Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

The small, cold eyes of McHenry gleamed, and a queer smile twisted his mouth.

“Well, keep him from under my feet!” he warned, and laughed at some thought now fully formed in his mind. I could see it squirming in his small brain.

McHenry was as rollicking a rascal as I knew in all the South Seas. He was bitter and yet had a flavor of real humor at odd times. Without schooling except that of a wharf-rat in Liverpool, New York, and San Francisco, he had come into these latitudes twenty years before. Cunning yet drunken, cruel but now and again doing a kindness out of sheer animal spirits or a desire to show off, he had many enemies, and yet he had a few friends. When the itching for money or the desire to feel power over those about him urged him, as most of the time, he proved himself the ripest and rottenest product of his early and present environment. He had had desperate fights to keep from being a decaying beachcomber, a parasite without the law; but a certain Scotch caution, a love of making and amassing profits, and, as I learned later, a firm and towering native wife, had kept him at least out of jail and in the groove of trading.

Boasting was his chief weakness. He would go far to find the chance to ease his latent sense of inferiority to an audience that did not know fully his poverty of character and attainment. After years of ups and downs he had now quarreled with his recent employers, and was going to pitch his trade tent on some Paumotu atoll where copra and pearl-shell might be found. He thought that he might stay a while in Takaroa, one of our ports, because the diving season was about to open there. He and I being the only ones whose language was English, we were much together, but I always half despised myself for not speaking my mind to him. Still, those lonely places make a man compromise as much as do cities. What one might fear most would be having no one to talk with.

We lived on deck, all four of us, the Moets, McHenry, and I, along with a half-caste mate, sleeping always on the roof of the cabin, and taking our meals off it, except in rain. In that moist case we bundled on the floor of the cabin. There was no ceremony. The cook brought the food through the cabin, and we handed up and down the dishes through the after scuttle, helping ourselves at will to the wine and rum which were in clay bottles on the roof. McHenry and I were the only passengers, and the crew of six Tahitians was ample for all tasks. They were Piri a Tuahine, the boat-steerer; Peretia a Huitofa, Moe a Nahe, Roometua a Terehe, Piha a Teina, and Huahine, with Tamataura, the cook.

The whole forward deck of the schooner was crowded with native men, women, and children, the families of church leaders who were returning to their Paumotu homes after attending a religious festival in Tahiti. They lay huddled at night, sleeping silently in the moonlight and under the stars. All day, and until eight or nine o’clock, they conversed and ate, and worked with their hands, plaiting hats of pandanus, sugar-cane, bamboo, and other materials. White laborers massed in such discomfort would have quarreled, squabbled for place, and eased their annoyance in loud words, but the Polynesian, of all races, loves his fellow and keeps his temper.

These were the first Paumotuan people I had seen intimately, and I listened to them and asked them questions. A deacon who at night removed a black coat and slept in a white-flowered blue loin-cloth, the pareu of all the Polynesians, gazed at the heavens for hours. He knew many of the stars.

“Our old people,” he said, “believed that the gods were always making new worlds in distant sky places beyond the Milky Way, the Maoroaheita. When a new world was made by the strong hands of the gods, the Atua, it went like a great bird to the place fixed for it. That star, Rehua,”—he pointed toward Sirius “was first placed by the Atua near the Tauha, the Southern Cross, but afterwards they changed it, and sent it to where it is now.”

I looked at the glowing cross, and remembered the emotion its first sight had stirred in me. I was tossing on the royal yard of a bark bound for Brazil, up a hundred feet and more from deck, when, raising my head from the sail I had made fast, there burst upon me the wonderful form and brilliance of the constellation which five thousand years ago entranced the Old World but which is hidden from it now.

The deacon again raised his hand and indicated the spot where Rehua had shone before the divine mind had changed. It was the Coal-sack, the black vacancy in the Magellan Clouds, so conspicuous below the cross when all the rest of the sky is cloudless and clear. The Maori mind had wisely settled upon that vast space in the stellar system in which not even an atom of stellar dust sheds a single flicker of luminosity as the point from which the gods had plucked Rehua. I had no such lucid reason for this amazing, celestial void as the half-naked deacon on the deck of the Marara.