CHAPTER XII

Pearl-fishing at Penrhyn—The Beautiful Golden-Edge—Perils of the Pearl Diver—A Fight for Life—Visit to a Leper Island—A God-forsaken Place—How they kept the Corpses—The Woman who sinned—A Nameless Grave—On to Merry Manahiki—The Island of Dance and Song—Story of the Leper and his Bird—Good-bye to the Duchess.

A DAY or two after leaving Malden we sighted Penrhyn, lying five degrees further south, but for some unexplained reason a very much hotter place than Malden. Penrhyn is an island that is famous all over the South Sea world, and not unknown even in Europe. Its pearl-shell and pearls, its strange, wild, semi-amphibious natives, and its melancholy leper station, make it a marked spot upon the Pacific map; and a certain rather fictitious value attaching to its stamps has made the name of the island familiar to all stamp collectors at home. The general impression conveyed to the voyager from kinder and fairer islands is that Penrhyn is a place “at the back of God-speed,” a lonely, sultry, windy, eerie spot, desolate and remote beyond description.

It is an atoll island, consisting merely of a strip of land some couple of hundred yards in width, enclosing a splendid lagoon nine miles long. The land is white coral gravel; nothing grows on it but cocoanut and pandanus and a few insignificant creepers. Fruit, vegetables, flowers, there are none. The natives live entirely on cocoanut and fish. They are nominally Christianised, but the veneer of Christianity is wearing uncommonly thin in places. They are reckless and daring to a degree, notable even among Pacific Islanders. Any Penrhyn man will attack a shark single-handed in its own element, and kill it with the big knife he usually carries. They are, beyond comparison, the finest swimmers in the world; it is almost impossible to drown a Penrhyn Islander. He will swim all day as easily as he will walk. You may often meet him out fishing, miles from shore, without a boat, pushing in front of him a small plank that carries his bait, lines, and catch. Some of the fish he most fancies seldom come to the surface. To catch these he baits his line, dives, and swims about underneath the water for a minute or two at a time, trailing the bait after him, and rising to the surface as often as a fish takes it.

Of his pearl-diving exploits I shall speak later. The deadly surf that breaks upon the outer reef has no terrors for him. Among the small boys of the island there is a favourite feat known as “crossing a hundred waves,” which consists in diving through ninety-nine great rollers, just as they are about to break, and rushing triumphantly to shore on the back of the hundredth. The old warlike, quarrelsome character of the islanders—no doubt originally due to scarcity of food—still lurks concealed under an outward show of civility. Penrhyn was the only South Pacific Island I have visited where I did not care to walk alone in the bush without my little American revolver. The four or five white traders all keep firearms ready to hand in their stores. There has been no actual trouble of recent years, but there are narrow escapes from a free fight every now and then, and every man must hold himself ready for emergencies. It is only eight years since there was such an outbreak of hostilities in Penrhyn that a man-of-war had to be sent up to protect the traders.

I was kindly offered the use of a house during the week the Duchess spent in Penrhyn lagoon repairing sails and rigging, and generally refitting after the stormy weather that we had experienced on several occasions. But Penrhyn is rotten with undeclared leprosy, the water is not above suspicion, and flies abound in myriads. So I slept on the ship, and by day wandered about the desolate, thin, sun-smitten woods of the island, or flew over the green lagoon in one of the marvellously speedy pearling sloops of the traders. These boats are about a couple of tons each, with a boom as big, in proportion, as a grasshopper’s leg. They are as manageable as a motor car, and faster than most yachts. It is a wonderful sight to see them taking cargo out to the schooners, speeding like gulls over the water, and turning round in their tracks to fly back again as easily as any gull might do. Pearling was almost “off” at the time of the Duchess’s visit, since a good part of the lagoon was tabooed to allow the beds to recover.

The pearls are rather a minor consideration at Penrhyn. The shell is of beautiful quality, large and thick, with the much-valued golden edge; but pearls are not plentiful in it, and they are generally of moderate size. Some very fine ones have been found, however; and gems of ordinary value can always be picked up fairly cheaply from the divers. The Penrhyn lagoon is the property of the natives themselves, who sell the shell and the pearls to white traders. Christmas Island and some other Pacific pearling grounds are privately owned, and in these places there is a great deal of poaching done by the divers. The great buyers of pearls are the schooner captains. There are three or four schooners that call at Penrhyn now and then for cargo; and every captain has a nose for pearls like that of a trained hound for truffles. In the Paumotus, about Penrhyn, Christmas Island, and the Scillies (the Pacific Scillies, not those that are so familiarly known to English readers), they flit from island to island, following up the vagrant rumours of a fine pearl with infinite tact and patience, until they run it to ground at last, and (perhaps) clear a year’s income in a day by a lucky deal. San Francisco and Sydney are always ready to buy, and the typical Pacific captain, if he is just a bit of a buccaneer, is also a very keen man of business in the most modern sense of the word, and not at all likely to be cheated. Three native divers, famous for their deepwater feats, came out in a pearling sloop with us one afternoon, and gave a fine exhibition.

The bed over which we halted was about ninety feet under the surface. Our three divers stripped to a “pareo” apiece, and then, squatting down on the gunwale of the boat with their hands hanging over their knees, appeared to meditate. They were “taking their wind,” the white steersman informed me. After about five minutes of perfect stillness they suddenly got up and dived off the thwart. The rest of us fidgeted up and down the tiny deck, talked, speculated, and passed away the time for what seemed an extraordinarily long period. No one, unfortunately, had brought a watch; but the traders and schooner captains all agree in saying that the Penrhyn diver can stay under water for full three minutes; and it was quite evident that our men were showing off for the benefit of that almost unknown bird, the “wahiné papa.” At last, one after another, the dark heads popped up again, and the divers, each carrying a shell or two, swam back to the boat, got on board, and presented their catch to me with the easy grace and high-bred courtesy that are the birthright of all Pacific islanders—not at all embarrassed by the fact that all the clothes they wore would hardly have sufficed to make a Sunday suit for an equal number of pigeons.

As a general rule, the divers carry baskets, and fill them before coming up. Each man opens his own catch at once, and hunts through the shell for pearls. Usually he does not find any; now and then he gets a small grey pearl, 01 a decent white one, or a big irregular “baroque” pearl of the “new art” variety, and once in a month of Sundays he is rewarded by a large gleaming gem worth several hundred pounds, for which he will probably get only twenty or thirty.

Diving dresses are sometimes used in Penrhyn; but in such an irregular and risky manner that they are really more dangerous than the ordinary method. The suit is nothing but a helmet and jumper. No boots are worn, no clothing whatever on the legs, and there are no weights to preserve the diver’s balance. It sometimes happens—though wonderfully seldom—that the diver trips, falls, and turns upside down, the heavy helmet keeping him head-downwards until the air all rushes out under the jumper, and he is miserably suffocated. The air pump above is often carelessly worked in any case, and there is no recognised system of signals, except the jerk that means “Pull up.”

“They’re the most reckless devils on the face of the earth,” said a local trader. “Once let a man strike a good bed of shell, and he won’t leave go of it, not for Father Peter. He’ll stick down there all day, grabbin’ away in twenty fathom or more till he feels paralysis cornin’ on——”

“Paralysis?”

“Yes—they gets it, lots of’em. If you was to go down in twenty fathom—they can do five and twenty, but anything over is touch and go—and stay ’alf the day, you’d come up ’owling like anything, and not able to move. That’s the way it catches them; and then they must get some one to come and rub them with sea water all night long, and maybe they dies, and maybe they’re all right by morning. So then down they goes again, just the same as ever. Sometimes a man’ll be pulled up dead at the end of a day. How does that happen? Well, I allow it’s because he’s been workin’ at a big depth all day, and feels all right; and then, do you see, he’ll find somethin’ a bit extra below of him, in a holler like, and down he’ll go after it; and the extra fathom or two does the trick.

“Sharks? Well, I’ve seen you poppin’ at them from the deck of the Duchess, so you know as well as I do how many there are. Didn’t ’it them, even when the fin was up? That’s because you ’aven’t greased your bullet, I suppose. You want to, if the water isn’t to turn it aside. But about the divers? Oh! they don’t mind sharks, none of them, when they’ve got the dress on. Sharks is easy scared. You’ve only got to pull up your jumper a bit, and the air bubbles out and frightens them to fits. If you meet a big sting-ray, it’ll run its spine into you, and send the dress all to—I mean, spoil the dress, so’s the water comes in, and maybe it’ll stick the diver too. And the big devilfish is nasty; he’ll ’old you down to a rock but you can use your knife on him. The kara mauaa is the worst; the divers don’t like him. He’s not as big as a shark, but he’s downright wicked, and he’s a mouth on him as big as ’alf his body. If one comes along, he’ll bite an arm or leg off the man anyways, and eat ’im outright if he’s big enough to do it. Swordfish? Well, they don’t often come into the lagoon; it’s the fishing canoes outside they’ll go for. Yes, they’ll run a canoe and a man through at a blow easy enough: but they don’t often do it. If you wants a canoe, I’ll get you one; and you needn’t mind about the swordfish. As like as not they’ll never come near you.

“About the divin’?—well, I think the naked divin’ is very near as safe as the machine, takin’ all things. Worst of it is, if a kara mauaa comes along, the diver can’t wait his time till it goes. No, he doesn’t stab it—not inside the lagoon, because there’s too many of them there, and the blood would bring a whole pack about. He gets under a ledge of rock, and ’opes it’ll go away before his wind gives out. If he doesn’t, he gets eat.”

Did Schiller, or Edgar Allan Poe ever conjure up a picture more ghastly than that of a Penrhyn diver, caught like a rat in a trap by some huge, man-eating shark, or fierce kara mauaa—crouching in a cleft of the overhanging coral, under the dark green gloom of a hundred feet of water, with bursting lungs and cracking eyeballs, while the threatening bulk of his terrible enemy looms dark and steady, full in the road to life and air? A minute or more has been spent in the downward journey; another minute has passed in the agonised wait under the rock. Has he been seen? Will the creature move away now, while there is still time to return? The diver knows to a second how much time has passed; the third minute is on its way; but one goes up quicker than one comes down, and there is still hope. Two minutes and a half; it is barely possible now, but——— The sentinel of death glides forward; his cruel eyes, phosphorescent in the gloom, look right into the cleft where the wretched creature is crouching, with almost twenty seconds of life still left, but now not a shred of hope. A few more beats of the labouring pulse, a gasp from the tortured lungs, a sudden rush of silvery air bubbles, and the brown limbs collapse down out of the cleft like wreaths of seaweed. The shark has his own.

There is a “Molokai,” or Leper Island, some two miles out in the lagoon, where natives afflicted with leprosy are confined. The Resident Agent—one of the traders—broke the rigid quarantine of the Molokai one day so far as to let me land upon the island, although he did not allow me to approach nearer than ten or twelve yards to the lepers, or to leave the beach and go inland to the houses that were visible in the distance. Our boatmen ran the sloop close inshore, and carried the captain and myself through the shallow water, carefully setting us down on dry stones, but remaining in the sea themselves. A little dog that had come with the party sprang overboard, and began swimming to the shore. It was hurriedly seized by the scruff of its neck, and flung back into the boat. If it had set paw on the beach it could never have returned, but would have had to stay on the island for good.

Very lovely is the Molokai of Penrhyn; sadly beautiful this spot where so many wretched creatures have passed away from death in life to life in death. As we landed, the low golden rays of the afternoon sun were slanting through the pillared palm stems and quaintly beautiful pandanus fronds, across the snowy beach, and its trailing gold-flowered vines. The water of the lagoon, coloured like the gems in the gates of the Heavenly City, lapped softly on the shore; the perpetual trade wind poured through the swaying trees, shaking silvery gleams from the lacquered crests of the palms. In the distance, shadowed by a heavy pandanus grove, stood a few low brown huts. From the direction of these there came, hurrying down to the beach as we landed, four figures—three men and a woman. They had put on their best clothes when they saw the sloop making for the island. The woman wore a gaudy scarlet cotton frock; two of the men had white shirts and sailor’s trousers of blue dungaree—relics of a happier day, these, telling their own melancholy tale of bygone years of freedom on the wide Pacific. The third man wore a shirt and scarlet “pareo,” or kilt. Every face was lit up with delight at the sight of strangers from the schooner; above all, at the marvellous view of the wonderful “wahiné papa.” Why, even the men who lived free and happy on Penrhyn mainland did not get the chance of seeing such a show once in a lifetime! There she was, with two arms, and two legs, and a head, and a funny gown fastened in about the middle, and the most remarkable yellow shoes, and a ring, and a watch, which showed her to be extraordinarily wealthy, and a pale smooth face, not at all like a man’s, and hair that was brown, not black—how odd! It was evidently as good as a theatre, to the lonely prisoners!

Bright as all the faces of the lepers were at that exciting moment, one could not mistake the traces left by a more habitual expression of heavy sadness. The terrible disease, too, had set its well-known marks upon every countenance. None of those who came out to see us had lost any feature; but all the faces had the gross, thickened, unhuman look that leprosy stamps upon its victims. The woman kept her arm up over her head, to hide some sad disfigurement about her neck. One of the men walked slowly and painfully, through an affection of the hip and leg. There were nine lepers in all upon the island; but the other five either could not, or did not, wish to leave their huts, and the agent refused to break the quarantine any further than he had already done. What care the wretched creatures are able to give one another, therefore, what their homes are like, and how their lives are passed, I cannot tell. Three of the lepers were accompanied by their faithful dogs. They are all fond of pets, and must have either a dog or a cat. Of course the animals never leave the island. We exchanged a few remarks at the top of our voices, left a case of oranges (brought up from the Cook Islands, a thousand miles away), and returned to our boat. The case of oranges was eagerly seized upon, and conveyed into the bush.

“They will eat them up at once,” I said.

“Not they,” said one of our white men. “They’ll make them into orange beer to-night, and get jolly well drunk for once in their miserable lives. Glad to see the poor devils get a chance, say I.” And so—most immorally, no doubt—said the “wahiné papa” as well.

The lepers are fed from stores furnished by a small Government fund; and the trader who fulfils the very light duties of Resident Government Agent generally sends them over a share of any little luxury, in the way of oranges, limes, or yams, that may reach the island. None the less, their condition is most miserable, and one cannot but regard it as a crying scandal upon the great missionary organisations of the Pacific that nothing whatever is done for the lepers of these northern groups. The noble example of the late Father Damien, of Hawaii, and of the Franciscan Sisters who still live upon the Hawaiian Molokai, courting a martyr’s death to serve the victims of this terrible disease, seems to find no imitators in the islands evangelised by British missionaries. Godless, hopeless, and friendless, the lepers live and die alone. That their lives are immoral in the last degree, their religion, in spite of early teaching, almost a dead letter, is only to be expected. Penrhyn is not alone in this terrible scourge. Rakahanga, Manahiki, and Palmerston—all in the same part of the Pacific—are seriously affected by the disease. Palmerston I did not see; but I heard that there is one whole family of lepers there, and some stray cases as well.

The island belongs to the half-caste descendants (about 150 in number) of Masters, a “beachcomber” of the early days, who died a few years ago. These people are much alarmed at the appearance of leprosy, and have segregated the lepers on an island in the lagoon. They are anxious to have them removed to the Molokai at Penrhyn, since the family came originally from that island; but no schooner will undertake to carry them. In Rakahanga, the lepers are not quarantined in any way, but wander about among the people. There are only a few cases as yet; but the number will certainly increase. This may also be said of Manahiki, for although very serious cases are isolated there, the lepers are allowed, in the earlier stages, to mix freely with every one else, and even to prepare the food of a whole family. The New Zealand Government, it is believed, will shortly pass a law compelling the removal of all these cases to the Molokai at Penrhyn. No Government, however, can alleviate the wretched condition of these unfortunate prisoners, once sent to the island. That remains for private charity and devotion.

A God-forsaken, God-forgotten-looking place is Penrhyn, all in all. When sunset falls upon the great desolate lagoon, and the tall cocoanuts of the island stand up jet black against the stormy yellow sky in one unbroken rampart of tossing spears, and the endless sweep of shadowy beach is empty of all human life, and clear of every sound save the long, monotonous, never-ceasing cry of the trade wind in the trees, it needs but little imagination to fancy strange creatures creeping through the gloom of the forest—strange, ghastly stories of murder and despair whispering in the gathering night. Death in every form is always near to Penrhyn; death in the dark waters of the lagoon, death from the white terror of leprosy, and death at the hands of men but quarter civilised, whose fingers are always itching for the ready knife. And at the lonely sunset hour, when old memories of the life and light of great cities, of welcoming windows shining red and warm through grey, cold northern gloamings come back to the wanderer’s mind in vivid contrast, the very wings of the “Shadow cloaked from head to foot” seem to shake in full sight above these desolate shores. Yet, perhaps, the intolerable blaze of full noon upon the windward beaches strikes a note of even deeper loneliness and distance. The windward side of Penrhyn is uninhabited; the sea that breaks in blinding white foam upon the untrodden strand, wreathed with trailing vines of vivid green, is never broken by a sail. The sun beats down through the palm and pandanus leaves so fiercely that the whole of the seaward bush is but a shadeless blaze of green fire. Nothing stirs, nothing cries; the earth is silent, the sea empty; and a barrier of thousands of long sea miles, steadily built up, day by day, through many weeks, and only to be passed again by the slow demolishing, brick by brick, of the same great wall, lies between us and the world where people live. Here there is no life, only an endless dream; not as in the happy southern islands, a gentle sunrise dream of such surpassing sweetness that the sleeper asks nothing more than to dream on thus forever; but a dark-hour dream of loneliness, desolation, and utter remoteness, from which the dreamer cannot awaken, even if he would. Why do men—white men, with some ability and some education—live in these faraway infertile islands? There is no answer to the problem, even from the men themselves. They came, they stayed, they do not go away—why? they do not know. That is all.

The land extent of Penrhyn is only three square miles, though the enclosed lagoon is a hundred. The population is little over four hundred souls; there are three or four white traders, as a rule. There is no resident white missionary. The island is one of those that have been annexed by New Zealand, and is therefore British property. It is governed by the Resident Commissioner of the Cook group, who visits it about once a year.

Until two or three years ago, the Penrhyn Islanders used to keep their dead in the houses, hanging up the corpse, wrapped in matting, until it was completely decayed. This hideous practice was put an end to by the Representatives of British Government, much to the grief of the natives, who found it hard to part with the bodies of their friends, and leave them away in the graveyard they were bidden to choose. As the best substitute for the old practice, they now build little houses, some four feet high, over the tombs of their friends, and live in these houses for many months after a death, sitting and sleeping and even eating on the tomb that is covered by the thatch or iron roof of the grave-house. The graveyard is in consequence a strange and picturesque sight, almost like a village of some pigmy folk. A few plain concrete graves stand above the remains of white men who have died in the island, and one headstone is carved with the initials—not the name—of a woman. There is a story about that lonely grave; it was told to me as I lingered in the little “God’s Acre” at sunset, with the light falling low between the palms and the lonely evening wind beginning to wail from the sea.

The woman was the wife of a schooner captain, a man of good family and connections, who liked the wild roving life of the Pacific, yet managed to retain a number of acquaintances of his own class in Auckland and Tahiti. His wife was young and handsome, and had many friends of her own. On one of the schooner’s visits to Penrhyn, the man was taken suddenly ill, and died in a very short time, leaving his wife alone. It seems that at first she was bewildered by her loss, and stayed on in the island, not knowing what to do, but before many months she had solved the problem after a fashion that horrified all the whites—she married a Penrhyn native! good-looking and attractive, but three-quarters savage, and left the island with him.

Several children were born to the pair, but they were given to the husband’s people. At last he took a native partner, and deserted his English wife. She left the islands, and went down to Auckland; but her story had travelled before her, and Auckland society closed its doors. To Tahiti, where morals are easy, and no one frowns upon the union, temporary or permanent, of the white man and the brown woman, she went, hoping to be received as in former days. But even Papeete, “the sink of the Pacific,” would have none of the white woman who had married a brown man. Northwards once more, to lonely Penrhyn, the broken-hearted woman went, wishing only to die, far from the eyes of her own world that had driven her out. A schooner captain, who called there now and then, cast eyes upon her—for she was still young and retained much of her beauty—and asked her, at last, if she would become his wife, and so redeem in some degree her position; but she had neither heart nor wish to live longer, so she sent the kindly sailor away, and soon afterwards closed her eyes for ever on the blue Pacific and the burning sands, the brown lover who had betrayed her, and the white lover who came too late. The traders buried her, and kindly left her grave without a name; only the initials of that which she had borne in her first marriage, and the date of her death. So, quiet and forgotten at last, lies in lonely Penrhyn the woman who sinned against her race and found no forgiveness.

It was a relief to leave Penrhyn, with all its gloomy associations, and see the schooner’s head set for the open sea and merry Manahiki. But we seemed to have brought ill-luck away with us, for there was what the captain called “mean weather” before we came within hail of land again, and the Duchess got some more knocking about.

It was on account of this that Neo, our native bo’sun, hit an innocent A.B. over the head with a belaying-pin one afternoon, and offered to perform the same service for any of the rest of the crew who might require it. The men had been singing mission hymns as they ran about the deck pulling and hauling—not exactly out of sheer piety, but because some of the hymns, with good rousing choruses, made excellent chanties. They were hauling to the tune of “Pull for the shore, brothers!” when a squall hit the ship, and out of the fifteen agitated minutes that followed, the Duchess emerged minus her jib-boom. When things had quieted down, Neo started to work with the belaying-, pin, until he was stopped, when he offered, as a sufficient explanation, the following:

“Those men, they sing something made bad luck, I think, jib-boom he break. Suppose they sing, ‘Pull for ‘em shore’ some other time, I break their head, that I telling them!”

The next time a chanty was wanted, “Hold the Fort!” took the place of the obnoxious tune, and Neo’s lessons were not called for.

And so, in a day or two we came to Rakahanga and Manahiki (Reirson and Humphrey Islands), and stopped there for another day or two, before we spread our wings like the swallows, to fleet southward again.

It was certainly globe-trotting, not proper travelling. To flit from group to group, taking in cargo, and then hurrying off again, is the way not to understand the places one sees, and I was more than half inclined to leave the Duchess here, and stop over for a month or two on the chance of another schooner turning up. But the dinner that the solitary trader ate when he came on board made me change my mind. He looked like a man half-famished, and he certainly acted like one. There was hardly a thing on the island to eat at present, he said; the natives had only enough fish for themselves, and the turtle weren’t coming and his stores were almost out, and he had been living on biscuit and cocoanuts for weeks. There was leprosy in both islands, and one did not dare to touch native pork or fowl. On the whole, I thought I would be contented to “globe-trot,” on this occasion, and see what I could in a day or two.

The islands are about twenty-five miles apart, and very much like one another. They each own an area of about two square miles, and a population of some four hundred natives. And there is nothing in the whole Pacific prettier.

Coming up to Manahiki, one sees first of all a snowy shore and a belt of green tossing palms, just like any other island. As the ship coasts along, however, making for the village, the palm-trees break and open out here and there, and through the break one sees—paradise! There is a great sheet of turquoise-green water inside, and on the water an archipelago of the most exquisite little plumy, palmy islets, each ringed round with its own pearly girdle of coral sand. Every gap in the trees frames in a picture more lovely than the last—and, as we approach the village, the dainty little brown island canoes that all the Pacific wanderers know so well, begin to dot the jewel-bright surface of the inner lake, and gleams of white and rose and scarlet dresses, worn by the rowers of the tiny craft, sparkle on the water like gems. At last the vessel comes to anchor before a wide white, sloping beach, with brown-roofed huts clustering behind, and we reached merry Manahiki.

The island has long enjoyed a reputation for peculiar innocence and simplicity, coupled with piety of a marked description. Well, one does not care to destroy any one’s illusions, so the less said about Manahiki’s innocence and simplicity the better. The islanders are, at all events, a kindly and a cheerful people, and their home is the neatest and best kept island in the Pacific. A palm-bordered road of finest white sand, beautifully kept, and four miles long, runs without a bend or break from one end of the island to the other—this portion of the atoll forming a separate island, and containing most of the scanty population. The village stands about midway—a collection of quaint little houses deeply thatched with plaited pan-danus leaf, and walled with small, straight saplings set side by side and admitting a good deal of light and air. The houses are unwindowed as a rule. Rakahanga, the sister island, is extremely like Manahiki in formation and architecture. It, however, enjoys the additional advantage of a jail, which is built of crossed saplings, looks much like a huge bird-cage, and certainly could not confine any one who made the smallest attempt to get out. But, as criminals are unknown in these islands, and petty offences are visited by fine instead of imprisonment, the jail is not expected to do real service, being merely a bit of “swagger,” like the white-washed stone houses possessed by one or two wealthy natives, who, Pacific fashion, never think of living in them.

Within, the ordinary houses are extremely simple. The floor of white coral gravel reflects and intensifies the soft diffused light that enters through the walls. There may be a native bedstead, laced across with, “sinnet”—plaited cocoanut fibre—and provided with a gay patchwork quilt, and a few large soft mats of pandanus leaf, ingeniously split, dried, and plaited. There will certainly be a pile of camphor-wood trunks, containing the clothes of the household; a dozen or so cocoanut shells, for drinking and eating purposes; a few sheath-knives, and a small quantity of much-cherished crockery. In a corner, you may find a heap of flying-fish ready cleaned for baking in the oven-pit outside, and a number of green, unhusked cocoanuts, for drinking. You may possibly see some ship’s biscuits, too, bought from the one white resident of the island, a trader and there will also be some lumps of white, soft pith, shaped like large buns—the “sponge” or kernel of the old cocoanut, which grows and fills up the shell after the water has dried away, and the nut commenced to sprout. But there will be no bananas, no oranges, no mangoes, granadillas, pineapples, yam, taro or ti root, bread-fruit or maupei chestnuts, as in the fertile volcanic islands. Manahiki is a coral island, pure and simple, and has no soil at all, nothing but sand and white gravel, out of which the cocoa-palm and a few small timber trees spring, in a manner that seems almost miraculous to those accustomed to the rich, fertile soil of Raratonga or Tahiti. Cocoanut and fish are the food of the Manahikian, varied by an occasional gorge of turtle-meat, and a feast of pig and fowl on very great occasions. There is, therefore, not much work to do in the island, and there are few distractions from the outside world, since trading schooners only call two or three times a year at best. Some copra-drying is done and a few toy canoes, baskets, and other curiosities are made, to find a precarious sale when a schooner comes in and the captain is inclined to speculate.

But time never hangs heavy on the Manahikian’s hands. He is the most accomplished dancer and singer in the whole South Pacific, and the island is inordinately vain of this distinction. All South Sea islanders sing constantly, but in Manahiki, the tunes are much sweeter and more definite than in most other islands; and the impromptu variations of the “seconds” are really wonderful. The voices, too, are exceptionally good. The women’s are rather hard and piercing, but those of the men are often magnificent. The time is as perfect as if beaten out by a metronome, and false notes are almost unknown.

Men and women alike seem incapable of fatigue when singing. The mere white man will feel tired and husky after going through the choruses of The Messiah or The Creation. A Manahikian, if he were acquainted with oratorio music, would run through both, and then “take on” Tannhauser, following up with another Wagnerian opera, and perhaps a cantata thrown in. By this time, it would be dusk, and the chorus would probably stop to eat a cartload of cocoanuts before beginning on the whole Nibelungen Ring cycle for the night. About midnight the Resident Agent, a clever half-caste, who has European ideas about the value of sleep, would probably send out the village policeman with a stick to induce the singers to go to bed; and, quite unfatigued, they would rise up from their cross-legged squatting posture on the ground, and go, remonstrant, but compelled.

Happily for the Resident Agent and the trader, however, European music is not known in Manahiki, and when a singing fit seizes the people, they can generally be stopped after about a day, unless somebody has composed something very new and very screaming. If the two ends of the village have begun one of their musical competitions, there may also be difficulty in bringing it to a period; for the rival choruses will sing against each other with cracking throats and swelling veins, hour after hour, till both sides are completely exhausted.

Dancing, however, is the Manahikian’s chief reason for existing. The Manahikian dances are infinitely superior to those of most other islands, which consist almost altogether of a wriggle belonging to the danse du ventre family, and a little waving of the arms. The Manahiki dance has the wriggle for its groundwork, but there are many steps and variations. Some of the steps are so rapid that the eye can hardly follow them, and a camera shutter which works up to 1/100 of a second does not give a sharp result. The men are ranged in a long row, with the women opposite; there is a good deal of wheeling and turning about in brisk military style, advancing, retreating, and spinning round. The men dance very much on the extreme tips of their toes (they are, of course, barefooted) and keep up this painful posture for an extraordinary length of time. Every muscle in the whole body seems to be worked in the “fancy” steps; and there is a remarkable effect of general dislocation, due to turning the knees and elbows violently out and in.

The women, like Miss Mercy Pecksniff, seem chiefly to favour the “shape and skip” style of locomotion. There is a good deal of both these, a great deal of wriggle, and plenty of arm action, about their dancing. They manoeuvre their long, loose robes about, not at all ungracefully, and do some neat step-dancing, rather inferior, however, to that of the men.

Both men and women dress specially for the dance, so the festival that was organised to greet our arrivals took some time to get up, as all the beaux and belles of the village had to hurry home and dress. The women put on fresh cotton loose gowns, of brilliant pink, purple, yellow, white and green, oiled their hair with cocoanut oil scented with the fragrant white tieré flower, and hung long chains of red and yellow berries about their necks. About their waists they tied the dancing girdle, never worn except on these occasions, and made of twisted green ferns. The men took off their cool, easy everyday costume, of a short cotton kilt and gay coloured singlet, and attired themselves in shirts and heavy stuff trousers (bought from the trader at enormous expense, and considered the acme of smartness). Both sexes crowned themselves with the curious dancing headdress, which looks exactly like the long-rayed halo of a saint, and is made by splitting a palm frond down the middle, and fastening it in a half-circle about the back of the head.

The music then struck up and the dancers began to assemble. The band consisted of two youths, one of whom clicked a couple of sticks together, while the other beat a drum. This does not sound attractive; but as a matter of fact, the Manahiki castanet and drum music is curiously weird and thrilling, and arouses a desire for dancing even in the prosaic European. On board our schooner, lying half a mile from shore, the sound of the measured click and throb used to set every foot beating time on deck, while the native crew frankly dropped whatever they were at, and began to caper wildly. Close at hand, the music is even more impressive; no swinging waltz thundered out by a whole Hungarian band gets “into the feet” more effectively than the Manahiki drum.

A much-cherished possession is this drum. It is carved and ornamented with sinnet, and topped with a piece of bladder; it seems to have been hollowed out of a big log, with considerable labour. The skill of the drummers is really remarkable. No drumsticks are used, only fingers, yet the sound carries for miles. While drumming, the hands rise and fall so fast as to lose all outline to the eye; the drummer nods and beats with his foot in an ecstasy of delight at his own performance; the air is full of the throbbing, rhythmical, intensely savage notes. The dancers at first hesitate, begin and stop, and begin again, laugh and retreat and come forward undecidedly. By-and-by the dancing fervour seizes one or two; they commence to twirl and to stamp wildly, winnowing the air with their arms. Others join in, the two rows are completed, and Manahiki is fairly started for the day. Hour after hour they dance, streaming with perspiration in the burning sun, laughing and singing and skipping. The green fern girdles wither into shreds of crackling brown, the palm haloes droop, the berry necklaces break and scatter, but on they go. The children join in the dance now and then, but their small frames weary soon; the parents are indefatigable.

Perhaps both ends of the settlement are dancing; if that is so, the competitive element is sure to come in sooner or later, for the feeling between the two is very like that between the collegers and oppidans at Eton, each despising the other heartily, and ready on all occasions to find a cause for a fight. They will dance against each other now, striving with every muscle to twinkle the feet quicker, stand higher on the tips of the toes, wriggle more snakily, than their rivals. Evening comes, and they are still dancing. With the night, the dance degenerates into something very like an orgy, and before dawn, to avoid scandal, a powerful hint from the native pastor and the agent causes the ball to break up.

Do the dancers go to bed now, lie down on their piled up sleeping mats, and compose themselves to slumber? By no means. Most of them get torches, and go out on the reef in the dark to spear fish. Cooking fires are lighted, and there is a hurried gorge in the houses; everywhere, in the breaking dawn, one hears the chuck-chuck of the husking-stick preparing cocoanuts, and smells the savoury odour of cooking fish. The dancers have not eaten for at least twenty-four hours, perhaps more. But this feast does not last long, for just as the sun begins to shoot long scarlet rays up through the palm trees, some one begins to beat the drum again. Immediately the whole village pours out into the open, and the dance is all on again, as energetic as ever. The trading schooner is three weeks over-due, and the copra on which the island income depends is not half dried; there is not a fancy basket or a pandanus hat ready for the trader; the washing of every house is hopelessly behind, and nobody has had a decent meal since the day before yesterday. No matter: the Manahikians are dancing, and it would take an earthquake to stop them.

Late in the second day, they will probably give out and take a night’s rest. But it is about even chances that they begin again the next morning. In any case, no day passes in Manahiki or Rakahanga without a dance in the evening. Regularly at sunset the drum begins to beat, the fern girdles are tied on (relics, these, of heathen days when girdles of grass or fern were all that the dancers wore), and palm haloes are twisted about the glossy black hair, and the island gives itself up to enjoyment for the evening.

There is a dancing-master in Manahiki, a most important potentate, who does nothing whatever but invent new dances, and teach the youth of the village both the old dances and the new.

We stopped overnight at the island, so I had time for a good walk along the beautiful coral avenue, which is indeed one of the loveliest things in the island world. It was Sunday, and all the natives were worshipping in the exceedingly ugly and stuffy concrete church, under the guidance of the native pastor, so I had the place almost to myself. Far away from everywhere, sitting in a ruinous little hut under the trees by the inner lagoon, I found a lonely old man, crippled and unable to walk. He was waiting until the others came back from church, staring solemnly into the lagoon the while, and playing with a heap of cocoanut shells. By-and-by he would probably rouse up, drag himself into the hut, and busy himself getting ready the dinner for the family against their return home, for he was an industrious old man, and liked to make himself useful so far as he could, and his relatives were very glad of what small services he could render in washing and cooking.

What was the matter with the poor old man? He was a leper!

That is the way of the islands, and no white rule can altogether put a stop to it. The half-caste who acts as agent for the Government of New Zealand had hunted out a very bad case of leprosy a year or two before, and insisted on quarantining it in a lonely part of the bush. This was all very well, but the leper had a pet cock, which he wanted to take with him, and the agent’s heart was not hard enough to refuse. Now the leper, being fed without working, and having nothing to do, found the time hanging heavy on his hands, so he taught the cock to dance—report says, to dance the real Manahiki dances—and the fame of the wondrous bird spread all over the island, and as far as Rakahanga, so that the natives made continual parties to see the creature perform, and quarantine became a dead letter. Still the agent had not the heart to take the cock away, but when he saw the leper’s end was near, he watched, and as soon as he heard the man was dead, he hurried to the quarantined hut, set it on fire, and immediately slaughtered the cock. An hour later, half the island was out at the hut, looking for the bird—but they came too late.

We have been two days at merry Manahiki, and the cargo is in, and the Captain has ordered the Duchess—looking shockingly cock-nosed without her great jib-boom—to be put under sail again. As the booms begin to rattle, and the sails to rise against the splendid rose and daffodil of the Pacific sunset, Shalli, our Cingalese steward, leans sadly over the rail, listening to the thrilling beat of the drum that is just beginning to throb across the still waters of the lagoon, now that evening and its merrymaking are coming on once more.

“He plenty good place, that,” says Shalli mournfully. “All the time dancing, singing, eating, no working—he all same place as heaven. O my God, I plenty wish I stopping there, I no wanting any heaven then!”

With this pious aspiration in our ears, we spread our white wings once more—for the last time. Raratonga lies before us now, and from Raratonga the steamers go, and the mails and tourists come, and the doors of the great world open for us again. So, good-bye to the life of the schooner.