Chapter I

If you want to study psychology go to the wilds. The minds of civilised men and women are so covered with embroidery that the true texture is almost hidden; their faces have been used so long for masks that form and expression cannot be relied on. Amongst savages you come sometimes upon the strangest facts bearing upon the structure of mind, facts that lose half their significance in the atmosphere of London, yet which, all the same, are not unconnected with our processes of reasoning and conduct.

I was sitting with Brent in the house of Ibanez, the agent of the Southern Islands Soap Syndicate, an institution that turns cocoanut trees and native labour into soap, mats, margarine, dollars and dividends, beats up the blue Pacific with the propellers of filthy steamboats and has its offices in San Francisco, London and New York. We were sitting, to speak more strictly, in the verandah, the southern night lay before us and a million stars were lighting the sea.

Tahori, a native boy, and one of Ibanez’s servants, had just brought along a big tray with cigars and drinks and placed it on a table by us. I noticed that he wore white cotton gloves. Brent had also noticed the fact.

“What’s wrong with that chap’s hands?” asked Brent.

“Tahori’s?” replied our host. “Nothing—only he must not touch glass.”

“Tabu?”

“Yes. He only helps occasionally in household work when Mauri is away. I got over the difficulty of his waiting upon me by giving him gloves in case he accidentally touched a tumbler or bottle; even with the gloves on he will not handle anything in the way of glass knowingly; the cook puts the things on that tray, and when he takes it back to the kitchen she will clear it.”

“I thought all that was dying out,” said Brent.

“So it is, but it still hangs about. Tahori is a South Island boy. I don’t know why the tabu about glass came about, makes it awkward for him as a servant.”

“No one knows,” said Brent. “I’ve seen chaps that were under tabu preventing them from eating oysters and others that daren’t touch the skin of a shark or the wood of such and such a tree, no one knows why.”

“What do they suppose would happen to them if they broke the tabu?” I asked.

“They couldn’t,” said Brent.

“Couldn’t?”

“No, they couldn’t. I’m talking of the real old Islanders whose minds haven’t been loosened up by missionaries and such, though I’m not so sure it wouldn’t hold good for the present-day ones too, and I’m saying that a chap like that couldn’t break his tabu not if he wanted to, not if his life depended on it; beliefs are pretty strong things, but this is something stronger even than a belief; maybe it’s the mixture of a custom and a belief, and that makes it have such a hold on the mind, but there it is—I’ve seen it.”

“Seen a man unable to break his tabu?”

“Seen the effects, anyhow, same as you might see the wreck of a ship lying on a beach. I doubt if you’d see the same thing these days, though there’s no telling; anyhow, it was away back in the early nineties and I’d just come up from the Tongas to Tahiti, getting a lift in the _Mason Gower_, she was an old trading schooner the missionaries had collared and turned into a Bible ship, and I lent my hand with the cooking to pay for my passage.

“I’d had a quarrel with Slane and parted from him, taking my share of the money we had in common, and I hadn’t seen him for six months and more. I hadn’t prospered either, losing nearly every buck in a blackbirding venture I ought never to have gone in for.

“I hadn’t more than ten dollars in my belt when I landed at Papeete, but I’d saved my dunnage and had some decent clothes and the luck to fall in with Billy Heffernan at the club. Billy was one of the Sydney boys; he wasn’t more than twenty-five, but he’d seen more of the world than most and lost two fortunes which he’d made with his own hands. That was the sort Billy was, and when I struck him at Papeete he was recovering from his last bust-up and had got the money together for another venture.

“His first fortune had been made over Sing Yang opium, which isn’t opium no more than Sam Shu is honest drink; then he’d done a deal in shell and pulled it off and lost the money in copra, and now he was after precious coral.

“When I met him in the bar I said: ‘Hello, Heff—what are you after down here,’ and he says, ‘Coral.’

“‘Well, you’ll find lots of it,’ says I, thinking he was joking, and then I found it was precious coral he was talking of. You see there’s about a hundred different sorts of coral. Coral’s made by worms. If you go on any reef and knock a chunk off between tide marks you’ll find your chunk has got worms hanging out of it. I’ve done it often in different parts, and I’ve been surprised to find the difference in those worms. Some are a foot long and as thin as a hair, and some are an inch thick and as long as your finger; some are like snails and some are like lobsters and prawns in shape; some are yellow and some blue. Above tide marks you don’t find anything, just solid rock. Well, there’s just as many different sorts of coral as there is worms, and there’s only one sort of precious coral and it’s a pale pink, the colour of a rose leaf, and that’s what Heffernan was after. He’d heard of an island in the Paumotus which isn’t very far from Tahiti, and by all accounts it was a good fishing ground for pink coral, and more than that, it was said the Queen of the place—for it was run by a woman—had a lot of the stuff for sale—Tawela was her name.

“Ships keep clear of the Paumotus on account of the currents that run every which way and the winds that aren’t dependable. Heff had his information from a whaling captain who’d struck the place the year before and had talk with the Kanakas. He was on the beach broken down with drink, and gave the location for twenty dollars. He said he didn’t think they were a dependable lot, but they had the stuff, and if Heffernan didn’t mind taking risks he might make a fortune. Heff asked the old chap why he hadn’t gone in for the business himself, and he answered that he would have done so only he had no trade goods; nothing but whale oil, and the Kanakas didn’t want that, they wanted knives and tobacco and any sort of old guns and print calico and so on. Heft didn’t know where to get any such things as these, and hadn’t the money if he had known, nor a ship to lade them into, but next day, by good luck, came blowing in the _Mary Waters_, owned and captained by Matt Sellers, a Boston chap who’d come round to the Pacific in a whaler out of Martha’s Vineyard, skipped at the Society Islands not liking the society on board, and risen from roustabout to recruiter and recruiter to captain and owner. He’d brought a mixed cargo from ’Frisco on spec to the Marquesas, couldn’t find a market and had come on to Papeete, couldn’t find a market and came into the club for a drink, fell into the arms, as you may say, of Heffernan, and that did him. He hadn’t been talking half an hour with Heff when he sees clearly that the hand of the Almighty was in the business, and that a sure fortune was waiting for him if he’d only take the trouble to pick it up. His trade goods were just the things wanted to buy the stuff, and he only had to put out for the Paumotus to get it. That was the way Heff mesmerised him. Then they had a talk as to the profits, and Sellers agreed to give Heff twenty-five per cent. commission on the deal.

“I blew into the business, as I was saying, by meeting Heffernan a few days later—day before the _Mary Waters_ was due to sail—and, seeing no chance of doing much in Papeete, I joined in with them at second officer’s pay, but without any duty, only to lend a hand if there should be a dust-up.

“Next day we started, steering a course almost due east. We weren’t long in finding out we’d struck the Paumotus, tide rips everywhere and reefs, then you’d see cocoanut trees growing out of the sea ahead and presently you’d be skimming by a beach of coral not ten feet above the sea level with cocoanut trees blowing in the wind and Kanaka children shouting at you. Very low free board those atoll islands have, and I’ve heard of ships being blown right over the beaches into the lagoons. We passed a big island like that, and then, two days after, we raised Utiali; that was the name of the island the whaler captain had given to Heffernan with the latitude and longitude. It wasn’t down in the South Pacific Directory. They’ve got it there now, but in those days there was no mention of Utiali, though the whaler captains knew it well enough, but a whaler captain would never bother to report an island; if he’d struck the New Jerusalem he wouldn’t have done more than log it as a place where you could take on milk and honey. Whales was all they cared for, and blubber.

“We came along up and found the place answering to all descriptions, lagoon about a mile wide, break to the east, good show of cocoanut trees and deep soundings all to north-east and south, with another island not bigger than the palm of your hand to west running out from a line of reef that joined with the beach of Utiali.

“If the place had been painted blue with the name in red on it, it couldn’t have been plainer.

“We came along to the eastward till we saw the opening, and got through without any bother just on the slack.

“It was a pretty place to look at. I’ve never seen a stretch of water that pleased me more than that lagoon; maybe it was the depth or something to do with the water itself, but it was more forget-me-not colour than sea blue, and where it was green in the shallows or the ship shadow, that green was brighter and different from any green I’ve ever seen.

“Maybe that’s why precious coral grew there, since the water colours were so clear and bright, the coral colours following suit would hit on new ideas, so to speak, but however that may have been, there was no denying the fact that Utiali was a garden, and the native houses on shore seemed the gardeners’ cottages—had that sort of innocent look.

“We dropped the hook close in shore on to a flower bed where you could see the sea anemones and the walking shells as clear as if there wasn’t more than two foot of water over them, and before the schooner had settled to the first drag of the ebb that was beginning to set, canoes began to come off with Kanakas in them.