"The captain collected a few bright trifles among his men: a mirror or two, a gaudy bandanna handkerchief, a clasp knife with a glittering blade. The native returned to parley with the savages, and while he was gone the skipper gave instructions to his men—they were to scatter a little and lie hidden; if the wild people found courage to leave their cave, and they were not too many, they were to be seized and bound at once.
"An hour passed. Then, without the warning crackle of a twig, two savages stepped from the bush and came toward the native who awaited them, holding out gifts and speaking encouragingly. They were naked save for light girdles of grass, and their shocks of hair were tied in high knots upon their heads. The captain whistled, and a moment later the two men of Iriatai lay triced and helpless on the ground.
"The schooner sailed for Tahiti the same night, carrying the prisoners, whose evidence—the story, freely told, of how the wrecked brig had been plundered before she broke up, and how every soul aboard had been massacred—was placed before the French authorities. A few months later a man-of-war was sent to Iriatai, with one of the prisoners as interpreter, and the people of the island were carried off to Tahiti to be civilized. In the end, the chief was executed in reprisal for the island's crime, and his people were taken away to distant atolls of the group.
"Only one of them, so far as I know, ever returned to Iriatai—Turia, the chief's daughter, a girl of eleven or twelve when she was carried off aboard the man-of-war. Her beauty and intelligence attracted the notice of a half-caste Tahitian, who adopted her and gave her an education at the Sisters' School. At seventeen she married the Baron von Tesmar—an Austrian nobleman, a man of wealth and taste, brought up among the capitals of the Old World. He was well known in all the outlandish ports of the Pacific; for reasons of his own, of which he never spoke, he had chosen to shut the door on the past. He traveled on his own yacht with a Kanaka crew, and during a visit to Tahiti he ran across Turia, the girl from Iriatai. A month later she sailed away with him, with a marriage certificate, all legal and shipshape, stowed away in her camphorwood box. I suppose she must have been the Baroness von Tesmar—By Jove, a funny world!
"The natives have a quality I like: each one of them loves his own island in a way that we can scarcely understand. Turia was no exception, but unlike the rest of her people, she ended her days on Iriatai. A short time after he married her the Baron became interested in pearl-culture and—at her suggestion, no doubt—they settled on the island where her savage forefathers had lived and died.
"To give you an understanding of the story from now on, I must tell you one or two things about pearl-shell, which furnishes the mother-of-pearl used all over the world for buttons and ornaments and the handles of knives. In the Paumotus where I trade, the pearl-oysters are of a kind called 'black-lipped,' valuable as mother-of-pearl but rather barren so far as real pearls are concerned. Out to the west, about Celebes and in the Sulu Sea, there is another variety, richer in pearls and far more valuable as shell, called 'gold-lipped,' because the edges of the shell are golden-tinted. Von Tesmar was a man of some scientific attainments, and he suspected, far ahead of his time, that the growth of a pearl in the oyster was caused by a parasite, which it might be possible to transmit by artificial means. In order to carry out his experiments, he had his schooner fitted with a kind of well, through which the sea water was allowed to circulate, and brought shipments of live oysters from distant parts, to be transplanted in Iriatai Lagoon. He may have had an idea that the gold-lipped oysters, in this new environment, would prove more susceptible to infection—to the little-known parasite believed to cause the pearl.
"The Baron's career, his studies of the pearl, and his new settlement on Iriatai were all ended by the hurricane of 1881. The island had been one of the finest of the Paumotus, with dense groves of coconuts and a deep soil on the higher spots, but when I first landed there, in ninety-six, it was a waste of sand and tumbled coral-blocks, clean-swept from end to end by breaching seas. On an islet, far down the lagoon, a small clump of palms remained—the only living things, save Turia and her child, to survive the fury of the sea.
"The settlement was at the weather end, and when the seas began to breach across into the lagoon, von Tesmar's schooner was anchored fifty yards offshore. Both cables snapped and she disappeared in an instant among the driving clouds downwind. She must have piled up at the leeward end, or perhaps she was carried clean over into the open sea beyond. At any rate, no man of her crew was ever seen again. The people of the settlement—a dozen natives with their wives, brought by von Tesmar to labor in the oyster-beds—had no time to chop off the tops of the palms in which they took refuge. A pair of old palms, eighty feet high, flexible and tough as whalebone, stood close beside the house. High up on the bole of one, the Baron tied himself, and Turia swarmed up the other, her three-year-old boy lashed to her back.
"It is useless to try to describe a South Sea hurricane. One after another, the houses were carried away. Each frothing comber seemed to rush over the land more fiercely than the last; the wind came in gusts that bent the palms like reeds. With a sound audible above the uproar of the hurricane, a palm-bole snapped, and its top, with two human beings clinging among the fronds, sped off to vanish in the wrack. Turia's was the last to withstand the wind; she watched the others go,—men, women, and babies at their mothers' breasts,—and finally a faint, splitting report close by told her that von Tesmar's palm had given way. Next moment her own refuge went, and still clinging to the upper bole, she was sailing above the torn white surface of the lagoon. How she survived the impact, disentangled herself from the wreckage, and lived through miles of angry water is a thing that I have never understood. When she struggled ashore on the islet which was the only land above the sea, her child was still alive. No one but a Paumotan could have done it, and no woman of any other race could have lived and supported her child—as Turia did for many weeks—on coconuts and the fish she was able to catch with her bare hands. In the end, the lookout of a passing schooner saw her signal-smoke."
My uncle's cigar had gone out and he rose for a moment to scratch a match against the fireplace. The lamp was turned low; the glowing logs on the andirons sent waves of light flickering among the shadows of the room. My father stood up to stretch his legs. Standing with hands clasped behind his back, he gazed quizzically at his brother, seated in the deep old leather chair.