Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories Part 14

"And the other little devil has dived, and they will lose her. Perdition take their souls! A bullet would have settled her," said Martinas. "She will easily get ash.o.r.e now and alarm the whole village."

Then, with a volley of oaths and curses, he ordered the rest of the boats away to the little strait separating the two islets.

But ere they had sped more than halfway to the sh.o.r.e, the girl who had dived had swum in between the jagged, isolated clumps of coral that stood out from the reef, and rising high upon a swelling wave, they saw her lifted bodily upon its ledge, and then, exhausted as she was, stagger to her feet and run sh.o.r.ewards along its surface.

On, on, she ran, the sharp coral rock tearing her feet, till she gained the white sand of the inner beach, and then she fell p.r.o.ne, and lay gasping for her breath. But not for long, for in a few minutes she was up again, and with wearied limbs and dizzy brain she struggled bravely on till the houses of the village came in sight, and the wondering people ran out to save her from falling again.

"Flee! flee!" she gasped. "My uncle, and Fetu, and all with them are killed.... The white men on the s.h.i.+ps have killed them all."

Like bees from their hives, the terrified natives ran out of their houses, and in ten minutes every soul in the village had fled to the beach, and launching canoes, were paddling madly across the lagoon to the main island of Nukufetau lagoon. Here, in the dense puka and mangrove scrub, there was hope of safety.

And, with rage in their villains' hearts, the slavers pursued them in vain; for before the boats could be brought round to the pa.s.sage the canoes were nearly across the lagoon. But two of the canoes, being overloaded, were swamped, and all in them were captured and bound. Among those who escaped were the wife of Big Harry and her daughter Vailele.

That afternoon, when the boats returned to the s.h.i.+ps, Captain Peter Hennessy and his worthy colleague, Captain Martinas, of the barque _Cid Campeador_ quarrelled, and the young Peruvian, drawing a pistol from his belt, shot the Irish gentleman through the left arm, and the next moment was cut down upon his own deck by a sweeping blow from Hennessy's cutla.s.s. Then, followed by Arguello's curses, the Irish captain went back to his brig and set sail for Callao, leaving Martinas to get the better of his wound and swoop down upon the natives of Easter Island six weeks later.

And down below in the stifling, sweating hold, with two hundred miserable captives like herself, torn from various islands and speaking a language akin to her own, lay the heart-broken and despairing daughter of Big Harry of Nukufetau.

And now comes the strange part of this true story. Two years had pa.s.sed, when one cold, sleety evening in Liverpool, a merchant living at Birkenhead returned home somewhat later than his usual hour in a hired vehicle. Hastily jumping out, he pulled the door-bell, and the moment it was opened told the domestic to call her mistress.

"And you, Mary," he added, "get ready hot flannels, or blankets, and a bed. I found an unfortunate young foreign girl nearly dead from cold and exhaustion lying at the corner of a side street. I am afraid she is dying."

In another minute the merchant and his wife had carried her inside, and the lady, taking off her drenched and freezing garments, set about to revive her by rubbing her stiffened limbs. A doctor meanwhile had been sent for, and soon after his arrival the girl, who appeared to be about sixteen years of age, regained consciousness, and was able to drink a gla.s.s of wine held to her lips. For nearly an hour the kindly hearted merchant and his wife watched by the girl's bedside, and with a feeling of satisfaction saw her sink into a deep slumber.

The story she told them the next day, in her pretty broken English, filled them with the deepest interest and pity. She had, she said, been captured by the crew of one of two slave s.h.i.+ps and taken to a place called Callao. On the voyage many of her ill-fated companions had died, and the survivors, upon their arrival at Callao, had been placed upon a vessel bound to the Chincha Islands. She, however, had, the night before the vessel sailed, managed to elude the sentries, and, letting herself drop overboard, swam to an English s.h.i.+p lying nearly a quarter of a mile away, and clambered up her side into the main-chains. There she remained till daylight, when she was seen by one of the crew. The captain of the s.h.i.+p, at once surmising she had escaped from the slave barque, concealed her on board and, the s.h.i.+p being all ready for sea, sailed next day for j.a.pan. For nearly ten months the poor girl remained on board the English s.h.i.+p, where she was kindly treated by the captain and his wife and officers. At last, after visiting several Eastern ports, the s.h.i.+p sailed for Liverpool, and the girl was taken by the captain's wife to her own lodgings. Here for some weeks she remained with this lady, whose husband meantime had reported the girl's story to the proper authorities, and much red-tape correspondence was inst.i.tuted with regard to having her sent back to her island home again. It so happened, however, that the girl, who was deeply attached to the captain's wife, was one day left alone, and wearied and perhaps terrified at her mistress not returning at dark, set out to look for her amid the countless streets of a great city. In a very short time she was hopelessly lost, and became so frightened at the strangeness of her surroundings that she sank exhausted and half-frozen upon the pavement of a deserted street. And here she was found as related.

For some months the girl remained with her friends, the merchant and his wife, for the captain of the s.h.i.+p by which she had reached Liverpool had, with his wife, consented to her remaining with them.

One evening, some few months after the girl had been thus rescued, a tall, sunburnt man, dressed like a seaman, presented himself at the merchant's house and asked to see him.

"Send him in," said Mr.----

As the stranger entered the room, Mr. ---- saw that he carried in his hand a copy of a Liverpool newspaper.

"I've come, sir," he began, "to ask you if you are the gentleman that I've been reading about----"

Just then the door opened, and the merchant's wife, followed by a girl, entered the room. At the sound of their footsteps the man turned, and the next moment exclaimed--

"My G.o.d! It's my little girl!"

And it was his little girl--the little Fetu from whom he had parted at Nukufetau two years before.

Sitting with his great arms clasped lovingly around his daughter, Big Harry told his tale. Briefly, it was this:--After reaching the Pelew Islands and remaining there a few weeks, he had taken pa.s.sage in a vessel bound to Manila, in the hope that from that port he could get a pa.s.sage back to Nukufetau in another whaler. But the vessel was cast away, and the survivors were rescued by a s.h.i.+p bound for Liverpool.

Landed at that port, and waiting for an opportunity to get a pa.s.sage to New Bedford, from where he could return to his island home in a whaler, he had one day picked up a paper and read the account of the slavers'

onslaught upon the Ellice Islands, and the story of the escape of a young half-caste girl. Never dreaming that this girl was his own daughter--for there are many half-castes in the eight islands of the group--he had sought her out, in the hope that she would be pleased to hear the sound of her native tongue again, and perhaps return with him to her native land.

Nearly a year pa.s.sed before Big Harry, with his daughter Fetu, sailed into the placid waters of Nukufetau Lagoon, and of the glad meeting of those four happy souls there is no need to tell.

A QUESTION OF PRECEDENCE

Denison, the supercargo of the _Indiana_ was always reproaching Packenham, the skipper, for getting the s.h.i.+p into trouble by his inconsiderate and effusive good-nature--"blind stupidity," Denison called it. And whenever Packenham did bring trouble upon himself or the s.h.i.+p's company by some fresh act of glaring idiotcy, he would excuse himself by saying that it wouldn't have happened if Nerida had been with him that trip. Nerida was Packenham's half-caste Portuguese wife. She was a very small woman, but kept her six-foot husband in a state of placid subjection and also out of much mischief whenever she made a cruise in the _Indiana_. Therefore Denison loved her as a sister, and forgave her many things because of this. Certainly she was a bit of a trial sometimes to every living soul on board the brig, but then all skippers' wives are that, even when pure white. And Nerida's doings would make a book worth reading--especially by married women with gadabout husbands like Packenham. But on this occasion Nerida was not aboard, and Denison looked for trouble.

For four days and nights the little _Indiana_ had leapt and spun along, before a steady southerly gale, rolling like a drunken thing a-down the for'ard slopes of mountain seas, and struggling gamely up again with flattened canvas from out the windless trough; a bright, hot sun had shone upon her swas.h.i.+ng decks from its slow rosy dawn to its quick setting of fiery crimson and blazing gold; and at night a big white moon lit up an opal sky, and silvered the hissing froth and smoky spume that curled in foaming ridges from beneath her clean-cut bows.

The brig was bound from Auckland to Samoa and the islands of the north-west, and carried a cargo of trade goods for the white traders who hoisted the _Indiana's_ house-flag in front of their thatched dwellings.

Packenham thought a good deal of this flag--it bore the letters R. P. in red in a yellow square on a blue ground--until one day Hammerfeld, the German supercargo of the _Iserbrook_, said it stood for Remorseless Plunderer. Some one told this to Packenham, and although he gave the big Dutchman a bad beating for it, the thing travelled all over the South Seas and made him very wroth. So then he got Nerida to sew another half turn in red to the loop of the P, and thereby made it into a B.

"That'll do fine," he said to Denison. '"Bob Packenham' instead of 'Robert Packenham,' eh?"

"Ye-s," answered, Denison thoughtfully, "I daresay it will be all right." And a month later, when Captain Bully Hayes came on board the _Indiana_ in Funafuti Lagoon, he gravely told Packenham that a lot of people were saying the letters stood for "b.l.o.o.d.y Pirate."

But all this has nothing to do with this story.

As I have said, the brig was running before a stiff southerly gale.

Packenham came on deck, and flinging his six feet of muscular manhood upon the up-ended flaps of the skylight, had just lit his cigar when Alan the bos'un came aft and said that the peak of Tutuila was looming high right ahead, thirty miles away.

"Bully old s.h.i.+p!" said the skipper, "give the _Indiana_ a good breeze that catches her fair and square in the stern and she'll run like a scared dog with a tin-pot tied to his tail. Denison, you sleepy beast, come up on deck and look at Samoa the Beautiful, where every prospect pleases and only the German trader is vile."

And so as he and Denison sat aft on the skylight drinking their afternoon coffee and smoking their Manilas, and the brown-skinned native crew sat below in the dark and stuffy foc's'le and gambled for tobacco, the _Indiana_ foamed and splashed and rolled before the gale till she ran under the lee of the land into a sea of transparent green, whose gentle rollers scarce broke in foam as they poured over the weed-clad ledges of the barrier-reef into the placid waters or the islet-studded lagoon encompa.s.sing the mainland about the village of Sa Lotopa.

Then as some of the merry-hearted kanaka crew ranged the cable, and others ran aloft to clew-up the sails, Packenham steered the brig between a narrow reef-bound pa.s.sage till she brought up abreast a sweeping curve of sandy beach, s.h.i.+ning white under the wooded spurs of a mountain peak two thousand feet above. Back from the beach and showing golden-brown among the sunlit green lay the thatched houses of a native village, and as the brig came head to wind, and the cable clattered through the hawse-pipes, the brown-skinned people ran joyously down to their canoes and swarmed off to the s.h.i.+p. For they all knew Pakenami the _kapeni_, and Tenisoni the supercargo, and Alan the half-caste bos'un, and the two mates, and the Chinaman cook, and every one else on board, and for years past had laughed and joked and sang and hunted the wild boar with them all; and sometimes lied to and robbed and fought with them, only to be better friends than ever when the white men came back again, and the skipper and Denison made the young men presents of meerschaum pipes and condemned Snider rifles; and Alan the Stalwart "asked" every fourth girl in the village when he got drunk at a dance and denied it when sober, yet paid damages like an honourable man (2 dols, in trade goods for each girl) to the relatives.

In a few minutes the first batch of canoes reached the s.h.i.+p, and the occupants, men, women, and children, clambered up the brig's side, and then rushed aft to the p.o.o.p to rub noses with Packenham and Denison, after the custom of the country, and then for a time a wild babble of voices reigned.

"Hallo, Iakopo, how are you!" said the skipper, shaking hands with a fat-faced, smiling native, who was clad in a white duck suit, and was accompanied by a pretty, dark-eyed girl; "how's the new church getting on? Nearly finished, is it. Well, I didn't forget you. I've brought you down the doors and windows from Auckland."

Iakopo (_Anglice_ Jacob), who was the local teacher and rather a favourite with the _Indiana's_ company, said he was very glad. He was anxious to get the church finished before the next visit of the missionary s.h.i.+p, he said. That vain fellow Pita, the teacher at Leone Bay, had been boasting terribly about _his_ church, and he (Iakopo) meant to crush him utterly with these European-made doors and windows, which his good friend Pakenami had brought him from Nui Silani.

"You bet," said the skipper; "and what's more, I'll help you to take the s.h.i.+ne out of Pita. I'll fix the doors and windows for you myself," and he winked slily at the teacher's daughter, who returned it as promptly as any Christian maiden, knowing that Nerida wasn't on board, and that she had nothing to fear.

"I wish to goodness that fellow hadn't come aboard," grumbled Denison to Packenham, after the missionary and his daughter had gone ash.o.r.e. "Peter Deasy and the Dutchman don't like it, I can see, or they would have been aboard before now. No white man likes boarding a s.h.i.+p _after_ a native teacher, and both these fellows are d----d touchy. The chances are that they won't come aboard at all to-day."

"That's true," said the captain thoughtfully; "I didn't think of that."

(He never did think.) "Shall I go ash.o.r.e first, and smooth down their ruffled plumage?"

Denison said he thought it would be a good thing to do. Deasy and the Dutchman (_i.e._, the German) were both independent traders, who had always bought their trade goods from and sold their produce to the _Indiana_ for years past, and were worth humouring. So Packenham went ash.o.r.e, leaving Denison to open out his wares in the brig's trade room in readiness for the two white men.

Now both Peter Deasy and Hans Schweicker were feeling very sulky--as Denison imagined--and at that moment were talking to each other across the road from their respective doorways, for their houses were not far apart. They had intended boarding the s.h.i.+p the moment she anch.o.r.ed, but abandoned the idea as soon as they saw the teacher going off. Not that they disliked Iakopo personally, but then he was only a low-cla.s.s native, and had no business thrusting himself before his betters. So they sat down and waited till Denison or the captain came ash.o.r.e.