will not be able to go out and get more. I know, master. I have studied the
way of white men. On the beaches are many old men who were young once, and who
could get money just like you. Now they are old, and they have nothing, and
they wait about for the young men like you to come ashore and buy drinks for
them.
“The black boy is a slave on the plantations. He gets twenty dollars a year.
He works hard. The overseer does not work hard.
He rides a horse and watches the black boy work. He gets twelve hundred
dollars a year. I am a sailor on the schooner. I get fifteen dollars a month.
That is because I am a good sailor. I work hard. The captain has a double
awning, and drinks beer out of long bottles. I have never seen him haul a rope
or pull an oar. He gets one hundred and fifty dollars a month. I am a sailor.
He is a navigator. ‘master, I think it would be very good for you to know
navigation.”
Otoo spurred me on to it. He sailed with me as second mate on my first
schooner, and he was far prouder of my command than I was myself. Later on it
was:
“The captain is well paid, master; but the ship is in his keeping, and he is
never free from the burden. It is the owner who is better paid–the owner who
sits ashore with many servants and turns his money over.”
“True, but a schooner costs five thousand dollars–an old schooner at that,” I
objected. “I should be an old man before I saved five thousand dollars.”
“There be short ways for white men to make money,” he went on, pointing ashore
at the cocoanut-fringed beach.
We were in the Solomons at the time, picking up a cargo of ivory nuts along
the east coast of Guadalcanar.
“Between this river mouth and the next it is two miles,” he said.
“The flat land runs far back. It is worth nothing now. Next year–who
knows?–or the year after, men will pay much money for that land. The
anchorage is good. Big steamers can lie close up. You can buy the land four
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miles deep from the old chief for ten thousand sticks of tobacco, ten bottles
of square-face, and a Snider, which will cost you, maybe, one hundred dollars.
Then you place the deed with the commissioner; and the next year, or the year
after, you sell and become the owner of a ship.”
I followed his lead, and his words came true, though in three years, instead
of two. Next came the grasslands deal on Guadalcanar–twenty thousand acres,
on a governmental nine hundred and ninety-nine years’ lease at a nominal sum.
I owned the lease for precisely ninety days, when I sold it to a company for
half a fortune. Always it was Otoo who looked ahead and saw the opportunity.
He was responsible for the salving of the Doncaster–bought in at auction for
a hundred pounds, and clearing three thousand after every expense was paid. He
led me into the Savaii plantation and the cocoa venture on Upolu.
We did not go seafaring so much as in the old days. I was too well off. I
married, and my standard of living rose; but Otoo remained the same old-time
Otoo, moving about the house or trailing through the office, his wooden pipe
in his mouth, a shilling undershirt on his back, and a four-shilling lava-lava
about his loins. I could not get him to spend money. There was no way of
repaying him except with love, and God knows he got that in full measure from
all of us. The children worshipped him; and if he had been spoilable, my wife
would surely have been his undoing.
The children! He really was the one who showed them the way of their feet in
the world practical. He began by teaching them to walk. He sat up with them
when they were sick. One by one, when they were scarcely toddlers, he took
them down to the lagoon, and made them into amphibians. He taught them more
than I ever knew of the habits of fish and the ways of catching them. In the
bush it was the same thing. At seven, Tom knew more woodcraft than I ever
dreamed existed. At six, Mary went over the Sliding Rock without a quiver, and
I have seen strong men balk at that feat. And when Frank had just turned six
he could bring up shillings from the bottom in three fathoms.
“My people in Bora Bora do not like heathen–they are all Christians; and I do
not like Bora Bora Christians,” he said one day, when I, with the idea of
getting him to spend some of the money that was rightfully his, had been
trying to persuade him to make a visit to his own island in one of our
schooners–a special voyage which I had hoped to make a record breaker in the
matter of prodigal expense.
I say one of OUR schooners, though legally at the time they belonged to me. I
struggled long with him to enter into partnership.
“We have been partners from the day the Petite Jeanne went down,” he said at
last. “But if your heart so wishes, then shall we become partners by the law.
I have no work to do, yet are my expenses large. I drink and eat and smoke in
plenty–it costs much, I know. I do not pay for the playing of billiards, for
I play on your table; but still the money goes. Fishing on the reef is only a
rich man’s pleasure. It is shocking, the cost of hooks and cotton line. Yes;
it is necessary that we be partners by the law. I need the money. I shall get
it from the head clerk in the office.”
So the papers were made out and recorded. A year later I was compelled to
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complain.
“Charley,” said I, “you are a wicked old fraud, a miserly skinflint, a
miserable land crab. Behold, your share for the year in all our partnership
has been thousands of dollars. The head clerk has given me this paper. It says
that in the year you have drawn just eighty-seven dollars and twenty cents.”
“Is there any owing me?” he asked anxiously.
“I tell you thousands and thousands,” I answered.
His face brightened, as with an immense relief.
“It is well,” he said. “See that the head clerk keeps good account of it. When
I want it, I shall want it, and there must not be a cent missing.
“If there is,:” he added fiercely, after a pause, “it must come out of the
clerk’s wages.”
And all the time, as I afterwards learned, his will, drawn up by Carruthers,
and making me sole beneficiary, lay in the American consul’s safe.
But the end came, as the end must come to all human associations.
It occurred in the Solomons, where our wildest work had been done in the wild
young days, and where we were once more– principally on a holiday,
incidentally to look after our holdings on Florida Island and to look over the
pearling possibilities of the Mboli Pass. We were lying at Savo, having run in
to trade for curios.
Now, Savo is alive with sharks. The custom of the woolly-heads of burying
their dead in the sea did not tend to discourage the sharks from making the
adjacent waters a hangout. It was my luck to be coming aboard in a tiny,
overloaded, native canoe, when the thing capsized. There were four
woolly-heads and myself in it, or rather, hanging to it. The schooner was a
hundred yards away.
I was just hailing for a boat when one of the woolly-heads began to scream.
Holding on to the end of the canoe, both he and that portion of the canoe were
dragged under several times. Then he loosed his clutch and disappeared. A
shark had got him.
The three remaining niggers tried to climb out of the water upon the bottom of
the canoe. I yelled and cursed and struck at the nearest with my fist, but it
was no use. They were in a blind funk. The canoe could barely have supported
one of them. Under the three it upended and rolled sidewise, throwing them
back into the water.
I abandoned the canoe and started to swim toward the schooner, expecting to be
picked up by the boat before I got there. One of the niggers elected to come
with me, and we swam along silently, side by side, now and again putting our
faces into the water and peering about for sharks. The screams of the man who
stayed by the canoe informed us that he was taken. I was peering into the