White Shadows in the South Seas Part 2

"Now I wasn't attached to the kid. I ain't attached to n.o.body. I ain't that kind of a man. But the kid was sort of used to me, and I was used to havin' him around. He used to come in through the window.

He'd just come in, nights, and sit there an' never say a word. When I was goin' to bed he'd say, 'McHenry, Your Dog is goin' now, but can't Your Dog sleep here?' Well, I used to let him sleep on the floor, no harm in that. But if he was a leper he'd got to go to the settlement, so I told him so.

"He made such a fuss, cryin' around--By G.o.d, I had to boot him out of the place. I said: 'Get out. I don't want you snivelin' around me.'

So he went.

"It's a rotten, G.o.d-forsaken place, I guess. I don't know. The government takes care of 'em. It ain't my affair. I guess for a leper colony it ain't so bad.

"Anyway, I was goin' to sell out an' leave Penryn. The diving season was over. One night I had the door locked an' was goin' over my accounts to see if I couldn't collect some more dough from the natives. I heard a noise, and By G.o.d! there comin' through the window was My Dog. He come up to me, and I said: 'Stand away, there!'

I ain't afraid of leprosy, but there's no use takin' chances. You never know.

"Well sir, that kid threw himself down on the floor, and he said, 'McHenry, I knowed you was goin' away and I had to come to see you.'

That's what he said in his Kanaka lingo.

"He was cryin', and he looked pretty bad. He said he couldn't stand the settlement. He said, 'I don't never see you there. Can't I live here an' be Your Dog again?'

"I said, 'You got to go to the settlement.' I wasn't goin' to get into trouble on account of no Kanaka kid.

"Now, that kid had swum about five miles in the night, with sharks all around him--the very place where his father had gone into a shark.

That kid thought a lot of me. Well, I made him go back. 'If you don't go, the doctor will come, an' then you got to go,' I said. 'You better get out. I'm goin' away, anyhow,' I said. I was figuring on my accounts, an' I didn't want to be bothered with no fool kid.

"Well, he hung around awhile, makin' a fuss, till I opened the door an' told him to git. Then he went quiet enough. He went right down the beach into the water an' swum away, back to the settlement. Now look here, that kid liked me. He knowed me well, too--he was around my store pretty near all the time I was in Penryn. He was a fool kid.

My Dog, that was the name he give himself. An' while I was in T'yti, here, I get a letter from the trader that took over my store, and he sent me a letter from that kid. It was wrote in Kanaka. He couldn't write much, but a little. Here, I'll show you the letter. You'll see what that kid thought of me."

In the light from the open cabin window I read the letter, painfully written on cheap, blue-lined paper.

"Greetings to you, McHenry, in Tahiti, from Your Dog. It is hard to live without you. It is long since I have seen you. It is hard. I go to join my father. I give myself to the _mako_. To you, McHenry, from Your Dog, greetings and farewell."

Across the bottom of the letter was written in English: "The kid disappeared from the leper settlement. They think he drowned himself."

CHAPTER III

Thirty-seven days at sea; life of the sea-birds; strange phosph.o.r.escence; first sight of Fatu-hiva; history of the islands; chant of the Raiateans.

Thirty-seven days at sea brought us to the eve of our landing in Hiva-oa in the Marquesas. Thirty-seven monotonous days, varied only by rain-squalls and sun, by calm or threatening seas, by the changing sky. Rarely a pa.s.sing schooner lifted its sail above the far circle of the horizon. It was as though we journeyed through s.p.a.ce to another world.

Yet all around us there was life--life in a thousand varying forms, filling the sea and the air. On calm mornings the swelling waves were splashed by myriads of leaping fish, the sky was the playground of innumerable birds, soaring, diving, following their accustomed ways through their own strange world oblivious of the human creatures imprisoned on a bit of wood below them. Surrounded by a universe filled with pulsing, sentient life clothed in such mult.i.tudinous forms, man learns humility. He shrinks to a speck on an illimitable ocean.

I spent long afternoons lying on the cabin-house, watching the frigates, the tropics, gulls, b.o.o.bys, and other sea-birds that sported through the sky in great numbers. The frigate-birds were called by the sailors the man-of-war bird, and also the sea-hawk.

They are marvelous flyers, owing to the size of the pectoral muscles, which compared with those of other birds are extraordinarily large.

They cannot rest on the water, but must sustain their flights from land to land, yet here they were in mid-ocean.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The ironbound coast of the Marquesas]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A road in Nuka-Hiva]

My eyes would follow one higher and higher till he became a mere dot in the blue, though but a few minutes earlier he had risen from his pursuit of fish in the water. He spread his wings fully and did not move them as he climbed from air-level to air-level, but his long forked tail expanded and closed continuously.

Sighting a school of flying-fish, which had been driven to frantic leaps from the sea by pursuing bonito, he begins to descend. First his coming down is like that of an aeroplane, in spirals, but a thousand feet from his prey he volplanes; he falls like a rocket, and seizing a fish in the air, he wings his way again to the clouds.

If he cannot find flying-fish, he stops gannets and terns in mid-air and makes them disgorge their catch, which he seizes as it falls.

Refusal to give up the food is punished by blows on the head, but the gannets and terns so fear the frigate that they seldom have the courage to disobey. I think a better name for the frigate would be pirate, for he is a veritable pirate of the air. Yet no law restrains him.

I observed that the male frigate has a red pouch under the throat which he puffs up with air when he flies far. It must have some other purpose, for the female lacks it, and she needs wind-power more than the male. It is she who seeks the food when, having laid her one egg on the sand, she goes abroad, leaving her husband to keep the egg warm.

The tropic-bird, often called the boatswain, or phaeton, also climbs to great heights, and is seldom found out of these lat.i.tudes. He is a beautiful bird, white, or rose-colored with long carmine tail-feathers. In the sun these roseate birds are brilliant objects as they fly jerkily against the bright blue sky, or skim over the sea, rising and falling in their search for fish. I have seen them many times with the frigates, with whom they are great friends. It would appear that there is a bond between them; I have never seen the frigate rob his beautiful companion.

In such idle observations and the vague wonders that arose from them, the days pa.s.sed. An interminable game of cards progressed in the cabin, in which I occasionally took a hand. Gedge and Lying Bill exchanged reminiscences. McHenry drank steadily. The future governor of the Marquesas added a _galon_ to his sleeves, marking his advance to a first lieutenancy in the French colonial army. He was a very soft, sleek man, a little worn already, his black hair a trifle thin, but he was plump, his skin white as milk, and his jetty beard and mustache elaborately cared for. He was much before the mirror, combing and brushing and plucking. Compared to us unkempt wretches, he was as a dandy to a tramp.

The ice, which was packed in boxes of sawdust on deck, afforded one cold drink in which to toast the gallant future governor, and that was the last of it. At night the Tahitian sailors helped themselves, and we bade farewell to ice until once more we saw Papeite.

It was no refreshment to reflect that had we dredging apparatus long enough we could procure from the sea-bottom buckets of ooze that would have cooled our drinks almost to the freezing point.

Scientists have done this. Lying Bill was loth to believe the story and the explanation, that an icy stream flows from the Antarctic through a deep valley in the sea-depths.

"It's contrar-iry to nature," he affirmed. "The depper you go the 'otter it is. In mines the 'eat is worse the farther down. And 'ow about 'ell?"

I slept on the deck. It was sickeningly hot below. The squalls had pa.s.sed, and as we neared Hiva-oa the sea became gla.s.sy smooth, but the leagues-long, lazy roll of it rocked the schooner like a cradle.

The night before the islands were to come into view the sea was lit by phosph.o.r.escence so magnificently that even my shipmates, absorbed in ecarte below, called to one another to view it. The engine took us along at about six knots, and every gentle wave that broke was a lamp of loveliness. The wake of the _Morning Star_ was a milky path lit with trembling fragments of brilliancy, and below the surface, beside the rudder, was a strip of green light from which a billion sparks of fire shot to the air. Far behind, until the horizon closed upon the ocean, our wake was curiously remindful of the boulevard of a great city seen through a mist, the lights fading in the dim distance, but sparkling still.

I went forward and stood by the cathead. The blue water stirred by the bow was wonderfully bright, a ma.s.s of coruscating phosph.o.r.escence that lighted the prow like a lamp. It was as if lightning played beneath the waves, so luminous, so scintillating the water and its reflection upon the ship.

The living organisms of the sea were _en fete_ that night, as though to celebrate my coming to the islands of which I had so long dreamed.

I smiled at the fancy, well knowing that the minute _pyrocistis_, having come to the surface during the calm that followed the storms, were showing in that glorious fire the panic caused among them by the cataclysm of our pa.s.sing. But the individual is ever an egoist.

It seems to man that the universe is a circle about him and his affairs. It may as well seem the same to the _pyrocistis_.

Far about the ship the waves twinkled in green fire, disturbed even by the ruffling breeze. I drew up a bucketful of the water. In the darkness of the cabin it gave no light until I pa.s.sed my hand through it. That was like opening a door into a room flooded by electricity; the table, the edges of the bunks, the uninterested faces of my shipmates, leaped from the shadows. Marvels do not seem marvelous to men to live among them.

I lay long awake on deck, watching the eerily lighted sea and the great stars that hung low in the sky, and to my fancy it seemed that the air had changed, that some breath from the isles before us had softened the salty tang of the sea-breeze.

Land loomed at daybreak, dark, gloomy, and inhospitable. Rain fell drearily as we pa.s.sed Fatu-hiva, the first of the Marquesas Islands sighted from the south. We had climbed from Tahiti, seventeen degrees south of the equator, to between eleven and ten degrees south, and we had made a westward of ten degrees. The Marquesas Islands lay before us, dull spots of dark rock upon the gray water.

They are not large, any of these islands; sixty or seventy miles is the greatest circ.u.mference. Some of the eleven are quite small, and have no people now. On the map of the world they are the tiniest pin-p.r.i.c.ks. Few dwellers in Europe or America know anything about them. Most travelers have never heard of them. No liners touch them; no wire or wireless connects them with the world. No tourists visit them. Their people perish. Their trade languishes. In Tahiti, whence they draw almost all their sustenance, where their laws are made, and to which they look at the capital of the world, only a few men, who traded here, could tell me anything about the Marquesas. These men had only the vague, exaggerated ideas of the sailor, who goes ash.o.r.e once or twice a year and knows nothing of the native life.

Seven hundred and fifty miles as the frigate flies separates these islands from Tahiti, but no distance can measure the difference between the happiness of Tahiti, the sparkling, brilliant loveliness of that flower-decked island, and the stern, forbidding aspect of the Marquesas lifting from the sea as we neared them. Gone were the laughing vales, the pale-green hills, the luring, feminine guise of nature, the soft-lapping waves upon a peaceful, shining sh.o.r.e. The spirit that rides the thunder had claimed these bleak and desolate islands for his own.

While the schooner made her way cautiously past the grim and rocky headlands of Fatu-hiva I was overwhelmed with a feeling of solemnity, of sadness; such a feeling as I have known to sweep over an army the night before a battle, when letters are written to loved ones and comrades entrusted with messages.

That gaunt, dark sh.o.r.e itself recalls that the history of the Marquesas is written in blood, a black spot on the white race. It is a history of evil wrought by civilization, of curses heaped on a strange, simple people by men who sought to exploit them or to mold them to another pattern, who destroyed their customs and their happiness and left them to die, apathetic, wretched, hardly knowing their own miserable plight.

The French have had their flag over the Marquesas since 1842. In 1521 Magellan must have pa.s.sed between the Marquesas and Paumotas, but he does not mention them. Seventy-three years later a Spanish flotilla sent from Callao by Don Garcia Hurtado de Mendoza, viceroy of Peru, found this island of Fatu-hiva, and its commander, Mendana, named the group for the viceroy's lady, Las Islas Marquesas de Mendoza.

One hundred and eighty years pa.s.sed, and Captain Cook again discovered the islands, and a Frenchman, Etienne Marchand, discovered the northern group. The fires of liberty were blazing high in his home land, and Marchand named his group the Isles of the Revolution, in celebration of the victories of the French people. A year earlier an American, Ingraham, had sighted this same group and given it the name of his own beloved hero, Washington.

Had not Captain Porter failed to establish American rule in 1813 in the island of Nuka-hiva, which he called Madison, the Marquesas might have been American. Porter's name, like that of Mendana, is linked with deeds of cruelty. The Spaniard was without pity; the American may plead that his killings were reprisals or measures of safety for himself. Murder of Polynesians was little thought of.

Schooners trained their guns on islands for pleasure or practice, and destroyed villages with all their inhabitants.