away from trouble when it started. And it was “Ware shoal!” when once Otoo
went into action. I shall never forget what he did to Bill King. It occurred
in German Samoa. Bill King was hailed the champion heavyweight of the American
Navy. He was a big brute of a man, a veritable gorilla, one of those
hard-hitting, rough-housing chaps, and clever with his fists as well. He
picked the quarrel, and he kicked Otoo twice and struck him once before Otoo
felt it to be necessary to fight. I don’t think it lasted four minutes, at the
end of which time Bill King was the unhappy possessor of four broken ribs, a
broken forearm, and a dislocated shoulder blade. Otoo knew nothing of
scientific boxing. He was merely a manhandler; and Bill King was something
like three months in recovering from the bit of manhandling he received that
afternoon on Apia beach.
But I am running ahead of my yarn. We shared the hatch cover between us. We
took turn and turn about, one lying flat on the cover and resting, while the
other, submerged to the neck, merely held on with his hands. For two days and
nights, spell and spell, on the cover and in the water, we drifted over the
ocean. Towards the last I was delirious most of the time; and there were
times, too, when I heard Otoo babbling and raving in his native tongue. Our
continuous immersion prevented us from dying of thirst, though the sea water
and the sunshine gave us the prettiest imaginable combination of salt pickle
and sunburn.
In the end, Otoo saved my life; for I came to lying on the beach twenty feet
from the water, sheltered from the sun by a couple of cocoanut leaves. No one
but Otoo could have dragged me there and stuck up the leaves for shade. He was
lying beside me. I went off again; and the next time I came round, it was cool
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50
and starry night, and Otoo was pressing a drinking cocoanut to my lips.
We were the sole survivors of the Petite Jeanne. Captain Oudouse must have
succumbed to exhaustion, for several days later his hatch cover drifted ashore
without him. Otoo and I lived with the natives of the atoll for a week, when
we were rescued by the French cruiser and taken to Tahiti. In the meantime,
however, we had performed the ceremony of exchanging names. In the South Seas
such a ceremony binds two men closer together than blood brothership. The
initiative had been mine; and Otoo was rapturously delighted when I suggested
it.
“It is well,” he said, in Tahitian. “For we have been mates together for two
days on the lips of Death.”
“But death stuttered,” I smiled.
“It was a brave deed you did, master,” he replied, “and Death was not vile
enough to speak.”
“Why do you ‘master’ me?” I demanded, with a show of hurt feelings. “We have
exchanged names. To you I am Otoo. To me you are Charley. And between you and
me, forever and forever, you shall be Charley, and I shall be Otoo. It is the
way of the custom. And when we die, if it does happen that we live again
somewhere beyond the stars and the sky, still shall you be Charley to me, and
I Otoo to you.”
“Yes, master,” he answered, his eyes luminous and soft with joy.
“There you go!” I cried indignantly.
“What does it matter what my lips utter?” he argued. “They are only my lips.
But I shall think Otoo always. Whenever I think of myself, I shall think of
you. Whenever men call me by name, I shall think of you. And beyond the sky
and beyond the stars, always and forever, you shall be Otoo to me. Is it well,
master?”
I hid my smile, and answered that it was well.
We parted at Papeete. I remained ashore to recuperate; and he went on in a
cutter to his own island, Bora Bora. Six weeks later he was back. I was
surprised, for he had told me of his wife, and said that he was returning to
her, and would give over sailing on far voyages.
“Where do you go, master?” he asked, after our first greetings.
I shrugged my shoulders. It was a hard question.
“All the world,” was my answer–“all the world, all the sea, and all the
islands that are in the sea.”
“I will go with you,” he said simply. “My wife is dead.”
I never had a brother; but from what I have seen of other men’s brothers, I
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51
doubt if any man ever had a brother that was to him what Otoo was to me. He
was brother and father and mother as well. And this I know: I lived a
straighter and better man because of Otoo. I cared little for other men, but I
had to live straight in Otoo’s eyes. Because of him I dared not tarnish
myself. He made me his ideal, compounding me, I fear, chiefly out of his own
love and worship and there were times when I stood close to the steep pitch of
hell, and would have taken the plunge had not the thought of Otoo restrained
me. His pride in me entered into me, until it became one of the major rules in
my personal code to do nothing that would diminish that pride of his.
Naturally, I did not learn right away what his feelings were toward me. He
never criticized, never censured; and slowly the exalted place I held in his
eyes dawned upon me, and slowly I grew to comprehend the hurt I could inflict
upon him by being anything less than my best.
For seventeen years we were together; for seventeen years he was at my
shoulder, watching while I slept, nursing me through fever and wounds–ay, and
receiving wounds in fighting for me. He signed on the same ships with me; and
together we ranged the Pacific from Hawaii to Sydney Head, and from Torres
Straits to the Galapagos. We blackbirded from the New Hebrides and the Line
Islands over to the westward clear through the Louisades, New Britain, New
Ireland, and New Hanover. We were wrecked three times–in the Gilberts, in the
Santa Cruz group, and in the Fijis. And we traded and salved wherever a dollar
promised in the way of pearl and pearl shell, copra, beche-de-mer, hawkbill
turtle shell, and stranded wrecks.
It began in Papeete, immediately after his announcement that he was going with
me over all the sea, and the islands in the midst thereof. There was a club in
those days in Papeete, where the pearlers, traders, captains, and riffraff of
South Sea adventurers forgathered. The play ran high, and the drink ran high;
and I am very much afraid that I kept later hours than were becoming or
proper. No matter what the hour was when I left the club, there was Otoo
waiting to see me safely home.
At first I smiled; next I chided him. Then I told him flatly that I stood in
need of no wet-nursing. After that I did not see him when I came out of the
club. Quite by accident, a week or so later, I discovered that he still saw me
home, lurking across the street among the shadows of the mango trees. What
could I do? I know what I did do.
Insensibly I began to keep better hours. On wet and stormy nights, in the
thick of the folly and the fun, the thought would persist in coming to me of
Otoo keeping his dreary vigil under the dripping mangoes. Truly, he made a
better man of me. Yet he was not strait-laced. And he knew nothing of common
Christian morality. All the people on Bora Bora were Christians; but he was a
heathen, the only unbeliever on the island, a gross materialist, who believed
that when he died he was dead. He believed merely in fair play and square
dealing. Petty meanness, in his code, was almost as serious as wanton
homicide; and I do believe that he respected a murderer more than a man given
to small practices.
Concerning me, personally, he objected to my doing anything that was hurtful
to me. Gambling was all right. He was an ardent gambler himself. But late
SOUTH SEA TALES
52
hours, he explained, were bad for one’s health. He had seen men who did not
take care of themselves die of fever. He was no teetotaler, and welcomed a
stiff nip any time when it was wet work in the boats. On the other hand, he
believed in liquor in moderation. He had seen many men killed or disgraced by
square-face or Scotch.
Otoo had my welfare always at heart. He thought ahead for me, weighed my
plans, and took a greater interest in them than I did myself. At first, when I