The one passenger of the Saint François who came ashore on our beach weighted the balance for America. He was Brunneck, an American swimmer, diver, and boxer, whom I had seen Sarah Bernhardt kiss when at Catalina Island he rose through the clear waters of Avalon Bay to her glass-bottomed boat and presented her with an abalone shell. I traded him my coffee-pot and utensils for the memory of Sarah’s moment of abandon, and Brunneck tipped the scales for me toward the America he had deserted. He was an atavist in a grass skirt and a crown of ferns, hatless, purseless, a set of boxing-gloves his only impedimenta. I could not equal his serenity, that of a civilized being again in harmony with the earth. I hurried aboard the steamship in Tahauku roadstead to decide my vacillation.
By dark, the Tahauku River, into which some weary cloud had emptied, sent a menacing current down the roadstead. The steamship rolled and swung wildly. As madder grew the fresh torrent, the anchors dragged, and the vessel drifted broadside toward the rocky cliff. Steam was down and the engines would not turn. The captain yelling from the bridge, the Breton sailors in noisy sabots, prancing alarmedly about the decks, a search-light playing upon the rocks, and lighting the groups of natives watching from the headlands, the shouting and swearing in French and Breton with a word or two for my benefit in English, all made a dramatic incident with a spice of danger.
The Saint François swung until the rail on which I stood was four feet from the jagged wall. A wild chant rose from the Marquesans on shore in the moment of most peril. I made ready to leap, but soon heard the hum of the screw as it began fighting the current. We gained little by little, and, once clear of the rocks, pointed the prow for the Bordelaise Channel and comparative safety. The cargo boats had not been hoisted aboard, and they banged to pieces as, urged by the rushing river, we drove through the door of the bay and out to sea.
I lay down on a bench, and when I awoke at dawn we were heading back for Tahauku to finish loading. Exploding Eggs was beside me. I had not known he was aboard. The adventures of the night, the fires, the engines, the electric lights, and the danger had delighted him.
“Sacré!” muttered the red-faced captain at breakfast. “These Marquesas are as bad as the Paumotus.”
No lighthouses, charts inaccurate, shore-guides lacking, treacherous tides, winds, currents, reefs, and passages. Lying Bill said it took “bloody near a gen’us to escape with his life after thirty years of navigation in these waters.”
The Polynesians believed that souls animate flowers and plants, that these are organized beings. For pigs, they had a special heaven, Ofetuna. Each pig had a distinct and arbitrary name, which was never changed, though men changed their names often.
On the deck of the Saint François were half a dozen slender pigs that had once played about my paepae and were now engaged in resisting the monopolistic tendencies of Alphonse, a ram bought from the trader. By uniting, they made his habitat painful, and his outcries brought the steward, who attempted to correct the ram, but was butted into profanity and flight.
“You’re no lam’ o’ goodness! You’ll be chops mighty soon!” the negro shouted, and threw a pan at him. The ram bolted, knocked open a swinging port, and, followed by the pork, dived into the bay. He may have sensed the threat of the steward.
“A la chasse! A la chasse!” ordered the captain from the bridge. “Tonnerre de Dieu! Our meat is going ashore.”