Copra drying
“Mapuhi’s som’mat for looks without ’is nose,” said Captain Pincher. “I’ve known ’im thirty years, an’ ’e’s the biggest man in the group in all that time. ’E’s got Mormonism stronger now, an’ ’e’s bloody well afraid of ’ell, the ’ell those Mormon missionaries tell about; but ’e’s the best navigator in these waters.”
“He’s past eighty now, big-hearted but shrewd, and loving his own people,” said Woronick, the Parisian, and cunningest of Tahiti pearl merchants, except Levy. “He’s gone on Mormonism, but he’s smart with all his religion. The trouble is he’s let charity run away with business principles, and divers and others get into him for hundreds of thousands of francs. I’d take his word for anything, and you know me! They didn’t keep me out of the United States because I’m a dummy, hein?”
“He’s a remarkable man, this Kanaka,” joined in Winnie Brander, master of a sieve of a schooner, as he drank his Doctor Funk. “When he was a boy he was a savage. His father ate his enemies. For fifty years Mapuhi has been sailing schooners in the Paumotus. He’s the richest man there, and the best skipper in these waters that ever weathered the New Year gales. I’m captain of a schooner and I have sailed the Group since a boy, but, matching my experience against his,—and I haven’t had a tenth of his,—Mapuhi knows more by instinct of weather, of reefs, of passes, and of seamanship than I have learned. He’s known from Samoa to Tahiti as a wizard for sailing. He knows every one of the eighty Paumotus by sight. Wake him up anywhere in the Group in sight of land, and he’ll take a squint and tell where they are. God knows that’s the hardest bit of spying there is, because these atolls are mostly all alike at a distance—just a few specks of green, then a bunch of palms, and a line of coral. It’s something uncanny the way this fellow can locate himself. They say he can tell them at night by the smell.”
“’E’s a bloody Rockefeller down ’ere,” Lying Bill took up the story. “’E’s combed this ’ere ’ole ocean. I remember when ’e lost the Tavaroa ’e ’ad built by Matthew Turner in California, and four other schooners, in the cyclone of 1906. Many a boat ’e built ’imself. ’E was the devil for women, with the pick of the group an’ ’im owin’ ’alf the families in debt. Then the Mormons got a ’olt of ’im, an’ ’e began prayin’ an’ preachin’, and stuck by ’is proper wife. You’ll see that big church, if you go to Takaroa, ’e built, an’ where ’is ol’ woman is buried.”
And now I was bound for the atoll of this mighty chief of his tribe, and was to see him face to face. From Kaukura, the Marara raced and lagged by turn. The glass fell, and I spoke to McHenry about it, pointing to the recording barometer.
“There’s trouble comin’,” he said, testily. “I know that. I don’t need any barometer. We South Sea men have got enough mercury in us to tell the weather without any barometer.”
The rain fell at intervals, but not hard enough for a bath on deck, the prized weather incident of these parts. With no fresh water in Niau, Anaa, or Kaukura, or not enough for bathing, and with only a dole on the Marara for hands and faces, I, with remembrance of Rupert Brooke’s complaint about the effect of sea-water on coral wounds, was about half-crazy for a torrential shower. But the rain passed, and the sunset soothed my sorrow. Never had I known such skies. In this heaven’s prism were hues not before seen by me. Manila, I had thought, was of all the world apart for the beauty and brilliancy of its sunsets. Such bepainted clouds as hung over the hill of Mariveles when I rode down the Malecon in the days of the Empire! But Manila was here surpassed in startling shape and blazing color.
A great bank of ocher held the western sky—a perfect curtain for a stage upon which gods might enact the fall of the angels. It depended in folds and fringes over stripes of gold—a startling, magnificent design which appeared too regular in form and color to be accident of clouds. One had to remember the bits of glass in the kaleidoscope.
The gold grew red, the stripes became a sheet of scarlet, and that vermilion and maroon, swiftly changing as deeper dipped the sun into the sea, until the entire sky was broken into mammoth fleecy white tiles, the tesselated ceiling of Olympus. The canopy grew gray, and night dropped abruptly. A wind came out of the darkness and caught the Marara under full canvas. It drove her through the fast-building waves at eleven knots. The hull groaned in tune with the shrieking cordage. The timbers that were long from the forest, and had fought a thousand gales, lamented their age in moans and whines, in grindings and fierce blows. The white water piled over the bows, deluged the deck, and foamed on the barrier of the cabin rise. I stripped and went forward to meet it. I could have danced in it for joy. Oh! the joy of sail! Steam and motor made swift the path of the ship, but they had in them no consonance with nature. They were blind and deaf to the wind and wave, which were the very life of the schooner. They brought no sense of participation in speed as did the white wings of the Marara, nor of kinship with the main. They were alive, those swelling and careening sheets of canvas, that swung to and fro with the mind of the breeze, and cried and laughed in stress of labor.