A thousand deaths by Jack London

blood and teeth that sometimes accompanied the process of knocking out seven

bells. One other thing he learned: no boy was struck or punished unless he did

wrong. Even when the white men were drunk, as they were frequently, they never

struck unless a rule had been broken.

Mauki did not like the plantation. He hated work, and he was the son of a

chief. Furthermore, it was ten years since he had been stolen from Port Adams

by Fanfoa, and he was homesick. He was even homesick for the slavery under

Fanfoa. So he ran away. He struck back into the bush, with the idea of working

southward to the beach and stealing a canoe in which to go home to Port Adams.

But the fever got him, and he was captured and brought back more dead than

alive.

A second time he ran away, in the company of two Malaita boys. They got down

the coast twenty miles, and were hidden in the hut of a Malaita freeman, who

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dwelt in that village. But in the dead of night two white men came, who were

not afraid of all the village people and who knocked seven bells out of the

three runaways, tied them like pigs, and tossed them into the whale boat. But

the man in whose house they had hidden–seven times seven bells must have been

knocked out of him from the way the hair, skin, and teeth flew, and he was

discouraged for the rest of his natural life from harboring runaway laborers.

For a year Mauki toiled on. Then he was made a house-boy, and had good food

and easy times, with light work in keeping the house clean and serving the

white men with whiskey and beer at all hours of the day and most hours of the

night. He liked it, but he liked Port Adams more. He had two years longer to

serve, but two years were too long for him in the throes of homesickness. He

had grown wiser with his year of service, and, being now a house-boy, he had

opportunity. He had the cleaning of the rifles, and he knew where the key to

the store room was hung. He planned to escape, and one night ten Malaita boys

and one boy from San Cristoval sneaked from the barracks and dragged one of

the whale boats down to the beach. It was Mauki who supplied the key that

opened the padlock on the boat, and it was Mauki who equipped the boat with a

dozen Winchesters, an immense amount of ammunition, a case of dynamite with

detonators and fuse, and ten cases of tobacco.

The northwest monsoon was blowing, and they fled south in the night time,

hiding by day on detached and uninhabited islets, or dragging their whale boat

into the bush on the large islands. Thus they gained Guadalcanar, skirted

halfway along it, and crossed the Indispensable Straits to Florida Island. It

was here that they killed the San Cristoval boy, saving his head and cooking

and eating the rest of him. The Malaita coast was only twenty miles away, but

the last night a strong current and baffling winds prevented them from gaining

across. Daylight found them still several miles from their goal. But daylight

brought a cutter, in which were two white men, who were not afraid of eleven

Malaita men armed with twelve rifles. Mauki and his companions were carried

back to Tulagi, where lived the great white master of all the white men. And

the great white master held a court, after which, one by one, the runaways

were tied up and given twenty lashes each, and sentenced to a fine of fifteen

dollars. They were sent back to New Georgia, where the white men knocked seven

bells out of them all around and put them to work. But Mauki was no longer

house-boy. He was put in the road-making gang. The fine of fifteen dollars had

been paid by the white men from whom he had run away, and he was told that he

would have to work it out, which meant six months’ additional toil. Further,

his share of the stolen tobacco earned him another year of toil.

Port Adams was now three years and a half away, so he stole a canoe one night,

hid on the islets in Manning Straits, passed through the Straits, and began

working along the eastern coast of Ysabel, only to be captured, two-thirds of

the way along, by the white men on Meringe Lagoon. After a week, he escaped

from them and took to the bush. There were no bush natives on Ysabel, only

salt-water men, who were all Christians. The white men put up a reward of

five-hundred sticks of tobacco, and every time Mauki ventured down to the sea

to steal a canoe he was chased by the salt-water men. Four months of this

passed, when, the reward having been raised to a thousand sticks, he was

caught and sent back to New Georgia and the road-building gang. Now a thousand

sticks are worth fifty dollars, and Mauki had to pay the reward himself, which

required a year and eight months’ labor. So Port Adams was now five years

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away.

His homesickness was greater than ever, and it did not appeal to him to settle

down and be good, work out his four years, and go home. The next time, he was

caught in the very act of running away. His case was brought before Mr.

Haveby, the island manager of the Moongleam Soap Company, who adjudged him an

incorrigible. The Company had plantations on the Santa Cruz Islands, hundreds

of miles across the sea, and there it sent its Solomon Islands’ incorrigibles.

And there Mauki was sent, though he never arrived. The schooner stopped at

Santa Anna, and in the night Mauki swam ashore, where he stole two rifles and

a case of tobacco from the trader and got away in a canoe to Cristoval.

Malaita was now to the north, fifty or sixty miles away. But when he attempted

the passage, he was caught by a light gale and driven back to Santa Anna,

where the trader clapped him in irons and held him against the return of the

schooner from Santa Cruz. The two rifles the trader recovered, but the case

of tobacco was charged up to Mauki at the rate of another year. The sum of

years he now owed the Company was six.

On the way back to New Georgia, the schooner dropped anchor in Marau Sound,

which lies at the southeastern extremity of Guadalcanar. Mauki swam ashore

with handcuffs on his wrists and got away to the bush. The schooner went on,

but the Moongleam trader ashore offered a thousand sticks, and to him Mauki

was brought by the bushmen with a year and eight months tacked on to his

account. Again, and before the schooner called in, he got away, this time in a

whale boat accompanied by a case of the trader’s tobacco. But a northwest gale

wrecked him upon Ugi, where the Christian natives stole his tobacco and turned

him over to the Moongleam trader who resided there. The tobacco the natives

stole meant another year for him, and the tale was now eight years and a half.

“We’ll send him to Lord Howe,” said Mr. Haveby. “Bunster is there, and we’ll

let them settle it between them. It will be a case, I imagine, of Mauki

getting Bunster, or Bunster getting Mauki, and good riddance in either event.”

If one leaves Meringe Lagoon, on Ysabel, and steers a course due north,

magnetic, at the end of one hundred and fifty miles he will lift the pounded

coral beaches of Lord Howe above the sea. Lord Howe is a ring of land some

one hundred and fifty miles in circumference, several hundred yards wide at

its widest, and towering in places to a height of ten feet above sea level.

Inside this ring of sand is a mighty lagoon studded with coral patches. Lord

Howe belongs to the Solomons neither geographically nor ethnologically. It is

an atoll, while the Solomons are high islands; and its people and language are

Polynesian, while the inhabitants of the Solomons are Melanesian.

Lord Howe has been populated by the westward Polynesian drift which continues

to this day, big outrigger canoes being washed upon its beaches by the

southeast trade. That there has been a slight Melanesian drift in the period

of the northwest monsoon, is also evident.

Nobody ever comes to Lord Howe, or Ontong-Java as it is sometimes called.

Thomas Cook & Son do not sell tickets to it, and tourists do not dream of its

existence. Not even a white missionary has landed on its shore. Its five

thousand natives are as peaceable as they are primitive. Yet they were not

always peaceable. The Sailing Directions speak of them as hostile and