White Shadows in the South Seas Part 33

I replied with some comments indicating my belief that c.o.c.kroaches belonged on a still lower rung, and going in an opposite direction.

"I know those _blattes_, those _saligauds_," he said with sympathy.

"They are sent by Satan to provoke us to blasphemy. I never go below."

Those pests of insects can hardly be estimated at their true dreadfulness by persons unacquainted with the infamous habits of the nocturnal beetle of the tropics. Sluggish creatures in the temperate zone, in warm countries they develop the power of flying, and obstacles successfully interposed to their progress in countries where they merely crawl are ineffectual here. They had entire possession of the _Roberta_.

The supercargo, Lee, was not to be blamed, for he told me that once he had taken time in port to capture by poisonous lures a number he calculated at eight thousand, and that within a month those who had escaped had repopulated the old schooner as before. Then he despaired, and let them have sway. To sleep or eat among them was not possible to me, and the voyage was a nightmare not relieved by an incident of the second night.

Capriata, whose feet were calloused from going bare for years, awoke from a deep slumber that had been aided by rum, to find that the c.o.c.kroaches in his berth had eaten through the half inch or more of hard skin and had begun to devour his flesh. With blasphemous and blood-chilling yells he bounded on deck, where he sat treating the wounds and cursing unrestrainedly for some time before joining Pere Olivier and me in democratic slumber on the bare boards. Several weeks later his feet had not recovered from their envenomed sores.

When eight bells sounded the hour of four, I got upon my feet and in the mellow dawn saw a panorama of peak and precipice, dark and threatening, the coast of Fatu-hiva and the entrance to Oomoa Bay, the southernmost island of the Marquesas, and the harbor in which the first white men who saw the islands anch.o.r.ed over three hundred years ago.

Those Spaniards, on whose ships the cross was seen in cabin and forecastle, on gun and halberd, murdered many Marquesans at Oomoa to glut their taste for blood. The standard of death the white flew then has never been lowered. Oomoa and Hanavave, the adjacent bay and village, were resorts for whalers, who brought a plague of ills that reduced the population of Fatu-hiva from many thousands to less than three hundred. Consumption was first brought to the islands by one of these whalers, and made such alarming inroads on the people of Hanavave that most of the remainder forsook their homes and crossed to the island of Tahuata, to escape the devil the white man had let loose among them.

We sailed on very slowly after the mountains had robbed us of the breeze, and when daylight succeeded the false dawn, we dropped our mud hooks a thousand feet from the beach. On it we could see a little wooden church and two dwellings, dwarfed to miniature by the grim pinnacles of rock, crude replicas of the towers of the Alhambra, slender minarets beside the giant cliffs, which were clothed with creeping plants in places and in places bare as the sides of a living volcano.

The fantastic and majestic a.s.semblage of rock shapes on the sh.o.r.es of Fatu-hiva appeared as if some Herculean sculptor with disordered brain and mighty hand had labored to reproduce the fearful chimeras of his dreams.

The priest and I, with the supercargo, went ash.o.r.e in a boat at six o'clock, and reached a beach as smooth and inviting as that of Atuona.

A canoe was waiting for Pere Olivier; he climbed into it at once, his black wet robe clinging to him, and called "_Adios!_" as his men paddled rapidly for Hanavave, where he was to say ma.s.s and hear confessions.

Lee and I took a road lined with a wall of rocks, and pa.s.sing many sorts of trees and plants entered an enclosure through a gate.

After a considerable walk through a thrifty plantation, we were in front of a European house which gave signs of comfort and taste. At the head of a flight of stairs on the broad veranda was a man in gold-rimmed eye-gla.s.ses and a red breechclout. His well-shaped, bald head and punctilious manner would have commanded attention in any attire.

I was introduced to Monsieur Francois Grelet, a Swiss, who had lived here for more than twenty years, and who during that time had never been farther away than a few miles. Not even Tahiti had drawn him to it. Since he arrived, at the age of twenty-four years, he had dwelt contentedly in Oomoa.

After we had chatted for a few moments he invited me to be his guest.

I thought of the _Roberta_ and those two kinds of c.o.c.kroaches, the Blatta orientalis and the Blatta germanica, who raid by night and by day respectively; I looked at Grelet's surroundings, and I accepted.

While the _Roberta_ gathered what copra she could and flitted, I became a resident of Oomoa until such time as chance should give me pa.s.sage to my own island.

Twenty years before my host had planted the trees that embowered his home. With the Swiss farmer's love of order, he had neglected nothing to make neat, as nature had made beautiful, his surroundings.

"I learned agriculture and dairying on my father's farm in Switzerland," said Grelet. "At school I learned more of their theory, and when I had seen the gay cities of Europe, I went to the new world to live. I was first at Pecos City, New Mexico, where I had several hundred acres' of government land. I brought grape-vines from Fresno, in California, but the water was insufficient for the sterile soil, and I was forced to give up my land. From San Francisco I sailed on the brig _Galilee_ for Tahiti. I have never finished the journey, for when the brig arrived at Tai-o-hae I left her and installed myself on the _Eunice_, a small trading-schooner, and for a year I remained aboard her, visiting all the islands of the Marquesas and becoming so attached to them that I bought land and settled down here."

Grelet looked about him and smiled.

"It isn't bad, _hein_?"

It was not. From the little cove where his boat-house stood a road swept windingly to his house through a garden of luxuriant verdure.

Mango and limes, breadfruit and cocoanut, _pomme de Cythere_, orange and papaws, banana and alligator-pear, candlenut and chestnut, mulberry and sandalwood, _tou_, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d ebony, and rosewood, the rose-apple with purple ta.s.seled flowers and delicious fruit, the pistachio and the _badamier_, scores of shrubs and bushes and magnificent tree-ferns, all on a tangled sward of white spider-lilies, great, sweet-smelling plants, an acre of them, and with them other ferns of many kinds, and mosses, the nodding _taro_ leaves and the _ti_, the leaves which the Fatu-hivans make into girdles and wreaths; all grew luxuriantly, friendly neighbors to the Swiss, set there by him or volunteering for service in the generous way of the tropics.

The lilies, oranges, and panda.n.u.s trees yielded food for the bees, whose thatched homes stood thick on the hillside above the house.

Grelet was a skilled apiarist, and replenished his melliferous flocks by wild swarms enticed from the forests. The honey he strained and bottled, and it was sought of him by messengers from all the islands.

Orchard and garden beyond the house gave us Valencia and Mandarin oranges, lemons, _feis_, Guinea cherries, pineapples, Barbadoes cherries, sugar-cane, sweet-potatoes, watermelons, cantaloups, Chile peppers, and pumpkins. Watercress came fresh from the river.

Cows and goats browsed about the garden, but Grelet banned pigs to a secluded valley to run wild. One of the cows was twenty-two years old, but daily gave br.i.m.m.i.n.g buckets of milk for our refreshment. Beef and fish, breadfruit and _taro_, good bread from American flour, rum, and wine both red and white, with bowls of milk and green cocoanuts, were always on the table, a box of cigars, packages of the veritable Scaferlati Superieur tobacco, and the Job papers, and a dozen pipes.

No king could fare more royally than this Swiss, who during twenty years had never left the forgotten little island of Fatu-hiva.

His house, set in this bower of greenery, of flowers and perfumes, was airy and neat, whitewashed both inside and out, with a broad veranda painted black. Two bedrooms, a storeroom in which he sold his merchandise, and a workroom, sufficed for all his needs. The veranda was living-room and dining-room; raised ten feet from the earth on breadfruit-tree pillars placed on stone, it provided a roof for his forge, for his saddle-and-bridle room, and for the small kitchen.

The ceilings in the house were of wood, but on the veranda he had cleverly hung a canvas a foot below the roof. The air circulated above it, bellying it out like a sail and making the atmosphere cool.

Under this was his dining-table, near a very handsome buffet, both made by Grelet of the false ebony, for he was a good carpenter as he was a crack boatsman, farmer, cowboy, and hunter. Here we sat over pipe and cigarette after dinner, wine at our elbows, the garden before us, and discussed many things.

Grelet had innumerable books in French and German, all the great authors old and modern; he took the important reviews of Germany and France, and several newspapers. He knew much more than I of history past and present, of the happenings in the great world, art and music and invention, finances and politics. He could name the cabinets of Europe, the characters and records of their members, or discuss the quality of Caruso's voice as compared with Jean de Reszke's, though he had heard neither. Twenty-two years ago he had left everything called civilization, he had never been out of the Marquesas since that time; he lived in a lonely valley in which there was no other man of his tastes and education, and he was content.

"I have everything I want; I grow it or I make it. My horses and cattle roam the hills; if I want meat, beef or goat or pig, I go or I send a man to kill an animal and bring it to me. Fish are in the river and the bay; there is honey in the hives; fruit and vegetables in the garden, wood for my furniture, bark for the tanning of hides.

I cure the leather for saddles or chair-seats with the bark of the rose-wood. Do you know why it is called rose-wood? I will show you.

Its bark has the odor of roses when freshly cut. Yes, I have all that I want. What do I need from the great cities?"

He tamped down the tobacco in his pipe and puffed it meditatively.

"A man lives only a little while, _hein_? He should ask himself what he wants from life. He should look at the world as it is. These traders want money, buying and selling and cheating to get it. What is money compared to life? Their life goes in buying and selling and cheating. Life is made to be lived pleasantly. Me, I do what I want to do with mine, and I do it in a pleasant place."

His pipe went out while he gazed at the garden murmurous in the twilight. He knocked out the dottle, refilled the bowl and lighted the tobacco.

"You should have seen this island when I came. These natives die too fast. Ah, if I could only get labor, I could make this valley produce enough for ten thousand people. I could load the ships with copra and cotton and coffee."

He was twenty-two years and many thousands of miles from the great cities of Europe, but he voiced the wail of the successful man the world over. If he could get labor, he could turn it into building his dreams to reality, into filling his ships with his goods for his profit. But he had not the labor, for the fruits of a commercial civilization had killed the islanders who had had their own dreams, their own ships, and their own pleasures and profits in life.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Labor in the South Seas; some random thoughts on the "survival of the fittest."

"I pictured myself cultivating many hundreds of acres when I first came here," said Grelet. "I laid out several plantations, and once shipped much coffee, as good, too, as any in the world. I gather enough now for my own use, and sell none. I grew cotton and cocoanuts on a large scale. I raise only a little now.

"There were hundreds of able-bodied men here then. I used to buy opium from the Chinese labor-contractors and from smugglers, and give it to my working people. A pill once a day would make the Marquesans hustle. But the government stopped it. They say that the book written by the Englishman, Stevenson, did it. We must find labor elsewhere soon, Chinese, perhaps. Those two Paumotans brought by Begole are a G.o.dsend to me. I wish some one would bring me a hundred."

The two Paumotan youths, Tennonoku and Kedeko-lio, lay motionless on the floor of the veranda twenty feet away. They had been sold to Grelet for a small sum by Begole, captain of a trading-schooner. In pa.s.sing the Paumotan Islands, many hundred miles to the south, Begole had forgotten to leave at Pukatuhu, a small atoll, a few bags of flour he had promised to bring the chief on his next voyage, and the chief, seeing the schooner a mile away, had ordered these boys to swim to it and remind the skipper of his promise. Begole meanwhile had caught a wind, and the first he knew of the message was when the boys climbed aboard the schooner many miles to sea. He did not trouble to land them, but brought them on to the Marquesas and sold them to Grelet.

They spoke no Marquesan, and Grelet had difficulty in making them understand that they must labor for him, and in enforcing his orders, which they could not comprehend. There was little copra being made in the rainy weather, and they lay about the veranda or squatted on the _paepae_ of the laborers' cookhouse, making a fire of cocoanut-husks twice a day to roast their breadfruit. Their savage hearts were ever in their own atoll, the home to which the native clings so pa.s.sionately, and their eyes were dark with hopeless longing. No doubt they would die soon, as so many do when exiled, but Grelet's copra crop would profit first.

The dire lack of labor for copra-making, tree-planting, or any form of profitable activity is lamented by all white men in these depopulated islands. Average wages were sixty cents a day, but even a dollar failed to bring adequate relief. The Marquesan detests labor, which to him has ever been an unprofitable expenditure of life and did not gain in his eyes even when his toil might enrich white owners of plantations. Since every man had a piece of land that yielded copra enough for his simple needs, and breadfruit and fish were his for the taking, he could not be forced to work except for the government in payment for taxes.

The white men in the islands, like exploiters of weaker races everywhere in the world, were unwilling to share their profits with the native. They were reduced to pleading with or intoxicating the Marquesan to procure a modic.u.m of labor. They saw fortunes to be made if they could but whip a mult.i.tude of backs to bending for them, but they either could not or would not perceive the situation from the native's point of view.

In America I often heard men who were out of employment, particularly in bad seasons, in big cities or in mining camps, argue the right to work. They could not enforce this alleged natural right, and in their misery talked of the duty of society or the state in this direction. But they were obliged to content themselves with the thin alleviation of soup-kitchens, charity wood-yards, and other easers of hard times, and with threats of sabotage or other violence.

Here in the islands, where work is offered to unwilling natives, the employers curse their lack of power to drive them to the copra forests, the kilns and boats. Thus, as in highly civilized countries we maintain that a man has no inherent or legal right to work, in these islands the employer has no weapon by which to enforce toil.

But had the whites the power to order all to do their bidding, they would create a system of peonage as in Mexico.

An acquaintance of mine in these seas took part in, and profited largely by, the removal to a distant place of the entire population of an island on which the people had led the usual life of the Polynesian. He and his a.s.sociates sold three hundred men to plantation labor, which they hated and to which they were unaccustomed. Within a year two hundred and fifty of them had died as fast as disease could sap their grief-stricken bodies. Their former home, which they died longing to see again, was made a feeding-place for sheep. The merchants reaped a double toll. They were paid well for delivering the owners of the land to the plantations, and in addition they got the land.