Chapter I: AM now going to tell you about Samoa and Samoan folk just as my eyes (1)

saw them. My ship sailed away, but I was not on board of it. The Samoan climate suited my health, and I found decent fellows living there who made jolly companions. One of them was a reformed German missionary who had mended his ways, left off the drink and toiled honestly on a coco-nut plantation which helped him to eke out a living for his accepted wife and family. They were pretty little children too—I knew them all well, thirteen altogether, some with blue-black eyes and some grey-black eyes. All had a tiny splash of white on their tiny plump bodies; their mothers were as brown as pheasants’ eggs and mostly fine-looking women.

For a week I lodged with a dark old Samoan who had a kind of bungalow on the beach. The walls were lined with the most beautiful South Sea shells. He traded with them, and I believe did a good business with sailors and traders. He certainly made more headway than I ever did in my tea shop. Well, I found my violin was a real fortune to me. I got in with all the wealthy Samoan chiefs and attended Samoan weddings; far away in the depths of the forest it was I who played and composed on the violin at those South Sea forest festivals. Stirring music! The hotly blushing bride, dressed in her bridal robe—her hair only!—which ruffled as the breeze of the cool forest kissed her innocent nakedness, was given away to the modest Samoan happy youth, and you must forgive me, dear reader, whoever you are, and remember I was only a romantic boy, when I tell you that my whole soul envied that youth! I was young and inexperienced in the ways of Western and Southern life, and I at first thought that the Samoan ladies were rather loose in their morals. I am older now, and I tell you this—the morals of the South Sea men and women place the morals of our Western life completely in the shade.

Certain phases of life in London could never occur in the South Seas, and even were the women inclined to traffic with their comeliness, the South Sea Samoan chief’s war-club never misses!

At night I would steal up the steep shore hills under the mangroves and coco-palms and creep into the tiny dome-shaped dens, which were the homesteads of the native men and women of those South Sea isles. They all got to know me and trust me, and I often would share their meals as they sat squatting around their big earthen steaming pots wherein they cooked fish and peculiar-smelling vegetables. The heat of those dens was terribly stifling to me with my clothes on, and I would very soon make tracks and get outside, and from those steeps I would gaze out seaward at the vast calm Pacific trembling into silver under the South Sea moon, as the phosphorus-sparkling waters at intervals curled and broke to silvery waves up the shore, by the mirroring palm-sheltered lagoons. On the beach through patches of moonlight passed the loafing half-caste traders and huddled groups of Samoan women with their tiny black children running round and round them like big black rats.

Laoleo, a Marquesan, was my special comrade on those nights out. He was the son of one of the South Sea queens who had seen her day—far away on one of the lonely Atolls, her beauty faded and mouth mumbling and toothless, she sat dreaming of her glorious past, and found life still sweet in living over the memories of all that had been. Laoleo’s father was in my time a dethroned king. I saw him once as he sat by his den. He was fat and squatty, only had one big yellow tooth, a large head, cute twinkling eyes and fearfully wrinkled brows, and when he wrinkled them up, as he thought of his past, he looked like some grim personification of the dark ages cast into human frame.

I shall never forget the great prayer-chanting night. Laoleo took me into the inland scrub one night, and there, in the forest by their dens, chanting to their ancient gods, sat the old naked chief and his big brown wives and daughters, some with their ridis on, but most of them attired only in their hair and modest smiles.

It was a beautifully calm night. Overhead from seaward crept cooling winds, drifting damp odours from wild flowers and orange-tree scents from the shore lagoons and palm-forest glooms. Round and round whirled the nude maidens of that strange world, swaying their bodies in lyrical beauty and over their heads in rhythmic movement their long curved brown arms. The men squatting around slowly moved their big brown bodies to and fro, chanting weirdly all the time. By his big domed den sat the dethroned king, Laoleo’s father. There he sat rehearsing his grand past, his large thin feet on a little mat, his chin pointing towards heaven, his face once more alive with revived majesty as his warrior chiefs around him swayed their clubs, calling down the spirits of the mighty dead to bless that old king and their own brave selves. Young Laoleo and I stood in the shadows watching them all. As for me, I felt a bit nervous—they all looked so different sitting round there with inspired eyes bright with memories of their glorious past, wondrous battles and beautiful cannibalistic feasts, memories of the bygone days when they nibbled their choice old friends, found them of sweet dispositions and wept over tender memories.

Through the spread tree-tops gleamed pale stars, and peeping through the hut doors hard by, among the coco-palms, through big leaves gazed the wistful eyes of their small brown naked babies—like tiny shadows of unborn children peeping from infinity into the dim regions of moonlit reality.

How the memories return to me as I write on. It was on that very night which I have just described that I, the son of a proud English gentleman of ancient family, fell in love with a South Sea Island woman, ten years older than myself. You shall hear something of my downfall. I loved and lost, and cried in my heart as I lay alone in my hut on a lone Pacific isle over the grief, the breakdown that has stricken men since the days of our first grief-stricken parents, old Adam and sad Eve. I have not told you before, but several days preceding the events which I have just spoken of, Laoleo and I were down in one of the shore grog shanties, talking and yarning to the batches of beachcombers, as they loafed in the sultry glooms by the coco-palms, smoking and spitting and playing cards—some of them the black sheep of the civilised world, who were never known to be really sober—when an exceedingly beautiful Samoan girl of twenty-six years of age came in and sat just by my seat as I played the fiddle. She was accompanied by her father, an old chief. She had an attractive, insinuating face, and as she sat there, half-leaning against a post, her brown naked soft velvet figure looked like some beautiful sculptural work of art. Silently she sat as I played on, her shining eyes gazing astonished at my white sunburnt face, and not till I had finished the fiddling, and the drunken old half-caste trader had finished his jig and swaggered up to the bar for another dose of stuff called brandy, did her eyes blink and her lips part in a smile of pleasure that revealed her white teeth. She gave me such a look as she sat there, dressed only in a narrow tappa loin-strip, that I quickly riveted all my attention on an attempt to tune up my violin, so as to hide the hot blush that flamed to my ear tips.

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VI

Contrasts—A South Sea Bar-room—I meet Robert Louis Stevenson—An Old Time
Trader’s Morals—Shell-backs

ALAS, a good many of those brown men and women of the old days have passed away for ever, and in their place, over the islands of the South Seas, roam the varied offspring of men from many lands, the half-caste children of white traders, Chinese mongrels, Polynesian niggers, descendants of wandering, adventurous viciousness, mixed up with the outcasts of civilisation, and more often than quite enough the puny offspring of touring American and German missionaries, and English too. I don’t know which has won in the race to populate the lonely and beautifully secret-keeping isles of those far-away seas, but I think the good old flag is still to the front, flying to the breeze, represented in the sparkling, dancing eyes of the romping children on the wooded South Sea slopes—pretty violet eyes they have too, some grey and some grey-brown, little laughing angels of innocence, as they gaze up at you and go tumbling head over heels, revealing their tiny plump white-splashed backs, and the good old missionary sprees hidden in the dark of the unrecorded! For true it is that sometimes the virtuous and the good have their weak moments, those sad lapses which are not on any account recorded in the delightfully innocent autobiography of the returned, weary but still earnest traveller, beautifully written, and sold for ten shillings and sixpence net, circulated among the numerous British, German, and American Christian Societies, and read by the benevolent old gentlemen and ladies of their native land, which is so overrun with poverty and misery.

I knew one old Samoan chief, who was a cute, intellectual fellow, and could speak “pigeon English” well enough to ply me with numerous questions concerning my native English land. I often remember how his bright eyes lit up with astonishment when I told him of the far-away sorrows of London Town, so different to the warm moonlit forest of his own Island. I told him how men slept on door-steps, shivering, clothed in verminous rags which fluttered in the cold night winds as they half covered starved skin and bone of dead men who still breathed—men who had dropped out of the fighting ranks of life, lost the forlorn hope, and did not believe in God, for they had sorrowed in life and found hell in the death of breathing-despair. I told him of tiny wistful eyes of children starving as they gazed into shop windows watching the mist rise from the steaming foods, and yet nothing in their little pinched bellies. I told him of vast cathedrals pointing their steeples up to the grey English skies, costing millions of money to build, while far below their stone walls, stealing along the wet cold streets, those tiny trembling prayers, God’s helpless children, crept without food and clothing. I told him of women, dishevelled and weary, sleeping out on the Embankment and huddled in dark corners and ditches, some fallen through drink, and some through loving too well the man who had betrayed their trust; and I told him of their more fortunate sisters who had loved and been unbetrayed by the object of their lucky trust, and how terribly bitter those very women were towards their fallen, lost sisters. I was young then, otherwise how much more could I have told the astonished old chap as he raised his eyes and hands to heaven and wiped the perspiration from his heathen brow!

Yes, to hear how we lived under the banner of the sign of the Cross, wherefrom only the shadow falls over the pale-faced multitudes as they tramp to the clank of the chains of conventionality, chains gold-plated with eighteen-carat hypocrisy.

“And then Englis come to here,” he said, as he opened his South Sea mouth in astonishment. He was an unmarried man, and having no fine-looking daughters had not suffered as some of the Samoans had, the why and the wherefore I leave the reader to guess. I also leave the reader of my autobiography to remember that the South Sea Islands’ so-called savages are men just like ourselves, with inclinations and dreams and religions based on mythology and the gods of their ancient histories, and were they a powerful and mighty race, owning three parts of the world, with all the advantages of climatic conditions and education that the Western world has had, they would most assuredly emigrate from their Isles and seek to reform men to their ways of thinking, and doubtless they would find a good harvest in our modern cities for their pious endeavours. I am sure we should all, under their influence, make a grand stride towards that far-off goal of perfect good. I know that there are many men stealing across the earth who do not think as I think, but this is the autobiography of my life, and not of another life.

I was a lad in the days that I am telling you of, and had the opportunities that other men who were older and more respected did not get. I have often rushed in where the angel feared to tread, and the devil also. R.L.S. and others only saw the traders, the Samoans and other tribes, as they stood before him in one light, and the missionaries with the halo of feverish goodness to reform shining around their brows. I was a boy, my opinion unrespected, a young beachcomber who knew more than they thought he did, so they let go, and out came the true man, glorious and joyous in the wild sprees of those long-ago Samoan nights! Mind you, there were good men in the South Seas of those days, but over most of their heads, in the cemetery where the whites were buried, the flowers grew. I have stood gazing on those forgotten graves at sunset and wondered what dead desires lay beneath those crosses and stones, what sad crimes and what memories of their native lands, for the Islands, as well as Australia, were the happy hiding places of men who were flying from justice, and were I to tell you the yarns, the terrible tales of escaped innocence being hunted and cursed through miscarriages of justice, I should have to fill a book with nothing else but those tales.

I will now return to where I left the South Sea Island girl Papoo, for that I discovered was her name. As the drunken trader swayed to his tub and her frizzly-headed brown father rolled a tobacco leaf into a cigarette with two fingers and stood by the one-roomed Samoan Hotel I spoke to the girl who had so attracted my attention.

“You like music,” I said.

“Nein spoke,” she answered, but her eyes spoke for her, and I shifted my seat and got closer and read that poem of curves and shoulders, bright eyes and hair, yes, all the mystery of a woman’s eyes, lit by the magic light of sincerity.

I will not tell you all the many details of my romantic love affair; but I can often hear in my dreams the cry of the night bird and the hushed intervals, as the sea-surf rose and thundered over the shore barrier by the forest track near Vaea Mountain’s thickly wooded slopes as I sat by Papoo and made love to her, just the very same as English boys do to the girls in the London suburbs to-day. Papoo was just the same in her manner, modest to a fault, betraying her modesty by adding another garment over her ridi, which looked to me very much like the half of a discarded red nightshirt of some cranky old skipper. I played the violin to Papoo by the thatched hut where she lived and she sang weird Samoan songs, which stealing into my ears from her lips trembled with lyrical beauty, the soul of which was in my own head. Nights followed nights and I would creep behind her thatched hut on all-fours and meet her secretly. I got so deeply in love with her that I asked her to clear from the Island and go with me to Australia; and then the end came, in the sense that we could not meet so often. Her father found us out! I thought he would kill me at first, but the anger in his dark eyes sank down and he jabbered in South Sea lingo tremendously for a time. I hung my head and pretended to be heartily ashamed of myself, and so he forgave me, but kept his weather eye on me just the same; and my dear Papoo crept in the hut door, gazed over her shoulder at me as she disappeared, and pointed to the shore, and I knew that she would meet me and bolt at the first opportunity.

It was the day after that episode that I was sitting by a dead banyan-tree, when a white man, whom I thought was a rather respectable trader, emerged from the forest just by. It was Robert Louis Stevenson. He had intellectual keen eyes and a sad emotional-looking face, and looked a bit of a dreamer. Of course I did not know him then, nor can I remember much what he said at that moment. I know that I had climbed a tree and was looking at a bird’s egg when he came up to me and asked me what bird’s egg it was; I could not tell him, but I did as he requested, climbed up the tree and placed it back into the nest. Had I known he was a great author and poet I should have taken more stock of him. I remember that we strolled across the slope together and I gave him some tobacco and climbed several more trees as he stood below calling up to me to show him the eggs. It was not till nearly a week after, when I was on the beach talking to a trader friend who said to me “That’s Stevenson, the writer,” that I asked about him, but even then I did not gather that he was as famous as he was. I remember the very next day as I and Papoo lay hidden by some coco-palms we saw him lying full length, leaning half on his elbow gazing seaward, writing now and again on a slip of paper that he held in his hand. He had his boots off, for they stood beside him. I think he must have been bathing in one of the creeks by the Bay and afterwards crept up to the seclusion of the banyan-trees to dream and write down his thoughts. Papoo and I watched him for a moment, and then arose and stole away, as she had the household duties to attend to and I did not want her father to catch her again.

Almost every night I would go down by the beach and mix with sailors and traders—men from all countries they were, a good many Germans among them, especially when the _Lubeck_ arrived from Sydney, bringing passengers and a varied cargo. The crew would come ashore and have a regular spree, some of them drinking the vile concoction sold at a shanty bar by the beach. There was one old chap who hailed from “Nuka Hiva.” He would sit drinking and smoking and yarning away for hours, telling us his experiences; he knew all the Islands, had been married over and over again, and as he was growing old and infirm through drink and temper (for he had a terribly fiery head) he would sit and curse the memory of his numerous family, not one of whom would help him. He had grown-up sons and daughters on most of the Isles of the South Seas round about; some of his children were as blackish as their mothers, and some half white and half brown. He would sit for hours while I played and strummed on the violin, telling me of the strange habits of the different tribes and their marriage customs. We would sit together and roar with laughter as he (half drunk) crawled on the shanty floor illustrating the way he solemnised the marriage of his eighth wife in Fiji, describing how he kissed her feet, and how he went through ceremonies of a most extraordinary kind in the many weddings that he had attended as bridegroom. I could not very well write here the tales he told, and moreover I do not believe all that he said was true, though he would pull his billy-goat whiskers, lift his hat from his extraordinary high bald head, and seal every detail with a blasphemous oath of “God’s truth.” He was interesting at first, but I soon wearied of his adventures, for he told the same yarn night after night, and as I slept in the same room with him my life became a burden to me. Just as I was going off to sleep he would suddenly sit up, half drunk, and say: “Did I ever tell you of my marriage with Betsy Brownlegs, the Fiji chief’s daughter?” And then, notwithstanding that I quickly answered “Yes, you have told me and everyone else in Samoa,” he would sit up and start off, pouring out the old tales.

One night I got him in a decent mood, played him some old English songs, and then he revealed the best side of his character, that all men have, and with tears in his eyes looked up at me and said, “Matey, that ’ere old song makes me remember—she sang that, and I killed her!” And then out came the sorrow of his life, why he was a drunken exile in the South Seas. As a young man when in England, for he was an Englishman, he had fallen madly in love with a pretty girl in a Kent village. All went well for a time; then a rival came on the scene who was more polished than poor Hornecastle, and the object of his affections cooled down towards him and gave every encouragement to the suitor who wore a top hat and white cuffs. I can still see the gleaming of Hornecastle’s eyes as he told me of that rival of his, how he caught his village sweetheart one night sitting on a stile with the top hat hanging on a post beside her and the cuffs round her neck. “I did for her,” he said; “I meant the shot for him.” And then, though many years had passed since that tragedy which had made him fly from his native land, the tears of remorse crept up to his eyes, but they quickly brightened as he told me that he had read in an old newspaper that the second shot had succeeded, and his rival had died in the hospital. So ended my strange comrade’s courtship—the girl and the rival in the grave, and Hornecastle an exile in the South Seas, and on the slopes his many wives and children romping with glee, brought into existence by the top hat and white cuffs episode. How strange and inscrutable are the ways of Fate.

I made the acquaintance of another old chap who had a mania for eating hard-boiled eggs. He had been a sailor, travelled the world over, done many misdeeds and many good ones. He spoke with a Yankee twang and I believe was an American. He would sit in the grog shanty telling all the traders and sailors in the bar, when his turn came round, of other lands, and invariably finished up by condemning the country in question or praising it according to the quality of the hard-boiled eggs that he had eaten while residing there. They were real old “Shell-backs,” the men of those days, had sailed the seas, lived on “hard tack,” slept “all standing” in wind and rain, and as the various yarns were told they would listen and quietly sip their beer, spitting over their shoulders out of the grog shanty windows without missing, in a way that struck me as wonderful. They were wild times, those that I am writing of, not so long ago either, as I am still a young man. You see I started young and saw more of life before I reached man’s estate (which is the only estate I ever possessed) than a good many men see in their threescore and ten years. As I write and dream on I can see those Isles glittering under the tropic sun, with the shoreward surfs rising and breaking into rainbow-flushed colours, thundering over the reefs. They are still breaking and curling to spray out there, as on the beach through the tracks of moonlight pass and repass the semi-savage-looking figures of Samoan men and women, and still I can hear the songs of those who fish in the Bay as they glide along from shore to shore in the strange outrigged canoes, while the half-caste and white traders loaf, lean, smoke and spit by the shore shanties, tugging at their short beards.

Time went on till Papoo and I drifted apart, and since I must tell the truth, this being no romance, one of her own tribe courted her. She still had her eye on me, but the novelty was wearing off, and I went off to Tonga in a small trading schooner. When I returned to Samoa after about six months, I found that Papoo and her family had left the Island. I never saw her again, and so ended my second love affair.

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VII

I go cruising amongst the Islands—Arrive in Sydney—Wharfers looking for
Work—I go off hunting for Gold—Meet R. L. Stevenson at Sea

ONCE more the wandering fever came over me, and wishing old Hornecastle good-bye and my few other friends, I shipped in a schooner bound for the Fijis. For two or three months I roamed with her from isle to isle, saw the various tribes of original mankind of all the South Seas, heard their songs and squatted with them in their little huts as the children of past bloodthirsty cannibals said grace over their meals to the great pride of the onlooking missionaries, who have done a deal of good notwithstanding their own sins.

After a week’s stay at Vanua-Levu we proceeded for the Australian coast, and I arrived once more in Sydney Harbour and there once again I fell in with sailors. There they were, a ragged chain of shoulders on the wharf, mostly men of forty to fifty years of age, stalwart and sunburnt relics of better, or worse, days. Still they stood, watching with weary eyes for work, tugging grizzly beards and moustaches, smoking plug tobacco or fiercely chewing in the hot sunshine, arguing the point over the latest trade union grievance, spitting over their shoulders with the same wonderful precision and fate-like persistence. And still they stand there, at least the younger ones; the older ones are now dead, asleep in the “Necropolis” out at “Rookwood,” with all their grievances at rest and their dried-up chewing gums silent for ever, the cry for higher wages for ever entombed!—while their pals stand down by Sydney Bay and now and again in the long silent watch of many years wipe their noses with their outstretched thumb and forefinger and break the silence by some brief remark, such as “Poor pal Bill, whenever I sees the old windjammers being tugged out across the Bay I thinks of ’im and the good old days before the mast, before we joined the trade union, and now he’s dead, I wonder where he is.” Then, by way of punctuation, the reminiscent loafer spits out a thin swift stream of black tobacco juice.

I soon tired of the wharf monotony, and finally, hearing of the gold discoveries of those times, the fever got hold of me and I resolved with a friend, whose spirit seemed very much like my own, to go up country and see if we could find gold ourselves. The gold discoveries were far away in Western Australia, but I got an idea in my head that gold was to be found in New South Wales. I bought a blanket, a billy can and other necessaries for bush exploitation, and we started off by taking tickets on the Newcastle night boat. It took one night to get round, and next morning we started off. I remember we passed some old coal-mine shafts and then tramped along a main track with tall gums each side of us. We were happy together. My comrade was a Scotch fellow, stolid and full of dry humour, and I believe he would have marched on for years without complaining so long as he could smoke. At midday, both tired and hungry, we hailed the driver of a cart that came across some paddocks to the right of us. He was an Australian farmer and a kind fellow we found him. I shall never forget his jolly laughter and the twinkle of his eyes when I told him we were “travelling up country in search of gold,” as we sat up there beside him and the Australian buck-jumper galloped along at about four miles an hour. He put us down about four miles outside of Maitland. It was an old-fashioned, sleepy-looking place, and as we tramped through the main street, with our cheese-cutter caps on and swags on our backs, the Australian youths opened their big mouths and grinned from ear to ear, as they stood in groups by the roadside.

That night we left Maitland behind and slept on the scrub by the Hunter River and then tramped across country. The heat was terrific and reminded me of my Queensland experience. We got work at homesteads and pulled pumpkins, examined creeks carefully, dug holes, gazed for sparkling running water that might reveal the precious metal as it ran over the pockets in the hills; but we found no gold, only hard work and toil. We soon sickened of the life, only suitable to the Chinamen who toiled about us on the stations. Grim, rum-looking things these men were. They looked so stolid and emotionless as they tramped in Indian file across the slopes at sunset back to their sweltering huts that it would require very little imagination to dream that they were stuffed mummies of the Pyramids walking in some long sleep, exiled to the dried-up Australian Bush, and they smelt so strong that when the wind blew from their direction my comrade and I at once lit our pipes!

We soon made tracks for Sydney, where once more I tried to get a berth on an English ship. I had received several letters from home and longed to see them all again; but it was not to be, all the home boats were full up that week and money was getting scarce. My comrade and I determined to get a job somewhere, and going on board the _Lubeck_, a German ship, I was taken on as mess-room steward, and my mate secured a job in the saloon. We were delighted at such a companionable bit of luck. Next morning she sailed, and as I was walking along the deck next day I saw the Pacific Ocean all around us, and gazing over the bulwark side by the saloon leaned Robert Louis Stevenson. He did not notice me as I stood there by the engine-room door, and I stared on and had a good opportunity of examining the man who had just begun to be interesting to me, as I had a faint idea that he stood apart from ordinary mortals and wrote books of poetry, and so I examined him with interest. He was a good deal like the photographs which I have since seen of him in books and elsewhere, though he looked somewhat older. His face seemed very much sunburnt, and its outline struck me as though it expressed Jewish origin.

The voyage to Samoa, as far as I can now remember, only took about a week or ten days. We called at Tonga and stayed, I think, only a few hours. I slept among the sailors in the fo’c’sle. They were all Germans and they spoke very little English. I discovered that one of them had a violin and, mine being in pawn in Sydney, I borrowed it from him and started to entertain the crew by playing old English songs, and some sea chanteys, one of which was the good stirring old Capstan song “Blow the Man Down.” As I sat on the hatchway at night and two German sea-salts shouted songs in German as I played, Robert Louis Stevenson came and spoke to me, and seemed very much interested in my playing. He remembered seeing me in the Islands and asked me if I was an Australian. I told him I came from England. He became interested in me and just as I was losing my first embarrassment, and had played him once again a Scottish melody which seemed to please him very much, I heard the wretched German chief steward shouting for me, and I had to make a bolt. I did not see him again till we arrived near the Islands, then one night as I was sitting on the hatchway picking the fiddle strings, sweating a good deal, for it was a sweltering hot night, Stevenson came through the alley-way by the engine-room, and sat beside me and another sailor who was humming as I strummed away. I saw his face outlined distinctly; it was a calm night, the moon right overhead flooded the sea with a silver sheen as the screw whirled steadily round and the vessel sped along leaving a long silver wake which could easily be seen for miles behind as the sparkling foam drifted with the glassy swell.

Stevenson was one of those men with a keen face that made you feel a bit reticent until he spoke, and then you discovered a human note in the voice that put you thoroughly at your ease, and as he spoke to a German sailor he picked my violin up and started to try and play some old folk melody. I told him how to hold the bow correctly and hold the head of the violin level with his chin, which he at once attempted to do and made several efforts to perform, upon which I smiled approvingly at my illustrious pupil! He had long delicate fingers and looked well as he stood in the Maestro fashion and did all I told him to do in an obedient way as though I were Stevenson and he the humble sailor-lad. He asked me many questions about music and seemed to know more about the history of celebrated violinists and the history of musical notation than I did, but he spoke modestly and did not take the least advantage of my inferior knowledge as he walked to and fro restlessly and then sat down again. He seemed fond of looking over the ship’s side, gazing out to sea, and up at the stars. He was very friendly with all the sailors, went into the fo’c’sle, talked to the crew and was greatly interested in ship life. I did not see him again till I arrived on the Islands. I did not care about travelling with Germans whom I could not speak to, my knowledge of German being no more than “nein,” and “jah,” and so I left the _Lubeck_ and once more came in contact with old Hornecastle. My chum, though I did all I could to persuade him to leave the boat, would not do so, and so we parted, and the last I heard of him was that he had shipped before the mast of a sailing ship bound for San Francisco and during terrible weather got lost overboard. Poor Ned, I often think of him and even regret leaving the _Lubeck_, otherwise he might not have gone off on the ill-fated ship, for she too got lost later on with “All Hands.”

Hornecastle[1] had also been away from the Islands somewhere or other, I forget now where, but I remember his pleasure at seeing me again as he smacked me on the back, and shouted “Hello, my hearty.”

Footnote 1:

Hornecastle was a successful trader and always gave me employment if I
required it, and paid well.

It was about that time that I spent a good deal of my time in practising the fiddle and studying music, and Hornecastle and another old shell-back would sit on a chest and say, “Shut it, youngster, give us a toon!” I had got hold of Kreutzer’s violin studies, and some of the double-stopping strains, I must admit, got very monotonous even to me as I played them over and over again hundreds of times, and when I think of the old chap’s temper at my persistence, and the way he got out of his bed one night, as I was practising, and said, “By Christ, if yer don’t stop that hell of a row, I’ll smash yer fiddle,” I can hardly blame him.

One night a schooner arrived from Honolulu and the crew came ashore and had a fine spree. She brought as passengers two missionaries. I do not remember their names, only that we all called them the “reverends”; the elder one of the two, who looked like a German, was a real “knock-out”; he had succumbed to more women, and had made more devoted mothers on that Isle than Hornecastle had in all his populating career! But he was a good fellow withal, and after he had been to the missionary school and done his duties he would come to us and talk about our evil ways, and try to reform old Hornecastle, who was dead against the Church. Hornecastle would listen to him, blinking his grey eyes all the time. He would tug his beard, put his finger to his beak-like nose and say, “Look ye here, Missy” (which was an abbreviation for missionary). “It’s no good yer trying to come your old swank over me, you’d best start to reform yerself, old cock.” But that missionary was oblivious, and used to the sarcasm and genial observations of his own kind, and took it all in good part. Half comic and half in earnest, he would raise his pious hands above his head, as old Hornecastle would let go and curse missionaries and all creation in general. This missionary meanwhile would sit quietly gazing around, taking notes down, asking questions, the names of trees, flowers, and Isle afar and near, busily engaged in compiling his memoirs, to be published when he returned to his native land in a grand volume chock-full of extreme virtue and self-sacrifice, and the sad ways of the children of the South Seas, and the little bit of good white men had circulated in the children who would grow up pious. I have read a good many books written by men who have presumably travelled and lived in the parts they have written about, but I can most earnestly assure my readers of this autobiography that black men of India and on the Gold Coast of West Africa and in the South Seas do not speak as I have read that they do speak.

The copper-coloured man of Ceylon and Bombay, as soon as you step ashore, speeds towards you and says, “Me show you where live, me good man, carry parcel and nebber steal,” points viciously to his rival—who is clamouring in pigeon English for your patronage—and swears that “He’s bad man, steal all, and been pison” (meaning prison), as the aristocratic dark-turbaned gentleman, with long black naked legs, white shoes and no socks, grins, shows his white teeth, pulls his black hand from under his shirt tail, and tries to entice you to scan his splendid selection of photographs—photographs that, not to put too fine a point upon it, even a Turk, on looking at them, would blow his nose and blush! The South Sea Islanders accost you in a more innocent way; naturally a virtuous race, and living in isolation from civilised Europe, they have watched the White askance, and gradually discovered that the godliness he clothes himself with sometimes covers a deal of vice! So they strive to sell you corals and fruit, as they patter over the ship’s deck with naked feet, and when they see the white man’s eyes wandering over their lithe figures, the women, who have been schooled in Western ways, glide up to you with speaking eyes, stroke your hand with their soft brown fingers, stand with their curved nude brown bodies, clothed only in a string of beads, and like a big greedy child say, “You like me? give me money, eh?”

This, of course, sounds very different to the books I have read, but whoever you are, go to the South Seas, and keep your weather-eye open and you will not contradict me when I say that the money spent by Christian Societies in England and America to polish up the South Sea Island daughters and men, who were far more innocent than Europe ever remembers being, could be spent in our own countries with far greater advantage. The South Sea Islanders would be happier and the English poor and starving children better looked after.

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VIII

An Old Time Marquesan Queen—Forced Teetotalism and the Result—With
R.L.S. watching Native Dance—A German Missionary—A Medley of
Incidents

THERE was an old Marquesan Queen who lived near Samoa. Years ago in the zenith of her beauty and fame she sang and danced at the cannibalistic feasts, was the belle of the Isles and a kind of Helen of Troy of the South Seas. She was taken prisoner by various tribes, bought by the big tattooed chiefs and, when they sickened of her, sold again and again until at last she emerged from the door of a South Sea Divorce Court, and fell into the arms of one of the Island Kings and, becoming a Queen, became virtuous, in so far as she possibly could be after being reformed to the Christian religion. Hornecastle called at her lonely Isle once, while we were cruising around in a sloop. He, of course, knew her well, and after introducing me to her as his son, I brought the fiddle out at “Castle’s” request, and played to her, as she sat old and wrinkled by her hut door. She was a most extraordinary-looking old woman; when she smiled her face puckered up into a map of wrinkles and her small shrunken black eyes twinkled as though through the dark came back old memories of those lusty stalwart chiefs of long ago. Then she readjusted her pince-nez and I saw the tears in her eyes as her black fingers nervously turned over leaf after leaf of the big English Bible which she had on her bony knees. She had grown very pious and sedate and no one on earth would have guessed her past history as she sat there, with nothing on except an old bustle skirt, which only reached to her knees, and stuck on her head a large Parisian hat of the fashion about the time of the French Revolution.

I suppose she’s dead now and gone to the land of her fathers. I often think of her and the way she gazed at my white face as I dropped on one knee, with all the respect due to a Queen, and kissed that shrivelled hand. I can still see the faint, majestic smile flickering on those aged lips that had received in the bloom of maidenhood how many kisses on their soft amorous curves—and the lithe brown body’s outline of breathing beauty, how often had it been folded in the arms of brief paradise? There she sat, a wrinkled-up bit of humanity, jealous and fretful of those who had not seen their day, for all the world like some old ladies of my own country, as she surveyed with approval, the decorum of the future race romping about her, tumbling head over heels on the plantation slopes, partially clothed in palm-leaf hats, and lava-lava, extending from the waist to the knees.

Hornecastle could speak the “Island lingo” like a native and many were the modest blushes she gave as the old chap went over reminiscences of the glorious past, telling her of her past beauty and swearing that she had but slightly changed, and that for the better, giving me a vigorous side wink as he told that thundering lie with its inner meaning. Poor old Castle, he may be still alive. I never met a more knowing and yet sentimental old shell-back and he grafted into my mind more than any other man the knowledge of South Sea Island life and the inefficacy of white men of religious aspirations. I would not even be surprised to hear that he was now pious and sobered down. I never met a man like Castle for strength. I’ve seen him pick up a tree trunk that weighed three hundredweight and handle it as though it were a one-seater canoe. He once told me that he had only had two illnesses in his life and they, he said, were “Bronshitus and Pew-Monja.” He was born in the early days of old England when they did not teach the boys and girls Latin, French, German and Euclid, long before children looked upon their parents as fools, and held the candle while their old mother fetched up a ton of coal.

There was one other eccentric old man whom I have forgotten to mention; his name was Bodey, he’d travelled the world over and had spent ten years of peace and rest in Darlinghurst Gaol, Sydney. I never saw him sober, so that I cannot tell you anything of his real character, excepting that he was extremely devoted to his Samoan wife, who likewise struck me as very fond of him. She was a tall, fine-looking woman of about forty years of age. Her original beauty had long since departed; her front teeth also had gone; her plump, full lips were much shrunken, but her eyes still remained cheerful-looking and moved quickly and intelligently as she spoke. Bodey gave her a terrible shock once. He broke his ankle and, being utterly helpless, could not get down to the beach drinking shanty, and so got quite sober. For two days running, his manner was so different that his wife gazed upon him as a stranger, and he too gazed upon her, as she nursed him and bathed his foot, with suspicion, quizzing her with astonishment, but I took mercy on him, went and got a bottle of Samoan whisky and the couple in half-an-hour were once more united and happy. Three weeks after that he died of shock.

Hornecastle and I went to his grave, to place a large cross on it, which we had made ourselves. When we got there Hornecastle cried like a child, and I gave a Samoan who was lying asleep near by a large silk handkerchief and one “mark” to dig a hole after we had gone, and place that cross over our dead friend. I remember well how Hornecastle in his drunken grief stuck the cross in and kept poking down and down, as though he was searching for his old comrade, and when I pulled him away he staggered back, fell on his knees and kissed the earth with his lips, crying out, “Bodey, old mate, can yer hear me?”

It upset me terribly at the time; I did not know Castle had such deep feeling in his nature. I pulled him off and told the Samoan to make the grave neat and he bowed his brown face fourteen times reverently to show me that he understood my wishes. As soon as we had gone he bolted off with the tombstone; what he wanted it for only heaven knows.

It was about that time that the Islanders had some great festive ball and I and Hornecastle went inland and had a fine spree. Hornecastle got fearfully drunk, and I played the violin as the Samoan men, boys and girls, dressed up in a very picturesque way, flowers in their hair, and grasses and leaves clinging to their brown bodies, went through their ancient dances, in the shade of the banyans and mangroves. It was a great meeting; the old fighting chiefs were all there, dethroned kings and discarded queens, claimants to fallen dynasties of the Islands around. Robert Louis Stevenson was there. Hornecastle smacked him on the back to let me see that he was in with the best society. Stevenson took it all in good part and laughed heartily as the half-naked Island women danced and whirled around and threw up their legs while Hornecastle kept shouting “Hen-core! Hen-core!” He was a low old scoundrel, but I couldn’t help liking him; he was most sincere in all his likes and dislikes and never put on any side. Stevenson liked him too, for while he was gazing interestedly on the weird moonlit forest scene of that primeval ballroom I noticed he often gazed sideways with intense amusement at Hornecastle, who kept getting enthusiastic about the various nude figures of the Samoan women, and made critical remarks about their limbs and beauty, slapping me on the shoulder every now and again, and poking me in the ribs as he noticed some especial point about them that interested him. The presence of Robert Louis Stevenson standing close by made me feel a bit uncomfortable in my association with Hornecastle, especially as the old reprobate would appeal to me at every incident, as though he thought I was as bad as himself. It was almost dawn before the Tribes finished their grand war dances. All the little children, tired out, lay huddled in groups under the scattered palms and coco-nut trees fast asleep, their tiny dark faces revealed by the moonbeams which crept over their pretty eyelids and tiny parted sleeping lips, as the night wind blew aside the long-fingered palm-leaves just above them.

The few whites, Robert Louis Stevenson and his friends, went off home some time before the grand finale, which consisted of the banging of drums and the kicking of legs and movement of bodies in a manner something resembling the modern “cakewalk,” except that it was a deal more rhythmical and fascinating to gaze upon. Hornecastle fell madly in love with a fat old dark woman of about sixty years of age; round and round the two of them went together, and the old chap, I’ll swear, cocked his legs quite as high as the South Sea maid of sixty summers. In the morning he looked pretty bad and kept sticking his head in a tub of cold seawater to keep it cool, and till he got a few more drinks down him he looked a bit ashamed of himself, and well he ought to, considering I have only told you half the truth with regard to his behaviour.