Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

If a boat coming to the Saint François had not intercepted the bold deserters, they would have succeeded in their break for liberty, and probably have taken to the wilds. The recovering them was no easy task, but, diverted from the rocks, they were run down, after half an hour of fierce commands through a megaphone from the captain. They were fast swimmers, being encumbered by no fat. Their adventure dispelled for me the myth that pigs cannot swim. The story ran that in swimming pigs cut their throats with their hoofs.

I had recognized in the English-African accent of the steward the lingo of the West-India negro, and oddly, I remembered having seen the man himself at Kowloon, in China, where he had been bartender at the Kowloon Hotel. With no word of French, and ten days aboard from Tahiti, the black man was bursting with conversation. Serving me with a bottle of Bordeaux beer, he spoke of his hardships, and of familiar figures of his happier days at Kowloon:

“Yes, sir, men can stand more than animiles,” he said. “They can, sir, work or play. You remember that goriller that Osborne had in the Kowloon Hotel grounds? He perished, sir, from his drinking habits. He took his reg’lar with the soldiers and tourists, and his favoryte tonoc was gin and whiskey mixed, but after he was started, he would ‘bibe near anything ’toxicating. You remember how big he was? Big as Sikh, that goriller was. He was a African ape like the white perfesser says he is descended from.

“Week before Chrismus, that infantry regiment in barricks, in Kowloon, kept him late every night, and I seen him climb to his house in that tree hardly able to hold onto the limbs. Chrismus eve he let nothing slip his paws. He began with the punch—you remember, sir, the punch I used to make? and he overdone it, though he had a stummick like a India major’s. He drank with the officers and he drank with the Tommies. When I opened the bar, Chrismus morning, he was dead on the ground. He hadn’t never been able to reach his home. Osborne gave him a Christian berrial under the comquat trees, but as sure as you’re born every officer and soldier turned up for more drink that night. Men can stand more than animiles, sir.”

All morning I sat on the deck and took my fill of the scenes on either shore, while copra was hoisted aboard from canoes and boats. Exploding Eggs was examining minutely the wonders of the steamship, reporting to me occasionally some astounding discovery. Until then I had refused to consider taking him away from his people, but, in a moment of selfishness, I drew a plat of America, to attract his thirteen years,—the lofty buildings, motor-cars, telephones, ice and ice-cream, snow and sleighs, roller-skates and moving pictures. He had seen none of these, nor read of them, but, nevertheless, the fear of homesickness caused him, after a few minutes to say:

“Aoe metai, Nakohu mata!” which meant, “No good; Exploding Eggs would die!”

Characteristic of all primitive peoples was this nostalgia, and, far from being sentiment easily smothered, it was more often than physical ailment the predisposing, or even actual, cause of death when they were separated from their homes. The Pitcairn youth who died in California and the Easter Islanders who could not endure even their exile in Tahiti were examples. The Maori Napoleon, Te Rauparaha, gazed upon his old home, Kawhia, and wept in farewell. His legendary song says:

O my own home! Ah me! I bid farewell to you,

And still, at distance, bid farewell.

Before noon, I was overcome by a longing to see Atuona again. The voices of the friends who had chanted their grief were in my ears. I landed at Tahauku in one of the copra boats which were coming and going, and walked along the cliffs until I came within sight of the beach where, so often, I had ridden the surf. I went at a fast pace down the hill, hoping for a familiar face. At a point overlooking the cove, that very spot Stevenson thought the most beautiful on earth, I heard shouts and merry laughter.