It must have taken a deal of talking to win my mother's consent, but Uncle Harry proved equal to the task. When we had breakfasted he sat with her for an hour in the courtyard, and afterward, when I saw her alone, she kissed me and told me that I was to go.
We had guests that day—old friends who had known my uncle when he was a boy. I sat at dinner with the others, but all I can remember of the meal is that Uncle Harry praised my ducks. I was still dazed at my good fortune: my dreams of adventure and of distant wanderings were to come true at last! A cruise on the Tara in the South Seas—a quest for pearls in a tropical lagoon—a part in the sequel of my uncle's tale—indeed, the prospect was enough to intoxicate any boy of fifteen. Iriatai! There was magic in the word alone, and I repeated it under my breath while the older people about me spoke of commonplace things.
The sun was low over the Pacific when we said good-bye. The others accompanied us to the beach: my father and mother, Marion, and our guests; and in a little group of people from the Santa Brigida I saw old Juana sobbing, with a shawl pulled over her head. The two sailors rolled the whaleboat into the wash of the sea; after the final handclasps, Uncle Harry and I took our places in the stern. The ocean was calmer than on the day before. Ivi and Ofai watched their time, ran the boat out in a lull, leaped in to seize their oars, and pulled seaward through the gentle surf. The mate of the Tara had seen us with his glasses and the schooner was headed toward the land. Presently we came alongside, scrambled over the rail, and helped the sailors haul the boat on deck. My uncle shouted a command; the sheets were slacked away, and the Tara bore off to the southwest.
I turned for a last look at the watchers on the beach, already so far distant that they were no more than a patch of color against the dunes. There was a lump in my throat—it was the first time that I had been away from home.
"I hate to leave," remarked Uncle Harry, who was standing at my side, "but we're off now; in the morning we'll be out of sight of land. Come below and have a look at your quarters. I think you'll like the Tara; she's my only child!"
The Tara, as I have said, was schooner-rigged—a vessel of a hundred tons, fast, comfortable, and designed to ride out any sea. A glance convinced me of her owner's love. The sides were snowy with fresh paint; the decks of white pine were holystoned till they gleamed spotless against their seams of pitch; the masts and spars were newly varnished, and no spot of mildew stained the sails. On the after deck a shallow cockpit contained the wheel and binnacle. Forward of the cockpit, the companionway led down to the saloon, where a pair of curtained doors gave on staterooms to starboard and to port. The woodwork was of bright mahogany. On either side of the saloon there was a leather-upholstered lounge, and half a dozen chairs were screwed fast to the floor about a handsome dining-table. Forward of the saloon was the engine-room, shut off by a bulkhead from the main hold where burlapped bales and packing-cases were piled high between decks. The galley was on deck, and the forecastle was placed far up in the bows, furnished with a deal-table and berths made of piping on which lengths of heavy canvas had been stretched.
My uncle's was the larger of the two staterooms. It was fitted with a washstand and a single berth; a few framed photographs hung on the walls, a large porthole gave a view of the sea outside, and a steel safe was built into one corner of the room. The cabin opposite was assigned to me—it was here that the half-caste son of von Tesmar had breathed his last.
"You're not afraid of ghosts, eh?" my uncle asked me with a smile. "The poor devil died in that very bunk, but he's never troubled us since, and if he did appear, he'd be harmless enough. Come—I want you to know my boys; excepting the cook I shipped in 'Frisco, I've known them all for years."
They were Kanakas—brown Polynesians of the islands, akin to the Hawaiian people and to the Maoris of far-away New Zealand. Ivi and Ofai I already knew. Fatu, the mate, was a huge silent fellow with a smile in his quick dark eyes—a nobly proportioned giant. The engineer, Pahuri, was an elderly Rarotongan with a passion for fishing: a small man, gray, wrinkled, and talkative. He had followed the sea since boyhood and had visited many parts of the world on whaling vessels and on merchant ships. His heart was kind, but he possessed a biting tongue and his travels had made him cynical. Then came Rairi, the half-caste cook my uncle had found stranded in San Francisco after a voyage before the mast. He was a shade lighter than the others, with a handsome, sullen face: a tall man and powerfully built, though dwarfed in the presence of the mate. Rairi spoke a little English, picked up along the waterfront, and had a pleasant manner when he wished to make himself agreeable, but at other times his features were of a forbidding cast. He cooked, and cooked well, in his box of a galley, set on the forward deck above the hold. Outside of his duties he had little to do with the men, as if his strain of white blood caused him to hold aloof. Last of all came Marama the cabin boy, who served our meals, polished brasses, and made himself useful whenever there was an odd job on hand. He was a brown lad of my own age, though larger and much stronger than I, and I liked him from the moment we met. He was a cheerful worker, his black eyes were bright with humor and intelligence, and he never lost his temper when a lurch of the deck threw a potful of hot coffee over his feet. His father, Uncle Harry told me, was a chief on Raiatea.
"We're heading straight for Raiatea," said my uncle as we sat at dinner that night. "I want you to stop there while I run across to unload my cargo at Tahiti. It's a fine island and the chief of Faatemu is a great friend of mine. You can put up at his house; I'll leave young Marama to keep you company. He knows a bit of English—that will help you at first. By the way, you'll need to pick up the native as fast as you can; the man who can't speak with them is handicapped. It's easy to learn; why not work at it during our passage South? I'll help you and so will any of the men; it always pleases them to find one of us interested in their language. Try memorizing a few words a day at the start, then the simple phrases will come to you, and before you know it, you'll be yarning with the crew.
"The quieter we keep this business the less trouble we'll have, and for that reason I'm going to pick up my men on Raiatea. There's a Paumotan colony on the island—we'll have no trouble in getting all the divers we need. They work two in a canoe, and we'll want fifteen canoes to be on the safe side. They'll have to be built specially; I want you to stay in Faatemu to see that they are ready when I return. It's a great place for fishing and pig-hunting—you'll have a lot of fun!"
When dinner was over we sat on deck for a time, while my uncle smoked one of his slender black cigars. The sails were furled, for the wind had died away an hour after sunset. An oily swell was running from the west and the pulsing of the Tara's engine drove us steadily away from land. By the dim light of the binnacle I could see that Ofai, at the wheel, was shivering. Finally he called to Ivi, and the other came aft with a thick woollen jacket on his arm. Uncle Harry tossed the stump of his cigar overboard; I heard it hiss for an instant as it struck the sea.
"Come," he said; "let's turn in before we're both frozen. My blood's too thin for these chilly winters of yours!"
Next day we left the zone of coastwise calms and ran into the northeast trade. The engine was stopped and the Tara headed southward with all sails set, running almost free. It is a brave wind, the trade, and it blew strong and fair, making the whitecaps dance on the dark blue swells, and driving us southward day after day till we were within a few degrees of the Line. Each day, at noon, my uncle fetched his sextant on deck to observe the sun, and I watched him afterward, bending over the chart in his stateroom, marking off our position with dividers and scale. Finally, with a very sharp pencil, he made a tiny cross, and I knew that this mark on the great blank spaces of the mid-Pacific was where the schooner had been at twelve o'clock.
Sometimes the wind fell away at sunset and the engine chugged steadily throughout the night; once, when the trade blew day and night without abating, the Tara reeled off two hundred knots from noon to noon.
The weather grew warmer day by day. Shoes, stockings, and warm clothing were stowed away, and the men went about their work in waistcloths, with brown chests bare. One morning Uncle Harry called me into the trade-room at the after end of the hold, and handed me half a dozen pareus—strips of cotton print, dyed in barbaric patterns of scarlet and white, a yard wide and two yards long.
"If I were you," he said, "I'd put away my trousers from now on—shirts too, if you're not afraid of the sun. My friends call me a savage, but aboard my own schooner I dress as I please. The natives invented the pareu, and it's the most sensible dress for this part of the world. It's cooler than pyjamas at night, and in the morning you have merely to hitch a fresh one around your waist and you're dressed for the day. Let me show you the trick of putting it on." He wrapped the cloth about my waist, tucked in the ends and made a tight roll at the top. "There," he remarked with a smile, "that's quick dressing, eh?"
From that day we went barefoot and bare-chested as the sailors did, and I was soon burned to a uniform deep ruddy brown, only a shade paler than the native crew.
We were in the tropics now. The ocean was of a vivid blue that I had never seen. Shoals of flying fish rose before the Tara's cutwater to skim off above the waves, and sometimes the water about us was alive with the predatory fish which rove the open sea. One afternoon Marama showed me how to catch my first albicore in native fashion.
We were standing by the rail, on the after deck. Suddenly, close to the schooner's side, a dozen great steel-blue fish flashed into the air, leaping like porpoises. "Albicore!" exclaimed my companion, as he darted away toward the forecastle. A moment later he was back, brandishing a twelve-foot pole of heavy bamboo. To the small end of it he made fast a length of strong cotton line, terminating in a lure of mother-of-pearl tinted in iridescent shades of yellow and green and fitted with a barbless hook of brass. The shell was cut and polished to resemble a six-inch flying-fish, with a tuft of white horsehair projecting on either side to represent the wings.
The albicore were still leaping and flashing alongside, now darting ahead, now circling to follow in our wake. Marama tossed his lure overboard and allowed it to skitter on the waves, holding the butt of the rod strongly with both hands. There was a flash of blue in the sea; the lure disappeared; the line snapped taut; the bamboo bent with the struggles of a powerful fish. A yell burst from my companion's lips. He braced himself to heave with all his strength, and a thirty-pound albicore, vibrant and flashing in the sunlight, broke from the water, sailed over the rail, and thudded to the deck.
"Quick!" shouted Marama. "You try! I kill this one—take him forward—Seroni no like blood on deck."
My own blood was up and the hint was enough. In an instant the lure was overboard and I was doing my best with unskilled hands to make it skitter as the native boy had done. The fish had circled and were following astern; I could see the spray of their leaping in the schooner's wake. Then, as I gazed into the clear water, I saw a single monstrous albicore rushing at my hook. His jaws gaped wide—there was a mighty wrench; I found myself doubled over the rail, clinging to the rod with all my strength and shouting for help. Marama had turned to come aft and his quick eye took in the situation at a glance. He bounded to the forecastle and came running along the deck, holding aloft a long, four-pointed spear. "Tapea maitai!" he shouted—"Don't let go!" At that moment, Seroni himself—for that was my uncle's native name—appeared on deck. He seized the spear from Marama's hand and sprang to the rail. I was beginning to learn that Uncle Harry prided himself on excelling the natives in their own pursuits. His arm shot out in a swift dexterous thrust which transfixed the wallowing fish, so heavy that we could not lift it till a noose had been thrown over its tail.
That night, for the first time in my life, I tasted the characteristic dish of Polynesia: raw fillets of fish, soaked in vinegar and served as an appetizer.
The trade wind held for sixteen days, and when it died away at last we were only four hundred miles north of the Line. Then the Tara's sails were furled and for three days and three nights the engine drove us southward over a sea ruffled by light airs from the west. I shall never forget those equatorial nights, when all the others, saving the steersman and myself, were asleep on deck—the steady pulsing of the Tara's motor; the calm sea, heaving gently as a sleeper's breast; the Southern Cross, low down among the blazing constellations. Each day at dawn the air cooled and freshened; presently the sky to the east began to pale, the little clouds on the horizon grew luminous with rosy light, and the sun appeared above the rim of the sea, a disk of dazzling brightness, glaring like burnished brass. The sunsets, on evenings when masses of cloud were piled along the western sky, were still more beautiful. Long after the sun had sunk beyond the slope of the world the clouds were tinted with opal and rose, and pierced by lofty shafts of golden light.
We crossed the Line and met the southeast trade, blowing from the far-off Chilean coast. Then the sheets were close-hauled and the Tara began to beat southward, pitching and bucking into the head sea. Marama brought racks to hold the dishes on our table; we moved about the deck in short runs, grasping at the rail or a convenient stay; and for the first time I felt a landsman's seasick qualms. The constant tossing made all hands irritable, and brought on the trouble between Pahuri and the cook.
I heard from Marama how the affair began. Fatu and the engineer ate their meals forward with the men, old friends and natives like themselves, with whom there was no occasion to enforce strict discipline. Pahuri, the little Rarotongan engineer, was the oldest man and the recognized story-teller of the crew. He had seen many strange parts of the world, and no doubt, like other story-tellers I have known, he was quite ready to describe other places he had never seen. No matter how often the story had been told, nor how obviously embellished by a resourceful imagination, the men always listened eagerly when Pahuri began his tale. Rairi, the half-caste cook, was the only skeptic of the lot, and his comment on the engineer's accounts of Sydney and Wellington and Singapore, coupled with his own white blood and pretense of superiority, caused daily friction between the two. There was soup on the day of the trouble, scalding-hot soup, carried to the forecastle by Rairi's own hands, and a plate of it, poured down the engineer's neck when the Tara gave a sudden violent lurch, brought Pahuri raging to his feet. Rairi was Paumotan on the native side; to a man of his kind no epithet could have been more offensive than the engineer's angry: "Uri Paumotu!—Paumotan dog!" But the mate's presence tied his hands and he retired sullenly to the galley, trembling with rage. The sequel came late that night.
Pahuri had been working on his engine and he came on deck, a little after midnight, for a breath of air. He was leaning on the rail by the shrouds when strong hands seized his throat and he heard a fierce whisper in his ear:—
"Ah!—Pig of a Rarotongan!"
Pahuri was a wiry little man and he struggled frantically in the other's grasp, for he realized at once that the cook intended to strangle him into silence and heave him overboard. He twisted his body about, gripped the shrouds like a monkey, doubled up his knees and drove both heels into Rairi's stomach. The cook relaxed his hands for a moment with a grunt of pain, and Pahuri managed to give a stifled shout. But the half-caste's fingers tightened once more, and the engineer felt his senses leaving him. His hands fell from the shrouds to which he had clung, his body was lifted to the height of the rail, and he thought numbly that the end was near. Then, suddenly as he had been seized, he was dropped to the deck, where he lay gasping for a time before he realized what had occurred.
The giant mate was standing over him, gazing down with an expression of concern. There was a waning moon, and by its light Pahuri saw that Fatu held the cook with one huge outstretched hand, the thumb and fingers sunk in the half-caste's corded neck. He held him easily as one lifts a puppy by the scruff.
"What is this?" the mate asked mildly, in his soft deep voice. "Has this man tried to do you harm?"
The man at the wheel had given the alarm, and my uncle came on deck a moment later, dressed only in a pareu, his chest and powerful shoulders bare. I had been sleeping, but the noises of the scuffle awakened me, and I followed close behind. Pahuri was able to speak when we arrived and he told a story that left out no detail of the affair. For a moment, no one thought of the half-caste, struggling weakly in Fatu's mighty grip. Even in the moonlight, I could see that his face was blackening—I pointed and touched my uncle's arm.
"Let him go, Fatu!" he ordered sharply. "You'll kill the man!"
The mate had been listening intently to Pahuri's tale, and at Uncle Harry's words he dropped Rairi with an air of surprise, as if he had forgotten him. The cook had fainted; we could not revive him until a bucket of sea water had been dashed over his face. At that he sat up feebly, groaning as his hands went up to feel his neck. My uncle glanced down, his dark eyes burning with a glitter that made Rairi turn away his face.
"Feel better now?" asked my uncle in a hard vibrant voice. "I'm glad of that, for I've something to say to you. You understand English, eh? You needn't do any talking—I know all about this affair. You tried to kill Pahuri—an old man half your size and your superior on board. These boys would like to heave you into the sea; I fancy they're right, it would be a riddance of damned poor trash. The only difficulty is that I need a cook. We're going to Raiatea first, and if you value your skin, you'll stick close aboard. Then I'm going to Tahiti and I'll drop you there. If you behave yourself from now on, I'll say nothing to the authorities; but if you try any more tricks, if any member of the crew goes overboard accidentally at night, or if anyone so much as falls ill before we reach Tahiti, I'll feel it my duty to turn you over to the French, who know me well. They guillotine their murderers down there—it's not a pleasant way to die! Think it over. You can go forward now."
Rairi struggled to his feet and tottered forward with a hand on the rail. At that moment, moved by a boy's emotion, I felt almost sorry for him, but as he passed me I caught a glimpse of his face in the moonlight—dark handsome features distorted by passion. I drew back as if he had raised his hand to strike me, but the others had not seen what I had seen, and I stifled the cry of warning which rose to my lips.
There was no more trouble with Rairi while he remained aboard the Tara; he went about his duties in silence, ignored by the sailors and sitting alone in his galley during the slack hours of the day. But I know now that it would have been better for us, and better for him, perhaps, in the long run, if my uncle had given his men their way—had let them throw the revengeful half-caste to the sharks.
On the morning after the trouble we raised our first land—the western islands of the Marquesas. At sunset we had seen flocks of birds flying steadily southeast, and my uncle told me that if we followed them they would lead us to the land. At dawn, when I came on deck, I heard the ringing shout of landfall from aloft, and gazing eastward, I made out the high silhouette of Hatutu, a faint outline against the flushing sky. An hour later we drew abreast of Eiao, a saw-toothed ridge, falling away gently at either end; and toward midday we raised the rock of Motu Iti, and the long highlands of Nukuhiva, veiled in masses of black thundercloud. At nightfall, in the darkling east, the pinnacled skyline of Uapou faded and disappeared.
"A beautiful group," remarked my uncle, standing by the rail. "When I was trading there I knew every bay from Hanavave to Tai-O-Hae. The larger islands have a fascination—a gloomy beauty that gets into one's blood. The people, though they were cannibals, were a fine savage race, who had developed, during the course of centuries in their isolated group, an interesting culture of their own. But their blood was too wild to stand contact with our civilization, and when the white man came they died off, as the Indian and the buffalo disappeared from our American plains. Now the valleys where people once dwelt in thousands are silent and deserted, the lonely burial-places of a vanished race. I suppose I'm a heathen, but I can see the savage's point of view—he asked no more than to be left in peace, a favor we white men have never been willing to grant...."
Two days afterward I had my first glimpse of the coral islands. The moon was bright that evening as we passed through the twelve-mile channel separating the atolls of Rangiroa and Tikehau. I climbed to a perch in the shrouds and lingered there as we coasted the western end of Rangiroa; the night-breeze blowing off the land brought to my nostrils a faint sweet perfume, the odor of pandanus blossoms. The line of palms, growing on the low ring of land, stood out sharply in the moonlight, and at times, when we passed a region of sparser vegetation, I had glimpses of the great lagoon beyond, silvered by the moon and stretching away to the horizon without land in sight.
It was close to midnight when the atoll dropped away astern and I climbed down to the deck, stiff from my long vigil aloft. I found Uncle Harry busy over some papers at the little desk in his stateroom. He swung about in his chair and lit a cigar as I sat down on the berth.
"Been having a look at Rangiroa, eh," he remarked. "There's a kind of beauty about the atolls, especially on a moonlight night. Iriatai is the same sort of place, though on a much smaller scale. There's no other group in the world like the Paumotus: eighty lagoon islands, some of them of immense size, strung out northwest and south-east in a cluster a thousand miles long. Darwin believed that they were the peaks of a submerged mountain-range, on which the coral polyps have built, as the mountains sank little by little beneath the sea. The lagoons are accounted for on the ground that the polyps tend to die in calm water, and thrive best in the froth and spray of breaking seas. As time went on, you see, the ones on the outside would build higher and higher, while the ones inside would die. Then, as the island continued gradually to sink, with the live polyps all working in the wash of the sea along the outer run, a deepening lagoon would form inside—and there you have your atoll. The passes are believed to be caused by fresh water, the heavy rainfall of these latitudes, finding an outlet to the sea. Running out at low tide over the lowest portion of the reef, it kills the coral-builders and causes the slow formation of a pass, often deep enough to allow large vessels to enter the lagoon.
"There was a day, perhaps, two thousand years ago, when the Paumotus lay lonely and uninhabited, spread out like a vast net, a thousand miles long and four hundred miles across, to catch the canoes of wanderers who had missed the higher and richer islands to the west. The Polynesians were daring seamen, but their methods of navigation were of the most primitive sort—by the stars, the clouds, the trade wind, and the flight of birds. Hundreds of their great double canoes with clumsy sails of matting must have left Samoa for the eastern groups, and some of them, missing the Cook Islands or Tahiti, of which they had only half-legendary accounts, fetched up along this chain of atolls. The Paumotan people of to-day are their descendants. The names of the islands still show the wonder of those ancient wanderers at the strange sea in which they found themselves, and the joy and relief the landfalls brought—'The Spread-out Heavens'; 'The Place of Rejoicing'; 'The Windward Rainbow'; 'The Land of Great Beacon-Fires.' But perhaps this doesn't interest you very much—I have a way of preaching when I start on the subject of the islands!" My uncle tilted his chair and smiled at me through a cloud of smoke.
"The wind is shifting toward the north," he went on, "and with a little luck we'll sight Raiatea before dark to-morrow night. As I said, I'll leave young Marama with you; you're getting on well with the language, but you'll need an interpreter for the present. I'll be gone a month, at least, and when I return I'd like to be able to start at once for Iriatai. You'll stop with Marama's father, the chief of Faatemu Bay. I'll be careful to explain what I want to the old man, but remember that a native hasn't the least notion of the passage of time. I'm leaving this to you—if you don't keep after old Taura every day, the canoes may not be finished for months. I want fifteen strongly made canoes of hibiscus wood, about twenty feet long, and complete with outriggers, cinnet for lashings, and a pair of paddles with each. Then we'll need twenty-five or thirty pairs of diving-goggles, with the glass set in wood or horn. Some of the men will have their own, but they're always losing them, and once his goggles are lost, a diver is no more use. I'll leave you the glass and the diamond to cut it with; Marama will find you men who understand this work. I have a store at Faatemu; you can take the keys and advance a certain amount of goods to the canoe-builders, but don't let them get too far ahead of you! Old Taura, the chief, is as good a native as I know, and he'll see that you enjoy your stay on the island. You'll be swimming, and spearing fish, and hunting wild pig in the mountains—I only wish that I were stopping over, myself!"
The north wind blew all night with sudden fierce gusts and squalls of rain. The day broke wild and gray, but toward noon the sun shone out, and presently the clouds were left behind, sinking along the horizon to the north. At four bells land was in sight—the peaks of Huahine, bearing a little west of south, minute irregularities on the line where sea met sky. It was an afternoon such as one sees rarely in the tropics: a cloudless horizon and an atmosphere clear as the air above our deserts at home. An hour before sundown the Leeward Islands were all in view, strung out in the shape of a great half-moon on the sea ahead of us. The tall mountain rising abruptly in the north was Bora Bora; Tahaa and Raiatea, sheltered within the same circling barrier-reef, lay straight before the Tara's bows; and Huahine made the southern horn—beautiful as some land remembered from a dream.
At midnight we saw the torches of fishermen on the Raiatea reef, and dawn found us off Faatemu Bay. The sails were furled, Pahuri started the engine, and we glided in through the Nao Nao passage, past the green islet of Haaio, past Tuuroto Point, and into the deep inlet where the thatched roofs of the village clustered beneath the palms.