I recall how the Knut and I tramped across those wild miles. We cheered ourselves up by singing part songs. Who killed Cock Robin? was our favourite melody. The first night we stayed at a small settlement near Namara, a native village. We met a strange old man at this spot. He lived in a hut by a palm-sheltered lagoon, slept on a fibre mat, native style, only wore a large beard and pants, and on his head a stitched banana-leaf hat. He was an ex-sailor. At first I took him for some mighty philosopher, some modern Montaigne out there in Fiji, unacknowledged and alone. But soon his wise sayings and growlings on life palled on us. He tried to impress the Knut and me that he was some kind of a mixture between François Villon and the wise Thoreau, with a splash of Darwin thrown in. I recall his hatchet-like face. His drooping nose seemed to be commiserating with his upper lip as he artfully drank water and chewed dirty brown bread. On his table were piled the works of the philosophers: Montaigne’s Essays, Diogenes, Thoreau’s Meditations in the Forest, J. J. Rousseau’s Confessions, Darwin, and many more standard works. He spoke much about the beauties of Nature, of birds’ songs and the beauty of flowers. And I believe he was a clever old man. His eyes shone with delight as the Knut and I praised him and bowed our heads in complete humility as he uttered tremendous phrases. In the corner of his hut stood a secret barrel of Fijian rum. It was neatly covered with a pail, but my keen nasal organ smelt it out. The natives told us that sometimes the old man got terribly drunk and danced like a madman by the door of his hut, to their extreme delight. He was, withal, a fine specimen of civilised man living under utterly new conditions in a strange country. Such men I have often met—ex-sailors, ex-convicts, ex-poets, ex-divines, authors and musicians—but seldom have they given one the slightest hint, by their mode of thought or their way of living, of their erstwhile calling during their life in civilised countries. Men change completely. Environment makes all the difference. Undress the artist, take the hope of praise for his enthusiastic efforts from him, make him a tribal chief, and lo! his mental efforts are reversed. Some primitive tribe applauds his ferocious, cannibalistic appetite, his cruelty, his merciless, sardonic grin as some harem wife shrieks at the stake. And he who, by God’s mercy, escaped the British gallows, roams some South Sea forest and finds himself; becomes a poet, the wonders of Nature, the music of the Ocean turning his exiled thoughts near to tears. Experience has shown me that the inherent truth and goodness of men is mostly hidden, and they learn by artifice that which leads them to the gallows. But to return to my ex-sailor. He gave us a bed on the floor, and made us comfortable; but we never had a wink of sleep all night. He seemed delighted to get someone to listen to his philosophy. He had evidently been living alone for a long time with his thoughts, so we got the benefit of the great flood that burst forth from his long-closed lips.
After we left that old sailor philosopher we walked two miles and then fell fast asleep under the palms, and made up for the night’s philosophy.
That evening we arrived at a little township near the mouth of the Rewa river. Having had so little sleep the night before, the Knut took comfortable lodgings with a white settler, a Frenchman.
As the evening wore on, we discovered that he had been a surveillant at Ile Nou, the convict settlement off Noumea. He was a pleasant man enough, but I could not help thinking of the power that had once been his. He seemed to take a delight in telling terrible anecdotes about his profession.
As he shrugged his shoulders and murmured, “Sapristi! Mon dieu!” we both looked at him, horror expressed in our eyes.
“Mine tere friens, I but do my duties,” he said, as he saw the shocked look on our faces.
As he continued telling us of those wretched convicts, I stared into the little hearth fire that merrily flickered as it cooked our supper, and I saw dawn breaking away over the seas as the waves lifted the limbs of that silent figure, and laved the sad face of the dead escapee convict girl of Nuka Hiva.
That surveillant’s happy wife and their little girl, staring at me with wondering eyes, only intensified the pathos of the scene that my imagination had conjured up.
I also had been to Noumea and seen those poor convicts, the dead still toiling in chains, while some were fast asleep under their little cross in the cemetery just by: “Ici repose Mercedes ——. Decede l’age——.” O terrible, nameless epitaphs!
Ah! reader, have you read The Prisoner of Chillon? Yes? Well, you may consider it a passionate poem of reflective longing as compared to the great unwritten poem about the prisoners of Noumea. If Byron had been able to see Noumea he would never have worried about Greece or Chillon, but would have sat down and outrivalled Dante’s Inferno with a New Caledonian Inferno—I’ll swear.