Soon after I joined the ship in Apia harbour. We stayed in port a few days, and then I shipped on the Golden Horn, bound for the Marquesas Islands. I had been there a year or two before and had a fancy that I should like to see the old spots once more. The schooner’s crew were mostly Samoans, the cook being a German. The skipper, Alfred Richardson, an Englishman, was not more than thirty years of age. I slept in the cuddy. The “Old Man” took a fancy to me, or at least to my violin-playing, so he, the English mate and I had a fine time together.
The weather was squally for a week and kept the crew busy, and then a calm fell and we hardly moved. The boat was a splendid sailer and ran like a hound with the yards almost squared. I remember the beautiful, calm nights as the sails half filled and flopped and the rigging rattled. The ocean about us was drenched with mirrored stars; so calm and bright was the water that we could look over the side and see the shadow of our ship and all the silent heavens over it, and the mirrored, beautiful katafa (frigate-bird) sail across the sky on silent wings.
The Samoan sailors squatted on deck and sang weird ditties; I played the violin, and even the skipper joined in in good fellowship. Sometimes we fished and caught bonito, a beautifully coloured fish. Soon the wind sprang up again, and we made rapid headway across the wonderful world of waters. One moonlight night I was standing on the starboard side thinking, and gazing at the sky-lines, ghostly bright in the moonlight for miles around us, when the great ocean silence was broken by a complaining monotone, such as you hear when you place a sea-shell to your ear. I instinctively gazed over the side and saw far off, opposite the weather-side of the moonlit sky-line, curling and tossing breakers, where liquid masses soared and dissolved on the coral reefs of an enchanted isle; for enchanted it looked to me as the tiny wind drifted us onward. Slowly the inland palm-clad mountain ranges rose, and the groves of coco-palms and dark-leafed tropical trees, and out of the creeks and bay came native canoes filled with paddling, singing savages! Presently we saw their dusky faces as they raced across the moonlit water, bringing their bargains of fruit, pine-apples, wild bananas and corals; and alas, two or three of them, who had no wares to sell, were accompanied by their immoral wives!
Up the side they came, clambering like savage mermen out of the ocean depths. Their frizzly, wet heads came above the rails and, puff! they leapt on deck and pattered about on naked feet. They were pleasant, bright-eyed, shaggy fellows and the world’s greatest talkers: they jabbered and jabbered till sunrise burst over the ocean, and before us, over the bows, half-a-mile away, lay Hiva-oa.
I asked the skipper to give me a long leave of absence ashore. “Very well, Middleton, we are not going for a fortnight. You can go off; and mind you behave yourself and bring that fiddle back.”
“All right, sir, and thank you,” I said gratefully, for he really did treat me as though I were a passenger. I had played cards with him and taught him melodies by ear on the fiddle.
“Come on, Sam Slick,” I said to my comrade, who was an American fellow and came from ’Frisco. I was reading Sam Slick the Clock-maker, and so gave him that name, for he was a kind of Slick. He was about twenty-six years old, but as boyish as I was; a merry-looking fellow, with a little straw-coloured moustache, grey, kind eyes, thin lips, good-natured and determined, and his long legs balanced on enormous feet. We went off, and I had not gone far before I met a Frenchman who had known me on my previous visit. I understood from him that a lot of the people I had been friendly with before were still living there.
Slick, who had not been to the Marquesas before, was enraptured with the sights we saw. I made him go up to Turoa village and see the natives en déshabillé. He made a splendid pioneer forest breaker, as his boots crashed down and levelled the jungle scrub, and I followed cautiously in the track he left behind him. The heat was terrific when we arrived, at last emerging from the thick tropical scrub and dust into the native town’s open space.
There was a store erected by the village, a new wooden, one-roomed shed. We fairly steamed as we loosened our shirts and stood drinking native toddy, and the little wind blew through the pandanus and dark spreading palm leaves on to our bare breasts. Out from their beehive-shaped huts came the Marquesan girls, dressed in their undraped beauty. Their fine dark eyes shone and their somewhat sensual lips, laughing, revealed their pearl-like teeth. The Marquesan girls are slightly darker skinned than the Samoans, and do their hair very attractively, almost with a Parisian effect. Some of the youths also bunch their hair up, and it is impossible at times to tell the difference between the youths and the maids till they stand in the grass smiling before one, and one sees the straight limbs of the males and the feminine curves of the dusky, smiling Eves. Sam Slick’s eyes twinkled with curiosity and very evident pleasure as they spoke to him in pidgin-English and by signs. One pretty girl, about fourteen years old, held her own baby up for our inspection. Slick held it in his hands. It was not much larger than a green coco-nut. Its skin was a pretty red-tinted brown colour. I held it on one hand and, to please the admiring mother, kissed its tiny bald head. Then all the little native children, who had crept up to us and were watching our white faces with childish interest, rushed back under the forest palms, screaming with delight. Off they went to tell the whole village population that the big white man had kissed Temarioa’s fantoe (child) on the head. I gave the girls a coin each, and they clapped their hands and said: “Yuranah!”[[8]]
[8]. Thank you.