By Reef and Palm

L >> Louis Becke >> By Reef and Palm

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9

Warren looked steadily at him for a moment, and then glanced at his
outstretched hand.

"The pleasure isn't mutual, blarst you, Mr Motley," he said coldly, and
he put his hand in his pocket.

The supercargo took a step nearer to him with a savage glare in his
blue eyes. "What do you mean by this, Captain Warren?"

"Mean?" and the imperturbable Warren seated himself on a corner of the
table, and gazed stolidly first at the handsome Motley and then at the
heavy, vicious features of Riedermann. "Oh, anything you like. Perhaps
it's because it's not pleasant to see white men landing at a quiet
island like this with revolvers slung to their waists under their
pyjamas; looks a bit too much like Bully Hayes' style for me," and then
his tone of cool banter suddenly changed to that of studied insolence.
"I say, Motley, I was talking about you just now to Taplin AND Nerida.
Do you want to know what I was saying? Perhaps I had better tell you. I
was talking about Tita Raymond--and yourself."

* * * * *

Motley put his right hand under his pyjama jacket, but Taplin sprang
forward, seized his wrist in a grip of iron, and drew him aside.

"The man who draws a pistol in my house, Mr Motley, does a foolish
thing," he said, in quiet, contemptuous tones, as he threw the
supercargo's revolver into a corner.

With set teeth and clenched hands Motley flung himself into a chair,
unable to speak.

Warren, still seated on the table, swung his foot nonchalantly to and
fro, and then began at Riedermann.

"Why, how's this, Captain Ricdermann? Don't you back up your
supercargo's little quarrels, or have you left your pistol on board?
Ah, no, you haven't. I can see it there right enough. Modesty forbids
you putting a bullet into a man in the presence of a lady, eh?" Then
slewing round again, he addressed Motley: "By God! sir, it is well for
you that we are in a white man's house, and that that man is my friend
and took away that pistol from your treacherous hand. If you had fired
at me I would have booted you from one end of Funafuti beach to the
other--and I've a damned good mind to do it now, but won't, as Taplin
has to do some business with you."

"That will do, Warren," I said. "We don't want to make a scene in
Taplin's house. Let us go away and allow him to finish his business."

Still glaring angrily at Riedermann and Motley, Warren got down slowly
from the table. Then we bade Taplin and Nerida good-bye and went
aboard.

At daylight we saw Taplin and his wife go off in the ALIDA'S boat. They
waved their hands to us in farewell as the boat pulled past the brig,
and then the schooner hove-up anchor, and with all sail set, stood away
down to the north-west passage of the lagoon.

A year or so afterward we were on a trading voyage to the islands of
the Tubuai Group, and were lying becalmed, in company with a New
Bedford whaler. Her skipper came on board the brig, and we started
talking of Taplin, whom the whale-ship captain knew.

"Didn't you hear?" he said. "The ALIDA never showed up again. 'Turned
turtle,' I suppose, somewhere in the islands, like all those slashing,
over-masted, 'Frisco-built schooners do, sooner or later."

"Poor Taplin," said Warren, "I thought somehow we would never see him
again."

* * * * *

Five years had passed. Honest old Warren, fiery-tempered and
true-hearted, had long since died of fever in the Solomons, and I was
supercargo with a smart young American skipper in the brigantine
PALESTINE, when we one day sailed along the weather-side of a tiny
little atoll in the Caroline Islands.

The PALESTINE was leaking, and Packenham, tempted by the easy passage
into the beautiful lagoon, decided to run inside and discharge our
cargo of copra to get at the leak.

The island had but very few inhabitants--perhaps ten or twelve men and
double that number of women and children. No ship, they told us, had
ever entered the lagoon but Bully Hayes' brig, and that was nine years
before. There was nothing on the island to tempt a trading vessel, and
even the sperm whalers, as they lumbered lazily past from Strong's
Island to Guam, would not bother to lower a boat and "dicker" for
pearl-shell or turtle.

At the time of Hayes' visit the people were in sore straits, and on the
brink of actual starvation, for although there were fish and turtle in
plenty, they had not the strength to catch them. A few months before, a
cyclone had destroyed nearly all the coconut trees, and an epidemic
followed it, and carried off half the scanty population.

* * * * *

The jaunty sea-rover--than whom a kinder-hearted man to NATIVES never
sailed the South Seas--took pity on the survivors, especially the
youngest and prettiest girls, and gave them a passage in the famous
LEONORA to another island where food was plentiful. There they remained
for some years, till the inevitable MAL DU PAYS that is inborn to every
Polynesian and Micronesian, became too strong to be resisted; and so
one day a wandering sperm whaler brought them back again.

But in their absence strangers had come to the island. As the people
landed from the boats of the whale-ship, two brown men, a woman, and a
child, came out of one of the houses, and gazed at them. Then they fled
to the farthest end of the island and hid.

Some weeks passed before the returned islanders found out the retreat
of the strangers, who were armed with rifles, and called them to "come
out and be friends." They did so, and by some subtle treachery the two
men were killed during the night.

The woman, who was young and handsome, was spared, and, from what we
could learn, had been well treated ever since.

"Where did the strangers come from?" we asked.

That they could not tell us. But the woman had since told them that the
ship had anchored in the lagoon because she was leaking badly, and that
the captain and crew were trying to stop the leak when she began to
heel over, and they had barely time to save a few things when she sank.
In a few days the captain and crew left the island in the boat, and,
rather than face the dangers of a long voyage in such a small boat, the
two natives and the woman elected to remain on the island.

"That's a mighty fishy yarn," said Packenham to me. "I daresay these
fellows have been doing a little cutting-off business. But then I don't
know of any missing vessel. We'll go ashore to-morrow and have a look
round."

A little after sunset the skipper and I were leaning over the rail,
watching the figures of the natives, as they moved to and fro in the
glare of the fires lighted here and there along the beach.

"Hallo!" said Packenham, "here's a canoe coming, with only a woman in
it. By thunder! she's travelling, too, and coming straight for the
ship."

A few minutes more and the canoe was alongside. The woman hastily
picked up a little girl that was sitting in the bottom, looked up, and
called out in English--

"Take my little girl, please."

A native sailor leant over the bulwarks and lifted up the child, and
the woman clambered after her. Then, seizing the child from the sailor,
she flew along the deck and into the cabin.

She was standing facing us as we followed and entered, holding the
child tightly to her bosom. The soft light of the cabin lamp fell full
upon her features, and we saw that she was very young, and seemed
wildly excited.

"Who are you?" we said, when she advanced, put out a trembling hand to
us, and said: "Don't you know me, Mr Supercargo? I am Nerida, Taplin's
wife." Then she sank on a seat and sobbed violently.

* * * * *

We waited till she regained her composure somewhat, and then I said:
"Nerida, where is Taplin?"

"Dead," she said in a voice scarce above a whisper; "only us two are
left--I and little Teresa."

Packenham held out his hands to the child. With wondering, timid eyes,
she came, and for a moment or two looked doubtingly upwards into the
brown, handsome face of the skipper, and then nestled beside him.

For a minute or so the ticking of the cabin clock broke the silence,
ere I ventured to ask the one question uppermost in my mind.

"Nerida, how and where did Taplin die?"

"My husband was murdered at sea," she said and then she covered her
face with her hands.

"Don't ask her any more now," said Packenham pityingly; "let her tell
us to-morrow."

She raised her face. "Yes, I will tell you to-morrow. You will take me
away with you, will you not, gentlemen--for my child's sake?"

"Of course," said the captain promptly. And he stretched out his honest
hand to her.

* * * * *

"She's a wonderfully pretty woman," said Packenham, as we walked the
poop later on, and he glanced down through the open skylight to where
she and the child slept peacefully on the cushioned transoms. "How
prettily she speaks English, too. Do you think she was fond of her
husband, or was it merely excitement that made her cry?--native women
are as prone to be as hysterical as our own when under any violent
emotion."

"I can only tell you, Packenham, that when I saw her last, five years
ago, she was a graceful girl of eighteen, and as full of happiness as a
bird is of song. She looks thirty now, and her face is thin and
drawn--but I don't say all for love of Taplin."

"That will all wear off by and by," said the skipper confidently.

"Yes," I thought, "and she won't be a widow long."

* * * * *

Next morning Nerida had an hour or two among the prints and muslin in
the trade-room, and there was something of the old beauty about her
when she sat down to breakfast with us. We were to sail at noon. The
leak had been stopped, and Packenham was in high good-humour.

"Nerida," I inquired unthinkingly, "do you know what became of the
ALIDA? She never turned up again."

"Yes," she answered; "she is here, at the bottom of the lagoon. Will
you come and look at her?"

After breakfast we lowered the dingy, the captain and I pulling. Nerida
steered us out to the north end of the lagoon till we reached a spot
where the water suddenly deepened. It was, in fact, a deep pool, some
three or four hundred feet in diameter, closed in by a continuous wall
of coral rock, the top of which, even at low water, would be perhaps
two or three fathoms under the surface.

She held up her hands for us to back water, then she gazed over the
side into the water.

"Look," she said, "there lies the ALIDA."

* * * * *

We bent over the side of the boat. The waters of the lagoon were as
smooth as glass and as clear. We saw two slender rounded columns that
seemed to shoot up in a slanting direction from out the vague, blue
depths beneath, to within four or five fathoms of the surface of the
water. Swarms of gorgeously-hued fish swam and circled in and about the
masses of scarlet and golden weed that clothed the columns from their
tops downward, and swayed gently to and fro as they glided in and out.

A hawk-bill turtle, huge, black, and misshapen, slid out from beneath
the dark ledge of the reef, and swam slowly across the pool, and then,
between the masts, sank to the bottom.

"'Twas six years ago," said Nerida, as we raised our heads.

That night, as the PALESTINE sped noiselessly before the trade wind to
the westward she told me, in the old Funafuti tongue, the tragedy of
the ALIDA.

* * * * *

"The schooner," she said, "sailed very quickly, for on the fifteenth
day out from Funafuti we saw the far-off peaks of Strong's Island. I
was glad, for Kusaie is not many days' sail from Ponape--and I hated to
be on the ship. The man with the blue eyes filled me with fear when he
looked at me; and he and the captain and mate were for ever talking
amongst themselves in whispers.

"There were five native sailors on board--two were countrymen of mine,
and three were Tafitos [Natives of the Gilbert Islands].

"One night we were close to a little island called Mokil [Duperrey's
Island],and Taplin and I were awakened by a loud cry on deck; my two
countrymen were calling on him to help them. He sprang on deck, pistol
in hand, and, behold! the schooner was laid to the wind with the land
close to, and the boat alongside, and the three white men were binding
my country-men with ropes, because they would not get into the boat.

"'Help us, O friend!' they called to my husband in their own tongue;
'the white men say that if we go not ashore here at Mokil they will
kill us. Help us--for they mean evil to thee and Nerida. He with the
yellow moustache wants her for his wife.'

"There were quick, fierce words, and then my husband struck Motley on
the head with his pistol and felled him, and then pointed it at the
mate and the captain, and made them untie the men, and called to the
two Tafito sailors who were in the boat to let her tow astern till
morning.

"His face was white with the rage that burned in him, and all that
night he walked to and fro and let me sleep on the deck near him.

"'To-morrow,' he said, 'I will make this captain land us on Mokil;' it
was for that he would not let the sailors come up from the boat.

"At dawn I slept soundly. Then I awoke with a cry of fear, for I heard
a shot, and then a groan, and my husband fell across me, and the blood
poured out of his mouth and ran down my arms and neck. I struggled to
rise, and he tried to draw his pistol, but the man with yellow hair and
blue eyes, who stood over him, stabbed him twice in the back. Then the
captain and mate seized him by the arms and lifted him up. As his head
fell back I saw there was blood streaming from a hole in his chest."

She ceased, and leant her cheek against the face of the little girl,
who looked in childish wonder at the tears that streamed down her
mother's face.

* * * * *

"They cast him over into the sea with life yet in him, and ere he sank,
Motley (that devil with the blue eyes) stood with one foot on the rail
and fired another shot, and laughed when he saw the bullet strike. Then
he and the other two talked.

"'Let us finish these Pelew men, ere mischief come of it,' said
Riedermann, the captain.

"But the others dissuaded him. There was time enough, they said, to
kill them. And if they killed them now, there would be but three
sailors to work the ship. And Motley looked at me and laughed, and said
he, for one, would do no sailor's work yet awhile.

"Then they all trooped below, and took me with them--me, with my
husband's blood not yet dried on my hands and bosom. They made me get
liquor for them to drink, and they drank and laughed, and Motley put
his bloodied hand around my waist and kissed me, and the others laughed
still more.

"In a little while Riedermann and the mate were so drunken that no
words came from them, and they fell on the cabin floor. Then Motley,
who could stand, but staggered as he walked, came and sat beside me and
kissed me again, and said he had always loved me; but I pointed to the
blood of my husband that stained my skin and clotted my hair together,
and besought him to first let me wash it away.

"'Wash it there,' he said, and pointed to his cabin.

"'Nay,' said I, 'see my hair. Let me then go on deck, and I can pour
water over my head.'

"But he held my hand tightly as we came up, and my heart died within
me; for it was in my mind to spring overboard and follow my husband.

"He called to one of the Tafito men to bring water, but none came; for
they, too, were drunken with liquor they had stolen from the hold,
where there was plenty in red cases and white cases--gin and brandy.
"But my two countrymen were sober; one of them steered the ship, and
the other stood beside him with an axe in his hand, for they feared the
Tafito men, who are devils when they drink grog.

"'Get some water,' said Motley, to Juan--he who held the axe; and as he
brought it, he said, 'How is it, tattooed dog, that thou art so slow to
move?' and he struck him in the teeth, and as he struck he fell.

"Ah! that was my time! Ere he could rise I sprang at him, and Juan
raised the axe and struck off his right foot; and then Liro, the man
who steered, handed me his knife. It was a sharp knife, and I stabbed
him, even as he had stabbed my husband, till my arm was tired, and all
my hate of him had died away in my heart.

* * * * *

"There was quick work then. My two countrymen went below into the cabin
and took Motley's pistol from the table; . . . then I heard two shots.

"GUK! He was a fat, heavy man, that Riedermann, the captain; the three
of us could scarce drag him up on deck and cast him over the side, with
the other two.

"Then Juan and Liro talked, and said: 'Now for these Tafito men; they,
too, must die.' They brought up rifles, and went to the forepart of the
schooner, where the Tafito men lay in a drunken sleep, and shot them
dead.

"In two more days we saw land--the island we have left but now, and
because that there were no people living there--only empty houses could
we see--Juan and Liro sailed the schooner into the lagoon.

"We took such things on shore as we needed, and then Juan and Liro cut
away the topmasts and towed the schooner to the deep pool, where they
made holes in her, so that she sank, away out of the sight of men.

* * * * *

"Juan and Liro were kind to me, and when my child was born, five months
after we landed, they cared for me tenderly, so that I soon became
strong and well.

"Only two ships did we ever see, but they passed far-off like clouds
upon the sea-rim; and we thought to live and die there by ourselves.
Then there came a ship, bringing back the people who had once lived
there. They killed Juan and Liro, but let me and the child live. The
rest I have told you. . . . How is this captain named? . . . He is a
handsome man, and I like him."

* * * * *

We landed Nerida at Yap, in the Western Carolines. A year afterwards,
when I left the PALESTINE, I heard that Packenham had given up the sea,
was trading in the Pelew Group, and was permanently married, and that
his wife was the only survivor of the ill-fated ALIDA.

THE CHILEAN BLUEJACKET

A Tale Of Easter Island

Alone, in the most solitary part of the Eastern Pacific, midway between
the earthquake-shaken littoral of Chili and Peru, and the thousand
palm-clad islets of the Low Archipelago, lies an island of the days
"when the world was young." By the lithe-limbed, soft-eyed descendants
of the forgotten and mysterious race that once quickened the land, this
lonely outlier of the isles of the Southern Seas is called in their
soft tongue Rapanui, or the Great Rapa.

* * * * *

A hundred and seventy years ago Roggewein, on the dawn of an Easter
Sunday, discerned through the misty, tropic haze the grey outlines of
an island under his lee beam, and sailed down upon it.

He landed, and even as the grim and hardy old navigator gazed upon and
wondered at the mysteries of the strange island, so this day do the
cunning men of science, who, perhaps once in thirty years, go thither
in the vain effort to read the secret of an all-but-perished race. And
they can tell us but vaguely that the stupendous existing evidences of
past glories are of immense and untold age, and show their designers to
have been coeval with the builders of the buried cities of Mexico and
Peru; beyond that, they can tell us nothing.

Who can solve the problem? What manner of an island king was he who
ruled the builders of the great terraced platforms of stone, the
carvers of the huge blocks of lava, the hewers-out with rudest tools of
the Sphinx-like images of trachyte, whose square, massive, and
disdainful faces have for unnumbered centuries gazed upwards and
outwards over the rolling, sailless swell of the mid-Pacific?

* * * * *

And the people of Rapa-nui of to-day? you may ask. Search the whole
Pacific--from Pylstaart, the southern sentinel of the Friendlies, to
the one-time buccaneer-haunted, far-away Pelews; thence eastward
through the white-beached coral atolls of the Carolines and Marshalls,
and southwards to the cloud-capped Marquesas and the sandy stretches of
the Paumotu--and you will find no handsomer men or more graceful women
than the light-skinned peqple of Rapa-nui.

* * * * *

Yet are they but the survivors of a race doomed--doomed from the day
that Roggewein in his clumsy, high-pooped frigate first saw their land,
and marvelled at the imperishable relics of a dead greatness. With
smiling faces they welcomed him--a stranger from an unknown, outside
world, with cutlass at waist and pistol in hand--as a god; he left them
a legacy of civilisation--a hideous and cruel disease that swept
through the amiable and unsuspicious race as an epidemic, and slew its
thousands, and scaled with the hand of Death and Silence the eager life
that had then filled the square houses of lava in many a town from the
wave-beaten cliffs of Terano Kau to Ounipu in the west.

* * * * *

Ask of the people now, "Whence came ye? and whose were the hands that
fashioned these mighty images and carved upon these stones?" and in
their simple manner they will answer, "From Rapa, under the setting
sun, came our fathers; and we were then a great people, even as the
ONEONE [sand] of the beach. . . . Our Great King was it, he whose name is
forgotten by us, that caused these temples and cemeteries and terraces to
be built; and it was in his time that the forgotten fathers of our fathers
carved from out of the stone of the quarries of Terano Kau the great
Silent Faces that gaze for ever upward to the sky. . . . AI-A-AH! . . .
But it was long ago. . . . Ah! a great people were we then in those
days, and the wild people to the West called us TE TAGATA TE PITO HENUA
(the people who live at the end of the world) . . . . and we know no
more."

And here the knowledge and traditions of a broken people begin and end.

* * * * *

I

A soft, cool morning in November, 187-. Between Ducie and Pitcairn
Islands two American whale-ships cruise lazily along to the gentle
breath of the south-east trades, when the look-out from both vessels
see a third sail bearing down upon them. In a few hours she is close
enough to be recognised as one of the luckiest sperm whalers of the
fleet--the brig POCAHONTAS, of Martha's Vineyard.

Within a quarter of mile of the two ships--the NASSAU and the
DAGGET--the newcomer backs her foreyard and hauls up her mainsail. A
cheer rises from the ships. She wants to "gam," I.E. to gossip. With
eager hands four boats are lowered from the two ships, and the captains
and second mates of each are soon racing for the POCAHONTAS.

* * * * *

The skipper of the brig, after shaking hands with his visitors and
making the usual inquiries as to their luck, number of days out from
New Bedford, etc., led the way to his cabin, and, calling his
Portuguese steward, had liquor and a box of cigars brought out. The
captain of the POCAHONTAS was a little, withered-up old man with sharp,
deep-set eyes of brightest blue, and had the reputation of possessing
the most fiery and excitable temper of any of the captains of the sixty
or seventy American whale-ships that in those days cruised the Pacific
from the West Coast of South America to Gaum in the Ladrones.

After drinking some of his potent New England rum with his visitors,
and having answered all their queries, the master of the POCAHONTAS
inquired if they had seen anything of a Chilian man-of-war further to
the eastward. No, they had not.

* * * * *

"Then just settle down, gentlemen, for awhile, and I'll tell you one of
the curiousest things that I ever saw or heard of. I've logged
partiklars of the whole business, and when I get to Oahu (Honolulu) I
mean to nar-rate just all I do know to Father Damon of the Honolulu
FRIEND. Thar's nothing like a newspaper fur showin' a man up when he's
been up to any onnatural villainy, and thinks no one will ever know
anything about it. So just take hold and listen."

The two captains nodded, and he told them this.

* * * * *

Ten days previously, when close in to barren and isolated Sala-y-Gomez,
the POCAHONTAS had spoken the Chilian corvette O'HIGGINS, bound from
Easter Island to Valparaiso. The captain of the corvette entertained
the American master courteously, and explained his ship's presence so
far to the eastward, by stating that the Government had instructed him
to call at Easter Island, and pick up an Englishman in the Chilian
service, who had been sent there to examine and report on the colossal
statues and mysterious terraces of that lonely island. The Englishman,
as Commander Gallegos said, was a valued servant of the Republic, and
had for some years served in its Navy as a surgeon on board EL
ALMIRANTE COCHRANE, the flag-ship. He had left Valparaiso in the
whale-ship COMBOY with the intention of remaining three months on the
island. At the end of that time a war vessel was to call and convey him
back to Chili. But in less than two months the Republic was in the
throes of a deadly struggle with Peru--here the commander of the
O'HIGGINS bowed to the American captain, and, pointing to a huge scar
that traversed his bronzed face from temple to chin, said, "in which I
had the honour to receive this, and promotion"--and nearly two years
had elapsed ere the Government had time to think again of the English
scientist and his mission. Peace restored, the O'HIGGINS was ordered to
proceed to the island and bring him back; and as the character of the
natives was not well known, and it was feared he might have been
killed, Commander Gallegos was instructed to execute summary justice
upon the people of the island, if such was the case.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9