“Lombrosso has written something like that,” said I.
“Has he? Well it’s a fact, but all the same it’s not evidence, the universality of a belief scorns to hint at reality in the thing believed in—yet what is more wanting in real reason than tabu. Yet tabu is universal. You find men here who daren’t touch an artu tree because artu trees are tabu to them, or eat turtle or touch a dead body. Well, look at the Jews; a dead body is tabu to a Cohen. India is riddled with the business, so’s English society—it’s all the same thing under different disguises.
“Funny that talking of ghosts we should have touched on this, for when I asked you did you believe in ghosts I had a ghost story in mind and tabu comes into it. This is it.”
And this is the story somewhat as told by Lygon.
Some fifty years back when Pease was a pirate bold, and Hayes in his bloom, and the topsails of the Leonora a terror to all dusky beholders, Maru was a young man of twenty. He was son of Malemake, King of Fukariva, a kingdom the size of a soup plate, nearly as round and without a middle—an atoll island, in short; just a ring of coral, sea beaten and circling, like a bezel, a sapphire lagoon.
Fukariva lies in the Paumotus or Dangerous Archipelago where the currents run every way and the trades are unaccountable. The underwriters to this day fight shy of a Paumotus trader, and in the ’60’s few ships came here and the few that came were on questionable business. Maru up to the time he was twenty years of age only remembered three.
There was the Spanish ship that came into the lagoon when he was seven. The picture of her remained with him, burning and brilliant, yet tinged with the atmosphere of nightmare, a big topsail schooner that lay for a week mirroring herself on the lagoon-water whilst she refitted, fellows with red handkerchiefs tied round their heads crawling aloft and laying out on the spars. They came ashore for water and what they could find in the way of taro and nuts, and made hay on the beach, insulting the island women till the men drove them off. Then when she was clearing the lagoon a brass gun was run out and fired, leaving a score of dead and wounded on that salt white strand.
That was the Spaniard. Then came a whaler who took what she wanted and cut down trees for fuel and departed, leaving behind the smell of her as an enduring recollection, and lastly, when Maru was about eighteen, a little old schooner slank in one early morning.
She lay in the lagoon like a mangy dog, a humble ship, very unlike the Spaniard or the blustering whaleman. She only wanted water and a few vegetables, and her men gave no trouble; then, one evening, she slank out again with the ebb, but she left something behind her—smallpox. It cleared the island, and of the hundred and fifty subjects of King Malemake only ten were left—twelve people in all, counting the king and Maru.
The king died of a broken heart and age, and of the eleven people left three were women, widows of men who had died of the smallpox.