Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles

by Godfrey Sweven

If the rest was to be found, it was in primitive conditions of life, perhaps in some obscure tribe that lived close to nature and had never heard an echo of our western world. With the restless nomadic instincts of boyhood and youth passionate within me, I longed to set forth on a voyage of discovery into seas untraversed. The sea-ferment stirred my Scandinavian blood. To rove untrammelled, to meet sudden storms and dangers, to hold intercourse with pure human souls fresh from God’s hand and unstained with the duplicities of luxurious grasping races—this was the dream of my early years. But my mother would not stir from the loved shore of her girlhood or the grave of the husband who had died too young to shatter her romance. And she was a comrade from whom I could not part. Year after year had bound us closer together, and, before manhood had unloosed the reins of my will, her forty years and locality—a stronger influence in her sex—had riveted down their fetters upon her spirit.

But ah, God! there came a time——

The surge of memory was too great for him. He would not let the tears come and he fled out into the woods. We saw no more of him for days. Nor could he approach the subject but with wild resurgence of sorrow that choked up speech. But by hint and inference we were able to mosaic together the history of this tempest that swept through his life. His mother had died not long after he had attained his majority, and his grief palsied his energies for almost a year. But driven to the net and the sea again by sheer fatigue of brooding, youth reflooded his veins with the old passions and ideals, and the flame in his blood mastered grief. Then came the thought that the wealth he had repelled so long might enable him to fulfil the dream of his boyhood, and to reach some land untainted by the vices of Europe. And the discovery that part of his heritage was a yacht driven by the marvellous new power of steam, that laughed at wind, and wave, and current, made him as one possessed. Everything bent to his new idea. He gathered his old comrades and playmates together, and he went with them to master the whole craft of the steam-engine and the screw; they learned every item of the marine engineer’s trade; and each he set to gain skill in some special part. He travelled himself from university to university, from laboratory to laboratory in order to master the best that was known in the physical sciences. He fitted out his yacht with the apparatus and material that would be needed for repairing any part of her, furnished her with everything that would enable him to pass years away from civilisation and to gain influence over the wild races he might encounter. Nor did he fail to collect for her a library of the finest books, not only imaginative and scientific, but pertaining to the arts. And, when all was ready and his machinery and crew had been tested in brief voyages north and west across the winter and summer Atlantic, he bade farewell to his hut upon the shore and the loved graveyard on the hill and set out to seek adventure and a land of primitive simplicity in untravelled seas.

How our blood surged with delight as we swept away to the south under full sail and head of steam! The ridged currents of the main, the wind-curled summits of the great billows only made our hearts to tingle. We were out free with God’s elements, our friends; no rumour of cruelty or injustice or bitter grief to harass our spirits. Young, bold, well-mated, bound by the ties of common tastes and common traditions, nothing seemed to us too difficult to attempt.

Round the old cape of storms, down into the latitude of icebergs, we easted till we hailed the coasts of Australia. In her towns and cities we learned from traders and sailors all we could of the islands that lay in the Pacific. Much of romance, much of dim rumour based on fact vitiated their tales and yet drew us on with magnetic power. Past New Zealand with her sombre fiords and the argent glory of her mountains we swept, gleaning from her sealers and whalers still more of the mysteries of the dim Pacific world we were about to see. Our blood coursed quicker in our veins as we touched the first palm-fringed atolls of the coral belt. And every new island we reached we seemed to get closer and closer to the centre of the primitive world we desired to visit.

For through the narratives that we heard of the wonders of the great Pacific archipelago there ran an undercurrent of reference to some mystic region that had deeply impressed the imaginations of all frequenters of this tropical sea, whether natives or foreigners. The islanders would scarcely speak of it and a curtain of superstition hung round it unlifted. Even Europeans spoke of it with bated breath.

But the more they evaded my questions, the more was I roused to get at some definite knowledge. From island to island we sailed in quest of the direction of this strange mirage of the sea. At times I concluded that it was but a religious myth, a hades invented by the priests or by the crude imagination of early worshippers to account for the misery of man and to define the destiny of his wilder nature. Then would come some hint that pointed to physical fact as its basis.

After weary, half-baffled investigation, I seemed to find a certain nucleus of reality. There lay away to the south-east of Oceania, out of the track of ships, an enormous region of the Pacific sealed by a ring of fog that had never lifted in the memory of man. Ships had sailed into it and never come out again; canoes that had ventured too near had been sucked in by the eddies that circled round it, and never been seen again. Above it there flashed strange lights that dimmed the stars and the play of gleaming wings seemed at times to rise far above it and vanish. To some islanders it was the refuge of the souls of their dead; to others it was the home of the demons who issued half-seen, half-unseen to torture them with plague and storm and disaster.

When I had discovered the direction in which it lay and defined its position on my chart, we ran back to the coast of New Zealand for coal and other supplies that would last me months, if not years. All ready, I summoned my staunch comrades who formed the crew and told them the bent of my enterprise, laying stress upon its dangers and uncertainty. Not one flinched, perhaps because their lives lay all in the future; none had left wife or sweetheart behind, none was old enough to have fixed ambition or a desire of settled existence. The sea had bred in them through their long ancestry a love of its mystery and its many-voiced dreams. None but imaginative natures had attached themselves to me in youth. And on board, during their long periods of rest, it was romance, and poetry, and other books of imagination they read. Not one of them had escaped the lotus-breathing air of these dreamy archipelagoes. Not one of them but loathed the thought of western life with its mean ambitions and falsities. Anything was better than the labyrinth of disease and wrong and crime wherein they must lose their way in old Europe. Even without such considerations, there was enough loyalty to their old comrade and leader to make them follow him wherever he would go. A cheer ended our conference, and we weighed anchor to a new chant with the refrain “Heave ho! let’s seek the secret of Riallaro.”