Faery Lands of the South Seas

by James Norman Hall; Charles Nordhoff

Riley chuckled. "Too early for an argument," he said. "Let's go below and have a drink."

I have not often run across a more interesting man than Riley. Thrown together, as he and I have been, in circumstances which make for an unusual exchange of confidence, I have learned more of him in two months than one knows of many an old acquaintance at home. At thirty-five years of age he is a living object lesson for those who bewail the old days of adventure and romance, and wish that their lives had been cast in other times. His blood is undiluted Irish; he has the humor, the imagination, the quick sympathy of the race, without the Irish heritage of instability. Born in South Boston and reared with only the sketchiest of educations, he set out to make his way in the world at an age when most boys are playing marbles and looking forward with dread to the study of algebra. For fifteen years he wandered, gathering a varied background of experience. He worked in mills; he drifted west and shipped as cabin boy on vessels plying the Great Lakes; he drifted farther west to become a rider of the range. Finally he reached San Francisco and took to the sea. He has been a sealer, an Alaska fisherman, an able-bodied seaman on square-riggers sailing strange seas. He has seen Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope; he speaks of the ports of India, China, Africa, the Java Sea, as you would speak of Boston or New York.

In the days when a line of schooners ran from San Francisco to Tahiti, touching at the Marquesas on the way, he felt a call to the South Seas, and shipped for a round trip before the mast. When he returned to San Francisco a change seemed to have come over him; the old, wandering life had lost its charm—had gone flat and stale. Like many another, he had eaten of the wild plantain unaware. The evenings of carousal ashore no longer tempted him; even the long afternoons of reading (for reading has always been this curious fellow's chief delight), stretched on his bed in a sailor's boarding house, had lost their flavor—the print blurred before his eyes, and in its place he saw lands of savage loveliness rising from a warm blue sea; shadowy and mysterious valleys, strewn with the relics of a forgotten race; the dark eyes of a girl in Tai-o-Hae.

Remember that Riley was both a sailor and an Irishman—a rough idealist, keenly susceptible to beauty and the sense of romance. It is stated that the men who live romance are seldom aware of it; this may be true, though I doubt it—certainly in Riley's case the theory does not work out. He is the most modest of men, untainted by a trace of egoism; in his stories, superbly told with the Irish gift for circumstantial detail and dramatic effect, the teller's part is always small. And yet as one listens, thrilled by the color and artistry of the tale, one is all the while aware that this man appraises his memories at their full value—reviews them with a ripened gusto, an ever-fresh appreciation. In short, he is one of those fortunate, or unfortunate, men for whom realities, as most of us know them, do not exist; men whose eyes are incapable of seeing drab or gray, who find mystery and fresh beauty in what we call the commonplace.

It is scarcely necessary to say that Riley was aboard the next schooner bound south for the islands. Nukuhiva knew him for a time, but the gloom and tragedy of that land—together with an episode of domestic infelicity—were overpowering to a man of his temperament. From the Marquesas he went to Tahiti, and his wanderings ended in the Cook group, six hundred miles to the West. Perhaps the finding of his journey's end wrought the change, perhaps it was due to his rather practical Tahitian wife—in any case, the wanderer ceased to rove, the spendthrift began to save and plan. In the groups to the eastward he had picked up a smattering of coconut lore; it was not long before he got a berth as superintendent of a small plantation. With a native wife and the Irishman's knack for languages, he soon mastered the dialect of his group; he is one of a very few men who speak it with all the finer shadings. This accounts in part for his success with labor—the chief difficulty of the planter throughout Polynesia. To one interested as I am in the variations of this oceanic tongue, it is a genuine pleasure to talk with Riley. In school he learned to read and write; beyond that he is entirely self-educated. A good half of his earnings, I should say, in the days when he followed the sea, were spent on books; a native intelligence enabled him to criticize and select; he has read enormously, and what he has read he has remembered. Each time a new subject attracted him he hastened to the book shops of San Francisco, or Liverpool, or Singapore, and gathered a little forecastle library of reference. Like most intelligent men in this part of the world, he has grown interested in the subject of Polynesian research; it is odd to hear him discuss—with a strong accent of South Boston and the manner of a professor of ethnology—some question of Maori chronology, or the variations in a causative prefix. Once he made clear to me a matter often referred to in print, but which I had never properly understood. He was speaking of the language of Tahiti.

"When you hear a Tahitian talk," he said, "it sounds different, but really it's the same as Hawaiian, or Marquesan, or Rarotongan, or New Zealand Maori. Tahiti is the oldest settled place, and the language has kind of rotted away there. Nowadays the Tahitian has lost the strong, harsh sounds of the old lingo, the k and ng; in place of them there is simply a catch between two vowels. If you know Rarotongan and understand the system of change, you can get on all right in Tahiti. Take our word akatangi—to play a musical instrument. Tangi means 'wail' or 'weep'; aka is the old causative prefix; the combination means 'cause to weep.' Now let's figure that word out in Tahitian. First we've got to take out the k and ng; that leaves a bad start—it doesn't sound good, so the Tahitians stick on an f at the beginning. That's all there is to it; fa'ata'i is the word. It makes me laugh to think of when I first came down here. I was working in Tahiti, and when I came home in the evening my girl would look up from her sewing and sing out, 'O Riley!' 'For the love of Mike,' I'd tell her, 'don't you know my name yet? It's Riley, not O'Riley!' Finally I caught on; I'd been fooled on the same proposition as Cook and all the rest of them. You remember they called the island Otahiti. That O is simply a special form of the verb used before personal pronouns and proper nouns. The old navigators, when the canoes came out to meet them, pointed to the land and asked its name. 'O Tahiti' said the natives ('It is Tahiti'). My girl didn't mean to call me O'Riley at all; she was simply saying, 'It's Riley.'"

A serious white man, particularly when he is able to recruit and handle native labor, is always in demand in the islands; it was not long before Riley's talents were recognized; now he is manager and part owner of an entire atoll. I have listened with a great deal of interest to his accounts of the life there. Every year, at about Christmas time, a schooner comes to load his copra and take his boys back to their respective islands. Not a soul is left on the atoll; Riley boards the schooner with his wife and takes passage to Papeete for a couple of months of civilization. When the time is up he makes a tour of the Cook group to recruit twenty or thirty boys for the new season, and is landed on his island with a nine months' supply of medicine, provisions, and reading matter. He is the only white man on the atoll; one would suppose such a life deadly monotonous and lonely, but just now he is pining to get back. It is really the pleasantest of lives, he says; enough routine in keeping the men properly at work, superb fishing when one desires a touch of sport, plenty of time to read and think, the healthiest climate in the world, and a bit of trouble now and then to give the spice a true Irishman needs.

Riley is a man of medium size, with thick brown hair and eyes of Celtic dark blue, perpetually sparkling with humor. I have never seen a stronger or more active man of his weight; on his atoll he spends an hour every day in exercise, running, jumping, working with dumbbells and Indian clubs. From head to foot he is burnt a deep, ruddy brown—a full shade darker than the tint of his native wife. Sometimes, he says, he works himself into such a pink of condition that he aches to pick a fight with the first comer, but I fancy he finds trouble enough to satisfy another man. Once a huge, sullen fellow from the Gambier group attempted to spear him, and Riley called all of his men in from their work, appointed the foreman referee, and beat the two-hundred-and-twenty-pound native fierce and lithe and strong as a tiger—slowly and scientifically, to a pulp. On another occasion, a half-savage boy, from a far-off island of the southern Paumotus, took a grudge against the manager and bided his time with the cunning of a wild animal. The chance came one afternoon when Riley was asleep in the shade behind his house. The Paumotan stole up with a club and put him still sounder asleep with a blow on the head that laid his scalp open and nearly fractured his skull. Half a dozen kicks from the ball of a toughened foot stove in the ribs on one side of his chest; with that, the native left his victim, very likely thinking him dead. Riley's wife, from whom I got the story, was asleep in the house at the time; toward evening she went to look for her husband, and found him stretched out, bloody and unconscious, on the sand. In spite of her agitation—her kind are not much use in a crisis—she managed to get him to the house and revive him. Riley's first act was to drink half a tumbler of whisky; his second, to send for the foreman. The Paumotan boy had disappeared; overcome by forebodings of evil, he had taken a canoe and paddled off to hide himself on an uncleared islet across the lagoon. Riley gave the foreman careful instructions; early in the morning he was to take all the boys and spend the day, if necessary, in running down the fugitive, who under no circumstances was to be injured or roughly handled.

They brought the boy in at noon—deadly afraid at first, sullen and relieved when he learned his punishment was no worse than to stand up to the manager before the assembled plantation hands. It must have been a grievous affair; Tetua could scarcely describe it without tears. Riley was still sick and dizzy; his ribs were taped so tightly that he could breathe with only half his lungs, and a two-inch strip of plaster covered the wound on his head. The Paumotan was fresh and unhurt; he outweighed his antagonist by twenty pounds, and fought with confidence and bitterness. The Kanaka is certainly among the strongest men of the world, a formidable adversary in a rough-and-tumble fight. It went badly with Riley for a time; the boy nearly threw him, and a blow on his broken ribs almost made him faint, but in the end—maddened by pain and the thought of the treacherous attack—he got his man down and might have killed him if the foreman and half a dozen others had not intervened.

Riley's island is a true atoll—a broad lagoon inclosed by an oval sweep of reef along which are scattered islets of varying size. Many people must have lived on it in the past; everywhere there are traces of man's occupation. A dozen inhabitants were there within the memory of living men, but the dead outnumbered the living too heavily—the place became unbearable to them, and in the end a schooner took them away.