• - * . . . ..... T . . .. rjlif;*/ iwfitossstJtfj ufMttMXM) miiiHWvflHi sss;;i:« n .tv::'-*;:1 Bott ■ •ooo QQCX. ISSS modg BOW : ? s T- . f.r;; n>iww>m$y«^ ^noacutCMk irijc !; 5- rww MS, rTV^jCW Vi tfijj tmwM: *« Yin H4v t>V* » /it ‘ -U v H h k ‘a«j< A / '■■•• •'. ■«.... (a KKKWCTC WtRiff :£':iin ?.‘9§ «»•>»• . . JM. m i /.'. V:\ :‘ flif I 5 l \ I*. r^R i ^iHcoa ffnwlw" ^1V'! ■ * * ' jtfOflti i.firKPlK? rtniii5" M/'mwvwwiMriW' R£/U Library of the University of Toronto Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from University of Toronto https://archive.org/details/atollsofsun00obri_0 ATOLLS OF THE SUN Photo from L. Gauthier Nature’s mirror showed him why he could not leave ATOLLS OF THE SUN BY FREDERICK O’BRIEN Author of “Mystic Isles of the South Seas,” ‘‘White Shadows in the South Seas,” etc. WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PAINTINGS, DRAWINGS AND PHOTOGRAPHS TORONTO McClelland & stewart 1922 Copyright, 1922, by The Century Co. PRINTED IN U. 8. A. FOREWORD “Atolls of the Sun” is a book of experiences, impres¬ sions, and dreams in the strange and lonely islands of the South Seas. It does not aim to be literal, or se¬ quential, though everything in it is the result of my wanderings in the far and mysterious recesses of the Pacific Ocean. I am not a scientist or scholar, and can relate only what I saw and heard, felt and imagined, in my dwell¬ ing with savage and singular races among the wonder¬ ful lagoons of the coral atolls, and poignant valleys of disregarded islands. If I can make my reader see and feel the sad and beautiful guises of life in them, and the secrets of a few unusual souls, I shall be satisfied. The thrills of adventure upon the sea and in the shadowy glens, the odors of rare and sweet flowers, the memories of lov¬ able humans, are here written to keep them alive in my heart, and to share them with my friends. Life is not real. It is an illusion, a screen upon which each one writes the reactions upon himself of his sensory knowledge. The individual is the moving camera, and what he calls life is his projection of the panorama about him — not more actual than the figures and storms upon the cinema screen. In this book I have put the film that passed through my mind in wild places, and among natural people. FOREWORD It is useless to look to find in the South Seas what I have found. It is there, glowing and true, and yet, as each beholder conjures a different vision of the human spectacle about him, each can see the islands of romance only by the lens life has fitted upon his souJ. To seek a replica of experience or scenes is to spoil a possession. If this book has interest, one may read and laugh, be entertained or repelled with thanks that one can sit at ease, and watch this picture made on another’s mind in long journeys and in many days and nights of hazard and delight. CONTENTS CHAPTER I Leaving Tahiti — The sunset over Moorea — Bound for the Paumotu Atolls — The Schooner Marara, Flying Fish — Captain Jean Moet and others aboard — Sighting and Landing on Niau .... 3 CHAPTER II Meeting with Tommy Eustace, the trader — Strange soil of the atoll — A bath in the lagoon — Momuni, the thirsty bread baker — Off for Anaa ... 23 CHAPTER III Perilous navigation — Curious green sky — Arrival at Anaa — Religion and the movies — Character of Pau- motuans ........ 40 CHAPTER IV The copra market — Dangerous passage to shore at Kaukura — Our boat overturns in the pass — I nar¬ rowly escape death — Josephite Missionaries — The deadly nohu — The himene at night . . .58 CHAPTER V Captain Moet tells of Mapuhi, the great Paumotuan — Kopcke tells about women — Virginie’s jealousy — An affrighting waterspout — The wrecked ship — Landing at Takaroa ...... 80 CONTENTS CHAPTER VI Diffidence of Takaroans — Hiram Mervin’s description of the cyclone — Teamo’s wonderful swim — Mormon missionaries from America — I take a bath . . 96 CHAPTER VII Breakfast with elders — The great Mapuhi enters — He tells of San Francisco — Of prizefighters and Police gazettes — I reside with Nohea — Robber crabs — The cats that warred and caught fish . . . .114 CHAPTER VIII I meet a Seventh-Day Adventist missionary, and a des¬ cendant of a mutineer of the Bounty — They tell me the story of Pitcairn island — An epic of isolation 135 CHAPTER IX The fish in the lagoon and sea — Giant clams and fish that poison — Hunting the devil-fish — Catching bonito — Snarling turtles — Trepang and sea cu¬ cumbers — The mammoth manta . . . .157 CHAPTER X Traders and divers assembling for the diving — A story told by Llewellyn at night — The mystery of Easter Island — Strangest spot in the world — Curious stat¬ ues and houses — Borrowed wives — Arrival of Eng¬ lish girl — Tragedy of the Meke Meke festival . 175 CHAPTER XI Pearl hunting in the lagoon — Previous methods wasteful — Mapuhi shows me the wonders of the lagoon — Marvelous stories of sharks — Woman who lost her arm — Shark of Samoa — Deacon who rode a shark a half hour — Eels are terrible menace . . .211 CONTENTS CHAPTER XII History of the pearl hunger — Noted jewels of past — I go with Nohea to the diving — Beautiful floor of the lagoon — Nohea dives many times — Escapes shark narrowly — Descends 148 feet — No pearls reward us — Mandel tells of culture pearls .... 230 CHAPTER XIII Story of the wondrous pearls planted in the lagoon of Pukapuka — Tepeva a Tepeva, the crippled diver, tells it — How a European scientist improved on na¬ ture — Tragedy of Patasy and Maurii — The robbed coral bank — Death under the sea .... 249 CHAPTER XIV The palace of the governor of the Marquesas in the vale of Atuona — Monsieur L’Hermier des Plantes, Ghost Girl, Miss Tail, and Song of the Nightingale — Tapus in the South Seas — Strange conventions that regulate life — A South Seas Pankhurst — How women won their freedom ..... 271 CHAPTER XV The dismal abode of the Peyrals — Stark-white daughter of Peyral — Only white maiden in the Marquesas — I hunt wild bulls — Peyral’s friendliness — I visit his house — He strikes me and threatens to kill me — I go armed — Explanation of the bizarre tragic comedy 294 CHAPTER XVI In the valley of Vaitahu — With Vanquished Often and Seventh Man He Is So Angry He Wallows in the Mire — Worship of beauty in the South Seas — Like the ancient Greeks — Care of the body — Prepara¬ tions for a belle’s debut — Massage as a cure for ills 319 CONTENTS CHAPTER XVII Skilled tattooers of Marquesas Islands a generation ago — Entire bodies covered with intricate tattooed designs — The foreigner who had himself tattooed to win the favor of a Marquesan beauty — The magic that removed the markings when he was recalled to his former life in England ..... 336 CHAPTER XVIII A fantastic but dying language — The Polynesian or Maori Tongue — Making of the first lexicons — Words taken from other languages — Decay of vo¬ cabularies with decrease of population — Humors and whimsicalities of the dictionary as arranged by for¬ eigners ........ 364? CHAPTER XIX Tragic Mademoiselle Narbonne — Whom shall she marry? — Dinner at the home of Wilhelm Lutz — The Taua> the sorcerer — Lemoal says Narbonne is a leper — I visit the Tana — The prophecy .... 384? CHAPTER XX Holy Week — How the rum was saved during the storm — An Easter Sunday “Celebration” — The Governor, Commissaire Bauda and I have a discussion — Paul Vernier, the Protestant Pastor, and his church — How the girls of the Valley imperilled the immortal souls of the first missionaries — Jimmy Kekela, his family — A watch from Abraham Lincoln . . 414? CHAPTER XXI Paul Gauguin, the famous French-Peruvian Artist — A Rebel against the society that rejected him while he lived, and now cherishes his paintings . . . 439 CONTENTS CHAPTER XXII Monsieur PInspecteur des Etablissements Fran^ais de l’Oceanie — How the school house was inspected — I receive my conge — The runaway pigs — Mademoi¬ selle Narbonne goes with Lutz to Papeete to be mar¬ ried — Pere Simeon, about whom Robert Louis Steven¬ son wrote ........ 460 CHAPTER XXIII McHenry gets a caning — The fear of the dead — A visit to the grave of Mapuhi — En voyage . . . 482 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Nature’s mirror showed him why he could not leave Frontispiece FACINO PAGE Map The atoll of Niau ....... 16 The anchorage at Tahauku. Atuona lies just around the first headland to the right .... 17 A Paumotu atoll after a blow ..... 32 A squall approaching Anaa ...... 33 Picking up the atoll of Anaa from the deck of the schooner Flying Fish ...... 48 Canoes and cutters at atoll of Anaa, Paumotu Islands . 49 The road from the beach ...... 64 An American Josephite missionary and his wife, and their church ......... 65 Typical and primitive native hut, Paumotu Archipelago 80 Copra drying ........ 81 Atoll of Hikuera after the cyclone .... 96 The wrecked County of Roxburgh .... 97 Mormon elders baptizing in the lagoon . . . .112 Over the reef in a canoe . . . . . .113 Robber-crab ascending tree at night. One of the few photographs taken of the marauder in action . 128 Where the Bounty was beached and burned . . . 129 The church on Pitcairn Island ..... 144 The shores of Pitcairn Island ..... 145 Spearing fish ........ 160 A canoe on the lagoon . . . . . . .161 Ready for the fishing ....... 161 Spearing fish in the lagoon ...... 176 The Captain and two sailors of the El Dorado . . 177 Beach dancers at Tahiti ...... 192 ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE After the bath in the pool ...... Old cocoanut trees ....... The dark valley of Taaoa ...... Launch towing canoes to diving grounds in lagoon Divers voyaging in Paumotu atolls .... Ghost Girl ......... A double canoe ........ A young palm in Atuona ...... Atuona valley and the peak of Temetiu Malicious Gossip, Le Brunnec^-and his wife, At Peace . Exploding Eggs and his chums packing copra Frederick O’Brien and Dr. Malcolm Douglas at home in Tahiti ......... Some friends in my valley ...... Wash-day in the stream by my cabin .... Te Ipu, an old Marquesan chief, showing tattooing The famous tattooed leg of Queen Vaikehu . Tattooing at the present day . . . . . Easter Islander in head-dress and with dancing-wand . My tattooed Marquesan friend ..... The author with his friends at council .... House of governor of Paumotu Islands. Atoll of Fakarava ........ Nakohu, Exploding Eggs ...... Haabuani, the sole sculptor of Hiva-Oa The coral road and the traders’ stores .... Scene on beach a few miles west of Papeete . Tahiatini, Many Daughters, the little leper lass . Francis Grelet, the Swiss, of Oomoa . . . . Brunneck, the boxer and diver . . . . . A village maid in Tahiti ...... A Samoan maiden of high caste . . . . . Throwing spears at a cocoanut on a stake The raised-up atoll of Makatea . . . . . Paumotuans on a heap of brain coral . . . . Did these two eat ChocolatP ...... The stonehenge men in the South Seas .... 193 208 209 224 225 256 257 272 273 304 304 305 320 321 336 337 352 353 353 368 369 384 385 416 417 432 433 464 465 465 480 481 496 496 497 ATOLLS OF THE SUN ATOLLS OF THE SUN CHAPTER I Leaving Tahiti — The sunset over Moorea — Bound for the Paumotu Atolls — The Schooner Marara, Flying Fish — Captain Jean Moet and others aboard — Sighting and Landing on Niau. w OUS partons! We air off — off!” shouted Capitalize Moet, gaily, as the Marara , the schooner Flying Fish, slipped through the nar¬ row, treacherous pass of the barrier reef of Papeete Harbor. “Mon ami, you weel by ’n’ by say dam Moet for take you to ze lies D anger eases. You air goin’ to ze worse climate in ze sacre mundo. Eet ees hot and ze win’ blow many time like ’urricane. An’ you nevaire wash, because ze wataire ees salt como se o-c-ean. 99 We had waited for a wafting breeze all afternoon, the brown crew alert to raise the anchor at every zephyr, but it was almost dark when we were clear of the reef and, with all sails raised, fair on our voyage to the mysterious atolls of the Paumotu Archipelago. Often I had planned that pilgrimage in my long stay in Tahiti. At the Cercle Bougainville, the business club, where the pearl and shell traders and the copra buyers drank their rum and Doctor Funks, I had heard many stories of a nature in these Paumotus strangely dif¬ ferent of aspect from all other parts of the world, of 4 ATOLLS OF THE SUN a native people who had amazing knowledge of the secrets of the sea and its inhabitants, and of white dwellers altered by residence there to a pattern very contrary from other whites. For scores of years these traders and sailors or their forerunners had played all the tricks of commerce on the Paumotuans, and they laughed reminiscently over them; yet they hinted of demons there, of ghosts that soared and whistled, and of dancers they had seen transfixed in the air. What was true or untrue I had not known; nor had they, I believed. Llewellyn, the Welsh-Tahitian gentleman, after four or five glasses of Pernoud , would ask, “Do you know why the Paumotus are unearthly?” and would answer in the same liquorish breath, “Because they have n’t any earth about them. They ’re all white bones.” Woronick, the Parisian expert in pearls, referred often to the wonderful jewel he had bought in Takaroa from a Paumotuan, and the fortune he had made on it. “That pearl was made by God and fish and man, and how it was grown and Tepeva a Tepeva got it, is a something to learn; unique. It is bizarre, ejfrayant . I will not recite it here, for you must go to Takaroa to hear it.” And Lying Bill and McHenry, in a score of vivid phrases, told of the cyclones that had swept entire populations into the sea, felled the trees of scores of years’ growth, and left the bare atoll as when first it emerged from the depths. “I knew a Dane who rode over Anaa on a tree like a ATOLLS OF THE SUN 5 bloody ’orse on the turf,” said Lying Bill to me, with a frightening bang of his tumbler on the table.” ’E was caught by the top of a big wave, an’ away e drove from one side of the bleedin’ island to the other, and come right side up. A bit ’urt in the ’ead, ’e was, but able to take ’is bloomin’ oath on what ’appened.” I had not depended on these raconteurs for a vicari¬ ous understanding of the Paumotus ; for I had read and noted all that I could find in books and calendars about them, but yet I had felt that these unlettered actors in the real dramas laid there gave me a valid picture. My hopes were fixed in finding in spirit what they saw only materially. Moet stood by the wheel until we cleared the waters where the lofty bulk of the island confused the winds, and I, when the actions of the sailors in shift¬ ing the sails with his repeated orders had lost newness, looked with some anguish at that sweet land I was leav¬ ing. It had meant so much to me. A poetic mood only could paint the swiftly changing panorama as the schooner on its seaward tacks moved slowly under the faint vesper breeze; the mood of a diarist could tell how “the sun setting behind Moorea in a brilliant saffron sky, splashed with small golden and mauve-colored clouds, threw boldly forward in a clear- cut, opaque purple mass that fantastically pinnacled island, near the summit of whose highest peak there glittered, star-like, a speck of light — the sky seen through a hole pierced in the mountain. How in the sea, smooth as a mirror, within the reef, and here and there to seaward, blue ruffled by a catspaw, away to the horizon was reflected the saffron hue from above; how 6 ATOLLS OF THE SUN against purple Moorea a cocoa-crowned islet in the harbor appeared olive-green — a gem set in the yellow water. How the sunlight left the vivid green shore of palm-fringed Tahiti, and stole upward till only the highest ridges and precipices were illuminated with strange pink and violet tints springing straight from the mysterious depth of dark-blue shadow. How from the loftiest crags there floated a long streamer cloud — the cloud-banner of Tyndal. Then, as the sun sank lower and lower, the saffron of the sky paled to the tur¬ quoise-blue of a brief tropical twilight, the cloud-ban¬ ner melted and vanished, and the whole color deepened and went out in the sudden darkness of the night.” If one must say farewell to Tahiti, let it be in the evening, in the tender hues of the sunset, the effacing shadows of the sinking orb in sympathy with the day’s tasks done; the screen of night being drawn amid flam¬ ing, dying lights across a workaday world, the dream pictures of the Supreme Artist appearing and fainting in the purpling heavens. I was leaving people and scenes that had taught me a new path in life, or, at least, had hung lamps to guide my feet in an apprecia¬ tion of values before unknown to me. I came back to the deck of the schooner with Moet’s call for a steersman, and his invitation to go below for food and drink. I refused despite his “Sapristi! Eef you no eat by ’n’ by you cannot drink!” and when he disappeared down the companion-ladder I climbed to the roof of the low cabin. The moon was now high — • a plate of glowing gold in an indigo ceiling. The swell¬ ing sea rocked the vessel and now and then lifted her sharp prow out of the water and struck it a blow of ATOLLS OF THE SUN 7 friendship as it rejoined it. I unrolled a straw mat, and, placing it well aft so that the jibing boom would not touch me, lay upon my back, and visioned the pro¬ digious world I was seeking. The very names given by discoverers were suggestive of extravagant adven¬ ture. The Half-drowned Islands, the Low Archi¬ pelago, the Dangerous Isles, the Pernicious Islands, were the titles of the early mariners. For three hundred years the Paumotus had been dimly known on the charts as set in the most perilous sea in all the round of the globe. I had read that they were more hazardous than any other shores, as they were more singular in form. They had excited the wonder of learned men and laymen by even the scant depiction of their astound¬ ing appearance. F or decades after the eyes of a Euro¬ pean glimpsed them they were thought by many book¬ ish men to be as fabulous as Atlantis or Micomicon; too chimerical to exist, though witches then were a surety, and hell a burning reality. I fell asleep, and as during the night the wind shifted and with it the schooner veered, I had but a precarious hold upon the mat and was several times stood on my feet in the narrow passageway. The dream jinn seized these shiftings and twistings, the shouts of the mate in charge, the chants of the sailors at work, the whistle of the wind through the cordage, and wove them into fantasies, — ecstasies or nightmares, — and thus warded off my waking. But the sun, roused from his slumber beneath the dip of the sphere, could be put off with no fine frenzies. When even half above the dipping horizon his beams opened my eyes as if a furnace door had been flung 8 ATOLLS OF THE SUN wide, and I turned over to see my hard couch occu¬ pied by others. Beside me was McHenry, next to him Moet, and furthest, the one white woman aboard, the captain’s wife. We yawned in unison; and, with a quick, accustomed movement, she dropped below. The day had begun on the schooner. The Marara was once a French gunboat of these seas when cannons were needed to prevent dishonor to the tricolor by failure to obey French discipline, while France was making good colonists or corpses of all peoples hereabout. She was the very pattern of the rakish craft in which the blackbirders and pirates sailed this ocean for generations — built for speed, for enter¬ ing threatening passes, for stealing silently away under giant sweeps, and for handling by a small number of strong and fearless men. The bitts on the poop were still marked by the gun emplacements, and the rail about the stern was but two feet high. Now her owners were a company of Tahiti Euro¬ peans who, trusting largely to the seamanship and busi¬ ness shrewdness of her master, despatched her every few weeks or months on voyages about the French is¬ lands within a thousand miles or so to sell the natives all they would buy, and to get from them at the least cost the copra, shells, and pearls which were virtually the sole products of these islands. The cabin was one room, stuffy and hot, and mal¬ odorous of decades of cargo. A small table in the center for dining was alone free from shelves and boxes holding merchandise, which was displayed as in a coun¬ try store. Besides all kinds of articles salable to a primitive people, there were foods in barrels, boxes, ATOLLS OF THE SUN 9 tins, and glass, for whites and for educated native palates. Jean Moet, the commander of the Marara, was of the type of French sailor encountered in the Mediterranean, and especially about Marseilles and Spanish ports. He had a slight person, with hair and moustache black as the stones of Papenoo beach — nervous, excitable, moving incessantly, gesturing with every word. Twenty-eight of his forty years had been passed in ships. He had visited the lie du Diable, and had seen Dreyfus there; he chattered of New York, Senegal, Yokohama, Cayenne, was full of French ocean oaths, breaking into English or Spanish to enlighten me or press a point, singing a Parisian music-hall chanson - ette, or a Spanish cancioncita. His language was a curious hodge-podge bespeaking the wanderings of the man and his intensely mercurial temperament. His wife, who sailed with him on all voyages since their marriage five years before, was his opposite — large¬ boned and heavy, like a Millet peasant, looking at her brilliant husband as a wistful cow at her master, but not fearing to caution him against extravagance in stimulant or money. Her life had begun in Tahiti, and she had always been there until the dashing son of the Midi had lifted her from the house of her father — a petty official — to the deck of the Flying Fish . She was a housekeeper and accountant. She paid especial attention to the shelves of pain¬ killers, cough cures, perunas, bitters and medical dis¬ coveries from America, which, in islands where all al¬ coholic liquors were forbidden to the aborigines, sold readily to all who sickened for them. Moet was affec- 10 ATOLLS OF THE SUN tionate but stern toward Virginie, the wife, and talked to her as does a kind but wise master to a trained seal. For breakfast, the captain, Madame Moet, McHenry, and I had canned sardines, canned hash from Chicago, California olives, canned pineapple from Hawaii, and red wine from Bordeaux. Virginie explained in Tahitian French that Jean had forgotten to get aboard stores of fresh food. He had been at the Cercle Bougainville until we had gone aboard, she said caustically. Jean put his arm about her fat waist. “Mais, dar-leeng,” he said, soothingly, “tais-toi!” And then to me, “We are camarades, ma femme y mi, companeros buenos. Ma wife she wash ze linge. That good, eh? Amerique ze woman got boss hand now. Diable! C’est rottan! H ombre , ze wife ees for ze cuisine, and ze babee.” He pressed her middle, and advised her to clear up the table while we went on deck for a smoke. He became confidential with me after a pousse cafe or two. “We faire ze chose economique, Virginie y mi,” he said. “Maybee som’ day we weesh avoir leetle farm en France. En verite, mon ami, I forget ze vegetable an’ ze meat because I beat McHenry at ecarte in ze Cercle Bougainville, jus’ avant we go ’way from Pa¬ peete. I nevaire play ze carte on ze schoonaire! Jamais de la vie!” The captain had aboard a brown pup, a mongrel he had found in the Marquesas Islands. He had named him Chocolat, and passed hours each day in teaching him tricks — to lie down and sit up at command, to ATOLLS OF THE SUN 11 stand and to bark. The dog liked to run over the roof of the cabin and to crouch upon the low rail at the stern. As any roll or pitch of the vessel might toss him into the ocean, I feared for his longevity, but Chocolat — pronounced by Moet “Shockolah” — was able to fall inboard whenever the motion jeopardized his safety. “Eh, petit chien ” Jean Moet would cry, when Choc¬ olat skated down the inclined deck into the scuppers, or hung for a moment indecisively on the rail, “you by ’n’ by goin’-a be eat by ze requin . Ze big shark getta you, perrillo, an’ you forget all my teach you, mi querido!” He whipped Chocolat many times a day, when the puppy let down from “attention” before told, or when he attacked his food before a certain whistled note. “What will you do with him when his education is complete?” I asked Moet. “When lie ees educate, hein? He will be like ze sair- cuss animal. One year old, maybe, he make turnover, fight ze booce, drink wine, an’, puedeser, he talk leetle. Zen I sell heem some tourist, some crazee Americain who zink he do for heem like me. I sharge five hunder franc.” McHenry, who kicked Chocolat whenever he had an opportunity unseen, ridiculed Moet’s dream of gain. “You will like hell!” said McHenry. “When you ’ve got the dirty little bastard sayin’, ‘Good mornin’,’ nice an’ proper, he ’ll sneak ashore in some boat-load o’ truck, an’ some Paumotuan ’ll hotpot him. Wait till he ’s fat! You know what they ’ll do for fresh meat.” “Non, non !” answered the captain, angrily. “I am 12 ATOLLS OF THE SUN not afraid of zat. I teach heem I keel heem he go in boat, but maybe you take heem an’ sell heem on ze quiet, McHenry.” The small, cold eyes of McHenry gleamed, and a queer smile twisted his mouth. “Well, keep him from under my feet!” he warned, and laughed at some thought now fully formed in his mind. I could see it squirming in his small brain. McHenry was as rollicking a rascal as I knew in all the South Seas. He was bitter and yet had a flavor of real humor at odd times. Without schooling except that of a wharf-rat in Liverpool, New York, and San Fran¬ cisco, he had come into these latitudes twenty years be¬ fore. Cunning yet drunken, cruel but now and again doing a kindness out of sheer animal spirits or a desire to show off, he had many enemies, and yet he had a few friends. When the itching for money or the desire to feel power over those about him urged him, as most of the time, he proved himself the ripest and rottenest prod¬ uct of his early and present environment. He had had desperate fights to keep from being a decaying beach- comber, a parasite without the law ; but a certain Scotch caution, a love of making and amassing profits, and, as I learned later, a firm and towering native wife, had kept him at least out of jail and in the groove of trading. Boasting was his chief weakness. He would go far to find the chance to ease his latent sense of inferioritv to an audience that did not know fully his poverty of character and attainment. After years of ups and downs he had now quarreled with his recent employers, and was going to pitch his trade tent on some Paumotu atoll where copra and pearl-shell might be found. He ATOLLS OF THE SUN 13 thought that he might stay a while in Takaroa, one of our ports, because the diving season was about to open there. He and I being the only ones whose language was English, we were much together, but I always half despised myself for not speaking my mind to him. Still, those lonely places make a man compromise as much as do cities. What one might fear most would be having no one to talk with. We lived on deck, all four of us, the Moets, McHenry, and I, along with a half-caste mate, sleeping always on the roof of the cabin, and taking our meals off it, except in rain. In that moist case we bundled on the floor of the cabin. There was no ceremony. The cook brought the food through the cabin, and we handed up and down the dishes through the after scuttle, helping ourselves at will to the wine and rum which were in clay bottles on the roof. McHenry and I were the only passengers, and the crew of six Tahitians was ample for all tasks. They were Piri a Tuahine, the boat-steerer ; Peretia a Huitofa, Moe a Nahe, Roometua a Terehe, Piha a Teina, and Huahine, with Tamataura, the cook. The whole forward deck of the schooner was crowded with native men, women, and children, the families of church leaders who were returning to their Paumotu homes after attending a religious festival in Tahiti. They lay huddled at night, sleeping silently in the moon¬ light and under the stars. All day, and until eight or nine o’clock, they conversed and ate, and worked with their hands, plaiting hats of pandanus, sugar-cane, bam¬ boo, and other materials. White laborers massed in such discomfort would have quarreled, squabbled for place, and eased their annoyance in loud words, but the 14 ATOLLS OF THE SUN Polynesian, of all races, loves his fellow and keeps his temper. These were the first Paumotuan people I had seen in¬ timately, and I listened to them and asked them ques¬ tions. A deacon who at night removed a black coat and slept in a white-flowered blue loin-cloth, the pareu of all the Polynesians, gazed at the heavens for hours. He knew many of the stars. “Our old people,” he said, “believed that the gods were always making new worlds in distant sky places beyond the Milky Way, the Mcioroaheita. When a new world was made by the strong hands of the gods, the Atua, it went like a great bird to the place fixed for it. That star, Rehua ” — he pointed toward Sirius, — “was first placed by the Atua near the Tauha, the Southern Cross, but afterwards they changed it, and sent it to where it is now.” I looked at the glowing cross, and remembered the emotion its first sight had stirred in me. I was tossing on the royal yard of a bark bound for Brazil, up a hun¬ dred feet and more from deck, when, raising my head from the sail I had made fast, there burst upon me the wonderful form and brilliance of the constellation which five thousand years ago entranced the Old World but which is hidden from it now. The deacon again raised his hand and indicated the spot where Reliua had shone before the divine mind had changed. It was the Coal-sack, the black vacancy in the Magellan Clouds, so conspicuous below the cross when all the rest of the sky is cloudless and clear. The Maori mind had wisely settled upon that vast space in the stellar system in which not even an atom of stellar ATOLLS OF THE SUN 15 dust sheds a single flicker of luminosity as the point from which the gods had plucked Rehua. I had no such lucid reason for this amazing, celestial void as the half- naked deacon on the deck of the Marara. We had a poor wind for two days, and I looked long hours in the water, so close to the deck, at the manifesta¬ tions of organic and vegetable vitality. All life of the ocean, I knew, depended ultimately on minute plants. The great fish and mammals fed on plant forms which were distributed throughout the seas. These grew in the waters themselves or were cast into them along their shores or by the thousands of rivers which eventually feed the ocean. The flora of all the earth, seeds, nuts, beans, leaves, kernels, swam or sank in the majority ele¬ ment, and aided in the nourishment of the creatures there. They had, also, taken root on shores foreign to their birth, and had, from immigrants, become esteemed natives of many lands. They had increased man’s knowledge, too, as the sea-beans found on the shores of Scotland led to the discovery of that puzzle of all cur¬ rents, the Gulf Stream. After all was said, the land was insignificant compared to the water — little more than a fourth of the surface of the globe, and in mass as puny. The average elevation of the land was less than a fifth of a mile, while the average depth of the sea was two miles, or thirty times the mass of the land. If the solid earth were smoothed down to a level, it would be entirely covered a mile deep by the water. I felt very close to the sea, and fearful of its might. I envied the natives their assurance, or, at least, stolidity. The days were intensely hot. When the sails were furled or flapped idly, and the Marara lay almost still, 16 ATOLLS OF THE SUN listening for even a whisper of wind, I suffered keenly. The second noon our common exasperation broke out in the inflammable Moet. The captain shouted to Huahine, a sailor, to cover his head with a hat. The man was a giant, weighing more than two hundred and fifty pounds, but Moet ad¬ dressed him as he would a child. (C Sapristir he yelled, “Taupoo! Maamaa! Your hat, you fool!” “ Diablo ! amigo ” he said, testily. “Zose nateev air babee. I have ze men paralyze by ze sun in ze Mar- queses. In ze viento , when ze win’ blow, no dan-gair, but when no blow — sacre! ze sun melts ze brain off-off .” Captain Moet was dramatic. Whatever he said he acted with face, hands and arms, feet, and even his whole body. He made a gesture that caused me to touch my own hat, to consider its resistance to the sun, to feel an anticipation of harm. Suddenly he took the arm of the sailor at the wheel, Piha a Teina, a Tahitian, and, releasing the spokes from his hands, himself began to steer. “Go there in the lee of the mainsail,” he said in Tahi¬ tian, “and tell the American about your terrible adven¬ ture when you almost died of thirst !” “Look at him!” said Moet to me. “He is old before his time. The sun did that.” Piha a Teina stood beside me, shy, slow to begin his epic. He was shriveled and withered, pitifully marked by some experience unusal even to these Maori masters of this sea. I gave him a cigarette, and, lighting it, he began ; “I am Piha a Teina,” he said. “I was living in the Photo from L. Gauthier The anchorage at Tahauku. Atuona lies just around the first headland to the right ATOLLS OF THE SUN 17 island of Marutea in the Paumotus when this thing hap¬ pened. I set out one day in a cutter for Manga Reva. That island was seven hundred miles away, and we were sent, Pere Ani, my friend, and I, to bring back copra. The cutter was small, not so large as a ship’s boat. We had food for eight or nine days, and as the wind was as we wanted it, blowing steadily toward Manga Reva, we felt sure we would arrive there in that time. But we lost the stars. They would not show themselves, and soon we did not know which way to steer. This schooner has a compass, but we could not tell the direction by the sun as we had not the aveia. We became uneasy and then afraid. Still we kept on by guess and hope, be¬ lieving the wind could not have changed its mind since we started. On the tenth day we ate the last bite of our food. We had not stinted ourselves until the eighth day, and then we felt sure the next day or the next would bring the land. “But on the eleventh day we saw nothing but the sea. I had a pearl hook and with it we caught bonito. We ate them raw. They made us thirsty, and we drank all our water. It did not rain for many days, and we drank the salt water. When it rained we had nothing in which to catch and keep the fresh water. We could only suck the wet sail which we had taken down because we had become too weak to handle it if the gale had caught us with it up. We drifted and drifted with the current. The sun beat upon us and we were burned like the bread¬ fruit in the oven. I could not touch my breast in the daytime it was so hot. The time went on as slowly as the cocoanut-tree grows from the nut we plant. We left in the month you call October. Days and nights we 18 ATOLLS OF THE SUN floated without using the tiller except to keep the cutter before the wind when it blew hard. We had been asleep maybe a day or two when a storm came. We did not wake up, but it cast us on the island of Rapa-iti. Pere Ani never woke up, but I am here. The sun killed him.” “How long were you in the cutter?” I asked. Moet heard my question and replied : “Mais, zey lef’ Marutea in octobre, an’ ze Zelee, the Franche war-sheep, fin’ zem on Rapa-iti in Januaire. Zey was — yo no se — more zan seexty day in ze boat.” Piha a Teina expressed neither gladness nor sorrow that he had escaped the fate of Pere Ani. He knew, as his race, that fate was inexorable, and he contemplated life as the gift of a powerful force that could not be argued with nor threatened by prayers, though, to be in the mode, he might make such supplications. “If I had had such a Jiohoa moana, a chart of the sea, as we formerly made of sticks,” he said, “I could have found Manga Reva without the stars. We made them of straight and curved pieces of wood or bamboo, and we marked islands on them with shells. They showed the currents from the four quarters of the sea, and with them we made journeys of thousands of miles to the Marquesas and to Hawaii and Samoa. But we have forgotten how to make them, and I know nothing of the paper charts the white man has, but I can read the aveia , the compass of the schooner. We did not take our hooa in our canoes, but studied them at home.” The captain whistled, caught my eye, touched his fore¬ head to signify Piha a Teina was wandering mentally, and summoned the sailor to take the wheel. ATOLLS OF THE SUN 19 “He ees maamaa evvair since zat leetle voyage,” he said, sagely. On the morning of the fourth day from Papeete the first of the eighty Paumotu atolls raised a delicate green fringe of trees four or five miles away. It lay so low that from the deck of the schooner it could not be seen even on the clearest days at a greater distance. One heard the surf before the island appeared. It was only a few feet above the plane of the sea, flat, with no hill or eminence upon it, a leaf upon the surface of a pond. I could hardly believe it part of the familiar globe. It was more like the fairy-island of childhood, the coral strand of youth, the lotus land of poesy. It was, in reality, the most beautiful, fascinating, inconceivable sight upon the ocean. McHenry and I stood with Chocolat and watched the slow rise of the atoll of Niau, as the Marara, under less¬ ened sail and with Captain Moet at the helm, cautiously approached the land. We crept up to it, as one might to a trap in which one hoped to snare a hare but feared to find a wolf. All hands stood by for orders. Though the sky was azure and the sun broiling, one never knew in the Pernicious Islands when the unfore¬ seen might happen. Seven miles long and five wide, Niau was a matchless bracelet of ivory and jade. Grieg Island, some Anglo- Saxon discoverer once named it, but Grieg had fame abroad only. None spoke his name as we advanced warily over the road, familiar to them all as the Sulu Sea to me. The cargo for Niau came through the hatches, thrown up from the hold, sailor to sailor, and was piled on deck until all was checked. Madame Moet 20 ATOLLS OF THE SUN was on the poop by the after door of the cabin, hanging over each item and marking it off upon her inventory, while Jean hummed the “Carmagnole,” and swung the Flying Fish about on short tacks for her goal. Between the shifting of the canvas the long-boat was lowered, and the goods heaped in it: boxes and barrels, bales and buckets, edibles and clothing, matches and tobacco, gim- cracks and patent medicines. As closer we went, I saw that Niau was a perfect oval, composed of a number of separate islets or motus. These formed the land on which were the trees and shrubs and the people, but this oval itself was inclosed by a hidden reef, several hundred feet wide, on which the breakers -crashed and spilled in a flood of foaming billows. There was no enthusiasm over the beauty of Niau except in my heaving breast, and I concealed it as I would free thinking in a monastery. To McHenry and Jean and Virginia, a lovely atoll was but a speck upon the ocean on which to cozen inferior creatures. “Madre de Dios!” vociferated the skipper, when, a mile from the gleaming teeth of the reef, he brought the Marara up into the wind and halted her like a panting mare thrown upon her haunches. “Mc’onree et M’sieu’ O’Breeon, eef you go ’shore, tomble een, pronto!” He released the wheel to the mate, and we three scrambled over the rail and jumped upon the cargo as the boat rose on a wave, joining the four Tahitians who were at the heavy oars, with Piri a Tuahine at the stern, holding a long sweep for a rudder. It was attached by a bight of rope, and by a longer rope kept from float¬ ing away in case of mishap. ATOLLS OF THE SUN 21 Now came as delicate a bit of action with sails as a yachtsman, with his mother-in-law as a guest, might reck¬ lessly essay. Captain Moet sang out from his perch on a barrel to the half-caste at the wheel to go ahead, and the Flying Fish , which for a few minutes had been trem¬ bling in leash, turned on her heel and headed directly for the streak of foam, the roar of which drowned our voices at that distance. Eight hundred feet away, when it must have looked to a landsman on the schooner that she was almost in the breakers, we cast off the line and took to our oars. It was nice seamanship to save time by minimizing rowing, but certainly not in Lloyd’s rules of safety. Those who reckon dangers do not laugh in these parts. A merry rashness helps ease of mind. In five minutes our boat was in the surf, rolling and tumbling, and I on my merchandise peak clasped a bale fervently, though McHenry and Moet appeared glued to barrels which they rode jauntily. It was now I saw the art of the Polynesians, the ablest breaker boatmen in the world. All about seemed to me solid coral rock or distorted masses of limestone covering and uncovering with the surging water, but suddenly there came into my altering view, as the steersman headed toward it, a strange pit in the unyielding strata. Into this maelstrom the water rushed furiously, drawn in and sucked out with each roll of the ocean. The Tahitians, at a word, stopped row¬ ing, while Piri a Tuahine scrutinized intently the onrush- ing waves. He judged the speed and force of each as it neared him, and on his accuracy of eye and mind de¬ pended our lives. 22 ATOLLS OF THE SUN The oarsmen tugged with their blades to hold the boat against the sweeping tide, and abruptly, with a wild shout, Piri a Tuahine set them to pulling like mad, while he with his long oar both steered and sculled. “Tamau te paina !” all yelled amid the boom of the surf. “Hold on to the wood!” and down into the pit we tore ; down and in, the boat raced through the vortex of the chute, the pilot avoiding narrowly the coffin-like sides of the menacing depression, and the sailors, with their oars aloft for the few dread seconds, awaiting with joyous shouts the emergence into the shallows. All was in the strong hands and steady nerves of Piri a Tuahine. A miscalculated swerve of his sturdy lever, and we would have been smashed like egg-shells, boat and bodies, against the massive sides. But spirit and wood were stedfast, and I rode as high and dry from the imminent Scylla as if on a camel in the Sahara. In a few twinklings of an eye we were past the reef, and in the moat in fast shoaling, quiet water, studded with hummocks and heaps of coral. The sailors leaped into it shoulder-deep, and guided and forced the boat as far shoreward as possible, to curtail the cargo-carry¬ ing distance. Captain Moet, McHenry, and I went up to our waists, and reached the beach. CHAPTER II Meeting with Tommy Eustace, the trader — Strange soil of the atoll — A bath in the lagoon — Momuni, the thirsty bread baker — Off for Anaa. THE crusader who entered Jerusalem had no deeper feeling of realization of a long-cherished hope than I when my foot imprinted its mold in the glistening sand of the atoll of Niau. I stood in my track and scanned it, as Crusoe the first human mark other than his own he saw on his lonely island. Not with his dismay, but yet with a slight panic, a pleasant but alarmed perturbation, an awe at the won¬ der of the scene. . The moment had the tenseness of that when I saw my first cocoanut-palm ; it mingled a fear that I had passed one of the great climacterics of visual emotion. Here was I in the arcanum of romance, the promised land of chimera, after years of faint expectation. I was almost stunned by the reality, and I felt sensibly the need of some one to share the pathos that oppressed me. I did not forsake my love for Tahiti. That was fixed, but this atoll was not the same. Tahiti was an adored mistress, this a light o’ love, a dazzling, alien siren, with whom one could not rest in safety; a fanciful abode for a brief period, as incomparable to Tahiti as an ice-field to a garden. “What the bloody hell’s eatin’ on you?” exclaimed the irked McHenry, questioningly as he glared at me. 23 24 ATOLLS OF THE SUN “Are n’t your feet mates? Let ’s see Tommy Eustace! He might have a bottle o’ beer buried in a cool place.” Moet was shaking the salt water from his long, inky hair. He had stumbled and dipped his head in the brine. “ ’ Sus-Maria!” he swore. “Virginie she say Jean been drink.’ ” A shed-like building of rough boards, with unpainted corrugated iron roof, was a hundred steps from the water, the store and warehouse of the single trader, who supplied the wants and ambitions of the hundred in¬ habitants of Niau and endeavored to monopolize a meager output of copra and pearl shell. It was on a rude road, which stretched along the beach, edged by a dozen houses, small, wooden huts, or thatched straw shanties, much more primitive and poor than in Tahiti. All the remainder of Niau was coral, water, and cocoa- nut-trees, except a scanty vegetation. Thomas Eustace, the trader, or Tome, as the natives called him, was in the doorway of his establishment, awaiting the sailors who had begun at once to carry the Mararas freight from the boat through the moat. A quarter of a century ago, a broth of a boy from Ireland, he had stepped off a ship alongside the Papeete quay, and had never left the South Seas since. “Faioc, I had the divil’s own toime to shtav,” say Tome, as we four sat by an empty barrel head and drank the warmish beer he had offered us with instant hospital¬ ity. “I waz that atthracted by the purty gir-ruls, the threes, and the foine-shmellin’ flowers that the ould man of the ship nivir could dhraw me back to the pots an5 ATOLLS OF THE SUN 25 pans iv the galley. I waz the flunky in the kitchin iv a wind-jammin’ Sassenach bark, peelin’ praties, an’ waitin’ on sailormin. The father iv a darlin’ hid me out be Fautaua falls, an’ the jondarmy hunted an’ hunted, wid nothin’ for their thrubble.” A stoutish, quizzical man was Tom6, with brown face and throat and hands, a stubby, chewed mustache and sleepy, laughing eyes. By the purling steam of Fautaua, where Loti had lived his idyl with Rarahu and I had walked with a princess, Thomas Eustace became Tome forever and ever. He was well satisfied to be bashaw of an atoll, unused to greater com¬ fort as he was, and enamored of reef and palm, and the lazy, unstandardized life of the South Seas. “Ye may picther me,” he went on, as he poured the beer, “jumpin’ out iv the p’isonous galley iv that wind- jammin’ man-killer, an’ failin’, be the grace iv God, into a grove iv cocoanuts, wid roas’ pig, breadfruit, and oranges fur breakfus, deejunee , an’ dinner, to whistle low about a brown fairy that swung on the same branch wid me! The Emerald Isle the divil! ’T is Tahiti’s the Tir-na’n-Og! This beats the bogs an’ the peat an’ the stirabout, wid no peeler to move you on, an’ no soggarth to tell ye ye’re a sinner!” Tome was ten years in Penrhyn, the noted pearl island belonging to New Zealand, and known as Tongareva. Lying Bill, McHenry, and Eustace were fellow-traders in that lonely spot. “Fellow” in such relations meant the affectionate intercourse of wolves who united to chase the sheep and quarrel over the carcass. McHenry and Tome had greeted each other with cold familiarity, each knowing the other through and through, wondering 26 ATOLLS OF THE SUN how the other would beat him, and yet not averse to an exchange of trade news and the gossip of Tahiti and the Group, as they called the Paumotus. “How ’s old Lovaina?” asked Tome. “Chargin’ as much as ever for her cheap scoffin’s,” replied McHenry, who had never eaten a better meal than that served at the Tiare Hotel. Eustace, I doubted not, was a square and genial man, but among his busi¬ ness kind he had to fight bludgeon with bludgeon. He opened a fresh cocoanut and diverted the mouth of an infant from its natural fount to make it swallow a few drops. The mother, a handsome, young woman, proud of her armful, gestured smilingly that Tome was its father. “JSlavourneen dheelish!” he called her, and the baby, “Molly.” Cocoanuts differ in kind and quality as much as apples, and Eustace gave me a kaipoa, which at his direction I ate, husks and all, and found it delicious. Leaving the two merchants to continue their armed banter, I stepped outside the store and struck off the road toward the center of the island, through fields of broken coral, mysterious in its oppositeness from all other terrestrial formations. There was no earth that one could see or feel, but a matted vegetation in spots showed that even in these whited sepulchers of the coral animals outlandish plants had found the substance of life. The flora, though desperate in its poverty, was heartening in that it could survive at all. The lofty cocoanut-palm, standing straight as a mast or curving in singular grace, grew luxuriantly — the evergreen banner of this giant fleet of anchored ships of stone. ATOLLS OF THE SUN 27] Through a few hundred yards of this weird desert- jun¬ gle, I reached the lagoon which the inner marge of the great coral reef inclosed. No lake that I have seen approached this mere in simple beauty, nor had artist’s vision wrought a more startling, extravagant, yet perfect work of color. The lagoon of Niau was small enough to encompass with a glance from where I stood. I felt myself in an enchanted spot. Niau was not all wooded. For long stretches only the white coral lined the shores, with here and there the plumy palms refreshing the eyes — brilliant in contrast with the bare sheen of the coral, and softly rustling in the breeze. The water of the lagoon was palest blue, verging to green, clear almost as the pure air, and the beach shelved rapidly into depths. The beach was made up of tiny shells crumbling into sand, billions and billions of them in the twenty miles about the lagoon. In each of the legion coral isles this was repeated, so that the mind contemplating them was confused at the incalculable prodigality of the life ex¬ pended to build them and the oddity of the problem ar¬ ranged by the power planning them. “Every single atom, from the least particle to the largest fragment of rock, in this great pile,” said Dar¬ win, “bears the stamp of having been subjected to organ¬ ized arrangement. We feel surprised when travelers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these when compared to these mountains of stone ac¬ cumulated by the agency of various minute and tender 28 ATOLLS OF THE SUN animals. This is a wonder which does not at first strike the eye of the body, but, after reflection, the eye of reason.,, I sat down under a dwarf cocoanut and let my eyes and mind dwell upon the gorgeousness of the prospect and the insight into nature’s reticences it afforded. Everywhere were the tombs or skeletons of the myriad creatures who had labored and died to construct these footstools of Might. Could man assume that these eons of years and countless births, efforts, and deaths, were for any concern of his? But else, he asked, why were they? To show the boundless power and caprice of the Creator? Was not the world made for humanity? An atoll was to an island as a comet to a star — a freak or sport in the garden of the sea-gods. It was as if the Designer had planned to set up, in the thousand miles of ocean through which the Dangerous Islands stretched, a whimsical cluster of shallower salt lakes, and so had bidden trillions of tiny beings to inclose them. For, after all, an atoll was but a lagoon surrounded by a reef of coral, or rather two reefs, for in the plan of the Architect there was built a second reef for every atoll, and this outer barrier was sunken, as the one through which we had come, but yet took the brunt of the waves, and prevented them from washing away and destroying the innner and habitable reef on which I then sat. This hidden shoal belted the beach regularly, so that it made a moat between the two ; and yet in most atolls there was such an opening as that through which we had come, often a mere depression, sometimes a deep and wide mouth. One was forced to consider whether the Architect had not taken man into his scheme, for with- ATOLLS OF THE SUN 29 out such an opening no people could reach the shore and lagoon. But the grievous fact was that in some atolls the minute workers had left no door and that man himself had torn one open with tools and explosives. Even once within the moat, our boat was in comparative safety only in the mildest weather, for the moat was studded with lumps and boulders of coral, and the most crafty guard¬ ianship was imperative to keep our craft whole. If there had been an entry through the inner shore into the peaceful lagoon by which I lolled, then would anchorage and calm have been assured. So, of course, nature had in some other atolls than Niau attended to this detail, and these I was to find more inhabited and more developed, for in some even schooners might seek the haven of the lake, and a fleet lie there in security. The lagoons were thus, generally, safe and unflurried, though sometimes terribly harried by cyclones, such as Lying Bill described the Dane as riding from sea to sea across the entire island of Anaa. Each of the Paumotus was made up of a number of motus , or islets, parted by lower strata in which was the moat water. This string of motus assumed many dis¬ similar figures. One had fifty pieces in its puzzle — a puzzle not fully solved by science, or, at least, still in dispute. The motus were all formed of coral rock of comparatively recent origin geologically. Were these atolls the mountain-tops of a lost Atlantis or thrust-up marine plateaus? The wise men differed. A theory was that the atolls were coral formations upon volcanic islands that had slowly sunk, each a monument marking an engulfed island or mountain peak. Another, that volcanic activity, which mothered the 30 ATOLLS OF THE SUN high islands in these seas, caused to rise from the bottom of the ocean a series of submerged tablelands, leveled by the currents and waves, on which the coral insects erected the reefs — reefs just peeping above the surface of the water — and on which the storms threw great blocks of madrepores and coral broken from the mass. When in this condition, mere rocky rings of milky coral, over which each billow swept, without life or aught else than the structures of the marvelous zoophytes, floors cut and broken here and there by the surging and pounding breakers, the hand of the Master raised them up, as through Polynesia other islands had been raised, and fixed these Paumotus as the fairest growths of Neptune’s park. Lifted above the watery level, they were able to begin their task of usefulness. Seeds carried by currents, borne by the winds, or brought by those greatest of all pioneers and settlers of new countries, the sea-birds, were flung on these ready, but yet barren, atolls, and vegetation gave them an entrancing present. Volcano and insect combined to make these coral blossoms of the South Seas so different from any other mundane formations that the man with any dreaming in his soul stood awe-struck at the wonder and artistry of nature. They were the most wonderful and simple of nature’s works. They eluded portrayal by brush and camera. No canvas or film could grasp their sym¬ metry and grace, seize more than a fragment of their alluring form or hint of their admirable colors. Ravish¬ ing scenes from the deck of a ship, and marvels of con¬ struction and hue when upon them, they were sad and ATOLLS OF THE SUN 31 disappointing to the dweller, like a lovely woman who has a bad disposition. Circles, ovals, and horseshoes, regular and irregular, a few miles or a hundred in circumference, the Pau- motus were always essentially the same — the lagoon and the fringe of reef and palm. These lies Dangereuses were the supreme in creation in harmonious light and shade. They were the very breath of imagination. My thoughts harked back to the dawn of life, and the struggle between the land and water in which continents and islands were drowned, and others rose to be the home of beast and man, when God said, “Let the dry land appear.” These atolls had fought the ceaseless war which slowly, but eternally, shifted our terrestrial foothold. Makatea, nearer Tahiti, lifted its strange cliffs two hun¬ dred feet in the air. It had been raised by subterra¬ nean force thirty-five fathoms from the sea-level, and its coasts were vertical walls of that height. The young Darwin’s theory appealed even with these exaniples of resurgence. It was improbable that an elevatory force would uplift through an immense area great, rocky banks within twenty or thirty fathoms of the surface of the sea, and not a single point above that level. Where on the surface of the globe was a chain of mountains, even a few hundred miles in length, with their many summits rising within a few feet of a given level, and not one pinnacle above it? Yet that was the condition in these atolls, for the coral animal could not live more than thirty fathoms or so below the atmosphere, so that the basic foundations of the atolls, on wThich the 32 ATOLLS OF THE SUN mites laid their offerings and their bones, were fewer than two hundred feet under the surface. The polyp gnome died from the pressure of water at greater depths. Just outside the reefs or between the atolls, the depths were often greater than a mile or two. The vague science I possessed stimulated the memo¬ ries of my reading of that oldest civilization in tradition, the immense continent of Pan, which a score of millen¬ niums ago, according to the poet archaeologists, flour¬ ished in this Pacific Ocean. Its cryptogram attended in many spots the discovery of a new Rosetta stone. I myself had seen huge monoliths, half-buried pyramids and High Places, hieroglyphs and carvings, certainly the fashioning of no living races. Were these Pau- motus, and many other islands from Japan to Easter, the tops of the submerged continent, Pan, which stretched its crippled body along the floor of the Pa¬ cific for thousands of leagues? There were legends, myths, customs, inexplicable absences of usages and knowledge on the part of present peoples, all perhaps capable of interpretation by this fascinating theory of a race lost to history before Sumer attained coherence or Babylon made bricks. Over this land bridge, mayhap, ventured a Caucasian people, the dominant blood in Polynesia to-day, and when the connecting links in the chain to their cradle fell from the sights of sun and stars, the survivors were isolated for ages on the islands like Tahiti and the Mar¬ quesas. On the mountain-tops, plateaus beneath the water, the coral insect built up these atolls until they stood in their wondrous shapes splendid examples of A Paumotu atoll after a blow Photo by Dr. Theodore P. Cleveland ATOLLS OF THE SUN 33 nature’s self-arrested labor, sculptures of unbelievable brilliancy. To them came first Caucasians who had been spared in the cataclysm, and later the new sailors of giant canoes who followed from Asia the line of islets and atolls, fighting with and conquering the Caucasians, and merging into them in the course of generations. These first and succeeding migrations must have been forced by devastating natural phenomena, by terrible economic pressure, by wars and tribal feuds. It was not probable that any people deliberately chose these atolls in preference to the higher lands, but that they occupied them in lieu of better on account of evil for¬ tune. These eighty Paumotu islands averaged about forty miles apart, with only two thousand people in all of them, which would allow, if equally distributed, only twenty-five inhabitants to each. On more than half of them no person lived, and all the others were scantily peopled. Three or four hundred might occupy one atoll where shell and cocoanuts were bountiful and fish plentiful and good, while two score and more atolls were left for the frigate-bird to build its nest and for the robber-crab to eat its full of nuts. The thud of a cocoanut beside me stirred me from my reverie. I was wet with the wading ashore and the sweat of my walk, and so I removed my few garments and plunged into the lagoon. Going down to test the declivity a yard or so from the water’s edge I dropped twenty feet and touched no bottom. The water was limpid, delicious, and I could see the giant coral fans waving fifty feet below me. 34 ATOLLS OF THE SUN As I loitered on my back in the water, and looked down into the crystal depths and at the cloudless sky, I had a moment’s phantasm of a great city, its lofty trade battlements, its crowded streets, the pale, set faces of its people, the splendor of the rich houses, the squalor of the tenements, the police with clubs and guns, and the shrieking traffic. Here was the sweetest con¬ trast, where man had hardly touched the primitive work of nature. It was long from Sumer, and far from Gotham. I was floating at ease when I heard a voice. It seemed to come out of the water. It was soft and al¬ most etheric. “Maitair it said, which meant, “You ’re all right.” I turned on my side, and by my garments was a long, gaunt Niauan, with a loose mouth, loafing there, with his eyes fawning upon me. He smiled sweetly, and said, “Goodanighta!” As it was hardly seven o’clock in the morning, the sun a ball of fire, and the glare of the reef like the shine of a boy’s mirror in one’s eyes, I argued against his English education. But courtesy is not correction. I said in kind, “Goodanighta!” He came into the water and repaid me by shaking my hand, and with a movement toward the beach, said, “Damafina!” “Maitair I corroborated his opinion, and then he beckoned to me to leave the lagoon and follow him. I dressed, all moist as I was, and we returned toward the village, I wondering what design on me he had. “She canna fik (fix) you show Niau,” my cicerone explained, as he waved toward the island. “All right, good, number one,” I assented. ATOLLS OF THE SUN 35 He laughed with pleased vanity at his success in con¬ versing with me in my tongue and at the envious looks of the people on their tiny porches as we passed them, and I saluted them. “Momuni! Momuni !” they called after him with scornful laughter, and beckoned me to leave him and join them. “Haere mai !” they said, sweetly to me. Come to us!” My guide did not like either the name they gave him or their efforts to alienate us. He retorted with an impolite gesticulation, and cried, “Popay! Popay!” Momuni , though, was plainly nervous, and afraid that I might be won over by the opposition. He plucked me by my wet sleeve and directed me to a shanty of old boards set upon a platform of coral rocks four feet from the bed of the atoll. In its single room on a white bedspread were a dozen loaves of bread, crisp and white, and smelling appetizingly. He lifted one, squeezed it to show its sponginess, and put it to my nose. He sniffed, and said, “She the greata coo-ooka.” I guessed that he referred to himself as the baker. He pointed out toward the schooner and made me understand that this baking was a present to me. I was embarrassed, and with many flourishes explained that the Tahitian cook of the Marara could not be com¬ pared with him as a bread-maker, but that he was of a jealous disposition and might resent bitterly the gift. My companion was cast down for a moment, but bright¬ ened with another idea. Through a hundred yards more of coral bones we plowed to his oven, a huge, coral stove like a lime-kiln, with a roof, and bags of Victor 36 ATOLLS OF THE SUN flour from the Pacific Coast beside it. Pridefully he made me note everything, as an artist might his studio. Momuni then touched my arm, and said, “Haere! We can do.” We walked along the beach of the lagoon and found a road that paralleled the one we had come. It was lower than the other and the rain had flooded it. The water was brown and stagnant, even red in pools, like blood. Uncanny things shot past my feet or crawled upon them, and once something that had not the feel of anything I knew of climbed the calf of my leg, and when I turned and saw it dimly I leaped into the air and kicked it off. I heard it plop into the dark water. Down this marsh we plodded and paddled, floundered and splashed for half a mile. The cocoanut-palms arched across it, but there was not a person nor a habita¬ tion in view. I wondered why “she the great cook” had led me into this morass. Momuni looked at me mysteriously several times, and his lips moved as if he had been about to speak. He studied my countenance attentively, and several times he patted and rubbed my back affectionately and said, “You damafina.” Then, slimy and sloppy as I was. covered with the foul water up to my waist, when we were in the darkest spot Momuni halted and drew me under a palm. He would either seek to borrow money or to cut my throat, I thought hastily. Again he scanned me closely, and I, to soften his heart and avert the evil, tried to appear firm and unafraid. To my astonish¬ ment he took from his pocket five five-franc notes, those ugly, red-inked bills which are current in all the ATOLLS OF THE SUN 37 Etablissements Franfais de VOceanie, and held them under my nose. He smiled and then made the motion of pulling a cork, and of a bottle’s contents gurgling through his loose mouth and down his long neck. I shuddered at my thoughts. Could it be that in this dry atoll, with intoxicants forbidden, and prison the penalty of selling or giving them to a native, this hospi¬ table Niauan had offered me his bread and shown me his oven, and the glories of the isle, and was displaying those five red notes to seduce me into breaking the law, into smuggling ashore a bottle of rum or wine? I was determined to know the worst. I drew from my drawers (I had worn no trousers) an imaginary corkscrew, and from my undershirt an unsubstantial bottle. I pulled a supposititious cork, and took a long drink of the unreal elixir. Momuni was transfixed. His jaws worked, and his tongue extended. He squeezed my hand' with happiness and hope, and left in it the five scarlet tokens of the Banque de VIndo - Chine. “Wina damafina; rumma damafina,” he confided. The man would be content with anything, so it bit his throat and made him a king for an evil hour. Tome was dealing out tobacco when we reached his store. His wife and baby, an Irish-Penrhyn baby, were now eating a can of salmon and Nabisco wafers. “Who is this gentleman, Mr. Eustace?” I asked, pointing to Momuni. “He ’s an omadhaun , a nuisance, that he is, sure,” said Tome. “He ’s a Mormon deacon that peddles bread an’ buys his flour from some one else because I won’t trust him. He ’s the only Mormon in this blessed 33 ATOLLS OF THE SUN island. Every last soul is a Roman Cat’lic, except me, and I ’m a believer in the leprechawn. Has that hooli¬ gan been thryin’ to work ye for a bottle of rum? He ’ll talk a day for a drink.” “What ’s Momuni and Popay V’ “ Momuni is the way they say ‘Mormons.’ The other’s the pope wid the accint on the last syllable. It ’s the name for Cat’lics all over these seas, because they worship the pope iv Rome. The Popays run this island, but the Momunis have got Takaroa and some others by the tail.” I turned to look at my guide, the bread-maker. I had new admiration for him. It took courage to be the one Mormon among a hundred Catholics, and to try to sell them the staff of life. But he could not with¬ stand the withering glances of Tome, and fled, with gestures to me which I could only hazard to mean to meet him later in the fearsome swamp, with the rum. “Does Momuni owe you any money?” I asked the trader, who was lighting his wife’s cigarette. “Does he? He owes me forty francs for flour, and I ’ll nivir see the shadow iv them. I ’ll tell ye, though, he ’s the best baker in the Group, an’ they ’re crazy about his bread.” Eustace had no cargo for us, and McHenry and I caught the last boat for the Marara, Moet having stayed for one trip only. “Come an’ shtay wid us a month or two,” said Tome in farewell. “We ’ll make ye happy and find ye a sweetheart! ’T is here ye can shpend yer valibil time doin’ nawthin’ at all, at all.” He laughed heartily at his joke on virtue, and as we ATOLLS OF THE SUN 3d dashed through the surf to climb into the boat I turned to see him telling the assembling villagers some story that might provoke a laugh and keep their copra a mo¬ nopoly for him. CHAPTER III Perilous navigation — Curious green sky — Arrival at Anaa — Religion and the movies — Character of Paumotuans. CURRENT set against us all night. Now I understood fully the alarms and misgivings that had caused the first and following dis¬ coverers of the “Pernicious Islands” to curse them by the titles they gave them. Our current was of the mischievous sort that upset logarithms and dead reckon¬ ing, and put ships ashore. “This group is a graveyard of vessels,” said Mc¬ Henry, “and there ’d be ten times as many wrecked, if they come here. Wait till you see the County of Roxburgh at Takaroa! I ’ve been cruisin’ round here more ’n twenty years, and I never saw the current the same. The Frog Government at Papeete is always talkin’ about puttin’ lighthouses on a half-dozen of these atolls, *but does nothin’. Maybe the chief or a trader hangs a lantern on top of his house when he expects a cargo for him, but you can’t trust those lights, and you can’t see them in time to keep from hittin’ the reef. There ’s no leeway to run from a wind past beating. It ’s lee shore in some bloody direction all the time. “There ’s a foot or two between high and low, and it ’s low in the lagoon when the moon is full. It ’s high when the moon rises and when it sets. In atolls where there ’s a pass into the lagoon, there ’s a hell 40 ATOLLS OF THE SUN 41 of a current in the lagoon at the lowerin’ tide, and in the sea near the lagoon when the tide is risin’. We’re goin’ to beat those tides with engines. In five years every schooner in the group will have an auxiliary. There’s only one now, the Fetia Taiao, and she ’s brand new. It used to be canoes, and then whale¬ boats, and then cutters here, and purty soon it ’ll be gasolene schooners.” Then will the cry arise that romance has perished of artificiality. But the heart of man is always the same, and nothing kills romance but sloth. We battled with the current and a fresh wind during the long, dark hours, Jean Moet never leaving the deck, and I keeping him company. Below on a settee Vir- ginie said her beads or slept. I could see her by the smudgy cabin lamp, and hear her call to her husband two or three times, hours apart, “Qa va bien V’ Jean would answer in Tahitian, as to a sailor, “Maitai” and invari¬ ably would follow his mechanical reply, with “ Et toi, dors-tuV’ Ever light-hearted, currents nor squalls could burden his Gascon spirit. He looked at the stars, and he looked at the water, he consulted with the mate, and gave orders to the steersman. “Eli Fen” he said to me, “moi, I am comme monsieur ze gouverneur ov ze Paumotu who live een Favarava, over zere.” He pointed into the darkness. “ ’E ’as a leetle schoonaire an’ ’e keep ze court and ze calaboose, hot mos’ly ’e lis’en to ze musique an’ make ze dance. La vie est triste ; vive la bagatelle! Maybee we pick op Anaa in ze morning. Eef not, amigo mio, Virginie she weel pray for nous both. 42 ATOLLS OF THE SUN Anaa, or Chain Island, as Captain Cook named it be¬ cause of its eleven motus or islets, strung like emeralds and pearls in a rosary, was not visible at daybreak, but as I studied the horizon the sky turned to a brilliant green. I thought some dream of that Tir-na’n-Og spoken of by Tome in Niau obsessed me. I turned my back and waited for my eyes to right themselves. One sees green in the rainbow and green in the sunset, but never had I known a morning sky to be of such a hue. McHenry came on deck in his pajamas, and looked about. “Erin go bragh !” he remarked. “Ireland is castin’ a shadow on the bloody heaven. There,” he pointed, “is the sight o’ the bleedin’ world. You ’ve never seen it before an’ you won’t see it again, unless you come to Anaa in the mornin’ or evenin’ of a purty clear day. It ’s the shinin’ of the lagoon of Anaa in the sky, an’ it ’s nowhere else on the ball. There ’s many a Kanaka in ’is canoe outa sight o’ land has said a prayer to his god when he seen that green. He knew he was near Anaa. You can see that shine thirty or thirty-five miles away, hours before you raise the atoll.” Some curious relation of the lagoon to the sky had painted this hazy lawn on high. It was like a great field of luscious grass, at times filmy, paling to the color of absinthe touched with water, and again a true aqua¬ marine, as I have seen the bay of Todos Santos, at En¬ senada of Lower California. Probably it is the shal¬ lowness of the waters, which in this lagoon are strangely different from most of the inland basins of the South Sea Isles. To these mariners, who moved their little boats between them, the mirage was famed; and the ATOLLS OF THE SUN 43 natives had many a legend of its origin and cause, and of their kind being saved from starvation or thirst by its kindly glint. McHenry called down the companionway, “Hey, monster, you can see the grass on Anaa. Vite-vite!” Moet, who was below, drinking a cup of coffee, leaped up the companionway. He called out swift orders to go over on the other tack, and headed straight for the mirage. The schooner heeled to the breeze, now fresh¬ ening as the sun became hotter, and we reeled off six or seven knots with all canvas drawing. In an hour the celestial plot of green had vanished, fading out slowly as we advanced, and we began to glimpse the cocoanuts on the beach, though few trees showed on the sky-line, and they were twisted as in travail. Anaa, as others of these islands and Tahiti, too, had suffered terribly by a cyclone a few years ago. More than any other island of this group Anaa had felt the devastating force of the matai rorofai, the “wind that kills” — the wind that slew Lovaina’s son and made her cut her hair in mourning. Hikueru lost more people, because there were many there ; but Anaa was mangled and torn as a picador’s horse by the horns of the angry bull. A half-mile away we could plainly see the havoc of wind and wave. The reef itself had been broken away in places, and coral rocks as big as houses hurled upon the beach. “I was there just after the cyclone,” said McHenry. “It was a bloomin’ garden before then, Anaa. It was the only island in the Paumotus in which they grew most of the fruits as in Tahiti, the breadfruit, the banana, the orange, lime, mango, and others. It may 44 ATOLLS OF THE SUN be an older island than the others or more protected usually from the wind; but, anyhow, it had the richest soil. The Anaa people were just like children, happy and singin’ all the time. That damned storm knocked them galley-west. It tore a hole in the island, as you can see, killed a hundred people, and ended their pros¬ perity. There was a Catholic church of coral, old and bloody fine, and when I got here a week after the cy¬ clone I could n’t find the spot where the foundations had been. I came with the vessels the Government sent to help the people. You never seen such a sight. The most of the dead were blown into the lagoon or lay under big hunks of coral. People with crushed heads and broken legs and arms and ribs were strewn all around. The bare reef is where the village was, and the people who went into the church to be safe were swept out to sea with it.” As at Niau, the schooner lay off the shore, and the long-boat was lowered. In it were placed the cargo, and with Moet, McHenry, and me, men, women, and children passengers, four oarsmen and the boat-steerer, it was completely filled, we sitting again on the boxes. Once more the Flying Fish towed the boat very near to the beach, and at the cry of “Let go!” flung away the rope’s end and left us to the oars. The passage through the reef of Anaa was not like that of Niau. There was no pit, but a mere depression in the rocks, and it took the nicest manoeuvering to send the boat in the exact spot. As we approached, the huge boulders lowered upon us, threatening to smash us to pieces, and we backed water and waited for the psychological mo¬ ment. The surf was strong, rolling seven or eight feet ATOLLS OF THE SUN 45 high, and crashing on the stone with a menacing roar, but the boat-steerer wore a smile as he shouted, “Tamau te paina !” The oars lurched forward in the water, the boat rose on the wave, and onward we surged; over the reef, scraping a little, avoiding the great rocks by inches al¬ most, and into milder water. The sailors leaped out, and with the next wave pulled the boat against the smoother strand; but it was all coral, all rough and all dangerous, and I considered well the situation before leaving the boat. I got out in two feet of water and raced the next breaker to the higher beach, my camera tied on my head. There was no beach, as we know the word — only a jumbled mass of coral humps, millions of shells, some whole, most of them broken into bits, and the rest mere coarse sand. On this were scattered enormous masses of coral, these pieces of the primitive foundation up- heaved and divided by the breakers when the cyclone blew. The hand of a Titan had crushed them into shapeless heaps and thrown them hundreds of feet to¬ ward the interior, the waves washing away the soil, destroying all vegetation, and laying bare the crude floor of the island. From the water’s edge I walked over this waste, gleaming white or milky, for a hundred yards before I reached the copra shed of Lacour, a French trader, and sat down to rest. The sailors bore the women and children on their shoulders to safety, and then commenced the landing of the merchandise for La¬ cour. Flour and soap, sugar, biscuit, canned goods, lamps, piece goods; gauds and gewgaws, cheap jewelry, beads, straw for making hats, perfumes and shawls. 46 ATOLLS OF THE SUN Lacour, pale beneath his deep tan, black-haired and slender, greeted us at the shed with the dead-and-alive manner of many of these island exiles, born of torrid heat, long silences, and weariness of the driven flesh. A cluster of women lounged under a tolionu tree, the only shade near-by, and they smiled at me and said, “la ora na oeT I strolled inland. It was an isle of desolation, rav¬ aged years ago, but prostrated still, swept as by a gi¬ gantic flail. Everywhere I beheld the results of the cataclysm. Picking up shells and bits of coral at haphazard, I came upon the bone of a child, the forearm, bleached by wind and rain. Few of the bodies of the drowned had been interred with prayer, but found a last resting- place under the coral debris or in the maws of the sharks that rode upon the cyclone’s back in search of prey. It was very hot. These low atolls were always ex¬ cessively warm, but not humid. It was a dry heat. The reflection of the sunlight on the blocks of coral and the white sand made a glare that was painful to whites, and made colored glasses necessary to shield their eyes. Temporary blindness was common among new-comers, thus unprotected. I walked miles and never lost the evidence of violence and loss. There was an old man by a coral pen, in which were three thin, measly pigs, a grayish yellow in color. He showed me to a small, wooden church. “There are four Catholic churches in Anaa,” he said, “with one priest, and there are three hundred souls all told in this island. The priest goes about to the dif¬ ferent churches, but money is scarce. This New Year ATOLLS OF THE SUN 47 the contribution was so trifling, the priest, who knew the bishop in Papeete would demand an accounting, sent word to know why — and what do you think he got back ? That Lacour, the trader, with his accursed cinemato¬ graph, had taken all the money. He charged twenty- five cocoanuts to see the views in his copra shed, and they are wonderful; but the churches are empty. We are all Katorika “Katorika?” I queried. “That is Popay?” The old man frowned. “Popay! That is what the Porotetani [Protestants] call the Katorika. I am the priest's right hand. But we are poor, and Lacour, with his store and now with his machine that sets the people wild over cowaboyas, and shows them the Farani [French] and the Amariti [Americans] in their own islands — there is no money for the church.” I interrupted the jeremiad of the ancient acolyte. “Was there nothing left of the old church?” I asked. The hater of cinematographs took me into the humble wooden structure, and there were a bronze crucifix and silver candlesticks that had been in the coral edifice. “I saved them,” he said proudly. “When I saw the wind was too great, when the church began to rock, I took them and buried them in a hole I dug. I did this before I climbed the tree which saved me from the big wave. Ah, that was a real cathedral. The people of Anaa are changed. The best died in the storm. They want now to know what is going on in Papeete, the great world.” A hundred years ago the people of Anaa erected three temples to the god of the Christians. For a century 48 ATOLLS OF THE SUN they have had the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Anaa had witnessed a bitter struggle between con¬ tending churches to win adherents. When F ranee took hold, France was Catholic, and the priests had every op¬ portunity and assistance to do their pious work. The schools were taught by Catholic nuns. Their govern¬ mental subsidy made it difficult for the English Prot¬ estants to proselytize, and with grief they saw their flocks going to Rome. Only the most zealous Protes¬ tant missionaries were unshaken by the change. When the anti-clerical feeling in France triumphed, the Con¬ cordat was broken, and the schools laicized, the priests and nuns in these colonies were ousted from the schools; the Catholic church was not only not favored, but, in many instances, was hindered by officials who were of anti-clerical feelings. The Protestant sects took heart again, and made great headway. The Mormons re¬ turned, the Seventh Day Adventists became active, and many nominal Catholics fell away. The fact was that it was not easy to keep Polynesians at any heat of re¬ ligion. They wanted entertainment and amusement, and if a performance of a religious rite, a sermon, re¬ vival, conference, or other solace or diversion was not offered, they inclined to seek relaxation and even pleas¬ ure where it might be had. Monotony was the sub¬ stance of their days, and relief welcomed in the most trifling incident or change. Lacour’s wife, granddaughter of a Welshman but all native in appearance, sat with the other women under the tohonu tree when I returned. I had seen thousands of fallen cocoanut-trees rotting in the swamps, and had climbed over the coral fields for several miles. There Photo from Underwood and Underwood Photo from L. Gauthier ATOLLS OF THE SUN 49 was no earth, only coral and shells and white shell-sand. Chickens evidently picked up something to eat, for I saw a dozen of them. In the lagoon, fish darted to and fro. Lacour’s wife had a yellowish baby in her lap, and she wore earrings, a wedding-ring, and a necklace and bracelets. The boat was plying from the schooner to the shore, and I watched its progress. Piri a Tuahine held the steering oar, laughing, calling to his fellows to pull or not to pull, as I could see through a glass. A current affected the surf, increasing or decreasing its force at intervals, and it was now at its height. The boat en¬ tered the passage on a crest, but a following wave struck it hard, turned it broadside, and all but over. A flood entered the boat, but the men leaped out and, though up to their shoulders in the water, held it firm, and finally drew it close to the beach. The flour and the boxes and beds of native passengers were wetted, but they ran to the boat and carried their belongings near to the copra shed, and spread them to dry. Lacour cursed the boat and the sailors. Near Lacour’s store was a house, in which lived Cap¬ tain Nimau, owner of a small schooner. Nimau invited me to sleep there and see the moving pictures. We had brought Lacour a reel or so, and in anticipation, the people of Anaa had been gathering cocoanuts for a week. The films were old ones that Tahiti had wearied of, and Lacour got them for a trifle. The theater was his copra house, and there were no seats nor need of them. He set the hour of seven for the show, and I alone stayed ashore for it. By six o’clock the residents began 50 ATOLLS OF THE SUN flocking to the shed with their entrance-fees. Each bore upon his back twenty-five cocoanuts, some in bags and others with the nuts tied on a pole by their husk. F athers carried double or even triple quantities for their little ones, and each, as he arrived at Lacour’s, counted the nuts before the trader. The women brought their own admission tickets. The acolyte, who had inveighed against the cinemato¬ graph, was second in line, and secured the best squat¬ ting space. His own cocoanuts were in Lacour’s bin. When the screen was erected and the first picture flashed upon it, few of the people of Anaa were absent, and Lacour’s copra heap was piled high. There were a hundred and sixty people present, and four thousand nuts in the box-office. The first film was concerned with the doings of Nick Winter, an English detective in France, a burlesque of Sherlock Holmes, and other criminal literatures. The spectators could not make a head nor tail of it, but they enjoyed the scenes hugely and were intensely mystified by many pictures. An auto¬ mobile, which, by the trickery of the camera, was made to appear to climb the face of a sky-scraper, raised cries of astonishment and assertions of diablerie. The devil was a very real power to South Sea Islanders, whether they were Christians or not, and they had fashioned a composite devil of our horned and cloven- hoofed chap and their own demons, who was made re¬ sponsible for most trouble and disaster that came to them, and whose machinations explained sleight of hand, and even the vagaries of moving pictures. What pleased them most were cow-boy pictures, the ATOLLS OF THE SUN 51 melodramatic life of the Wild West of America, with bucking bronchos, flying lassos, painted Indians whom they thought tattooed, and dashes of vaqueros , border sheriffs, and maidens who rode cayuses like Comanches. Tahiti was daft over cow-boys, and had adopted that word into the language, and these Anaans were vastly taken by the same life. Lacour explained the pictures as they unrolled, shouting any meanings he thought might pass; and I doubted if he himself knew much about them, for later he asked me if all cow-boys were not Spaniards. This was the first moving picture machine in these islands. Lacour had only had it a few weeks. He purposed taking it through the Group on a cutter that would transport the cocoanut receipts. Lacour, Nimau, and I sat up late. These Frenchmen save for a few exceptions were as courteous as at home. Peasants or sailors in France, they brought and improved with their position that striking cosmopolitan spirit which dis¬ tinguishes the Gaul, be he ever so uneducated. The English and American trader was suspicious, sullen or blatant, vulgar and often brutal in manner. The Frenchman had bonhomie , politeness. England and America in the South Seas considered this a weakness, and aimed at the contrary. Manners, of course, origi¬ nated in France. “This island is on the French map as La Chained said Captain Nimau, “but we who traverse these seas always use the native names. Those old admirals who took word to their king that they had discovered new islands always said, too, that they had named them after the king or some saint. A Spaniard selected a 52 ATOLLS OF THE SUN nice name like the Blessed Sacrament or the Holy Mother of God, or some Spanish saint, while a French¬ man chose something to show the shape or color of the land. The Englishman usually named his find after some place at home, like New England, New Britain, and so on. But we don’t give a sacre for those names. How could we? All those fellows claimed to have been here first, and so all islands have two or three European names. We who have to pick them up in the night, or escape from them in a storm, want the native name as we need the native knowledge of them. The land¬ marks, the clouds, the smells, the currents, the passes, the depths — those are the items that save or lose us our lives and vessels. Let those vieuoc capitaines fight it out below for the honor of their nomenclature and precedence of discovery!” What recriminations in Hades between Columbus and Vespucci! “Take this whole archipelago!’7 continued Nimau. “The Tahitians named it the Poumotu or pillar islands, because to them the atolls seemed to rise like white trees from the sea. But the name sounded to the people here like Paumotu, which means conquered or destroyed islands, and so, after a few petitions or requests by proud chiefs, the French in 1852 officially named them Tuamotu, distant, out of view, or below the horizon. That was more than a half century ago, but we still call them the Paumotu. There ’s nothing harder to change than the old names of places. You can change a man’s or a whole island’s religion much easier.” Near the little hut in which we were, Nimau’s house, a bevy of girls smoked cigarettes and talked about me. ATOLLS OF THE SUN 53 They had learned that I was not a sailor, not one of the crew of the Marara, and not a trader. What could I be, then, but a missionary, as I was not an official, because not French? But I was not a Catholic mis¬ sionary, for they wore black gowns ; and I could not be Mormoni nor Konito, because there in public I was with the Frenchmen, drinking beer. Two, who were handsome, brown, with teeth as brilliant as the heart of the nacre, and eyes and hair like the husks of the ripe cocoanut, came into the house and questioned Lacour. “They want to know what you are doing here,” inter¬ preted Lacour. “I am not here to make money nor to preach the Gospel,” I replied. The younger came to me and put her arms about me, and said : “ Ei aha e rev a a noho io nei!” And that meant, “Stay here always and rest with me!” After a while the acolyte joined us, and I put them all many questions. The Paumotuans were a quiet people, dour, or at least serious and contemplative. They were not like the Tahitians, laugh-loving, light-hearted, frenzied dancers, orators, music worshipers, feasters. The Tahi¬ tians had the joy of living, though with the melancholy strain that permeated all Polynesia. The folk of the Dangerous Archipelago were silent, brooding, and re¬ ligious. The perils they faced in their general vocation of diving, and from cyclones, which annihilated entire populations of atolls, had made them intensely suscep¬ tible to fears of hell-fire and to hopes of heaven. The rather Moslem paradise of Mormonism made strong ap¬ peal, but was offset by the tortures of the damned, 54 ATOLLS OF THE SUN limned by other earnest clerics who preached the old Wesley-Spurgeon everlasting suffering for all not of their sect. Had religion never affected the Paumotuans, their food would have made them a distinct and a restrained people. We all are creatures of our nourishment. The Tahitians had a plentitude of varied and delicious food, a green and sympathetic landscape, a hundred waterfalls and gentle rills. The inhabitants of these low isles had cocoanut and fish as staples, and often their only sustenance for years. No streams meander these stony beds, but rain-water must be caught, or dependence placed on the brackish pools and shallow wells in the porous rocks or compressed sand, which ebbed and flowed with the tides. To a Tahitian his brooks were his club, where often he sat or lay in the laughing water, his head crowned with flowers, dreaming of a life of serene idleness. Once or twice a day he must bathe thoroughly. He was clean; his skin was aglow with the effect of air and water. No European could teach him hygiene. He was a perfect animal, untainted and unsoiled, ac¬ customed to laving and massage, to steam, fresh, and salt baths, when Europeans, kings, courts, and com¬ moners went unwashed from autumn to summer; when in the “Lois de la {ralanterie/' written for beaux and dandies in 1640, it was enjoined that “every day one should take pains to wash one’s hands, and one should wash one’s face almost as often.” Environment, purling rivulets under embowering trees, the most enchanting climate between pole and pole, a simple diet but little clothing, made the Tahitian ATOLLS OF THE SUN 55 and Marquesan the handsomest and cleanest races in the world. Clothes and cold are an iron barrier to cleanliness, except where wealth affords comfort and privacy. Michelangelo wore a pair of socks many years without removing them. Our grandfathers counted a habit of frequent bathing a sign of weakness. In old New England many baths were thought con¬ ducive to immorality, by some line of logic akin to that of my austere aunt, who warned me that oysters led to dancing. The Paumotuan, before the white man made him a mere machine for gathering copra and pearl-shell and pearls, had a very distinct culture, savage though it was. He was the fabric of his food and the actions induced in him by necessity. Ellis, the interesting mis¬ sionary diarist of Tahiti and Hawaii, recorded that in 1817, when at Afareaitu, on Moorea, he was printing for the first time the Bible in Tahitian “among the vari¬ ous parties in Afareaitu . . . were a number of natives of the Paumotu, or Pearl Islands, which lie to the north¬ west of Tahiti and constitute what is called the Danger¬ ous Archipelago. These numerous islands, like those of Tetuaroa to the north, are of coralline formation, and the most elevated parts of them are seldom more than two or three feet above high water mark. The princi¬ pal, and almost only, edible vegetable they produce is the fruit of the cocoanut. On these, with the numerous kinds of fishes resorting to their shores or among the coral reefs, the inhabitants entirely subsist. They ap¬ pear a hardy and industrious race, capable of enduring great privations. The Tahitians believe them to be cannibals. . . . They are in general firm and muscular, 56 ATOLLS OF THE SUN but of a more spare habit of body than the Tahitians. Their limbs are well formed, their stature generally tall. The expression of their countenance, and the outline of their features, greatly resemble those of the Society Islanders; their manners are, however, more rude and uncourteous. The greater part of the body is tattooed, sometimes in broad stripes, at others in large masses of black, and always without any of the taste and elegance frequently exhibited in the figures marked on the persons of the Tahitians.” One who traveled much in the isolated parts of the world was often struck by the unfitness of certain popu¬ lated places to support in any comfort and safety the people who generation after generation persisted in liv¬ ing in them. For thousands of years the slopes of Vesuvius have been cultivated despite the imminent horror of the volcano above. The burning Paumotu atolls are as undesirable for residences as the desert of Sahara. Yet the hot sands are peopled, and have been for ages, and in the recesses of the frozen North the processes of birth and death, of love and greed, are as absorbing as in the Edens of the earth. Hateful as a lengthy enforced stay in the Paumotus might be to any of us, I have seen two Paumotuan youths dwelling abroad for the first time in their lives, eating delicious food and hardly working at all, weep hours upon hours from homesickness, a continuous longing for their atoll of Puka-ruhu, where they had half starved since birth, and where the equatorial typhoon had raped time and again. Nature, in her insistence that mankind shall continue, implanted that instinct of home in us as one of the most powerful agents of survival of the ATOLLS OF THE SUN 57 species. Enduring terrible privation, even, we learned to love the scenes of our sufferings. Never was that better exemplified than in these melancholy and mad¬ dening-atolls of the half -browned Archipelago. CHAPTER IV The copra market — Dangerous passage to shore at Kaukura — Our boat overturns in the pass — I narrowly escape death — Josephite Mis¬ sionaries — The deadly nohu — The himene at night. WORD we got at Anaa of a few tons of copra at Kaukura sent us hurrying there. The wind was against us, and we drew long sides of a triangle before we reached that atoll, which was, as our starting-point, at the base of the isosceles. Kau¬ kura was a divergence from our intended course, but these schooners were like birds of the air, which must take their sustenance as fortune wills. Copra was scarce, and competition in buying, fierce. The natives received about four cents a pound, but as payment was usually in goods, the Tahiti traders, who shipped copra to America and Europe, profited heavily. There were grades in copra, owing to the carelessness of the natives in drying it. Green or poorly-dried nuts shrank, and the nuts parched in kilns developed more undesirable creosote than sun-dried. All copra was sold by weight and quality, and it continually lessened in weight by evaporation of oil. Time was the essence of a good bargain. The sooner to the presses of the mainland, the greater the return. Crude mills in the Paumotus or Tahiti crushed out the oil formerly, and it was sealed in bamboo lengths, and these exported. These tubes, air-tight, were common mediums of ex¬ change, as wampum among Indians, or gold-dust in 58 ATOLLS OF THE SUN 59 Alaska. Modern processes extracted double the oil of the old presses, and the eight-foot sections of the long grass were almost obsolete for cocoanut-oil, and used mostly for sauces sold in the Papeete market-place. “Trade ain’t what it was,” said McHenry. “There’s more traders than natives, almost. I remember when they were so crazy to exchange our stuff for their prod¬ uce, we ’d have the trade-room crowded all day, an’ had to keep guns handy to chase the mob away, to add up the bloody figures. Now every atoll has its store, and the trader has to pat his copra-makers an’ divers on the back, instead o’ kickin’ them the way we used to. The damn Frogs treat these Kanakas like they were white people, an’ have spoiled our game. We can’t trade in the Paumotus unless the schooner has a French registry and a French captain, — Lyin’ Bill is a Frog citizen for not stealin’ a vessel he had a chance to, — an’ when you leave the Papeete you ’ve got to register every last drop o’ booze you ’ve got aboard. It ’s sup¬ posed to be only for us on the schooner, and for the whites in the Paumotus, or a few chieves who have permits, for bein’ Froggy. But it ’s the rotten mis¬ sionaries who hurt us, really. We could smuggle it in, but they tell on us.” We had not caught a fish from the schooner, despite having a tackle rigged most of the days. I had fixed a bamboo rod, about eighteen feet long and very strong, on the rail of the waist of the vessel, and from it let trail a hundred feet or so of tough line. The hook was the most perfect for the purpose ever made by man. It was cut out of the mother-of-pearl lining of the Paumotuan pearl-oyster shell. It was about six inches 60 ATOLLS OF THE SUN long, and three quarters wide, shaped rudely like a flying-fish, and attached to it on the concave side was a barb of bone about an inch and a half in length, fas¬ tened with purau fiber, and a few hog’s bristles inserted. The line was roved through the hole where the barb was fastened, and, being braided along the inner side of the pearl shank, was tied again at the top, forming a chord to the arch. Unbaited, the hook, by the pull of the schooner, skipped along the surface of the sea like a flying-fish. I had made a telltale of a piece of stick, and while McHenry and I talked and Jean Moet slept it snapped before my eyes. To seize the rod and hold on was the act of a second. I let out the entire five hundred feet of line, before the fish tired, and then it took four of us to drag him to the deck. He was a roroa, a kind of barracuda, about ten feet long, and weighing a couple of hundred pounds. The fish made a welcome change in our diet and was enough for all, including a number of Paumotuans who were returning to Takaroa for the opening of the div¬ ing season. Chocolat nibbled a head, but preferred the remnants of a can of beef. He improved daily in his tricks and in his agility in avoiding being hurtled into the water by the roll or pitch of the schooner. He had an almost incredible instinct or acquired knowl¬ edge of the motion of the Marara, and when I felt sure we had lost him — that he would fall overboard in an¬ other instant — he would leap to the deck and frolic about the wheel. The spokes of it were another con¬ stant threat to his health, for one blow when they spun fast might kill him; but he was reserved for a more horrid fate. ATOLLS OF THE SUN 61 Kaukura rose from the sea at dawn, after a night of wearing and tacking. It was an atoll, irregularly annular in shape, twenty-six miles long and ten wide, wooded in patches, and with vast stretches where only the dazzling coral shone. It, too, had been spoiled in prosperity by an inimical wind and tide, and the cocoa- palms had been annihilated that had once grown upon all its many component islets. The cocoanut-tree lives more than eighty years, and does not fruit until seven years old, so that the loss of thousands of these life-giv¬ ing palms was a fearful blow. Each tree bore a hun¬ dred nuts annually, and that crop was worth to the owner for copra nearly a dollar, besides being much of his food. Landmarks we gradually discerned; a village, two churches, and a row of houses, and then the French tricolor on a pole. The surf broke with a fierce roaring on the reef, and when McHenry and I left the schooner, Moet stayed aboard, as the wind was ominous. There was no pass into the lagoon at this village, and even the pit in the barrier-reef had been made by French engi¬ neers. They had blown up the madrepore rock, and made a gateway for small boats. The schooner did not take our painter, for the breeze was too stiff for the venture, and so we had a half-mile to row. When we neared the reef and entered the pit, I felt that it was touch-and-go, for we rose and tot¬ tered on the huge swells, and dived into their hollows, with a prophetic certainty of capsizing. I could hardly keep on the box under me, and swayed forebodingly. Then suddenly the steering oar caught under a bank of coral. I barely heard the cry of Piri a Tuahine, 62 ATOLLS OF THE SUN “E era! There she goes!” when the boat rose on its stern with a twisting motion, as if a whale had struck it with its fluke, and turned turtle. I was slighted into the water at is topmost teeter, falling yards away from it, and in the air I seemed to see the Tahitians leaping for safety from its crushing thwarts and the cargo. McHenry’s “What the bloody - !” as we both somersaulted, was in my ears as I was plunged beneath the surface. With the fear of encountering the boat, the dark bulk of which I saw dimly above me, I swam hard under the water a dozen strokes, and rose to find myself be¬ neath the reef, which grew in broken ledges. When my head in stunning contact with the rock knelled a warning to my brain, I opened my eyes. There was only blackness. I dived again, a strange terror chilling me, but when I came up, I was still penned from air in abysmal darkness. Now fear struck me weak. I realized my extraor¬ dinary peril, a peril glimpsed in nightmares. I had penetrated fifteen or twenty feet under the ledge, and I had no sense of direction of the edge of the coral. My distance from it was considerable; I knew by the invisible gloom. With a fleeting recollection of camera films in my shirt pocket, came the choking dread of suffocation, and death in this labyrinth. I supposed I invoked God and his Son to save me. Probably in my agony I promised big things to them and humanity if I survived. I kept my eyes open and struck out. After swimming a few yards I felt the coral shelving inwardly. I realized that I had gone ATOLLS OF THE SUN 63 farther from my only goal of life. I felt the end was close, but still in desperation moved my limbs vigor¬ ously. Then I felt the water lashing about me. Something seized my arm. Shark stories leaped from my mem¬ ory’s cold storage to my very soul. My blood was an icy stream from head to toes. Singular to relate, I was aware of a profound regret for my murders of many sharks — who, after all, I reasoned with an ata¬ vistic impulse of propitiation, were but working out the wise plan of the Creator. But the animal that grasped my arm did not bite. It held me firmly, and dragged me out from that murky hell, until in a few seconds the light, God’s eldest and loveliest daughter, appeared faintly, and then, bright as lightning, and all of a sud¬ den, I was in the center of the sun, my mouth open at last, my chest heaving, my heart pumping madly, and my head bursting with pain. I was in the arms of Piri a Tuahine, who, as all the other Tahitians, had swum under the reef in search of me. In the two or three minutes — or that half-hour — dur¬ ing which I had been breathless, the sailors had recap¬ tured the boat and were righting it, the oars still fas¬ tened to the gunwales. I was glad to be hauled into the empty boat, along with McHenry, who was sput¬ tering and cursing. “Gorbli-me!” he said, as he spat out salt water, “you made a bloody fool o’ yerself doin’ that! Why didn’t ye look how I handled meself ? But I lost a half-pound of tobacco by that christenin’.” I was laid down on the cargoless seats, and the men 64 ATOLLS OF THE SUN rowed through the moat, smiling at me with a worthy sense of superiority, while McHenry dug the soaked tobacco out of his trousers pocket. “Ye can always trust the Kanaka to get ye out o’ the water if ye capsize,” said he, artfully. “We ’ve taught him to think o’ the white man first. He damn well knows where he ’d get off, otherwise.” A hundred feet farther, we came to a spit of rocks, which stopped progress. A swarm of naked children were playing about it. Assisted by the Tahitians I was lifted to my feet, and, with McHenry, continued to the sand. There I took stock of my physical self. I was bat¬ tered and bruised, but no bones were broken. My shins were scraped and my entire body bleeding as if a sharp steel comb had raked me. My head was bloody, but my skull without a hole in it, or even marked de¬ pression, except my usual one where phrenologists lo¬ cate the bump of reverence. I was sick at my stomach, and my legs bent under me. I knew that I would be as well as ever soon, unless pnisoned, but would bear the marks of the coral. All these white men who jour¬ neyed about the Paumotus bore indelible scars of coral wound. My friend, the poet, Rupert Brooke, had been made very ill by coral poisoning. He wrote from the Tiare Hotel in Papeete : “I’ve got some beastly coral-poison¬ ing into my legs, and a local microbe on top of that, and made the places worse by neglecting them, and sea¬ bathing all day, which turns out to be the worst possible thing. I was in the country, at Mataiea, when it came on bad, and tried native remedies, which took all the The road from the beach An American Josephite missionary and his wife, and their church ATOLLS OF THE SUN 65 skin off, and produced such a ghastly appearance that I hurried into town. I Ve got over it now and feel spry.” His nickname, Pupure , meant leprous, as well as fair, and was a joking double entendre by the natives. I was later, in the Marquesas, to see a man die of such poison received in the Paumotus. But, in Xau- kura, I had to make the best of it, and after a short rest began to see the sights. There was a crowd of people about, men and women, and still more children, all lighter than the Paumotuans in complexion and stouter in body. They were dressed up. The men were in denim trousers and shirts, and some with the stiff white atrocities suffered by urbanites in America and Europe. The women wore the conventional night¬ gowns that Christian propriety of the early nineteenth century had pulled over their heads. They were not the spacious holokus of Hawaii. These single gar¬ ments fitted the portly women on the beach as the skin of a banana its pulpy body — =and between me and the sun hid nothing of their roly-poly forms. I recognized the ahu Vahine of Tahiti. “/a ora na i te Atua !” the people greeted me, with winning smiles. “God be with you!” was its meaning, and their accent confirmed their clothing. They were Tahitians. I spoke to them, and they commiserated my sad appearance, and pointed out a tall young white man who came striding down the beach, his mouth pursed in an anxious question as he saw me. “Got any medicine on that hay wagon?” he asked. “We Ve got a bunch of dysentery here.” I knew at once by his voice issuing through his nos¬ trils instead of his mouth, and by the sharp cut of his 66 ATOLLS OF THE SUN jib, that he was my countryman, and from the Middle West. He had the self-satisfied air of a Kansan. “The trade-room of the Marara is full of medical discoveries, perunas, Jamaica ginger, celery compounds, and other hot stuff,” I replied, “but what they ’ll cure I don’t know. We have divers patent poisons known to prohibition.” • “That ’s all rotten booze. My people don’t use the devilish stuff,” he commented, caustically. He con¬ tinued on, wading to the boat, and, after a parley, pro¬ ceeding with it to the schooner. McHenry had half determined to plant himself, at least temporarily, in Kaukura, and left me to spy on the store of a Chinese, who had brought a stock of goods from Papeete. I walked toward an enormous thatched roof, under which, on the coral strand, were nearly a thousand persons. The pungent smoke from a hun¬ dred small fires of cocoanut husks gave an agreeable tang to the air; the lumps of coral between which they were kindled were red with the heat, the odors rose from bubbling pots. All the small equipment of Tahitian travelers was strewn about. Upon mattresses and mats in the shed, the sides of which were built up several feet to prevent the intrusion of pigs and dogs, lay old people and children, who had not finished their slum¬ bers. Stands for the sale of fruits, ice, confections, soda-water, sauces, and other ministrants to hunger and habit bespoke the acquired tastes of the Tahitians; but most of the people were of Kaukura and other atolls. Kaukura alone had nearly a thousand inhabitants. Its lagoons were the richest in pearl of all the group. Being one of the nearest of the Paumotus to Tahiti, ATOLLS OF THE SUN 67 it had been much affected by the proselytizing and com¬ mercializing spirits of that island — spirits often at vari¬ ance but now and again joined, as on a greater scale trust magnates capitalize and direct missions and reli¬ gious institutions with the left hand, while their right takes toll of life-killing mill and mine. The village was as attractive as a settlement could be in these benighted islands, the houses stretching along one or two roads, some in gala color. A small, sprightly white man was donning shirt and trousers on the ve¬ randa of the best residence at the end of the street. He was about forty years old, with a curiously keen face, a quick movement, and an eye like an electric light through a keyhole. “Hello,” he said, briskly, “by golly, you ’re not an American, are you? I ’m getting my pants on a little late. We were up all hours last night, but I flatter my¬ self God was glad of it. Kidd’s my name; Johnny Kidd, they call me in Lamoni. I ’m glad to meet you, Mr. - ?” “O’Brien, Frederick O’Brien, of almost anywhere, except Lamoni,” I replied, laughingly, his good-na¬ tured enthusiasm being infectious. He looked at me, inquiringly. “Not in my line, are you?” he asked, with an apprais¬ ing survey of me. My head bleeding and aching, my body quivering with the biting pain of its abraded surface, I still sur¬ rendered to the irony of the question. I guessed that he was a clergyman from his possessive attitude to¬ ward God, but he was so simple and natural in manner, with so little of a clerical tone or gesture, that I would 68 ATOLLS OF THE SUN have thought him a street-faker or professional gambler had I had no clue to his identity. I remembered, too, the oft-quoted: “In my Father’s house are many man¬ sions.” “I ’m merely a beach-comber,” I assured him. “I take a few notes now and then.” “Oh, you ’re not a sky-pilot,” he went on, in comic relief. “You never can tell. Those four-flushing Mormons have been bringing a whole gang of young elders from Utah to Tahiti to beat us out. I ’m an elder myself of the Reorganized Church of J esus Christ of Latter Day Saints. They usually call us the Jose- phites. In these islands we are Konito or Tonito. We ’ve been having a grand annual meeting here. Over sixty from Tahiti, and altogether a thousand and seventy members. They ’ve been gathering from most of the Paumotus for weeks, coming with the wind, but we ’re about over now.” “But I thought the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was the Mormons,” said I, puzzled. “Mormon!” There was such vigor in his explosive catching up of my query that I may well be pardoned if I thought he placed the common name for Sheol after that of the sect. But it stands to reason that he did not. His whole training would stop such a word ere it escaped him. “Mormon! I should say not! Those grafters and polygamists are not our kind. They stole our name. We were the same until Brigham Young split off and led his crowd to Utah. Our headquarters is at La- moni, Iowa, but I. N. Imbel, who ’s gone to the schooner, my partner, and I are the missionaries in these ATOLLS OF THE SUN 69 islands. We ’re properly authorized ministers who make this our regular and whole business. My pal and I live in Papeete, but run through the Paumotus when there ’s anything doing.” The reverend fellow had no airs about him. “Sit down and take off your clothes and dry them, and I ’ll rub your cuts with some liniment,” he invited. “They ’ll dry in the sun, and here ’s a pareu to slip over you. I ’d like to tell you more about our work, so ’s you won’t mix us up with those Mormons. They ’re a tough bunch. My father ’s the head of our mission in England, and I ’m in charge of these islands. Every year we have a business meeting. That ’s what this is ; not a revival. We don’t believe in that emotion game. We call it a ‘reasonable service.’ We take up a collec¬ tion, of course. We invite the natives to investigate our claims. We have the custom to get converts by debating with the Mormons, but after we had accepted a challenge to meet them in Papeete the French gov¬ ernor stopped the show, because a French law forbade such meetings. They used to have riots in France, it seems. The Mormons teach polygamy and other abominations. They ’ll tell you they don’t, but they do. You ask any Mormon native if he believes in plural wives, and he ’ll say yes, that the elders from America teach that it ’s right. Those Mormons ran away from here once, when the French government scared them, and we got in and had most of the natives in the Pau¬ motus that the Catholics had n’t kept. Then when the Mormons saw there was no danger, they came back here from Salt Lake. Oh, they ’re a bad outfit. We ’re regularly ordained ministers, not farmers off on 70 ATOLLS OF THE SUN a lark. This temple here cost a thousand dollars, with¬ out the labor. That was all voluntary. Wait a minute!” He dashed into a room, and returned with a pamphlet which purported to be the findings of the Court of Lake County, Ohio, and he read from it a decree that the Utah Mormons were a fragment and split off from the real simon-pure religion established by Joseph Smith in New York. I wished that Stevenson had been there to hear him, for I remembered his page of bewilderment at the enigma of the ‘‘Kanitu’ and Mor- moni in the Paumotus, and how he made comparisons of the Holy Willies of Scotland, and a New Guinea god named Kanitu. LI is uninquiring mind had not solved the problem. “We beat those wolves in sheep’s clothing in this court,” said Elder Kidd, animatedly. “We ’re the real church, and the Brighamites are a hollow sham.” Mr. Kidd engaged my interest, true or pseudo-dis¬ ciple of Joseph Smith. He was so human, so guileful, and had such an engaging smile and wink. He seemed to feel that he was in a soul-saving business thoroughly respectable, yet needing to be explained and de¬ fended to the Gentile. His competitors’ incompetency he deemed worthy of emphasis. “Not long ago,” he said, “in certain of these Pau¬ motus there had been a good deal of backsliding from our church. Nobody had stirred them up, and with these people you have got to keep their souls awake all the time or they ’ll go to sleep, or, worse, get into the control of those Mormons. They ’ll steal a convert like you ’d peel a banana, and that ’s what I call the limit ATOLLS OF THE SUN 71 of a dirty trick. The Mormons thought they had a puddin’ in these backsliders to pull them over to their side. I heard about it, and without a word to any one I took a run through the group. I went through that crowd of backsliders with a spiritual club, and I not only redeemed the old Josephites, but I baptized seventy-five others before you could run a launch from here to Anaa. It was like stealin’ persimmons from a blind farmer whose dog is chained. I was talkin’ to the head Mormon in Papeete shortly afterward, and he asked me what we were doin’. I counted off the seventy-five new ones, and he had to acknowledge his church had n’t made a count in a long time. I offered to bet him anything he was beat to a finish, but he quit cold.” The Reverend Mr. Kidd excused himself to go to the meeting-house and get his breakfast with some of his deacons. McHenry had returned from his tour of espionage. He was cast down at the poor chance for business. “There ’s nothing doin’,” he said. “Twenty years ago I was here with a schooner o’ booze to a Konito meetin’ like this. There was kegs o’ rum with bloody tops knocked in right in the road. An’ wimmin’! Y ou ’d a-gone nuts tryin’ to choose. This is what re- ligi’n does to business. A couple o’ bleedin’ chinks sellin’ a few bottles o’ smell water, an’ a lot o’ Tahitians with fruit an’ picnic stuff. A thousand Kanakas in one bunch an’ not one drunk. By cripes, the mishes have ruined the trade. The American Government ought to interfere. You and me had better skin out to west- ’ard where there ain’t so many bloody preachers, an’ 72 ATOLLS OF THE SUN you can handle the Kanaka the way you want. To¬ night this mob ’ll be in that meetin’ -house singin’ their heads off, instead o’ buyin’ rum and dancin’ like they used to. Them two sky-pilots has got all the francs. Even the Chinks has n’t made a turn. Kopcke of Pa¬ peete is here an’ ain’t made a sou. He ’s goin’-a go to leeward.” “McHenry,” I interrogated, “do you never consider the other fellow? Are n’t these poor people better off chanting hymns and praying than getting drunk and dancing the hula, just to make you money.” He regarded me with contemptuous malice. “I knew after all you were a bloody missionary,” he said, acridly. “I been on to you. You ’ll be in that straw shed to-night singin’ ‘Come to Jesus.’ You ’d better look out after your cuts ! You ’ll be sore ’n a boil to-morrow when they get stiff. Let ’s go back to the schooner and get drunk!” I was tempted to return to the Marara to ease my misery, and only the promise of Elder Kidd to assuage it with liniment, and an ardent desire to attend the Josephite services that night, detained me in the heat of the atoll. McHenry persisting in his decision to cool his coppers in rum, and I to see everything of Kaukura, I joined with a friendly native for a stroll. The Josephite temple was a small coral edifice, washed white with coral lime. An old and uncared-for Catholic church was near-by. Most of the residences were thatched huts, or shacks made of pieces of boxes and tin and corrugated iron, with a few formal wooden cottages, painted red, white, and blue. They were very ATOLLS OF THE SUN 73 poor, these Kaukurans, from our point of view, earn¬ ing barely enough to sustain them in strength, and with few comforts in their huts, except the universal sewing- machine. Everywhere that was the first ambition of the uncivilized woman roused to modern vanities, as of the poor woman in all countries. Walking along the beach I narrowly escaped a more serious accident than the disaster of the reef, for only the warning of my companion stayed me from tread¬ ing upon a nohu, the deadliest underfoot danger of the Paumotus. It was a fish peculiarly hateful to humans, yet gifted by nature with both defensive disguise and offensive weapons, a remnant of the fierce struggle for survival in which so many forms of life had disappeared or altered in changing environment. The nohu lay on the coral strand where the tide lapped it, looking the twin of a battered, mossy rock, so deceiving that one must have the sight of the aborigine to avoid stepping upon it, if in one’s way. Put a foot on it, and before one could move, the nohu raised the bony spines of its dorsal fin and pierced one’s flesh as would a row of hat¬ pins; not only pierced, but simultaneously injected through its spines a virulent poison that lay at the base of a malevolent gland. The nohu possessed a protec¬ tive coloring and shape more deluding than any other noxious creature I know, and kept its mouth shut ex¬ cept when it swallowed the prey for which it lay in wait. Its mouth is very large, and a brilliant lemon- color inside, so that if it parts its lips it betrays itself. Brother to the nohu in evil purpose is the tataraihau. But what a trickster is nature! The nohu is as ugly 74 ATOLLS OF THE SUN as a squid, and the tataraihau beautiful as a piece of the sunset, a brilliant red, with transverse bands of choco¬ late, bordered with ebony. “If you can spit on the nohu before he sticks his taetae into you, it will not poison you,” sagely said my savior, as he stabbed the wretch with his knife. Pliny, as translated by Holland, said : All men carry about them that which is poyson to serpents : for if it be true that is reported, they will no better abide the touching with man’s spittle than scalding water cast upon them : but if it happen to light within their chawes or mouth, especially if it comes from a man that is fasting, it is present death. Pliny in his day may have known of quick-witted people who, when assailed by a snake, had presence of mind to expectorate in his chawes, but the most hungry, salivary man could hardly avail himself of this prophy¬ lactic unless he recognized the nohu before treading upon him. The Paumotuans employ the mape , the native chestnut, the atae, ape , and rea moeruru. These are all “yarb” remedies, and the first, the juice of the chestnut, squeezed on the head and neck, they swear by. The French doctors advise morphine injection or laud¬ anum externally, or to suck the wound and cup it. Co¬ agulating the poison in situ by alcohol, acids, or caustic alkali, or the use of turpentine, is also recommended. If the venom is not speedily drawn out or nullified, the feet of the victim turn black and coma ensues. The French called the nohu , La Mort, The Death. My Paumotuan friend and Elder Kidd together gave me this information, and when we brought the nohu to the house in which he lived the clergyman said we would ATOLLS OF THE SUN eat it. The native heated an old iron pipe and, after flaying the skin off the fish, boiled it. The flesh was remarkably sweet and tender. I lay on a mat, and, after the American had laved me with the liniment, the Paumotuan, a Konito elder, mas¬ saged me for an hour, during which grievous process I fell asleep, and woke after dark when the “reasonable service” was beginning. The people were ranged under the immense roof in orderly ranks, the Tahitians being in one knot. Both the American elders were upon a platform, sur¬ rounded by the native elders, who aided in the conduct of the program, which was in Paumotuan. The Pau¬ motuan language is a dialect closely allied to the Maori, which includes the Tahitian, Hawaiian, Marquesan, New Zealand, Samoan, and other island tongues. The Paumotuan was crossed with a strange tongue, the origin of which was not fixed, but which might be the remains of an Aino or negroid race found in the Pau- motus by the first Polynesian immigrants. Tahitians easily understood the Paumotuans, though many words were different, and there were many variations in pro¬ nunciation and usage. The Tahitians had been living closely with Europeans for a hundred years, and their language had become a mere shadow of its past form. The Paumotuan had remained more primitive, for the Paumotuan was a savage when the Tahitians were the most cultivated race of the South Seas; not with a culture of our kind, but yet with elaborated ceremoni¬ als, religious and civil, ranks of nobility, drama, ora- torv, and wit. It being the conclusion of the grand annual meeting 76 ATOLLS OF THE SUN of the Josephites, a summing up of the business condi¬ tion of the sect in these waters was the principal item. Elders Kidd and Imbel stressed dependence of the Al¬ mighty upon his apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastors, and of these called-of-God men upon the francs collected at such gatherings as this. Both the divines spoke earnestly, and mentioned Je¬ hovah and Joseph Smith many times, with Aarona, Timoteo, Pauro, and other figures from the Scriptures. They struck the pulpit when they spoke of the Mormoni, and the faces of the congregation took on expressions of holy disdain. Somewhat like the modern preacher of the larger cities, the elders strove to entertain as well as instruct, edify, and command their flock. They proposed a charade or riddle, which they said was of very ancient origin, and perhaps had been told in the time of the Master’s sojourn among men. They spoke it very slowly and carefully and repeated it several times, so that it was thoroughly understood by all: He walked on earth, He talked on earth, He reproved man for his sin; He is not in earth, He is not in heaven. Nor can he enter therein. This mysterious person was written about in the Bible, said Elder Kidd. Aue! That was a puzzler! Who could it be? Many scratched their heads. Others shook theirs de¬ spairingly. A few older men, of the diaconate, prob- ATOLLS OF THE SUN 77 ably, smiled knowingly. Some began to eliminate likely biblical characters on their fingers. Iesu-Kirito, Aberahama, Ioba, Petero, and so on through a list of the more prominent notables of Scripture. But after five minutes of guesses, which were pointed out by Mr. Kidd not to comply with the specifications of the charade, the answer was announced with impressive unc¬ tion: “Asini Balaama.” Balaam’s ass. Aue! Why, of course. I had named to myself every persona dramatis of the Book I could recall, but the talkative steed had escaped me. We all laughed. Most of the congregation had never seen an ass or even a horse, and the word itself was pulled into their language by the ears. But they could conjure up a life-like picture of the scene from their pastor’s description, and there were many interchanges between neighbors about the wisdom of the beast, and his kindness in saving Balaam from the angry angel who would have killed him. But in time the prose part of the service came to an end, and the singing began. I moved myself to the shadows outside the pale, and stretching at full length on a mat on the sand, gave myself to the rapture of their poetry, and the waking dreams it brought. Himene, all mass singing was called in these islands — the missionary hymn Polynesianized. They had only chants when the whites came; proud recitatives of valor in war, of the beginnings of creation, of the wan¬ derings of their heroes, challenges to the foe, and pray¬ ers to the mysterious gods and demons of their supernal regions. They learned awedly the hymns of Christian- 78 ATOLLS OF THE SUN ity, and struggled decades with the airs. Confused with these were songs of the white sailors, the spirited bowline and windlass chanteys of the British and Ameri¬ can tars, the trivial or obscene lays of beach-combers and soldiers, and later the popular tunes of nations and governments. Out of all these the Polynesians had evolved their himenes , singing as different from any ever heard in Europe or America as the bagpipe from the violin, but never to be forgotten when once heard to advantage, for its barbaric call, its poignancy of utterance, and its marvelous harmony. In the great shed outside which I lay under the pur¬ ple sky, the men and women were divided, and the women led the himene. One began a wail, a high note, almost a shriek, like the keening of a wake, and carrying but a phrase. Others met her voice at an exact interval, and formed a chorus, into which men and women entered, apparently at will, but each with a perfect observance of time, so that the result was an overwhelming symphony of vocal sounds which had in them the power of a pipe-organ to evoke thought. I heard the cry of sea-birds, the crash of the waves on the reef, the thrashing of the giant fronds of the cocoa-palms, the groans of afflicted hu¬ mans, and the paeans of victory of embattled warriors. The effect was incredibly individual. Each white heard the himene differently, according to his own cos¬ mos. There under the stars on Kaukura, cast down and con¬ scious as I had been of my trivial hurts, and of a certain loneliness of situation, I forgot all in the thrill of emo¬ tion caused by the exquisite though unstudied art of ATOLLS OF THE SUN 79 these simple Josephites, worshipers, whose voices pierced my heart with the sorrows and aspirations of an occult world. The Reverends Kidd and Imbel were forgotten, and all but the mysterious conflict of man with his soul. I fell asleep as the liimene went on for hours, and was awakened by Kopcke, the trader, who said that the Marara was to sail at midnight, and that he had been asked to bring me aboard. Chocolat barked a welcome from the taffrail as we boarded the schooner, and with the offshore wind we wel¬ comed I could hear a faint human noise which I inter¬ preted as the benediction of the Reverend Johnny Kidd. CHAPTER V Captain Moet tells of Mapuhi, the great Paumotuan — Kopcke tells about women — Virginie’s jealousy — An affrighting waterspout — The wrecked ship — Landing at Takaroa. a M AINTENANT ” said Captain Moet, as he gave orders for the course, “we weel veesit ze king ov ze Paumotu. Monsieur O’Breeon, ’e got no nose, hot ’e ees magnifique. ’E like out ov ze story-book. Ze bigges’ tradaire, ze bes’ divaire, ze bon pere ov ze Paumotu. An’ ’e ees reech, eef ’e don’ geeve ’way ev’rysing. Nevaire ’ave I know one hornbre like ’eem!” “He ’s lost his grip since he got old,” McHenry inter¬ rupted, in his contrary way. “They say he ’s got a mil¬ lion francs out in bad accounts to natives. He ’s rotten easy, and spoils trade for a decent white man, by cripes!” “Nom d’une pipe!” cried the Marseillais. “Mac, you nevaire see anysing nice. ’E ees not easy ; ’e ees not rotten. ’E ’as got old, an’ maintenant, ’e ees ’fraid ov ze devil, ze diablo malo. Mac, eef you waire so nice as Mapuhi, I geeve you wan hug an’ kees. ’E ees ’onnes’, Mac, vous savez! Mapuhi say somesing, eet ees true. Zat bad for you, eh?” Mapuhi! In Tahiti, among the Paumotu traders at the Cercle Bougainville, his name was every-day men¬ tion. He was the outstanding figure of the Paumatuan race. Lying Bill had narrated a dozen stories about 80 t Typical and primitive native hut, Paumotu Archipelago ATOLLS OF THE SUN 81 him over our glasses, and Goeltz, Hallman, all the skippers and supercargos, had spoken of him. “Mapuhi ’s som’mat for looks without ’is nose,” said Captain Pincher. “I ’ve known ’im thirty years, an’ ’e ’s the biggest man in the group in all that time. ’E ’s got Mormonism stronger now, an’ ’e ’s bloody well afraid of ’ell, the ’ell those Mormon missionaries tell about; but ’e ’s the best navigator in these waters.” “He ’s past eighty now, big-hearted but shrewd, and loving his own people,” said Woronick, the Pari¬ sian, and cunningest of Tahiti pearl merchants, except Levy. “He ’s gone on Mormonism, but he ’s smart with all his religion. The trouble is he ’s let charity run away with business principles, and divers and others get into him for hundreds of thousands of francs. I ’d take his word for anything, and you know me! They did n’t keep me out of the United States because I ’m a dummy, hein?” “He ’s a remarkable man, this Kanaka,” joined in Winnie Brander, master of a sieve of a schooner, as he drank his Doctor Funk. “When he was a boy he was a savage. His father ate his enemies. For fifty years Mapuhi has been sailing schooners in the Paumotus. He ’s the richest man there, and the best skipper in these waters that ever weathered the New Year gales. I ’m captain of a schooner and I have sailed the Group since a boy, but, matching my experience against his, — and I have n’t had a tenth of his, — Mapuhi knows more by instinct of weather, of reefs, of passes, and of sea¬ manship than I have learned. He ’s known from Samoa to Tahiti as a wizard for sailing. He knows every one of the eighty Paumotus by sight. Wake him up any- 82 ATOLLS OF THE SUN where in the Group in sight of land, and he ’ll take a squint and tell where they are. God knows that ’s the hardest bit of spying there is, because these atolls are mostly all alike at a distance — just a few specks of green, then a bunch of palms, and a line of coral. It ’s something uncanny the way this fellow can locate himself. They say he can tell them at night by the smell.” “ E ’s a bloody Rockefeller down ’ere,” Lying Bill took up the story. “ ’E ’s combed this ’ere ’ole ocean. I remember when ’e lost the Tavaroa ’e ’ad built by Matthew Turner in California, and four other schoon¬ ers, in the cyclone of 1906. Many a boat ’e built ’im- self. ’E was the devil for women, with the pick of the group an’ ’im owin’ ’alf the families in debt. Then the Mormons got a ’olt of ’im, an’ ’e began prayin’ an’ preachin’, and stuck by ’is proper wife. You ’ll see that big church, if you go to Takaroa, ’e built, an’ where ’is ol’ woman is buried.” And now I was bound for the atoll of this mighty chief of his tribe, and was to see him face to face. From Kaukura, the Marara raced and lagged by turn. The glass fell, and I spoke to McHenry about it, point¬ ing to the recording barometer. “There ’s trouble cornin’,” he said, testily. “I know that. I don’t need any barometer. We South Sea men have got enough mercury in us to tell the weather without any barometer.” The rain fell at intervals, but not hard enough for a bath on deck, the prized weather incident of these parts. With no fresh water in Niau, Anaa, or Kau¬ kura, or not enough for bathing, and with only a dole ATOLLS OF THE SUN 83 on the Marara for hands and faces, I, with remem¬ brance of Rupert Brooke’s complaint about the effect of sea-water on coral wounds, was about half-crazy for a torrential shower. But the rain passed, and the sunset soothed my sorrow. Never had I known such skies. In this heaven’s prism were hues not before seen by me. Manila, I had thought, was of all the world apart for the beauty and brilliancy of its sunsets. Such bepainted clouds as hung over the hill of Mari- veles when I rode down the Malecon in the days of the Empire! But Manila was here surpassed in startling shape and blazing color. A great bank of ocher held the western sky — a per¬ fect curtain for a stage upon which gods might enact the fall of the angels. It depended in folds and fringes over stripes of gold — a startling, magnificent design which appeared too regular in form and color to be acci¬ dent of clouds. One had to remember the bits of glass in the kaleidoscope. The gold grew red, the stripes became a sheet of scarlet, and that vermilion and maroon, swiftly chang¬ ing as deeper dipped the sun into the sea, until the en¬ tire sky was broken into mammoth fleecy white tiles, the tesselated ceiling of Olympus. The canopy grew gray, and night dropped abruptly. A wind came out of the darkness and caught the Marara under full can¬ vas. It drove her through the fast-building waves at eleven knots. The hull groaned in tune with the shriek¬ ing cordage. The timbers that were long from the forest, and had fought a thousand gales, lamented their age in moans and whines, in grindings and fierce blows. The white water piled over the bows, deluged the deck, 84 ATOLLS OF THE SUN and foamed on the barrier of the cabin rise. I stripped and went forward to meet it. I could have danced in it for joy. Oh! the joy of sail! Steam and motor made swift the path of the ship, but they had in them no consonance with nature. They were blind and deaf to the wind and wave, which were the very life of the schooner. They brought no sense of participation in speed as did the white wings of the Marara , nor of kin¬ ship with the main. They were alive, those swelling and careening sheets of canvas, that swung to and fro with the mind of the breeze, and cried and laughed in stress of labor. The rain blanketed the ocean, the vessel heeled over to starboard until her rail was salty, the jibs pleaded for relief, but man was implacable. For hours we held our course, driving fast in the obscure night toward the home of the wondrous diver, the man without a nose, Mapuhi, the uncrowned king of the Dangerous Isles. But when the moon lit the road to Takaroa, she lulled the wind. The eleven knots fell to seven, and to five, and at midnight we drifted in a zephyr. When I went below in a light squall, sure sign of near-by land, Kopcke, the handsome trader, and a na¬ tive girl were asleep on a mat in the passageway beside and partly under my bunk. I had to step over them. Her red tunic was drawn up over her limbs in her rest¬ less slumber, and a sheet covered closely her head. He lay on his back, his eyes facing the cabin lamp, his breathing that of a happy child after a day of hard play. As a matter of fact he had drunk a half dozen tots of rum since he had brought me aboard. Kopcke had failed at Kaukura, and like McHenry ATOLLS OF THE SUN 85 was bound for Takaroa, to set up a store for the div¬ ing season. He was a ne’er-do-well who existed with¬ out hard work merely because of familiarity with the people and languages of the islands. After a few glasses on board he had spilled his affairs to me, and especially his amorous adventures, in the boasting way of his kind. “Mary pity women!” A quarter-Tahi- tian, his father a European, and his mother French Tahitian, he was remarkably good-looking, in the style of a cinema idol. He had first married the half-caste daughter of Lying Bill, one of the many children of that Bedouin of the Pacific, who, in more than three decades of roaming the islands, had, according to his brag, scores of descendants. She had died, and Kopcke had left their child to charity, and taken up with an¬ other whom he had deserted after a year, leaving her their new-born infant. t “She would not obey me,” Kopcke explained to Vir- ginie and me. “I was good to her, but she was ob¬ stinate, and I had to send her to Takepoto. She had a good thing but could not appreciate me. I then took this girl here, whose father is an old diver in Takaroa, with a good deal of money. He once picked up a single pearl worth a big fortune. She is sixteen, and is easily managed. You ’ve got to get them young, mon ami , to learn your ways. That Takepoto girl feels sorry now. Women are queer, all of them, mon vieux, n’est-ce pas?” Virginie was all Huguenot French blood though born in Tahiti, and Kopcke went against her puritan grain. She thought him a bad example for her Jean, who, though as devoted a husband as seaman, was danger- 80 ATOLLS OF THE SUN ously attractive to the native girls. Moet could tutoyer them in their own tongue, with a roughish but alluring manner toward them that, though it crowded the trade-room of the Marara with customers for finery and cologne water, tortured Virginie. His endearing terms, his gentle slaps on their hips, and momentary arm about their waists, rended Virginie between jeal¬ ousy and profits. “Metis/* Jean would exclaim, after an interchange of bitter words, in which cochon had been applied to him, “how zat femme zink I do bees’ness. Wiz kicks ’an go-to-’ells? She count ze money wiz plaisir , bot Jean Moet, ’er ’usbin’, ’e mos’ be like wan mutton. ’Sus Maria! I will make show ’oo ees boss!” Kopcke was rather more honest in his dealings with women than the white men. His quarter-native strain made him less ruthless, and more understanding of them. The ordinary European or American in the South Seas had not his own home’s standards in such affairs. He released himself with a prideful assertiveness from such restraints, and went to an opposite ethic in his breaking of the chain. His usual attitude to women here was that of the average man toward domesticated animals — to pet and feed them, and to abuse them when disobedient or at whim. Of course, the white flotsam and jetsam of humanity in these islands, who in their own countries had prob¬ ably starved for caresses, and who may never have known women other than the frowzy boughten ones of the cabaret and brothel, were here giving back to the sex what it had bestowed on them in more formalized circles. The soft, loving women of Polynesia paid for ATOLLS OF THE SUN 87 the sex starvation enforced by economic conditions among the superior whites. A feast brought the in¬ gratitude of the beggar. All day, with half a gale, we sailed past atolls and bare reefs, groves of palms and rudest rocks, primal strata and beaches of softest and whitest sand. The schooner went close to these islands, so that it appeared I could throw my hat upon them; but distances here were deceptive, and I suppose we were never less than a thousand feet away. Y et we were near enough to hear the smash of the surf and to see the big fish leap in the lagoon, to drink the intoxicating draft of oneness with the lonely places, and to feel the secrets of their isola¬ tion. I was happy that before I died I had again seen the Thing I had worshipped since I began to read. I slipped off the coat of years and was a boy on a pirate schooner, my hand on Long Tom, the brass gun, ready to fire if the cannibals pushed nearer in their canoes. Again I had trained my hand and eye so that I brought down the wild pigeon with my sling, and I outran the furious turtle on the beach. I dived under the reef into the cave where the freebooters had stored their ill-gotten treasure, and reveled in the bags of pieces of eight, and the bars of virgin gold. I thought of Silver , and sang: “Fifteen men on the Dead Man’s Chest — Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!” “Mais vous etes gai ” said Jean Moet. “Quest cela? You not drink wan bottle when I no look?” At three o’clock in the afternoon the gale had almost died away. The sun was struggling to break through 88 ATOLLS OF THE SUN the lowering sky. McHenry and Kopcke were en¬ gaged in their usual bombast of personal achievement with women and drink, and I, to shut out their blague, was playing with Chocolat. Suddenly Kopcke broke off in a sentence and shouted to Moet, who was in the trade-room. “Capitaine! Capitaine!” he called loudly through the window of the cabin. “There is a flood in air. Puahiohio! On deck! On deck!” His voice vibrated with alarm, and Moet made three jumps and was at the wheel. He looked ahead, and I, too, saw, directly on the course we were steering, a convolute stem of water stretching from the sea to the sky. Well I knew what it was. I whirled McHenry around. “Look!” I said, and pointed to the oncoming spec¬ tacle. “A bloody waterspout!” yelled McHenry. “By cripes — here ’s where we pay up !” I heard the native passengers and the sailors for¬ ward shouting confusedly, and saw them throwing themselves flat on deck, where they held on to the hatch lashings and other stable objects. Moet, with a fierce oath, ordered the sailors to the halyards. “Off with every stitch!” he commanded, as he threw the wheel hard over. fCVave ! VaveW “ Trombe !” he warned his wife, who was in the cabin with Kopcke’s girl. “Hold on, Virginie, hold on! Pray, and be quick about it!” McHenry, Kopcke, and I sprang to the main boom, and helped to take down the canvas and make it fast. The jibs were still standing, when the Marara turned ATOLLS OF THE SUN 89 on her heel like a hare pursued by a hound. The water¬ spout was yet miles distant, but rushing toward us, as we made slow starboard progress from our previous wake. The daylight faded; the air seemed full of wa¬ ter. The sailors were again prone, and we, at the calm though sharp word of Moet, pulled over the companion cover. I shrank behind the house, and McHenry tucked his head into the bend of my body, while Kop- cke, on his knees, held on to the traveler. “Sacramento!” said Moet, as if to himself. “Maybe she no can meet zat!” With pounding heart, but every sense alert, I watched the mad drive of the sable column. The Ma- rara was now in smooth water, — the glassy circle of the Puahiohio, — and so near was the terrifying, twisting mass of dark foam and spindrift that it seemed impos¬ sible we could avoid it. Every inch the master, Moet alone stood up. . Chocolat was huddled whimpering be¬ tween his feet. I saw the captain pull up the straps that held the wheel when in light airs we drifted peace¬ fully, and attach them so that the helm was fixed. There was a dreadful roaring a short way off and near¬ ing every second. The spout was bigger than any of the great trees I had seen in the California forests, and from its base a leaden tower of hurrying water seemed to wind in a spiral stream to the clouds. “She ’s going to drop,” said McHenry in my ear. “Now hold on, and we ’ll see who comes out of the bloody wash!” The roar was that of a blast-furnace, and so close, so fearful, I ceased to breathe. Captain Moet crouched by the steadfast wheel, his hand on the spokes. For- 90 ATOLLS OF THE SUN ward, I saw two Tahitians with their palms upon their ears. Suddenly the Marara heeled over. The starboard rail was in the water, and Kopcke, McHenry, and I, a tangled heap against the rail, as we struggled to keep our heads above the foam. Farther and farther the schooner listed. It was certain to me that we must meet death under it in another instant. Moet’s feet were deep in the water, and now the wheel held him up. We clutched madly at the stanchions of the rail, as we choked with the salt flood. Came the supreme moment. The waterspout rose above us on the port bow like a cliff, solid as stone. A million trumpets blew to me the call of Judgment Day. Then the wall of water passed by a hundred feet to port. In another breath the Marara regained her poise and was on an even keel. The peril was over. “Mais, tonnere de Dieu !” cried Moet, excitedly, “zat was a cochon ov a watairespouse ! Zere air many in zese latitude. Some time I see seex, seven, playin’ ’round at wan time. I sink we make ze sail, and take wan drink queeck. Eh, Virginie, id! Donne-moi un haiser little cabbage! Deed you pray ’ard?” Over his petit verre , the captain said to me, confiden¬ tially, “Moi, I was almos’ become a bon catholique again.” Chocolat, who must have thought he had borne his part bravely in the crisis, frisked wildly about the wheel, risking his own brown hide at every leap, to testify his joy at his safety. McHenry and Kopcke, with the heartening rum in their stomachs, resumed their palaver. ATOLLS OF THE SUN 91 “That spout did n’t come within fifty feet of us,” said McHenry. “I ’ve seen one in which a bird was bein’ carried up, whirlin’ round and round, and not able to fly away. It was cornin’ toward us like lightnin’ when I jumped into the shrouds with a ‘big tin tub, an’ -banged it like bloody hell. It scared the spout away, an’ it busted far enough from us not to hurt us. Bill an’ Tommy Eustace can swear to that.” “Diable!” Kopcke broke in. “Mapuhi and his daugh¬ ter were in a cutter coming from Takepoto when they were attacked by a trombe. It did not strike them but the force of it overturned their cutter, four miles from shore, and knocked the girl insensible, so that Mapuhi had to swim to shore with her.” They are fearsome spectacles at their best, these phe¬ nomena of the sea, comparable only in awe-inspiring qualities to the dread composants of St. Elmo’s Fire, those apparitions of flame which appear on mastheads and booms on tempestuous nights, as if the spirits of hell had come to welcome the sailor to Davy Jones’s locker. Waterspouts I had seen many times. They were common in these waters, — more frequent, perhaps, than anywhere else, — and to the native they were the most alarming manifestation of nature. Many a canoe had been sunk by them. There were legends of de¬ struction by them, and of how the gods and devils used them as weapons to destroy the war fleets of the ene¬ mies of the legend-telling tribes. When I went to sleep at ten o ’clock that night, we were ranging up and down between Takepoto and Tak- aroa, steering no course but that of prudence, and wait¬ ing for the dawn. 92 ATOLLS OF THE SUN I came on deck again at four. The moon was two thirds down the steep slope of the west, a golden sphere vaster than ever Jbefore. The sea was bright and quak¬ ing, and shoals of fish were waking and parting the shining surface of the water. Suddenly from out of the gloom of the distance there loomed as strange a vision as ever startled a wayfarer. A huge ship, under bare poles, solemn and lonely of aspect and almost out of the water, lifted a black bulk as if bearing down upon us. Somber and omi¬ nous, void of light or life, fancy peopled it with a ghostly crew. I almost expected to read upon its quarter the name of Vanderdecken’s specter-ship, and to hear the mournful voice of the Flying Dutchman s skipper re¬ port that he had at last reached a haven. The weirdness of this unexpected sight was incred¬ ibly surprising. It electrified me, dismayed me, as few phenomena have. Piri a Tuahine, at the wheel, called down to the cap¬ tain. “Paparai te pahi mat air he announced in the even tone of the Maori sailor. “The ship wrecked in the cyclone!” Moet came on deck in pajamas, surveyed the spec¬ tacle of desolation, said (cBon jourT to me, gave an order to the sailor to “Keep her off,” and returned to snatch another nap. I saw through the stripped masts of the wrecked ship the fires of the bakers who mix their flour with cocoanut-milk, and wrap their loaves in co- coanut-leaves to bake. They were comforting as tokens of the living, contrasted with the sorrowful skeleton of one-time glory in that isolated cradle of rocks. ATOLLS OF THE SUN 93 Kopcke stuck his head through the companionway to observe our bearings, squinted at the somber wraith through his heavy eyes, — he and McHenry had played ecarte most of the night, — and replied to my query: “As you say, mon gar fon, it is the County of Rox¬ burgh, that English ship. She lost her reckoning, and in a big hurricane crashed upon the reef. Her crew put over a boat but it was smashed at once, and those who reached the shore were badly bruised and broken by the coral. When the people of Takaroa — my girl’s father was one of them — rushed to succor them, they fought them off, because their books said the Paumo- tuans were savages and cannibals. It was n’t till they saw Takauha, the gendarme, and he showed them his red stripe on the sleeve of his jacket, that they real¬ ized they were not on a cannibal isle. Takauha brought Monsieur George Fordham, an Englishman, to interpret for them, and they were taken care of. They had broken arms and legs, and heads, too. Ma- puhi bought the ship from Lloyd’s for fifteen hundred francs. Think of that! He took everything off he could, but the hull, masts, and yards stayed on. He made thousands of dollars out of the ship, and in his store you will find the doors and chests and the glass. She was built in Scotland.” Her hull and decks of heavy metal, and her masts and yards, great iron tubes, she had defied even that master wrecker, Mapuhi, to disrobe her of more than her ornaments. Carried over the reef upon a gigantic wave, and perched upon a bed of coral in which she now fitted as snugly as in a dry-dock, she had withstood the storms and tides of years, and doubtless must stay in 94 ATOLLS OF THE SUN that solitary spot until time should disintegrate her metal and dissolve its atoms in the eternal sea. The palms on the atoll paraded in battalions, waving their dark heads like shakos, and the surf shone in silver splashes, as I sat on the cabin house and watched the dawn unfold. Slowly the moon withdrew. At half¬ past five o’clock, the mother of life and her coldly brilliant satellite were in concert, and the ocean was exquisitely divided by sunbeams and moonbeams match¬ ing for favor in my admiring eyes. Kopcke reappeared with a cigarette. He had an unusual chance to find me alone, and was hungry for in¬ formation. “There is a passage in the reef at Takaroa,” he said, “but you can bet the Mcirara won’t go through it. It is plenty big enough to let her in, but that takes seaman¬ ship. Now, I have seen Mapuhi sail his schooner through this passage in half a gale of wind, and swing her about inside in the space most chauffeurs in Tahiti need to turn their automobiles. No one else would try it. He won’t go in; but Mapuhi would have his crew stand by, and, with the wheel in his own hands, would tear through the opening as if he had all the seven seas about him.” I was below washing my hands, when the roar of the breakers came to my ears with the call of Moet that a boat was leaving. I rushed to the waist of the schooner and, catching hold of a belayed rope’s end, dropped on the dancing thwart. Chocolat made a bound and landed on his master’s lap. Moet swore, but we were away. There was a high sea, and for a few seconds it was ATOLLS OF THE SUN 95 pitch and toss whether we could keep right side up. However, we struck the gait of the rollers, and, with Piri a Tuahine at the long steering-oar, moved toward the beach, urged on by rowers and breakers, but op¬ posed by a strong outsetting current. The dexterity of the steersman saved us a dozen times from capsizing. Often we climbed waves that, but for an expert guidance, would have crashed over us. Many and many a boat turns over in these “landings” and spills its life freight to death or hurt. Nearing the passage, a white and brawling two hundred feet between murderous rocks, the boat had to be swung obliquely to -enter, and we hung upon a comber’s peak for a seeming age, the rowers sweating furiously at the oars, until Piri a Tuahine gave a staccato signal. Oars inboard, we rushed down the shore side of the breaker, and were at peace in a lovely lagoon. Of the many miles of circumference of Takaroa, a tiny motu was inhabited by the hundred and fifty people, and on it they had built a stone quay for small boats. We made fast to it and sprang ashore. CHAPTER VI Diffidence of Takaroans — Hiram Mervin’s description of the cyclone — Teamo’s wonderful swim — Mormon missionaries from America — I take a bath. THERE was no stir on the quay of Takaroa. In these latitudes the civilized stranger is shocked by the indifference to his arrival of the half- naked native. It enrages a prideful white. He per¬ haps remembers the pages of Cook and the other dis¬ coverers, who wrote of the overflowing enthusiasm of the new-found aborigines for them; but he forgets the pages of history since national, religious, and business rivalries invaded the South Seas. These Paumotuans, and, indeed, most Polynesian peoples, are kin to pet cats who madden mistresses by pretending not to hear calls, and by finding views from windows interesting when asked to show their accomplishments or fine coats. Though they may have seen no outsider for months, these Paumotuans will appear as unconcerned at a white visitor’s coming as if circuses dropped in their midst daily. Yet every movement, every word of a new¬ comer is as alluring to their imaginations, bored by the sameness of their days, as a clown’s antics to a child. “It is a politeness and pride, not indifference,” had explained my friend, that first gentleman of Tahiti, the Chevalier Tetuanui, of Mataiea. “We simple is¬ landers have been so often rebuffed by uncultivated whites that we wait for advances. It is our etiquette.” 96 Atoll of Hikuera after the cyclone The wrecked County of Roxburgh ATOLLS OF THE SUN 97 The main thoroughfare of the village stretched up from the quay half a mile, with one or two ramifying byways, along which straggled the humble homes of the Takaroans. There were not the usual breakfast fires before them, as in Tahiti, where breadfruit and feis are to be cooked, nor did the appetizing odor of coffee rise, as in Tahiti, for Mormonism forbade coffee to its adher¬ ents as it did alcohol and tobacco. Beside the quay were dozens of cutters, and a small launch. Canoes were being relegated to lesser civilizations by the fast sail¬ ing cutters. Motor power was new here ; almost new in Tahiti. But a few years and it would be common, for while the islander cared nothing for time, he was at¬ tracted to labor-saving machines. Captain Moet set the sailors to unload the Mararas boat, and the chief of Takaroa appeared. The French, whose island possessions in P.olynesia occupy sea room in spots from eight to twenty-seven degrees below the equator, and from 136 to 155 west of Greenwich, have left survive, in title at least, the chieftaincies, the form of government they found upon seizure. “Monsieur le Chef ” they said of the native officials here, as they did of a head cook in a restaurant. These chiefs, though nominally the representatives of French sover¬ eignty, were, in pitiable reality, wretchedly-paid tax collectors, policemen, and bailiffs. But they often were gentlemen — gentlemen of rich color. The strapping fel¬ low who had vised the documents of the Marara, though wearing only denim overalls, lacked nothing in cour¬ tesy. A rent disclosed that the “alls” were over his birth-suit. I was not arrayed very smartly, having left collar, 98 ATOLLS OF THE SUN cravat, and socks, as well as shirt and undershirt, aboard. Pongee coat and trousers, with flexible shoes, were in this tropic an ideal compromise with culture. Open the coat, and the breeze had access to one’s puris natural- ibus, and, if one had to swim or wade, little clothing was wetted. The chief surveyed me, saw that I took no interest in the cargo, and drew his own conclusion. “la ora na!” he said gently, and led me toward the village. It was seven years earlier that the last great cyclone had devastated these islands. Takaroa was mute wit¬ ness of its ruin. The houses were almost all mere shacks of corrugated iron — walls and roofs of hideous gray metal. A few wooden buildings, including two stores, were the exceptions. The people had neither courage nor money to rebuild comfortable abodes. Lumber must be brought from Tahiti and carpenters employed. No more unsuitable material than iron for a house in this climate could be chosen, except glass, but it was comparatively cheap, easily put together, and a novelty. It was as unharmonious a note among the palms as rag-time music in a Greek theater, and in the next cyclone each separate sheet would be a guillo¬ tine. Nothing more than a few feet above the ground withstands these hurricanes, which fell cocoanuts^ as fire eats prairie-grass. We had not walked a hundred yards before a power¬ ful half-caste stopped me with a soft “Bon jour!” A good-looking, clean-cut man of thirty years, the white blood in him showed most in his efficient manner and his excellent French. ATOLLS OF THE SUN 99 “You are American,” he said in that tongue in the mildest voice. “Metis oui” I replied. “I am Hiram Mervin, son of Captain Mervin, owner of the schooner France- Austral. My father is Ameri¬ can, and I am half American, though I speak no Eng¬ lish. You may have read of me. I repaired his boat, the Shark , for that American author. Jack. His engine was broken down. He wanted me to go to Australia as his mechanician, but my father said no, and when an American says no, *he means that, nest-ce pas. Monsieur ?” “Where w^ere you,” I inquired, “when the last cy¬ clone blew?” His fine brown face wrinkled. Hiram had a firm chin, a handsome black mustache, and teeth as hard and white as the keys of a new piano. “Ah, you have heard of how we escaped? Non? Alors, Monsieur, I will tell you. I am a diver, and here I keep a store. We were at Hikueru, my father and I, when it began to storm. Father watched the barometer, and the sea. The mercury lowered fast, and the waves rolled bigger every hour. “ ‘The barometer is sinking fast. The ocean will drown the island,’ said my father. ‘Noah built an ark, but we cannot float on one ; we must get above the water.’ “There were four cocoanut-trees, solid and thick- trunked, that grew a few feet from one another. Bad planting, oui, but ‘most useful. He set me and some others, his close friends, to climbing these trees and cut¬ ting off their heads, so that they stood like pillars of 100 ATOLLS OF THE SUN the temple. It was a pity, I thought, for we ruined them. Then we took heavy planks and lifted them to the tops of these trees and spiked and roped them in a platform. “Attendez, Monsieur! All this time the cyclone in¬ creased. My father was not with us. It was the div¬ ing season on Hikueru, and people were gathered from all over the atolls, and from Tahiti, hundreds of Maoris, and many whites. My father was directing the efforts of the people to save their property. We had not yet thought of our lives being in great danger. We island¬ ers could not live if we expected the worst. “A gale from the east, strong but not dangerous, had lashed the water of the lagoon and made it like the ocean, and then, turning to the west, had driven the ocean mad. Now the ocean was coming over the reef, the waves very high and threatening. We knew that if ever the sea and the lagoon met to fight, we would be the victims. Thus, Monsieur, the lagoon surrounded by the island, and the usually calm waters inside the outer reef, were .both in a frightful state, and we began to fear what had been in other atolls. My father was wise, but, being a Mormon and also an American, he must not think of himself first. My father came to us and tested the platform, and showed us where to strengthen it. “ ‘The island will be covered by the sea and the la¬ goon,’ he said. ‘Make haste, in the name of God!’ “Some one, a woman, called to him for help, and he ran to her. A sheet of iron from a roof came through the air, and wounded him. I thought his head was al¬ most cut off, from the quantity of blood. Mats, Mon - ATOLLS OF THE SUN 101 sieur, c'etait terrible! We caught hold of my father, and made a sling with our ropes, and lifted him, un¬ conscious, to the platform at the top of the trees. He raised his head and looked around. “ ‘Go down again V he commanded. ‘Cut down those three trees. If they fall they will strike us.’ “Monsieur, that was my father, the American, who spoke, though nearly dead. He was wise. We did as he said, as quickly as we could, and climbed back to the platform. The great breakers of the ocean were now far up on our beach at each end of the tide. The whole width of the land from the edge of the beach to the lagoon is but the length of four or five cocoanut- trees. The water below the atoll was forced up through the coral sand, Monsieur, until it was like the dough of the baker when he first pours in the cocoanut juice. People still on the ground went up to their arms in it. We feared the atoll would be taken back to the depths. Our platform was nearer the lagoon than the moat — to be exact, two hundred feet from the moat, and a hun¬ dred from the lagoon. My father had us tie him to the platform and to the trees. We had brought plenty of ropes for that. ‘cMon Dieu ! Below the poor people were tying them¬ selves to the trunks of the cocoanut-trees, and climbing them, if they could, and roosting in the branches like the wild birds of the air. They were shrieking and praying. There were many whites, too, because all the pearl-shell and pearl buyers, and the keepers of stores like us, were there from Papeete. The little children who could not climb were crying, and many parents stayed with them to die. The sea was now like the reef, 102 ATOLLS OF THE SUN white as the noon clouds with foam. We had bound my father’s wounds with my shirt, but the blood dripped on the boards where he lay with his eyes open and watch¬ ing the cyclone.” The chief, who had accompanied me, became restless. He understood no French. “Monsieur V Americain, do I detain you?” Hiram Mervin asked me. I signed for him to continue. “Then came the darkness. There were only the sounds of the wind and water, the crash of the cocoanut- trees as they fell with their human fruit. We heard the houses being swept away ; we thought we caught glimpses of vessels riding on the breakers, and we im¬ agined we caught the shrieks of those being destroyed. But the wind itself sounded like the voices of people. I heard many calling my name. “ ‘Hiram Mervin, pray for us! Save us!’ said the cyclone. “Ah, I cannot tell it! It was too dreadful. It was hours after darkness that the sea reached its height. Those below were torn from hummocks of coral, from the roofs of houses, and from trees. We knew that the sharks and other devils of the sea were seizing them. The sea rushed over the land into the lagoon and the lagoon returned to the sea. When they met under us, they fought like the bulls of Bashan. Hikueru was being swallowed as the whale swallowed Iona , the pero - feta. We held on though our trees bent like the mast of a schooner in a typhoon. We called often to one another to be sure none was lost. When morning came, after night on night of darkness, the waters re- ATOLLS OF THE SUN 103 ceded, and we saw the work of the demon. Almost every house had been cut down, and most of the trees. The cemeteries were washed up, and the bodies, bones, and skulls of our dead for decades were strewn about or in the ocean. The lagoon was so full of corpses old and new that our people would not fish nor dive for shells there for a long time. The spirits are still seen as they fly through the air when there is a gale. But, Mon¬ sieur, our four cocoanut-trees had stood as the pillars of the temple of Birigi’ama Iunga. Not for nothing was my father born in America. Mais, Monsieur , the chief is waiting. The mitinare will be glad to see you. Au revoir ” Hiram took a step to return to the quay when he called back to me. “Ah, there is Teamo, who is the Living Ghost,” and he pointed to a Paumotuan woman who was coming up from the quay towards where we three stood. Teamo had the balanced gait of one who sits or stands much in canoes, and she strode like a man, her powerful figure showing under her red Mother-Hub- bard which clung close to her stoutish form. Short, she was like most of the Paumotuans, of middle height, but with her head set upon a pillar of a neck, and her bare chocolate arms, rounded, hut hinting of the powerful muscles beneath the skin. Her hair was piled high on her head like a crown, and upon it was a basket in which were two chickens. A live pig was under her arm. She was carrying this stock from our boat. “There,” said Hiram, “there is Teamo, who is the greatest swimmer of all these seas, and who went through the great cyclone as does a fish. Haere maiT he called, “This monsieur, who is an American, like my 104 ATOLLS OF THE SUN father, wants to hear about your swimming of the seas in the matai rorofai ” Teamo put down her pig and the chickens from her head, sat upon her haunches, and drawing a diagram in the coral sand, she told her strange tale in her own language. “The water is coming over the atoll, and the lagoon and the sea are one,” said Teamo, “when my brother and sisters and I climbed the great cocoanut-tree by our house, because it is death below. You know the cocoa- nut-trees. You see they have no limbs. You know that it is hard to hold on because the great trees shake in the wind, and there is no place ta sit. Only we could put our arms around the leaves and hold as best we might. When it comes on dark we feel the wind roaring louder about us, and we hear the cries of those who are in other trees. Then far out on the reef we hear the pounding of the sea and the waves begin more and more to come over the atoll until* they cover it deeper and deeper, and each succeeding wave climbs higher and higher toward where we cling. We know that soon there will come a wave whose teeth will tear us from the tree. “That wave came all of a sudden. It was like a cloud in the sky. It lifted me out of the cocoanut- leaves as the diver tears the shell from the bank at the bottom of the lagoon. It lifted me and took me over the lagoon, over the tops of all trees, and when it went back to the ocean, it carried me miles with it. I was on the top of its back, almost in the sky, and it was as black as the spittle of the devil-fish.” ATOLLS OF THE SUN 105 The chief was listening attentively, for she spoke in Paumotuan. Hiram Mervin interposed: “Teamo went away from Hikueru on that wave and stayed three days,” said he. “She was numbered with the dead when the count of the living was made by my father.” Teamo squatted on the sand of the road. I was afraid she would weary in her relation, as do her race. “ Parau vinivini !” I said, and smoothed her shoulders. “I kept upon its back,” she resumed. “All through that night I swam or floated, fighting the waves, and fearing the sharks. I called on Birigi’ama Iunga and on letu Kirito, and on God. Hours and hours I kept up until the dawn. Then I saw a coral-reef, and swam for it. I was nearly crushed time and time on the rocks, but at last I crawled up on the sand above the water, and fell asleep. “When I awoke I was all naked. The waves had torn my dress from me, and the sun was burning my body. I was bruised and wounded, but I prayed my thanks to the God of the Mormons. I stood upon my feet, and I saw all about me the poke roa, the black¬ ening and broken bodies of people of Hikueru. They, too, had floated on the same wave, but they had per¬ ished. They were all about me. I searched for cocoa- nuts, for I was drying up with thirst and shaking with hunger. At last I found one under the body of my cousin, and, breaking it with a rock, I drank the water in it, and again fell asleep. “Now when I awoke I was stronger, and a distance away in the water I saw a box floating. I broke it 106 ATOLLS OF THE SUN open, and found it had in it tins of salmon. They were from some store in Hikueru, for I soon knew there was no living human on that atoll but me. I could not open the tins of salmon but pierced holes in them with a piece of coral and sucked out the fish. God was even better to me, for I found a camphor- wood chest with a shirt and pareu in it, and I put them on. I then found a canoe thrown up on the beach, and it was half full of rain-water. I made up my mind to*return to my home in the canoe. It was broken and there was no paddle, I patched it, I found the outrigger, and tied it on with cocoanut fiber which I plaited. I made a paddle from the top of the salmon case, and lashed it to the handle of a broom- I found. I kept enough fresh water in the canoe, and a*fter two days of eating and resting I pushed out in the canoe, with the remainder of the salmon. I could not see any other atoll, but I trusted to God and prayed as I pad- died. I pushed over the reef at daybreak of the third day, and paddled until the next morning, when I saw Hikueru, and reached the remnants of my village.” Teamo gathered up her burdens and, with a reminis¬ cent smile, walked on. “Monsieur V Americain” said Hiram, “you may sure that when she returned to Hikueru from Tekokota — that atoll was fifteen miles away — they were afraid of her, as the friends of Lataro when Ietu Kirito raised him from the dead.” The chief’s restlessness increased, as if he must de¬ liver me somewhere quickly; but I thought of the man they called the king of the Paumotus. “The house of Mapuhi, is it — ” ATOLLS OF THE SUN 107 “The chief is taking you there now,” said Hiram. “The elders are there. My father was long-time the partner of Mapuhi. They sailed their schooners to¬ gether and had their divers.” “You and your father are Mormons?” “ Nous sommes bons Mormons ” replied the half-caste, seriously. “Am I not named for the king who built the temple of Solomon. It is a shame, Monsieur, that those KoJiito are permitted in these islands. They corrupt the true religion.” The chief touched my arm, and we proceeded, after an exchange of bows with the son of the American. We walked to the very end of the small motu or islet. The motus are often long but always very narrow, between three hundred and fifteen hundred feet. The people of Takaroa had chosen to pitch their huts on this spot of the whole atoll because of the pass into the lagoon being there. That was the determining factor just as the banks of rivers and bays were selected by American pioneers. Where the salt water was on three sides — the moat, the lagoon, and the chan¬ nel between the next motu — was the residence of our seeking. It was a neat domicile of dressed lumber, raised ten feet from the ground on stilts. It was fenced about, and here and there a banana-plant or fig-tree grew in a hole dug in the coral, surrounded by a little wall of coral and with rotting tin cans heaped about. Driven in the trunks were nails. I asked the chief the reason, and he replied vaguely that the trees needed the iron of the cans and the nails. 108 ATOLLS OF THE SUN We were entering the grounds now, and I guessed it was Mapuhi’s house. “Mapuhi is here?” I inquired. “?ES he is at prayer, maybe.” The chief shrank back, as we were on the porch. “Faaea oe ; tehaeri nei au. You stay; I go,” he said. On the side veranda, a girl of seventeen or so, in a black gown, lay on a mattress and yawned as she scratched her knee with her toes — not of the same leg. She was almost naked, slender and very brown. These Paumotuans are darkened by the sun, their hair is not long and beautiful like the Tahitians’. Beauty is a matter of food and fresh water. She lay on this bare mattress, without sheets or pillows, evidently just awakening for the day. She made quite a picture when she smiled. The daughter of the king, doubt¬ less. There was a noise in response to my knock, and the door opened. A tousled pompadour of yellowish-red hair above hazel eyes peeped out, the eyes snapped in amazement, and their owner, a strapping chap of twenty-five, put out his hand. “Hello! Where are vou from?” he said. “Off the Marara just now, and from the United States not long ago.” “Well, gee cricketty, I ’m glad to see you! My name ’s Overton, T. E. Overton of Logan, Utah. Come here, Martin! He’s Martin De Kalb of Koo- sharem, Utah. We ’re Mormon elders. Say, it ’s good to talk United States!” A body leaped out of bed in an inner room, and a pair ATOLLS OF THE SUN 109 of blue eyes under brown hair, an earnest face, sup¬ ported by an athletic figure in pajamas, rushed out. The owner seized my hand. “I ’ll be doggoned! I did n’t know anything was in sight. The Marara! Any mail for me? Come in, and we ’ll dress.” The king’s daughter had fled when the missionaries appeared. I entered the living-room and found a chair, while the elders flooded me with questions from their sleeping quarters, as they put on their clothes. While I answered, I looked at the home of this foremost of the Paumotuans, whose father and mother had eaten their kind. A dining-room table and half a dozen cheap chairs were all the furniture. South Sea Islanders found sit¬ ting in chairs uncomfortable, and these were plainly guest seats, for governors and pearl-buyers and mis¬ sionaries. The walls held prints curiously antagonistic. Brig¬ ham Young, founder of the Utah Mormon colony, with a curly white beard, smooth upper lip, and glorified countenance, sat in an arm-chair, holding a walking- stick of size, with a gilded head. A splendiferous col¬ ored lithograph of the temple at Salt Lake flanked the portrait. On the other wall was a double pink page from a New York gazette, usually found in barber-shops and on boot-black stands, with pictures of two prize-fighters, Jeffries and Johnson, one white and the other black, glaring viciously at each other, and with threatening gloved fists. Beneath this picture was in handwriting: 110 ATOLLS OF THE SUN Teferite e Tihonitone na Taata Moto Emerging from their bedroom, the elders caught my eyes fastened on the pink page, and they looked grieved, as housewives whose kitchen is found in disorder. “They ’re crazy about boxing,” said Overton. “That’s young Mapuhi who put that up and wrote that. We reprove them for such ungodly interests, but they are good Mormons, anyhow.” I led the conversation to their own work in this group. They became enthusiastic. Sincere faces they had, simple and strong, of the pioneer type. They were sons of healthy peasantry, and products of plain living in the open. De Kalb had left a wife and child in Koo- sharem, and Overton a sweetheart in Logan, to take their part in spreading their gospel among these natives. They were voluntary missionaries, paying their own ex¬ penses for the two or three years they were to give to proselytizing, according to the rule of their church, they said. They were eager to return to their women and their farms, and their service was soon to be at an end. Each had spent a year or so in Papeete in the Mormon Mission 'House, learning the Paumotuan language and the routine of their duties, and now for a year and more they had journeyed from atoll to atoll where they had churches, preaching and making converts, they said. They talked with fervor of their success. “The Lord has been mighty good to us,” said De Kalb, who was in his twenties. “We ’ve got this island hog-tied. If it were n’t for the Josephites and some of those Catholic priests, we ’d have every last one. Those ATOLLS OF THE SUN 111 Josephites are sorest, because they are deserters from Mormonism. Why are they? Why, their so-called prophet was Joseph. I forget his other name. Oh, no, he was not our martyr, Joseph Smith. They split off from the real church. They don’t amount to a hill of beans, but when the Mormons left these islands, be¬ cause the French were hostyle, these Josephites sneaked in and got quite a hold by lying about us, before we got on to their game and came back here. They ’re out for the stuff. The real name of our church here is, Te Etaretia a Jesu Metia e te feia mo' a i te Man Ma- liana Ho pea Nei “Gosh, I ’d like to get my hair cut and roached,” said Elder Overton. “It was fine, when I left Papeete. I just have to let it go,” and he stirred his golden shock with the air of a man who has abandoned comfort for an ideal. “Do the Paumotuans cling to their heathen customs?” I asked. Overton looked at the floor, but De Kalb, the older, spoke up. “They will circumcise,” he said hesitatingly. “We try to stop it, but they say it is right; that it makes them a separate people. They often wait until thirteen years of age before prompted to perform the rite. The kids don’t appreciate it.” “And tithes?” Your church members give a tenth of their incomes?” Again De Kalb replied : “They should,” he said. “These Takaroans are just beginning to see the beauty of that divine law. It is hard to make them exact. Perhaps they give a twen- 112 ATOLLS OF THE SUN tieth. It ’s cocoanuts, you know, and it ’s hard to keep account.” “Of course, polygamy is — ” I was about to say “for¬ bidden,” when I felt that I had broached a delicate topic. I was stupid. Here in a lagoon surrounded by a nar¬ row fringe of coral, to bang the eternal polyangle of one man and many women! The elders looked pained. I was about to withdraw the remark with an apology, but Westover made the most of his twenty-four years and waived aside my amends. “It must be met,” he said. “We obey the laws of the land. The American law forbids plural marriages, and our church expressly forbids them. We are loyal Americans. We say to these people that polygamy is not to be practised. That ’s true, no matter what the Josephites say.” Elder De Kalb, who was watching me, interposed: “I suppose you ’re not a Mormon, but, as a matter of fact, is n’t polygamy, with wives and children to the extent of a man’s purse, all avowed and cherished, bet¬ ter than adultery?” Overton got upon his feet. “You bet it is,” he de¬ clared, with intense feeling. “It ’s nature’s law. There are more women than men by millions. Men are polyg¬ amous by instinct. And, by heavens! look at all those old maids at home and in England!” Considering the sorrows of old maids, I felt my stand¬ ards being endangered, but was saved from downright perversion by accepting the royal favor of a tub of fresh water from a cistern that caught the rain-water from the roof. I was seeking to immerse myself in the inadequate bath when I saw the daughter of the king Over the reef in a canoe ATOLLS OF THE SUN 113 gazing at me interestedly, and I hope that I blushed. But the princess distinctly winked in the direction of my hosts as I attempted to sink into oblivion in the ten- gallon pail. CHAPTER VII Breakfast with elders — The great Mapuhi enters — He tells of San Fran¬ cisco — Of prizefighters and Police gazettes — I reside with Nohea — Robber crabs — The cats that warred and caught fish. TIMES in my life a bath had been a guerdon after days of denial in desert and at sea, but seldom so grateful as that in the stony garden of Mapuhi under the tropical sun. My wounds were healing, but the new skin forming in a score of places bound me like patches of plaster. Not many houses in the Paumotus were constructed to impound rain, even for drinking purposes. The cocoanut furnished the liquid for quenching thirst, or the brackish rain-water retained in holes dug five or six feet in the coral was drunk by the natives. The Europeans of any perma¬ nent residence gathered the rain in barrels or cisterns, and sometimes made ample reservoirs, while in a few atolls were little fresh lakes fed by rains, the bottoms of which were formed by a coral limestone impervious to water. Such lakes were very precious. When I went up the steps to the house, I found the Mormon elders fully dressed and preparing breakfast for three. A can of California peaches, a small broiled fish, and pilot biscuits were all the meal, but the grace was worthy of a feast. They bowed their heads, closed their eyes, and implored God to bless their fare, to make it strengthen them for the affairs of this world only as they conduced to His greater honor and glory. And 114 ATOLLS OF THE SUN 115 they put in a word for me, “Our brother who has come among us all unannounced, but doubtless for some good purpose known to Him who directs the sparrow’s fall, and the sphere’s movements.” “We have to economize dreadfully,” said De Kalb, apologetically. “We are spending our savings. Canned goods are dear. But we are saving souls right along. There is to be a service in the temple in half an hour, and we would like you to attend. We are going to pray for a successful rahui, the diving season, and for the safety of the divers. You know they never know when they ’re going to come up dying or dead from the bottom of the lagoon.” As he spoke there was framed in the doorway a native whom I knew instinctively to be the monarch of this cluster of atolls. He wore only a dark-blue pareu stamped with white flowers, but some men have an air which makes you know at first sight that they are masters of those about them. So was this Mapuhi, who, of all Paumotuans in a hundred years, had become distin¬ guished among whites. Mapuhi was a giant in stature, a man solidly planted on spreading bare feet of which each toe was articulated as the fingers of a master pianist’s hand. His legs were rounded columns, the muscles hidden under the pad of flesh, his chest a great barrel, and below it a mighty belly, the abdomen of a Japanese or Chinese god of plenty. He was almost black from a life upon and in the salt water. His head was huge, a mass of grizzled hair low upon his forehead. His eyes, very large and luminous, gentle but piercing, gave an impression of absolute fearless¬ ness, of breadth of mind, and of devotion to his idea, be 116 ATOLLS OF THE SUN it ideal or indulgence. His chin was round and power¬ ful, but not prognathous. His mouth was well-formed, big and sensual under the short gray mustache, and not lacking in humor or a trace of irony. His nose was all but missing, for once when building a schooner an adz had slipped and cut it off. His face was thus flat¬ tened, with a slight suggestion of a fragment of a Greek gladiator’s head; but it was not so disfigured as one might think, and preserved a mien of dignity and re¬ serve force, of moral grandeur and superiority which one might call kingly were kings as of old. But it was in his eyes I read the reasons for his rise from the ruck of his race to lordship over it, and to the admiration of the white traders and mariners whom he bested in all their own ways — navigation, ship-building, and even trade. When Mapuhi saw me, he looked inquiringly at the elders, and then smiled. I saw two rows of teeth, large as my thumb nail, and as brilliant as the pearl-shell from which he had wrung his vast fortune. He stood up¬ right, straight as a mast, solid as a tree, and commanding in every sense. More than seventy years of wrestling with the devils of the sea and lagoon, and the outcasts of Europe and America, had failed to bow him an inch or to take from him apparently a single attribute of his vigorous manhood except that across his broad face ran a score of wrinkles, which criss-crossed his forehead into diamond panes, and made one know he had learned the secrets of man and wind and water by fearful experi¬ ence. Thus was Mapuhi who had made the winds and cur¬ rents his sport, who in the dark of night ran the foaming ATOLLS OF THE SUN 117 passes that the white mariner shunned even in daylight, and who had made the trees and lagoons of his isles pay him princely toll. This was the man who alone had out¬ witted the white trader who came to take much and give little. “Good morning,” said Mapuhi, in English, of which he knew only a few words. He gave me a probing glance, and retired, to appear in a few minutes in black calico trousers, a pink undershirt, and a belt of red silk. His eyes asked me if I was a trader come to compete with him. He sat down in a great chair that vaguely resembled a throne, wrought of bamboo, and carved, and trussed to bear the exceeding weight of the man, for Mapuhi was over three hundred pounds. As he sat he inquired of the elders the reason for my being there. He did it with his foot. He twisted his toes into the most expressive interrogation, which was a plain ques¬ tion to the elders. They said in Paumotuan that I was an American, an important man, but precisely what were my affairs they did not know. I was interested in Mormonism, in Takaroa, and in the career of Ma¬ puhi. Assured that I was not another Tahiti trader, Mapuhi put out his great hands and took into them one of mine, and pressed it, as he said in Paumotuan, “My island is yours.” I was loath to talk my poor Paumotuan, because I wanted to get as closely as possible to the mind of this noblest of his tribe ; and so I conversed in F rench, except when I appealed to the elders for more exact meanings in Paumotuan. “Mapuhi,” I began, “even in San Francisco sailors know your skill in these dangerous waters.” 118 ATOLLS OF THE SUN “Ah, San Francisco!” said Mapuhi, regretfully. “I was there. I had a ship built there, and I sailed it to Takaroa. I lived there a week in your great house into which one drives with horses.” I conjured a picture of Mapuhi coming in a hack from the dock in San Francisco to the Palace Hotel, and of the striking contrast between this mighty man of these isles and the little men of finance and of commerce who must have dined about him. Kalakaua, king of the Hawaiian Islands, had lived there, and had died there. But charming as was that prince of bons vivants , he was nevertheless the victim of the white man’s vices, and as years passed, his appearance became that of an overfed, over-ginned head porter. Even the patrons of the Palace must have had some vision of this man Mapuhi on the deck of his schooner, his vast chest and arms bare, his hair blown by the wind. Or, emerging from the waters of the lagoon, arising from the plunge to the coral cave where the lethal shark looks for prey. This was what he spoke in face and form to me. “I had seven nights,” said Mapuhi, “in your great house, and seven days in your streets. The people were like the fish in the lagoon of Pukapuka, where no man seeks them, and where they crowd each other until they kill. I went in a room from the ground to where I slept, a room that moved on a cord ; and I rode in other rooms that moved about the roads on iron bands in which people sat who never said a word to one another, and who never spoke to me. As I walked in the roads they were dark as in the cocoanut-groves, for your houses make caves of the roads, as under the barrier-reef.” “But, Mapuhi,” I said, “we are happy in our way.” ATOLLS OF THE SUN 119 “You do not laugh much,” returned the chief. “Only I heard the laughter from the houses in which you sold rum. I am a good Mormon. I do not now drink your mad waters, but in your city only the mad waters made men happy. I was a gentile myself many years and did not know the truth. I, too, drank the mad waters.” Mapuhi’s eyes sought the picture of Brigham Young which was on the wall, but mine went to the figures of the prize-fighters, Jeffries and Johnson. Ma- puhi intercepted my glance and immediately became alert. “Was it possible that I had ever seen Teferite or Ti- honitone V’ This question was put to Elder Overton, who hesi¬ tated to interpret. The subject was a scandal through¬ out the Paumotus. I read that in the preacher’s face, but, comprehending the import of the words, I said that I knew Teferite ; that he lived very near me, and that I saw him often in his store. Once or twice I had bought goods of him. He was getting very fat since Tihonitone had whipped him, and most of his time he hunted fish and wild animals. Tihonitone , the neega, as the Paumotuans call Afro-Americans, I had seen more than once, I said. “That neega knocked down the white Teferite and took the hundreds of thousands of francs given the winner,” said Mapuhi, with spirit. “They are both great men, but the neega is the greatest. Next to the chiefs of the Mormon church, they are the greatest Americans.” “H ave you never heard of Roosevelt, Teddy Roose¬ velt?” I demanded. 120 ATOLLS OF THE SUN He did not know the man. An acquaintance in Ta¬ hiti sent him now and then the pink paper which con¬ tained the pictures of fighting men, of fighting dogs, and of women whose bosoms and legs were bare. America must now be full of these fights, and of beauti¬ ful women almost naked, he said. “Your two most famous men, Teferite and Tihoni- tone, sell rum. The goods you bought of Teferite was rum, for he keeps a rum store in Los Angelese, and the neega in Keekago.” Each sentence tore the elders’ hearts, but Mapuhi salved their wounds. “These men are gentiles, I know,” he concluded. “The elders have informed me. Mormons sell no rum. But tell me, is Tihonitone master of his white wife? I have her picture. She is beautiful.” Overton frowned. “Mapuhi,” he said, gently, “you make too much of those ‘Police Gazette’ pictures. The godly in America never see them. They are for the rum-drinkers, and are found only in the resorts of the wicked. Strength is admirable, but the fighting men of our country are the Philistines whom Jehovah chastised.” To me, in English, the Utahan said: “That coon’s licking the white man has cost the whole white race dear. A preacher in India told me England could better have afforded to give Johnson five million dollars, for what it has cost in troops. The same in Africa. The evil of prize-fighting was never better exemplified. Jef¬ fries’ beating has hurt religion seriously.” Mapuhi and the elders left the room, and returned in a few minutes in black broadcloth coats and high white ATOLLS OF THE SUN 121 collars, in which they sweated woefully. We all walked to the temple. It was close beside the beach, built of coral blocks, smeared with cement, white as the ocean foam. Its iron roof, painted crimson, was the only spot of color on the motu, except the nodding palms. “It is like the blood of the martyrs,” exclaimed Over- ton, piously. “The temple was begun over twenty years ago. Nine years it took to build it, because the con¬ verts were few and poor, and labor scarce. Twice cyclones leveled it. Ten years ago the Takaroans began it again, and for two years it has been completed. I know of no more sublime monument to the true religion than this little temple. Every block of coral is a re¬ deemed soul. If only the gentiles in America knew the work we were doing!” We entered the temple reverently, the congregation, already seated, nearly filling it. On its rude coral floor were rough benches accommodating five or six per¬ sons each. A pulpit of gingerbread scrollwork, the only other furniture, was apologized for by De Kalb. “It was the plainest we could get. It was made for the Catholics. They like ’em fancy, like their religion.” Elder Overton preached the sermon. De Kalb read from the Bible and the “Book of Mormon.” The people who filled the edifice paid all attention. Serious always in their demeanor, except when affected by al¬ cohol, they were positively melancholy in religion. All who could afford it wore black, and the oldsters had long frock coats of funereal hue, and collars like the Americans. After the services, I broached to the elders my ne¬ cessity of a habitation. With the diving season opening 122 ATOLLS OF THE SUN in a few weeks, divers and traders would be at Takaroa from all about, and the 140 people of the atoll would be multiplied three or four times. Most of these divers would crowd in the houses of the natives, and the ma¬ jority of the traders would live on their schooners. Ma- puhi regretted that all his accommodations were be¬ spoken. The elders took me to the house of Nohea, a small, neat cottage, at the end of the avenue leading from the mole, an avenue all shining white with coral sand. It reminded me of the shell roads of my native State, Maryland, in my childhood. It was lined with the shanties and huts of the inhabitants. Nohea greeted me quietly. He was a dark man, six feet four inches in height, big all over, his muscles well insulated by deep fat, and with the placid giantism of a Yeddo wrestler. He was taciturn, reserved, and melancholy. Most of these natives became spiritually strained when, as commonly, late in life, they gave up the wicked pleasures of the flesh — alcohol, tobacco, and philandering. They lost toleration for unrighteousness, and the joy that in their unregenerate state had oozed from their wicked pores turned to acid. A friend and sometime partner of Mapuhi, and as devout a Mormon, Nohea was, next to Mapuhi, the fore¬ most figure in the archipelago. He was not a trader, except that he sold his pearls, shell, and copra for money and merchandise ; but he had dignity, strength, and per¬ sonality — not quite as had Mapuhi, but more than any other Takaroan. Among Paumotuans few men showed distinctive character. Nohea possessed that, and also physical strength and skill for the diving, for ATOLLS OF THE SUN 123 the handling of boats, and for the making of copra. When there was no white missionary at Takaroa, he was the hierophant of the Mormon church. He con¬ ducted the services and advised the faithful, collected the tithes, and admonished the sinners. He did not fail in zeal for that task. Nohea painted a hell darker than a shark’s jaws, a pit of horror, lit by black flames which burned the non-Mormons, and a heaven on earth where baked pig was a free dish at all hours. The Mormon heaven is nearer the Mussulman’s than the Christian’s. Food and rills of fresh water, many beautiful and pas¬ sionate wives, song and feasting, were promised the Paumotuan. Golden harps and streets of pearl would hardly have brought their tithes to the church treasury. The very day I joined him I began to see things through his eyes. I was bathing at dusk in the clear waters of the lagoon near our home. The severe heat of the equatorial day had passed, and the still salt lake was as refreshing to my sun-stricken and coral-scratched body as the spring of the oasis to the parched traveler. The night was riding fast after the sunken sun, and driving the last gleam of color from the sky. As I floated at ease upon the quiet surface of the pale-green lagoon, the sounds of the murmurous twi¬ light — the rustling of the trees and the splash of the surf on the outer shore — were made discordant by a pe¬ culiar scraping noise near-by. I turned lazily over on my face and raised my head from the water. On the coral in the deceptive half-light of the crepus- cule was a hideous, shell-backed monster, which had emerged from an unseen lair, and moved slowly and lumberingly toward the cocoanut-trees. Its motions 124 ATOLLS OF THE SUN and appearance, in the semi-obscurity, took on the qual¬ ity of a dream-beast, affrighting in its amazing novelty. It was like a great paper-mache animal in a pantomine. I was beset by apprehension that it might advance to the lagoon and approach me in an element in which it would be my master. I swam swiftly to shore and called, “Nohea!” My companion came from near our hut, where on the red-hot coral stones, which had been made to glow by a fire of cocoanut-husks, he cooked the fish he had caught that afternoon. He looked at me inquiringly, and I pointed to the alarming creature now disappearing in the palm-grove. “ Aue!” he cried irascibly, and sprang after the night¬ mare. When I overtook him, he was standing at the foot of a lofty cocoanut-tree and shaking his fist at the object of his pursuit, which was climbing with unbeliev¬ able speed up the slippery gray trunk. “I teienei! It is the kaveu , that devil of the night who robs us of our cocoanuts while we sleep. But wait ! I made a vow to destroy the next one I found thieving!” Nohea went a hundred yards to where a banana plant was growing in earth brought from Tahiti. He gathered clay and leaves, and with painstaking effort fashioned a wreath of the mixture six inches wide and several feet in length. I stood in wonderment, guessing that he was making a charm to bring about the death of the despoiler of the groves. Nohea took a length of coir , the rope the Paumotuans make of cocoanut-fiber, — from the tree which feeds them, clothes them, and houses them, — and, tying it into a girdle but little larger than the girth of the palm, put ATOLLS OF THE SUN 125 it about his wrists. The cocoanut-tree had, at regular intervals upon its trunk, projecting bands of its tough bark, and about the first of these above his head Nohea slipped the rope. He pulled himself up by it, and, clasping the tree with his legs, seized a higher holding- place. Thus he proceeded with ease until he had reached a point half-way of the lofty column. There he halted, and, taking from his shoulders his matted band, he plastered it firmly around the trunk. He then slipped to the ground. I was as puzzled as a boy who was told at sailing that the ship was weighing its anchor, and saw no scale. “That will do for him,” said Nohea, “as the reef shatters the canoe when the steersman fails to find the pass.” He returned to the fire, and soon we were absorbed in the pleasant processes of supper. We lived simply, be¬ coming near-to-nature folk, but we had plenty. First, we ate popo , tiny fish we had snared in our traps, and which we swallowed raw, after a soaking in the juice of limes. With our bonito steak we had broiled cocoanut- meat, and for drink we opened the wondrous chalices of the green nuts and enjoyed the cool wine. There was no breadfruit, for these islands of stone afforded no nourishment to such delicate and rich plants. But we had ship’s biscuit from the schooner, and for desert a pot of loganberry jam. Nohea, his stomach full, sat contemplatively on his haunches. Now and then he cocked his ear toward the cocoanut-grove, but he said nothing. The crown of the tree in which the giant crustacean had vanished was lost in the gloom of night. A slight breeze sprang up from the distance toward the 126 ATOLLS OF THE SUN Land of the War Fleet, and pandanus and miki-miki bushes nodded and gave forth little noises as their leaves and branches rubbed together. Over all was the atmosphere of mystic aloofness which the white feels so keenly in these far-away dots — the utter difference of scene and incident from the accus¬ tomed one of the home land. I mused about my own future in these little known tropics — Nohea cautiously raised himself to his feet, and, mo¬ tioning me to be silent, directed my attention to the tree up which had gone the ugly marauder an hour be¬ fore. We heard plainly a grating, incisive noise, and in a moment a huge cocoanut fell from among the swaying leaves to the earth. A smothered exclamation of fury broke from the Paumotuan, but he made no step and continued point¬ ing at the palm. Then I heard a scratching, and peering through the darkness with the aid of my electric torch, I saw the colossal crab coming down the trunk. He held on to the slippery bark by the sharp points of his walking legs, and backwardly descended with extreme care. Nohea watched intently as the animal neared the girdle of clay and leaves. I noted his excitement, but still could not resolve his plan. It flashed upon me as its success was established in an instant of action. The robber-crab, touching the clay, moved less care¬ fully, and suddenly, to my astonishment, let go his hold, and with claws wildly beating the air, whirled downward from the height of forty feet, crashing on the rocks at the foot of the tree. In a second Nohea was upon him with a club of purau wood. But there ATOLLS OF THE SUN 127 was no need for further punishment. The drop had caused instant death. The immense shell was smashed and the monster lay inert upon the coral stones. The diver sprang in the air and clapped his hands rapidly, as might a winning bettor at a prize-fight. “The fool!” he said. “He has no koekoe — no bowels of wisdom. He thought the clay was the bottom, and that he was already with the nut he had robbed me of, and which he could open and eat. Many I have killed like that one, but it takes time. I have had such a thief steal my pareu for his house, and a bottle of kerosene for mere mischief. We will eat the flesh of this one’s legs, and I will melt his fat against the rahui when I might have rheumatism.” Nohea showed me a great mass of blue fat under the kaveus tail, and from this he boiled down a quart of the finest oil. It was not only a specific for rheumatism but the best possible lubricant for sewing-machines and clocks, he said. He put some of the oil in the sun, and when thickened it made butter, though not with a milky taste. This thievish crab seemed marked by his star — doubt¬ less of the Cancer constellation — to play a deceptive part in the crustacean world, for not only had he practically abandoned the water as his element, learned to climb trees, and to eat food utterly foreign to his natural ap¬ petite, but he had a habit of hiding his tail when the rest of his body was in full view. He would stick it in any convenient hole, under a log, or even in the cocoanut- shell he had emptied. He was over-conscious and seem¬ ingly ashamed of it, like an awkward man of his hands at a wedding. 128 ATOLLS OF THE SUN The haven's descent from the hermit-crab family might explain his tail-concealment custom, for the her¬ mit concealed his entire body in a borrowed shell, and so, perhaps, the robber-baron was -but showing an atavis¬ tic remnant of the disguise instinct. The whole crab tribe seemed tainted with this fear of being merely them¬ selves. Many of them picked up a piece of seaweed and stuck in on their projecting curved bristles, and let it grow as a kind of permanent bonnet. Others took pieces of live sponge, and fastened them to hooks on their backs. One clever chap stitched seaweed threads together to form a tube, and then crawled into it. And one masonic crab mixed a sandy cement and plastered its back with it until it looked like the floor of its pond. These specious masqueraders selected colors, too, to suit their background, and the seaweed or sponge must match the environment or be rejected. Older and hard¬ ened backsliders invited oysters and other mollusks and worms that live in limestone pipes to dwell on their shells, and move about with them. I was convinced that these low-down-in-the-scale beings knew more about their environment, and practised “safety first” more assiduously, than did man himself. The biggest robber-crab in the Takaroa groves could not have got a humble hermit brother to volunteer to go to war against a crab colony, or risk his life to glorify the crab state. In carrying a cocoanut, the robber crab held it under some of its walking legs, and retired, raised high on the tips of its other members a foot from the ground. Its body measured two feet long by eighteen inches wide. It did not use its claws in ascending the tree, but clung with the sharp points of its legs ; and I saw it go up steep a .2 ‘■+j o a u q w 3 c3 t-. ci g 0) £3 a> oi +j to a 2 bfi O £ 0) 0) o fl O bo c a V o CO c3 ,£5 Ph* 2 u *• I s o