The raised-up atoll of Makatea
On the way to the beach I met Mrs. Fisher, whom Bishop Dordillon, my dictionary writer, had as adopted mother, when he was old enough to be her grandfather. That was because Queen Vaekehu had adopted him as a grandson, and Mrs. Fisher as a daughter, and the bishop had observed the pseudo-relationship strictly.
“Mrs. Stevenson gave me a shawl,” said Mrs. Fisher. “I have shown that to many people. Madame Jack London wore it when she was here with her husband on the Snark. They lived with Lutz, the German, who was then here. Pauvre Stevenson! He had to die young, and here I am, after all these years!”
I waded through the surf to the boat, and reached the Saint François to find all the others aboard. We shipped the buoy and were away in a trice. The last sight I had of the shore was of the promontory where Captain Porter raised the American flag a hundred years before. I was never to see the Marquesas Islands again. The fresh breath of nature was too foul with the worst of civilization.
CHAPTER XXIII
McHenry gets a caning—The fear of the dead—A visit to the grave of Mapuhi—En voyage.
IMAGINE my delight when the captain of the Saint François set our course for Takaroa, the atoll of Mapuhi, Nohea, and the crippled diver who had possessed the great pearl of Pukapuka! The Marquesas Islands are only eight hundred miles from the Society Islands, of which Tahiti is one, and between the Marquesas and the Society Islands lie the strewn eighty atolls of the Iles Dangereuses or Paumotu group. With steam we ran the half-thousand miles or so from Taiohae in two nights and two days, and at daybreak of the second day were due to see the familiar, lonely figure of the wrecked County of Roxburgh on an uninhabited motu of Takaroa. It was this startling sight that informed the Londons in the Snark that they were out of their course and in danger, and it was Takaroa the Stevensons in the Casco looked for, only to fetch up at Tikei, thirty miles to windward. I had no confidence in our Breton captain, to whom these waters were as unknown as the Indies to Columbus. I breathed a sigh of relief when the lofty iron masts of the dismantled vessel loomed on the horizon.
After so many months in the frowning islands of the war fleet, with their thunderous headlands, gleaming streams, and green and black valleys, the spectacle of the slender ring of white sand and coral, the verdant banners of this first of the Low Islands lying flat upon the jeweled waters, aroused in me again sensations of wonder at the ineffable variety of creation; the myriad-mindedness of the Creator. The crash of the surf upon the outer reef, the waving of the breeze-stirred cocoanuts, the flight of a solitary bird, contrasted with the marvelous fabrication of man, the metal ship, thrown by a toss of the sea and a puff of the wind among these evidences of a beautiful yet deadly design.
The Saint François crept along the coast of the atoll and anchored opposite the pass, a good mile from the breakers. Everybody was on deck, the black-gowned nuns with Mademoiselle Narbonne—she also in a tunic of religious hue. Since we had left Nuku-hiva they had not appeared. The contrary currents and confused trade-winds among these Pernicious Islands had kept them in their cabin. The six-hundred-ton hull of the Saint had see-sawed through the two hundred leagues of the tropic of Capricorn, and only hardened trenchermen like the ship’s officers and myself could find appetite for food. Lutz, too, had raised a mournful face to the deck but seldom. A few hundred sacks of copra awaited us at Takaroa, and we put off a life-boat to bring it aboard. Lutz and I accompanied the second officer with a command from the captain to stay no longer than the cargo’s loading. Lying Bill’s schooner, the Morning Star, was in the lagoon, and, seeing it there, I wondered if Mapuhi, the great sailor of these atolls, had steered it through the narrow pass. About the landing, despite the uniqueness of the steamship’s arrival, was an unusual quietude, a hush that moved me to fear, as a presage of evil. A cholera-stricken village in the Philippines had that same dismal aura. A few natives were upon the coral mole, and the Mutoi came forward to examine our papers.