The Marquesas Islands
Chapter IX The Real South Seas — Big-game Shooting Extraordinary — A Case of Thwarted Ambition
We of the dream ship were “watering,” or rather transferring, three hundred gallons of a doubtful-looking fluid from the beach reservoir of Cristobal to the ship’s tanks by means of kerosene tins, a rickety landing-stage swarming with sand flies, and an equally rickety dinghy.
We were, in fact, enjoying a spell, to the accompaniment of vast quantities of cocoanut milk, before setting sail for the Marquesas, three thousand miles distant, and were in no mood for an interruption, which is probably why it came. A pigmy figure on the landing was apparently dancing a hornpipe and emitting strange cries.
“Who is it, and what the —— does he want?” I queried with customary amiability.
“It’s the comisario,” said Steve, with binocular upheld in one hand and a brimming cocoanut shell in the other, “and he’s probably found that we need a bill of health or clearance or something.”
I believe I sighed. I have a notion that Steve swore, and I am quite sure that we rowed ashore and interviewed the comisario, the handsome youth whose silk socks and passionate tie contrasted strangely with his surroundings. He still danced.
“He says that it is necessary that he should accompany us,” Steve translated.
“To the Marquesas?”
“To anywhere.”
“Really? And where does the necessity come in?”
After still further variations of the hornpipe and a prodigious outflow of Ecuadorean Spanish, the following was evolved: They were after him—a trifling indiscretion in the matter of issuing grog licenses to the peons. The Ecuadorean Government was to blame. They expected an official to live on twenty dollars a month and nothing else! How was it possible? Moreover, the President himself, elected on a wage basis of forty-dollars-a-month-and-bring-your-own-blankets, would be getting the boot in a short three months, and with him went everyone—everyone!
What was then to happen to the officials he had placed in power? More important still, what was to happen to this particular official? He must accompany us. It was the only possible solution. He would work. Carramba, how he would work! and for nothing but his passage to anywhere—anywhere!
Steve and I exchanged glances. The entire crew of the dream ship was, as I think I have before mentioned, exceedingly tired of cooking. The comisario seized on our silence.
Maybe we thought he could not work?
With a dramatic gesture he tore from his neck the passionate tie, from his feet the silk socks, from his back a virulently striped shirt, and stood revealed in a natty line of undervests.
“Poor devil!” said I, thinking of the dream ship’s fo’c’s’le in a seaway.
“Poor nothing!” said Steve. “He wants work; let him have it.”
And that was how Señor ——, hereafter known as Bill, came to join the dream ship.
We sailed, and continued to sail before a steady southeast “trade” for twenty-two days, during which the comisario suffered alternately from seasickness, homesickness, and sheer inability to do anything but smoke cigarettes and sleep; our water tanks, under the magic wand of the Galapagos beach reservoir, transformed themselves into aquariums of energetic animalcules; and our entire biscuit supply crumbled to dust under the onslaughts of a particularly virulent red ant.
But these be incidentals to life aboard dream ships, and, at the first sight of Nukuhiva they faded to little more than amusing memories.
We had reached our goal! The South Sea Islands were ours! It was hard to realize. At the sight of gorgeous Nukuhiva gliding toward us over the sparkling blue water I remember looking round at the good old ship that had slowly but steadfastly carried us all these thousands of miles, and wondering what she thought of it all. I am aware that the idea of a ship having thoughts savours of senile decay, but that is what passed through my mind at the time, and has passed through it a hundred times since.
More nonsense has probably been written about the South Sea Islands than about any other part of the world. The library novelist, the globe-trotting journalist, and a reading public athirst for exotic romance have all contributed to this end: so that here, at the outset of attempting to describe what we of the dream ship saw there, I find myself at a loss. In short, “these few remarks” may be taken as an apology and a warning.
I have nothing to offer on a par with the standard article, such as struggles with sharks, conflicts with cannibals, or philandering with princesses. My line, I fear, is facts as I find them.
A fine island is Nukuhiva—as fine an example of volcanic formation as one will find anywhere. Sheer walls of cloud-capped rock six thousand feet high, some literally overhanging the crystal-clear water, and all embossed and engraved with strangely patterned basalt. There are pillars, battlements, turrets, so that with half-closed eyes it seems one is approaching a temple, a mediæval castle, a mosque of the East. And the valleys—deep, river-threaded, verdure-choked valleys fading away into mysterious purple mists. But it is little better than an impertinence to attempt a description of Nukuhiva after Melville’s “Typee.”*
For once the monstrosity in our engine-room was induced to exert three of its four cylinders, and we entered the harbour of Tai o Hae in style. It was as well, for a trim trading schooner flying the French flag was at anchor close inshore, and her entire crew lined the rail to see what manner of insect had invaded her privacy.
“Where are you from?” hailed a surprisingly English voice as soon as our anchor-chain had ceased its clamour.
“London,” we chorused.
“Well, I’m damned!” came a response, evidently not intended for our ears, but audible nevertheless.
In rather less than three minutes a whaleboat-load of visitors was aboard the dream ship, and the silent bay echoed to a fusillade of question and counter-question.
Followed a dinner at the trading station on a wide, cool veranda, where, under the influence of oysters, California asparagus, fowl, bush pig, taro root, and French champagne, we became better acquainted with our hosts—two as amiable Frenchmen as ever I met. They represented a trading company of Papeete and Paris, and lived as only Frenchmen appear to know how to live.
The Marquesans, we gathered over coffee and cigars, were dying rapidly. Consumption. Introduced in the form of Panama fever by labourers returning from canal construction. The fever afterward developed into the white plague by reason of the natives’ unresisting, if not acquiescent, nature. And when all were gone, what then? Chinese.
The Chinese appear to be the answer to most questions in the South Pacific to-day. They come; it costs them but fifty dollars to land; and after that they grow—mon Dieu, how they grow!
And can nothing be done? A shrug of the shoulders and the offer of a refilled glass are the answers of the Frenchman. But a short time now and he personally will be in a position to return to his beloved Paris, or Marseilles, or Brittany.
But we had lately returned from dealing with the Boche; so had our hosts. We drank respectively to the Royal Field Artillery, the Mitrailleurs, the Machine-gun Corps, and the incomparable French Infantry. What of it, if we continue the sport on the morrow, among the wild cattle and goats of Nukuhiva? To-morrow, then, at five o’clock.
The schooner, scheduled at daylight to load copra worth five hundred dollars a ton, was cheerfully detained for the trip, and loaded to capacity with bottled beer, coughing Marquesans, and a varied armoury of firearms.
We sailed down a coast that it is a sore temptation to describe and landed by whaleboat on a surf-pounded beach. Thereafter we plodded, crawled, and stumbled over as vicious a country as it is possible to imagine—crumbling shale, razor-edged ledges, and deceptive tableland of knee-high grass that only served to hide the carpet of keen-edged volcanic rocks beneath.
And the heat! But a representative of the incomparable infantry led the way; and who would not follow to the death, out of very shame? At each halting place the élan of this same representative seemed to increase. Sitting crosslegged on a rock in the meagre shade of a scrub tree, he would discourse on any subject under the sun, while his audience gasped, emptied the perspiration out of their boots, and cursed the cantine (a gigantic native bearing an almost as gigantic sack of bottled beer) for lagging.
I was under the impression that the game was to have been wild; hence my surprise when a herd of something like a hundred and fifty goats of all ages, from the bearded and maned veteran, or “stinker,” down to the daintiest kid, cavorted up to our resting-place and sniffed at us inquisitively. It was necessary to fling stones to keep some of the more daring at bay.
So much for goat-hunting in the Marquesas. It is evident that these beasts are so “wild” that they know nothing of man; who shall say they have missed much in consequence?
The cattle are a different matter. Shy as deer, they must be warily stalked and shot mostly on the run, at anything from a hundred to a hundred and fifty yards; also, they have an engaging habit of turning when wounded and giving the huntsman the worst possible time in their power, which in the case of a hefty bull or cow with calf is not inconsiderable.
There must have been a herd of something like fifty grazing on the precipitous hillside, and the first shot, fired by an over-anxious Marquesan, against strict orders, sent them scuttling like antelope out of the valley and over the ridge. One fine bull received his medicine from my trusty little Winchester on the very brink, collapsed, and rolled like an avalanche of meat to the bottom.
We bagged four of this herd, and the Marquesans fell on them, quartering and selecting with extraordinary skill, and finally carrying one hundred pounds each of solid meat to the beach five miles below. How this last feat was accomplished by a band of ramping consumptives I have no notion, though I saw it done. I only know that after carrying two rifles and a gun over the same country I literally tumbled on to the beach, bruised and bleeding and trembling from sheer fatigue. Even the representative of incomparable infantry admitted to being tired, and, thank heaven, he looked it!
It had been a successful day, I was given to understand, and there followed in consequence song and dance aboard the dream ship until dawn touched the peaks of Tai o Hae.
A native dance is a dreary and monotonous affair to the average white man, because he does not take the trouble to understand. He sees before him an assembly of posturing, howling natives, and seldom realizes that he is witnessing a pageant of history that has never been written or read.
The performance opened with a pantomimic representation of the cruise of the dream ship. According to the actors’ ideas, all aboard suffered acutely from seasickness, were utterly unable to stand upright, and continually looked for land under the shade of an upraised hand. Our vigour in battling with storms was extraordinary; we stumbled over rope-ends, clung to the rigging, nearly capsized, and one of us fell overboard, to be rescued, amid shrieks of laughter, by means of a boat-hook and the seat of his pants.
We were a joke, there was no doubt about that, and any one who takes a ten-thousand-mile journey in a twenty-three-ton yacht to the Marquesas and wants to be taken seriously had better go elsewhere.
From such trivialities the performers passed on to what was evidently their stock repertoire—the history of the Marquesas as handed down from father to son. It was all there in gesture and chant—mighty battles with their neighbours the Paumotans, cannibalism, peace, the advent of the white man with his rum, the plague that still consumes them, and all enacted without resentment.
That is the most astounding thing, that these people who were living their own lives, and surely as happy lives as ours, bear no ill will for the incredible sufferings our civilization has brought among them. Perhaps they do not think, and if so it is as well.
Conceive yourself, if you can, oh, denizen of Park Lane, Fifth Avenue, or Champs Elysées, a healthy, upstanding, unclad savage of-the South Seas, and living your own life.
You may be a cannibal; and are there no cannibals, and worse, west of Suez? You will be a warrior and fight for your country and your womenfolk. Is there anything wrong about that?
You will have a stricter moral code than most white folk, but that cannot be helped. You will hunt and fish and gather fruit for your family—in fact, you will live in the only way you know how to live, in contentment.
One day an extraordinary-looking object called a white man presents himself and informs you that you are not living in the right way at all. A much better way, according to this gentleman, is to exchange a ton of your cocoanuts for a bottle of rum or a death-dealing instrument made of rusty iron.
You are a tolerant sort of person, and you listen and drink his rum. The next day you have an insufferable headache, and, logically concluding that he has poisoned you, you kill him.
But that is not the end. Replicas of him keep arriving, and you find you need his rum and his rusty iron, the one for its elevating properties, the other for its dispatch in dealing with enemies. Still more replicas arrive, but of a different order. Many of them are kindly, well-meaning men, and great talkers. They tell you that they have found a God—the only God—and you must worship him in their way. The trouble is that each has a different way, but they are all right, and they all prove it by the same book.
Preserve me from the futilities of theological argument; but I met at Tai o Hae a Seventh Day Adventist missionary, an earnest, clean-living, kindly man, without a spark of humour in his composition. He was consumed by a genuine and mighty fervour to demonstrate to the native Marquesan that he was keeping the Sabbath on the wrong day.
“Does that matter so very much?” I asked him, and that was all I had a chance to ask. Apparently it did matter. And he was getting converts. Why? Because the native is not slow to discover that by embracing Seventh Day Adventism he gets two days of rest in the week.
Elsewhere I have met Roman Catholic, Mormon, Latter-Day Saint, Presbyterian, and Anglican Church missionaries, all at work in the same field, all earnest, well-meaning men, and each convinced that he is right.
Is it any wonder, then, that after listening to them all the dazed South Sea Island native asks himself what all the pother is about, and, finding no satisfactory answer to the conundrum, turns to his tangible rum bottle?
To revert to safer topics, there is pearl shell in the Marquesas. The representative of incomparable infantry told us so while we sat on his incomparable veranda one morning, consuming large quantities of papia, rolls, honey, and coffee, each in his particular brand of pyjamas.
The information brought upon our serene lives at Tai o Hae the white man’s blight of avariciousness. Was this thing possible, with shell at one thousand dollars a ton delivered at Philadelphia? Yes; he, the incomparable, had seen it through a water-glass, in anything from five to fifteen fathoms, between the islands of Hivaoa and Tahuata.
Why had it not been prospected? It was doubtful if any but he and the natives knew of its existence. Undoubtedly it was worth looking into. He made us a present of the information to do with as we willed. His cook was an old Paumotan diver, who would no doubt accompany us—Pascal!—accompany us to the island, a bare ninety miles distant. We could take samples of shell to the company in Papeete, and no doubt make arrangements—Pascal!—arrangements with them to advance working capital in return for a lien on the shell—Pascal!!!
“Monsieur.” An enormous Paumotan native stood in the doorway smiling benignly.
He would accompany us. He would cook, and he would dive.
We sailed that evening, the deck being littered with green bananas, live chickens tied by the leg to bulwark stanchions, a rabbit, firewood, a stove composed of a kerosene tin half filled with earth, and—Pascal.
There was apparently nothing this extraordinary man could not do. He knew every island of the Marquesas like the palm of his hand. He could produce savoury messes from a kerosene tin, remain under water three minutes, discourse entertainingly in pidgin-English, French, German, Marquesan, and Paumotan, and secure a ship’s provisions without the annoying triviality of paying for them.
“But whom do we owe for all this?” I asked him, eyeing the menagerie that surrounded us.
Pascal smiled and waved a hand.
“Rabbit no money,” he informed us; “chickens, bananas, all no money. Me get um.”
Here surely is a solution of the high-cost-of-living problem. Take Pascal to the profiteering areas and the thing is done.
Dawn revealed to us Tahuata close abeam. Each island of this group seems more lovely than the last: waterfalls pouring three thousand feet to the sea, blow-holes at the base of rocky cliffs that spray the air with spindrift and miniature rainbows, deep bays with coral beaches at their head.
But the beauties of nature were not for us on this occasion; we were prospecting. It was a serious business. There might be money in it. After this I can scarce believe that in Paradise itself the white man will not be dogged by the curse of opportunism.
Leaving the dream ship at anchor a cable’s length from shore, we took to the dinghy and explored the floor of the ocean thereabouts through water-glasses, consisting of wooden boxes with glass bottoms. This was the place, Pascal informed us, and, sure enough, there was shell, old barnacle-encrusted shell, but widely scattered.
What of a few samples? Pascal grinned and shook his head. “Shark,” he muttered, apologetically; which, being interpreted, meant that he refused to dive.
He pointed out that in the Paumotus it was different. In the Paumotus there was always a reef-surrounded lagoon where few sharks found entrance. In the Paumotus men dived in couples as a safeguard. In the Paumotus——
In vain we pointed out that we happened to be in the Marquesas and not the Paumotus; that he had been hired to dive in the Marquesas; that we were really very angry—in the Marquesas. He grinned.
In rather less than half an hour, and to Pascal’s utter amazement, we had put him and his belongings ashore, paid him his wages, and were under way for Tahiti.
Ah, Monsieur of the incomparable infantry, I rather suspect you of pulling our legs. Or was it that your innate enthusiasm ran away with you? Or that we should have been less hasty? I do not know. All I know is that you spoke truth; there is shell in the Marquesas—and it is likely to remain there.
As the South Pacific Islands become more widely known, which they are rapidly doing, the Marquesas are bound to attract the attention they deserve. Apart from their scenic grandeur and healthful climate, they are as fertile a group as any in the Pacific, and more so than most. It has been proved that cotton of the best quality flourishes there, as well as sugar cane and every other tropical product, and there are thousands of acres of knee-high, well-watered pastures for the stockman.
Since this visit to the Marquesas I have been living in France, to which country the group belongs, and I have not yet met a Frenchman who knows of their existence. In fact, the average Frenchman’s ignorance of his own possessions is nothing short of amazing.
Some day the congested areas of this queer old world will overflow, and the Marquesas will be discovered afresh. When that time comes, France will have people knocking at her door and demanding to know why she debars all other nationalities from acquiring land that she does not attempt to develop herself.
Already there is a movement afoot in England to establish a colony in the Marquesas. Permission has somehow been obtained from the French Government—a process comparable with the extraction of a particularly obstinate winkle from its shell—to purchase blocks of land, and distribute them amongst intending settlers who already number over a thousand.
“Lucky thousand!” say I, “and good luck to them!”
Notes
* See Appendix.