The woman was the wife of a schooner captain, a man of good family and connections, who liked the wild roving life of the Pacific, yet managed to retain a number of acquaintances of his own class in Auckland and Tahiti. His wife was young and handsome, and had many friends of her own. On one of the schooner’s visits to Penrhyn, the man was taken suddenly ill, and died in a very short time, leaving his wife alone. It seems that at first she was bewildered by her loss, and stayed on in the island, not knowing what to do, but before many months she had solved the problem after a fashion that horrified all the whites—she married a Penrhyn native! good-looking and attractive, but three-quarters savage, and left the island with him.
Several children were born to the pair, but they were given to the husband’s people. At last he took a native partner, and deserted his English wife. She left the islands, and went down to Auckland; but her story had travelled before her, and Auckland society closed its doors. To Tahiti, where morals are easy, and no one frowns upon the union, temporary or permanent, of the white man and the brown woman, she went, hoping to be received as in former days. But even Papeete, “the sink of the Pacific,” would have none of the white woman who had married a brown man. Northwards once more, to lonely Penrhyn, the broken-hearted woman went, wishing only to die, far from the eyes of her own world that had driven her out. A schooner captain, who called there now and then, cast eyes upon her—for she was still young and retained much of her beauty—and asked her, at last, if she would become his wife, and so redeem in some degree her position; but she had neither heart nor wish to live longer, so she sent the kindly sailor away, and soon afterwards closed her eyes for ever on the blue Pacific and the burning sands, the brown lover who had betrayed her, and the white lover who came too late. The traders buried her, and kindly left her grave without a name; only the initials of that which she had borne in her first marriage, and the date of her death. So, quiet and forgotten at last, lies in lonely Penrhyn the woman who sinned against her race and found no forgiveness.
It was a relief to leave Penrhyn, with all its gloomy associations, and see the schooner’s head set for the open sea and merry Manahiki. But we seemed to have brought ill-luck away with us, for there was what the captain called “mean weather” before we came within hail of land again, and the Duchess got some more knocking about.
It was on account of this that Neo, our native bo’sun, hit an innocent A.B. over the head with a belaying-pin one afternoon, and offered to perform the same service for any of the rest of the crew who might require it. The men had been singing mission hymns as they ran about the deck pulling and hauling—not exactly out of sheer piety, but because some of the hymns, with good rousing choruses, made excellent chanties. They were hauling to the tune of “Pull for the shore, brothers!” when a squall hit the ship, and out of the fifteen agitated minutes that followed, the Duchess emerged minus her jib-boom. When things had quieted down, Neo started to work with the belaying-, pin, until he was stopped, when he offered, as a sufficient explanation, the following:
“Those men, they sing something made bad luck, I think, jib-boom he break. Suppose they sing, ‘Pull for ‘em shore’ some other time, I break their head, that I telling them!”
The next time a chanty was wanted, “Hold the Fort!” took the place of the obnoxious tune, and Neo’s lessons were not called for.
And so, in a day or two we came to Rakahanga and Manahiki (Reirson and Humphrey Islands), and stopped there for another day or two, before we spread our wings like the swallows, to fleet southward again.
