South-Sea Idyls Part 9

"Why, wasn't I right-minded? I could tell a hawk from a hernshaw; and, speaking of hawks, where was that cursed owl?"

The captain concluded I was bettering, and put the physic into the locker, so as to give his whole attention to keeping right side up.

Well, this is how it happened, as I afterward learned: The Great Western suffered somewhat from the gale at Motu Hilo, though she was comparatively sheltered in that inner sea. Having repaired, and given me up as a deserter, she sailed for Tahiti. The first day out, in a light breeze, they all saw a man apparently wading up to his middle in the sea. The fellow hailed the Great Western, but as she could hardly stand up against the rapid current in so light a wind, the captain let her drift past the man in the sea, who suddenly disappeared. A consultation of officers followed. Evidently some one was cast away and ought to be looked after; resolved to beat up to the rock, big turtle, or whatever it might be that kept that fellow afloat, provided the wind freshened sufficiently; wind immediately freshened; Great Western put about and made for the spot where Hua Manu had been seen hailing the schooner. But when that schooner pa.s.sed he threw himself upon the sand beside me and gave up hoping at last, and was seen no more.

What did he then? I must have asked for drink. He gave it me from an artery in his wrist, severed by the finest teeth you ever saw. That's what saved me. On came the little schooner, beating up against the wind and tide, while I had my lips sealed to that fountain of life.

The skipper kept banging away with an old blunderbuss that had been left over in his bargains with the savages, and one of these explosions caught the ears of Hua. He tore my lips from his wrist, staggered to his feet, and found help close at hand. Too late they gathered us up out of the deep and strove to renew our strength. They transported us to the little cabin of the schooner, Hua Manu, myself, and that mincing owl, and swung off into the old course. Probably the Great Western never did better sailing since she came from the stocks than that hour or two of beating that brought her up to the shoal. She seemed to be emulating it in the home run, for we went bellowing through the sea in a stiff breeze and the usual flood-tide on deck.

I lived to tell the tale. I should think it mighty mean of me not to live after such a sacrifice. Hua Manu sank rapidly. I must have nearly drained his veins, but I don't believe he regretted it. The captain said when he was dying, his faithful eyes were fixed on me. Unconsciously I moved a little; he smiled, and the soul went out of him in that smile, perfectly satisfied. At that moment the owl fled from the cabin, pa.s.sed through the hatchway, and disappeared.

Hua Manu lay on the deck, stretched under a sail, while I heard this. I wondered if a whole cargo of pearls could make me indifferent to his loss. I wondered if there were many truer and braver than he in Christian lands. They call him a heathen. It _was_ heathenish to offer up his life vicariously. He might have taken mine so easily, and perhaps have breasted the waves back to his own people, and been feted and sung of as the hero he truly was.

Well, if he is a heathen, out of my heart I would make a parable, its rubric bright with his sacrificial blood, its theme this glowing text: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for a friend."

[Decoration]

THE LAST OF THE GREAT NAVIGATOR.

Think of a sea and sky of such even and utter blueness, that any visible horizon is out of the question. In the midst of this pellucid sphere the smallest of propellers trailing two plumes of sea-foam, like the tail-feathers of a bird of paradise, and over it all a league of floating c.r.a.pe,--for so seem the heavy folds of smoke that hang above us.

Thus we pa.s.s out of our long hours of idleness in that grove of eight thousand cocoa-palms by the sea-sh.o.r.e,--the artist and I seeking to renew our _dolce far niente_ in some new forest of palms by any sh.o.r.e whatever. Enough that it is sea-washed, and hath a voice and an eternal song.

Now turn to the stone-quarry darkened with the groups of the few faithful friends and many islanders. They are so ready to kill time in the simplest manner; why not in staring our awkward little steamer out of sight?

One glimpse of the white handkerchiefs, fluttering like a low flight of doves, and then with all the sublime resignation of the confessed lounger, we await the approach of twilight and the later hours that shall presently pa.s.s silver-footed over this tropic sea.

Four, P. M., and the roar of the reef lost to us voyagers. The sun an hour high. The steams of dinner appealing to us through the yawning hatches,--everything yawning in this lat.i.tude, animate and inanimate,--and the world as hot as Tophet. We lie upon our mattresses, brought out of the foul cabin into the sweet air, and pa.s.s the night half intoxicated with romance and cigarettes. The natives cover the deck of our little craft in lazy and laughing flocks. Some of them regard us tenderly; they are apt to love at sight, though Heaven knows there is little in our untrimmed exteriors to attract any one under the stars.

We hear, now and then, the sharp click of flint and steel, and after it see the flame, and close to the flame a dark face, grotesque it may be, like an antique water-spout with dust in its jaws. But some are beautiful, with glorious eyes that s.h.i.+ne wonderfully in the excitement of lighting the pipe anew.

Voices arise at intervals from among the groups of younger voyagers. We hear the songs of our own land worded in oddly and rather prettily broken English. "Annie Laurie," "When the Cruel War is over," and other equally ambitious and proportionately popular ballads ring in good time and tune from the lips of the young bloods, but the girls seldom join to any advantage. How strange it all seems, and how we listen!

With the first and deepest purple of the dawn, the dim outlines of Molokai arise before us. It is an island of cliffs and canons, much haunted of the King, but usually out of the tourist's guide-book.

It is hinted one may turn back this modern page of island civilization, and with it the half-christianized and wholly bewildered natures of the uncomprehending natives, and here find all of the old superst.i.tions in their original significance, the temples, and the shark-G.o.d, and the _hula-hula_ girls, beside whose weird and maddening undulations your _can-can_ dancers are mere jumping-jacks.

Listen for faint music of the wandering minstrels! No, we are too far out from sh.o.r.e: then it is the wrong end of the day for such festivals.

A brief siesta under the opening eyelids of the morn, and at sunrise we dip our colors abreast charming little Lahaina, drowsy and indolent, with its two or three long, long avenues overhung with a green roof of leaves, and its odd summer-houses and hammocks pitched close upon the white edge of the sh.o.r.e.

We wander up and down these shady paths an hour or two, eat of the fruits, luscious and plentiful, and drink of its liquors, vile and fortunately scarce, and get us hats plaited of the coa.r.s.est straw and of unbounded rim, making ourselves still more hideous, if indeed we have not already reached the acme of the unpicturesque.

Now for hours and hours we hug the sh.o.r.e, slowly progressing under the insufficient shadow of the palms, getting now and then glimpses of valleys folded inland, said to be lovely and mystical. Then there are mites of villages always half-grown and half-starved looking, and always close to the sea. These islanders are amphibious. The little bronze babies float like corks before they can walk half the length of a bamboo-mat.

Another night at sea, in the rough channel this time, and less enjoyable for the rather stiff breeze on our quarter, and some very sour-looking clouds overhead. All well by six, however, when we hear the Angelus rung from the low tower of a long coral church in another sea-wedded hamlet.

Think of the great barn-like churches, once too small for the throngs that gathered about them, now full of echoes, and whose doors, if they still hang to their hinges, will soon swing only to the curious winds!

In and out by this strange land, marking all its curvatures with the fidelity of those shadow lines in the atlas, and so lingering on till the evening of the second day, when, just at sunset, we turn suddenly into the bay that saw the last of Captain Cook, and here swing at anchor in eight fathoms of liquid crystal over a floor of s.h.i.+ning white coral, and clouds of waving sea-moss. From the deck behold the amphitheatre wherein was enacted the tragedy of "The Great Navigator, or the Vulnerable G.o.d." The story is brief and has its moral.

The approach of Captain Cook was mystical. For generations the islanders had been looking with calm eyes of faith for the promised return of a certain G.o.d. Where should they look but to the sea, whence came all mysteries and whither retreated the being they called divine?

So the white wings of the Resolution swept down upon the life-long quietude of Hawaii like a messenger from heaven, and the signal gun sent the first echoes to the startled mountains of the little kingdom.

They received this Jupiter, who carried his thunders with him and kindled fires in his mouth. He was the first smoker they had seen, though they are now his most devout apostles. Showing him all due reverence, he failed to regard their customs and traditions, which was surely unG.o.dlike, and it rather weakened the faith of their sages.

A plot was devised to test the divinity of the presuming captain.

While engaged in conversation, one of the chiefs was to rush at Cook with a weapon; should he cry out or attempt to run, he was no G.o.d, for the G.o.ds are fearless; and if he was no G.o.d, he deserved death for his deception. But if a G.o.d, no harm could come of it, for the G.o.ds are immortal.

So they argued, and completed their plans. It came to pa.s.s in the consummation of them that Cook did run, and thereupon received a stab in the back. Being close by the sh.o.r.e he fell face downward in the water and died a half-b.l.o.o.d.y, half-watery, and wholly inglorious death. His companions escaped to the s.h.i.+p and peppered the villages by the harbor, till the inhabitants, half frantic, were driven into the hills.

Then they put to sea, leaving the body of their commander in the hands of the enemy, and with flag at half-mast were blown sullenly back to England, there to inaugurate the season of poems, dirges, and pageants in honor of the Great Navigator.

His bones were stripped of flesh, afterwards bound with _kapa_, the native cloth, and laid in one of the hundred natural cells that perforate the cliff in front of us, and under whose shadow we now float.

Which of the hundred is the one so honored is quite uncertain. What does it matter, so long as the whole mountain is a catacomb of kings? No commoners are buried there. It was a kind and worthy impulse that could still venerate so far the mummy of an idol of such palpable clay as his.

Many of these singular caverns are almost inaccessible. One must climb down by ropes from the cliff above. Rude bars of wood are laid across the mouths of some of them. It is the old _tabu_ never yet broken. But a few years back it was braving death to attempt to remove them.

Cook's flesh was most likely burned. It was then a custom. But his heart was left untouched of the flames of this sacrifice. What a salamander the heart is that can withstand the fires of a judgment!

The story of this heart is the one shocking page in this history: some children discovered it afterward, and, thinking it the offal of an animal, devoured it. Whoever affirms that the "Sandwich-Islanders eat each other," has at least this ground for his affirmation. Natives of the South Sea Islands have been driven as far north as this in their frail canoes. They were cannibals, and no doubt were hungry, and may have eaten in their fas.h.i.+on, but it is said to have been an acquired taste, and was not at all popular in this region. Dramatic justice required some tragic sort of revenge, and this was surely equal to the emergency.

Our advance guard, in the shape of a month-earlier tourist, gave us the notes for doing this historical nook in the Pacific. A turned-down page, it is perhaps a little too dog-eared to be read over again, but we all like to compare notes. So we noted the items of the advance guard, and they read in this fas.h.i.+on:--

OBJECTS OF INTEREST RELATING TO CAPTAIN COOK.

Item I. The tree where Cook was struck.

" II. The rock where Cook fell.

" III. The altar on the hill-top.

" IV. The riven palms.

" V. The sole survivor,--the boy that ran.

" VI. A specimen sepulchre in the cliff.

Until dark the native children have been playing about us in the sea, diving for very smooth "rials," and looking much as frogs must look to wandering lilliputians. The artist cares less for these wild and graceful creatures than one would suppose, for he confesses them equal in physical beauty to the Italian models. All sentiment seemed to have been dragged out of him by much travel. At night we sit together on the threshold of our gra.s.s house, and not twenty feet from the rock--under water only at high tide--where Cook died. We sit talking far into the night, with the impressive silence broken only by the plash of the sea at our very door.

By and by the moon looks down upon us from the sepulchre of the kings.

We are half clad, having adopted the native costume as the twilight deepened and our modesty permitted. The heat is still excessive. All this low land was made to G.o.d's order some few centuries ago. We wonder if He ever changes his mind; this came down red-hot from the hills yonder, and cooled at high-water mark. It holds the heat like an oven-brick, and we find it almost impossible to walk upon it at noontime, even our sole-leather barely preserving our feet from its blistering surface. The natives manage to hop over it now and then; they are about half leather, anyhow, and the other half appet.i.te.

We come first upon No. II. in the list of historic haunts.

Let us pa.s.s down to the rock, and cool ourselves in the damp moss that drapes it. It is almost as large as a dinner-table, and as level. You can wade all around it, count a hundred little crabs running up and down over the top of it. So much for one object of interest, and the artist draws his pencil through it. At ten, P. M., we are still chatting, and have added a hissing pot of coffee over some live coals to our housekeeping. Now down a little pathway at our right comes a native woman, with a plump and tough sort of pillow under each arm. These she implores us to receive and be comfortable. We refuse to be comforted in this fas.h.i.+on, we despise luxuries, and in true cosmopolitan independence hang our heads over our new saddle-trees, and sleep heavily in an atmosphere rank with the odor of fresh leather; but not till we have seen our humane visitor part of the way home. Back by the steep and winding path we three pa.s.s in silence. She pauses a moment in the moonlight at what seems a hitching-post cased in copper. It is as high as our hip, and has some rude lettering apparently scratched with a nail upon it. We decipher with some difficulty this legend:--

+ Near this spot fell ~CAPTAIN JAMES COOK, R. N.,~ the Renowned Circ.u.mnavigator, who discovered these islands, A. D. 1778.