"YAH! YAH! YAH!"
He was a whiskey-guzzling Scotchman, and he downed his whiskey neat,
beginning with his first tot punctually at six in the morning, and
thereafter repeating it at regular intervals throughout the day till
bedtime, which was usually midnight. He slept but five hours out of
the twenty-four, and for the remaining nineteen hours he was quietly
and decently drunk. During the eight weeks I spent with him on Oolong
Atoll, I never saw him draw a sober breath. In fact, his sleep was so
short that he never had time to sober up. It was the most beautiful
and orderly perennial drunk I have ever observed.
McAllister was his name. He was an old man, and very shaky on his
pins. His hand trembled as with a palsy, especially noticeable when he
poured his whiskey, though I never knew him to spill a drop. He had
been twenty-eight years in Melanesia, ranging from German New Guinea
to the German Solomons, and so thoroughly had he become identified
with that portion of the world, that he habitually spoke in that
bastard lingo called "bech-de-mer." Thus, in conversation with me, SUN
HE COME UP meant sunrise; KAI-KAI HE STOP meant that dinner was
served; and BELLY BELONG ME WALK ABOUT meant that he was sick at his
stomach. He was a small man, and a withered one, burned inside and
outside by ardent spirits and ardent sun. He was a cinder, a bit of a
clinker of a man, a little animated clinker, not yet quite cold, that
moved stiffly and by starts and jerks like an automaton. A gust of
wind would have blown him away. He weighed ninety pounds.
But the immense thing about him was the power with which he ruled.
Oolong Atoll was one hundred and forty miles in circumference. One
steered by compass course in its lagoon. It was populated by five
thousand Polynesians, all strapping men and women, many of them
standing six feet in height and weighing a couple of hundred pounds.
Oolong was two hundred and fifty miles from the nearest land. Twice a
year a little schooner called to collect copra. The one white man on
Oolong was McAllister, petty trader and unintermittent guzzler; and he
ruled Oolong and its six thousand savages with an iron hand. He said
come, and they came, go, and they went. They never questioned his will
nor judgment. He was cantankerous as only an aged Scotchman can be,
and interfered continually in their personal affairs. When Nugu, the
king's daughter, wanted to marry Haunau from the other end of the
atoll, her father said yes; but McAllister said no, and the marriage
never came off. When the king wanted to buy a certain islet in the
lagoon from the chief priest, McAllister said no. The king was in debt
to the Company to the tune of 180,000 cocoanuts, and until that was
paid he was not to spend a single cocoanut on anything else.
And yet the king and his people did not love McAllister. In truth,
they hated him horribly, and, to my knowledge, the whole population,
with the priests at the head, tried vainly for three months to pray
him to death. The devil-devils they sent after him were awe-inspiring,
but since McAllister did not believe in devil-devils, they were
without power over him. With drunken Scotchmen all signs fail. They
gathered up scraps of food which had touched his lips, an empty
whiskey bottle, a cocoanut from which he had drunk, and even his
spittle, and performed all kinds of deviltries over them. But
McAllister lived on. His health was superb. He never caught fever; nor
coughs nor colds; dysentery passed him by; and the malignant ulcers
and vile skin diseases that attack blacks and whites alike in that
climate never fastened upon him. He must have been so saturated with
alcohol as to defy the lodgment of germs. I used to imagine them
falling to the ground in showers of microscopic cinders as fast as
they entered his whiskey-sodden aura. No one loved him, not even
germs, while he loved only whiskey, and still he lived.
I was puzzled. I could not understand six thousand natives putting up
with that withered shrimp of a tyrant. It was a miracle that he had
not died suddenly long since. Unlike the cowardly Melanesians, the
people were high-stomached and warlike. In the big graveyard, at head
and feet of the graves, were relics of past sanguinary
history--blubber-spades, rusty old bayonets and cutlasses, copper
bolts, rudder-irons, harpoons, bomb guns, bricks that could have come
from nowhere but a whaler's trying-out furnace, and old brass pieces
of the sixteenth century that verified the traditions of the early
Spanish navigators. Ship after ship had come to grief on Oolong. Not
thirty years before, the whaler BLENNERDALE, running into the lagoon
for repair, had been cut off with all hands. In similar fashion had
the crew of the GASKET, a sandalwood trader, perished. There was a big
French bark, the TOULON, becalmed off the atoll, which the islanders
boarded after a sharp tussle and wrecked in the Lipau Passage, the
captain and a handful of sailors escaping in the longboat. Then there
were the Spanish pieces, which told of the loss of one of the early
explorers. All this, of the vessels named, is a matter of history, and
is to be found in the SOUTH PACIFIC SAILING DIRECTORY. But that there
was other history, unwritten, I was yet to learn. In the meantime I
puzzled why six thousand primitive savages let one degenerate Scotch
despot live.
One hot afternoon McAllister and I sat on the veranda looking out over
the lagoon, with all its wonder of jeweled colors. At our backs,
across the hundred yards of palm-studded sand, the outer surf roared
on the reef. It was dreadfully warm. We were in four degree south
latitude and the sun was directly overhead, having crossed the Line a
few days before on its journey south. There was no wind--not even a
catspaw. The season of the southeast trade was drawing to an early
close, and the northwest monsoon had not yet begun to blow.
"They can't dance worth a damn," said McAllister.
I had happened to mention that the Polynesian dances were superior to
the Papuan, and this McAllister had denied, for no other reason than
his cantankerousness. But it was too hot to argue, and I said nothing.
Besides, I had never seen the Oolong people dance.
"I'll prove it to you," he announced, beckoning to the black New
Hanover boy, a labor recruit, who served as cook and general house
servant. "Hey, you, boy, you tell 'm one fella king come along me."
The boy departed, and back came the prime minister, perturbed, ill at
ease, and garrulous with apologetic explanation. In short, the king
slept, and was not to be disturbed.
"King he plenty strong fella sleep," was his final sentence.
McAllister was in such a rage that the prime minister incontinently
fled, to return with the king himself. They were a magnificent pair,
the king especially, who must have been all of six feet three inches
in height. His features had the eagle-like quality that is so
frequently found in those of the North American Indian. He had been
molded and born to rule. His eyes flashed as he listened, but right
meekly he obeyed McAllister's command to fetch a couple of hundred of
the best dancers, male and female, in the village. And dance they did,
for two mortal hours, under that broiling sun. They did not love him
for it, and little he cared, in the end dismissing them with abuse and
sneers.
The abject servility of those magnificent savages was terrifying. How
could it be? What was the secret of his rule? More and more I puzzled
as the days went by, and though I observed perpetual examples of his
undisputed sovereignty, never a clew was there as to how it was.
One day I happened to speak of my disappointment in failing to trade
for a beautiful pair of orange cowries. The pair was worth five pounds
in Sydney if it was worth a cent. I had offered two hundred sticks of
tobacco to the owner, who had held out for three hundred. When I
casually mentioned the situation, McAllister immediately sent for the
man, took the shells from him, and turned them over to me. Fifty
sticks were all he permitted me to pay for them. The man accepted the
tobacco and seemed overjoyed at getting off so easily. As for me, I
resolved to keep a bridle on my tongue in the future. And still I
mulled over the secret of McAllister's power. I even went to the
extent of asking him directly, but all he did was to cock one eye,
look wise, and take another drink.
One night I was out fishing in the lagoon with Oti, the man who had
been mulcted of the cowries. Privily, I had made up to him an
additional hundred and fifty sticks, and he had come to regard me with
a respect that was almost veneration, which was curious, seeing that
he was an old man, twice my age at least.
"What name you fella kanaka all the same pickaninny?" I began on him.
"This fella trader he one fella. You fella kanaka plenty fella too
much. You fella kanaka just like 'm dog--plenty fright along that
fella trader. He no eat you, fella. He no get 'm teeth along him. What
name you too much fright?"
"S'pose plenty fella kanaka kill 'm?" he asked.
"He die," I retorted. "You fella kanaka kill 'm plenty fella white man
long time before. What name you fright this fella white man?"
"Yes, we kill 'm plenty," was his answer. "My word! Any amount! Long
time before. One time, me young fella too much, one big fella ship he
stop outside. Wind he no blow. Plenty fella kanaka we get 'm canoe,
plenty fella canoe, we go catch 'm that fella ship. My word--we catch
'm big fella fight. Two, three white men shoot like hell. We no
fright. We come alongside, we go up side, plenty fella, maybe I think
fifty-ten (five hundred). One fella white Mary (woman) belong that
fella ship. Never before I see 'm white Mary. Bime by plenty white man
finish. One fella skipper he no die. Five fella, six fella white man
no die. Skipper he sing out. Some fella white man he fight. Some fella
white man he lower away boat. After that, all together over the side
they go. Skipper he sling white Mary down. After that they washee
(row) strong fella plenty too much. Father belong me, that time he
strong fella. He throw 'm one fella spear. That fella spear he go in
one side that white Mary. He no stop. My word, he go out other side
that fella Mary. She finish. Me no fright. Plenty kanaka too much no
fright."
Old Oti's pride had been touched, for he suddenly stripped down his
lava-lava and showed me the unmistakable scar of a bullet. Before I
could speak, his line ran out suddenly. He checked it and attempted to
haul in, but found that the fish had run around a coral branch.
Casting a look of reproach at me for having beguiled him from his
watchfulness, he went over the side, feet first, turning over after he
got under and following his line down to bottom. The water was ten
fathoms. I leaned over and watched the play of his feet, growing dim
and dimmer, as they stirred the wan phosphorescence into ghostly
fires. Ten fathoms--sixty feet--it was nothing to him, an old man,
compared with the value of a hook and line. After what seemed five
minutes, though it could not have been more than a minute, I saw him
flaming whitely upward. He broke surface and dropped a ten pound rock
cod into the canoe, the line and hook intact, the latter still fast in
the fish's mouth.
"It may be," I said remorselessly. "You no fright long ago. You plenty
fright now along that fella trader."
"Yes, plenty fright," he confessed, with an air of dismissing the
subject. For half an hour we pulled up our lines and flung them out in
silence. Then small fish-sharks began to bite, and after losing a hook
apiece, we hauled in and waited for the sharks to go their way.
"I speak you true," Oti broke into speech, "then you savve we fright
now."
I lighted up my pipe and waited, and the story that Oti told me in
atrocious bech-de-mer I here turn into proper English. Otherwise, in
spirit and order of narrative, the tale is as it fell from Oti's lips.
"It was after that that we were very proud. We had fought many times
with the strange white men who live upon the sea, and always we had
beaten them. A few of us were killed, but what was that compared with
the stores of wealth of a thousand thousand kinds that we found on the
ships? And then one day, maybe twenty years ago, or twenty-five, there
came a schooner right through the passage and into the lagoon. It was
a large schooner with three masts. She had five white men and maybe
forty boat's crew, black fellows from New Guinea and New Britain; and
she had come to fish beche-de-mer. She lay at anchor across the lagoon
from here, at Pauloo, and her boats scattered out everywhere, making
camps on the beaches where they cured the beche-de-mer. This made them
weak by dividing them, for those who fished here and those on the
schooner at Pauloo were fifty miles apart, and there were others
farther away still.
"Our king and headmen held council, and I was one in the canoe that
paddled all afternoon and all night across the lagoon, bringing word
to the people of Pauloo that in the morning we would attack the
fishing camps at the one time and that it was for them to take the
schooner. We who brought the word were tired with the paddling, but we
took part in the attack. On the schooner were two white men, the
skipper and the second mate, with half a dozen black boys. The skipper
with three boys we caught on shore and killed, but first eight of us
the skipper killed with his two revolvers. We fought close together,
you see, at hand grapples.
"The noise of our fighting told the mate what was happening, and he
put food and water and a sail in the small dingy, which was so small
that it was no more than twelve feet long. We came down upon the
schooner, a thousand men, covering the lagoon with our canoes. Also,
we were blowing conch shells, singing war songs, and striking the
sides of the canoes with our paddles. What chance had one white man
and three black boys against us? No chance at all, and the mate knew
it.
"White men are hell. I have watched them much, and I am an old man
now, and I understand at last why the white men have taken to
themselves all the islands in the sea. It is because they are hell.
Here are you in the canoe with me. You are hardly more than a boy. You
are not wise, for each day I tell you many things you do not know.
When I was a little pickaninny, I knew more about fish and the ways of
fish than you know now. I am an old man, but I swim down to the bottom
of the lagoon, and you cannot follow me. What are you good for,
anyway? I do not know, except to fight. I have never seen you fight,
yet I know that you are like your brothers and that you will fight
like hell. Also, you are a fool, like your brothers. You do not know
when you are beaten. You will fight until you die, and then it will be
too late to know that you are beaten.
"Now behold what this mate did. As we came down upon him, covering the
sea and blowing our conches, he put off from the schooner in the small
boat, along with the three black boys, and rowed for the passage.
There again he was a fool, for no wise man would put out to sea in so
small a boat. The sides of it were not four inches above the water.
Twenty canoes went after him, filled with two hundred young men. We
paddled five fathoms while his black boys were rowing one fathom. He
had no chance, but he was a fool. He stood up in the boat with a
rifle, and he shot many times. He was not a good shot, but as we drew
close many of us were wounded and killed. But still he had no chance.
"I remember that all the time he was smoking a cigar. When we were
forty feet away and coming fast, he dropped the rifle, lighted a stick
of dynamite with the cigar, and threw it at us. He lighted another and
another, and threw them at us very rapidly, many of them. I know now
that he must have split the ends of the fuses and stuck in match
heads, because they lighted so quickly. Also, the fuses were very
short. Sometimes the dynamite sticks went off in the air, but most of
them went off in the canoes. And each time they went off in a canoe,
that canoe was finished. Of the twenty canoes, the half were smashed
to pieces. The canoe I was in was so smashed, and likewise the two men
who sat next to me. The dynamite fell between them. The other canoes
turned and ran away. Then that mate yelled, Yah! Yah! Yah!' at us.
Also he went at us again with his rifle, so that many were killed
through the back as they fled away. And all the time the black boys in
the boat went on rowing. You see, I told you true, that mate was hell.
"Nor was that all. Before he left the schooner, he set her on fire,
and fixed up all the powder and dynamite so that it would go off at
one time. There were hundreds of us on board, trying to put out the
fire, heaving up water from overside, when the schooner blew up. So
that all we had fought for was lost to us, besides many more of us
being killed. Sometimes, even now, in my old age, I have bad dreams in
which I hear that mate yell, Yah! Yah! Yah!' In a voice of thunder he
yells, Yah! Yah! Yah!' But all those in the fishing camps were killed.
"The mate went out of the passage in his little boat, and that was the
end of him we made sure, for how could so small a boat, with four men
in it, live on the ocean? A month went by, and then, one morning,
between two rain squalls, a schooner sailed in through our passage and
dropped anchor before the village. The king and the headmen made big
talk, and it was agreed that we would take the schooner in two or
three days. In the meantime, as it was our custom always to appear
friendly, we went off to her in canoes, bringing strings of cocoanuts,
fowls, and pigs, to trade. But when we were alongside, many canoes of
us, the men on board began to shoot us with rifles, and as we paddled
away I saw the mate who had gone to sea in the little boat spring upon
the rail and dance and yell, Yah! Yah! Yah!'
"That afternoon they landed from the schooner in three small boats
filled with white men. They went right through the village, shooting
every man they saw. Also they shot the fowls and pigs. We who were not
killed got away in canoes and paddled out into the lagoon. Looking
back, we could see all the houses on fire. Late in the afternoon we
saw many canoes coming from Nihi, which is the village near the Nihi
Passage in the northeast. They were all that were left, and like us
their village had been burned by a second schooner that had come
through Nihi Passage.
"We stood on in the darkness to the westward for Pauloo, but in the
middle of the night we heard women wailing and then we ran into a big
fleet of canoes. They were all that were left of Pauloo, which
likewise was in ashes, for a third schooner had come in through the
Pauloo Passage. You see, that mate, with his black boys, had not been
drowned. He had made the Solomon Islands, and there told his brothers
of what we had done in Oolong. And all his brothers had said they
would come and punish us, and there they were in the three schooners,
and our three villages were wiped out.
"And what was there for us to do? In the morning the two schooners
from windward sailed down upon us in the middle of the lagoon. The
trade wind was blowing fresh, and by scores of canoes they ran us
down. And the rifles never ceased talking. We scattered like flying
fish before the bonita, and there were so many of us that we escaped
by thousands, this way and that, to the islands on the rim of the
atoll.
"And thereafter the schooners hunted us up and down the lagoon. In the
nighttime we slipped past them. But the next day, or in two days or
three days, the schooners would be coming back, hunting us toward the
other end of the lagoon. And so it went. We no longer counted nor
remembered our dead. True, we were many and they were few. But what
could we do? I was in one of the twenty canoes filled with men who
were not afraid to die. We attacked the smallest schooner. They shot
us down in heaps. They threw dynamite into the canoes, and when the
dynamite gave out, they threw hot water down upon us. And the rifles
never ceased talking. And those whose canoes were smashed were shot as
they swam away. And the mate danced up and down upon the cabin top and
yelled, "Yah! Yah! Yah!"
"Every house on every smallest island was burned. Not a pig nor a fowl
was left alive. Our wells were defiled with the bodies of the slain,
or else heaped high with coral rock. We were twenty-five thousand on
Oolong before the three schooners came. Today we are five thousand.
After the schooners left, we were but three thousand, as you shall
see.
"At last the three schooners grew tired of chasing us back and forth.
So they went, the three of them, to Nihi, in the northeast. And then
they drove us steadily to the west. Their nine boats were in the water
as well. They beat up every island as they moved along. They drove us,
drove us, drove us day by day. And every night the three schooners and
the nine boats made a chain of watchfulness that stretched across the
lagoon from rim to rim, so that we could not escape back.
"They could not drive us forever that way, for the lagoon was only so
large, and at last all of us that yet lived were driven upon the last
sand bank to the west. Beyond lay the open sea. There were ten
thousand of us, and we covered the sand bank from the lagoon edge to
the pounding surf on the other side. No one could lie down. There was
no room. We stood hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder. Two days they
kept us there, and the mate would climb up in the rigging to mock us
and yell, Yah! Yah! Yah!' till we were well sorry that we had ever
harmed him or his schooner a month before. We had no food, and we
stood on our feet two days and nights. The little babies died, and the
old and weak died, and the wounded died. And worst of all, we had no
water to quench our thirst, and for two days the sun beat down on us,
and there was no shade. Many men and women waded out into the ocean
and were drowned, the surf casting their bodies back on the beach. And
there came a pest of flies. Some men swam to the sides of the
schooners, but they were shot to the last one. And we that lived were
very sorry that in our pride we tried to take the schooner with the
three masts that came to fish for beche-de-mer.
"On the morning of the third day came the skippers of the three
schooners and that mate in a small boat. They carried rifles, all of
them, and revolvers, and they made talk. It was only that they were
weary of killing us that they had stopped, they told us. And we told
them that we were sorry, that never again would we harm a white man,
and in token of our submission we poured sand upon our heads. And all
the women and children set up a great wailing for water, so that for
some time no man could make himself heard. Then we were told our
punishment. We must fill the three schooners with copra and
beche-de-mer. And we agreed, for we wanted water, and our hearts were
broken, and we knew that we were children at fighting when we fought
with white men who fight like hell. And when all the talk was
finished, the mate stood up and mocked us, and yelled, Yah! Yah! Yah!'
After that we paddled away in our canoes and sought water.
"And for weeks we toiled at catching beche-de-mer and curing it, in
gathering the cocoanuts and turning them into copra. By day and night
the smoke rose in clouds from all the beaches of all the islands of
Oolong as we paid the penalty of our wrongdoing. For in those days of
death it was burned clearly on all our brains that it was very wrong
to harm a white man.
"By and by, the schooners full of copra and beche-de-mer and our trees
empty of cocoanuts, the three skippers and that mate called us all
together for a big talk. And they said they were very glad that we had
learned our lesson, and we said for the ten-thousandth time that we
were sorry and that we would not do it again. Also, we poured sand
upon our heads. Then the skippers said that it was all very well, but
just to show us that they did not forget us, they would send a
devil-devil that we would never forget and that we would always
remember any time we might feel like harming a white man. After that
the mate mocked us one more time and yelled, Yah! Yah! Yah!' Then six
of our men, whom we thought long dead, were put ashore from one of the
schooners, and the schooners hoisted their sails and ran out through
the passage for the Solomons.
"The six men who were put ashore were the first to catch the
devil-devil the skippers sent back after us."
"A great sickness came," I interrupted, for I recognized the trick.
The schooner had had measles on board, and the six prisoners had been
deliberately exposed to it.
"Yes, a great sickness," Oti went on. "It was a powerful devil-devil.
The oldest man had never heard of the like. Those of our priests that
yet lived we killed because they could not overcome the devil-devil.
The sickness spread. I have said that there were ten thousand of us
that stood hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder on the sandbank. When
the sickness left us, there were three thousand yet alive. Also,
having made all our cocoanuts into copra, there was a famine.
"That fella trader," Oti concluded, "he like 'm that much dirt. He
like 'm clam he die KAI-KAI (meat) he stop, stink 'm any amount. He
like 'm one fella dog, one sick fella dog plenty fleas stop along him.
We no fright along that fella trader. We fright because he white man.
We savve plenty too much no good kill white man. That one fella sick
dog trader he plenty brother stop along him, white men like 'm you
fight like hell. We no fright that damn trader. Some time he made
kanaka plenty cross along him and kanaka want 'm kill m, kanaka he
think devil-devil and kanaka he hear that fella mate sing out, Yah!
Yah! Yah!' and kanaka no kill 'm."
Oti baited his hook with a piece of squid, which he tore with his
teeth from the live and squirming monster, and hook and bait sank in
white flames to the bottom.
"Shark walk about he finish," he said. "I think we catch 'm plenty
fella fish."
His line jerked savagely. He pulled it in rapidly, hand under hand,
and landed a big gasping rock cod in the bottom of the canoe.
"Sun he come up, I make 'm that dam fella trader one present big fella
fish," said Oti.
