In the strange South Seas

Contents

PAGE

INTRODUCTION .9

Chapter I

Fate and Her Parcels — How It All came true — The First South Sea Island — Coleridge and the Tropics — The Spell of the Island Scents — What happens to Travellers — Days in Dreamland — A Torchlight Market — The Enchanted Fei . . . . . . . .12

Chapter II

The History of Tahiti — Drink and the Native — In the Old Wild Days — The Simple and the Civilised Life — What an Island Town is like — The Lotos Eaters — Cocoanuts and Courtesy — A Feast of Fat Thirigs — The Orgy on the Verandah — Schooners and Pearls — The Land of Tir-n'an-Oge . . .*- - . ,: - . . . . .26

Chapter III

Is It the Loveliest ? — How they deal with the Beachcomber — Cockroaches and Local Colour — The Robinson Crusoe Steamer — Emigrating to the South Seas — The Lands of Plenty — How to get an Island . . .50

Chapter IV

Where are the Six Thousand ? — Calling on the Queen — A Victoria of the Pacific — 'The Prince sleeps softly — The Mystical Power of the Mana — How Islanders can die *'• — A Depressing Palace — Round the Wonderful Roadway— The Home of Queen Tinomana — A Princess's Love Story — Once on Board the Schooner ! — The Incredible Crabs — Depravity of a Mor Kiri-kiri . . 68

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Chapter V

Feasting and Fun on Steamer Day — The Brown People of Raratonga — Who sent back the Teeth ? — Divorce made easy — Climbing a Tropical Mountain — A Hot-water Swim — Out on the Rainbow Coral Reef — Necklaces for No One . ..-.-. . ." . "r . 88

Chapter VI

The Simple Life in the South Seas — Servant Problems again — Foods and Fruits of the Country — The Tree that digests — Home-made Vanilla — The Invaluable Lime — How to cook a Turtle — In an Island Bungalow — The Little House on the Coral Shore — Humours of Island Life — Burying a Cycle — a Network of Names — Mr. Zebedee-Thunderstorm-Tin-Roof — The Nightdress that went to Church — The Extraordinary Wedding— South Sea Musicians — A Conductor's Paradise — Society Journalism in Song . . . , . 103

Chapter VII

The Schooner at last — White Wings versus Black Funnels — Not according to Clark Russell — The Marvellous White Woman— The Song of the Surf— Why not ? — Delightful Aitutaki — Into an Atoll — A Night in the House of a Chieftainess — The Scarlet Devil — Nothing to wear — How to tickle a Shark — The Fairy Islets — A Chance for Robinson Crusoe . . . . : .118

'CHAPTER vin

Jumping a Coral Reef — The Great Wall of the Makatea — Makaia's Wonderful Staircases — A Clothing Club of the Pacific — Cool Costumes in Atiu — The Lands that lie waste — Mystery of a Vanished Tribe — Fashions in Hair-Dressing — The Sign-Language of the Sex — Invited to a Feast 140

Chapter IX

Islands and Adventures — What about the Missionary ? — The Lotus Eaters — How to Hunt the Robber-Crab — The Ship that would not sail — Proper Place of a Passenger— One Way to get wrecked — The Pirate and the Pearls .... /•> .. - . . . 156

CONTENTS Vll

PAGK

Chapter X

How not to see the Islands — Lonely Niue — A Heathen Quarantine Board — The King and the Parliament — The Great Question of Gifts— Is it Chief-like ?— The New Woman in Niue — Devil-fish and Water-Snakes — An Island of Ghosts — How the Witch-Doctor died —The Life of a Trader . . . . .181

Chapter XI

A Life on the Ocean Wave — Where they kept the Dynamite — How far from an Iced Drink ? — The Peacefulness of a Pacific Calm — A Golden Dust Heap — Among the Rookeries — Sailing on the Land — All about Guano .• 212

Chapter XII

Pearl-fishing at Penrhyn — The Beautiful Golden-Edge — Perils of the Pearl Diver — A Fight for Life — Visit to a Leper Island — A God-forsaken Place — How they kept the Corpses — The Woman who sinned — A Nameless Grave — On to Merry Manahiki — The Island of Dance and Song — Story of the Leper and his Bird — Good-bye to the Duchess , .212

Chapter XIII

The Last of the Island Kingdoms — Fashions in Nukualofa — The King who was shy — His Majesty's Love Story — Who got the Wedding-Cake ? — The Chancellor goes to Jail — Bungalow Housekeeping — The Wood of the Sacred Bats — By the Tombs of the Tui-Tongas — A " Chief " Kava-party — The Waits ! — Mariner's Cave — The Cave of the Swallows — To Samoa » t -255

Chapter XIV

Stevenson's Samoa — What happened when it rained — Life in a Native Village — The Albino Chief — A Samoan " Bee " — The Tyranny of Time — Fishing at Midnight — Throwing the Presents — My Friend Fangati — The Taupo Dances — Down the sliding Rock — " Good-bye, my Flennie ! " ' . . . . . » . 281

V1U CONTENTS

Chapter XV

Southward to New Zealand — Into the Hot-Water Country — Coaching Days come back — The Early Victorian Inn — The Fire and Snow of Ruapehu — A Hotel run wild — Hot Lakes and Steaming Rivers — The Devil's Trumpet — The Valley of the Burning Fountains — Waking up the Champagne Lake . . . . 312

Chapter XVI

From Heaven to Hades — Gay Rotorua — Where One lives on a Pie-crust — The Birth of a River — Horrible Tikitere — In the Track of the Great Eruption — Where are

'. • the Pink and White Terraces ? — A Fountain fifteen hundred feet high — Foolhardy Feat of a Guide — How

; the Tourists were killed — A Maori Village — Soaping a

Geyser — The End < . . . . . 331

APPENDIX 349

In desire of many marvels over sea, When the new made tropic city sweats and roars, I have sailed with young Ulysses from the quay, Till the anchor rattled down on stranger shores.

KIPLING.

MOST men have their loves, happy or hopeless, among the countries of the earth. There are words in the atlas that ring like trumpet calls to the ear of many a stay-at-home in grey northern cities — names of mountains, rivers, islands, that tramp across the map to the sound of swinging music played by their own gay syllables, that summon, and lure, and sadden the man who listens to their fifing, as the music of marching regiments grips at the heart of the girl who loves a soldier.

They call, they call, they call — through the long March mornings, when the road that leads to everywhere is growing white and dry — through restless summer nights, when one sits awake at the window to see the stars turn grey with the dawn — in the warm midday, when one hurries across the city bridge to a crowded eating-house, and the glittering masts far away down the river must never be looked at as one passes. Of a misty autumn evening, when steamers creeping up to seaport towns send long cries across the water, one here, and another there, will stir uneasily in his chair by the fire, and shut his ears against the insistent call. . . . Why should he listen, he who may never answer ?

(Yokohama, the Golden Gate, Cape Horn, the Rio Grande, Agra, Delhi, Benares, Bombay, the Amazon, the Andes, the South Sea Islands, Victoria Nyanza, the Pyramids, the Nile, Lhassa, Damascus, Singapore, the tundras, the prairies, trade-winds, tropics, and the Line — can't you hear us calling i>)

Love is not stronger than that call — let sweetheartless girls left alone, and the man of cities who has loved the woman of the wandering foot, give bitter witness. Death is not stronger — those who follow the call must defy him over and over again. Pride of country, love of home, delight in well-known faces and kindly hearts that understand, the ease of the old and well-tried ways, the prick of ordinary ambitions hungering for the showy prizes that every one may see — these are but as dead leaves blown before the wind, when the far-off countries cry across the seas. Not one in a hundred may answer the call ; yet never think, you who suppose that love and avarice and the lust of battle sum up all the great passions of the world, that scores out of every hundred Englishmen have not heard it, all the same. " In the heart of every man, a poet has died young " ; and in the heart of almost every Briton, a wanderer once has lived. If this were not so, the greatest empire of the world had never been.

So, to The Man Who Could Not Go, I address this book — to the elderly, white-waistcoated city magnate, grave autocrat of his clerkly kingdom (never lie to me, sir — what was your favourite reading in the sixties, and why were you a very fair pistol shot, right up to the time when you were made junior manager ?) — to the serious family solicitor, enjoying his father's good old practice and house, and counting among the furnishings of the latter, a shelf of Marryats, Mayne Reids, and Michael Scotts, wonderfully free of dust — to the comfortable clergyman, immersed in parish cares, who has the oddest fancy at times for standing on dock-heads, and sniffing up odours of rope and tar — to all of you, the army of the brave, unwilling,

IN THE STRANGE SOUTH SEAS n

more or less resigned Left Behinds, who have forgotten years ago, or who will never forget while spiring masts stand thick against blue skies, and keen salt winds wake madness in the brain — to all I say : Greeting ! and may the tale of another's happier chance send, from the fluttering pages of a book, a breath of the far-off lands and the calling sea.

Chapter I

Fate and Her Parcels — How It All came true — The First South Sea Island — Coleridge and the Tropics — The Spell of the Island Scents — What happens to Travellers — Days in Dreamland — A Torchlight Market — The Enchanted Fei.

T IKE an idle messenger-boy, Fate takes a long while J— ' about her rounds, but she will get through with them and deliver all her parcels, if you give her time enough.

She has so much business that she confuses orders very often, and you are never sure of getting what you sent for. Still, you will certainly get something, if you wait, and it may even be the thing you demanded.

The morning she called at my door, with a very full basket, she had already been to my neighbours, and given them, in a big assortment of goods — a failure on the Stock Exchange, a hunting accident, and a broken engagement. What they had ordered was a seat in Parliament, and a winter at Monte Carlo, with anything good that might come in in the way of new-laid motor-cars. But Fate was, as usual, in a hurry, and she never changes any goods, once delivered. So they had to take them in.

I had given up expecting her when her knock came to my door, because my order had been sent in some years ago, -and so far had remained unacknowledged. But she fairly emptied her basket into my hands, once she was admitted.

" Goods all right, and none the worse for keeping ; couldn't find time to see to you before, I've been so busy attending to an order from Japan for a new army and a gross of assorted victories," she panted. " Had to serve the Czar of Russia with a lot of old defeats I've had lying by since the Crimea, instead of the new empire he sent for ;

and can't get time to fill more than half the German Emperor's order for fireworks. You private people are lucky to get anything at all. Count the goods, please — one journey round the world, two-and-a-half years of mixed adventures, a hundred South Sea Islands, threescore new friends, first quality, one large package luck. That's all, I think — sign the book, and let me go ; I've got seven attacks of appendicitis, a foreclosed mortgage, two lawsuits, and a divorce, to deliver in this square before lunch."

So, like the fairy tales, " it all came true," and one bright winter afternoon a Cunard liner bore me away from the streets and shops and drab-coloured, huddled houses of Liverpool, down the muddy Mersey — off round the world.

There were thousands of people on the quay, come to see the famous boat away, for it was Saturday afternoon, and the town took holiday. They had a few hours of freedom before them — then, the airless office room, the stuffy shop, the ledger and the copying-press, and the clattering typewriter, the grim window giving on the dark wet street, for six long days again. Next year, and the year after, just the office, the frowsy lodging, the tram car, the pen in the strong young fingers, the desk to stoop the broad young shoulders, the life foreseen, eventless, grey for ever and for ever. And I was going round the world.

It is three weeks later, and the big " A and A " steamer is ploughing along in the midst of a marvellous dazzle of diamond-spangled, pale-blue tropic sea and scorching, pale-blue tropic sky. The passengers, in cool white suits and dresses, are clustered together on the promenade deck, looking eagerly over the port railing, while the captain, telescope in hand, points out something lying only a mile away, and says : " That's Tiki-Hau, so now you've seen a South Sea Island."

We are on our way to Tahiti, a twelve-day run from

T4 IN THE STRANGE SOUTH SEAS

San Francisco, and are not stopping anywhere, but as Tiki-Hau is the only glimpse of land we shall get until we cast anchor in Papeete, every one wants to look at it. Not one of us has ever seen a South Sea Island, and we are all eager to realise this little fragment of our rainbowcoloured childish dreams.

Is it as good as we dreamed it ? we ask ourselves and each other. The verdict, given unanimously, is : " Yes — but not the same."

Here is no high green palmy peak, overhanging a waveless sea, with sparkling waterfalls dashing down from crag to crag, like the coloured illustrations in our old school prize books. There are, indeed, just such islands in the Pacific, we are told — many hundreds of them — but there are still more of the kind we are now looking at, which is not half so often mentioned. All South Sea Islands are either high or low ; the high island, with lofty mountains and dark, rich volcanic soil, is the familiar island of the picture book, while the low type, composed only of coral, is the variety to which Tiki-Hau belongs.

What we can see of the island, however, is enough to set at rest any tendency to comparison. None of us want anything better ; none of us think there can be anything better, among the wonders that the Great South Seas yet hold in store.

Tiki-Hau is an island of the atoll or ring-shaped type, a splendid circle of seventy and eighty-foot palms, enclosing an inner lagoon clear and still as glass. Outside the windy palms, a dazzling beach runs down to the open sea all round the island — a beach that is like nothing the travellers ever have seen before, for it is made of powdered coral, and is as white as salt, as white as starch, as white as the hackneyed snow-simile itself can paint it. All the island — the whole great ring, many miles in length — is coral too, white, branching, flowering coral under water, white, broken-coral gravel above, with here and there a thin skin of earth collected by a century or two of falling palm-leaves and ocean waste. Outside the magic ring the sea-waves tumble, fresh and blue, upon the cloud-white sand ; within, the still lagoon glows like a basin of molten emerald. Above, the enormous palm-trees swing their twenty-foot plumes of gaudy yellow-green to the rush of warm trade-wind, high in the burning sky. A glorious picture indeed — but one before which the painter well might tremble.

Here, for the first time, we begin to understand why pictures of tropical scenes are so few and so unsatisfactory. Paint ! what combination of coloured grease that ever came out of a box could hope to suggest the pale green fire of those palm-tree plumes, the jewel-blaze of the lagoon, the sapphire flame of the sea, the aching, blinding whitenesses of spray and sand ? Who could paint the sun that is literally flashing back from the light dresses of the passengers, making of every separate person a distinct conflagration, and darting lightning rays out of the officers' gold shoulder-straps and buttons ? Does any dweller in the dim grey North really know what light and colour are ? did we know, with our tinselled April days, and gentle blue and white August afternoons, that we were so proud of once ? Well, we know now ; and, alas, in the dim, prosaic years that are yet to come, we shall remember !

The ship steams on, the atoll fades away in the distance, and once more comes the changeless level of long blue empty sea. But we have seen a coral island, and the picture is ours for ever.

Flying-fish, skimming and " skittering " over the surface of the waves, we have all become used to now. The first day we met them was a memorable one, all the same — they were so exactly what one had paid one's money to see. Sharks have disappointed us so far ; never a sight of the famous " black triangular fin " have we yet enjoyed, and the passengers have an idea that something ought to be said to the steamship company about it. Nor have the equatorial sunsets quite kept up their stage character. Books of travel, and sea literature in general, have led us to expect that the sun, in the tropics, should go out at sunset as though Poseidon had hold of the switch down below the water line, and turned off the light the instant sun and horizon met.

i . . The sun's rim dips, the stars rush out, At one stride comes the dark.

p They don't, Mr. Coleridge, and it doesn't, and you never were there to see for yourself, .or you would not have talked beautiful nonsense and misled countless travellers of all ages who did see, but who have refused to look, save through your illustrious spectacles, ever since. Even on the equator, the sun gives one time to dress for dinner (if the toilet is not a very elaborate one) while it is setting, and after it has set. So dies one more illusion. Yet it can easily be spared, in the midst of a thousand wild dreams and strange imaginings, realised to the very utmost, as ours are to be ere long.

Tahiti comes at last. In the pearly light of a sunrise pure as a dawn of earliest Eden, we glide into the shadow of a tall, rose-painted peak, spiring eight thousand feet up into heaven, and anchor in the midst of a glassy mirror of violet sea. Papeete, the loveliest, sweetest, and wickedest town of all the wide South Seas, lies before us — just a sparkle of red roofs looking out from under a coverlet of thick foliage, a long brown wharf and a many-coloured crowd. Across the water steals a faint strange perfume, unlike anything I have ever smelled before — heavy, sweet, penetrating, suggestive. ... It is cocoanut oil scented with the white tiere flower, 'and never, from Tahiti to Samoa, from Raratonga to Fiji, Vavau, Manihiki, or Erromanga, will the South Sea traveller lose the odour of it again. Cocoanut oil, and the nutty, heavy smell of copra (dried cocoanut kernel) are charms that can raise in an instant for any old island wanderer, in the farthest corners of the earth, the glowing vision of the wonderful South Sea world.

. . . Smells are surer than sounds or sights To make your heartstrings crack, They start those awful voices o' nights That whisper : " Old man, come back ! "

(Old island wanderers in all parts of the world — settled down to desks in the E.G. district — tramping through the December glare of Pitt Street, Sydney, for " orders " — occupying a tranquil, well-bred billet, and a set of red-tape harness, in the Foreign Office — do you smell the tiere flower, and hear the crooning of the reef, and feel the rush of the warm trade wind, and the touch of the sun-baked sand, under the utu trees once more ?}

So I landed in Papeete, and found myself in the South Sea Islands at last.

All that afternoon, like " Tommy " in Barrie's .Thrums, I kept saying to myself : " I'm here, I'm here ! " . . . There was no mistake about Papeete. It was not disappointing or disillusioning, it was only more lifelike than life, more fanciful than fancy, infinitely ahead of all past imaginations.

There were the waving palms of picture and story, laden with immense clusters of nuts ; there were the wonderful bananas, with broad green leaves ten and twelve feet long, enshrouding bunches of fruit that were each a good load for a man ; there were the greenhouse flowers of home — the costly rare stephanotis, tuberose, gardenia — climbing all over the verandahs of the houses, and filling half-cultivated front gardens with stacks and bouquets of bloom. And the dug-out canoes, made from a single hollowed log supported by an outrigger, flitting about the glassy lagoon like long-legged waterflies — and the gorgeous, flamboyant trees, ablaze with vermilion flowers, roofing over the grassy roadway in a series of gay triumphal arches — and above all, beyond all, the fiery-gold sunlight, spilling i8 IN THE STRANGE SOUTH SEAS

cataracts of flame through the thickest leafage, turning the flowers to white and red-hot coals, painting the shadows under the houses in waves of ink, and bleaching the dust to dazzling snow — how new, how vivid, how tropical it all was !

The native population was out in full force to see the steamer come in. So, indeed, were the white residents, in their freshest suits and smartest muslins, but they met with small attention from the little band of newcomers. It was the Tahitians themselves who claimed all our interest — the famous race who had been so well liked by Captain Cook, who had seduced the men of the Bounty from allegiance to King George of England, a hundred and sixteen years ago, who were known all the world over as the most beautiful, the most amiable, and the most hospitable of all the South Sea Islanders.

Some of the passengers, I fancy, expected to see them coming down to the shore clad in necklaces and fringes of leaves, eager to trade with the newcomers^ and exchange large pearls and thick wedges of fine tortoiseshell for knives, cloth, and beads. . . . Most of us were better prepared, however, having heard a good deal about Papeete, the Paris of the South Seas, from the people of the steamer, and having realised, on our own account, that a great deal of water might run under a bridge in a hundred years, even here in the South Pacific.

So the smartness of the native crowd surprised only a few, of whom I was not one. On the contrary, I was surprised to find that here, in this big island group, with its fortnightly steamer, its large " white " town, and its bureaucratic French Government, some kind of a national dress did really still exist. The Tahitian men were variously attired, some in full suits of white, others in a shirt and a brief cotton kilt. The women, however, all wore the same type of dress — a flowing nightdress of cotton or muslin, usually pink, pale green, or yellow, and a neat small sailor hat made in the islands, and commonly trimmed with a pretty wreath of shells. Most of them wore their hair loose, to show off its length and fineness — Tahitians have by far the most beautiful hair of any island race — and not a few were shoeless, though nearly all had smart parasols. The colour of the crowd was extremely various, for Tahiti has more half and quarter castes than full-blooded natives — in Papeete at all events. The darkest, however, were not more than tea-coloured, and in most instances the features were really good.

So much one gathered in the course of landing. Later on, during the few days I spent in an hotel waiting for the Cook Island steamer — for, alas ! I was not staying in Tahiti — there was opportunity for something further in the way of observation. But

But It happens to every one in Tahiti, why

should I be ashamed of it ? There was once a scientific man, who came to write a book, and took notes and notes and notes — for two days and a half. Then, he thought he would take a morning's rest, and that is five years ago, and he has been resting ever since, and they say in the stores that he has not bought so much as a sheet of letter paper, or a penny bottle of ink, but that his credit for cigars and ice, and things that go with both very well, and for pyjamas to lounge about the back verandah in, and very cheap novels, and silk-grass hammocks, is nearly run out in Papeete. There was a Government official — perhaps it was two, or three, or sixty Government officials — who came to Papeete very full of energy and ability, and very much determined to work wonders in the sleepy little colony. . . . He, or they, is, or are, never to be seen awake before three in the afternoon, and his clerks have to type the signatures to his letters, because he will not trouble to write his name ; and their people think they died years and years ago, because they have never carried out their intention of telling some one to find some one else to send a message to say they are alive. And there are a dozen or fourteen gentlemen who keep stores in

Papeete, and if you go in to buy things in the morning or afternoon or evening, mayhap you will find the gentleman or his understudy asleep behind the counter, but mayhap you will find the door shut, and the proprietor away at breakfast, which takes him an hour, or lunch, which takes from two hours to three, or dinner, which occupies him from six till nine inclusive. After that, he may open again for a little while, or he may not.

Must I explain now what happened to me in Papeete, or why I am not in a position to add anything to the scientific or ethnological, or geographic knowledge of the world, concerning the Society Islands in general ?

A duty, obvious, immediate, and unperformed, is perhaps the best of all spices to a dish of sweet laziness. And there is not on earth's round ball such a spot to be lazy in as pleasant Papeete. One is never fairly awake. It is dreamland — and what a happy dream ! The golden light on the still lagoon is surely the " light that never was on sea nor land " — before we sailed in under the purple peaks of Orohena. The chanting of the coral reef far out at sea, unceasing, day and night, is the song the sirens sang to strong Ulysses, in the dream dreamed for all ages by the old Greek poet, long ago. The languorous voices of the island women, sweet and low as the " wind of the western sea " — the stillness of the island houses, where feet go bare upon the soundless floors, and music waxes and wanes so softly now and then in whispering songs or lightly swept piano keys, that it only blends with the long mysterious murmur of the wind in the rustling palm trees, to lull the senses into perfect rest — these, too, are of the world of dream.

Something out of dreamland, also, is the little hotel where most of the travellers stay — a rambling bungalow in a grass enclosure, overrun with vivid flowers and splendid leafage. That the proprietress should welcome her guests in a long lace and muslin nightgown-dress, her pretty brown feet bare, and her flowing wavy hair crowned with a wreath of perfumed gardenia and tuberose, seems quite a natural part of the dream ; that the chamber-maids should be beautiful island girls clad in the same garb, and that they should sit in the drawing-room playing the piano and singing wild melancholy island songs, like the sighing of the surf on the shore, when they ought to be making beds or serving dinners, is also " in the picture." That the Chinese cook should do elaborate Parisian cookery, and that the coffee and the curry and the bread (or at least the bread-fruit) should be picked in the garden as required, and that there should be no visible means of shutting the door of the bathroom, which is very public, until a carpenter