Chapter III: Part 3

On the strength of our sudden affluence, the dream ship received a sleek and well-deserved coat of paint, a new main sheet of good manila, a hundred gallons of kerosene, a fresh supply of provisions, and incidentally a new lease of life.

She sailed in charge of a genial pilot who seemed as pleased as his confrere of the canal at being under sail again, and sighed wistfully on taking his leave at the last fairway buoy. There are many such men engaged in the routine of life, who long to break away and answer the call of the sea and adventure, but who rarely do, either because they cannot or have not the courage of their dream.

We had been advised that Panama Bay was a promising trolling ground, and for once report spoke true, for we caught a fine bonito within an hour of our departure. We were doing about five knots at the time, and it was a fine sight to see a fifteen-pound fish leaping and splashing astern; and a still finer to see sections of him sizzling in the frying pan.

A very different class of fish visited us a day or two later but, spurning our spoon bait, gave his attention to the log. A large shark, looking like a sinister shadow in the turmoil of our wake, investigated the twinkling fan with interest. Five times he approached it and withdrew, before risking indigestion and swallowing it whole.

As about a week later precisely the same thing occurred to our last remaining fan, from then onward we were bereft of log and "dead reckoning" at one fell swoop. However, as the sun is an almost constant companion in these latitudes, and the chronometer, after a thorough overhauling at Panama, appeared to be behaving itself, the loss was not as serious as might be expected.

Each day now brought us appreciably nearer the Equator, and its presence began to make itself felt in gasping moments at the tiller, a glare from the water that caused blood-shot eyes until Peter the practical produced a pair of smoked glasses, and deck seams running and bubbling marine glue.

Peter's watch was a spectacle not to be missed, consisting as it did of pyjamas, smoked glasses, and a parasol! I have often wondered what sort of entertainment we should have provided for a passing steamer on occasion, but as we never sighted one from the beginning to the end of our cruise, I fear I shall never know.

"To-morrow," said Steve, after twelve days of fair though light winds, "we ought to raise Tower Island."

We were approaching the ash heap of the world. At the time we had no notion that it was an ash heap, but you shall judge. Throughout that night we took our appointed four-hour single-handed watch, slept our four hours as we had come mechanically so to do during the past four months, and went on deck at dawn to see Tower Island.

It was not there.

Steve, who was at the tiller, looked vaguely troubled, but offered no comment. Neither did we, by this time being used to such things. Besides, "Leave a man to his job," had become our watch-word through many vicissitudes. But when night followed day with customary inexorableness, and without producing anything more tangible than the same empty expanse of ocean, Steve was constrained to mutter, a sure preliminary to coherent speech.

"One of three things has happened," he announced: "the chronometer's got the jim-jams, the chart's wrong, or the blinking island has foundered."

As skipper of the dream ship, it devolved upon myself to verify these surprising statements, which, after a superhuman struggle, I did. By our respective observations and subsequent calculations the ship's position proved identical. According to instruments we were at that moment plumb in the middle of Tower Island. It was thoughtless of it to have evaporated at the very moment when we so sorely needed it as a landmark. We said so in strong terms. We were still saying something of the sort when a small, high-pitched voice came from aloft:

"Land O!"

Peter, in striped white-and-green pyjamas, was astride the jaws of the gaff. Steve and I exchanged relieved glances, and, with a lashed tiller, we all went below for a "swizzle," the now inevitable accompaniment to a landfall. We had reached the Galapagos Islands.

The southeast "trade" was blowing as steadily as a "trade" knows how, and there was nothing between us and Cristobal, the only inhabited island of the group; consequently, I slept the sleep of a mind at peace until awakened by a well-known pressure on the arm.

"Come and take a look at this," whispered Steve so as not to wake Peter in the opposite bunk.

"This" proved to be a solid wall of mist towering over the ship like a precipice. The trade wind had fallen to a stark calm, and the dream ship lay wallowing on an oily swell. A young moon rode clear overhead, and myriads of monstrous stars glared down at us; yet still this ominous gray wall lay fair in our path.

"It ought not to be land," said Steve, "but I don't like the look of it."

Neither did I. We stood side by side, straining our eyes into the murk. A soft barking, for all the world like that of a very old dog, sounded somewhere to port. Splashes, as of giant bodies striking the water, accompanied by flashes of phosphorescent light, came at intervals from all sides, and presently the faint lap of water reached our ears.

"Mother of Mike!" breathed Steve. "We're _alongside_ something."

At that moment, and as though impelled by some silent mechanism, the pall of mist lifted, revealing an inky black wall of rock not fifty yards distant.

My frenzied efforts at the flywheel of the motor auxiliary were futile, as I had more than half expected. Who has ever heard of these atrocities answering in an emergency? We had no sweeps. To anchor was a physical impossibility; the lead-line vanished as probably twenty other lead-lines would have vanished after it in those fathomless waters. So we stood, watching the dream ship drift to her doom.

What happened during the next hour is as hard to describe as I have no doubt it will be to believe. The Galapagos Islands are threaded with uncertain currents, and one was setting us now on to the rocky face of an islet cut as clean and sheer to the sea as a slice of cheese. We should have touched but for our fending off. There is no other way of describing our antics than to say that we clawed our way along that rocky wall until at the end of it a faint air caught the jib, the foresail, the mainsail, and we stood away without so much as a scratch.

Sunrise that morning was the weirdest I have ever seen. There are over two thousand volcano cones in the Galapagos Islands, and apparently we were in the midst of them. On all hands and at all distances were rugged peaks one hundred to two thousand feet high, rising sheer from a rose-pink sea into a crimson sky. Sleek-headed seals broke water alongside, peered at us for a space with their fawnlike eyes, barked softly, and were gone. Pelicans soared above our truck, and fell like a stone on their prey. Tiny birds, yellow and red, flitted about the deck or flew through the skylights, and settled on the cabin fittings with the utmost unconcern. And down under, in the crystal-clear depths, vague shapes hovered constantly: sharks, dolphin, turtle, and ghastly devil fish.

All life seemed confined to water and air; never was dry land so desolate and sinister as those myriads of volcanic cones. Yet one of them was peopled with human beings. Which? We were lost, if ever a ship was lost, in the labyrinths of an ash heap.

All we knew was that Cristobal was the eastern-most of the group. We sailed east, only to be becalmed inside of an hour and to lose by current what we had gained by wind. Close to this same group a sailing vessel has been known to have her insurance paid before she reached port. The calms run in belts of varying widths, and unless a ship can be towed or kedged to one side or the other there is nothing to prevent her remaining in the same spot for six months. Our water would not last that time, and there is none on any of the islands except Cristobal. We began to think. We continued to think for four mortal days until the fitful southeast "trade" revived as by a miracle, and we were bowling along at a seven-knot clip. What a relief was the blessed motion of air! We hardly dared breathe lest it should drop.

It held, and we made what we took to be Cristobal. The dinghy was lowered, the ship cleaned up for port, and we began to discuss the possibilities of fresh milk, eggs, and bread. But it was not Cristobal Island. Neither were three others that we visited, all as alike as peas--a chain of ash heaps, an iron-bound coast of volcanic rock broken here and there by a dazzling coral beach.

I admit that to professional seafarers our inability to find Cristobal must appear ridiculous. For their benefit I would point out that we were not professional seafarers but a party of inconsequent and no doubt over-optimistic landlubbers engaged in the materialization of a dream--to cruise through the South Sea Islands in our own ship; that what navigation we knew had been learnt in three weeks; and that I would invite any one who fancies his bump of locality to test it in the Galapagos Islands.

We had more than half decided to cut out Cristobal and its five hundred inhabitants, and shape a course for the Society Islands, three thousand miles to the southwest'ard, when Steve gave a yell like a wounded pup.

"I see Dalrymple Rock," he chanted as one in a trance, with the binocular to his eyes. "I see Wreck Point, and a bay between 'em with houses on the beach. What more do you want?"

How supremely simple it was to recognize each feature by the chart--when there was an unmistakable landmark to go by. What fools we had been to---- But we left further recriminations till a later date. At the present moment it was necessary to enter Wreck Bay through a channel three hundred yards wide without a mark on either side in the teeth of a snorting "trade," and with a lee tide.

At one time during the series of short tacks that were necessary to get a "slant" for the anchorage we were not more than fifty yards from the giant emerald-green rollers breaking on Lido Point to port with the roar of thunder. To starboard one could see the fangs of the coral reef waiting for us to miss stays to rip the bottom out of us. But the dream ship did not miss stays, and finally we shot through the channel into Wreck Bay, and anchored in three fathoms off a rickety landing-stage.

While the agony of removing a three-weeks' beard was in progress a crowd had assembled on the beach, and presently a boatload of three put off to us. Steve, with his smattering of Spanish, received them at the companion with a new-born elegance that matched their own. They proved to be the owner of the island, a good-looking youth of about twenty-five; the chief of police (presumably "chief" because there is only one representative of the law in the Galapagos), a swarthy Ecuadorean in a becoming poncho; and a little, wrinkled old man with a finely chiselled face and delicate hands.

The owner of Cristobal informed us in excellent French (he had been four years in Paris previous to marooning himself on his equatorial possession) that the island was ours, and the fulness thereof; that he also was ours to command, and would we dine with him that evening at the _hacienda_, it being New Year's eve?

The "chief" of police demanded our ship's papers, which, when placed in his hands, he gracefully returned without attempting to read, and gave his undivided attention to a rum "swizzle" and a cigar.

The little old man, whom we soon learnt to call "Dad," sat mum, with a dazed expression on his face and his head at an angle after the fashion of the deaf. When he spoke, which he presently did with an unexpectedness that was startling, it was in a low, cultured voice, and in English! "What about this Dutch war he had heard rumours of during the last year or two? With Germany, was it? Well, now, and who was winning? Over, eh?--and with the Allies on top? That was good, that was good!" He rubbed his wrinkled hands and glared round on the assembled company with an air of triumph, but without making any appreciable impression on the owner of Cristobal or the "chief" of police.

Dad was a type, if ever there was one, of the educated ne'er-do-well hidden away in the farthest corner of the earth to avoid those things which most of us deem so desirable. He had a split-bamboo house on the beach, a wife who could cook, freedom, and God's sunlight. What more did man desire? He had run away to sea at the age of seventeen, run away from sea two years later at the Galapagos Islands, and remained there ever since. This was the second time he had spoken English in fifty years, so we must excuse his halting diction, but the tales he could tell--the tales!

He was here when the pirates of the South American coast murdered for money, even as they have a knack of doing to this day, and hid the loot at their headquarters in the Galapagos Islands, silver and gold, boatloads of it. He had built a cutter with his own hands, and sailed in search of this same loot, only to encounter the sole owner, still guarding his ill-gotten gains though reduced to nakedness and hair. At a distance Dad had seen him first, and, mistaking him for a mountain goat, had shot him through the heart. It was the first man he had killed, and he could not stay on the island after that--especially at night.

Afterward, I asked the owner of Cristobal if one might believe half the old man said, and he nodded gravely.

"There is much, also, that he does not say," he added with a smile.

There is undoubtedly treasure still lying hidden in the Galapagos Islands. Two caches have been unearthed, silver ingots and pieces of eight respectively. The finder of one built himself a handsome hotel in Ecuador, and the other drank himself to death in short order. But there is definite proof that there is more.

As a field for the treasure hunter it is doubtful if any place in the world offers better chances of success to-day than the Galapagos Islands, but--and there is always a "but"--the uncertainty of wind and current amongst the islands makes it impossible for a sailing ship to undertake the search, a motor auxiliary is too unreliable, and a small steamer is too large for the creeks and reef channels it would be necessary to negotiate. With a full-powered launch and diving apparatus, and a parent ship in attendance, and unlimited time, and patience, and money--but these be dreams beyond the reach of the penniless world-wanderer: dreams, nevertheless, that will assuredly one day be realized.

No one thinks of the Galapagos Islands. Situated a bare six hundred miles from the American coastline in the direct trade route between the South Pacific Islands and the United States of America, this group is seldom visited more than twice a year, and then for the most part by Ecuadorean schooners. The veriest atoll in the South Pacific receives more attention, and with not a tithe of the cause. The cause? Well, come with us to the _hacienda_ of the owner of Cristobal and you shall see.

For this purpose it is necessary to transfer one's activities from the heaving deck of the dream ship to the equally heaving back of a mountain pony, and lope for an hour up a winding, boulder-strewn track through a wilderness of low scrub and volcanic rock. "Still an ash heap," you think, "nothing but an ash heap."

Then you surmount a ridge, the last of half a dozen, and rein in to breathe your pony and incidentally to marvel. You remind yourself that you are precisely on the Equator; yet it is positively chilly up here. A green, gently undulating country, dotted with grazing cattle and horses, patches of sugar-cane, coffee bushes, and lime trees, stretches away to a cloud-capped range of mountains.

The soil is a rich red loam, almost stoneless, and scarcely touched with the plough. There are three thousand five hundred head of cattle at present on Cristobal Island, and it could support fifty thousand with ease. There is no disease and no adverse climatic condition with which to contend, and at three years old a steer brings one hundred dollars (gold), live weight, at Guayaquil--when a steamer can be induced to call and take it there.

There are a few hundred acres under cultivation when there ought to be thousands, and two hundred bone-lazy peons do the work of fifty ordinary farm hands.

Looking down on this fertile valley it is hard to realize that one is standing on the lip of a long-extinct crater, that in reality Cristobal is a series of these, dour and uninviting to a degree, viewed from outside, but veritable gardens within. And there are four other islands in the Galapagos Group--some smaller, some larger, than Cristobal--uninhabited and exactly similar in character. Nominally, they belong to Ecuador, which accounts for their tardy development; but here, surely, is a new field for enterprise.

In the midst of the valley, situated on a hillock and surrounded by the peons' grass houses, is the owner's _hacienda_. Here we met, at a dinner of strange but appetizing dishes, the accountant and the _comisario_, the former a rotund little gentleman with very long thumb nails (the insignia of the brain worker), which he clicked together with gusto when excited or amused; the latter a tall, handsome youth and something of an exquisite, if one may judge by biscuit-coloured silk socks and an esthetic tie.

It was a cheerful occasion, followed by the best coffee I have ever tasted and songs to a guitar accompaniment.

Out in the compound, under the stars, the peons also indulged in a New Year's _fiesta_; so that by midnight the place was a blur of tobacco smoke, oil flares, thrumming guitars; gyrating, brightly hued ponchos, with their owners somewhere inside them; dogs, chickens, and children.

Everyone seemed thoroughly happy and contented. And after all, what else matters? That is the Ecuadorean point of view, and who shall say it is a bad one?

A starlit ride to the beach, a few strokes of the oars that carve deep caverns of phosphorescent light in the inky waters, and we are again aboard. And herein lies one of the manifold joys of one's own ship. One may travel at will over the highway of the earth, carrying his home and his banal but treasured belongings with him. Like the hermit-crab, he may emerge where and when he will, take a glimpse at life thereabouts, and return to the comfort of accustomed surroundings--a pipe-rack ready to hand, a favourite book or picture placed just so.

Sheltered by a coral reef that broke the force of the Pacific rollers, and with holding-ground of firm white sand, we made up arrears of sleep that night, and scattered after breakfast to explore the beach.

There was a lagoon swarming with duck, not half a mile inland, that attracted Steve and his new twelve-bore gun like a magnet. Peter interviewed the lighthouse-keeper's wife anent cooking for us during our stay, and I--I lazed; it gives one time to notice things that escape the attention of the industrious.

A steam-engine was chugging somewhere behind the belt of stunted trees that fringed the beach, and I found it to be a coffee-grinder fuelled, if you please, with sawed lengths of lignum-vitae--a furnace of wood at something like five dollars a stick in most countries! I should have liked to see the face of a block-maker of my acquaintance at such vandalism. But here it is nothing of the sort. Little else in the way of indigenous scrub grows on Cristobal.

Mechanically gravitating toward Dad's split-bamboo abode, I came upon him seated on a log, staring meditatively at the crumbling skeleton of what had been, or was at one time going to be, a ship.

"Why didn't you finish her?" I shouted into his "best" ear.

He stared at me in a daze, then burst forth in Spanish, until I succeeded in convincing him that he might as well talk double Dutch.

"Of course, of course," he muttered. "I forgot; Lord, how I forget! It's queer to me that I can speak English at all after all these years; but I can; that's something, isn't it?"

"Sure thing," I yelled; "keep it up. Tell me why you didn't finish your ship."

He pondered the matter; then spoke slowly:

"I told you of the other I built--and why. Well, I ran her on a reef--splinters in five minutes. Took the heart out of me for a bit, that did.

"Then I began to think of that loot again. I do still, for that matter; can't help it. You see, I think I know where it is. So I started on this one." He nodded toward the hulk, silhouetted against the crimsoning sky.

"I'd got to the planking when it occurred to me I'd want a partner for the job, at my age; and who could I trust? They'd slit your throat for ten dollars in those days. They murdered the present owner's father in cold blood. I wouldn't put it beyond 'em to do the same to this one if it wasn't that he's a smart lad and carries the only firearms on the island.

"No one's come here since, no one that I'd trust.... Then, too, what if I found the stuff? What good would it do me--now?" He spread out his delicately shaped hands in a deprecating gesture. "I should die in a month if I left here. Finest climate on earth, this is...." Suddenly he laughed--a low, reminiscent cackle of mirth.

"But that wasn't all that decided me. I'd got to the planking, Guayaquil oak it was, and I was steaming it on when a nail drew, and the plank caught me in the chest, knocked me six yards, and broke a rib. It's broken yet, I guess; there was no one to mend it. Well, that finished it. I wasn't meant to build that ship."

He stopped abruptly and stared down at his battered rawhide shoes.

The inference was obvious.

"Well, what about it?" I suggested.

He looked up at that.

"I've been thinking about it ever since you came here," he confessed. "I'll go with you; but mind this, you mustn't curse me if nothing comes of it. I don't promise anything. All I say is I think I know where the stuff is, if someone hasn't got it."

"I'll let you know to-morrow," said I, and left him sitting there.

Was the man senile? There was nothing to make one think so. Was he a liar? There was equally nothing to prove it. At least half his story was a matter of island history.

We of the dream ship held a board meeting on the subject of loot that evening. We discussed it from every angle, and came to the conclusion that with the present atrocity called a motor auxiliary and the weather conditions of the group, we might take three days over the business and we might take three months; that the chances of finding something were outweighed by the risk of losing the ship, and that we were in pursuit of something visionary, anyway, so we had better get on with it.

The voting went two to one against, and I leave you to decide whose was the deciding voice.

I give this interview with Dad for what it is worth, and simply because I see no prospect of undertaking the search as it should be undertaken. I am aware that it reads like the purest romance, but it is true in every particular, as any one will soon discover on visiting Wreck Bay, Cristobal Island, in the Galapagos Group.

The old man still waits there on the beach for a ship and someone he can trust; but judging by his frail appearance (he is seventy-seven), he will not wait much longer.

Often during the days that followed I found myself standing at the dream ship's rail, looking seaward to a dim outline of mountains against the blue, and wondering.... But only the ash heap knows.

*THE MARQUESAS ISLANDS*

_The real South Seas--Big-game shooting
extraordinary--A case of thwarted ambition_

*CHAPTER IX*

_The real South Seas--Big-game shooting
extraordinary--A case of thwarted ambition_

We of the dream ship were "watering," or rather transferring, three hundred gallons of a doubtful-looking fluid from the beach reservoir of Cristobal to the ship's tanks by means of kerosene tins, a rickety landing-stage swarming with sand flies, and an equally rickety dinghy.

We were, in fact, enjoying a spell, to the accompaniment of vast quantities of cocoanut milk, before setting sail for the Marquesas, three thousand miles distant, and were in no mood for an interruption, which is probably why it came. A pigmy figure on the landing was apparently dancing a hornpipe and emitting strange cries.

"Who is it, and what the ---- does he want?" I queried with customary amiability.

"It's the _comisario_," said Steve, with binocular upheld in one hand and a brimming cocoanut shell in the other, "and he's probably found that we need a bill of health or clearance or something."

I believe I sighed. I have a notion that Steve swore, and I am quite sure that we rowed ashore and interviewed the _comisario_, the handsome youth whose silk socks and passionate tie contrasted strangely with his surroundings. He still danced.

"He says that it is necessary that he should accompany us," Steve translated.

"To the Marquesas?"

"To anywhere."

"Really? And where does the necessity come in?"

After still further variations of the hornpipe and a prodigious outflow of Ecuadorean Spanish, the following was evolved: They were after him--a trifling indiscretion in the matter of issuing grog licenses to the peons. The Ecuadorean Government was to blame. They expected an official to live on twenty dollars a month and nothing else! How was it possible? Moreover, the President himself, elected on a wage basis of forty-dollars-a-month-and-bring-your-own-blankets, would be getting the boot in a short three months, and with him went everyone--everyone!

What was then to happen to the officials he had placed in power? More important still, what was to happen to this particular official? He must accompany us. It was the only possible solution. He would work. _Carramba_, how he would work! and for nothing but his passage to anywhere--anywhere!

Steve and I exchanged glances. The entire crew of the dream ship was, as I think I have before mentioned, exceedingly tired of cooking. The _comisario_ seized on our silence.

Maybe we thought he could not work?

With a dramatic gesture he tore from his neck the passionate tie, from his feet the silk socks, from his back a virulently striped shirt, and stood revealed in a natty line of undervests.

"Poor devil!" said I, thinking of the dream ship's fo'c's'le in a seaway.

"Poor nothing!" said Steve. "He wants work; let him have it."

And that was how Senor ----, hereafter known as Bill, came to join the dream ship.

We sailed, and continued to sail before a steady southeast "trade" for twenty-two days, during which the _comisario_ suffered alternately from seasickness, homesickness, and sheer inability to do anything but smoke cigarettes and sleep; our water tanks, under the magic wand of the Galapagos beach reservoir, transformed themselves into aquariums of energetic animalcules; and our entire biscuit supply crumbled to dust under the onslaughts of a particularly virulent red ant.

But these be incidentals to life aboard dream ships, and, at the first sight of Nukuhiva they faded to little more than amusing memories.

We had reached our goal! The South Sea Islands were ours! It was hard to realize. At the sight of gorgeous Nukuhiva gliding toward us over the sparkling blue water I remember looking round at the good old ship that had slowly but steadfastly carried us all these thousands of miles, and wondering what she thought of it all. I am aware that the idea of a ship having thoughts savours of senile decay, but that is what passed through my mind at the time, and has passed through it a hundred times since.

More nonsense has probably been written about the South Sea Islands than about any other part of the world. The library novelist, the globe-trotting journalist, and a reading public athirst for exotic romance have all contributed to this end: so that here, at the outset of attempting to describe what we of the dream ship saw there, I find myself at a loss. In short, "these few remarks" may be taken as an apology and a warning.

I have nothing to offer on a par with the standard article, such as struggles with sharks, conflicts with cannibals, or philandering with princesses. My line, I fear, is facts as I find them.

A fine island is Nukuhiva--as fine an example of volcanic formation as one will find anywhere. Sheer walls of cloud-capped rock six thousand feet high, some literally overhanging the crystal-clear water, and all embossed and engraved with strangely patterned basalt. There are pillars, battlements, turrets, so that with half-closed eyes it seems one is approaching a temple, a mediaeval castle, a mosque of the East. And the valleys--deep, river-threaded, verdure-choked valleys fading away into mysterious purple mists. But it is little better than an impertinence to attempt a description of Nukuhiva after Melville's "Typee."*

*See Appendix.

For once the monstrosity in our engine-room was induced to exert three of its four cylinders, and we entered the harbour of Tai o Hae in style. It was as well, for a trim trading schooner flying the French flag was at anchor close inshore, and her entire crew lined the rail to see what manner of insect had invaded her privacy.

"Where are you from?" hailed a surprisingly English voice as soon as our anchor-chain had ceased its clamour.

"London," we chorused.

"Well, I'm damned!" came a response, evidently not intended for our ears, but audible nevertheless.

In rather less than three minutes a whaleboat-load of visitors was aboard the dream ship, and the silent bay echoed to a fusillade of question and counter-question.

Followed a dinner at the trading station on a wide, cool veranda, where, under the influence of oysters, California asparagus, fowl, bush pig, taro root, and French champagne, we became better acquainted with our hosts--two as amiable Frenchmen as ever I met. They represented a trading company of Papeete and Paris, and lived as only Frenchmen appear to know how to live.

The Marquesans, we gathered over coffee and cigars, were dying rapidly. Consumption. Introduced in the form of Panama fever by labourers returning from canal construction. The fever afterward developed into the white plague by reason of the natives' unresisting, if not acquiescent, nature. And when all were gone, what then? Chinese.

The Chinese appear to be the answer to most questions in the South Pacific to-day. They come; it costs them but fifty dollars to land; and after that they grow--_mon Dieu_, how they grow!

And can nothing be done? A shrug of the shoulders and the offer of a refilled glass are the answers of the Frenchman. But a short time now and he personally will be in a position to return to his beloved Paris, or Marseilles, or Brittany.

But we had lately returned from dealing with the Boche; so had our hosts. We drank respectively to the Royal Field Artillery, the Mitrailleurs, the Machine-gun Corps, and the incomparable French Infantry. What of it, if we continue the sport on the morrow, among the wild cattle and goats of Nukuhiva? To-morrow, then, at five o'clock.

The schooner, scheduled at daylight to load copra worth five hundred dollars a ton, was cheerfully detained for the trip, and loaded to capacity with bottled beer, coughing Marquesans, and a varied armoury of firearms.

We sailed down a coast that it is a sore temptation to describe and landed by whaleboat on a surf-pounded beach. Thereafter we plodded, crawled, and stumbled over as vicious a country as it is possible to imagine--crumbling shale, razor-edged ledges, and deceptive tableland of knee-high grass that only served to hide the carpet of keen-edged volcanic rocks beneath.

And the heat! But a representative of the incomparable infantry led the way; and who would not follow to the death, out of very shame? At each halting place the _elan_ of this same representative seemed to increase. Sitting crosslegged on a rock in the meagre shade of a scrub tree, he would discourse on any subject under the sun, while his audience gasped, emptied the perspiration out of their boots, and cursed the _cantine_ (a gigantic native bearing an almost as gigantic sack of bottled beer) for lagging.

I was under the impression that the game was to have been wild; hence my surprise when a herd of something like a hundred and fifty goats of all ages, from the bearded and maned veteran, or "stinker," down to the daintiest kid, cavorted up to our resting-place and sniffed at us inquisitively. It was necessary to fling stones to keep some of the more daring at bay.

So much for goat-hunting in the Marquesas. It is evident that these beasts are so "wild" that they know nothing of man; who shall say they have missed much in consequence?

The cattle are a different matter. Shy as deer, they must be warily stalked and shot mostly on the run, at anything from a hundred to a hundred and fifty yards; also, they have an engaging habit of turning when wounded and giving the huntsman the worst possible time in their power, which in the case of a hefty bull or cow with calf is not inconsiderable.

There must have been a herd of something like fifty grazing on the precipitous hillside, and the first shot, fired by an over-anxious Marquesan, against strict orders, sent them scuttling like antelope out of the valley and over the ridge. One fine bull received his medicine from my trusty little Winchester on the very brink, collapsed, and rolled like an avalanche of meat to the bottom.

We bagged four of this herd, and the Marquesans fell on them, quartering and selecting with extraordinary skill, and finally carrying one hundred pounds each of solid meat to the beach five miles below. How this last feat was accomplished by a band of ramping consumptives I have no notion, though I saw it done. I only know that after carrying two rifles and a gun over the same country I literally tumbled on to the beach, bruised and bleeding and trembling from sheer fatigue. Even the representative of incomparable infantry admitted to being tired, and, thank heaven, he looked it!

It had been a successful day, I was given to understand, and there followed in consequence song and dance aboard the dream ship until dawn touched the peaks of Tai o Hae.

A native dance is a dreary and monotonous affair to the average white man, because he does not take the trouble to understand. He sees before him an assembly of posturing, howling natives, and seldom realizes that he is witnessing a pageant of history that has never been written or read.

The performance opened with a pantomimic representation of the cruise of the dream ship. According to the actors' ideas, all aboard suffered acutely from seasickness, were utterly unable to stand upright, and continually looked for land under the shade of an upraised hand. Our vigour in battling with storms was extraordinary; we stumbled over rope-ends, clung to the rigging, nearly capsized, and one of us fell overboard, to be rescued, amid shrieks of laughter, by means of a boat-hook and the seat of his pants.

We were a joke, there was no doubt about that, and any one who takes a ten-thousand-mile journey in a twenty-three-ton yacht to the Marquesas and wants to be taken seriously had better go elsewhere.

From such trivialities the performers passed on to what was evidently their stock repertoire--the history of the Marquesas as handed down from father to son. It was all there in gesture and chant--mighty battles with their neighbours the Paumotans, cannibalism, peace, the advent of the white man with his rum, the plague that still consumes them, and all enacted without resentment.

That is the most astounding thing, that these people who were living their own lives, and surely as happy lives as ours, bear no ill will for the incredible sufferings our civilization has brought among them. Perhaps they do not think, and if so it is as well.

Conceive yourself, if you can, oh, denizen of Park Lane, Fifth Avenue, or Champs Elysees, a healthy, upstanding, unclad savage of-the South Seas, and living your own life.

You may be a cannibal; and are there no cannibals, and worse, west of Suez? You will be a warrior and fight for your country and your womenfolk. Is there anything wrong about that?

You will have a stricter moral code than most white folk, but that cannot be helped. You will hunt and fish and gather fruit for your family--in fact, you will live in the only way you know how to live, in contentment.

One day an extraordinary-looking object called a white man presents himself and informs you that you are not living in the right way at all. A much better way, according to this gentleman, is to exchange a ton of your cocoanuts for a bottle of rum or a death-dealing instrument made of rusty iron.

You are a tolerant sort of person, and you listen and drink his rum. The next day you have an insufferable headache, and, logically concluding that he has poisoned you, you kill him.

But that is not the end. Replicas of him keep arriving, and you find you need his rum and his rusty iron, the one for its elevating properties, the other for its dispatch in dealing with enemies. Still more replicas arrive, but of a different order. Many of them are kindly, well-meaning men, and great talkers. They tell you that they have found a God--the only God--and you must worship him in their way. The trouble is that each has a different way, but they are all right, and they all prove it by the same book.

Preserve me from the futilities of theological argument; but I met at Tai o Hae a Seventh Day Adventist missionary, an earnest, clean-living, kindly man, without a spark of humour in his composition. He was consumed by a genuine and mighty fervour to demonstrate to the native Marquesan that he was keeping the Sabbath on the wrong day.

"Does that matter so very much?" I asked him, and that was all I had a chance to ask. Apparently it did matter. And he was getting converts. Why? Because the native is not slow to discover that by embracing Seventh Day Adventism he gets two days of rest in the week.

Elsewhere I have met Roman Catholic, Mormon, Latter-Day Saint, Presbyterian, and Anglican Church missionaries, all at work in the same field, all earnest, well-meaning men, and each convinced that he is right.

Is it any wonder, then, that after listening to them all the dazed South Sea Island native asks himself what all the pother is about, and, finding no satisfactory answer to the conundrum, turns to his tangible rum bottle?

To revert to safer topics, there is pearl shell in the Marquesas. The representative of incomparable infantry told us so while we sat on his incomparable veranda one morning, consuming large quantities of _papia_, rolls, honey, and coffee, each in his particular brand of pyjamas.

The information brought upon our serene lives at Tai o Hae the white man's blight of avariciousness. Was this thing possible, with shell at one thousand dollars a ton delivered at Philadelphia? Yes; he, the incomparable, had seen it through a water-glass, in anything from five to fifteen fathoms, between the islands of Hivaoa and Tahuata.

Why had it not been prospected? It was doubtful if any but he and the natives knew of its existence. Undoubtedly it was worth looking into. He made us a present of the information to do with as we willed. His cook was an old Paumotan diver, who would no doubt accompany us--Pascal!--accompany us to the island, a bare ninety miles distant. We could take samples of shell to the company in Papeete, and no doubt make arrangements--Pascal!--arrangements with them to advance working capital in return for a lien on the shell--Pascal!!!

"Monsieur." An enormous Paumotan native stood in the doorway smiling benignly.

He would accompany us. He would cook, and he would dive.

We sailed that evening, the deck being littered with green bananas, live chickens tied by the leg to bulwark stanchions, a rabbit, firewood, a stove composed of a kerosene tin half filled with earth, and--Pascal.

There was apparently nothing this extraordinary man could not do. He knew every island of the Marquesas like the palm of his hand. He could produce savoury messes from a kerosene tin, remain under water three minutes, discourse entertainingly in pidgin-English, French, German, Marquesan, and Paumotan, and secure a ship's provisions without the annoying triviality of paying for them.

"But whom do we owe for all this?" I asked him, eyeing the menagerie that surrounded us.

Pascal smiled and waved a hand.

"Rabbit no money," he informed us; "chickens, bananas, all no money. Me get um."

Here surely is a solution of the high-cost-of-living problem. Take Pascal to the profiteering areas and the thing is done.

Dawn revealed to us Tahuata close abeam. Each island of this group seems more lovely than the last: waterfalls pouring three thousand feet to the sea, blow-holes at the base of rocky cliffs that spray the air with spindrift and miniature rainbows, deep bays with coral beaches at their head.

But the beauties of nature were not for us on this occasion; we were prospecting. It was a serious business. There might be money in it. After this I can scarce believe that in Paradise itself the white man will not be dogged by the curse of opportunism.

Leaving the dream ship at anchor a cable's length from shore, we took to the dinghy and explored the floor of the ocean thereabouts through water-glasses, consisting of wooden boxes with glass bottoms. This was the place, Pascal informed us, and, sure enough, there was shell, old barnacle-encrusted shell, but widely scattered.

What of a few samples? Pascal grinned and shook his head. "Shark," he muttered, apologetically; which, being interpreted, meant that he refused to dive.

He pointed out that in the Paumotus it was different. In the Paumotus there was always a reef-surrounded lagoon where few sharks found entrance. In the Paumotus men dived in couples as a safeguard. In the Paumotus----

In vain we pointed out that we happened to be in the Marquesas and not the Paumotus; that he had been hired to dive in the Marquesas; that we were really very angry--in the Marquesas. He grinned.

In rather less than half an hour, and to Pascal's utter amazement, we had put him and his belongings ashore, paid him his wages, and were under way for Tahiti.

Ah, Monsieur of the incomparable infantry, I rather suspect you of pulling our legs. Or was it that your innate enthusiasm ran away with you? Or that we should have been less hasty? I do not know. All I know is that you spoke truth; there is shell in the Marquesas--and it is likely to remain there.

As the South Pacific Islands become more widely known, which they are rapidly doing, the Marquesas are bound to attract the attention they deserve. Apart from their scenic grandeur and healthful climate, they are as fertile a group as any in the Pacific, and more so than most. It has been proved that cotton of the best quality flourishes there, as well as sugar cane and every other tropical product, and there are thousands of acres of knee-high, well-watered pastures for the stockman.

Since this visit to the Marquesas I have been living in France, to which country the group belongs, and I have not yet met a Frenchman who knows of their existence. In fact, the average Frenchman's ignorance of his own possessions is nothing short of amazing.

Some day the congested areas of this queer old world will overflow, and the Marquesas will be discovered afresh. When that time comes, France will have people knocking at her door and demanding to know why she debars all other nationalities from acquiring land that she does not attempt to develop herself.

Already there is a movement afoot in England to establish a colony in the Marquesas. Permission has somehow been obtained from the French Government--a process comparable with the extraction of a particularly obstinate winkle from its shell--to purchase blocks of land, and distribute them amongst intending settlers who already number over a thousand.

"Lucky thousand!" say I, "and good luck to them!"

*THE PAUMOTU ISLANDS*

_The people of the atolls--including Mr. Mumpus_

*CHAPTER X*

_The people of the atolls--including Mr. Mumpus_

From the moment I first set eyes on an atoll it fascinated me, and its lure has not departed with the years.

Think of any place in the world that you have seen, and an atoll is different. It is the fairy ring of the sea. Out of the depths it comes, rearing a vegetation and people of its own, and often into the depths it goes, leaving no trace. How? Why? Scientists murmur something about the coral polyp; but, not being a scientist, I prefer my theory of the fairy ring. That was how it looked to me many years ago, and that was how it looked again from the masthead of the dream ship.

We had left the Marquesas seven days previously, and were now becalmed in that maze of atolls known as the Paumotu or Low Archipelago.

Imagine a circular beach of glistening coral sand and green vegetation from five to fifty yards wide, thrust up through the sea for all the world like a hedge, and enclosing a garden of coral fronds submerged under water so still and clear as to be hardly visible, and you have an atoll as I saw it from the masthead.

And there were myriads of them--big atolls, little atolls, fat and thin atolls--fading away into the shimmering heat haze of the horizon. The fairies must have been mighty busy down this way.

I descended to the deck and things mundane. What to do when becalmed in a network of coral reefs and seven-knot currents was the problem that confronted us. I had no text book on the subject, but by some miracle the monstrosity was persuaded to fire on two cylinders.

Imagine yourself, then, passing through the narrow gateway in the hedge--I should say, passage in the reef--and coming to anchor in the garden--I mean lagoon.

It is sunrise, and already the pearling canoes are putting out from the village and scurrying to the fishing grounds over the glassy surface of the lagoon.

A fine people, these of the atolls--upstanding, deep of chest, a race of mermen if ever there was one. From birth up, if they are not in the water they are on it or as close to it as they can get. Take them inland and they die. So they squat on their canoe outriggers, smoking, chatting, laughing, until the spirit moves them (nothing else will), and one of their number drops from sight, feet first, with hardly a ripple.

You look down and you see him, as though through green-tinted glass, crouched on the sloping floor of the lagoon. He is plucking oysters as one would gather flowers in a garden. There is no haste in his movements, nothing to indicate that there is any time limit to his remaining down there, under anything from five to fifteen fathoms of water.

A minute passes, two minutes; still he pursues his leisurely way, plucking to right and left and thrusting the shells into a network bag about his neck.

The man of the atolls is in a world of his own where none but his kind can follow, and they still squat on their outriggers, chatting and laughing like a crowd of boys at a swimming pool.

One alone seems interested in the diver's movements: his mate, a fair-skinned woman, with streaming blue-black hair, leans over the gunwale of the canoe, looking down through a kerosene tin water-glass.

The diver's dark figure against the pale-green coral becomes more blurred; a stream of silver air bubbles floats upward. Three minutes by the watch have come and gone. To the landsman it seems incredible; and even then there is no haste, no shooting to the surface and gasps for breath.

The dark body becomes clearer in outline as it emerges from the depths, and slowly, quite slowly, floats upward until a jet-black head breaks water and the diver clings to the gunwale of the canoe, inhaling deep but unhurried breaths and exhaling with a long-drawn whistle peculiarly his own.

In what way this whistle helps matters it is impossible to say, but whether a habit, a pose, or an aid in the regaining of breath, it is universal throughout the Paumotus; so much so that a busy afternoon with the pearlers sounds more like a tin-whistle band than anything else.

With the people of the atolls the ability to remain under water for long periods is more than an art; it is second nature. Instinctively, they do just those things that make one breath suffice for three minutes and sometimes four.

Preparatory to a descent they do not take a deep breath and hold it until the surface is reached again. They fill their lungs with a normal amount of air, which lasts them about a minute and a half; the other minute and a half is occupied in its exhalation. Then, too, every movement below water is made with the utmost conservation of energy; yet a good diver can bring up a hundred and fifty kilos of shell in a day, which means in the neighbourhood of six hundred francs.

And it is just these same nimble francs that tempt the Paumotan to abase his talents, even as others are tempted the world over. For the sake of a few more shells, another cluster a little farther down, he remains below just that trifle longer than is good for him, and in time it tells. The eyes become bloodshot and start from the head, he goes deaf, or paralysis seizes him.

"But the women are the worst," a sun-baked trader informed me; "the worst or the best, as you like to put it," he added, grinning. "They'll go on till they burst, or pretty near it. Bargain-counter instinct, I guess. We call it the 'bends.'"

'"The bends?'"

"Yes, one of 'em goes down, and down; sees some more shell a bit lower, and some more a bit lower than that. Then she's reaching out for one last flutter at something like twenty fathoms when they get her the 'bends,' I mean. You can see her fighting against them, but it's no good; they bring her knees to her chin, and she can't straighten up, and she drops the last lot of shell she's gathered, and hates that worse than the 'bends'."

"What does she do?"

"Nothing, except lie there crumpled up until her mate fetches her up and massages her back to life. Then she's no sooner conscious than she's down again.

"Water never kills this crowd; it takes dry land to do that. Why, there's a diver close on fifty years old here, paralyzed clean down one side. He can't walk, but he can swim. He gets them to carry him down to the reef and heave him in; says it's the only place he can get any comfort."

"How about sharks?"

"Oh, there are sharks all right, but the diver's mate looks after that; gives the signal, and they're all in after him double quick."

"Finish him off with knives, eh?"

The sun-baked trader smiled reminiscently.

"Well, hardly," he said. "A dead shark makes a square meal for the others, and that's all. What they need is an example, and they get it. They're cruising about sometime when they come on one of their number with no tail, one fin, and sundry other decorations that wouldn't exactly please the S.P.C.A. He is not nice to look at, and they clear out of a place where such things are possible.