Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

The rain blanketed the ocean, the vessel heeled over to starboard until her rail was salty, the jibs pleaded for relief, but man was implacable. For hours we held our course, driving fast in the obscure night toward the home of the wondrous diver, the man without a nose, Mapuhi, the uncrowned king of the Dangerous Isles.

But when the moon lit the road to Takaroa, she lulled the wind. The eleven knots fell to seven, and to five, and at midnight we drifted in a zephyr.

When I went below in a light squall, sure sign of near-by land, Kopcke, the handsome trader, and a native girl were asleep on a mat in the passageway beside and partly under my bunk. I had to step over them. Her red tunic was drawn up over her limbs in her restless slumber, and a sheet covered closely her head. He lay on his back, his eyes facing the cabin lamp, his breathing that of a happy child after a day of hard play. As a matter of fact he had drunk a half dozen tots of rum since he had brought me aboard.

Kopcke had failed at Kaukura, and like McHenry was bound for Takaroa, to set up a store for the diving season. He was a ne’er-do-well who existed without hard work merely because of familiarity with the people and languages of the islands. After a few glasses on board he had spilled his affairs to me, and especially his amorous adventures, in the boasting way of his kind. “Mary pity women!” A quarter-Tahitian, his father a European, and his mother French Tahitian, he was remarkably good-looking, in the style of a cinema idol. He had first married the half-caste daughter of Lying Bill, one of the many children of that Bedouin of the Pacific, who, in more than three decades of roaming the islands, had, according to his brag, scores of descendants. She had died, and Kopcke had left their child to charity, and taken up with another whom he had deserted after a year, leaving her their new-born infant.

“She would not obey me,” Kopcke explained to Virginie and me. “I was good to her, but she was obstinate, and I had to send her to Takepoto. She had a good thing but could not appreciate me. I then took this girl here, whose father is an old diver in Takaroa, with a good deal of money. He once picked up a single pearl worth a big fortune. She is sixteen, and is easily managed. You’ve got to get them young, mon ami, to learn your ways. That Takepoto girl feels sorry now. Women are queer, all of them, mon vieux, n’est-ce pas?”

Virginie was all Huguenot French blood though born in Tahiti, and Kopcke went against her puritan grain. She thought him a bad example for her Jean, who, though as devoted a husband as seaman, was dangerously attractive to the native girls. Moet could tutoyer them in their own tongue, with a roughish but alluring manner toward them that, though it crowded the trade-room of the Marara with customers for finery and cologne water, tortured Virginie. His endearing terms, his gentle slaps on their hips, and momentary arm about their waists, rended Virginie between jealousy and profits.

“Mais,” Jean would exclaim, after an interchange of bitter words, in which cochon had been applied to him, “how zat femme zink I do bees’ness. Wiz kicks ‘an go-to-’ells? She count ze money wiz plaisir, bot Jean Moet, ’er ’usbin’, ’e mos’ be like wan mutton. ’Sus-Maria! I will make show ’oo ees boss!”

Kopcke was rather more honest in his dealings with women than the white men. His quarter-native strain made him less ruthless, and more understanding of them. The ordinary European or American in the South Seas had not his own home’s standards in such affairs. He released himself with a prideful assertiveness from such restraints, and went to an opposite ethic in his breaking of the chain. His usual attitude to women here was that of the average man toward domesticated animals—to pet and feed them, and to abuse them when disobedient or at whim.

Of course, the white flotsam and jetsam of humanity in these islands, who in their own countries had probably starved for caresses, and who may never have known women other than the frowzy boughten ones of the cabaret and brothel, were here giving back to the sex what it had bestowed on them in more formalized circles. The soft, loving women of Polynesia paid for the sex starvation enforced by economic conditions among the superior whites. A feast brought the ingratitude of the beggar.

All day, with half a gale, we sailed past atolls and bare reefs, groves of palms and rudest rocks, primal strata and beaches of softest and whitest sand. The schooner went close to these islands, so that it appeared I could throw my hat upon them; but distances here were deceptive, and I suppose we were never less than a thousand feet away. Yet we were near enough to hear the smash of the surf and to see the big fish leap in the lagoon, to drink the intoxicating draft of oneness with the lonely places, and to feel the secrets of their isolation. I was happy that before I died I had again seen the Thing I had worshipped since I began to read.