he spoke. His smile was a caress, an embrace that surrounded the tired mate and

"We have no schooner or cutter," he replied. "And we carry our canoes to the top of the cliff."

"You've got to show me," snorted the mate. "How d'ye get around to the other islands, heh? Tell me that."

"We don't get around. As governor of Pitcairn, I sometimes go. When I was younger, I was away a great

dealsometimes on the trading schooners, but mostly on the missionary brig. But she's gone now, and we

depend on passing vessels. Sometimes we have had as high as six calls in one year. At other times, a year,

and even longer, has gone by without one passing ship. Yours is the first in seven months."

The old man turned his brown eyes, sweet as a woman's, shoreward, and both captain and mate followed his

gaze around from the lonely rock of Pitcairn to the crew clustering forward and waiting anxiously for the

announcement of a decision. 'mcCoy did not hurry. He thought smoothly and slowly, step by step, with the

"The wind is light now," he said finally. "There is a heavy current setting to the westward."

"That's what made us fetch to leeward," the captain interrupted, desiring to vindicate his seamanship.

"Yes, that is what fetched you to leeward," McCoy went on. "Well, you can't work up against this current

"But I will tell you what you can do. The breeze will freshen tonight around midnightsee those tails of

clouds and that thickness to windward, beyond the point there? That's where she'll come from, out of the

southeast, hard. It is three hundred miles to Mangareva. Square away for it. There is a beautiful bed for your

McCoy found a stifling, poisonous atmosphere in the pent cabin. Stray waftures of invisible gases bit his eyes

and made them sting. The deck was hotter, almost unbearably hot to his bare feet. The sweat poured out of

his body. He looked almost with apprehension about him. This malignant, internal heat was astounding. It

was a marvel that the cabin did not burst into flames. He had a feeling as if of being in a huge bake oven

where the heat might at any moment increase tremendously and shrivel him up like a blade of grass.

As he lifted one foot and rubbed the hot sole against the leg of his trousers, the mate laughed in a savage,

"The anteroom of hell," he said. "Hell herself is right down there under your feet."

"It's hot!" McCoy cried involuntarily, mopping his face with a bandana handkerchief.

"Here's Mangareva," the captain said, bending over the table and pointing to a black speck in the midst of the

white blankness of the chart. "And here, in between, is another island. Why not run for that?"

"That's Crescent Island," he answered. "It is uninhabited, and it is only two or three feet above water. Lagoon,

"Mangareva it is, then," said Captain Davenport, interrupting the mate's growling objection. "Call the crew

The sailors obeyed, shuffling wearily along the deck and painfully endeavoring to make haste. Exhaustion

was evident in every movement. The cook came out of his galley to hear, and the cabin boy hung about near

When Captain Davenport had explained the situation and announced his intention of running for Mangareva,

an uproar broke out. Against a background of throaty rumbling arose inarticulate cries of rage, with here and

there a distinct curse, or word, or phrase. A shrill Cockney voice soared and dominated for a moment, crying:

"Gawd! After bein' in ell for fifteen daysan' now e wants us to sail this floatin' ell to sea again?"

The captain could not control them, but McCoy's gentle presence seemed to rebuke and calm them, and the

muttering and cursing died away, until the full crew, save here and there an anxious face directed at the

captain, yearned dumbly toward the green clad peaks and beetling coast of Pitcairn.

"Ay," was the answer, "and so we are. I've had a sea biscuit and a spoonful of salmon in the last two days.

We're on whack. You see, when we discovered the fire, we battened down immediately to suffocate the fire.

And then we found how little food there was in the pantry. But it was too late. We didn't dare break out the

He spoke to the men again, and again the throat rumbling and cursing arose, their faces convulsed and

animallike with rage. The second and third mates had joined the captain, standing behind him at the break of

the poop. Their faces were set and expressionless; they seemed bored, more than anything else, by this

mutiny of the crew. Captain Davenport glanced questioningly at his first mate, and that person merely

"You see," the captain said to McCoy, "you can't compel sailors to leave the safe land and go to sea on a

burning vessel. She has been their floating coffin for over two weeks now. They are worked out, and starved

But the wind was light, the Pyrenees' bottom was foul, and she could not beat up against the strong westerly

current. At the end of two hours she had lost three miles. The sailors worked eagerly, as if by main strength

they could compel the PYRENEES against the adverse elements. But steadily, port tack and starboard tack,

she sagged off to the westward. The captain paced restlessly up and down, pausing occasionally to survey the

vagrant smoke wisps and to trace them back to the portions of the deck from which they sprang. The

carpenter was engaged constantly in attempting to locate such places, and, when he succeeded, in calking

"Well, what do you think?" the captain finally asked McCoy, who was watching the carpenter with all a

"I think it would be better to square away for Mangareva. With that breeze that is coming, you'll be there

"Have your boats ready in the falls. The same breeze will carry your boats to Mangareva if the ship burns out

Captain Davenport debated for a moment, and then McCoy heard the question he had not wanted to hear, but

"I have no chart of Mangareva. On the general chart it is only a fly speck. I would not know where to look for

"Yes, Captain," he said, with the same quiet unconcern with which he would have accepted an invitation to

Again the crew was called aft, and the captain spoke to them from the break of the poop.

"We've tried to work her up, but you see how we've lost ground. She's setting off in a twoknot current. This

gentleman is the Honorable McCoy, Chief Magistrate and Governor of Pitcairn Island. He will come along

with us to Mangareva. So you see the situation is not so dangerous. He would not make such an offer if he

thought he was going to lose his life. Besides, whatever risk there is, if he of his own free will come on board

This time there was no uproar. 'mcCoy's presence, the surety and calm that seemed to radiate from him, had

had its effect. They conferred with one another in low voices. There was little urging. They were virtually

unanimous, and they shoved the Cockney out as their spokesman. That worthy was overwhelmed with

consciousness of the heroism of himself and his mates, and with flashing eyes he cried:

"One moment, Captain," McCoy said, as the other was turning to give orders to the mate. "I must go ashore

"Go ashore!" the captain cried. "What for? It will take you three hours to get there in your canoe."

"Yes, it is six now. I won't get ashore till nine. The people cannot be assembled earlier than ten. As the breeze

freshens up tonight, you can begin to work up against it, and pick me up at daylight tomorrow morning."

"In the name of reason and common sense," the captain burst forth, "what do you want to assemble the people

McCoy was as placid as a summer sea, and the other's anger produced not the slightest ripple upon it.

"Yes, Captain," he cooed in his dovelike voice. "I do realize that your ship is burning. That is why I am

going with you to Mangareva. But I must get permission to go with you. It is our custom. It is an important

matter when the governor leaves the island. The people's interests are at stake, and so they have the right to

"Then if you know they will give it, why bother with getting it? Think of the delaya whole night."

"It is our custom," was the imperturbable reply. "Also, I am the governor, and I must make arrangements for

"But it is only a twentyfour hour run to Mangareva," the captain objected. "Suppose it took you six times

that long to return to windward; that would bring you back by the end of a week."

"Very few vessels come to Pitcairn, and when they do, they are usually from San Francisco or from around

the Horn. I shall be fortunate if I get back in six months. I may be away a year, and I may have to go to San

Francisco in order to find a vessel that will bring me back. 'my father once left Pitcairn to be gone three

months, and two years passed before he could get back. Then, too, you are short of food. If you have to take

to the boats, and the weather comes up bad, you may be days in reaching land. I can bring off two canoe

loads of food in the morning. Dried bananas will be best. As the breeze freshens, you beat up against it. The

He held out his hand. The captain shook it, and was reluctant to let go. He seemed to cling to it as a drowning

"Yes, that's it!" cried the mate. "How do we know but what he's skinning out to save his own hide?"

McCoy did not speak. He looked at them sweetly and benignantly, and it seemed to them that they received a

The captain released his hand, and, with a last sweeping glance that embraced the crew in its benediction,

The wind freshened, and the Pyrenees, despite the foulness of her bottom, won half a dozen miles away from

the westerly current. At daylight, with Pitcairn three miles to windward, Captain Davenport made out two

canoes coming off to him. Again McCoy clambered up the side and dropped over the rail to the hot deck. He

was followed by many packages of dried bananas, each package wrapped in dry leaves.

"Now, Captain," he said, "swing the yards and drive for dear life. You see, I am no navigator," he explained a

few minutes later, as he stood by the captain aft, the latter with gaze wandering from aloft to overside as he

estimated the Pyrenees' speed. "You must fetch her to Mangareva. When you have picked up the land, then I

"Eleven," Captain Davenport answered, with a final glance at the water rushing past.

"Eleven. Let me see, if she keeps up that gait, we'll sight Mangareva between eight and nine o'clock

tomorrow morning. I'll have her on the beach by ten or by eleven at latest. And then your troubles will be all

It almost seemed to the captain that the blissful moment had already arrived, such was the persuasive

Captain Davenport had been under the fearful strain of navigating his burning ship for over two weeks, and

A heavier flaw of wind struck the back of his neck and whistled by his ears. He measured the weight of it,

"The wind is making all the time," he announced. "The old girl's doing nearer twelve than eleven right now.

All day the Pyrenees, carrying her load of living fire, tore across the foaming sea. By nightfall, royals and

topgallantsails were in, and she flew on into the darkness, with great, crested seas roaring after her. The

auspicious wind had had its effect, and fore and aft a visible brightening was apparent. In the second

dogwatch some careless soul started a song, and by eight bells the whole crew was singing.

"I've forgotten what sleep is," he explained to McCoy. "I'm all in. But give me a call at any time you think

At three in the morning he was aroused by a gentle tugging at his arm. He sat up quickly, bracing himself

against the skylight, stupid yet from his heavy sleep. The wind was thrumming its war song in the rigging,

and a wild sea was buffeting the PYRENEES. Amidships she was wallowing first one rail under and then the

other, flooding the waist more often than not. 'mcCoy was shouting something he could not hear. He reached

out, clutched the other by the shoulder, and drew him close so that his own ear was close to the other's lips.

"It's three o'clock," came McCoy's voice, still retaining its dovelike quality, but curiously muffled, as if from

a long way off. "We've run two hundred and fifty. Crescent Island is only thirty miles away, somewhere there

dead ahead. There's no lights on it. If we keep running, we'll pile up, and lose ourselves as well as the ship."

So the Pyrenees, with her cargo of fire, was hove to, bitting the teeth of the gale and fighting and smashing

the pounding seas. She was a shell, filled with a conflagration, and on the outside of the shell, clinging

precariously, the little motes of men, by pull and haul, helped her in the battle.

"It is most unusual, this gale," McCoy told the captain, in the lee of the cabin. "By rights there should be no

gale at this time of the year. But everything about the weather has been unusual. There has been a stoppage of

the trades, and now it's howling right out of the trade quarter." He waved his hand into the darkness, as if his

vision could dimly penetrate for hundreds of miles. "It is off to the westward. There is something big making

off there somewherea hurricane or something. We're lucky to be so far to the eastward. But this is only a

By daylight the gale had eased down to normal. But daylight revealed a new danger. It had come on thick.

The sea was covered by a fog, or, rather, by a pearly mist that was foglike in density, in so far as it

obstructed vision, but that was no more than a film on the sea, for the sun shot it through and filled it with a

The deck of the Pyrenees was making more smoke than on the preceding day, and the cheerfulness of officers

and crew had vanished. In the lee of the galley the cabin boy could be heard whimpering. It was his first

voyage, and the fear of death was at his heart. The captain wandered about like a lost soul, nervously chewing

"What do you think?" he asked, pausing by the side of McCoy, who was making a breakfast off fried bananas

McCoy finished the last banana, drained the mug, and looked slowly around. In his eyes was a smile of

"Well, Captain, we might as well drive as burn. Your decks are not going to hold out forever. They are hotter

this morning. You haven't a pair of shoes I can wear? It is getting uncomfortable for my bare feet."

The Pyrenees shipped two heavy seas as she was swung off and put once more before it, and the first mate

expressed a desire to have all that water down in the hold, if only it could be introduced without taking off the

"I'd hold her up some more, Captain," he said. "She's been making drift when hove to."

"I'd make it two points, Captain. This bit of a blow kicked that westerly current ahead faster than you

Captain Davenport compromised on a point and a half, and then went aloft, accompanied by McCoy and the

first mate, to keep a lookout for land. Sail had been made, so that the Pyrenees was doing ten knots. The

following sea was dying down rapidly. There was no break in the pearly fog, and by ten o'clock Captain

Davenport was growing nervous. Al l hands were at their stations, ready, at the first warning of land ahead, to

spring like fiends to the task of bringing the Pyrenees up on the wind. That land ahead, a surfwashed outer

Another hour passed. The three watchers aloft stared intently into the pearly radiance."What if we miss

"Why, let her drive, captain. That is all we can do. All the Paumotus are before us. We can drive for a

"Then drive it is." Captain Davenport evidenced his intention of descending to the deck. "We've missed

Mangareva. God knows where the next land is. I wish I'd held her up that other halfpoint," he confessed a

"The old navigators called the Paumotus the Dangerous Archipelago," McCoy said, when they had regained

"I was talking with a sailor chap in Sydney, once," said Mr. Konig. "He'd been trading in the Paumotus. He

"Except that they don't insure," he explained. "The owners write off twenty per cent of the cost of their

"My God!" Captain Davenport groaned. "That makes the life of a schooner only five years!" He shook his

Again they went into the cabin to consult the big general chart; but the poisonous vapors drove them

"Here is Moerenhout Island," Captain Davenport pointed it out on the chart, which he had spread on the

"A hundred and ten." 'mcCoy shook his head doubtfully. "It might be done, but it is very difficult. I might

beach her, and then again I might put her on the reef. A bad place, a very bad place."

"We'll take the chance," was Captain Davenport's decision, as he set about working out the course.

Sail was shortened early in the afternoon, to avoid running past in the night; and in the second dogwatch the

crew manifested its regained cheerfulness. Land was so very near, and their troubles would be over in the

But morning broke clear, with a blazing tropic sun. The southeast trade had swung around to the eastward,

and was driving the PYRENEES through the water at an eightknot clip. Captain Davenport worked up his

dead reckoning, allowing generously for drift, and announced Moerenhout Island to be not more than ten

miles off. The Pyrenees sailed the ten miles; she sailed ten miles more; and the lookouts at the three

"But the land is there, I tell you," Captain Davenport shouted to them from the poop.

McCoy smiled soothingly, but the captain glared about him like a madman, fetched his sextant, and took a

"I knew I was right, he almost shouted, when he had worked up the observation. "Twentyone, fiftyfive,

south; onethirtysix, two, west. There you are. We're eight miles to windward yet. What did you make it

"Twentyone, fiftyfive all right; but my longitude's onethirtysix, fortyeight. That puts us considerably

But Captain Davenport ignored his figures with so contemptuous a silence as to make Mr. Konig grit his

"Keep her off," the captain ordered the man at the wheel. "Three pointssteady there, as she goes!"

Then he returned to his figures and worked them over. The sweat poured from his face. He chewed his

mustache, his lips, and his pencil, staring at the figures as a man might at a ghost. Suddenly, with a fierce,

muscular outburst, he crumpled the scribbled paper in his fist and crushed it under foot. 'mr. Konig grinned

vindictively and turned away, while Captain Davenport leaned against the cabin and for half an hour spoke

no word, contenting himself with gazing to leeward with an expression of musing hopelessness on his face.

"Mr. McCoy," he broke silence abruptly. "The chart indicates a group of islands, but not how many, off there

to the north'ard, or nor'nor'westward, about forty milesthe Acteon Islands. What about them?"

"There are four, all low," McCoy answered. "First to the southeast is Matueruino people, no entrance to

the lagoon. Then comes Tenarunga. There used to be about a dozen people there, but they may be all gone

now. Anyway, there is no entrance for a shiponly a boat entrance, with a fathom of water. Vehauga and

Teuararo are the other two. No entrances, no people, very low. There is no bed for the Pyrenees in that

"Listen to that!" Captain Davenport was frantic. "No people! No entrances! What in the devil are islands

"Well, then, he barked suddenly, like an excited terrier, "the chart gives a whole mess of islands off to the

McCoy calmly considered. He did not refer to the chart. All these islands, reefs, shoals, lagoons, entrances,

and distances were marked on the chart of his memory. He knew them as the city dweller knows his

"Papakena and Vanavana are off there to the westward, or westnor'westward a hundred miles and a bit

more," he said. "One is uninhabited, and I heard that the people on the other had gone off to Cadmus Island.

Anyway, neither lagoon has an entrance. Ahunui is another hundred miles on to the nor'west. No entrance, no

"Well, forty miles beyond them are two islands?" Captain Davenport queried, raising his head from the chart.

"Paros and Manuhungino entrances, no people. NengoNengo is forty miles beyond them, in turn, and it

has no people and no entrance. But there is Hao Island. It is just the place. The lagoon is thirty miles long and

five miles wide. There are plenty of people. You can usually find water. And any ship in the world can go

He ceased and gazed solicitously at Captain Davenport, who, bending over the chart with a pair of dividers in

"Is there any lagoon with an entrance anywhere nearer than Hao Island?" he asked.

"Well, it's three hundred and forty miles." Captain Davenport was speaking very slowly, with decision. "I

won't risk the responsibility of all these lives. I'll wreck her on the Acteons. And she's a good ship, too," he

added regretfully, after altering the course, this time making more allowance than ever for the westerly

An hour later the sky was overcast. The southeast trade still held, but the ocean was a checker board of

"We'll be there by one o'clock," Captain Davenport announced confidently. "By two o'clock at the outside.

The sun did not appear again, nor, at one o'clock, was any land to be seen. Captain Davenport looked astern

Mr. Konig was incredulous. 'mcCoy was noncommittal, though he said that in the Paumotus there was no

reason why it should not be an easterly current. A few minutes later a squall robbed the Pyrenees temporarily

"Where's that deep lead? Over with it, you there!" Captain Davenport held the lead line and watched it sag off

McCoy and the mate tried it, and felt the line thrumming and vibrating savagely to the grip of the tidal

"An easterly current instead of a westerly," said Captain "Davenport, glaring accusingly at McCoy, as if to

"That is one of the reasons, Captain, for insurance being eighteen per cent in these waters," McCoy answered

cheerfully. "You can never tell. The currents are always changing. There was a man who wrote books, I

He missed Takaroa by thirty miles and fetched Tikei, all because of the shifting currents. You are up to

"But how much has this current set me?" the captain demanded irately. "How am I to know how much to

The wind returned, and the PYRENEES, her deck smoking and shimmering in the bright gray light, ran off

dead to leeward. Then she worked back, port tack and starboard tack, crisscrossing her track, combing the sea

Captain Davenport was beside himself. His rage took the form of sullen silence, and he spent the afternoon in

pacing the poop or leaning against the weather shrouds. At nightfall, without even consulting McCoy, he

squared away and headed into the northwest. Mr. Konig, surreptitiously consulting chart and binnacle, and

McCoy, openly and innocently consulting the binnacle, knew that they were running for Hao Island. By

midnight the squalls ceased, and the stars came out. Captain Davenport was cheered by the promise of a clear

"I'll get an observation in the morning," he told McCoy, "though what my latitude is, is a puzzler. But I'll use

The day proved clear, the trade blew steadily out of the east, and the Pyrenees just as steadily logged her nine

knots. Both the captain and mate worked out the position on a Sumner line, and agreed, and at noon agreed

"Another twentyfour hours and we'll be there," Captain Davenport assured McCoy. :"It's a miracle the way

the old girl's decks hold out. But they can't last. They can't last. Look at them smoke, more and more every

day. Yet it was a tight deck to begin with, freshcalked in Frisco. I was surprised when the fire first broke out

He broke off to gaze with dropped jaw at a spiral of smoke that coiled and twisted in the lee of the

Beneath it there was no smoke. Crawling up from the deck, sheltered from the wind by the mast, by some

freak it took form and visibility at that height. It writhed away from the mast, and for a moment overhung the

captain like some threatening portent. The next moment the wind whisked it away, and the captain's jaw

"As I was saying, when we first battened down, I was surprised. It was a tight deck, yet it leaked smoke like a

sieve. And we've calked and calked ever since. There must be tremendous pressure underneath to drive so

That afternoon the sky became overcast again, and squally, drizzly weather set in. The wind shifted back and

forth between southeast and northeast, and at midnight the Pyrenees was caught aback by a sharp squall from

"We won't make Hao until ten or eleven," Captain Davenport complained at seven in the morning, when the

fleeting promise of the sun had been erased by hazy cloud masses in the eastern sky. And the next moment he

Lookouts at the mastheads could report no land, and the day passed in drizzling calms and violent squalls. By

nightfall a heavy sea began to make from the west. The barometer had fallen to 29.50. There was no wind,

and still the ominous sea continued to increase. Soon the Pyrenees was rolling madly in the huge waves that

marched in an unending procession from out of the darkness of the west. Sail was shortened as fast as both

watches could work, and, when the tired crew had finished, its grumbling and complaining voices, peculiarly

animallike and menacing, could be heard in the darkness. Once the starboard watch was called aft to lash

down and make secure, and the men openly advertised their sullenness and unwillingness. Every slow

movement was a protest and a threat. The atmosphere was moist and sticky like mucilage, and in the absence

of wind all hands seemed to pant and gasp for air. The sweat stood out on faces and bare arms, and Captain

Davenport for one, his face more gaunt and careworn than ever, and his eyes troubled and staring, was

"It's off to the westward," McCoy said encouragingly. "At worst, we'll be only on the edge of it."

But Captain Davenport refused to be comforted, and by the light of a lantern read up the chapter in his

Epitome that related to the strategy of shipmasters in cyclonic storms. From somewhere amidships the silence

"Oh, shut up!" Captain Davenport yelled suddenly and with such force as to startle every man on board and

"Mr. Konig," the captain said in a voice that trembled with rage and nerves, "will you kindly step for'ard and

But it was McCoy who went forward, and in a few minutes had the boy comforted and asleep.

Shortly before daybreak the first breath of air began to move from out the southeast, increasing swiftly to a

stiff and stiffer breeze. All hands were on deck waiting for what might be behind it. "We're all right now,

Captain," said McCoy, standing close to his shoulder. "The hurricane is to the west'ard, and we are south of

it. This breeze is the insuck. It won't blow any harder. You can begin to put sail on her."

"But what's the good? Where shall I sail? This is the second day without observations, and we should have

sighted Hao Island yesterday morning. Which way does it bear, north, south, east, or what? Tell me that, and

"I used to think I was one," was the retort, "before I got into these Paumotus."

At midday the cry of "Breakers ahead!" was heard from the lookout. The Pyrenees was kept off, and sail after

sail was loosed and sheeted home. The Pyrenees was sliding through the water and fighting a current that

threatened to set her down upon the breakers. Officers and men were working like mad, cook and cabin boy,

Captain Davenport himself, and McCoy all lending a hand. It was a close shave. It was a low shoal, a bleak

and perilous place over which the seas broke unceasingly, where no man could live, and on which not even

sea birds could rest. The PYRENEES was swept within a hundred yards of it before the wind carried her

clear, and at this moment the panting crew, its work done, burst out in a torrent of curses upon the head of

McCoy of McCoy who had come on board, and proposed the run to Mangareva, and lured them all away

from the safety of Pitcairn Island to certain destruction in this baffling and terrible stretch of sea. But

McCoy's tranquil soul was undisturbed. He smiled at them with simple and gracious benevolence, and,

somehow, the exalted goodness of him seemed to penetrate to their dark and somber souls, shaming them,

"Bad waters! Bad waters!" Captain Davenport was murmuring as his ship forged clear; but he broke off

abruptly to gaze at the shoal which should have been dead astern, but which was already on the PYRENEES'

He sat down and buried his face in his hands. And the first mate saw, and McCoy saw, and the crew saw,

what he had seen. South of the shoal an easterly current had set them down upon it; north of the shoal an

"I've heard of these Paumotus before," the captain groaned, lifting his blanched face from his hands. "Captain

Moyendale told me about them after losing his ship on them. And I laughed at him behind his back. God

"Because I never saw it before, and because I have never heard of it. I do know that it is not charted. These

At four in the afternoon cocoanut trees were sighted, apparently growing out of the water. A little later the

"I know where we are now, Captain." McCoy lowered the glasses from his eyes. "That's Resolution Island.

"There's only a canoe passage. But now that we know where we are, we can run for Barclay de Tolley. It is

only one hundred and twenty miles from here, due nor'nor'west. With this breeze we can be there by nine

"If we wreck her here," McCoy added, "we'd have to make the run to Barclay de Tolley in the boats just the

The captain gave his orders, and once more the Pyrenees swung off for another run across the inhospitable

And the middle of the next afternoon saw despair and mutiny on her smoking deck. The current had

accelerated, the wind had slackened, and the Pyrenees had sagged off to the west. The lookout sighted

Barclay de Tolley to the eastward, barely visible from the masthead, and vainly and for hours the

PYRENEES tried to beat up to it. Ever, like a mirage, the cocoanut trees hovered on the horizon, visible only

Again Captain Davenport consulted McCoy and the chart. 'makemo lay seventyfive miles to the southwest.

Its lagoon was thirty miles long, and its entrance was excellent. When Captain Davenport gave his orders, the

crew refused duty. They announced that they had had enough of hell fire under their feet. There was the land.

What if the ship could not make it? They could make it in the boats. Let her burn, then. Their lives amounted

to something to them. They had served faithfully the ship, now they were going to serve themselves.

They sprang to the boats, brushing the second and third mates out of the way, and proceeded to swing the

boats out and to prepare to lower away. Captain Davenport and the first mate, revolvers in hand, were

advancing to the break of the poop, when McCoy, who had climbed on top of the cabin, began to speak.

He spoke to the sailors, and at the first sound of his dovelike, cooing voice they paused to hear. He extended

to them his own ineffable serenity and peace. His soft voice and simple thoughts flowed out to them in a

magic stream, soothing them against their wills. Long forgotten things came back to them, and some

remembered lullaby songs of childhood and the content and rest of the mother's arm at the end of the day.

There was no more trouble, no more danger, no more irk, in all the world. Everything was as it should be, and

it was only a matter of course that they should turn their backs upon the land and put to sea once more with

McCoy spoke simply; but it was not what he spoke. It was his personality that spoke more eloquently than

any word he could utter. It was an alchemy of soul occultly subtile and profoundly deepa mysterious

emanation of the spirit, seductive, sweetly humble, and terribly imperious. It was illumination in the dark

crypts of their souls, a compulsion of purity and gentleness vastly greater than that which resided in the

The men wavered reluctantly where they stood, and those who had loosed the turns made them fast again.

Then one, and then another, and then all of them, began to sidle awkwardly away.

McCoy's face was beaming with childlike pleasure as he descended from the top of the cabin. Thee was no

trouble. For that matter there had been no trouble averted. There never had been any trouble, for there was no

"Those boys are good," was the answer. "Their hearts are good. They have had a hard time, and they have

Mr. Konig had not time to reply. His voice was ringing out orders, the sailors were springing to obey, and the

PYRENEES was paying slowly off from the wind until her bow should point in the direction of Makemo.

The wind was very light, and after sundown almost ceased. It was insufferably warm, and fore and aft men

sought vainly to sleep. The deck was too hot to lie upon, and poisonous vapors, oozing through the seams,

crept like evil spirits over the ship, stealing into the nostrils and windpipes of the unwary and causing fits of

sneezing and coughing. The stars blinked lazily in the dim vault overhead; and the full moon, rising in the

east, touched with its light the myriads of wisps and threads and spidery films of smoke that intertwined and

writhed and twisted along the deck, over the rails, and up the masts and shrouds.

"Tell me," Captain Davenport said, rubbing his smarting eyes, "what happened with that BOUNTY crowd

after they reached Pitcairn? The account I read said they burnt the Bounty, and that they were not discovered

until many years later. But what happened in the meantime? I've always been curious to know. They were

men with their necks in the rope. There were some native men, too. And then there were women. That made

"There was trouble," McCoy answered. "They were bad men. They quarreled about the women right away.

One of the mutineers, Williams, lost his wife. All the women were Tahitian women. His wife fell from the

cliffs when hunting sea birds. Then he took the wife of one of the native men away from him. All the native

men were made very angry by this, and they killed off nearly all the mutineers. Then the mutineers that

escaped killed off all the native men. The women helped. And the natives killed each other. Everybody killed

"Timiti was killed by two other natives while they were combing his hair in friendship. The white men had

sent them to do it. Then the white men killed them. The wife of Tullaloo killed him in a cave because she

wanted a white man for husband. They were very wicked. God had hidden His face from them. At the end of

two years all the native men were murdered, and all the white men except four. They were Young, John

Adams, McCoy, who was my greatgrandfather, and Quintal. He was a very bad man, too. Once, just

"Yes, they were very bad," McCoy agreed and went on serenely cooing of the blood and lust of his iniquitous

ancestry. "My greatgrandfather escaped murder in order to die by his own hand. He made a still and

manufactured alcohol from the roots of the tiplant. Quintal was his chum, and they got drunk together all the

time. At last McCoy got delirium tremens, tied a rock to his neck, and jumped into the sea.

"Quintal's wife, the one whose ear he bit off, also got killed by falling from the cliffs. Then Quintal went to

Young and demanded his wife, and went to Adams and demanded his wife. Adams and Young were afraid of

Quintal. They knew he would kill them. So they killed him, the two of them together, with a hatchet. Then

By morning no more than a faint air was blowing from the eastward, and, unable to make appreciable

southing by it, Captain Davenport hauled up fullandby on the port track. He was afraid of that terrible

westerly current which had cheated him out of so many ports of refuge. All day the calm continued, and all

night, while the sailors, on a short ration of dried banana, were grumbling. Also, they were growing weak and

complaining of stomach pains caused by the straight banana diet. All day the current swept the PYRENEES

to the westward, while there was no wind to bear her south. In the middle of the first dogwatch, cocoanut

trees were sighted due south, their tufted heads rising above the water and marking the lowlying atoll

"That is Taenga Island," McCoy said. "We need a breeze tonight, or else we'll miss Makemo."

"What's become of the southeast trade?" the captain demanded. "Why don't it blow? What's the matter?"

"It is the evaporation from the big lagoonsthere are so many of them," McCoy explained. The evaporation

upsets the whole system of trades. It even causes the wind to back up and blow gales from the southwest.

Captain Davenport faced the old man, opened his mouth, and was about to curse, but paused and refrained.

'mcCoy's presence was a rebuke to the blasphemies that stirred in his brain and trembled in his larynx.

'mcCoy's influence had been growing during the many days they had been together. Captain Davenport was

an autocrat of the sea, fearing no man, never bridling his tongue, and now he found himself unable to curse in

the presence of this old man with the feminine brown eyes and the voice of a dove. When he realized this,

Captain Davenport experienced a distinct shock. This old man was merely the seed of McCoy, of McCoy of

the BOUNTY, the mutineer fleeing from the hemp that waited him in England, the McCoy who was a power

for evil in the early days of blood and lust and violent death on Pitcairn Island.

Captain Davenport was not religious, yet in that moment he felt a mad impulse to cast himself at the other's

feetand to say he knew not what. It was an emotion that so deeply stirred him, rather than a coherent

thought, and he was aware in some vague way of his own unworthiness and smallness in the presence of this

other man who possessed the simplicity of a child and the gentleness of a woman.

Of course he could not so humble himself before the eyes of his officers and men. And yet the anger that had

prompted the blasphemy still raged in him. He suddenly smote the cabin with his clenched hand and cried:

"Look here, old man, I won't be beaten. These Paumotus have cheated and tricked me and made a fool of me.

I refuse to be beaten. I am going to drive this ship, and drive and drive and drive clear through the Paumotus

to China but what I find a bed for her. If every man deserts, I'll stay by her. I'll show the Paumotus. They can't

fool me. She's a good girl, and I'll stick by her as long as there's a plank to stand on. You hear me?"

During the night, light, baffling airs blew out of the south, and the frantic captain, with his cargo of fire,

watched and measured his westward drift and went off by himself at times to curse softly so that McCoy

"That's the leeward point of Makemo," McCoy said. "Katiu is only a few miles to the west. We may make

But the current, sucking between the two islands, swept them to the northwest, and at one in the afternoon

they saw the palms of Katiu rise above the sea and sink back into the sea again.

A few minutes later, just as the captain had discovered that a new current from the northeast had gripped the

"It is Raraka," said McCoy. "We won't make it without wind. The current is drawing us down to the

southwest. But we must watch out. A few miles farther on a current flows north and turns in a circle to the

northwest. This will sweep us away from Fakarava, and Fakarava is the place for the Pyrenees to find her

"They can sweep all they daall they well please," Captain Davenport remarked with heat. "We'll find a bed

But the situation on the Pyrenees was reaching a culmination. The deck was so hot that it seemed an increase

of a few degrees would cause it to burst into flames. In many places even the heavysoled shoes of the men

were no protection, and they were compelled to step lively to avoid scorching their feet. The smoke had

increased and grown more acrid. Every man on board was suffering from inflamed eyes, and they coughed

and strangled like a crew of tuberculosis patients. In the afternoon the boats were swung out and equipped.

The last several packages of dried bananas were stored in them, as well as the instruments of the officers.

Captain Davenport even put the chronometer into the longboat, fearing the blowing up of the deck at any

All night this apprehension weighed heavily on all, and in the first morning light, with hollow eyes and

ghastly faces, they stared at one another as if in surprise that the Pyrenees still held together and that they still

Walking rapidly at times, and even occasionally breaking into an undignified hopskipandrun, Captain

"It is a matter of hours now, if not of minutes," he announced on his return to the poop.

The cry of land came down from the masthead. From the deck the land was invisible, and McCoy went aloft,

while the captain took advantage of the opportunity to curse some of the bitterness out of his heart. But the

cursing was suddenly stopped by a dark line on the water which he sighted to the northeast. It was not a

squall, but a regular breezethe disrupted trade wind, eight points out of its direction but resuming business

"Hold her up, Captain," McCoy said as soon as he reached the poop. "That's the easterly point of Fakarava,

and we'll go in through the passage fulltilt, the wind abeam, and every sail drawing."

At the end of an hour, the cocoanut trees and the lowlying land were visible from the deck. The feeling that

the end of the PYRENEES' resistance was imminent weighed heavily on everybody. Captain Davenport had

the three boats lowered and dropped short astern, a man in each to keep them apart. The Pyrenees closely

And a minute later the land parted, exposing a narrow passage and the lagoon beyond, a great mirror, thirty

For the last time the yards of the Pyrenees swung around as she obeyed the wheel and headed into the

passage. The turns had scarcely been made, and nothing had been coiled down, when the men and mates

swept back to the poop in panic terror. Nothing had happened, yet they averred that something was going to

happen. They could not tell why. They merely knew that it was about to happen. 'mcCoy started forward to

take up his position on the bow in order to con the vessel in; but the captain gripped his arm and whirled him

"Do it from here," he said. "That deck's not safe. What's the matter?" he demanded the next instant. "We're

"You are bucking a sevenknot current, Captain," he said. "That is the way the full ebb runs out of this

At the end of another hour the Pyrenees had scarcely gained her length, but the wind freshened and she began

His voice was still ringing, and the men were just beginning to move in obedience, when the amidship deck

of the Pyrenees, in a mass of flame and smoke, was flung upward into the sails and rigging, part of it

remaining there and the rest falling into the sea. The wind being abeam, was what had saved the men

crowded aft. They made a blind rush to gain the boats, but McCoy's voice, carrying its convincing message of

"Take it easy," he was saying. Everything is all right. Pass that boy down somebody, please."

The man at the wheel had forsaken it in a funk, and Captain Davenport had leaped and caught the spokes in

"Better take charge of the boats," he said to Mr. Konig. "Tow one of them short, right under the quarter. . . .

Amidships the Pyrenees was an open flaming furnace, out of which poured an immense volume of smoke

which rose high above the masts and completely hid the forward part of the ship. 'mcCoy, in the shelter of the

mizzenshrouds, continued his difficult task of conning the ship through the intricate channel. The fire was

working aft along the deck from the seat of explosion, while the soaring tower of canvas on the mainmast

went up and vanished in a sheet of flame. Forward, though they could not see them, they knew that the

"If only she don't burn all her canvas off before she makes inside,:" the captain groaned.

"She'll make it," McCoy assured him with supreme confidence. "There is plenty of time. She is bound to

make it. And once inside, we'll put her before it; that will keep the smoke away from us and hold back the fire

A tongue of flame sprang up the mizzen, reached hungrily for the lowest tier of canvas, missed it, and

vanished. From aloft a burning shred of rope stuff fell square on the back of Captain Davenport's neck. He

acted with the celerity of one stung by a bee as he reached up and brushed the offending fire from his skin.

Slowly, point by point, as she entered the lagoon, the PYRENEES described the circle that put her before the

wind; and point by point, with all the calm certitude of a thousand years of time to spare, McCoy chanted the

Captain Davenport whirled several spokes over, suddenly reversing and coming back one to check her.

Despite the fact that the wind was now astern, the heat was so intense that Captain Davenport was compelled

to steal sidelong glances into the binnacle, letting go the wheel now with one hand, now with the other, to rub

McCoy's beard was crinkling and shriveling and the smell of it, strong in the other's nostrils, compelled him

to look toward McCoy with sudden solicitude. Captain Davenport was letting go the spokes alternately with

his hands in order to rub their blistering backs against his trousers. Every sail on the mizzenmast vanished in

"Now," said McCoy, stealing a glance ahead at the low shore, "four points up, Captain, and let her drive."

Shreds and patches of burning rope and canvas were falling about them and upon them. The tarry smoke from

a smouldering piece of rope at the captain's feet set him off into a violent coughing fit, during which he still

The Pyrenees struck, her bow lifted and she ground ahead gently to a stop. A shower of burning fragments,

dislodged by the shock, fell about them. The ship moved ahead again and struck a second time. She crushed

"All right. She is swinging around." 'mcCoy peered over the side. "Soft, white sand. Couldn't ask better. A

As the Pyrenees swung around her stern away from the wind, a fearful blast of smoke and flame poured aft.

Captain Davenport deserted the wheel in blistering agony. He reached the painter of the boat that lay under

"You first," the captain cried, gripping him by the shoulder and almost throwing him over the rail. But the

flame and smoke were too terrible, and he followed hard after McCoy, both men wriggling on the rope and

sliding down into the boat together. A sailor in the bow, without waiting for orders, slashed the painter

through with his sheath knife. The oars, poised in readiness, bit into the water, and the boat shot away.

The three boats pulled away for the white beach of pounded coral, beyond which, on the edge of a cocoanut

grove, could be seen a half dozen grass houses and a score or more of excited natives, gazing wideeyed at