“Seen a man unable to break his tabu?”
“Seen the effects, anyhow, same as you might see the wreck of a ship lying on a beach. I doubt if you’d see the same thing these days, though there’s no telling; anyhow, it was away back in the early nineties and I’d just come up from the Tongas to Tahiti, getting a lift in the Mason Gower, she was an old trading schooner the missionaries had collared and turned into a Bible ship, and I lent my hand with the cooking to pay for my passage.
“I’d had a quarrel with Slane and parted from him, taking my share of the money we had in common, and I hadn’t seen him for six months and more. I hadn’t prospered either, losing nearly every buck in a blackbirding venture I ought never to have gone in for.
“I hadn’t more than ten dollars in my belt when I landed at Papeete, but I’d saved my dunnage and had some decent clothes and the luck to fall in with Billy Heffernan at the club. Billy was one of the Sydney boys; he wasn’t more than twenty-five, but he’d seen more of the world than most and lost two fortunes which he’d made with his own hands. That was the sort Billy was, and when I struck him at Papeete he was recovering from his last bust-up and had got the money together for another venture.
“His first fortune had been made over Sing Yang opium, which isn’t opium no more than Sam Shu is honest drink; then he’d done a deal in shell and pulled it off and lost the money in copra, and now he was after precious coral.
“When I met him in the bar I said: ‘Hello, Heff—what are you after down here,’ and he says, ‘Coral.’
“‘Well, you’ll find lots of it,’ says I, thinking he was joking, and then I found it was precious coral he was talking of. You see there’s about a hundred different sorts of coral. Coral’s made by worms. If you go on any reef and knock a chunk off between tide marks you’ll find your chunk has got worms hanging out of it. I’ve done it often in different parts, and I’ve been surprised to find the difference in those worms. Some are a foot long and as thin as a hair, and some are an inch thick and as long as your finger; some are like snails and some are like lobsters and prawns in shape; some are yellow and some blue. Above tide marks you don’t find anything, just solid rock. Well, there’s just as many different sorts of coral as there is worms, and there’s only one sort of precious coral and it’s a pale pink, the colour of a rose leaf, and that’s what Heffernan was after. He’d heard of an island in the Paumotus which isn’t very far from Tahiti, and by all accounts it was a good fishing ground for pink coral, and more than that, it was said the Queen of the place—for it was run by a woman—had a lot of the stuff for sale—Tawela was her name.
“Ships keep clear of the Paumotus on account of the currents that run every which way and the winds that aren’t dependable. Heff had his information from a whaling captain who’d struck the place the year before and had talk with the Kanakas. He was on the beach broken down with drink, and gave the location for twenty dollars. He said he didn’t think they were a dependable lot, but they had the stuff, and if Heffernan didn’t mind taking risks he might make a fortune. Heff asked the old chap why he hadn’t gone in for the business himself, and he answered that he would have done so only he had no trade goods; nothing but whale oil, and the Kanakas didn’t want that, they wanted knives and tobacco and any sort of old guns and print calico and so on. Heft didn’t know where to get any such things as these, and hadn’t the money if he had known, nor a ship to lade them into, but next day, by good luck, came blowing in the Mary Waters, owned and captained by Matt Sellers, a Boston chap who’d come round to the Pacific in a whaler out of Martha’s Vineyard, skipped at the Society Islands not liking the society on board, and risen from roustabout to recruiter and recruiter to captain and owner. He’d brought a mixed cargo from ’Frisco on spec to the Marquesas, couldn’t find a market and had come on to Papeete, couldn’t find a market and came into the club for a drink, fell into the arms, as you may say, of Heffernan, and that did him. He hadn’t been talking half an hour with Heff when he sees clearly that the hand of the Almighty was in the business, and that a sure fortune was waiting for him if he’d only take the trouble to pick it up. His trade goods were just the things wanted to buy the stuff, and he only had to put out for the Paumotus to get it. That was the way Heff mesmerised him. Then they had a talk as to the profits, and Sellers agreed to give Heff twenty-five per cent. commission on the deal.
“I blew into the business, as I was saying, by meeting Heffernan a few days later—day before the Mary Waters was due to sail—and, seeing no chance of doing much in Papeete, I joined in with them at second officer’s pay, but without any duty, only to lend a hand if there should be a dust-up.
“Next day we started, steering a course almost due east. We weren’t long in finding out we’d struck the Paumotus, tide rips everywhere and reefs, then you’d see cocoanut trees growing out of the sea ahead and presently you’d be skimming by a beach of coral not ten feet above the sea level with cocoanut trees blowing in the wind and Kanaka children shouting at you. Very low free board those atoll islands have, and I’ve heard of ships being blown right over the beaches into the lagoons. We passed a big island like that, and then, two days after, we raised Utiali; that was the name of the island the whaler captain had given to Heffernan with the latitude and longitude. It wasn’t down in the South Pacific Directory. They’ve got it there now, but in those days there was no mention of Utiali, though the whaler captains knew it well enough, but a whaler captain would never bother to report an island; if he’d struck the New Jerusalem he wouldn’t have done more than log it as a place where you could take on milk and honey. Whales was all they cared for, and blubber.