CHAPTER XXV
At Nuka Hiva—Gilbert the Astronomer—The Grog Shanty—The Astronomer’s Audience—Ah Foo, the Chinaman—Other Worlds than Ours—The Reformed Traders—The Death of Gilbert
ABOUT a month after the foregoing incidents took place, and while I was in the Marquesas Group, I came across an old man who was one of those characters which are often to be met with in the wild, outer spaces of the world. He lived not far from the shore-side, at Nuka Hiva, and was an enthusiastic astronomer. His lone homestead was by the lowest peak of some hills, and so situated that it was eminently suitable for the purposes for which he required it, which were rest, reading and quiet, and unobserved observation of the starry skies; whereat for hours, with hopeful eye fixed at the telescope, he would gaze on cloudless nights.
Night after night, while the traders and natives slept, the solitary old man would sleeplessly follow his hobby. The wild poetry of primeval nature surrounded his hut home; the swinging seas thundered or softly broke over the reefs below, and clumps of pandanus-trees and coco-palms, like æolian harps, caught the wandering winds and wailed mournfully. They were and are wild places, and the scattered isles were as oases on the vast Sahara of the Pacific Ocean. Tao-o-hae was the nearest primitive capital, where strange races mingled and traded. Inland lived the old tribes, the survivors of cannibalistic days. Those old tattooed Marquesan chiefs sat by their conical dens, chewed modern plug tobacco and smoked opium, and looked upon the calaboose as the final resting-place for reflective age. In the villages the natives grew copra and tropical fruits and sold them to the French, who formed the greater part of the white population. They wore the ridi, and still encouraged old tribal customs, and the native women and girls, though modest and virtuous, were often ruined, body and soul, by the Chinamen who sold them opium and did many other things.
Why old Gilbert—for that was the name we knew the astronomer by—had left his native land and lived this lonely life was a mystery that no one bothered about; one thing was certain—he was no myth and was there. We all liked him. Originally he must have been a tall man, but age had bent his backbone and reduced his height by about two inches. His unkempt grey beard gave him a patriarchal aspect, and his deep-set clear grey eyes, fine, lofty brow and kind expression revealed no hint of inward vice. The native Marquesan servant who tidied his one room once a week was old and wrinkled, being over seventy years of age. Photographs pinned on the wooden wall of his bedroom imaged the refined faces of relatives, one of them a sad-faced young girl.
“Solitary Gilbert” was respected by the white community of the district, a community which chiefly consisted of traders and cast-ashore sailors of various nations, and represented the adventurous stock of England, Scotland, and France, one or two Mongolian niggers, and a full-blooded celestial who did their washing and spent the proceeds on Marquesan ladies, who wore few clothes, worked on the various plantations, chatted and chewed.
The traders used to congregate in the grog shanty, which was run by a jovial libre from Numea, the convict settlement, tell their various experiences and argue over the latest Marquesan politics or murders, and also express their various views of the local missionaries, who had long since given them up as hopeless atheists. Drinking beer till their teeth floated seemed to be the height of their ambition, though a few hoped to realise by trading enough money to go back to their native land. They were jovial men; some had sailed the seven seas, and some had hurriedly emigrated direct to the South Seas, and only thought of their country in troublous dreams; but all of them positively refused to give up their wild ways, listen to the missionaries and live a sweet and beerless life. Only one man had a magnetic influence for good over them, and that man was the mysterious old astronomer, Gilbert.
I came to know the lonely star-watcher well. Often while I was sitting in the grog shanty, listening to the traders arguing, he would walk in, and talk and lecture them; and they listened with profound respect. When excited by the thrilling subject of his conversation—the stars—his aged lips trembled and revealed the sensitive temperament of a lofty imagination. Something in his manner and in his earnest voice made us all lift our eyes and attention to him.
Every night he would bring his telescope under his arm and, perching it outside on a beer barrel, get the traders, each in turn, to fix their eyes to the lens and gaze at the heavens. We all liked the wise old man, and from him I learnt all that I know of the stars and their travels through space.