Men who shaved their Beards off—Grog Shanty Sympathy—The Dead who returned on the Tide—Indian-like Men from the Malay Archipelago—The Little Carpet Bag and its Hidden Potentialities—True Belief—Idol-Worship in Secret—My Incorrigible Reverence for a Heathen Idol—The Old Clothes of Kindness from the Hands of Civilisation, and their Hidden Potentialities—The Devil tempts Eve in the New Garden of Eden, with a Leg Bangle!—Waylao returns Home late—Her Mother’s Wrath—Benbow’s Cottage—I conjure up a Picture of what must have been when Waylao fell in the Arms of Mohammed—The Cockney’s Disgust—Where did You get that ’At—A Bankrupt Poet—Helen of Troy—Odysseus
IN that grog shanty congregated the derelicts from the civilised cities of the world, for the Marquesan Group was the special province of those men who found it extremely convenient to change their names and shave their chins.
Some would come hurrying up the shore, stagger into the grog shanty, swallow a few drinks and once more pass away to sea, like ships in the night.
Some were fugitives from justice, escaped from Ile Nouve, the convict settlement of New Caledonia. They came in like waifs on the tide; some on rafts and some disguised as passengers on the schooners that traded from isle to isle.
It was an open secret amongst the scanty white population who these hurried men really were.
The well-seasoned shellback would gaze critically at the gaunt, haggard stranger who had arrived on the last schooner and say quietly:
“Waal, stranger, where yer bound for?”
Then he would immediately stand the new-comer a drink, and give a significant smile that expressed brotherhood, and seemed to say:
“I know the kind ye are, but never you mind that; we don’t go back on a cove when he’s down—no, not in these parts.”
I was deeply interested in these derelicts of the world. Some were devil-may-care fellows, caring not a tinker’s cuss how the wind blew, so low had they sunk in the social scale of human affairs.