A Modern Buccaneer Part 14

I could not have eaten a fiftieth part of what was offered, but as declining would have been regarded as a rudeness, I begged them to take it to the chief's house for me.

On my return a singular and characteristic scene presented itself. I could not help smiling as I thought what a shock it would have given many of my steady-going friends and relatives in Sydney, most of whom, if untravelled, resemble nothing so much as the inhabitants of English country towns, and are equally apt to be displeased at any departure from the British standard of manners and morals.

The Captain was seated on a mat in the great council-house of the tribe, talking business with a white-headed warrior, whom he introduced as the king of the Mortlock group. The women had decorated the Captain's neck and broad breast with wreaths--two girls were seated a little farther off, binding into his hat the tail-feathers of the tropic bird. He seemed in a merry mood, and whispering something to the old man, pointed to me.

In a moment a dozen young girls bounded up, and with laughing eyes and lips, commenced to circle around me in a measure, the native name of which means "a dance for a husband."

They formed a pretty enough picture, with their waving arms and flowing flower-crowned hair. I plead guilty to applauding vociferously, and rewarding them with a quant.i.ty of the small red beads which the Mortlock girls sew into their head-dresses.

Thus, with but slight variations, our life flowed, if monotonously, pleasantly, even luxuriously on--as we sailed to and fro amid these charmed isles, from Namoluk to Truk, thence to the wondrously beautiful Royalist Islands, inhabited by a wild vigorous race. They also made much of us and gave dances and games in honour of our visit.

And still we sailed and sailed. Days pa.s.sed, and weeks. Still glided we over the summer sea--still gazed we at a cloudless sky--still felt we the languorous, sighing breath of the soft South Pacific winds.

Day by day the same flock of predatory frigate birds skimmed and swept o'er the glittering ocean plain, while high overhead the wandering tropic birds hung motionless, with their scarlet tail-feathers floating like lance pennons in relief against the bright blue heavens.

Now, the Captain had all a true seaman's dislike to seeing a sea-bird shot. One day, off Ocean Island, Jansen, the mate, came out of the cabin with a long, smooth bore, which he proceeded to load with buck shot, glancing the while at two graceful tropic birds, which, with snow-white wings outspread, were poised in air directly over the deck, apparently looking down with wondering eye at the scene below.

"What are you going to shoot, Jansen?" inquired the Captain, in a mild voice.

The mate pointed to the birds, and remarked that his girl wanted the feathers for a head-dress. He was bringing the gun to his shoulder, when a quick "Put down that musket," nearly caused him to drop it.

"Jansen!" said the Captain, "please to remember this,--never let me see you or any other man shoot a sea-bird from the deck of this s.h.i.+p. Your girl can live without the feathers, I presume, and what is more to the point, I _forbid_ you to do it."

The mate growled something in an undertone, and was turning away to his cabin, when Hayston sprang upon him like a panther, and seizing him by the throat, held him before him.

"By ----! Jansen," he said, "don't tempt me too far. I told you as civilly as possible not to shoot the birds--yet you turn away and mutter mutinously before my men. Listen to me! though you are no seaman, and a thorough 'soldier,' I treat you well for peace' sake. But once give me a sidelook, and as sure as G.o.d made me, I'll trice you up to the mainmast, and let a n.i.g.g.e.r flog you."

He released his hold of the mate's throat after this warning. The cowed bully staggered off towards his cabin. After which the Captain's mood changed with customary suddenness; he came aft, and began a game with Kitty and her brother--apparently having forgotten the very existence of Jansen.

The calm, bright weather still prevailed--the light air hardly filling our sails--the current doing all the work. When one afternoon, taking a look from aloft, I descried the loom of Kusaie or Strong's Island, on the farthest horizon.

"Land ho!" The watch below, just turning out, take up the cry as it goes from mouth to mouth on deck. Some of them gaze longingly, making calculations as to the amount of liberty they are likely to get, as well as the work that lies before them.

Early next morning we had drifted twenty miles nearer, whereupon the Captain decided to run round to the weather side of the island first, and interview the king, before going to Utw or South harbour, where we proposed to do the most of our trading.

Suddenly, after breakfast, a serious disturbance arose between the Chinese carpenter and Bill Hicks, the fierce Fijian half-caste, who was second mate. The carpenter's provisional spouse was a handsome young woman from the Gilbert group, who rejoiced in the name of Ni-a-bon (Shades of Night). Of her, the carpenter, a tall, powerfully-built Chinaman, who had sailed for years with Hayston in the China Seas, was intensely jealous. So cunning, however, was she in evading suspicion, that though every one on board was aware of the state of affairs, her lawful protector suspected nothing.

However, on this particular morning, Nellie, the Hope Island girl, being reproved by the second mate for throwing pine apple and banana peel into the s.h.i.+p's dingey, flew into a violent rage, and told the carpenter that the second mate was stealing Ni-a-bon--and, moreover, had persuaded her to put something into his, the carpenter's, food, to make him "go mat,"

_i.e._ sicken and die.

Seizing an axe, the Chinaman sallied on deck, and commenced to exact satisfaction by aiming a blow at Ni-a-bon, who was playing cards with the other girls. The girl Mila averted the blow, and the whole pack fled shrieking to the Captain, who at once called upon Bill for explanation.

He did not deny the impeachment, and offered to fight the carpenter for Ni-a-bon. The Captain decided this to be eminently right and proper; but thought the carpenter was hardly a match for the mate with fists. Bill promptly suggested knives. This seemed to choke off the carpenter, as, amid howls from the women, he stepped back into his cabin, only to reappear in the doorway with a rifle, and to send a bullet at the mate's head, which missed him.

"At him, Billy," cried the Captain, "give him a good licking--but _don't hurt his arms_; there's a lot of work to be done to the bulwarks when we get the anchor down again."

The second mate at once seized the carpenter, and dragging him out of his cabin, in a few minutes had so knocked his features about that he was hardly recognisable.

Ni-a-bon was then called up before the Captain and questioned as to her preference, when, with many smiles and twisting about of her hands, she confessed to an ardent attachment to the herculean Bill.

The Captain told Bill that he would have to pay the carpenter for damages, which he a.s.sessed at ten dollars, the amount being given, not for personal injury, but for the loss sustained by his annexation of the fascinating Ni-a-bon.

At sunset we once more were off Chabral harbour, where we ran in and anch.o.r.ed--_within fifty yards_ of the king's house.

CHAPTER X

MURDER AND s.h.i.+PWRECK

We found the island in a state of excitement. Two whales.h.i.+ps had arrived, bringing half a dozen white men, and who had a retinue of nearly a hundred natives from Ocean and Pleasant Islands. The white men had to leave Pleasant Island on account of a general engagement which had taken place; had fled to the s.h.i.+ps for safety, taking with them their native wives, families, and adherents.

The other men were from Ocean Island, a famine having set in from drought in that lovely isle. They had also taken pa.s.sage with their native following, to seek a more temporarily favoured spot. The fertility of Kusaie (Strong's Island) had decided them to remain.

Strange characters, in truth, were these same traders, now all quartered at Chabral harbour! They were not without means, and so far had conducted themselves decently. But their retinue of savage warriors had struck terror into the hearts of the milder natives of Kusaie.

Let me draw from the life one of the patriarchs of the movement, on the occasion of his embarkation.

Ocean Island, lat. 0 50 south, long. 168 east.

A fantastic, lonely, forbidding-looking spot. Circular in form, with rounded summit, and a cruel upheaved coral coast, split up into ravines running deep into the land. Here and there, on ledges overlooking the sea, are perched tiny villages, inhabited by as fierce and intractable a race of Malayo-Polynesians as ever lacerated each other's bodies with sharks'-tooth daggers, after the mad drunkenness produced by sour toddy.

Mister Robert Ridley, aged seventy, sitting on a case in his house, on the south-west point of Paanopa, as its people call Ocean Island, with a bottle of "square face" before him, from which he refreshes himself, without the intervention of a gla.s.s, is one of the few successful deserters from the convict army of New South Wales. At the present moment he is an ill-used man. For seven years he has been the boss white man of Paanopa, ever since he left the neighbouring Naura or Pleasant Island, after seeing his comrades fall in the ranks one by one, slain by bullet or the scarce less deadly drink demon. Now, solitary and saturnine, he has to bow to Fate and quit his equatorial cave of Adullam, because a mysterious Providence has afflicted his island with a drought.

From out the open door he sees the _Josephine_, of New Bedford, Captain Jos Long, awaiting the four whaleboats now on the little beach below his house, which are engaged in conveying on board his household goods and chattels, his wives and his children, with _their_ children, and a dusky retinue of blood-relations and retainers; for the drought had made food scarce. Blood had been shed over the owners.h.i.+p of certain cocoa-nut trees; and old Bob Ridley has decided to bid farewell to his island, and to make for Ponap in the Carolines. So the old man sits alone and awaits a call from the last boat. Perhaps he feels unusual emotion stirring him, as the faint murmur of voices ascends from the beach. He would be alone for awhile to conjure up strange memories of the past, or because the gin bottle is but half emptied.

"The _Josephine_, of New Bedford!" he mutters, as a grim smile pa.s.ses over his bronzed, sin-wrinkled countenance; "why, _t'other one_ was from New Bedford too. This one's larger--a six-boat s.h.i.+p--and carries a big afterguard. Still the job could be done agin. But--what's the good now!

If Joe, the Portuguese, was here with me I'd say it _could_ be done."

Another gulp at the "square face." "d.a.m.n it! I'm an old fool. There's too many of these here cussed blubber-hunting Yankees about now. Say we took the s.h.i.+p, we'd never get away with her. Please G.o.d, I'll go to Ponap and live like a d--d gentleman. There's some of the old crowd there now, and I a'n't so old yet."

And here, maybe, the old renegade falls a thinking afresh of "the other one" from New Bedford, that made this very island on the evening of the 3rd of December 1852.

Out nearly two years, and working up from the Line Islands towards Honolulu, the skipper had tried to make Pleasant Island, to get a boat-load of pigs for his crew, but light winds and strong currents had drifted him away, till, at dawn, he saw the rounded summits of Ocean Island pencilled faintly against the horizon, and stood away for it. "We can get a few boat-loads of pigs and 'punkins' there, anyhow," he said to the mate.

The mate had been there before, and didn't like going again. That was in 1850. Sixteen white men lived there then, ten of whom were runaway convicts from Sydney or Norfolk Island. He told his captain that they were part of a gang of twenty-seven who had at various times been landed from whalers at Pleasant Island in 1845. They had separated--some going away in the _Sallie_ whaler, and others finding their way to Ocean Island. Now, the _Sallie was never heard of again_, the mate remarked.

The captain of the _Inga_ looked grave, but he had set his heart upon the pigs and "punkins." So at dusk the brig hove to, close to the south-west point, and as no boats came off the skipper went ash.o.r.e.

There were nearly a thousand people on Ocean Island then, and he felt a trifle queer as the boat was rushed by the wild, long-haired crowd, and carried bodily on sh.o.r.e.