Chapter I: AM now going to tell you about Samoa and Samoan folk just as my eyes (2)

I must tell you, before I go on, about the German missionary “Von Sour-Craut.” One night he was caught out with one of the high caste chieftain’s daughters; what he had been really doing I don’t know, but there was a terrible rumpus. One of the old Inland tribes who were staying on for some feast at Satufa and were on the warpath (for at that time there was always some trouble about over-chief jealousy) got hold of him and took him off into the forest. The whites, English and American missionaries, got wind of his predicament and off we all went and succeeded in finding him trussed up like a fowl. Hornecastle swore that they were an emigrant tribe of Solomon Islanders and that their intention was to roast him on a cannibalistic spit; he even told me afterwards that he saw the oil basting pot; anyway, true or not true, we all had a terrible fighting scramble to rescue Sour-Craut. Hornecastle knocked six of them over with a log. I got in a blow on one of them and had my knuckle dislocated as I put my hand up to protect my head as a warrior lifted his club and brought it down with a crash! We won the day though and released the trussed-up victim, and the whole tribe of outraged mothers and fathers, who had attempted to get their own back, scampered off into the moonlit forest like a pack of mammoth rats. We tried to get the truth out of Sour-Craut the missionary as to what he had done to cause such wrath among the natives, but he insisted that divine prayer was his only object in seeking out the dusky maid, but we all had our suspicions and Sour-Craut got the sack by the authorities and left those parts. Hornecastle had a nasty wound in the back and one of his ears was partly chewed off. He had good blood though and it soon healed. The way he swore over that wound was something terrible, in fact I really think he used worse language than he did when we went to Nuka-Hiva and slept side by side in a hut that had previously been inhabited by a half-caste Chinaman. We were just going off to sleep when out they came from their hungry vigil and running in all directions started to taste the two of us—for they were bugs as big as hornets! We did smash them up too, and I’ll swear that they were more tenacious in their death struggles than the New York species that came down the walls in vast regiments and nearly ate my eyelids away, but I will tell you of all that terrible time later on.

One night soon after the first-mentioned event, a German sailor gave me a copy of A. Lindsay Gordon’s poems. I read the “Sick Stockrider” and felt like leaving the Islands for a pilgrimage to the author’s grave. I at once came under the influence of the unfortunate Omar Khayyam of the Australian Bush and wrote off yards of quatrains. I think if they had been published they would have made me famous as the author of the world’s worst poems; anyway I liked them, and when I read them to Hornecastle and he smacked me on the back and said I was a genius I almost put them in an envelope to send to the Poet Laureate of England. I dedicated the poems to Hornecastle, and that’s the only part of it that I wish to remember.

Mr Castle introduced me to a real poet; he wore long shaggy hair, unfortunately he was a Dane and wrote in his own language, but I knew that he was a real poet by the way he gazed at the pretty brown Samoan girls as they passed by us on the beach, their arms round each other’s naked shoulders, crimson flowers in their rough hair, and their ridis adorned with leaves and blossoms that dangled to their bare knees. The poet came under the influence of Castle’s loose ways and one night while half intoxicated fell on his knees and attempted to embrace a beautiful Samoan wife of about twenty-five years of age. I knew the husband intimately and quickly explained matters to him, told him that he was only a poet, otherwise there would, I am sure, have been another rumpus. The Dane and I became very friendly after that episode and, to my delight, I found that he could play the violin, and had a lot of fine duets for two fiddles. We went to the native hut villages and borrowed a disused hut, and sat there together playing for all we were worth. The native children, men and women stood by their small doors and huddled round us delighted and astonished as we scraped away in the twilight by the border of the forest. Old Hornecastle got quite jealous of my friendship with that Danish poet, but I soon stroked him down the right way, and took him down to a grog shanty and gave him several “splashes.” A touring party came across the Bay one day, four of them altogether; they were English and had come across from New South Wales. One of them was a retired judge; he had a head without much front to it, and the back stuck up like a large walnut with a few hairs gummed on it. His son spent the whole day in taking photos; he took snap-shots of everything for miles, also of Hornecastle in all positions, and the old chap was delighted.

“Castle” and I persuaded that judge’s son to sail across to the Isle where that old Marquesan Queen lived with the sole purpose of taking her photo. I was an innocent party to the whole business, but they took several hundreds of photographs of Castle’s friends, etc., and the old judge discovered them among his son’s belongings and there was a row! I never saw such wrath, such virtuous indignation as that man was capable of. I don’t know what became of the son, but I have a suspicion that he is on the Bench in England to-day, a good and prosperous man, and if he ever reads these memoirs of mine he need not be frightened as I have not the slightest intention of giving him away over that photo business. How sad is life when you think of things, but the best thing to do is not to think too much. I have seen men become prematurely old through worrying over the inevitable things of civilised life. Why try and improve things or make them worse? “Socialism,” “Trade Unionism” and all the other thousand “isms” if they are for the betterment of the race will come, or, if not, fall away. Universal approval will guide the laws of mankind as well as the laws of nature, and so things fall into their places or fall from their assumed places as sure as the stars of heaven roll and fall to the universal laws of gravitation. And so I jog along doing my best for my immediate circle and do not get excited over the awful event that will never happen.

I must tell you of a gentleman I met one night who came across the Pacific from the Island of Pitcairn where the mutinous crew of the _Bounty_ landed years ago. They are all dead now, but their children are still living there; in fact, the whole race are now partly descendants of the sailors of that long-ago ship. I have met in my later musical rambles many of the blue-blooded folk of different lands and I think if God makes Peers and Knights of dead men in heaven, very few of them will be able to go on with their title, but if that son of the old mutineer of the _Bounty_ does not get a title when he’s dead it will be a shame. He was a splendid fellow, brave, sincere in his conversation. He tolerated Hornecastle’s numerous repetitions of past loyal deeds, etc., like a hero, and gave me my first lesson in astronomy. With a quick soulful ear he heard the note of pathos as I played some old folk songs to him; he gave me a long and wonderful account of the beauty of life and the sadness of death, and when he told me who he was I could have fallen over with astonishment. I had thought he was at least the head of some English University on tour. I was of course young then, and the astonishment would be, now I am more in with the world, more on the side of finding a University man who had some really original information to impart. Some men think too much learning kills originality and makes men become automatic penny-in-the-slot machines. Ask the question of them and their memory reverts back to the fourteenth chapter of the _Odyssey_ or Plato’s _Ethics_ to seek for the reply and so their faculties through long disuse slowly fade away and they die from the head downwards. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I have heard that some great theoretical men always when just dead cool off at the head first, their feet being warm long after stiffness has set in, but this is a gloomy topic and quite out of my province, so I will ask my reader’s forgiveness and change the subject at once.

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IX

Descendants of Mutineers—Cannibalism—I play a Violin Overture at what I
fear is a Cannibalistic Feast—A Samoan Chief’s Philosophy—Musings

BEFORE I proceed I will tell you about the crew of the _Bounty_ just as I heard it from the lips of one of the descendants of the old mutineers whom I have awhile back spoken of.

The _Bounty_ left England considerably more than a hundred years ago, and made a voyage to the South Seas, calling at the Isle of Tahiti. No one knows exactly what the mutiny was about; anyway there certainly was a mutiny and the crew cast the Captain and one or two officers adrift, then ran the ship ashore in the Pacific and hid themselves in the Isles among the savage Tahitian men and women. The latter being beautiful to look upon, the sailors took them to wife, and with my knowledge of seafaring men of my own day I can assure you that they did not grieve much over their exile and thoroughly enjoyed themselves. The Government sent out a search for them and some of them got collared and were taken home to England and executed. The remainder, who had gone off to another Isle taking their wives with them, eluded their pursuers, lived and ended their lives on the Isle of “Pitcairn” and left behind them hundreds of half-caste children, who turned out to be anything but what one would have expected, being an intelligent and upright race. It appears that the mutineers went in for debauchery; fought over each other’s wives, and even their comrades’ daughters as the years rolled by. Eventually they all died excepting Adams, the mutineer ring-leader, who, seeing all his old comrades dead, grew pious and remorseful over his wild career, and being king of the Island race brought the whole family up to be strictly upright and honest in all their ways, and he succeeded too; and there they are out there to-day in the South Seas, happy and industrious. By the irony of fate old Adams proved to be the best and most successful missionary that ever reared a brood in the South Seas, and all men who have been that way will agree with all I have said and tell you that even to this generation the Island children of those parts are brave sailors, and their faces resemble the long dead lineaments of those sailors of long ago, and most of the families have English names, such as Johnson, Noble, etc.

I am now going to tell you about cannibalism in the Pacific Islands just as I saw it and heard of it. Of course, a lot has been written on the subject by many travellers, but you may be interested to know my views and experiences on this gruesome but interesting matter.

I knew two Islanders who still hungered after the flesh of man; they were not the true natives of Samoa, for the Samoans were not at all addicted to cannibalism. One night they listened to me as I sat playing the violin under the shade of some banyan-trees, and invited me into the forest village to their den. Well, when I arrived inside their snug little homestead I noticed a grizzled old man and woman nibbling away at the remains of a thigh bone of some departed enemy whom they had roasted and eaten. As I looked across at them sitting there enjoying that awful meal they swiftly hid the bone behind them. The man was a simple-looking fellow; his shrunken gleaming eyes gazed kindly upon me, but I could not conjure up in my heart much love for him, especially when he grinned and revealed his yellowish front teeth that had chewed up the remains of who knows who? Some missing white trader, or someone of his own race, or even a missionary with M.A. after his name. They were very fond of missionaries, as I’ve heard that they eat well, being nicely nourished, and not being addicted to too much drink they have not the rum-flavour that traders have had who have met the awful fate of supplying the cannibalistic festive board with meat.

I felt rather nervous as I caught sight of that awful remainder of departed woe, but I took good care not to let them see that I had noticed, as they knew what would happen to them if they were found out, and consequently, I being at that moment in their power, they might have thought it advisable to put an end to my existence and make me into provisions for their secret larder! I was very young, white and tender in those days and would have eaten well.

I am quite sure these remarks of mine may make you think I treat such things as cannibalism lightly, but it is not so; good and bad are comparative, and when I sit here and write and see life with sadder and more earnest eyes I simply think what a lucky fellow I was not to have been born in the South Seas. Had my parents been South Sea Islanders, and I born in Fiji instead of Kent, doubtless someone would have already recorded in their autobiography my own cannibalistic revels and terrible sins, for I am adventurous and wayward enough now with all the advantages of birth and education—so what would I have been if I had crept into the world and seen the first light and heard the first sounds in some Fijian moonlit forest? And you too, reader, what would you have been? Probably both happier than we are now—who knows?

Well, I looked over at that grim couple and smiled pleasantly to let them see I had noticed nothing, and as I spoke to them and the woman picked her teeth with her finger and nearly choked as she swallowed the mouthful that she sought to conceal, and said, “No savee,” I heard a noise outside in the forest and they both jumped up. I looked outside and saw a group of the savages passing along through the forest. It was already twilight, yet I could see most of their swarthy faces distinctly and I at once recognised an old Tongan friend of mine whom I had long since thought had gone back to Tonga. The four of us left the den and went across the clearing and met the group as they hurried along, dragging behind them a heavy load. What I am going to tell you is absolute truth, and I will tell you the details just as I saw them with my own eyes. That load which they dragged behind them was a body, and they were off into the forest depth bound for the grand cannibalistic feast!

As I came up to them they all looked startled and frightened and made as though to go for me, and I believe now that I look back that had not my Tongan friend appealed on my behalf I should have been immediately killed. I had my fiddle with me, and they looked upon my violin as some kind of enchanter, some spirit of the dead, and after a hurried consultation, standing there under the trees with fierce faces and frizzly heads, muttering in guttural tones, they all turned toward me, and one said, “Ova lu-lu,” and made signs that I should follow them into the forest and play music to them, their intention being not to kill me but to entice me on with them so that I could not return and give them away, and so I was commandeered.

At that moment I had not the slightest suspicion that the load that bumped behind them, tightly wrapped up, as it parted the tall grasses and flowers as they hurried along, was the dead body of some fallen enemy, otherwise I am quite sure that I should have made a bolt for it, but possibly my slow comprehension saved my life, for however fast I ran I doubt if I could have out-run a South Sea savage.

How well do I remember that terrible journey through the forest, as overhead sang the trade-wind in the palms and giant trees, and the sunset died away and the mysterious glooms around became deeper mysteries. Hot and dejected I followed those stalwart bare men, twenty behind me and twenty in front, as their naked feet hurried in single file toward the terrible “place” where that “thing” was to be cooked! And I, the hired musician, trembled as the hot breath of the tall savage just behind me blew down my neck as he dragged his burden along on that sweltering hot night. I have played the violin in many ball-rooms and fêtes since that long-ago night, but never once have I played without that terrible picture (which I am now going to tell you of) rising before my eyes. It seemed miles to me before they stopped. Great heaven, they were dressed up for the occasion! Some of them were smeared with whitish stuff, and three of them—women!—were got up like idols. One was a young and attractive-looking type of South Sea womanhood. She walked two ahead of me and I remember her well as she did not look so fierce as the others and the thought came to my mind that I could look to her for sympathy if they wanted to kill me. Women are women the world over, and down in my heart I blessed the soft curves of that female frame as she moved along in front of me, turning her head from time to time to gaze steadfastly into my eyes. Several times I thought of making a sudden dive into the forest. If I had done so I feel quite sure the reader would never have read this autobiography.

In between two great plateaux they stopped and the chief that led them gave two bird-like calls among the hills, and presently the bush parted gently and out poked frizzly heads. More of them to attend that feast! One was a terrible-looking fellow; his head looked like a huge coco-nut with fat lips on it and a tuft of quills on the top. He glared at me and spoke viciously to the others. How my heart thumped! I felt my face turn grey and my lips go dry as I gave a sickly smile to that awful man to let him see that I was perfectly agreeable to all that they were doing and to all that they might do, and in an inspiration I started to play the fiddle and laughed hysterically. I do not mind telling you that I was in a terrible funk and to this day I do not like the look of men who have coco-nut-shaped heads, so horrified and cowed was I by that chief who muttered to the others and swayed his club to and fro and several times half lifted it as though to brain me! And all this I am telling you is so terribly true that I don’t know how to proceed with all that happened, whether to describe my feelings or what my eyes saw. But there, whoever you are, you can place yourself in my predicament, and if you have a good imagination feel a faint echo of my despair of that night of long ago.

Overhead hung the bright moon in the vault of night as the busy hands of that fierce tribe gathered and piled up the wood fire as in the hot embers frizzled the “Long Pig.” There are some details of cooking odours which I must leave out. I cannot describe all, it was too hellish to describe. Round and round that terrible fire they whirled like some ghastly nightmare of the dead in hell, lifting their chins skywards and chanting thanksgiving to their ancient gods, and I heard the rattle of the threaded shells that adorned the bodies of the wild women as they too sang in shrill voices. I played away as fast as I could on my violin the repeated intervals of those minor strains, keeping time to that terrible dance, the perspiration pouring down my face as I tore away at the only two strings on my instrument. There they were, a ring of swarthy faces around me, as they suddenly stopped all hushed as the nightbird in the forest said “Wail-wail-tu-tu-wail-wail,” and they started on their haunches to devour their “meal.” And as the forest wind blew the dying, flickering firelight over their faces I thought I would presently awake from some ghastly nightmare, so terrible was the sight and so unreal-looking were the surroundings conjured up in my own brain by the knowledge of what that big dish joint consisted of, for they themselves as they sat there swallowing away looked quite innocent and peaceful, and they even offered up a prayer to their gods in devoted thanks for that supper, just the very same as tiny white children who put their hands together and thank God for their feast of the poor murdered four-legged creatures of the field. I pretended to join in the prayer and muttered out some noises, but I could not under any pretence eat. I really think that I would have died sooner than eat of that joint. How I got out of it I don’t know, but I did, and I put down my escape to the quantity of diners at the festivity and their greediness.

As I sat there in that den of the forest I thought of my people in England, in a respectable London suburban home, calmly going about their household duties, singing and playing the piano, and the afternoon “At Home,” small talk and whispering, while I sat on a little dead tree stump in the South Sea Isle with my heart thumping like a funeral march drum, as about fifty naked savage cannibals gnawed the bones of that inhuman and yet human feast! I thought of my father’s offices in London, as he sat editing the adventurous books for that publishing house wherefrom sprang out to the hands of the schoolboys the _Highway Men_, _Red Indians_ and _Spring Heeled Jacks_, etc.,[2] that fired the heads of the boys of my schooldays with the mad adventurous spirit to go to sea and seek adventure in far lands, and I cursed these books, for it was through them that I was sitting there, wondering every moment if those terrible men would suddenly take a fancy to me, knock my skull in and prepare me for the next meal!

Footnote 2:

Work which was very distasteful to my father. He, having a refined
literary taste, was a critic of poetry, and wrote several critical
works, including _Shelley and his Writings_.

But no such thing happened. As soon as they had finished they all crept silently away into the forest to their several homes to sleep off the effects of that orgy. They were men of the interior, and even the true Samoans do not agree with cannibalism, but the Island was in a fever then; they had been prepared for war some time before and those cannibals had come over from some other group.

I took my first opportunity and leapt away into the wooded country and arrived next day at Hornecastle’s hut. I kept my mouth closed, for had I told of that terrible night they would have known that I had split and I should have been doomed; and so I followed the good old proverb that “a still tongue shows a wise head.” And I was pleased that I did hold my tongue, for while I was drinking in a saloon in Apia with Hornecastle, the night following my terrible fright and dread of being eaten, a German started cursing and told us how he had hung a prize pig up in his store and, when he went in the morning, to cut it up for joints, he found it missing; the natives had stolen it, and crept into the forest, and probably roasted it and had a glorious feast, and as I listened to his details I started to wonder if the load that my friends of the night before had dragged through the forest to the midnight feast could have possibly been his stolen pig!—and all the horror of that secret feast the outcome of my own suspicions. I said nothing, and to this day my suspicions each way are equal.

Thank goodness that under the influence of education and the work of the missionaries the terrible appetite which I have just described has long since died out. The white man in the South Seas has done that much good. You must remember that I am writing under the still clinging atmosphere that my mind inhaled when I was a lad, of an age when we are apt to look upon those who are mediators with the Supreme as men who are, or should be, very different to other men, and consequently their natural failings were greatly magnified to my onlooking eyes. And so my remarks and musings, considered from this aspect, do not treat harshly the men who went out to the South Seas to reform their brethren, but simply show the futility, the uselessness of mortals attempting to reform, to better the spiritual conditions of those who are born of Mother Earth as they themselves are. After all we are all of us only like little children clambering and crying at the skirts of creation, some with white faces and some with black faces, and if the black-faced children, in their innocence, laugh and cry over their little idol-dolls and are pleased with them, why should the white-faced children try to steal their dolls and smash the lot up and make them unhappy by offering them an idol in exchange which they cannot see and which is too big for them to carry if they could see it. And moreover, what more do the white children know than the black ones?

I knew a Samoan chief who was a kind of philosopher of his race, and I was much struck by his remarks and wisdom as he used to sit squatting by his hut and talk to me of the old days. He was not a true-blooded Samoan, but came from the Marquesan group and had once been a king before the heavy tramp of civilisation came his way. He would tell me wonderful tales of his time, many of which, when I think of them now, seem almost incredible, but they were true enough and some day I intend to devote my time to writing them down for publication. They alluded a good deal to cannibalistic orgies and terrible battles for the love of the women of those times, wild dances round their monstrous idols, idols that sang and voiced forth terrible prophecies, that made the warriors of those Isles do most outrageous things to their enemies and to their children and daughters. As he sat there squatting and told me many things I would turn “all chicken flesh,” as people say, and watch his grim wrinkled face and twinkling eyes reveal the smouldering passions that flamed in the dark age of his time. Under the influence of that old king’s memories I wrote the following poem just as he would have written it, and approved of it too if he could only see it; in fact it is just what he really said, word for word, but I have rhymed it in my own way.

Let him shout on, pass me the full nut-bowl,
I’m old, would I trust to his wretched creed?
I, with my fifty gods, that soothe my soul,
Must fail them all—trust to one god—indeed!
Look you—I’m wise, a dead white man is dead
Should he offend his Heav’n while ’neath the sun—And
we?—well, at the worst, when our soul’s fled,
If fifty fail, we’ve still his Mighty One!

He’d steal our souls, curse him, his lying race
Claimed my blue seas and this my ancient isle!
Remember well do I that first white face
That blessed my head, with hand t’wards heaven did smile,
Pah! I believed that grin!—had I known then
Those eyes gazed from the spirit heart of Hell
I’d slain him!—faith, ’tis true these strange white men
One virtue have when cooked—yes, they eat well!

Pass me the bowl, time ’tis to grieve, at most,
When in sick dying eyes the last stars sleep.
We’ve won our battles too, enjoyed the roast
Of what sweet foes! ’tis even so we reap
Sweet vengeance! They, those prating white men skunks,
Our wives defiled, our land made one vile hell;
Cursed missionaries, and traders on night-drunks—
Ah! I’ve a tale, when dead, their God to tell!

He’s dead now and the day is not far off when the whole race will have passed away before the tramp of the Western whites, vanished for ever, for all men know that as soon as the white race creeps into the household of the dark race of the South Seas race extinction commences, and so the Fijians, Marquesans, Samoans, Tongans, indeed all the original inhabitants of the South Sea Isles, are diminishing before the civilisation and Christianising work of the whites, which means annihilation of the brown race and brings before us the inevitable thought that it would have been better for the race and its posterity for the Islanders to have eaten all the whites instead of cohabiting with them. But it is too late, they are now completely in the power of the “great white hand,” as I heard an old chief express it, and soon the half-caste of Chinese, niggers, exconvicts and the ne’er-do-wells of the Australian cities will tramp over the graves of the dead men and women who sang by forest huts and danced by the glimmering fires in the days when the white surfs ran up the shores singing into foams and silence.

Personally I do not believe that the drastic change to other conditions has anything to do with the diminishing population of the varied races of the South Seas, and all men who have experienced life in those clinics know that rum and syphilis, putrefying the milk of the South Sea babies, and the preventives to motherhood are the sole causes of race extinction, and these causes have of course been introduced by the whites and all the other semi-civilised races. I am simply stating facts as I know them, and I have not the slightest idea in my mind that railing against those evils will better things; indeed to attempt to better the conditions might lead to more disastrous complications, like the sailor who went down into the hold of the ship’s magazine to find where the leak was, struck a match and blew the ship up. And so things are best left as they are; as useless to attempt to change them as to seek to revise a man’s temperament. I myself have made many attempts to change my own temperament, but I think till I die I shall dream and dream and always be under the control of that unfortunate impulse that does the very thing which at that particular time I should not have done. How often do we embrace with affectionate trust our enemy and scorn the advice of our best friend! And so the world jogs along, always busy righting the wrongs of life and more often than enough writing beautiful epitaphs on the tombstones of men who cannot read them.

Such is my experience of life, and I have been obliged to be pretty observant and have not travelled this world over without noticing the special points that influence existence. It is really wonderful how observant some men are and how unobservant other men are. I knew a man who had done nothing but roam his life away over the seven seas to the mountain peaks of the world. “What is Rio like?” I said, “and the Amazon?” “All right I guess,” he answered. “What’s it like in Pekin?” I ventured to ask again. “All right I guess,” was the growled reply as he squirted out of his grizzly mouth an eggcupful of tobacco juice. I probed him all ways to get a glimpse of his views of the world and experience, but never got him beyond the “all right I guess.” Another time I came across a young fellow who had passed through the same places like a race-horse. “What’s Rio like?” I asked him. At once his face lit up and we had to hold him down as the flood of description he poured into our ears overwhelmed us. So you see it’s a matter of the observant temperament that makes the tale-teller and it’s ridiculous for anyone to think that a man has to camp on the top of a mountain or up a palm-tree for twenty years before he can describe the surrounding country or the height and character of the tree. Nature is very easy to scan and appreciate; it’s only men and women that it takes years to understand thoroughly, and then you may be wrong.

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X

A Cockney and his Fijian Bride—Nature’s Lady—South Sea Dress
Fashions—Idol Worship

AFTER the exciting experience which I related to you in the last chapter, when I think I was within an ace of being eaten by that cannibal tribe, I started off cruising with “Castle” and my friend the Danish poet. We made a happy trio and many were the subsequent adventures which we had together. Hornecastle hired a sloop and made a good bit of cash at times by trading around the Islands, and I was delighted to go off with him. It took us several days to reach the Fiji Islands. I shall never forget the times we had together and the strange people we came in contact with. The Fijians struck me as a very different type of people from the Samoans, who are much more intellectual-looking, and when Hornecastle and the poet and I went ashore we soon found plenty to interest us. There were plenty of whites there, half-castes and Indians who worked on the plantations.

I chummed in with an Australian fellow and we went up towards the mountains and saw the Fijians in their homesteads. They were neat little thatched homes; some of them shaped something like a haystack as seen in English fields. I and my friend, who could speak a bit of their language, went inside one or two of these and watched them squatting on their haunches at dinner eating steaming stuff out of earthen bowls, using their fingers as knives and forks. I made friendly signs to a Fijian mother and her eyes quickly brightened up as I took her baby in my arms and examined its tiny wild face, its jewel-like eyes twinkling with fright. I never saw such pretty babies anywhere in the world as the mites of the South Seas. Their little plump bodies are as soft as velvet and the expression on the face like that of a baby kitten, and the mothers are as proud as Punch when you admire and kiss them, as I have often done, but you have to be careful that you kiss them all—I mean the babies—because mothers are just as jealous in the South Seas as in the Isles of the English seas. And so after I had committed myself and held up that little Fijian kid, I went from one mother to the other and did likewise to their offspring, and those dark naked mothers (for they were only dressed in a loin-cloth) all admired me and even the eyes of the men looked pleased as they offered me food, and the native youths clambered around us as we crept out of the door, and tried to steal the buttons off our clothes. They are all terrible thieves and the thieving instinct is so strong in all of the Islanders of the Pacific that they only place half the value on goods which are given them and jealously guard and over-estimate all that they steal.

I shall always remember vividly that ramble in the mountains of Fiji, because we came across a white man who had married a native woman. I suppose the marriage was something after the wild bird marriage act, anyway there he was sitting by his dusky beauty on the slopes that rolled seaward, quite as proud as any English father of his two tiny half-caste brats. His wife, dressed only in an old red flannel skirt, smoked a cigarette by the hut door, and every now and again gave the little whitish beggars as they romped and quarrelled with each other a terrible spank. I never saw children turn head over heels as those two nippers did; over and over they went down the slope like two big brown balls, uncurled themselves and came racing up to us again and then off once more as I stood sweltering under the tropic sun fanning myself with a large palm leaf speaking to their proud father. He was a Cockney from Mile End! You can imagine my astonishment when he asked all sorts of questions about my own birthplace and sighed as he said, “The dear old smoke,” meaning London Town. From the little that he let out I could see that he had previously been to sea as a coal trimmer on a tramp steamer. He was a man of about thirty-eight to forty years of age, but looked older through growing a scrubby beard, possibly to disguise himself from the English police! He seemed happy enough sitting there under his big umbrella hat, with white pants to his waist, and beyond those two articles of dress quite bare and cool.

His wife could speak English very well indeed and I must say I admired her husband’s taste, for though she was the descendant of South Sea savages, cannibals, she would have put nearly all the Mile End women of his native land into the shade, and the West End ones too! She had a fine head for a woman, a voluptuous soft curved body, earnest dark eyes, darkish high-bunched hair, and a freedom of manner and modest exposure of the upper part of her body and lower limbs which was very fascinating. She would have created an enormous sensation could she have been transported just as she was to Piccadilly or the Strand. I am quite sure that the Mile End Cockney would have been envied and would have had to keep his weather-eye open too, as the Christians of London Town came into contact with the innocence of the heathen South Seas.

“You come England?” she said, as I spoke to her husband. “Yes,” I said, “same country,” and she smiled with approval that such as I should have had the honour of hailing from the same country as her children’s father, and going into the hut brought my chum and me both a drink. I don’t know what it was, but English beer tastes like poison compared to it. I have been to many afternoon teas since that time, but never have I had a sweeter hostess or seen softer eyes, and all those things that make Nature’s lady. I have heard a lot about “Nature’s gentleman,” but I tell you this, Nature’s lady is nicer to meet and as rare, and I’ve found her just as she was turned out of the Garden of Eden and just as beautiful and innocent, as she sat on that little stump, bare as at her birth, excepting for her lava-lava, with her pretty one-month-old baby’s tiny mouth toiling away at her breast for all it was worth. As the sunset faded out seaward the Cockney sailor, his “savage” wife, my chum and I sang all together, to the sailor’s accordion, “The Old Rustic Bridge by the Mill,” also “White Wings they never Grow Weary,” and I can never hear those songs now but I see that scene again, the half-dressed sailor, my freckled lanky Australian chum, the Fijian beauty, singing at the top of her voice on the Pacific slope by the Island hut.

We only stayed at that Island two days and then sailed off to Lakemba and other Isles of the same group. We carried Hornecastle on board and dropped him in his bunk when we left Suva. I do not know what he had been drinking, but it made him pretty bad. We set the jibs and big mutton sail and the trade-wind took us along at a splendid pace. I was the second in command, and though she was a rotten old tub I was the proudest officer on the high seas! Hornecastle kept me awake that night. The poet and I got a bit worried; we thought he’d got a touch of the d.t.’s, and from what I could gather by his delirious mutterings he’d actually got married during that short stay and was frightened out of his life of being pursued by his irate bride!

Next day he was on his legs again and looked better than ever. I tried to pump him and find out what he had done to get so drunk and look so worried, but he would not budge an inch, and to all my innocent queries only told me to mind my own business and look after the wind!

I cannot for the life of me tell you the correct name of the Isle we next called at; they all had native names and I never could understand half of them. I think it was called Mulooka; anyway it was a fine place and well wooded. I shall never forget the beautiful sight of the forest-clad country and the intense loneliness of the wooded depths away from the tracks. I stood in the wood alone and gazed up at the branches overhead. They were covered with big breathing blossoms that had beaks on them; they were big fat parrot-birds chuckling away to themselves as the trade-wind swept across, blew the top branches aside and revealed the deep blue skies. I turned round and looked west; there through the trees far away stretched the dark blue crinkling Pacific, dotted here and there with native canoes, paddled along swiftly from shore to shore. On the beach far below were groups of dark men and half-castes by our little sloop.

I must tell you of the fashions of those times. Some of the chiefs wore a dirty white collar only, and a waistbelt wherein was stuck an old-fashioned revolver and rusty knife. Another stood on the shore as proud as possible attired in a waistcoat. Men and women seemed to vie with one another at making themselves look ridiculous and outrageous too. Of course, most people were amused by them. I shall never forget how the Dane laughed; he was a real good fellow that poet. I laughed too, but not like him; I was getting a bit used to sights of that kind. As for Hornecastle he simply looked on and yawned. Finding that he was staying the night and did not intend leaving till late the next day, I made up my mind to have a look round and go into the interior, so off I went alone. I am constituted that way and am never so happy as when I am completely alone with no one to ply me with questions or tell me their experiences while I am keenly interested in my own at that precise moment.

About a mile from the shore I came across a village of native homesteads built on a beautiful spot shaped out and shaded by the hand of instinct. There they stood dotting the landscape by the cooling shade of palms, yams, orange and other trees of luxuriant tropic foliage. In the cleared spaces by those huts squatted the tribes of powerful mothers and men, all of them dressed in no clothes excepting their hair, which sprouted upwards on the top of their heads and shone in the sunlight. As I emerged from the forest trees into full view the tiny children stopped from their gambolling, stared at me for a moment and then all raced off towards the village homesteads as though for dear life. They ran so fast that I could only see their legs twinkling in the sun-gleam. Then uprose the wild mothers and stalwart forest men, and between their bare legs, with little wistful demon-like faces, those frightened children peeped at me as I walked across the scrub and waved my hand, smiling as I approached them.

I found them a very hospitable people; they gave me food and drink and I well repaid those wild mothers for their kind thoughtfulness as I stroked the small frizzing heads of their babes and raced the little naked beggars, boys and girls, across the track and gave the winners buttons for prizes. “Moora, moora,” they shouted as I gave the last button away, and then I held on to myself tightly as they scrambled around me and tried to steal the buttons off my clothes! “No, no,” I shouted to one persevering little imp, and his mother, seeing my annoyance, picked up a large plank and struck him over the head with a terrible crash! By Jove, I was astonished when she did that, but the poor little devil simply looked a bit crestfallen, looked up to me for sympathy, instead of his mother, and I rubbed the top of his head and made him happy. I found out afterwards that the top of their heads is the safest place to hit, the South Sea Island skull being very thick indeed.

I don’t know how those natives lived or what employment they followed. I suppose some of them worked at copra gathering or some other work which was useful to the white traders; anyway they all looked fat and well and their native villages like little bits of paradise compared with European cities. Away further in the interior were living (so I heard) tribes that still encouraged the cannibalistic tendency. I suppose they were still under the influence of the older men and women who had memories in their heads of the olden days when they dined off their enemies and discovered the good points of old rivals at the festive board. I never went off into the interior to see if it was so; my past experience was quite sufficient for me and I did not intend to take any more risks.

Before I leave that native village I must tell you of their idol worship. Before sunset I went back to the beach, and loitering about got in with some sailors, and together that night we went over the hills and down into the village and strolled among the natives, and going behind one of the larger huts there stood before us monstrous effigies with hideous faces and eyes bulging out like unburst soap-bubbles, and before them on little mats knelt the elder native men bowing and chanting prayers at the top of their voices, throwing their long arms up over their heads all the time. They were earnest enough in those fetish rites, and as we stood there, white-faced men of the Western world, watching, they took not the slightest notice of us, so deeply were they engrossed in their pleadings to those dirty wooden deaf idols. Of course I could not understand a word they were saying, but the note of the chant had grief in it and sounded to me like “Winga-wonga, wonga-winga,” repeated over and over again to a minor cadence that fell and rose as their bodies and arms moved up and down.

My comrades and I were somehow impressed by that strange sight of religious old-world grief which sounded the same note and showed the same earnestness as the creed expression of the modern civilised world. The missionaries were, and are, of course, dead against the idol worship, and so as time goes on and the methods of Christianity get hold of the people the idols rot away or are touched up and hidden in the secret depths of the forest, safe from the destroying hands of those who have gone over to the new creed. Often the wanderer among the primeval woods will come across the relics of those gods standing in some secluded gully under the shade of banyan-trees and rotting tropic trunks, covered with wild vines, vividly coloured with gorgeous flowers, still upright, with perhaps one eye missing and the face thus obliterated by decaying rot made more hideous than ever. Yet some indefinable awe still clings to them as they stand there deserted by the poor heathen children who once appealed to them with their whole hearts, sorrowing over “the giant agony of the world,” now long dead in their forest graves.

I have told you all this because I once saw it, just as I have attempted to describe it to you, and as I stood gazing, quite alone, I looked up over the rotting, eyeless head and saw a branch with about twenty human skulls hanging in a row. The tropic rains had washed them quite white and as they swayed and clinked one against the other as the wind swept mournfully through the trees I became nervous and made off from the spot as quickly as I could. I am very fond of music, but the funereal notes of those tinkling skulls did not appeal to me and make me brave.

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XI

Back in Samoa—My Friend the Missionary—Musings

NEXT day we sailed away, and being lucky with a fair wind blowing steadily behind us we soon arrived back safely at the Samoan Islands. It was a long trip and I was jolly glad to see my berth ashore again as I did not get much sleep at sea—room being scarce I had slept on deck the whole time, and I had to sleep in the sloop scupper as she lay over with so great a list. Everything was just about the same, and very quiet. The _Lubeck_ had been in and left again for Sydney. Hornecastle had a heavy drinking bout. There were several American sailors hanging round who had been left stranded by the wrecks of the man-o’-war ships that were blown ashore. I once more felt a longing to get away to the civilised world. Our comrade the poet got a job on a schooner and went away, and I was sorry to see him go. I still had my violin and started practising again in the evenings and often went into my old friend the shell-seller’s big den on the beach and yarned to him in “pigeon-English,” and it was there that I met Mrs Stevenson. I was playing the violin and she took a great interest in me. She was a real Bohemian and invited me to her home at once, but I was young and nervous, and at that time I was getting pretty shabby too—my blue serge suit had almost turned yellow through fading under the tropic sun—so I pretended to have an important job on that very night and got out of that invitation. I played several melodies at her request and I well remember playing “Alice, where art thou?” to her, to which she sang the refrain quietly as I played. She was attractive-looking and looked as though she had spent her life exploring the tropics. At first I thought she was some passenger just arrived on one of the boats till she introduced herself and told me her name.