THE HEATHEN
I met him first in a hurricane; and though we had gone through the
hurricane on the same schooner, it was not until the schooner had gone
to pieces under us that I first laid eyes on him. Without doubt I had
seen him with the rest of the kanaka crew on board, but I had not
consciously been aware of his existence, for the Petite Jeanne was
rather overcrowded. In addition to her eight or ten kanaka seamen, her
white captain, mate, and supercargo, and her six cabin passengers, she
sailed from Rangiroa with something like eighty-five deck
passengers--Paumotans and Tahitians, men, women, and children each
with a trade box, to say nothing of sleeping mats, blankets, and
clothes bundles.
The pearling season in the Paumotus was over, and all hands were
returning to Tahiti. The six of us cabin passengers were pearl buyers.
Two were Americans, one was Ah Choon (the whitest Chinese I have ever
known), one was a German, one was a Polish Jew, and I completed the
half dozen.
It had been a prosperous season. Not one of us had cause for
complaint, nor one of the eighty-five deck passengers either. All had
done well, and all were looking forward to a rest-off and a good time
in Papeete.
Of course, the Petite Jeanne was overloaded. She was only seventy
tons, and she had no right to carry a tithe of the mob she had on
board. Beneath her hatches she was crammed and jammed with pearl shell
and copra. Even the trade room was packed full with shell. It was a
miracle that the sailors could work her. There was no moving about the
decks. They simply climbed back and forth along the rails.
In the night time they walked upon the sleepers, who carpeted the
deck, I'll swear, two deep. Oh! And there were pigs and chickens on
deck, and sacks of yams, while every conceivable place was festooned
with strings of drinking cocoanuts and bunches of bananas. On both
sides, between the fore and main shrouds, guys had been stretched,
just low enough for the foreboom to swing clear; and from each of
these guys at least fifty bunches of bananas were suspended.
It promised to be a messy passage, even if we did make it in the two
or three days that would have been required if the southeast trades
had been blowing fresh. But they weren't blowing fresh. After the
first five hours the trade died away in a dozen or so gasping fans.
The calm continued all that night and the next day--one of those
glaring, glassy, calms, when the very thought of opening one's eyes to
look at it is sufficient to cause a headache.
The second day a man died--an Easter Islander, one of the best divers
that season in the lagoon. Smallpox--that is what it was; though how
smallpox could come on board, when there had been no known cases
ashore when we left Rangiroa, is beyond me. There it was,
though--smallpox, a man dead, and three others down on their backs.
There was nothing to be done. We could not segregate the sick, nor
could we care for them. We were packed like sardines. There was
nothing to do but rot and die--that is, there was nothing to do after
the night that followed the first death. On that night, the mate, the
supercargo, the Polish Jew, and four native divers sneaked away in the
large whale boat. They were never heard of again. In the morning the
captain promptly scuttled the remaining boats, and there we were.
That day there were two deaths; the following day three; then it
jumped to eight. It was curious to see how we took it. The natives,
for instance, fell into a condition of dumb, stolid fear. The
captain--Oudouse, his name was, a Frenchman--became very nervous and
voluble. He actually got the twitches. He was a large fleshy man,
weighing at least two hundred pounds, and he quickly became a faithful
representation of a quivering jelly-mountain of fat.
The German, the two Americans, and myself bought up all the Scotch
whiskey, and proceeded to stay drunk. The theory was
beautiful--namely, if we kept ourselves soaked in alcohol, every
smallpox germ that came into contact with us would immediately be
scorched to a cinder. And the theory worked, though I must confess
that neither Captain Oudouse nor Ah Choon were attacked by the disease
either. The Frenchman did not drink at all, while Ah Choon restricted
himself to one drink daily.
It was a pretty time. The sun, going into northern declination, was
straight overhead. There was no wind, except for frequent squalls,
which blew fiercely for from five minutes to half an hour, and wound
up by deluging us with rain. After each squall, the awful sun would
come out, drawing clouds of steam from the soaked decks.
The steam was not nice. It was the vapor of death, freighted with
millions and millions of germs. We always took another drink when we
saw it going up from the dead and dying, and usually we took two or
three more drinks, mixing them exceptionally stiff. Also, we made it a
rule to take an additional several each time they hove the dead over
to the sharks that swarmed about us.
We had a week of it, and then the whiskey gave out. It is just as
well, or I shouldn't be alive now. It took a sober man to pull through
what followed, as you will agree when I mention the little fact that
only two men did pull through. The other man was the heathen--at
least, that was what I heard Captain Oudouse call him at the moment I
first became aware of the heathen's existence. But to come back.
It was at the end of the week, with the whiskey gone, and the pearl
buyers sober, that I happened to glance at the barometer that hung in
the cabin companionway. Its normal register in the Paumotus was 29.90,
and it was quite customary to see it vacillate between 29.85 and
30.00, or even 30.05; but to see it as I saw it, down to 29.62, was
sufficient to sober the most drunken pearl buyer that ever incinerated
smallpox microbes in Scotch whiskey.
I called Captain Oudouse's attention to it, only to be informed that
he had watched it going down for several hours. There was little to
do, but that little he did very well, considering the circumstances.
He took off the light sails, shortened right down to storm canvas,
spread life lines, and waited for the wind. His mistake lay in what he
did after the wind came. He hove to on the port tack, which was the
right thing to do south of the Equator, if--and there was the rub--IF
one were NOT in the direct path of the hurricane.
We were in the direct path. I could see that by the steady increase of
the wind and the equally steady fall of the barometer. I wanted him to
turn and run with the wind on the port quarter until the barometer
ceased falling, and then to heave to. We argued till he was reduced to
hysteria, but budge he would not. The worst of it was that I could not
get the rest of the pearl buyers to back me up. Who was I, anyway, to
know more about the sea and its ways than a properly qualified
captain? was what was in their minds, I knew.
Of course, the sea rose with the wind frightfully; and I shall never
forget the first three seas the Petite Jeanne shipped. She had fallen
off, as vessels do at times when hove to, and the first sea made a
clean breach. The life lines were only for the strong and well, and
little good were they even for them when the women and children, the
bananas and cocoanuts, the pigs and trade boxes, the sick and the
dying, were swept along in a solid, screeching, groaning mass.
The second sea filled the Petite Jeanne'S decks flush with the rails;
and, as her stern sank down and her bow tossed skyward, all the
miserable dunnage of life and luggage poured aft. It was a human
torrent. They came head first, feet first, sidewise, rolling over and
over, twisting, squirming, writhing, and crumpling up. Now and again
one caught a grip on a stanchion or a rope; but the weight of the
bodies behind tore such grips loose.
One man I noticed fetch up, head on and square on, with the starboard
bitt. His head cracked like an egg. I saw what was coming, sprang on
top of the cabin, and from there into the mainsail itself. Ah Choon
and one of the Americans tried to follow me, but I was one jump ahead
of them. The American was swept away and over the stern like a piece
of chaff. Ah Choon caught a spoke of the wheel, and swung in behind
it. But a strapping Raratonga vahine (woman)--she must have weighed
two hundred and fifty--brought up against him, and got an arm around
his neck. He clutched the kanaka steersman with his other hand; and
just at that moment the schooner flung down to starboard.
The rush of bodies and sea that was coming along the port runway
between the cabin and the rail turned abruptly and poured to
starboard. Away they went--vahine, Ah Choon, and steersman; and I
swear I saw Ah Choon grin at me with philosophic resignation as he
cleared the rail and went under.
The third sea--the biggest of the three--did not do so much damage. By
the time it arrived nearly everybody was in the rigging. On deck
perhaps a dozen gasping, half-drowned, and half-stunned wretches were
rolling about or attempting to crawl into safety. They went by the
board, as did the wreckage of the two remaining boats. The other pearl
buyers and myself, between seas, managed to get about fifteen women
and children into the cabin, and battened down. Little good it did the
poor creatures in the end.
Wind? Out of all my experience I could not have believed it possible
for the wind to blow as it did. There is no describing it. How can one
describe a nightmare? It was the same way with that wind. It tore the
clothes off our bodies. I say TORE THEM OFF, and I mean it. I am not
asking you to believe it. I am merely telling something that I saw and
felt. There are times when I do not believe it myself. I went through
it, and that is enough. One could not face that wind and live. It was
a monstrous thing, and the most monstrous thing about it was that it
increased and continued to increase.
Imagine countless millions and billions of tons of sand. Imagine this
sand tearing along at ninety, a hundred, a hundred and twenty, or any
other number of miles per hour. Imagine, further, this sand to be
invisible, impalpable, yet to retain all the weight and density of
sand. Do all this, and you may get a vague inkling of what that wind
was like.
Perhaps sand is not the right comparison. Consider it mud, invisible,
impalpable, but heavy as mud. Nay, it goes beyond that. Consider every
molecule of air to be a mudbank in itself. Then try to imagine the
multitudinous impact of mudbanks. No; it is beyond me. Language may be
adequate to express the ordinary conditions of life, but it cannot
possibly express any of the conditions of so enormous a blast of wind.
It would have been better had I stuck by my original intention of not
attempting a description.
I will say this much: The sea, which had risen at first, was beaten
down by that wind. More: it seemed as if the whole ocean had been
sucked up in the maw of the hurricane, and hurled on through that
portion of space which previously had been occupied by the air.
Of course, our canvas had gone long before. But Captain Oudouse had on
the Petite Jeanne something I had never before seen on a South Sea
schooner--a sea anchor. It was a conical canvas bag, the mouth of
which was kept open by a huge loop of iron. The sea anchor was bridled
something like a kite, so that it bit into the water as a kite bites
into the air, but with a difference. The sea anchor remained just
under the surface of the ocean in a perpendicular position. A long
line, in turn, connected it with the schooner. As a result, the Petite
Jeanne rode bow on to the wind and to what sea there was.
The situation really would have been favorable had we not been in the
path of the storm. True, the wind itself tore our canvas out of the
gaskets, jerked out our topmasts, and made a raffle of our running
gear, but still we would have come through nicely had we not been
square in front of the advancing storm center. That was what fixed us.
I was in a state of stunned, numbed, paralyzed collapse from enduring
the impact of the wind, and I think I was just about ready to give up
and die when the center smote us. The blow we received was an absolute
lull. There was not a breath of air. The effect on one was sickening.
Remember that for hours we had been at terrific muscular tension,
withstanding the awful pressure of that wind. And then, suddenly, the
pressure was removed. I know that I felt as though I was about to
expand, to fly apart in all directions. It seemed as if every atom
composing my body was repelling every other atom and was on the verge
of rushing off irresistibly into space. But that lasted only for a
moment. Destruction was upon us.
In the absence of the wind and pressure the sea rose. It jumped, it
leaped, it soared straight toward the clouds. Remember, from every
point of the compass that inconceivable wind was blowing in toward the
center of calm. The result was that the seas sprang up from every
point of the compass. There was no wind to check them. They popped up
like corks released from the bottom of a pail of water. There was no
system to them, no stability. They were hollow, maniacal seas. They
were eighty feet high at the least. They were not seas at all. They
resembled no sea a man had ever seen.
They were splashes, monstrous splashes--that is all. Splashes that
were eighty feet high. Eighty! They were more than eighty. They went
over our mastheads. They were spouts, explosions. They were drunken.
They fell anywhere, anyhow. They jostled one another; they collided.
They rushed together and collapsed upon one another, or fell apart
like a thousand waterfalls all at once. It was no ocean any man had
ever dreamed of, that hurricane center. It was confusion thrice
confounded. It was anarchy. It was a hell pit of sea water gone mad.
The Petite Jeanne? I don't know. The heathen told me afterwards that
he did not know. She was literally torn apart, ripped wide open,
beaten into a pulp, smashed into kindling wood, annihilated. When I
came to I was in the water, swimming automatically, though I was about
two-thirds drowned. How I got there I had no recollection. I
remembered seeing the Petite Jeanne fly to pieces at what must have
been the instant that my own consciousness was buffeted out of me. But
there I was, with nothing to do but make the best of it, and in that
best there was little promise. The wind was blowing again, the sea was
much smaller and more regular, and I knew that I had passed through
the center. Fortunately, there were no sharks about. The hurricane had
dissipated the ravenous horde that had surrounded the death ship and
fed off the dead.
It was about midday when the Petite Jeanne went to pieces, and it must
have been two hours afterwards when I picked up with one of her hatch
covers. Thick rain was driving at the time; and it was the merest
chance that flung me and the hatch cover together. A short length of
line was trailing from the rope handle; and I knew that I was good for
a day, at least, if the sharks did not return. Three hours later,
possibly a little longer, sticking close to the cover, and with closed
eyes, concentrating my whole soul upon the task of breathing in enough
air to keep me going and at the same time of avoiding breathing in
enough water to drown me, it seemed to me that I heard voices. The
rain had ceased, and wind and sea were easing marvelously. Not twenty
feet away from me, on another hatch cover were Captain Oudouse and the
heathen. They were fighting over the possession of the cover--at
least, the Frenchman was. "Paien noir!" I heard him scream, and at the
same time I saw him kick the kanaka.
Now, Captain Oudouse had lost all his clothes, except his shoes, and
they were heavy brogans. It was a cruel blow, for it caught the
heathen on the mouth and the point of the chin, half stunning him. I
looked for him to retaliate, but he contented himself with swimming
about forlornly a safe ten feet away. Whenever a fling of the sea
threw him closer, the Frenchman, hanging on with his hands, kicked out
at him with both feet. Also, at the moment of delivering each kick, he
called the kanaka a black heathen.
"For two centimes I'd come over there and drown you, you white beast!"
I yelled.
The only reason I did not go was that I felt too tired. The very
thought of the effort to swim over was nauseating. So I called to the
kanaka to come to me, and proceeded to share the hatch cover with him.
Otoo, he told me his name was (pronounced o-to-o ); also, he told me
that he was a native of Bora Bora, the most westerly of the Society
Group. As I learned afterward, he had got the hatch cover first, and,
after some time, encountering Captain Oudouse, had offered to share it
with him, and had been kicked off for his pains.
And that was how Otoo and I first came together. He was no fighter. He
was all sweetness and gentleness, a love creature, though he stood
nearly six feet tall and was muscled like a gladiator. He was no
fighter, but he was also no coward. He had the heart of a lion; and in
the years that followed I have seen him run risks that I would never
dream of taking. What I mean is that while he was no fighter, and
while he always avoided precipitating a row, he never ran away from
trouble when it started. And it was "Ware shoal!" when once Otoo went
into action. I shall never forget what he did to Bill King. It
occurred in German Samoa. Bill King was hailed the champion
heavyweight of the American Navy. He was a big brute of a man, a
veritable gorilla, one of those hard-hitting, rough-housing chaps, and
clever with his fists as well. He picked the quarrel, and he kicked
Otoo twice and struck him once before Otoo felt it to be necessary to
fight. I don't think it lasted four minutes, at the end of which time
Bill King was the unhappy possessor of four broken ribs, a broken
forearm, and a dislocated shoulder blade. Otoo knew nothing of
scientific boxing. He was merely a manhandler; and Bill King was
something like three months in recovering from the bit of manhandling
he received that afternoon on Apia beach.
But I am running ahead of my yarn. We shared the hatch cover between
us. We took turn and turn about, one lying flat on the cover and
resting, while the other, submerged to the neck, merely held on with
his hands. For two days and nights, spell and spell, on the cover and
in the water, we drifted over the ocean. Towards the last I was
delirious most of the time; and there were times, too, when I heard
Otoo babbling and raving in his native tongue. Our continuous
immersion prevented us from dying of thirst, though the sea water and
the sunshine gave us the prettiest imaginable combination of salt
pickle and sunburn.
In the end, Otoo saved my life; for I came to lying on the beach
twenty feet from the water, sheltered from the sun by a couple of
cocoanut leaves. No one but Otoo could have dragged me there and stuck
up the leaves for shade. He was lying beside me. I went off again; and
the next time I came round, it was cool and starry night, and Otoo was
pressing a drinking cocoanut to my lips.
We were the sole survivors of the Petite Jeanne. Captain Oudouse must
have succumbed to exhaustion, for several days later his hatch cover
drifted ashore without him. Otoo and I lived with the natives of the
atoll for a week, when we were rescued by the French cruiser and taken
to Tahiti. In the meantime, however, we had performed the ceremony of
exchanging names. In the South Seas such a ceremony binds two men
closer together than blood brothership. The initiative had been mine;
and Otoo was rapturously delighted when I suggested it.
"It is well," he said, in Tahitian. "For we have been mates together
for two days on the lips of Death."
"But death stuttered," I smiled.
"It was a brave deed you did, master," he replied, "and Death was not
vile enough to speak."
"Why do you 'master' me?" I demanded, with a show of hurt feelings.
"We have exchanged names. To you I am Otoo. To me you are Charley. And
between you and me, forever and forever, you shall be Charley, and I
shall be Otoo. It is the way of the custom. And when we die, if it
does happen that we live again somewhere beyond the stars and the sky,
still shall you be Charley to me, and I Otoo to you."
"Yes, master," he answered, his eyes luminous and soft with joy.
"There you go!" I cried indignantly.
"What does it matter what my lips utter?" he argued. "They are only my
lips. But I shall think Otoo always. Whenever I think of myself, I
shall think of you. Whenever men call me by name, I shall think of
you. And beyond the sky and beyond the stars, always and forever, you
shall be Otoo to me. Is it well, master?"
I hid my smile, and answered that it was well.
We parted at Papeete. I remained ashore to recuperate; and he went on
in a cutter to his own island, Bora Bora. Six weeks later he was back.
I was surprised, for he had told me of his wife, and said that he was
returning to her, and would give over sailing on far voyages.
"Where do you go, master?" he asked, after our first greetings.
I shrugged my shoulders. It was a hard question.
"All the world," was my answer--"all the world, all the sea, and all
the islands that are in the sea."
"I will go with you," he said simply. "My wife is dead."
I never had a brother; but from what I have seen of other men's
brothers, I doubt if any man ever had a brother that was to him what
Otoo was to me. He was brother and father and mother as well. And this
I know: I lived a straighter and better man because of Otoo. I cared
little for other men, but I had to live straight in Otoo's eyes.
Because of him I dared not tarnish myself. He made me his ideal,
compounding me, I fear, chiefly out of his own love and worship and
there were times when I stood close to the steep pitch of hell, and
would have taken the plunge had not the thought of Otoo restrained me.
His pride in me entered into me, until it became one of the major
rules in my personal code to do nothing that would diminish that pride
of his.
Naturally, I did not learn right away what his feelings were toward
me. He never criticized, never censured; and slowly the exalted place
I held in his eyes dawned upon me, and slowly I grew to comprehend the
hurt I could inflict upon him by being anything less than my best.
For seventeen years we were together; for seventeen years he was at my
shoulder, watching while I slept, nursing me through fever and
wounds--ay, and receiving wounds in fighting for me. He signed on the
same ships with me; and together we ranged the Pacific from Hawaii to
Sydney Head, and from Torres Straits to the Galapagos. We blackbirded
from the New Hebrides and the Line Islands over to the westward clear
through the Louisades, New Britain, New Ireland, and New Hanover. We
were wrecked three times--in the Gilberts, in the Santa Cruz group,
and in the Fijis. And we traded and salved wherever a dollar promised
in the way of pearl and pearl shell, copra, beche-de-mer, hawkbill
turtle shell, and stranded wrecks.
It began in Papeete, immediately after his announcement that he was
going with me over all the sea, and the islands in the midst thereof.
There was a club in those days in Papeete, where the pearlers,
traders, captains, and riffraff of South Sea adventurers forgathered.
The play ran high, and the drink ran high; and I am very much afraid
that I kept later hours than were becoming or proper. No matter what
the hour was when I left the club, there was Otoo waiting to see me
safely home.
At first I smiled; next I chided him. Then I told him flatly that I
stood in need of no wet-nursing. After that I did not see him when I
came out of the club. Quite by accident, a week or so later, I
discovered that he still saw me home, lurking across the street among
the shadows of the mango trees. What could I do? I know what I did do.
Insensibly I began to keep better hours. On wet and stormy nights, in
the thick of the folly and the fun, the thought would persist in
coming to me of Otoo keeping his dreary vigil under the dripping
mangoes. Truly, he made a better man of me. Yet he was not
strait-laced. And he knew nothing of common Christian morality. All
the people on Bora Bora were Christians; but he was a heathen, the
only unbeliever on the island, a gross materialist, who believed that
when he died he was dead. He believed merely in fair play and square
dealing. Petty meanness, in his code, was almost as serious as wanton
homicide; and I do believe that he respected a murderer more than a
man given to small practices.
Concerning me, personally, he objected to my doing anything that was
hurtful to me. Gambling was all right. He was an ardent gambler
himself. But late hours, he explained, were bad for one's health. He
had seen men who did not take care of themselves die of fever. He was
no teetotaler, and welcomed a stiff nip any time when it was wet work
in the boats. On the other hand, he believed in liquor in moderation.
He had seen many men killed or disgraced by square-face or Scotch.
Otoo had my welfare always at heart. He thought ahead for me, weighed
my plans, and took a greater interest in them than I did myself. At
first, when I was unaware of this interest of his in my affairs, he
had to divine my intentions, as, for instance, at Papeete, when I
contemplated going partners with a knavish fellow-countryman on a
guano venture. I did not know he was a knave. Nor did any white man in
Papeete. Neither did Otoo know, but he saw how thick we were getting,
and found out for me, and without my asking him. Native sailors from
the ends of the seas knock about on the beach in Tahiti; and Otoo,
suspicious merely, went among them till he had gathered sufficient
data to justify his suspicions. Oh, it was a nice history, that of
Randolph Waters. I couldn't believe it when Otoo first narrated it;
but when I sheeted it home to Waters he gave in without a murmur, and
got away on the first steamer to Aukland.
At first, I am free to confess, I couldn't help resenting Otoo's
poking his nose into my business. But I knew that he was wholly
unselfish; and soon I had to acknowledge his wisdom and discretion. He
had his eyes open always to my main chance, and he was both
keen-sighted and far-sighted. In time he became my counselor, until he
knew more of my business than I did myself. He really had my interest
at heart more than I did. Mine was the magnificent carelessness of
youth, for I preferred romance to dollars, and adventure to a
comfortable billet with all night in. So it was well that I had some
one to look out for me. I know that if it had not been for Otoo, I
should not be here today.
Of numerous instances, let me give one. I had had some experience in
blackbirding before I went pearling in the Paumotus. Otoo and I were
on the beach in Samoa--we really were on the beach and hard
aground--when my chance came to go as recruiter on a blackbird brig.
Otoo signed on before the mast; and for the next half-dozen years, in
as many ships, we knocked about the wildest portions of Melanesia.
Otoo saw to it that he always pulled stroke-oar in my boat. Our custom
in recruiting labor was to land the recruiter on the beach. The
covering boat always lay on its oars several hundred feet off shore,
while the recruiter's boat, also lying on its oars, kept afloat on the
edge of the beach. When I landed with my trade goods, leaving my
steering sweep apeak, Otoo left his stroke position and came into the
stern sheets, where a Winchester lay ready to hand under a flap of
canvas. The boat's crew was also armed, the Sniders concealed under
canvas flaps that ran the length of the gunwales.
While I was busy arguing and persuading the woolly-headed cannibals to
come and labor on the Queensland plantations Otoo kept watch. And
often and often his low voice warned me of suspicious actions and
impending treachery. Sometimes it was the quick shot from his rifle,
knocking a nigger over, that was the first warning I received. And in
my rush to the boat his hand was always there to jerk me flying
aboard. Once, I remember, on SANTA ANNA, the boat grounded just as the
trouble began. The covering boat was dashing to our assistance, but
the several score of savages would have wiped us out before it
arrived. Otoo took a flying leap ashore, dug both hands into the trade
goods, and scattered tobacco, beads, tomahawks, knives, and calicoes
in all directions.
This was too much for the woolly-heads. While they scrambled for the
treasures, the boat was shoved clear, and we were aboard and forty
feet away. And I got thirty recruits off that very beach in the next
four hours.
The particular instance I have in mind was on Malaita, the most savage
island in the easterly Solomons. The natives had been remarkably
friendly; and how were we to know that the whole village had been
taking up a collection for over two years with which to buy a white
man's head? The beggars are all head-hunters, and they especially
esteem a white man's head. The fellow who captured the head would
receive the whole collection. As I say, they appeared very friendly;
and on this day I was fully a hundred yards down the beach from the
boat. Otoo had cautioned me; and, as usual when I did not heed him, I
came to grief.
The first I knew, a cloud of spears sailed out of the mangrove swamp
at me. At least a dozen were sticking into me. I started to run, but
tripped over one that was fast in my calf, and went down. The
woolly-heads made a run for me, each with a long-handled, fantail
tomahawk with which to hack off my head. They were so eager for the
prize that they got in one another's way. In the confusion, I avoided
several hacks by throwing myself right and left on the sand.
Then Otoo arrived--Otoo the manhandler. In some way he had got hold of
a heavy war club, and at close quarters it was a far more efficient
weapon than a rifle. He was right in the thick of them, so that they
could not spear him, while their tomahawks seemed worse than useless.
He was fighting for me, and he was in a true Berserker rage. The way
he handled that club was amazing.
Their skulls squashed like overripe oranges. It was not until he had
driven them back, picked me up in his arms, and started to run, that
he received his first wounds. He arrived in the boat with four spear
thrusts, got his Winchester, and with it got a man for every shot.
Then we pulled aboard the schooner, and doctored up.
Seventeen years we were together. He made me. I should today be a
supercargo, a recruiter, or a memory, if it had not been for him.
"You spend your money, and you go out and get more," he said one day.
"It is easy to get money now. But when you get old, your money will be
spent, and you will not be able to go out and get more. I know,
master. I have studied the way of white men. On the beaches are many
old men who were young once, and who could get money just like you.
Now they are old, and they have nothing, and they wait about for the
young men like you to come ashore and buy drinks for them.
"The black boy is a slave on the plantations. He gets twenty dollars a
year. He works hard. The overseer does not work hard. He rides a horse
and watches the black boy work. He gets twelve hundred dollars a year.
I am a sailor on the schooner. I get fifteen dollars a month. That is
because I am a good sailor. I work hard. The captain has a double
awning, and drinks beer out of long bottles. I have never seen him
haul a rope or pull an oar. He gets one hundred and fifty dollars a
month. I am a sailor. He is a navigator. Master, I think it would be
very good for you to know navigation."
Otoo spurred me on to it. He sailed with me as second mate on my first
schooner, and he was far prouder of my command than I was myself.
Later on it was:
"The captain is well paid, master; but the ship is in his keeping, and
he is never free from the burden. It is the owner who is better
paid--the owner who sits ashore with many servants and turns his money
over."
"True, but a schooner costs five thousand dollars--an old schooner at
that," I objected. "I should be an old man before I saved five
thousand dollars."
"There be short ways for white men to make money," he went on,
pointing ashore at the cocoanut-fringed beach.
We were in the Solomons at the time, picking up a cargo of ivory nuts
along the east coast of Guadalcanar.
"Between this river mouth and the next it is two miles," he said.
"The flat land runs far back. It is worth nothing now. Next year--who
knows?--or the year after, men will pay much money for that land. The
anchorage is good. Big steamers can lie close up. You can buy the land
four miles deep from the old chief for ten thousand sticks of tobacco,
ten bottles of square-face, and a Snider, which will cost you, maybe,
one hundred dollars. Then you place the deed with the commissioner;
and the next year, or the year after, you sell and become the owner of
a ship."
I followed his lead, and his words came true, though in three years,
instead of two. Next came the grasslands deal on Guadalcanar--twenty
thousand acres, on a governmental nine hundred and ninety-nine years'
lease at a nominal sum. I owned the lease for precisely ninety days,
when I sold it to a company for half a fortune. Always it was Otoo who
looked ahead and saw the opportunity. He was responsible for the
salving of the Doncaster--bought in at auction for a hundred pounds,
and clearing three thousand after every expense was paid. He led me
into the Savaii plantation and the cocoa venture on Upolu.
We did not go seafaring so much as in the old days. I was too well
off. I married, and my standard of living rose; but Otoo remained the
same old-time Otoo, moving about the house or trailing through the
office, his wooden pipe in his mouth, a shilling undershirt on his
back, and a four-shilling lava-lava about his loins. I could not get
him to spend money. There was no way of repaying him except with love,
and God knows he got that in full measure from all of us. The children
worshipped him; and if he had been spoilable, my wife would surely
have been his undoing.
The children! He really was the one who showed them the way of their
feet in the world practical. He began by teaching them to walk. He sat
up with them when they were sick. One by one, when they were scarcely
toddlers, he took them down to the lagoon, and made them into
amphibians. He taught them more than I ever knew of the habits of fish
and the ways of catching them. In the bush it was the same thing. At
seven, Tom knew more woodcraft than I ever dreamed existed. At six,
Mary went over the Sliding Rock without a quiver, and I have seen
strong men balk at that feat. And when Frank had just turned six he
could bring up shillings from the bottom in three fathoms.
"My people in Bora Bora do not like heathen--they are all Christians;
and I do not like Bora Bora Christians," he said one day, when I, with
the idea of getting him to spend some of the money that was rightfully
his, had been trying to persuade him to make a visit to his own island
in one of our schooners--a special voyage which I had hoped to make a
record breaker in the matter of prodigal expense.
I say one of OUR schooners, though legally at the time they belonged
to me. I struggled long with him to enter into partnership.
"We have been partners from the day the Petite Jeanne went down," he
said at last. "But if your heart so wishes, then shall we become
partners by the law. I have no work to do, yet are my expenses large.
I drink and eat and smoke in plenty--it costs much, I know. I do not
pay for the playing of billiards, for I play on your table; but still
the money goes. Fishing on the reef is only a rich man's pleasure. It
is shocking, the cost of hooks and cotton line. Yes; it is necessary
that we be partners by the law. I need the money. I shall get it from
the head clerk in the office."
So the papers were made out and recorded. A year later I was compelled
to complain.
"Charley," said I, "you are a wicked old fraud, a miserly skinflint, a
miserable land crab. Behold, your share for the year in all our
partnership has been thousands of dollars. The head clerk has given me
this paper. It says that in the year you have drawn just eighty-seven
dollars and twenty cents."
"Is there any owing me?" he asked anxiously.
"I tell you thousands and thousands," I answered.
His face brightened, as with an immense relief.
"It is well," he said. "See that the head clerk keeps good account of
it. When I want it, I shall want it, and there must not be a cent
missing.
"If there is," he added fiercely, after a pause, "it must come out of
the clerk's wages."
And all the time, as I afterwards learned, his will, drawn up by
Carruthers, and making me sole beneficiary, lay in the American
consul's safe.
But the end came, as the end must come to all human associations.
It occurred in the Solomons, where our wildest work had been done in
the wild young days, and where we were once more--principally on a
holiday, incidentally to look after our holdings on Florida Island and
to look over the pearling possibilities of the Mboli Pass. We were
lying at Savo, having run in to trade for curios.
Now, Savo is alive with sharks. The custom of the woolly-heads of
burying their dead in the sea did not tend to discourage the sharks
from making the adjacent waters a hangout. It was my luck to be coming
aboard in a tiny, overloaded, native canoe, when the thing capsized.
There were four woolly-heads and myself in it, or rather, hanging to
it. The schooner was a hundred yards away.
I was just hailing for a boat when one of the woolly-heads began to
scream. Holding on to the end of the canoe, both he and that portion
of the canoe were dragged under several times. Then he loosed his
clutch and disappeared. A shark had got him.
The three remaining niggers tried to climb out of the water upon the
bottom of the canoe. I yelled and cursed and struck at the nearest
with my fist, but it was no use. They were in a blind funk. The canoe
could barely have supported one of them. Under the three it upended
and rolled sidewise, throwing them back into the water.
I abandoned the canoe and started to swim toward the schooner,
expecting to be picked up by the boat before I got there. One of the
niggers elected to come with me, and we swam along silently, side by
side, now and again putting our faces into the water and peering about
for sharks. The screams of the man who stayed by the canoe informed us
that he was taken. I was peering into the water when I saw a big shark
pass directly beneath me. He was fully sixteen feet in length. I saw
the whole thing. He got the woolly-head by the middle, and away he
went, the poor devil, head, shoulders, and arms out of the water all
the time, screeching in a heart-rending way. He was carried along in
this fashion for several hundred feet, when he was dragged beneath the
surface.
I swam doggedly on, hoping that that was the last unattached shark.
But there was another. Whether it was one that had attacked the
natives earlier, or whether it was one that had made a good meal
elsewhere, I do not know. At any rate, he was not in such haste as the
others. I could not swim so rapidly now, for a large part of my effort
was devoted to keeping track of him. I was watching him when he made
his first attack. By good luck I got both hands on his nose, and,
though his momentum nearly shoved me under, I managed to keep him off.
He veered clear, and began circling about again. A second time I
escaped him by the same manoeuvre. The third rush was a miss on both
sides. He sheered at the moment my hands should have landed on his
nose, but his sandpaper hide (I had on a sleeveless undershirt)
scraped the skin off one arm from elbow to shoulder.
By this time I was played out, and gave up hope. The schooner was
still two hundred feet away. My face was in the water, and I was
watching him manoeuvre for another attempt, when I saw a brown body
pass between us. It was Otoo.
"Swim for the schooner, master!" he said. And he spoke gayly, as
though the affair was a mere lark. "I know sharks. The shark is my
brother."
I obeyed, swimming slowly on, while Otoo swam about me, keeping always
between me and the shark, foiling his rushes and encouraging me.
"The davit tackle carried away, and they are rigging the falls," he
explained, a minute or so later, and then went under to head off
another attack.
By the time the schooner was thirty feet away I was about done for. I
could scarcely move. They were heaving lines at us from on board, but
they continually fell short. The shark, finding that it was receiving
no hurt, had become bolder. Several times it nearly got me, but each
time Otoo was there just the moment before it was too late. Of course,
Otoo could have saved himself any time. But he stuck by me.
"Good-by, Charley! I'm finished!" I just managed to gasp.
I knew that the end had come, and that the next moment I should throw
up my hands and go down.
But Otoo laughed in my face, saying:
"I will show you a new trick. I will make that shark feel sick!"
He dropped in behind me, where the shark was preparing to come at me.
"A little more to the left!" he next called out. "There is a line
there on the water. To the left, master--to the left!"
I changed my course and struck out blindly. I was by that time barely
conscious. As my hand closed on the line I heard an exclamation from
on board. I turned and looked. There was no sign of Otoo. The next
instant he broke surface. Both hands were off at the wrist, the stumps
spouting blood.
"Otoo!" he called softly. And I could see in his gaze the love that
thrilled in his voice.
Then, and then only, at the very last of all our years, he called me
by that name.
"Good-by, Otoo!" he called.
Then he was dragged under, and I was hauled aboard, where I fainted in
the captain's arms.
And so passed Otoo, who saved me and made me a man, and who saved me
in the end. We met in the maw of a hurricane, and parted in the maw of
a shark, with seventeen intervening years of comradeship, the like of
which I dare to assert has never befallen two men, the one brown and
the other white. If Jehovah be from His high place watching every
sparrow fall, not least in His kingdom shall be Otoo, the one heathen
of Bora Bora.
