The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

ATOLLS OF THE SUN

Photo from L. Gauthier
Nature’s mirror showed him why he could not leave

ATOLLS

OF THE SUN

BY

FREDERICK O’BRIEN

Author of “Mystic Isles of the South Seas,” “White Shadows

in the South Seas,” etc.

WITH MANY

ILLUSTRATIONS

FROM

PAINTINGS, DRAWINGS AND PHOTOGRAPHS

TORONTO

McCLELLAND & STEWART

1922

Copyright, 1922, by

The Century Co.

PRINTED IN U. S. A.

To G——

FOREWORD

“Atolls of the Sun” is a book of experiences, impressions, and dreams in the strange and lonely islands of the South Seas. It does not aim to be literal, or sequential, though everything in it is the result of my wanderings in the far and mysterious recesses of the Pacific Ocean.

I am not a scientist or scholar, and can relate only what I saw and heard, felt and imagined, in my dwelling with savage and singular races among the wonderful lagoons of the coral atolls, and poignant valleys of disregarded islands.

If I can make my reader see and feel the sad and beautiful guises of life in them, and the secrets of a few unusual souls, I shall be satisfied. The thrills of adventure upon the sea and in the shadowy glens, the odors of rare and sweet flowers, the memories of lovable humans, are here written to keep them alive in my heart, and to share them with my friends.

Life is not real. It is an illusion, a screen upon which each one writes the reactions upon himself of his sensory knowledge. The individual is the moving camera, and what he calls life is his projection of the panorama about him—not more actual than the figures and storms upon the cinema screen. In this book I have put the film that passed through my mind in wild places, and among natural people.

It is useless to look to find in the South Seas what I have found. It is there, glowing and true, and yet, as each beholder conjures a different vision of the human spectacle about him, each can see the islands of romance only by the lens life has fitted upon his soul.

To seek a replica of experience or scenes is to spoil a possession.

If this book has interest, one may read and laugh, be entertained or repelled with thanks that one can sit at ease, and watch this picture made on another’s mind in long journeys and in many days and nights of hazard and delight.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ATOLLS OF THE SUN

ATOLLS OF THE SUN

CHAPTER I

Leaving Tahiti—The sunset over Moorea—Bound for the Paumotu Atolls—The Schooner Marara, Flying Fish—Captain Jean Moet and others aboard—Sighting and Landing on Niau.

“NOUS partons! We air off—off!” shouted Capitaine Moet, gaily, as the Marara, the schooner Flying Fish, slipped through the narrow, treacherous pass of the barrier-reef of Papeete Harbor. “Mon ami, you weel by ’n’ by say dam Moet for take you to ze Iles Dangereuses. You air goin’ to ze worse climate in ze sacré mundo. Eet ees hot and ze win’ blow many time like ’urricane. An’ you nevaire wash, because ze wataire ees salt como se o-c-ean.”

We had waited for a wafting breeze all afternoon, the brown crew alert to raise the anchor at every zephyr, but it was almost dark when we were clear of the reef and, with all sails raised, fair on our voyage to the mysterious atolls of the Paumotu Archipelago. Often I had planned that pilgrimage in my long stay in Tahiti. At the Cercle Bougainville, the business club, where the pearl and shell traders and the copra buyers drank their rum and Doctor Funks, I had heard many stories of a nature in these Paumotus strangely different of aspect from all other parts of the world, of a native people who had amazing knowledge of the secrets of the sea and its inhabitants, and of white dwellers altered by residence there to a pattern very contrary from other whites. For scores of years these traders and sailors or their forerunners had played all the tricks of commerce on the Paumotuans, and they laughed reminiscently over them; yet they hinted of demons there, of ghosts that soared and whistled, and of dancers they had seen transfixed in the air. What was true or untrue I had not known; nor had they, I believed.

Llewellyn, the Welsh-Tahitian gentleman, after four or five glasses of Pernoud, would ask, “Do you know why the Paumotus are unearthly?” and would answer in the same liquorish breath, “Because they haven’t any earth about them. They’re all white bones.”

Woronick, the Parisian expert in pearls, referred often to the wonderful jewel he had bought in Takaroa from a Paumotuan, and the fortune he had made on it.

“That pearl was made by God and fish and man, and how it was grown and Tepeva a Tepeva got it, is a something to learn; unique. It is bizarre, effrayant. I will not recite it here, for you must go to Takaroa to hear it.”

And Lying Bill and McHenry, in a score of vivid phrases, told of the cyclones that had swept entire populations into the sea, felled the trees of scores of years’ growth, and left the bare atoll as when first it emerged from the depths.

“I knew a Dane who rode over Anaa on a tree like a bloody ’orse on the turf,” said Lying Bill to me, with a frightening bang of his tumbler on the table. “’E was caught by the top of a big wave, an’ away ’e drove from one side of the bleedin’ island to the other, and come right side up. A bit ’urt in the ’ead, ’e was, but able to take ’is bloomin’ oath on what ’appened.”

I had not depended on these raconteurs for a vicarious understanding of the Paumotus; for I had read and noted all that I could find in books and calendars about them, but yet I had felt that these unlettered actors in the real dramas laid there gave me a valid picture. My hopes were fixed in finding in spirit what they saw only materially.

Moet stood by the wheel until we cleared the waters where the lofty bulk of the island confused the winds, and I, when the actions of the sailors in shifting the sails with his repeated orders had lost newness, looked with some anguish at that sweet land I was leaving. It had meant so much to me.

A poetic mood only could paint the swiftly changing panorama as the schooner on its seaward tacks moved slowly under the faint vesper breeze; the mood of a diarist could tell how “the sun setting behind Moorea in a brilliant saffron sky, splashed with small golden and mauve-colored clouds, threw boldly forward in a clear-cut, opaque purple mass that fantastically pinnacled island, near the summit of whose highest peak there glittered, star-like, a speck of light—the sky seen through a hole pierced in the mountain. How in the sea, smooth as a mirror, within the reef, and here and there to seaward, blue ruffled by a catspaw, away to the horizon was reflected the saffron hue from above; how against purple Moorea a cocoa-crowned islet in the harbor appeared olive-green—a gem set in the yellow water. How the sunlight left the vivid green shore of palm-fringed Tahiti, and stole upward till only the highest ridges and precipices were illuminated with strange pink and violet tints springing straight from the mysterious depth of dark-blue shadow. How from the loftiest crags there floated a long streamer cloud—the cloud-banner of Tyndal. Then, as the sun sank lower and lower, the saffron of the sky paled to the turquoise-blue of a brief tropical twilight, the cloud-banner melted and vanished, and the whole color deepened and went out in the sudden darkness of the night.”

If one must say farewell to Tahiti, let it be in the evening, in the tender hues of the sunset, the effacing shadows of the sinking orb in sympathy with the day’s tasks done; the screen of night being drawn amid flaming, dying lights across a workaday world, the dream pictures of the Supreme Artist appearing and fainting in the purpling heavens. I was leaving people and scenes that had taught me a new path in life, or, at least, had hung lamps to guide my feet in an appreciation of values before unknown to me.

I came back to the deck of the schooner with Moet’s call for a steersman, and his invitation to go below for food and drink. I refused despite his “Sapristi! Eef you no eat by ’n’ by you cannot drink!” and when he disappeared down the companion-ladder I climbed to the roof of the low cabin. The moon was now high—a plate of glowing gold in an indigo ceiling. The swelling sea rocked the vessel and now and then lifted her sharp prow out of the water and struck it a blow of friendship as it rejoined it. I unrolled a straw mat, and, placing it well aft so that the jibing boom would not touch me, lay upon my back, and visioned the prodigious world I was seeking. The very names given by discoverers were suggestive of extravagant adventure. The Half-drowned Islands, the Low Archipelago, the Dangerous Isles, the Pernicious Islands, were the titles of the early mariners. For three hundred years the Paumotus had been dimly known on the charts as set in the most perilous sea in all the round of the globe. I had read that they were more hazardous than any other shores, as they were more singular in form. They had excited the wonder of learned men and laymen by even the scant depiction of their astounding appearance. For decades after the eyes of a European glimpsed them they were thought by many bookish men to be as fabulous as Atlantis or Micomicon; too chimerical to exist, though witches then were a surety, and hell a burning reality.

I fell asleep, and as during the night the wind shifted and with it the schooner veered, I had but a precarious hold upon the mat and was several times stood on my feet in the narrow passageway. The dream jinn seized these shiftings and twistings, the shouts of the mate in charge, the chants of the sailors at work, the whistle of the wind through the cordage, and wove them into fantasies,—ecstasies or nightmares,—and thus warded off my waking.

But the sun, roused from his slumber beneath the dip of the sphere, could be put off with no fine frenzies. When even half above the dipping horizon his beams opened my eyes as if a furnace door had been flung wide, and I turned over to see my hard couch occupied by others. Beside me was McHenry, next to him Moet, and furthest, the one white woman aboard, the captain’s wife. We yawned in unison; and, with a quick, accustomed movement, she dropped below. The day had begun on the schooner.

The Marara was once a French gunboat of these seas when cannons were needed to prevent dishonor to the tricolor by failure to obey French discipline, while France was making good colonists or corpses of all peoples hereabout. She was the very pattern of the rakish craft in which the blackbirders and pirates sailed this ocean for generations—built for speed, for entering threatening passes, for stealing silently away under giant sweeps, and for handling by a small number of strong and fearless men. The bitts on the poop were still marked by the gun emplacements, and the rail about the stern was but two feet high.

Now her owners were a company of Tahiti Europeans who, trusting largely to the seamanship and business shrewdness of her master, despatched her every few weeks or months on voyages about the French islands within a thousand miles or so to sell the natives all they would buy, and to get from them at the least cost the copra, shells, and pearls which were virtually the sole products of these islands.

TUAMOTU ARCHIPELAGO
(PACIFIC OCEAN)
click on map for a larger view

The cabin was one room, stuffy and hot, and malodorous of decades of cargo. A small table in the center for dining was alone free from shelves and boxes holding merchandise, which was displayed as in a country store. Besides all kinds of articles salable to a primitive people, there were foods in barrels, boxes, tins, and glass, for whites and for educated native palates.

Jean Moet, the commander of the Marara, was of the type of French sailor encountered in the Mediterranean, and especially about Marseilles and Spanish ports. He had a slight person, with hair and moustache black as the stones of Papenoo beach—nervous, excitable, moving incessantly, gesturing with every word. Twenty-eight of his forty years had been passed in ships. He had visited the Ile du Diable, and had seen Dreyfus there; he chattered of New York, Senegal, Yokohama, Cayenne, was full of French ocean oaths, breaking into English or Spanish to enlighten me or press a point, singing a Parisian music-hall chansonette, or a Spanish cancioncita. His language was a curious hodge-podge bespeaking the wanderings of the man and his intensely mercurial temperament.

His wife, who sailed with him on all voyages since their marriage five years before, was his opposite—large-boned and heavy, like a Millet peasant, looking at her brilliant husband as a wistful cow at her master, but not fearing to caution him against extravagance in stimulant or money. Her life had begun in Tahiti, and she had always been there until the dashing son of the Midi had lifted her from the house of her father—a petty official—to the deck of the Flying Fish. She was a housekeeper and accountant.

She paid especial attention to the shelves of pain-killers, cough cures, perunas, bitters and medical discoveries from America, which, in islands where all alcoholic liquors were forbidden to the aborigines, sold readily to all who sickened for them. Moet was affectionate but stern toward Virginie, the wife, and talked to her as does a kind but wise master to a trained seal.

For breakfast, the captain, Madame Moet, McHenry, and I had canned sardines, canned hash from Chicago, California olives, canned pineapple from Hawaii, and red wine from Bordeaux.

Virginie explained in Tahitian French that Jean had forgotten to get aboard stores of fresh food. He had been at the Cercle Bougainville until we had gone aboard, she said caustically. Jean put his arm about her fat waist.

“Mais, dar-leeng,” he said, soothingly, “tais-toi!” And then to me, “We are camarades, ma femme y mi, compañeros buenos. Ma wife she wash ze linge. That good, eh? Amerique ze woman got boss hand now. Diable! C’est rottan! Hombre, ze wife ees for ze cuisine, and ze babee.”

He pressed her middle, and advised her to clear up the table while we went on deck for a smoke.

He became confidential with me after a pousse café or two.

“We faire ze chose économique, Virginie y mi,” he said. “Maybee som’ day we weesh avoir leetle farm en France. En vérité, mon ami, I forget ze vegetable an’ ze meat because I beat McHenry at écarté in ze Cercle Bougainville, jus’ avant we go ’way from Papeete. I nevaire play ze carte on ze schoonaire! Jamais de la vie!”

The captain had aboard a brown pup, a mongrel he had found in the Marquesas Islands. He had named him Chocolat, and passed hours each day in teaching him tricks—to lie down and sit up at command, to stand and to bark. The dog liked to run over the roof of the cabin and to crouch upon the low rail at the stern. As any roll or pitch of the vessel might toss him into the ocean, I feared for his longevity, but Chocolat—pronounced by Moet “Shockolah”—was able to fall inboard whenever the motion jeopardized his safety.

“Eh, petit chien,” Jean Moet would cry, when Chocolat skated down the inclined deck into the scuppers, or hung for a moment indecisively on the rail, “you by ’n’ by goin’-a be eat by ze requin. Ze big shark getta you, perrillo, an’ you forget all my teach you, mi querido!”

He whipped Chocolat many times a day, when the puppy let down from “attention” before told, or when he attacked his food before a certain whistled note.

“What will you do with him when his education is complete?” I asked Moet.

“When he ees educate, hein? He will be like ze saircuss animal. One year old, maybe, he make turnover, fight ze boxe, drink wine, an’, puedeser, he talk leetle. Zen I sell heem some tourist, some crazee Americain who zink he do for heem like me. I sharge five hunder franc.”

McHenry, who kicked Chocolat whenever he had an opportunity unseen, ridiculed Moet’s dream of gain.

“You will like hell!” said McHenry. “When you’ve got the dirty little bastard sayin’, ‘Good mornin’, ‘nice an’ proper, he’ll sneak ashore in some boat-load o’ truck, an’ some Paumotuan ’ll hotpot him. Wait till he’s fat! You know what they’ll do for fresh meat.”

“Non, non!” answered the captain, angrily. “I am not afraid of zat. I teach heem I keel heem he go in boat, but maybe you take heem an’ sell heem on ze quiet, McHenry.”

The small, cold eyes of McHenry gleamed, and a queer smile twisted his mouth.

“Well, keep him from under my feet!” he warned, and laughed at some thought now fully formed in his mind. I could see it squirming in his small brain.

McHenry was as rollicking a rascal as I knew in all the South Seas. He was bitter and yet had a flavor of real humor at odd times. Without schooling except that of a wharf-rat in Liverpool, New York, and San Francisco, he had come into these latitudes twenty years before. Cunning yet drunken, cruel but now and again doing a kindness out of sheer animal spirits or a desire to show off, he had many enemies, and yet he had a few friends. When the itching for money or the desire to feel power over those about him urged him, as most of the time, he proved himself the ripest and rottenest product of his early and present environment. He had had desperate fights to keep from being a decaying beachcomber, a parasite without the law; but a certain Scotch caution, a love of making and amassing profits, and, as I learned later, a firm and towering native wife, had kept him at least out of jail and in the groove of trading.

Boasting was his chief weakness. He would go far to find the chance to ease his latent sense of inferiority to an audience that did not know fully his poverty of character and attainment. After years of ups and downs he had now quarreled with his recent employers, and was going to pitch his trade tent on some Paumotu atoll where copra and pearl-shell might be found. He thought that he might stay a while in Takaroa, one of our ports, because the diving season was about to open there. He and I being the only ones whose language was English, we were much together, but I always half despised myself for not speaking my mind to him. Still, those lonely places make a man compromise as much as do cities. What one might fear most would be having no one to talk with.

We lived on deck, all four of us, the Moets, McHenry, and I, along with a half-caste mate, sleeping always on the roof of the cabin, and taking our meals off it, except in rain. In that moist case we bundled on the floor of the cabin. There was no ceremony. The cook brought the food through the cabin, and we handed up and down the dishes through the after scuttle, helping ourselves at will to the wine and rum which were in clay bottles on the roof. McHenry and I were the only passengers, and the crew of six Tahitians was ample for all tasks. They were Piri a Tuahine, the boat-steerer; Peretia a Huitofa, Moe a Nahe, Roometua a Terehe, Piha a Teina, and Huahine, with Tamataura, the cook.

The whole forward deck of the schooner was crowded with native men, women, and children, the families of church leaders who were returning to their Paumotu homes after attending a religious festival in Tahiti. They lay huddled at night, sleeping silently in the moonlight and under the stars. All day, and until eight or nine o’clock, they conversed and ate, and worked with their hands, plaiting hats of pandanus, sugar-cane, bamboo, and other materials. White laborers massed in such discomfort would have quarreled, squabbled for place, and eased their annoyance in loud words, but the Polynesian, of all races, loves his fellow and keeps his temper.

These were the first Paumotuan people I had seen intimately, and I listened to them and asked them questions. A deacon who at night removed a black coat and slept in a white-flowered blue loin-cloth, the pareu of all the Polynesians, gazed at the heavens for hours. He knew many of the stars.

“Our old people,” he said, “believed that the gods were always making new worlds in distant sky places beyond the Milky Way, the Maoroaheita. When a new world was made by the strong hands of the gods, the Atua, it went like a great bird to the place fixed for it. That star, Rehua,”—he pointed toward Sirius “was first placed by the Atua near the Tauha, the Southern Cross, but afterwards they changed it, and sent it to where it is now.”

I looked at the glowing cross, and remembered the emotion its first sight had stirred in me. I was tossing on the royal yard of a bark bound for Brazil, up a hundred feet and more from deck, when, raising my head from the sail I had made fast, there burst upon me the wonderful form and brilliance of the constellation which five thousand years ago entranced the Old World but which is hidden from it now.

The deacon again raised his hand and indicated the spot where Rehua had shone before the divine mind had changed. It was the Coal-sack, the black vacancy in the Magellan Clouds, so conspicuous below the cross when all the rest of the sky is cloudless and clear. The Maori mind had wisely settled upon that vast space in the stellar system in which not even an atom of stellar dust sheds a single flicker of luminosity as the point from which the gods had plucked Rehua. I had no such lucid reason for this amazing, celestial void as the half-naked deacon on the deck of the Marara.

We had a poor wind for two days, and I looked long hours in the water, so close to the deck, at the manifestations of organic and vegetable vitality. All life of the ocean, I knew, depended ultimately on minute plants. The great fish and mammals fed on plant forms which were distributed throughout the seas. These grew in the waters themselves or were cast into them along their shores or by the thousands of rivers which eventually feed the ocean. The flora of all the earth, seeds, nuts, beans, leaves, kernels, swam or sank in the majority element, and aided in the nourishment of the creatures there. They had, also, taken root on shores foreign to their birth, and had, from immigrants, become esteemed natives of many lands. They had increased man’s knowledge, too, as the sea-beans found on the shores of Scotland led to the discovery of that puzzle of all currents, the Gulf Stream. After all was said, the land was insignificant compared to the water—little more than a fourth of the surface of the globe, and in mass as puny. The average elevation of the land was less than a fifth of a mile, while the average depth of the sea was two miles, or thirty times the mass of the land. If the solid earth were smoothed down to a level, it would be entirely covered a mile deep by the water. I felt very close to the sea, and fearful of its might. I envied the natives their assurance, or, at least, stolidity.

The days were intensely hot. When the sails were furled or flapped idly, and the Marara lay almost still, listening for even a whisper of wind, I suffered keenly. The second noon our common exasperation broke out in the inflammable Moet.

The captain shouted to Huahine, a sailor, to cover his head with a hat. The man was a giant, weighing more than two hundred and fifty pounds, but Moet addressed him as he would a child.

“Sapristi!” he yelled, “Taupoo! Maamaa! Your hat, you fool!”

“Diablo! amigo,” he said, testily. “Zose nateev air babee. I have ze men paralyze by ze sun in ze Marqueses. In ze viento, when ze win’ blow, no dan-gair, but when no blow—sacré! ze sun melts ze brain off-off.”

Captain Moet was dramatic. Whatever he said he acted with face, hands and arms, feet, and even his whole body. He made a gesture that caused me to touch my own hat, to consider its resistance to the sun, to feel an anticipation of harm. Suddenly he took the arm of the sailor at the wheel, Piha a Teina, a Tahitian, and, releasing the spokes from his hands, himself began to steer.

“Go there in the lee of the mainsail,” he said in Tahitian, “and tell the American about your terrible adventure when you almost died of thirst!”

“Look at him!” said Moet to me. “He is old before his time. The sun did that.”

Photo from L. Gauthier
The atoll of Niau

Piha a Teina stood beside me, shy, slow to begin his epic. He was shriveled and withered, pitifully marked by some experience unusual even to these Maori masters of this sea. I gave him a cigarette, and, lighting it, he began;

“I am Piha a Teina,” he said. “I was living in the island of Marutea in the Paumotus when this thing happened. I set out one day in a cutter for Manga Reva. That island was seven hundred miles away, and we were sent, Pere Ani, my friend, and I, to bring back copra. The cutter was small, not so large as a ship’s boat. We had food for eight or nine days, and as the wind was as we wanted it, blowing steadily toward Manga Reva, we felt sure we would arrive there in that time. But we lost the stars. They would not show themselves, and soon we did not know which way to steer. This schooner has a compass, but we could not tell the direction by the sun as we had not the aveia. We became uneasy and then afraid. Still we kept on by guess and hope, believing the wind could not have changed its mind since we started. On the tenth day we ate the last bite of our food. We had not stinted ourselves until the eighth day, and then we felt sure the next day or the next would bring the land.

The anchorage at Tahauku. Atuona lies just around the first headland to the right

“But on the eleventh day we saw nothing but the sea. I had a pearl hook and with it we caught bonito. We ate them raw. They made us thirsty, and we drank all our water. It did not rain for many days, and we drank the salt water. When it rained we had nothing in which to catch and keep the fresh water. We could only suck the wet sail which we had taken down because we had become too weak to handle it if the gale had caught us with it up. We drifted and drifted with the current. The sun beat upon us and we were burned like the breadfruit in the oven. I could not touch my breast in the daytime it was so hot. The time went on as slowly as the cocoanut-tree grows from the nut we plant. We left in the month you call October. Days and nights we floated without using the tiller except to keep the cutter before the wind when it blew hard. We had been asleep maybe a day or two when a storm came. We did not wake up, but it cast us on the island of Rapa-iti. Pere Ani never woke up, but I am here. The sun killed him.”

“How long were you in the cutter?” I asked.

Moet heard my question and replied:

“Mais, zey lef’ Marutea in octobre, an’ ze Zelee, the Franche war-sheep, fin’ zem on Rapa-iti in Januaire. Zey was—yo no se—more zan seexty day in ze boat.”

Piha a Teina expressed neither gladness nor sorrow that he had escaped the fate of Pere Ani. He knew, as his race, that fate was inexorable, and he contemplated life as the gift of a powerful force that could not be argued with nor threatened by prayers, though, to be in the mode, he might make such supplications.

“If I had had such a hohoa moana, a chart of the sea, as we formerly made of sticks,” he said, “I could have found Manga Reva without the stars. We made them of straight and curved pieces of wood or bamboo, and we marked islands on them with shells. They showed the currents from the four quarters of the sea, and with them we made journeys of thousands of miles to the Marquesas and to Hawaii and Samoa. But we have forgotten how to make them, and I know nothing of the paper charts the white man has, but I can read the aveia, the compass of the schooner. We did not take our hooa in our canoes, but studied them at home.”

The captain whistled, caught my eye, touched his forehead to signify Piha a Teina was wandering mentally, and summoned the sailor to take the wheel.

“He ees maamaa evvair since zat leetle voyage,” he said, sagely.

On the morning of the fourth day from Papeete the first of the eighty Paumotu atolls raised a delicate green fringe of trees four or five miles away. It lay so low that from the deck of the schooner it could not be seen even on the clearest days at a greater distance. One heard the surf before the island appeared. It was only a few feet above the plane of the sea, flat, with no hill or eminence upon it, a leaf upon the surface of a pond. I could hardly believe it part of the familiar globe. It was more like the fairy-island of childhood, the coral strand of youth, the lotus land of poesy. It was, in reality, the most beautiful, fascinating, inconceivable sight upon the ocean.

McHenry and I stood with Chocolat and watched the slow rise of the atoll of Niau, as the Marara, under lessened sail and with Captain Moet at the helm, cautiously approached the land. We crept up to it, as one might to a trap in which one hoped to snare a hare but feared to find a wolf. All hands stood by for orders. Though the sky was azure and the sun broiling, one never knew in the Pernicious Islands when the unforeseen might happen.

Seven miles long and five wide, Niau was a matchless bracelet of ivory and jade. Grieg Island, some Anglo-Saxon discoverer once named it, but Grieg had fame abroad only. None spoke his name as we advanced warily over the road, familiar to them all as the Sulu Sea to me. The cargo for Niau came through the hatches, thrown up from the hold, sailor to sailor, and was piled on deck until all was checked. Madame Moet was on the poop by the after door of the cabin, hanging over each item and marking it off upon her inventory, while Jean hummed the “Carmagnole,” and swung the Flying Fish about on short tacks for her goal. Between the shifting of the canvas the long-boat was lowered, and the goods heaped in it: boxes and barrels, bales and buckets, edibles and clothing, matches and tobacco, gimcracks and patent medicines.

As closer we went, I saw that Niau was a perfect oval, composed of a number of separate islets or motus. These formed the land on which were the trees and shrubs and the people, but this oval itself was inclosed by a hidden reef, several hundred feet wide, on which the breakers crashed and spilled in a flood of foaming billows.

There was no enthusiasm over the beauty of Niau except in my heaving breast, and I concealed it as I would free thinking in a monastery. To McHenry and Jean and Virginia, a lovely atoll was but a speck upon the ocean on which to cozen inferior creatures.

“Madre de Dios!” vociferated the skipper, when, a mile from the gleaming teeth of the reef, he brought the Marara up into the wind and halted her like a panting mare thrown upon her haunches. “Mc’onree et M’sieu’ O’Breeon, eef you go ’shore, tomble een, pronto!”

He released the wheel to the mate, and we three scrambled over the rail and jumped upon the cargo as the boat rose on a wave, joining the four Tahitians who were at the heavy oars, with Piri a Tuahine at the stern, holding a long sweep for a rudder. It was attached by a bight of rope, and by a longer rope kept from floating away in case of mishap.

Now came as delicate a bit of action with sails as a yachtsman, with his mother-in-law as a guest, might recklessly essay. Captain Moet sang out from his perch on a barrel to the half-caste at the wheel to go ahead, and the Flying Fish, which for a few minutes had been trembling in leash, turned on her heel and headed directly for the streak of foam, the roar of which drowned our voices at that distance.

Eight hundred feet away, when it must have looked to a landsman on the schooner that she was almost in the breakers, we cast off the line and took to our oars. It was nice seamanship to save time by minimizing rowing, but certainly not in Lloyd’s rules of safety. Those who reckon dangers do not laugh in these parts. A merry rashness helps ease of mind.

In five minutes our boat was in the surf, rolling and tumbling, and I on my merchandise peak clasped a bale fervently, though McHenry and Moet appeared glued to barrels which they rode jauntily. It was now I saw the art of the Polynesians, the ablest breaker boatmen in the world.

All about seemed to me solid coral rock or distorted masses of limestone covering and uncovering with the surging water, but suddenly there came into my altering view, as the steersman headed toward it, a strange pit in the unyielding strata. Into this maelstrom the water rushed furiously, drawn in and sucked out with each roll of the ocean. The Tahitians, at a word, stopped rowing, while Piri a Tuahine scrutinized intently the onrushing waves. He judged the speed and force of each as it neared him, and on his accuracy of eye and mind depended our lives.

The oarsmen tugged with their blades to hold the boat against the sweeping tide, and abruptly, with a wild shout, Piri a Tuahine set them to pulling like mad, while he with his long oar both steered and sculled.

“Tamau te paina!” all yelled amid the boom of the surf.

“Hold on to the wood!” and down into the pit we tore; down and in, the boat raced through the vortex of the chute, the pilot avoiding narrowly the coffin-like sides of the menacing depression, and the sailors, with their oars aloft for the few dread seconds, awaiting with joyous shouts the emergence into the shallows. All was in the strong hands and steady nerves of Piri a Tuahine. A miscalculated swerve of his sturdy lever, and we would have been smashed like egg-shells, boat and bodies, against the massive sides. But spirit and wood were stedfast, and I rode as high and dry from the imminent Scylla as if on a camel in the Sahara.

In a few twinklings of an eye we were past the reef, and in the moat in fast shoaling, quiet water, studded with hummocks and heaps of coral. The sailors leaped into it shoulder-deep, and guided and forced the boat as far shoreward as possible, to curtail the cargo-carrying distance. Captain Moet, McHenry, and I went up to our waists, and reached the beach.

CHAPTER II

Meeting with Tommy Eustace, the trader—Strange soil of the atoll—A bath in the lagoon—Momuni, the thirsty bread baker—Off for Anaa.

THE crusader who entered Jerusalem had no deeper feeling of realization of a long-cherished hope than I when my foot imprinted its mold in the glistening sand of the atoll of Niau. I stood in my track and scanned it, as Crusoe the first human mark other than his own he saw on his lonely island. Not with his dismay, but yet with a slight panic, a pleasant but alarmed perturbation, an awe at the wonder of the scene. The moment had the tenseness of that when I saw my first cocoanut-palm; it mingled a fear that I had passed one of the great climacterics of visual emotion.

Here was I in the arcanum of romance, the promised land of chimera, after years of faint expectation. I was almost stunned by the reality, and I felt sensibly the need of some one to share the pathos that oppressed me. I did not forsake my love for Tahiti. That was fixed, but this atoll was not the same. Tahiti was an adored mistress, this a light o’ love, a dazzling, alien siren, with whom one could not rest in safety; a fanciful abode for a brief period, as incomparable to Tahiti as an ice-field to a garden.

“What the bloody hell’s eatin’ on you?” exclaimed the irked McHenry, questioningly as he glared at me. “Aren’t your feet mates? Let’s see Tommy Eustace! He might have a bottle o’ beer buried in a cool place.”

Moet was shaking the salt water from his long, inky hair. He had stumbled and dipped his head in the brine.

“’Sus-Maria!” he swore. “Virginie she say Jean been drink.”

A shed-like building of rough boards, with unpainted corrugated iron roof, was a hundred steps from the water, the store and warehouse of the single trader, who supplied the wants and ambitions of the hundred inhabitants of Niau and endeavored to monopolize a meager output of copra and pearl-shell. It was on a rude road, which stretched along the beach, edged by a dozen houses, small, wooden huts, or thatched straw shanties, much more primitive and poor than in Tahiti. All the remainder of Niau was coral, water, and cocoanut-trees, except a scanty vegetation.

Thomas Eustace, the trader, or Tomé, as the natives called him, was in the doorway of his establishment, awaiting the sailors who had begun at once to carry the Marara’s freight from the boat through the moat. A quarter of a century ago, a broth of a boy from Ireland, he had stepped off a ship alongside the Papeete quay, and had never left the South Seas since.

“Faix, I had the divil’s own toime to shtay,” say Tomé, as we four sat by an empty barrel head and drank the warmish beer he had offered us with instant hospitality.

“I waz that atthracted by the purty gir-ruls, the threes, and the foine-shmellin’ flowers that the ould man of the ship nivir could dhraw me back to the pots an’ pans iv the galley. I waz the flunky in the kitchin iv a wind-jammin’ Sassenach bark, peelin’ praties, an’ waitin’ on sailormin. The father iv a darlin’ hid me out be Fautaua falls, an’ the jondarmy hunted an’ hunted, wid nothin’ for their thrubble.”

A stoutish, quizzical man was Tomé, with brown face and throat and hands, a stubby, chewed mustache and sleepy, laughing eyes. By the purling steam of Fautaua, where Loti had lived his idyl with Rarahu and I had walked with a princess, Thomas Eustace became Tomé forever and ever. He was well satisfied to be bashaw of an atoll, unused to greater comfort as he was, and enamored of reef and palm, and the lazy, unstandardized life of the South Seas.

“Ye may picther me,” he went on, as he poured the beer, “jumpin’ out iv the p’isonous galley iv that wind-jammin’ man-killer, an’ fallin’, be the grace iv God, into a grove iv cocoanuts, wid roas’ pig, breadfruit, and oranges fur breakfus, deejunee, an’ dinner, to whistle low about a brown fairy that swung on the same branch wid me! The Emerald Isle the divil! ‘Tis Tahiti’s the Tir-na’n-Og! This beats the bogs an’ the peat an’ the stirabout, wid no peeler to move you on, an’ no soggarth to tell ye ye’re a sinner!”

Tomé was ten years in Penrhyn, the noted pearl island belonging to New Zealand, and known as Tongareva. Lying Bill, McHenry, and Eustace were fellow-traders in that lonely spot. “Fellow” in such relations meant the affectionate intercourse of wolves who united to chase the sheep and quarrel over the carcass. McHenry and Tomé had greeted each other with cold familiarity, each knowing the other through and through, wondering how the other would beat him, and yet not averse to an exchange of trade news and the gossip of Tahiti and the Group, as they called the Paumotus.

“How’s old Lovaina?” asked Tomé.

“Chargin’ as much as ever for her cheap scoffin’s,” replied McHenry, who had never eaten a better meal than that served at the Tiaré Hotel. Eustace, I doubted not, was a square and genial man, but among his business kind he had to fight bludgeon with bludgeon. He opened a fresh cocoanut and diverted the mouth of an infant from its natural fount to make it swallow a few drops. The mother, a handsome, young woman, proud of her armful, gestured smilingly that Tomé was its father.

“Mavourneen dheelish!” he called her, and the baby, “Molly.”

Cocoanuts differ in kind and quality as much as apples, and Eustace gave me a kaipoa, which at his direction I ate, husks and all, and found it delicious.

Leaving the two merchants to continue their armed banter, I stepped outside the store and struck off the road toward the center of the island, through fields of broken coral, mysterious in its oppositeness from all other terrestrial formations. There was no earth that one could see or feel, but a matted vegetation in spots showed that even in these whited sepulchers of the coral animals outlandish plants had found the substance of life. The flora, though desperate in its poverty, was heartening in that it could survive at all. The lofty cocoanut-palm, standing straight as a mast or curving in singular grace, grew luxuriantly—the evergreen banner of this giant fleet of anchored ships of stone. Through a few hundred yards of this weird desert-jungle, I reached the lagoon which the inner marge of the great coral reef inclosed.

No lake that I have seen approached this mere in simple beauty, nor had artist’s vision wrought a more startling, extravagant, yet perfect work of color. The lagoon of Niau was small enough to encompass with a glance from where I stood. I felt myself in an enchanted spot. Niau was not all wooded. For long stretches only the white coral lined the shores, with here and there the plumy palms refreshing the eyes—brilliant in contrast with the bare sheen of the coral, and softly rustling in the breeze.

The water of the lagoon was palest blue, verging to green, clear almost as the pure air, and the beach shelved rapidly into depths.

The beach was made up of tiny shells crumbling into sand, billions and billions of them in the twenty miles about the lagoon. In each of the legion coral isles this was repeated, so that the mind contemplating them was confused at the incalculable prodigality of the life expended to build them and the oddity of the problem arranged by the power planning them.

“Every single atom, from the least particle to the largest fragment of rock, in this great pile,” said Darwin, “bears the stamp of having been subjected to organized arrangement. We feel surprised when travelers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals. This is a wonder which does not at first strike the eye of the body, but, after reflection, the eye of reason.”

I sat down under a dwarf cocoanut and let my eyes and mind dwell upon the gorgeousness of the prospect and the insight into nature’s reticences it afforded. Everywhere were the tombs or skeletons of the myriad creatures who had labored and died to construct these footstools of Might. Could man assume that these eons of years and countless births, efforts, and deaths, were for any concern of his? But else, he asked, why were they? To show the boundless power and caprice of the Creator? Was not the world made for humanity?

An atoll was to an island as a comet to a star—a freak or sport in the garden of the sea-gods. It was as if the Designer had planned to set up, in the thousand miles of ocean through which the Dangerous Islands stretched, a whimsical cluster of shallower salt lakes, and so had hidden trillions of tiny beings to inclose them. For, after all, an atoll was but a lagoon surrounded by a reef of coral, or rather two reefs, for in the plan of the Architect there was built a second reef for every atoll, and this outer barrier was sunken, as the one through which we had come, but yet took the brunt of the waves, and prevented them from washing away and destroying the inner and habitable reef on which I then sat.

This hidden shoal belted the beach regularly, so that it made a moat between the two; and yet in most atolls there was such an opening as that through which we had come, often a mere depression, sometimes a deep and wide mouth. One was forced to consider whether the Architect had not taken man into his scheme, for without such an opening no people could reach the shore and lagoon. But the grievous fact was that in some atolls the minute workers had left no door and that man himself had torn one open with tools and explosives. Even once within the moat, our boat was in comparative safety only in the mildest weather, for the moat was studded with lumps and boulders of coral, and the most crafty guardianship was imperative to keep our craft whole.

If there had been an entry through the inner shore into the peaceful lagoon by which I lolled, then would anchorage and calm have been assured. So, of course, nature had in some other atolls than Niau attended to this detail, and these I was to find more inhabited and more developed, for in some even schooners might seek the haven of the lake, and a fleet lie there in security. The lagoons were thus, generally, safe and unflurried, though sometimes terribly harried by cyclones, such as Lying Bill described the Dane as riding from sea to sea across the entire island of Anaa.

Each of the Paumotus was made up of a number of motus, or islets, parted by lower strata in which was the moat water. This string of motus assumed many dissimilar figures. One had fifty pieces in its puzzle—a puzzle not fully solved by science, or, at least, still in dispute. The motus were all formed of coral rock of comparatively recent origin geologically. Were these atolls the mountain-tops of a lost Atlantis or thrust-up marine plateaus? The wise men differed. A theory was that the atolls were coral formations upon volcanic islands that had slowly sunk, each a monument marking an engulfed island or mountain peak.

Another, that volcanic activity, which mothered the high islands in these seas, caused to rise from the bottom of the ocean a series of submerged tablelands, leveled by the currents and waves, on which the coral insects erected the reefs—reefs just peeping above the surface of the water—and on which the storms threw great blocks of madrepores and coral broken from the mass. When in this condition, mere rocky rings of milky coral, over which each billow swept, without life or aught else than the structures of the marvelous zoöphytes, floors cut and broken here and there by the surging and pounding breakers, the hand of the Master raised them up, as through Polynesia other islands had been raised, and fixed these Paumotus as the fairest growths of Neptune’s park.

Lifted above the watery level, they were able to begin their task of usefulness. Seeds carried by currents, borne by the winds, or brought by those greatest of all pioneers and settlers of new countries, the sea-birds, were flung on these ready, but yet barren, atolls, and vegetation gave them an entrancing present.

Volcano and insect combined to make these coral blossoms of the South Seas so different from any other mundane formations that the man with any dreaming in his soul stood awe-struck at the wonder and artistry of nature. They were the most wonderful and simple of nature’s works. They eluded portrayal by brush and camera. No canvas or film could grasp their symmetry and grace, seize more than a fragment of their alluring form or hint of their admirable colors. Ravishing scenes from the deck of a ship, and marvels of construction and hue when upon them, they were sad and disappointing to the dweller, like a lovely woman who has a bad disposition.

Circles, ovals, and horseshoes, regular and irregular, a few miles or a hundred in circumference, the Paumotus were always essentially the same—the lagoon and the fringe of reef and palm. These Iles Dangereuses were the supreme in creation in harmonious light and shade. They were the very breath of imagination. My thoughts harked back to the dawn of life, and the struggle between the land and water in which continents and islands were drowned, and others rose to be the home of beast and man, when God said, “Let the dry land appear.”

These atolls had fought the ceaseless war which slowly, but eternally, shifted our terrestrial foothold. Makatea, nearer Tahiti, lifted its strange cliffs two hundred feet in the air. It had been raised by subterranean force thirty-five fathoms from the sea-level, and its coasts were vertical walls of that height.

The young Darwin’s theory appealed even with these examples of resurgence. It was improbable that an elevatory force would uplift through an immense area great, rocky banks within twenty or thirty fathoms of the surface of the sea, and not a single point above that level. Where on the surface of the globe was a chain of mountains, even a few hundred miles in length, with their many summits rising within a few feet of a given level, and not one pinnacle above it? Yet that was the condition in these atolls, for the coral animal could not live more than thirty fathoms or so below the atmosphere, so that the basic foundations of the atolls, on which the mites laid their offerings and their bones, were fewer than two hundred feet under the surface. The polyp gnome died from the pressure of water at greater depths. Just outside the reefs or between the atolls, the depths were often greater than a mile or two.

The vague science I possessed stimulated the memories of my reading of that oldest civilization in tradition, the immense continent of Pan, which a score of millenniums ago, according to the poet archæologists, flourished in this Pacific Ocean. Its cryptogram attended in many spots the discovery of a new Rosetta stone. I myself had seen huge monoliths, half-buried pyramids and High Places, hieroglyphs and carvings, certainly the fashioning of no living races. Were these Paumotus, and many other islands from Japan to Easter, the tops of the submerged continent, Pan, which stretched its crippled body along the floor of the Pacific for thousands of leagues? There were legends, myths, customs, inexplicable absences of usages and knowledge on the part of present peoples, all perhaps capable of interpretation by this fascinating theory of a race lost to history before Sumer attained coherence or Babylon made bricks.

A Paumotu atoll after a blow

Over this land bridge, mayhap, ventured a Caucasian people, the dominant blood in Polynesia to-day, and when the connecting links in the chain to their cradle fell from the sights of sun and stars, the survivors were isolated for ages on the islands like Tahiti and the Marquesas. On the mountain-tops, plateaus beneath the water, the coral insect built up these atolls until they stood in their wondrous shapes splendid examples of nature’s self-arrested labor, sculptures of unbelievable brilliancy.

Photo by Dr. Theodore P. Cleveland
A squall approaching Anaa

To them came first Caucasians who had been spared in the cataclysm, and later the new sailors of giant canoes who followed from Asia the line of islets and atolls, fighting with and conquering the Caucasians, and merging into them in the course of generations. These first and succeeding migrations must have been forced by devastating natural phenomena, by terrible economic pressure, by wars and tribal feuds. It was not probable that any people deliberately chose these atolls in preference to the higher lands, but that they occupied them in lieu of better on account of evil fortune.

These eighty Paumotu islands averaged about forty miles apart, with only two thousand people in all of them, which would allow, if equally distributed, only twenty-five inhabitants to each. On more than half of them no person lived, and all the others were scantily peopled. Three or four hundred might occupy one atoll where shell and cocoanuts were bountiful and fish plentiful and good, while two score and more atolls were left for the frigate-bird to build its nest and for the robber-crab to eat its full of nuts.

The thud of a cocoanut beside me stirred me from my reverie. I was wet with the wading ashore and the sweat of my walk, and so I removed my few garments and plunged into the lagoon. Going down to test the declivity a yard or so from the water’s edge I dropped twenty feet and touched no bottom. The water was limpid, delicious, and I could see the giant coral fans waving fifty feet below me.

As I loitered on my back in the water, and looked down into the crystal depths and at the cloudless sky, I had a moment’s phantasm of a great city, its lofty trade battlements, its crowded streets, the pale, set faces of its people, the splendor of the rich houses, the squalor of the tenements, the police with clubs and guns, and the shrieking traffic. Here was the sweetest contrast, where man had hardly touched the primitive work of nature. It was long from Sumer, and far from Gotham.

I was floating at ease when I heard a voice. It seemed to come out of the water. It was soft and almost etheric.

“Maitai!” it said, which meant, “You’re all right.”

I turned on my side, and by my garments was a long, gaunt Niauan, with a loose mouth, loafing there, with his eyes fawning upon me. He smiled sweetly, and said, “Goodanighta!”

As it was hardly seven o’clock in the morning, the sun a ball of fire, and the glare of the reef like the shine of a boy’s mirror in one’s eyes, I argued against his English education. But courtesy is not correction. I said in kind, “Goodanighta!” He came into the water and repaid me by shaking my hand, and with a movement toward the beach, said, “Damafina!”

“Maitai!” I corroborated his opinion, and then he beckoned to me to leave the lagoon and follow him. I dressed, all moist as I was, and we returned toward the village, I wondering what design on me he had.

“She canna fik (fix) you show Niau,” my cicerone explained, as he waved toward the island.

“All right, good, number one,” I assented.

He laughed with pleased vanity at his success in conversing with me in my tongue and at the envious looks of the people on their tiny porches as we passed them, and I saluted them.

“Momuni! Momuni!” they called after him with scornful laughter, and beckoned me to leave him and join them.

“Haere mai!” they said, sweetly to me. Come to us!

My guide did not like either the name they gave him or their efforts to alienate us. He retorted with an impolite gesticulation, and cried, “Popay! Popay!” Momuni, though, was plainly nervous, and afraid that I might be won over by the opposition. He plucked me by my wet sleeve and directed me to a shanty of old boards set upon a platform of coral rocks four feet from the bed of the atoll. In its single room on a white bedspread were a dozen loaves of bread, crisp and white, and smelling appetizingly. He lifted one, squeezed it to show its sponginess, and put it to my nose. He sniffed, and said, “She the greata coo-ooka.”

I guessed that he referred to himself as the baker. He pointed out toward the schooner and made me understand that this baking was a present to me. I was embarrassed, and with many flourishes explained that the Tahitian cook of the Marara could not be compared with him as a bread-maker, but that he was of a jealous disposition and might resent bitterly the gift. My companion was cast down for a moment, but brightened with another idea. Through a hundred yards more of coral bones we plowed to his oven, a huge, coral stove like a lime-kiln, with a roof, and bags of Victor flour from the Pacific Coast beside it. Pridefully he made me note everything, as an artist might his studio.

Momuni then touched my arm, and said, “Haere! We can do.”

We walked along the beach of the lagoon and found a road that paralleled the one we had come. It was lower than the other and the rain had flooded it. The water was brown and stagnant, even red in pools, like blood. Uncanny things shot past my feet or crawled upon them, and once something that had not the feel of anything I knew of climbed the calf of my leg, and when I turned and saw it dimly I leaped into the air and kicked it off. I heard it plop into the dark water.

Down this marsh we plodded and paddled, floundered and splashed for half a mile. The cocoanut-palms arched across it, but there was not a person nor a habitation in view. I wondered why “she the great cook” had led me into this morass. Momuni looked at me mysteriously several times, and his lips moved as if he had been about to speak.

He studied my countenance attentively, and several times he patted and rubbed my back affectionately and said, “You damafina.” Then, slimy and sloppy as I was, covered with the foul water up to my waist, when we were in the darkest spot Momuni halted and drew me under a palm.

He would either seek to borrow money or to cut my throat, I thought hastily. Again he scanned me closely, and I, to soften his heart and avert the evil, tried to appear firm and unafraid. To my astonishment he took from his pocket five five-franc notes, those ugly, red-inked bills which are current in all the Etablissements Français de l’Oceanie, and held them under my nose. He smiled and then made the motion of pulling a cork, and of a bottle’s contents gurgling through his loose mouth and down his long neck.

I shuddered at my thoughts. Could it be that in this dry atoll, with intoxicants forbidden, and prison the penalty of selling or giving them to a native, this hospitable Niauan had offered me his bread and shown me his oven, and the glories of the isle, and was displaying those five red notes to seduce me into breaking the law, into smuggling ashore a bottle of rum or wine?

I was determined to know the worst. I drew from my drawers (I had worn no trousers) an imaginary corkscrew, and from my undershirt an unsubstantial bottle. I pulled a supposititious cork, and took a long drink of the unreal elixir. Momuni was transfixed. His jaws worked, and his tongue extended. He squeezed my hand with happiness and hope, and left in it the five scarlet tokens of the Banque de l’Indo-Chine.

“Wina damafina; rumma damafina,” he confided. The man would be content with anything, so it bit his throat and made him a king for an evil hour.

Tomé was dealing out tobacco when we reached his store. His wife and baby, an Irish-Penrhyn baby, were now eating a can of salmon and Nabisco wafers.

“Who is this gentleman, Mr. Eustace?” I asked, pointing to Momuni.

“He’s an omadhaun, a nuisance, that he is, sure,” said Tomé. “He’s a Mormon deacon that peddles bread an’ buys his flour from some one else because I won’t trust him. He’s the only Mormon in this blessed island. Every last soul is a Roman Cat’lic, except me, and I’m a believer in the leprechawn. Has that hooligan been thryin’ to work ye for a bottle of rum? He’ll talk a day for a drink.”

“What’s Momuni and Popay?”

“Momuni is the way they say ‘Mormons.’ The other’s the pope wid the accint on the last syllable. It’s the name for Cat’lics all over these seas, because they worship the pope iv Rome. The Popays run this island, but the Momunis have got Takaroa and some others by the tail.”

I turned to look at my guide, the bread-maker. I had new admiration for him. It took courage to be the one Mormon among a hundred Catholics, and to try to sell them the staff of life. But he could not withstand the withering glances of Tomé, and fled, with gestures to me which I could only hazard to mean to meet him later in the fearsome swamp, with the rum.

“Does Momuni owe you any money?” I asked the trader, who was lighting his wife’s cigarette.

“Does he? He owes me forty francs for flour, and I’ll nivir see the shadow iv them. I’ll tell ye, though, he’s the best baker in the Group, an’ they’re crazy about his bread.”

Eustace had no cargo for us, and McHenry and I caught the last boat for the Marara, Moet having stayed for one trip only.

“Come an’ shtay wid us a month or two,” said Tomé in farewell. “We’ll make ye happy and find ye a sweetheart! ’Tis here ye can shpend yer valibil time doin’ nawthin’ at all, at all.”

He laughed heartily at his joke on virtue, and as we dashed through the surf to climb into the boat I turned to see him telling the assembling villagers some story that might provoke a laugh and keep their copra a monopoly for him.

CHAPTER III

Perilous navigation—Curious green sky—Arrival at Anaa—Religion and the movies—Character of Paumotuans.

A CURRENT set against us all night. Now I understood fully the alarms and misgivings that had caused the first and following discoverers of the “Pernicious Islands” to curse them by the titles they gave them. Our current was of the mischievous sort that upset logarithms and dead reckoning, and put ships ashore.

“This group is a graveyard of vessels,” said McHenry, “and there’d be ten times as many wrecked, if they come here. Wait till you see the County of Roxburgh at Takaroa! I’ve been cruisin’ round here more’n twenty years, and I never saw the current the same. The Frog Government at Papeete is always talkin’ about puttin’ lighthouses on a half dozen of these atolls, but does nothin’. Maybe the chief or a trader hangs a lantern on top of his house when he expects a cargo for him, but you can’t trust those lights, and you can’t see them in time to keep from hittin’ the reef. There’s no leeway to run from a wind past beating. It’s lee shore in some bloody direction all the time.

“There’s a foot or two between high and low, and it’s low in the lagoon when the moon is full. It’s high when the moon rises and when it sets. In atolls where there’s a pass into the lagoon, there’s a hell of a current in the lagoon at the lowerin’ tide, and in the sea near the lagoon when the tide is risin’. We’re goin’ to beat those tides with engines. In five years every schooner in the group will have an auxiliary. There’s only one now, the Fetia Taiao, and she’s brand new. It used to be canoes, and then whale-boats, and then cutters here, and purty soon it’ll be gasolene schooners.”

Then will the cry arise that romance has perished of artificiality. But the heart of man is always the same, and nothing kills romance but sloth.

We battled with the current and a fresh wind during the long, dark hours, Jean Moet never leaving the deck, and I keeping him company. Below on a settee Virginie said her beads or slept. I could see her by the smudgy cabin lamp, and hear her call to her husband two or three times, hours apart, “Ça va bien?” Jean would answer in Tahitian, as to a sailor, “Maitai,” and invariably would follow his mechanical reply, with “Et toi, dors-tu?”

Ever light-hearted, currents nor squalls could burden his Gascon spirit. He looked at the stars, and he looked at the water, he consulted with the mate, and gave orders to the steersman.

“Eh b’en,” he said to me, “moi, I am comme monsieur ze gouverneur ov ze Paumotu who live een Favarava, over zere.” He pointed into the darkness. “’E ’as a leetle schoonaire an’ ’e keep ze court and ze calaboose, bot mos’ly ’e lis’en to ze musique an’ make ze dance. La vie est triste; viva la bagatelle! Maybee we pick op Anaa in ze morning. Eef not, amigo mio, Virginie she weel pray for nous both.”

Anaa, or Chain Island, as Captain Cook named it because of its eleven motus or islets, strung like emeralds and pearls in a rosary, was not visible at daybreak, but as I studied the horizon the sky turned to a brilliant green. I thought some dream of that Tir-na’n-Og spoken of by Tomé in Niau obsessed me. I turned my back and waited for my eyes to right themselves. One sees green in the rainbow and green in the sunset, but never had I known a morning sky to be of such a hue. McHenry came on deck in his pajamas, and looked about.

“Erin go bragh!” he remarked. “Ireland is castin’ a shadow on the bloody heaven. There,” he pointed, “is the sight o’ the bleedin’ world. You’ve never seen it before an’ you won’t see it again, unless you come to Anaa in the mornin’ or evenin’ of a purty clear day. It’s the shinin’ of the lagoon of Anaa in the sky, an’ it’s nowhere else on the ball. There’s many a Kanaka in ’is canoe outa sight o’ land has said a prayer to his god when he seen that green. He knew he was near Anaa. You can see that shine thirty or thirty-five miles away, hours before you raise the atoll.”

Some curious relation of the lagoon to the sky had painted this hazy lawn on high. It was like a great field of luscious grass, at times filmy, paling to the color of absinthe touched with water, and again a true aquamarine, as I have seen the bay of Todos Santos, at Enseñada of Lower California. Probably it is the shallowness of the waters, which in this lagoon are strangely different from most of the inland basins of the South Sea Isles. To these mariners, who moved their little boats between them, the mirage was famed; and the natives had many a legend of its origin and cause, and of their kind being saved from starvation or thirst by its kindly glint.

McHenry called down the companionway, “Hey, monster, you can see the grass on Anaa. Vite-vite!”

Moet, who was below, drinking a cup of coffee, leaped up the companionway. He called out swift orders to go over on the other tack, and headed straight for the mirage. The schooner heeled to the breeze, now freshening as the sun became hotter, and we reeled off six or seven knots with all canvas drawing. In an hour the celestial plot of green had vanished, fading out slowly as we advanced, and we began to glimpse the cocoanuts on the beach, though few trees showed on the sky-line, and they were twisted as in travail.

Anaa, as others of these islands and Tahiti, too, had suffered terribly by a cyclone a few years ago. More than any other island of this group Anaa had felt the devastating force of the matai rorofai, the “wind that kills”—the wind that slew Lovaina’s son and made her cut her hair in mourning. Hikueru lost more people, because there were many there; but Anaa was mangled and torn as a picador’s horse by the horns of the angry bull. A half-mile away we could plainly see the havoc of wind and wave. The reef itself had been broken away in places, and coral rocks as big as houses hurled upon the beach.

“I was there just after the cyclone,” said McHenry. “It was a bloomin’ garden before then, Anaa. It was the only island in the Paumotus in which they grew most of the fruits as in Tahiti, the breadfruit, the banana, the orange, lime, mango, and others. It may be an older island than the others or more protected usually from the wind; but, anyhow, it had the richest soil. The Anaa people were just like children, happy and singin’ all the time. That damned storm knocked them galley-west. It tore a hole in the island, as you can see, killed a hundred people, and ended their prosperity. There was a Catholic church of coral, old and bloody fine, and when I got here a week after the cyclone I couldn’t find the spot where the foundations had been. I came with the vessels the Government sent to help the people. You never seen such a sight. The most of the dead were blown into the lagoon or lay under big hunks of coral. People with crushed heads and broken legs and arms and ribs were strewn all around. The bare reef is where the village was, and the people who went into the church to be safe were swept out to sea with it.”

As at Niau, the schooner lay off the shore, and the long-boat was lowered. In it were placed the cargo, and with Moet, McHenry, and me, men, women, and children passengers, four oarsmen and the boat-steerer, it was completely filled, we sitting again on the boxes.

Once more the Flying Fish towed the boat very near to the beach, and at the cry of “Let go!” flung away the rope’s end and left us to the oars. The passage through the reef of Anaa was not like that of Niau. There was no pit, but a mere depression in the rocks, and it took the nicest manœuvering to send the boat in the exact spot. As we approached, the huge boulders lowered upon us, threatening to smash us to pieces, and we backed water and waited for the psychological moment. The surf was strong, rolling seven or eight feet high, and crashing on the stone with a menacing roar, but the boat-steerer wore a smile as he shouted, “Tamau te paina!”

The oars lurched forward in the water, the boat rose on the wave, and onward we surged; over the reef, scraping a little, avoiding the great rocks by inches almost, and into milder water. The sailors leaped out, and with the next wave pulled the boat against the smoother strand; but it was all coral, all rough and all dangerous, and I considered well the situation before leaving the boat. I got out in two feet of water and raced the next breaker to the higher beach, my camera tied on my head.

There was no beach, as we know the word—only a jumbled mass of coral humps, millions of shells, some whole, most of them broken into bits, and the rest mere coarse sand. On this were scattered enormous masses of coral, these pieces of the primitive foundation upheaved and divided by the breakers when the cyclone blew. The hand of a Titan had crushed them into shapeless heaps and thrown them hundreds of feet toward the interior, the waves washing away the soil, destroying all vegetation, and laying bare the crude floor of the island. From the water’s edge I walked over this waste, gleaming white or milky, for a hundred yards before I reached the copra shed of Lacour, a French trader, and sat down to rest. The sailors bore the women and children on their shoulders to safety, and then commenced the landing of the merchandise for Lacour. Flour and soap, sugar, biscuit, canned goods, lamps, piece goods; gauds and gewgaws, cheap jewelry, beads, straw for making hats, perfumes and shawls.

Lacour, pale beneath his deep tan, black-haired and slender, greeted us at the shed with the dead-and-alive manner of many of these island exiles, born of torrid heat, long silences, and weariness of the driven flesh. A cluster of women lounged under a tohonu tree, the only shade near-by, and they smiled at me and said, “Ia ora na oe!”

I strolled inland. It was an isle of desolation, ravaged years ago, but prostrated still, swept as by a gigantic flail. Everywhere I beheld the results of the cataclysm.

Picking up shells and bits of coral at haphazard, I came upon the bone of a child, the forearm, bleached by wind and rain. Few of the bodies of the drowned had been interred with prayer, but found a last resting-place under the coral débris or in the maws of the sharks that rode upon the cyclone’s back in search of prey.

It was very hot. These low atolls were always excessively warm, but not humid. It was a dry heat. The reflection of the sunlight on the blocks of coral and the white sand made a glare that was painful to whites, and made colored glasses necessary to shield their eyes. Temporary blindness was common among new-comers, thus unprotected.

I walked miles and never lost the evidence of violence and loss. There was an old man by a coral pen, in which were three thin, measly pigs, a grayish yellow in color. He showed me to a small, wooden church.

“There are four Catholic churches in Anaa,” he said, “with one priest, and there are three hundred souls all told in this island. The priest goes about to the different churches, but money is scarce. This New Year the contribution was so trifling, the priest, who knew the bishop in Papeete would demand an accounting, sent word to know why—and what do you think he got back? That Lacour, the trader, with his accursed cinematograph, had taken all the money. He charged twenty-five cocoanuts to see the views in his copra shed, and they are wonderful; but the churches are empty. We are all Katorika.”

“Katorika?” I queried. “That is Popay?”

The old man frowned.

“Popay! That is what the Porotetani [Protestants] call the Katorika. I am the priest’s right hand. But we are poor, and Lacour, with his store and now with his machine that sets the people wild over cowaboyas, and shows them the Farani [French] and the Amariti [Americans] in their own islands—there is no money for the church.”

I interrupted the jeremiad of the ancient acolyte.

“Was there nothing left of the old church?” I asked.

The hater of cinematographs took me into the humble wooden structure, and there were a bronze crucifix and silver candlesticks that had been in the coral edifice.

“I saved them,” he said proudly. “When I saw the wind was too great, when the church began to rock, I took them and buried them in a hole I dug. I did this before I climbed the tree which saved me from the big wave. Ah, that was a real cathedral. The people of Anna are changed. The best died in the storm. They want now to know what is going on in Papeete, the great world.”

A hundred years ago the people of Anaa erected three temples to the god of the Christians. For a century they have had the Jewish and Christian scriptures.

Anaa had witnessed a bitter struggle between contending churches to win adherents. When France took hold, France was Catholic, and the priests had every opportunity and assistance to do their pious work. The schools were taught by Catholic nuns. Their governmental subsidy made it difficult for the English Protestants to proselytize, and with grief they saw their flocks going to Rome. Only the most zealous Protestant missionaries were unshaken by the change. When the anti-clerical feeling in France triumphed, the Concordat was broken, and the schools laicized, the priests and nuns in these colonies were ousted from the schools; the Catholic church was not only not favored, but, in many instances, was hindered by officials who were of anti-clerical feelings. The Protestant sects took heart again, and made great headway. The Mormons returned, the Seventh Day Adventists became active, and many nominal Catholics fell away. The fact was that it was not easy to keep Polynesians at any heat of religion. They wanted entertainment and amusement, and if a performance of a religious rite, a sermon, revival, conference, or other solace or diversion was not offered, they inclined to seek relaxation and even pleasure where it might be had. Monotony was the substance of their days, and relief welcomed in the most trifling incident or change.

Photo from Underwood and Underwood
Picking up the atoll of Anaa from the deck of the schooner Flying Fish

Lacour’s wife, granddaughter of a Welshman but all native in appearance, sat with the other women under the tohonu tree when I returned. I had seen thousands of fallen cocoanut-trees rotting in the swamps, and had climbed over the coral fields for several miles. There was no earth, only coral and shells and white shell-sand. Chickens evidently picked up something to eat, for I saw a dozen of them. In the lagoon, fish darted to and fro.

Photo from L. Gauthier
Canoes and cutters at atoll of Anaa, Paumotu Islands

Lacour’s wife had a yellowish baby in her lap, and she wore earrings, a wedding-ring, and a necklace and bracelets.

The boat was plying from the schooner to the shore, and I watched its progress. Piri a Tuahine held the steering oar, laughing, calling to his fellows to pull or not to pull, as I could see through a glass. A current affected the surf, increasing or decreasing its force at intervals, and it was now at its height. The boat entered the passage on a crest, but a following wave struck it hard, turned it broadside, and all but over. A flood entered the boat, but the men leaped out and, though up to their shoulders in the water, held it firm, and finally drew it close to the beach. The flour and the boxes and beds of native passengers were wetted, but they ran to the boat and carried their belongings near to the copra shed, and spread them to dry. Lacour cursed the boat and the sailors.

Near Lacour’s store was a house, in which lived Captain Nimau, owner of a small schooner. Nimau invited me to sleep there and see the moving pictures. We had brought Lacour a reel or so, and in anticipation, the people of Anaa had been gathering cocoanuts for a week. The films were old ones that Tahiti had wearied of, and Lacour got them for a trifle. The theater was his copra house, and there were no seats nor need of them.

He set the hour of seven for the show, and I alone stayed ashore for it. By six o’clock the residents began flocking to the shed with their entrance-fees. Each bore upon his back twenty-five cocoanuts, some in bags and others with the nuts tied on a pole by their husk. Fathers carried double or even triple quantities for their little ones, and each, as he arrived at Lacour’s, counted the nuts before the trader.

The women brought their own admission tickets. The acolyte, who had inveighed against the cinematograph, was second in line, and secured the best squatting space. His own cocoanuts were in Lacour’s bin.

When the screen was erected and the first picture flashed upon it, few of the people of Anaa were absent, and Lacour’s copra heap was piled high. There were a hundred and sixty people present, and four thousand nuts in the box-office.