Frederick Tissot, a storekeeper at Puamau, a Swiss in his fifties, ten years in the Foreign Legion of Algiers, a worker upon the Chicago Exposition buildings in the early nineties, and seventeen years here, spoke of the “good time” when he worked at Zinkand’s restaurant in San Francisco.
“I drank thirty quarts of beer a day. I was cook, and the bartenders stood in with me for bonnes bouches. I never tasted solid food. I had soup and booze. I nearly died in a year, and had to leave.”
He sighed at the memory of those golden days. Later I saw him falling off his horse, and laid upon a mat in a native house.
James Nichols, son of a Chicagoan, dignified, tall and thin, almost white, with side-whiskers, a black cutaway, overalls, and bare feet, a shoeless butler for all the world, had a tale for me of his father’s marrying in Tahiti a member of the royal family of Pomaré, and of himself being born on Christmas Island.
“A wild island that,” said the quasi-butler in English. “Captain Cook discovered it when he was steering north from Borabora on Christmas day. He stayed there a few weeks and saw an eclipse of the sun. He took away three hundred turtles. When I lived there they melted cocoanuts into oil, and my father was the cooper. Cook had planted cocoanuts there. It is an atoll, a lonely place, and I was glad to leave. I learned English from my father, and married a Paumotu lady. I was in Tahiti until eight years ago, when the cyclone wiped me out. Here I work for the mission, making copra, and I am the tinker and tinsmith. Here’s looking at you!”
Jensen, the young and engaging Dane, who will never return to civilization, trod a measure with a charming girl from Hanamenu.
“The clan of the Puna has left its bare paepaes all over her valley,” he said. “She is the last.”
At dark the cavalcade reeled down the hill, leaving Pierre Guillitoue sleeping beside the drum. Despite his late fifties and his, to say the least, irregular way of living, Pierre is strong and healthy.
Captain Cook marveled in his diary that “since the arrival of the ship in Batavia [Java] every person belonging to her has been ill, except the sailmaker, who was more than seventy years old; yet this man got drunk every day while we remained there.”
A white man lured away the consort of Ahi, an agreeable young man much in love. I found the lorn husband screaming in grief.