nighttime we slipped past them. But the next day, or in two days or three
days, the schooners would be coming back, hunting us toward the other end of
the lagoon. And so it went. We no longer counted nor remembered our dead.
True, we were many and they were few. But what could we do? I was in one of
the twenty canoes filled with men who were not afraid to die. We attacked the
smallest schooner. They shot us down in heaps. They threw dynamite into the
canoes, and when the dynamite gave out, they threw hot water down upon us. And
the rifles never ceased talking. And those whose canoes were smashed were shot
as they swam away. And the mate danced up and down upon the cabin top and
yelled, “Yah! Yah! Yah!’
“Every house on every smallest island was burned. Not a pig nor a fowl was
left alive. Our wells were defiled with the bodies of the slain, or else
heaped high with coral rock. We were twenty-five thousand on Oolong before the
three schooners came. Today we are five thousand. After the schooners left, we
were but three thousand, as you shall see.
“At last the three schooners grew tired of chasing us back and forth. So they
went, the three of them, to Nihi, in the northeast. And then they drove us
steadily to the west. Their nine boats were in the water as well. They beat up
every island as they moved along. They drove us, drove us, drove us day by
day. And every night the three schooners and the nine boats made a chain of
watchfulness that stretched across the lagoon from rim to rim, so that we
could not escape back.
“They could not drive us forever that way, for the lagoon was only so large,
and at last all of us that yet lived were driven upon the last sand bank to
the west. Beyond lay the open sea. There were ten thousand of us, and we
covered the sand bank from the lagoon edge to the pounding surf on the other
side. No one could lie down. There was no room. We stood hip to hip and
shoulder to shoulder. Two days they kept us there, and the mate would climb up
in the rigging to mock us and yell, Yah! Yah! Yah!’ till we were well sorry
that we had ever harmed him or his schooner a month before. We had no food,
and we stood on our feet two days and nights. The little babies died, and the
old and weak died, and the wounded died. And worst of all, we had no water to
quench our thirst, and for two days the sun beat down on us, and there was no
shade. Many men and women waded out into the ocean and were drowned, the surf
casting their bodies back on the beach. And there came a pest of flies. Some
men swam to the sides of the schooners, but they were shot to the last one.
And we that lived were very sorry that in our pride we tried to take the
schooner with the three masts that came to fish for beche-de-mer.
“On the morning of the third day came the skippers of the three schooners and
that mate in a small boat. They carried rifles, all of them, and revolvers,
and they made talk. It was only that they were weary of killing us that they
had stopped, they told us. And we told them that we were sorry, that never
SOUTH SEA TALES
43
again would we harm a white man, and in token of our submission we poured sand
upon our heads. And all the women and children set up a great wailing for
water, so that for some time no man could make himself heard. Then we were
told our punishment. We must fill the three schooners with copra and
beche-de-mer. And we agreed, for we wanted water, and our hearts were broken,
and we knew that we were children at fighting when we fought with white men
who fight like hell. And when all the talk was finished, the mate stood up and
mocked us, and yelled, Yah! Yah! Yah!’ After that we paddled away in our
canoes and sought water.
“And for weeks we toiled at catching beche-de-mer and curing it, in gathering
the cocoanuts and turning them into copra. By day and night the smoke rose in
clouds from all the beaches of all the islands of Oolong as we paid the
penalty of our wrongdoing. For in those days of death it was burned clearly on
all our brains that it was very wrong to harm a white man.
“By and by, the schooners full of copra and beche-de-mer and our trees empty
of cocoanuts, the three skippers and that mate called us all together for a
big talk. And they said they were very glad that we had learned our lesson,
and we said for the ten-thousandth time that we were sorry and that we would
not do it again. Also, we poured sand upon our heads. Then the skippers said
that it was all very well, but just to show us that they did not forget us,
they would send a devil-devil that we would never forget and that we would
always remember any time we might feel like harming a white man. After that
the mate mocked us one more time and yelled, Yah! Yah! Yah!’ Then six of our
men, whom we thought long dead, were put ashore from one of the schooners, and
the schooners hoisted their sails and ran out through the passage for the
Solomons.
“The six men who were put ashore were the first to catch the devil-devil the
skippers sent back after us.”
“A great sickness came,” I interrupted, for I recognized the trick. The
schooner had had measles on board, and the six prisoners had been deliberately
exposed to it.
“Yes, a great sickness,” Oti went on. “It was a powerful devil-devil. The
oldest man had never heard of the like. Those of our priests that yet lived we
killed because they could not overcome the devil-devil. The sickness spread.
I have said that there were ten thousand of us that stood hip to hip and
shoulder to shoulder on the sandbank. When the sickness left us, there were
three thousand yet alive. Also, having made all our cocoanuts into copra,
there was a famine.
“That fella trader,” Oti concluded, “he like ‘m that much dirt. He like ‘m
clam he die KAI-KAI (meat) he stop, stink ‘m any amount. He like ‘m one fella
dog, one sick fella dog plenty fleas stop along him. We no fright along that
fella trader. We fright because he white man. We savve plenty too much no good
kill white man. That one fella sick dog trader he plenty brother stop along
him, white men like ‘m you fight like hell. We no fright that damn trader.
Some time he made kanaka plenty cross along him and kanaka want ‘m kill m,
kanaka he think devil-devil and kanaka he hear that fella mate sing out, Yah!
Yah! Yah!’ and kanaka no kill m.”
SOUTH SEA TALES
44
Oti baited his hook with a piece of squid, which he tore with his teeth from
the live and squirming monster, and hook and bait sank in white flames to the
bottom.
“Shark walk about he finish,” he said. “I think we catch ‘m plenty fella
fish.”
His line jerked savagely. He pulled it in rapidly, hand under hand, and landed
a big gasping rock cod in the bottom of the canoe.
“Sun he come up, I make ‘m that dam fella trader one present big fella fish,”
said Oti.
THE HEATHEN
I met him first in a hurricane; and though we had gone through the hurricane
on the same schooner, it was not until the schooner had gone to pieces under
us that I first laid eyes on him. Without doubt I had seen him with the rest
of the kanaka crew on board, but I had not consciously been aware of his
existence, for the Petite Jeanne was rather overcrowded. In addition to her
eight or ten kanaka seamen, her white captain, mate, and supercargo, and her
six cabin passengers, she sailed from Rangiroa with something like eighty-five
deck passengers– Paumotans and Tahitians, men, women, and children each with
a trade box, to say nothing of sleeping mats, blankets, and clothes bundles.
The pearling season in the Paumotus was over, and all hands were returning to
Tahiti. The six of us cabin passengers were pearl buyers. Two were Americans,
one was Ah Choon (the whitest Chinese I have ever known), one was a German,
one was a Polish Jew, and I completed the half dozen.
It had been a prosperous season. Not one of us had cause for complaint, nor