Rutiaro
Chance began to move of set purpose in Papeete, on the day I was to sail with the one-hundred-and-ten-ton schooner, Caleb S. Winship, for the Cloud of Islands. I was on my way to the water front, and, having plenty of time, walked leisurely, thinking of the long journey so nearly at hand, of the strange and lonely islands I was to see, and wondering, as an Anglo-Saxon must when presented with a piece of good fortune, what I had done to merit it. Oro, the cabin boy of the Winship, was following with my luggage. He kept at some distance, a mark of respect, as I thought, until I saw him sublet his contract to a smaller boy. Then he retired to spend the unearned increment in watermelon and a variety of cakes sold at the Chinese stalls along the street. Not wanting him to think that I begrudged him his last little fling on shore, I became interested of a sudden in the contents of a shop window, and there I saw a boxful of marbles. In a moment Oro was forgotten. Papeete faded from view, and the warm air, fragrant with the odors of vanilla and roasting coffee, became more bracing. There was a tang in it, like that of early April, in Iowa, for example, at the beginning of the marble-playing season. Fifteen years dropped lightly from my shoulders and I was back at the old rendezvous in the imagination, almost as really as I had ever been in the flesh. The lumber yard of S. M. Brown & Son lay on the right hand and the Rock Island Railroad tracks on the left. Between, on a stretch of smooth cinder right of way, a dozen games were in full swing. There were cries of, "Picks and vents!" "Bunchers!" "Sneakers!" "Knucks down!" the sharp crack of expert shots; the crunch of cinders under bare and yet tender feet. Meadow larks were singing in a nearby pasture, and from afar I heard the deep whistle of the Rocky Mountain Limited as it came down the Mitchellville grade.
I bought the marbles—the whole box of them. They cost fifty francs, about four dollars American, as the exchange was then, but I considered the investment a good one. I knew that, no matter where I might be, to lift the lid of my box was to make an immediate and inexpensive journey back to one of the pleasantest periods of boyhood. Oro was awaiting me at the quay, and carried my small sea chest on board with an air of spurious fatigue. I gave him my purchase and told him to stow it away for me in the cabin, which he did with such care that I did not find it again until we were within view of Rutiaro. The Caleb S. Winship was homeward bound then, from Tanao, where we had left Crichton, the English planter. Rutiaro lying on our course, it was decided to put in there in the hope that we might be able to replace our lost deck cargo of copra, washed overboard in a squall a few days previously.
Neither Findlay's South Pacific Directory nor the British Admiralty Sailing Directions had much to say about the atoll. Both agreed that the lagoon is nine miles long by five broad, and that on June 29, 1887, the French surveying vessel, St. Etienne, found the tide running through a narrow pass at two knots per hour, the flood as swift as the ebb. It was further stated that in 1889 Her Majesty's ship, Prince Edward, anchored in eight fathoms, three hundred yards from shore in front of the village, which is situated on the most westerly island; and that a few pigs and chickens were purchased at a nominal price from the inhabitants. With this information I had to be content in so far as my reading was concerned. There was nothing of a later date in either volume, and the impression I had was that the atoll, having been charted and briefly described, had remained unvisited, almost forgotten, for a period of thirty-one years.
This, of course, was not the case. Tinned beef and kerosene oil had followed the flag there as elsewhere in the world. Religion, in fact, had preceded it, leaving a broad wake of Bibles and black mother-hubbards still in evidence among the older generation. But skippers of small trading schooners are rarely correspondents of the hydrographic associations, and the "reports from the field" of itinerant missionaries are buried in the dusty files of the religious journals, so that Rutiaro is as little known to the world at large as it has always been. Findlay's general remarks about it were confined to a single sentence, "A lonely atoll, numbering a population of between seventy-five and one hundred inhabitants." It certainly looked lonely enough on the chart, far out on the westerly fringe of the archipelago, more than six hundred miles from the nearest steamship route, and that one infrequently traveled. I sought further information from Tino-a-Tino, the supercargo, a three-quarters American despite his Tahitian name. He had been trading in the Low Islands for twenty years, and during that time had created a voluminous literature with reference to their inhabitants. But it was all of an occupational nature and confined to the ledgers of the Inter-Island Trading Company. I found him at his usual task in the cabin, where he gave me some specimen compositions for criticism.
"I wish you'd look them over," he said. "These copra bugs drive a man wild. They get in your eyes, in your liquor, in your mouth—Lord! What a life!"
The cabin was filled with unsacked copra to the level of the upper tier of bunks. One had to crawl in on hands and knees. The copra bugs were something of a nuisance, and the smell and heat oppressive. I had traveled on more comfortable vessels, with tennis courts on the boat decks and Roman swimming baths below—but they didn't touch at Rutiaro.
I went through his accounts, verifying long lists of items, such as:
To Terii Tuahu, Dr.,
1 dozen beacon lanterns............at 480 frs....Frs. 480
To Ohiti Poene, Dr.,
12 sacks Lily-Dust flour...........at 300 frs....Frs. 3600
To Low Hung Chin, Dr.,
1 gross Night-King flash lamps.....at 3600 frs...Frs. 3600
The work of checking up finished, we went out for a breath of air. The atoll lay abeam and still far distant; a faint bluish haze lifted a bare eighth of an inch above the circle of the horizon. Behind us, rain fell in a straight wall of water from a single black cloud which cast a deep shadow over the path we had come. Elsewhere the sky was clear and the sea the incredible blue of the tropics. Tino broke a long silence.