Well, the men who travelled the South Seas in the days when I was a boy will vouch for the truth of what I say about the strange characters who lived in those wild parts—and they were wild in those days. I guarantee that, as I proceed with my chapters, my only artificial colouring will be introduced to enable me to touch up some of my characters so that they may be presented to polite readers in polite form.
When I think of those castaways from civilised lands, how I tramped across vast plains in their company, sat by their camp-fires far away in the Australian and New Zealand bush, I feel that I once met humanity in its most blessed state. Often they would sit and sing some old English, Irish or Scots song, as the whimpering ’possums leapt across the moonlit branches of our roof. Listening to their tales of better days, it seemed incredible that there really was a civilised world thousands of miles across the seas. The memories of the great cities appeared like far-off opéra bouffe, where the actors rushed across the phantom limelight in some terrified fright from their own dreams. The thought of vigilant policemen on London’s streets, the cataclysm of running wheels, crowds of huddled women and men staring in lamp-lit, serrated shop windows, pale-faced street arabs shouting “Evening News! Star and Echo!” swearing bus-men, shrieking engines, trains pulling back to the suburbs cargoes of wretched people who thought they were intensely happy—seemed something absurd, something that I dreamed before my soul fledged its wings and flew away from the homestead surrounded by the windy poplar trees—away to the steppes of another world.
Yet—and strange it is—had an English thrush, in some mysterious way, commenced to sing somewhere down the wide groves of banyans and karri-karri trees, our hearts’ blood would have pulsed to the soul of England!
One may ask, in this sceptical old world, why such fine fellows as my old beachcombers and shellbacks turned out such apparent rogues. I must say that I, too, have pondered on the mystery of it all. The only conclusion that I can arrive at is, that they were, very often, men who had been spirited, courageous, romantic-minded boys, and so had once aspired beyond the beaten track and made a bold plunge into pioneer life.
All men have some besetting sin, and it is so easy to slip and fall by the wayside, to wrap one’s robe of shattered dreams about one, and tell the civilised communities to go and hang themselves.
In reference to the half-caste girl and the white girl, Waylaos and Paulines exist in this grey old world by millions, and will do so as long as skies are blue and fields are green. Waylao was a half-caste Marquesan girl; and Pauline—well, she was Pauline! Neither are the leper lovers introduced for scenic effects. They, too, were terribly real. Their whitened bones still lie clasped together in the island cave in the lone Pacific. Terrible as their fate may appear, believe me, the terror, the horror of the leper dramas enacted on the desolate seas by Hawaii are only faintly touched upon in my book.
Old Matafa and his wife I number amongst my dearest Samoan comrades. It was with them that I stayed during my last two sojourns in Apia. The grog shanty near Tai-o-hae has possibly vanished. Could I be convinced that it still stands beneath the plumed palms, with its little door facing the moonlit sea, the dead men, out of their graves, roaring their rollicking sea chanteys, what should I do? I would long to speed across the seas, to become some swift, silent old sea-gull. Yes, to be numbered with the dead so that I might rejoin those ghosts and find such good company again.
As for Abduh Allah, the Malay Indian, I have expressed my opinion of that worthy in the book. I have no personal grudge against Mohammedanism in the South Seas, any more than I have for the Mohammedans and their white converts in the Western Seas. The islands—especially Fiji—through the immigration of men from the Indian, China, and Malay archipelagos are rapidly becoming South Sea India, the white man’s creed being converted into a kind of pot-pourri of Eastern, Southern and Western theology, doing the can-can.
When I, as a lad, arrived at the islands, the Marquesan race was fast ebbing to the grave. So my readers may take these incidents, of their dances, songs, ideas and laughter, as the last record of the Marquesans.
We are but wandering bundles of dreams!—Swagmen tramping across the drought-stricken track on the great, gold rush of this life’s Never-Never-Land.