Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

“I knew a Dane who rode over Anaa on a tree like a bloody ’orse on the turf,” said Lying Bill to me, with a frightening bang of his tumbler on the table. “’E was caught by the top of a big wave, an’ away ’e drove from one side of the bleedin’ island to the other, and come right side up. A bit ’urt in the ’ead, ’e was, but able to take ’is bloomin’ oath on what ’appened.”

I had not depended on these raconteurs for a vicarious understanding of the Paumotus; for I had read and noted all that I could find in books and calendars about them, but yet I had felt that these unlettered actors in the real dramas laid there gave me a valid picture. My hopes were fixed in finding in spirit what they saw only materially.

Moet stood by the wheel until we cleared the waters where the lofty bulk of the island confused the winds, and I, when the actions of the sailors in shifting the sails with his repeated orders had lost newness, looked with some anguish at that sweet land I was leaving. It had meant so much to me.

A poetic mood only could paint the swiftly changing panorama as the schooner on its seaward tacks moved slowly under the faint vesper breeze; the mood of a diarist could tell how “the sun setting behind Moorea in a brilliant saffron sky, splashed with small golden and mauve-colored clouds, threw boldly forward in a clear-cut, opaque purple mass that fantastically pinnacled island, near the summit of whose highest peak there glittered, star-like, a speck of light—the sky seen through a hole pierced in the mountain. How in the sea, smooth as a mirror, within the reef, and here and there to seaward, blue ruffled by a catspaw, away to the horizon was reflected the saffron hue from above; how against purple Moorea a cocoa-crowned islet in the harbor appeared olive-green—a gem set in the yellow water. How the sunlight left the vivid green shore of palm-fringed Tahiti, and stole upward till only the highest ridges and precipices were illuminated with strange pink and violet tints springing straight from the mysterious depth of dark-blue shadow. How from the loftiest crags there floated a long streamer cloud—the cloud-banner of Tyndal. Then, as the sun sank lower and lower, the saffron of the sky paled to the turquoise-blue of a brief tropical twilight, the cloud-banner melted and vanished, and the whole color deepened and went out in the sudden darkness of the night.”

If one must say farewell to Tahiti, let it be in the evening, in the tender hues of the sunset, the effacing shadows of the sinking orb in sympathy with the day’s tasks done; the screen of night being drawn amid flaming, dying lights across a workaday world, the dream pictures of the Supreme Artist appearing and fainting in the purpling heavens. I was leaving people and scenes that had taught me a new path in life, or, at least, had hung lamps to guide my feet in an appreciation of values before unknown to me.

I came back to the deck of the schooner with Moet’s call for a steersman, and his invitation to go below for food and drink. I refused despite his “Sapristi! Eef you no eat by ’n’ by you cannot drink!” and when he disappeared down the companion-ladder I climbed to the roof of the low cabin. The moon was now high—a plate of glowing gold in an indigo ceiling. The swelling sea rocked the vessel and now and then lifted her sharp prow out of the water and struck it a blow of friendship as it rejoined it. I unrolled a straw mat, and, placing it well aft so that the jibing boom would not touch me, lay upon my back, and visioned the prodigious world I was seeking. The very names given by discoverers were suggestive of extravagant adventure. The Half-drowned Islands, the Low Archipelago, the Dangerous Isles, the Pernicious Islands, were the titles of the early mariners. For three hundred years the Paumotus had been dimly known on the charts as set in the most perilous sea in all the round of the globe. I had read that they were more hazardous than any other shores, as they were more singular in form. They had excited the wonder of learned men and laymen by even the scant depiction of their astounding appearance. For decades after the eyes of a European glimpsed them they were thought by many bookish men to be as fabulous as Atlantis or Micomicon; too chimerical to exist, though witches then were a surety, and hell a burning reality.

I fell asleep, and as during the night the wind shifted and with it the schooner veered, I had but a precarious hold upon the mat and was several times stood on my feet in the narrow passageway. The dream jinn seized these shiftings and twistings, the shouts of the mate in charge, the chants of the sailors at work, the whistle of the wind through the cordage, and wove them into fantasies,—ecstasies or nightmares,—and thus warded off my waking.

But the sun, roused from his slumber beneath the dip of the sphere, could be put off with no fine frenzies. When even half above the dipping horizon his beams opened my eyes as if a furnace door had been flung wide, and I turned over to see my hard couch occupied by others. Beside me was McHenry, next to him Moet, and furthest, the one white woman aboard, the captain’s wife. We yawned in unison; and, with a quick, accustomed movement, she dropped below. The day had begun on the schooner.

The Marara was once a French gunboat of these seas when cannons were needed to prevent dishonor to the tricolor by failure to obey French discipline, while France was making good colonists or corpses of all peoples hereabout. She was the very pattern of the rakish craft in which the blackbirders and pirates sailed this ocean for generations—built for speed, for entering threatening passes, for stealing silently away under giant sweeps, and for handling by a small number of strong and fearless men. The bitts on the poop were still marked by the gun emplacements, and the rail about the stern was but two feet high.

Now her owners were a company of Tahiti Europeans who, trusting largely to the seamanship and business shrewdness of her master, despatched her every few weeks or months on voyages about the French islands within a thousand miles or so to sell the natives all they would buy, and to get from them at the least cost the copra, shells, and pearls which were virtually the sole products of these islands.