THERE was a steamer in Apia harbour and I was lucky enough to get a berth aboard her. I think I had only been in Apia two days when she got steam up to leave for Fiji and New South Wales. I berthed forward in the forecastle. She was a tramp steamer and carried sail to help the decrepit engines and take the vessel to port when they broke down. Just before we left we took on a cargo of natives bound for somewhere! They were a mixed lot, most of them Samoans or Malay-Polynesians, and among them some Solomon Islanders who had arrived in Apia a week before, waiting to be transhipped. They were berthed forward between decks. Most of them were dressed in dead men’s clothes, collected in the South Sea Island morgues, after the first occupants had no further use for them: dead sailors, beachcombers, coolies, suicides; indeed all the derelict corpses of life’s drama who lay in their final resting-place in the unvisited cemeteries of the Pacific Islands.
These natives were a cheerful, indifferent lot of people—at least when they got over the first pang of parting from their relatives. But that grief was soon over, for they each believed that they were leaving their native isle to return some day with fortunes from the promised El Dorado: hope is as intense in natives of the South Seas as it is in white people. Next day they started to sing cheerfully, and came up on deck in shoals to cadge from the galley, and get the cook to bake their bread-fruit[[11]] and yams. Some had their wives with them, big fat women with glittering eyes. They were supposed to keep down below after dark, but they came up on deck and went pattering by us as we stood by the fore-peak hatchway smoking with the sailors. About three days after we left Apia, bound for Suva (Fiji), a hurricane came on, and the boat rolled and pitched till we thought she would turn a somersault, or turn turtle. The natives between decks were shut down; we heard their yells as the mass of clinging arms and bodies were hurled about as the boat rolled and shipped seas over the bows.
[11]. The name bread-fruit is more poetical than the flavour of the fruit, which tasted to the writer like sweet turnips.
At midday next morning the wind suddenly ceased and the sun burst out. Only those who had experienced the howling chaos of mountainous seas, blackness and wind would have believed what the weather had really been a few hours before.
The boatswain and the carpenter were interesting characters, both typical shellbacks of the island trading type. The boatswain looked like a priest: his face was weather-beaten and his nose twisted; he had no hair on his face, head or neck, and wore a cap to hide his polished skull. His chum the carpenter fairly wallowed in hair, had bristly eyebrows, a bristly beard, head and neck, and a vast moustache; you could only see his fierce, twinkling eyes as he sat arguing in the forecastle with the boatswain. Those two never agreed on any subject, but were inseparable companions. The boatswain, I believe, loved to be contradicted by his shipmate, and if no sudden response was made to any assertion he might make, he at once looked round fiercely and said that silence was equivalent to disbelief, and they might as well call him a liar and be done with it.
I recall how he sat by his bunk on his sea-chest and said: “Remember ’im? I should think I does. Very old man. He had been a skipper on the trader between the Samoan and Marquesas Group; a nice old fellow; he was blind, quite blind in both eyes.” At this the argument commenced immediately, as the carpenter looked up and said: “Of course he was blind in both eyes; he wouldn’t be blind if he could still see with one eye, would he?” Then, as he hammered at the hinge of the sea-chest he was mending, the boatswain shouted: “Stow yer gab, yer clever son of a nigger, d—n yer. Isn’t a man blind if he’s blind in his eye?”
“Course ’e ain’t, he’s only lost one hye!”
“Yer d——d swab! To h—— with yer! If ’e’s lost his eye, ain’t ’e blind in it?”
At this the carpenter’s unshaved face fairly steamed with heat as he appealed to the sailor standing by: “A man ain’t blind if he’s lost ’is one eye, is ’e?”
“Well,” slowly answered the sailor solemnly, “if he couldn’t see out of the eye that was blind, I should say that he was blind in it.”