Faery Lands of the South Seas

by James Norman Hall; Charles Nordhoff

Well, we had kept it with the others—Nordhoff and I—and have the memory of it now, to be enjoyed over and over again as the years pass. But there was danger that we might outstay the freshness of that period. We were anxious to avoid that for the sake of our memories, if for nothing else. While we were not yet free to order our movements as we chose, we pretended that we were, and so one rainy evening in the December following the armistice we decided to call that chapter of experience closed and to go forward with the making of new plans.

For we meant to have further adventure of one kind or another—adventure in the sense of unexpected incident rather than of hazardous activity. That had been a settled thing between us for a long time. We had no craving for excitement, but turned to plans for uneventful wanderings which we had sketched in broad outlines months before. They had been left, of necessity, vague; but now that any of them might be made realities, now that we had leisure and a reasonable hope for the fulfillment of plans—well, we had cause for a contentment which was something deeper than happiness.

The best of it was that the close of the war found us with nothing to prevent our doing pretty much as we chose. We might have had houses or lands to anchor us, or promising careers to drag us back into the bewilderments of modern civilization; but, fortunately or unfortunately, there were none of these things. The chance of war had given us a freedom far beyond anyone's desert. We had some misgivings about accepting so splendid a gift, which the event sometimes proves to be the most doubtful of benefits. Viewed in the light of our longings, however, our capacity for it seemed incalculable, and so, by degrees, we allowed our minds to turn to an old allurement—the South Pacific. It became irresistible the more we talked of it, longing as we then were for the solitude of islands. The objection to this choice was that the groups of islands which we meant to visit have been endowed with an atmosphere of pseudoromance displeasing to the fastidious mind.

But there was not the slightest chance of our being pioneers wherever we might go. We could not hope to see with the eyes of the old explorers who first came upon those far-off places. We must expect great changes. But much as we might regret for the purposes of this adventure that we had not been born two hundred years earlier, comfort was not wanting to our situation. Had we been contemporaries and fellow-explorers with De Quiros, or Cook, or Bougainville we should have missed the Great War.

We came within view of Tahiti one windless February morning—such a view as Pedro Fernandez de Quiros himself must have had more than three hundred years before. The sky to the west was still bright with stars and but barely touched with the very ghost of light, giving it the appearance of a great water, with a few clouds, like islands, immeasurably distant. Half an hour later the islands themselves lay in full sunlight, jagged peaks falling away in steep ridges to the sea. Against sheer walls still in shadow in upland valleys one could see a few terns; but there was no other movement, no sound, nor any sign of a human habitation—nothing to shatter the illusion of primitive loveliness. It was illusion, of course, but the reality was nothing like so disappointing as I had feared it would be. Outwardly, two hundred years of progress have wrought no great amount of havoc. There is a little port, a busy place on boat days. But when the steamer has emptied the town of her passengers, the silence flows down again from the hills. Off the main harbor-front thoroughfare streets lie empty to the eye for half hours at a time. Chinese merchants sit at the doorways of their shops, waiting for trade. Now and then broad pools of sunlight flow over the gayly flowered dresses of a group of native women, scarcely to be seen otherwise as they move slowly through tunnels of moist green gloom; or a small schooner, like a detail gifted with sudden mobility in a picture, will back away from shore, cross the harbor, bright with the reflections of clouds, and stand out to sea. In the stillness of the noon siesta one hears at infrequent intervals the resounding thud of ripe fruits as they tear their way to the ground through barriers of foliage; and at night the melancholy thunder of the surf on the reef outside the harbor, and the slithering of bare feet in the moonlit streets.

Coming from a populous exile, doubly attracted for that reason by the lure of unpeopled places, Nordhoff and I sought here an indication of what we might find later elsewhere. The few thousands of natives, whites, Orientals, half-castes, live in a charmed circle of low land fronting the sea, conscious of their mountains, no doubt, but the whites without curiosity, the Orientals without desire, the natives without remembrance. There must have been a maze of trails in the old days, leading down from the rich valleys. Now they are overgrown, untraveled, lost. Since the old life is no more than a memory, one is glad for the desolation, and grateful to the French lack of enterprise which surely is the only way to account for it.

No, we couldn't have chosen a better jumping-off place for our unpremeditated wanderings. We had the whole expanse of the Pacific before us, or, better, around us, and there was, as I have said, a harbor full of shipping. Boats with pleasing names, like the Curieuse, the Avarua, the Potii Ravarava, the Kaeo, the Liane—and self-confident, seagoing aspect. Some tidy and smart with new paint and rigging; others with decks warped and sides blistered, bottoms foul with the accumulation of a six months' cruise, reeking with the warm odor of copra. Boats newly arrived from remote islands, with crowds of bare-legged natives on their decks, their eyes beaming with pleasure in anticipation of the delights of the great capital; outward-bound to the Marquesas, the Australs, the Cooks, the Low Archipelago, despite the fact that it was the middle of the hurricane season. Among these latter there was one whose name was like a friendly hail from Gloucester, or Portland, Maine. But it was not this which attracted me to her, for all its assurance of Yankee hospitality. She was off to the Paumotus, the Cloud of Islands, and a longing to go there persisted in the face of a number of vague discouragements. There were no practical difficulties. Easy enough to get passage by one schooner or another. Paumotu copra is famous throughout the Southern Pacific. There is a good deal of competition for it, boats racing one another for cargo to the richer islands. The discouragements weren't so vague, either, now that I think of them. They came from men kindly disposed, interested in the islands in their own way. But their concerns were purely commercial. I heard a deal of talk about copra—in kilos, in tons, in shiploads; its market value in Papeete, in San Francisco, in Marseilles, until the stately trees which gave it lost for a time their old significance. Talk, too, of coconut oil and its richness in butter-fat. Butter-fat! There was a word to bring one back to a workaday world. To meet it at the outset of a long-dreamed-of journey was disheartening. It followed me with the shrill insistence of a creamery whistle, and I came very near giving up my plans altogether. Nordhoff did change his. He said that it was silly, no doubt, but he didn't like the idea of wandering, however lonely, in a cloud of butter-fat islands. Therefore we said good-by, having arranged for a rendezvous at a distant date, and set out on diverging paths.

I ought to leave Crichton, the English planter, out of this story altogether. He doesn't belong in a commonplace record of travel such as this one set out to be. He had very little to do with the voyage of the Caleb S. Winship among the atolls. But when I think of that vessel he comes inevitably into mind. I see him sitting on the cabin deck with his freckled brown hands clasped about his knees, looking across a solitude of waters; and in my mental concept of the Low Archipelago he is always somewhere in the background, standing on the sun-stricken reef of a tiny atoll, his back to the sea, almost as much a part of the lonely picture as the sea itself.

But one can't be wholly matter of fact in writing of these islands. They are not real in the ordinary sense, but belong, rather, to the realm of the imagination. And it is only in the imagination that you can conceive of your ever having been there, once you are back again in a well-plowed sea track. As for the people, whether native or alien, in order to focus them in a world of reality it is necessary to remember what they said or did; what they ate; what sort of clothing they wore. Otherwise they elude you just as the islands do.

This point of view isn't, perhaps, commonly held among the few white men who know them—captains of small schooners, managers of trading companies, resident agents, whose interest, as I have said, is in what they produce rather than in what they are. As one old skipper of my acquaintance put it, in speaking of the atolls, "Take them by and large, they are as much alike as the reef-points on that sail." Findlay's South Pacific Directory, a supposedly competent authority, bears him out in this: "They are all of similar character," adding, for emphasis, no doubt, "and they exhibit very great sameness in their features." He does, however, make certain slight concessions to what may be his own private conception of their peculiar fascination, "This vast collection of coral islands; one of the wonders of the Pacific," and later, in his account of them, "The native name, 'Paumotu,' signifies a Cloud of Islands, an expressive term." But he doesn't forget that he is writing for practical-minded mariners who want facts and not fancies, however truthful these may be to reality.