Mystic Isles of the South Seas Part 15

"On the eighteenth we were in lat.i.tude 26 53' South, and the captain said that Easter Island was in the 27th degree, so after all we had steered pretty well.

"On the night of the nineteenth, we had a fearful storm. It seemed worse than the hurricane we had on the El Dorado. All night long we thought that every minute would end us, and we lay huddled in misery, not caring much whether we went down or not. But the next morning, we set part of the sail again, and at noon that day the captain took a sight and found that we were in lat.i.tude 27 8' south. Easter Island is 27 10' south. And now we began to fear that we might run past Easter Island. If we did, we knew we could never get back with the wind. We had squall after squall now, but we felt sure that soon we must see land. Our soup was all gone, and we were living on the soda crackers mixed with water and milk. Each of us got a cupful of this stuff once a day.

"On the twenty-second, when we were nine days out, I saw the land at ten o'clock in the morning, thirty miles away. We felt pretty good over that, and had two cupfuls of the mixture, because we felt we were nearly safe. My G.o.d! what we felt when we saw the rise of that land! The captain said it was Easter Island for certain, but that it was not a place that any merchant s.h.i.+ps ever went, as there was no trade there. Once we saw the land we could not get any nearer to it. We tried to row toward it, but the wind was against us. Two days we hung about the back of that island, just outside the line of breakers. We were afraid to risk a landing, for the coast was rocky. On the eleventh day we saw a spot where the rocks looked white, and we rowed in toward it with great pains and much fear. A big sea threw us right upon a smooth boulder, and we leaped from the boat and tried to run ash.o.r.e. We were weak and fell down many times. Finally we got a hold and we carried everything out of the boat, and after hours hauled it up out of reach of the breakers.

"There was a cliff that went right up straight from the rocks, and we could not climb it, we were so weak from hunger and the cramped position we had had to keep in the boat. We laid down a while, and then it was decided that the first and second mates should have a good feed and try to get up the precipice. We were taking risks, because we had very little grub left. It was about a hundred feet up, and we watched them closely as they went slowly up. They did not come back, and we were much afraid of what they might find. We did not know but there might be savages there. During the day the other sailors also got up, leaving the old man and me to watch the boat.

"Help arrived for us. The mates had walked all night, and at daybreak they reached the house of the head man, employed by the owner of Easter Island. It was a sheep and horse island. The mates were fed, and then they went on to the house of the manager. Horses were gotten out, and bananas and poi sent to us. The water just came in time, because we were all out. They brought horses for all of us then, and after we had started the people of the island went ahead and came back with water and milk, which did us a world of good. At the house of the governor we had a mess of brown beans, and then we all fell asleep on the floor. G.o.d knows how long we slept, but when we waked up we were like wolves again. We then had beans with fresh killed mutton, and that made us all deathly sick because our stomachs were weak."

Underneath us, while the red-cheeked and golden-haired Steve uttered his puzzling sentences in English, I heard from time to time the heavy tread of Captain Benson. He was, doubtless, living over again the hours of terror and resolution on the El Dorado and in the boat, and seeking to find words to amplify his log by his memories. I heard him sit down and get up more than once; while opposite me in an easy-chair, with his gla.s.s of Schiedam schnapps beside him, was the virile Dutchman, hammering in his breast-swelling story of danger and courage, of starvation and storm. I sighed for a dictaphone in which the original Dutch-English might be recorded for the delight of others.

Alex Simoneau came back after a night of the hospitality of M. Lontane, and soon was joyous again, telling his wondrous epic of the main to the beach-combers in the parc de Bougainville or in the Paris saloon, where the brown and white toilers of land and sea make merry.

"A man that goes to sea is a fool," he said, with a bang of his fist on the table that made the schnapps dance in its heavy bottle. "My people in Ma.s.sachusetts are all right, and like a crazy man I will go to sea when I could work in a mill or on a farm. They must think I'm dead by now."

Alex was corroborative of all that Steve said, but I could not pin him down to hours or days. He was too exalted by his present happy fate--penniless, jobless, family in mourning, but healthy, safe, and full-stomached, not to omit an ebullience of spirits incited by the continuing wonder of each new listener and the praise for his deeds and by the conviviality of his admirers.

Alex was sure of one point, and that was that the El Dorado was overloaded.

"Dose shkvarehet shkippers vould dake a cheese-box to sea mit a cargo of le't," commented Steve. "All dey care for is de havin' de yob. De owner he don't care if de vessel sink mit de insurance."

When Alex had shuffled out of the cottage, I gave the Dutchman the course of his narrative again.

"You were safe on Easter Island, and ill from stuffing yourself with fresh mutton," I prompted, "And now what?"

Steve spat over the rail.

"Ram, lam', sheep, und muddon for a hundred und fife days. Dere vas noding odder. Dot's a kveer place, dot Easter Island, mit shtone gotts lyin' round und det fulcanoes, und noding good to eat. Ve liffed in a house de English manager gif us. Dere's a Chile meat gompany owns de island, und grows sheep. Aboud a gouple of hundred kanakas chase de sheep. Ve vas dreaded vell mit de vimmen makin' luff und the kanakas glad mit it. Dere vas noding else to do. De manager he say no s.h.i.+p come for six months, und he vanted us to blant bodadoes, und ve had no tobacco. He say de bodadoes get ripe in eight months, und I d.i.n.k if I shtay dere eight months I go grazy. Ve vas ragged, und efery day ve go und look for a vessel. Ve gould see dem a long vay ouid, und ve made signals und big fires, but no s.h.i.+p efer shtopped. De shkipper made a kvarrel mit de mates, und de old man he say he go away in de boat, und he bick Alex und me because ve was de bestest sailormen. Ve vas dere nearly four months ven ve shtart ouid. De oder men dey vas sore, but dey vanted de old man to bromise to gif dem big money, und ve go for noding. Ve fix oop de boat und ve kvit."

Steve went on to describe how they fixed up the boat for the voyage by making guards of canvas about the sides, and an awning which they could raise and lower. They took a ten-gallon steel oil-drum and made a stove out of it. They cut it in two at the middle and kept the bottom half. They then made a place for holding a pot, with pieces of sc.r.a.p-iron fixed to the side of the drum, so that they could make a fire under the pot without setting fire to the boat. Then the captain set them to learning to make fire by rubbing sticks, and after many days they learned it. The manager had a steer killed, and they jerked the meat and loaded up their boat beside with sweet potatoes, taro, white potatoes, five dozen eggs, and twenty gallons of water in their tank, with twenty-five more in a barrel.

Then bidding good-by to everybody who gathered to see them off, they steered for Pitcairn Island. They soon found that the prevailing wind would not permit them to make that course, and so they laid for Mangareva in 23 south and 134 west, sixteen hundred miles distant. They had to go from 28 south and 110 west, 5 of lat.i.tude and 24 of longitude. Again they were at the mercy of the sea, but now they had only three men in the boat, and had enough food for many days, rough as it was. In the lat.i.tude of Pitcairn, the island so famous because to it fled the mutineers of the Bounty, they all but perished. For two days a severe storm nearly overwhelmed them. The boat was more buoyant, and with the sea-anchor trailing, they came through the trial without injury. Steve said the lightning was "yoost like a leedle bid of h.e.l.l." It circled them about, hissed in the water, and finally struck their mast repeatedly, so that the wise captain took it down. The entire heavens were a ma.s.s of coruscating electricity, and they could feel the air alive with it. They were shocked by the very atmosphere, said Steve, and feared for their lives every moment. The sea piled up, the wind blew a gale, and death was close at hand. They wished they had not left Easter Island, and envied those who had remained there.

But they rode it out, with their pile of blankets a-trail, and with helm and oars alert to keep the boat afloat.

The gale amended after several days, and on the sixteenth day from their departure they reached Mangareva. That island is in the Gambier group, and a number of Europeans live there. The castaways were received generously, and were informed that a schooner was expected in a fortnight, which might carry them to some port on their way home. But the old man said they must push on. He had to report to his owners the loss of the El Dorado; he had to see his family. They had come twenty-six hundred miles since deserting the schooner, and the thousand miles more to Tahiti was not a serious undertaking. He persuaded Steve and Alex to his manner of thinking, and with the boat stocked with provisions they took the wave again, after a couple of days at Mangareva.

Now the bad weather was over. The sea was comparatively smooth, and the breeze favorable. But fate still had frowns for them, as if to keep them in terror. Sharks and swordfish, as though resenting the intrusion of their tiny craft in waters where boats were seldom seen, attacked them furiously. Five times a giant shark launched himself at their boat, head on, and drove them frantic with his menace of sinking them. They were so filled with this dread that they fastened a marlinespike in the spar, and despite probability of provoking the shark to more desperate onslaughts, maneuvered so that they were able to kill him with a blow.

The next day a swordfish of alarming size played about them, approaching and retreating, eying them and acting in such a manner that they felt sure he was challenging the boat as a strange fish whose might he disputed. One thrust of his bony weapon, and they might be robbed of their chance for life. They shouted and banged on the gunwales, and escaped.

Steve hurried through this part of his diary. So near to safety then, he had had not much thought for a record. There was little more to tell, for after the lightning, the sharks, and the swordfish, they had had no unusual experiences. They had made the voyage of nearly four thousand miles from the pit of water in which they had left the El Dorado, and were glad that they had not stayed behind on Easter Island. Steve had only good words for the skipper's skill as a seaman, but now that they were there, he would like to be a.s.sured of his wages. The captain said he did not know what the owners would do about paying Steve for the time since the El Dorado sank. He was sure she had gone down immediately, for, he said, he would not have left his s.h.i.+p had he not been certain she could not stay on the surface. He contrasted his arrival in Papeete with his coming years before in the brig Lurline, when he brought the first phonograph to the South Seas. Crowds had flocked to the quay to hear it, and it was taken in a carriage all about the island.

The superb courage of these men, their marvelous seamans.h.i.+p, and their survival of all the perils of their thousands of miles' voyage were not lessened in interest or admiration by their personality. But one realized daily, as one saw them chewing their quids, devouring rudely the courses served by Lovaina, or talking childishly of their future, that heroes are the creatures of opportunity. It is true Steve and Alex were picked of all the crew for their sea knowledge and experience, their nerve and willingness, by the st.u.r.dy captain, and that he, too, was a man big in the primitive qualities, a viking, a companion for a Columbus; but--they were peculiarly of their sept; types molded by the wind-swept s.p.a.ces of the vasty deep, chiseled by the stress of storm and calm, of burning, gla.s.sy oceans, and the chilling, killing berg; men set apart from all the creeping children of the solid earth, and trained to seize the winds from heaven for their wings, to meet with grim contempt the embattled powers of sky and wave, and then, alas! on land to become the puny sport of merchant, crimp, and money-changer, and rum and trull.

Goeltz, Lying Bill, Llewellyn, and McHenry sat in the Cercle Bougainville with eager looks as I read them the diary of Steve Drinkwater. The seamen held opinions of the failure of Captain Benson's seamans.h.i.+p at certain points, and all knew the waters through which he had come.

"Many of the people of Mangareva came from Easter Island," said Lying Bill. "There was a French missionary brought a gang of them there. 'E was Pere Roussel, and 'e ran away with 'em because Llewellyn's b.l.o.o.d.y crowd 'ere tried to steal 'em and sell 'em. They lived at Mangareva with 'im till he died a few years ago, and they never went back."

Llewellyn lifted his dour eyes. There was never such a dule countenance as his, dark naturally with his Welsh and Tahitian blood, and shaded by the gloom of his soul. He looked regretfully at Captain Pincher.

"You are only repeating the untruthful a.s.sertion of that clergyman,"

he said accusingly. "He put it in a pamphlet in French. My people have had to do with Easter Island for forty years. I lived there several years and, as you know, I made that island what it is now, a cattle and sheep ranch. It is the strangest place, with the strangest history in the world. If we knew who settled it originally and carved those stone G.o.ds the Dutch sailor spoke of, we would know more about the human race and its wanderings.

"The Peruvians murdered and stole the Easter Islanders. Just before we took hold there, a gang of blackbirders from Peru went there and killed and took away many hundreds of them. They sold them to the guano diggings in the Chincha Islands. Only those escaped death or capture who hid in the dark caverns. Nearly all those taken away died soon. We then made contracts with some of those left, and took them to Tahiti to work. It is true they died, too, most of them, but some you can find where McHenry lives half a mile from here at Patutoa. We sold off the stock to Chileans, and that country owns the island now.

"I think the island had a superior race once. There are immense platforms of stone, like the paepaes of the Marquesas, only bigger, and the stones are all fitted together without cement. They built them on promontories facing the sea. Some are three hundred feet long, and the walls thirty feet high. On these platforms there were huge stone G.o.ds that have been thrown down; some were thirty-seven feet high, and they had redstone crowns, ten feet in diameter. There were stone houses one hundred feet long, with walls five feet thick. How they moved the stones no one knows, for, of course, these people there now were not the builders. Some race of whom they knew nothing was there before them.

"They are one of the greatest mysteries in the world. Easter is the queerest of all the Maori islands. They had nothing like the other Maoris had in any of these islands, but they had plenty of stone, their lances were tipped with obsidian, and they were terrible fighters among themselves. They had no trees, and so no canoes; and they depended on driftwood and the hibiscus for weapons. They are all done for now."

Captain Benson was still busied with his log when the steams.h.i.+p from New Zealand arrived to take the s.h.i.+pwrecked men away. The El Dorado's boat was stowed carefully on the deck of the liner. I saw the skipper watching it as the deck-hands put chocks under it and made it fast against the rolling of the s.h.i.+p. That boat deserved well of him, for its stanchness had stood between him and the maws of the sharks many days and nights.

I bade him and the two seamen good-by on the wharf. The old man was full of his plan to exhibit the boat in a museum and of selling his account of his adventures to a magazine.

The crew left on Easter Island were rescued sooner than they had expected. A British tramp, the Knight of the Garter, put into Easter Island for emergency repairs, having broken down. The castaways left with her for Sydney, Australia, and from there reached San Francis...o...b.. the steams.h.i.+p Ventura, ten months after they had sailed away on the El Dorado. That schooner was never sighted again.

Chapter XI

I move to the Annexe--Description of building--The baroness and her baby--Evoa and poia--The corals of the lagoon--The Chinese shrine--The Tahitian sky.

Lovaina suggested, since I liked to be about the lagoon, that I move to the Annexe, a rooming-house she owned and conducted as an adjunct to the Tiare. I moved there, and regretted that I had stayed so long in the animal-yard. And yet I should have missed knowing Lovaina intimately, the hour-to-hour incidents of her curious menage, the close contact with the girls and the guests, the El Dorado heroes, the Dummy, and others.

The Annexe fronted the lagoon. It was a two-story building, with broad verandas in front and rear, and stood back a few feet from the Broom Road. It had a very large garden behind, with tall cocoanut trees, and the finest rose-bushes in Tahiti. Vava, the Dummy, put all the sweepings from his stable on the flower beds, and Lovaina cut the roses for the tables at the Tiare Hotel and for presents to friends and prosperous tourists. Vava was often about the garden, and drove Lovaina to and fro in her old chaise.

When he brought me and my belongings from the Tiare, Lovaina came with us. She signed to him to go to the glacerie, the ice- and soda-water factory, to buy ice for the hotel. The Dummy was intensely jealous of new-comers whom Lovaina liked. He left on foot, but merely took a walk, and, returning, answered her question by opening his hands and shaking his head, conveying perfectly the statement that the glacerie had refused Lovaina credit because of her debt to it of two hundred francs, and that cash was demanded. He intimated that the proprietor had ridiculed her.

"That dam' lie," said Lovaina to him and to me,--she always supplemented her gestures to him with words,--and she made a sign that she had paid the bill. He uttered a choking sound of anger, accompanied by a dreadful grimace, and after a little while came back with a large piece of ice, which he placed in the carriage. Lovaina told him to break off a lump for my room. He became indignant, and in pantomime vividly described the suffering of guests at the Tiare with the ice exhausted, and Lovaina's plight if she could sell no more drinks.

Lovaina persisted, and when I went to take the ice myself, he struck me with his horsewhip. Temanu, who had come with Lovaina, rushed out shrieking, and the Dummy, seeing his advantage, began to threaten all who came at the noise. Afa, a half-white, who lives in a cottage in the garden, and who alone could control him, slapped his face. The wretched mute sat down and wept bitterly until Lovaina rubbed his back, and informed him that he was again in her good graces. I, too, smiled upon him, and he became a happy child for a moment.

The Annexe was decaying fast. In the great storm of 1906 it was partly blown down, and was poorly restored. It was the prey of rat and insect, dusty, neglected, but endearing. It had had a season of glory. It was built for the first modern administration office of the French Government, over sixty years before, and was painted white with blue tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs. In its bare and dusty entrance-hall hung two steel engravings ent.i.tled, "The Beginning of the Civil War in the United States" and "The End of the Civil War in the United States." The former showed Freedom in the center; Justice with a sword and balance; the Stars and Stripes being torn from a liberty-tree, with a snake winding about it; an aged man labeled Buchanan asleep on a big book; and a gentleman named Floyd counting a bag of money; on the other side Abraham Lincoln exhorted a white-haired general who commanded a file of soldiers, and some rich-looking men were throwing money on the floor.

The other picture was indeed florid. It represented three ladies, Freedom, Justice, and Mercy, disputing the center, slaves being unshackled, the army of victory led by Grant claiming honors, Lee handing over a sword, an ugly fellow toting off a bag of gold (graft?) and a gang of conspirators egging on the madman Booth to slay Lincoln. In both these engravings there were scores of supposed likenesses, but I could not identify them. They were published by Kimmel & Forster in New York in 1865, and had probably decorated Papeete walls for half a century. There were large, ramshackle chambers on the first floor, and an exquisite winding staircase, with a rosewood bal.u.s.trade, led to the second story, where I lived.

In this building all the pomp and circ.u.mstance of the Nations in Tahiti had been on parade, kings and queens of the island had pleaded and submitted, admirals and ensigns had whispered love to dusky vahines, and the petty wars of Oceanic had been planned between waltzes and wines. Here Loti put his arms about his first Tahitian sweetheart, and practised that vocabulary of love he used so well in "Rarahu,"

"Madame Chrysantheme," and his other studies of the exotic woman. A hundred noted men, soldiers, and sailors, scientists and dilettanti, governors and writers, had walked or worked in those tumbling rooms.

Lovaina had owned the building many years, buying it from the thrifty French Government.

My apartment was of two rooms, and my section of the balcony was cut off by a door, giving privacy unusual in Tahiti. The coloring of the wall was rich in hue.

Any color, so it's red, said a satirist, who might have been characterizing my rooms. Turkey-red muslin with a large, white diamond figure was pasted on the plaster walls and hung in the doorways.

"It very bes' the baroness could do in T'ytee," explained Lovaina. "She must be bright all about, and she buy and fix rooms. She have whole top floor Annexe, and spen' money like gentleman, two or three thousand dollar' every month. I wish you know her. She talk beautiful', and never one word s.m.u.t. Hones', true. Johnny, my son, read 'Three Weeks'

that time, and he speak the baroness, 'You jus' like that woman in the book.' She have baby here and take with her to Paris. She want that baby jus' like 'Three Weeks.' Oh, but she live high! She have her own servants, get everything in market, bring peac.o.c.ks and pheasants and turkeys from America. How you think? Dead? No. She sen'