Faery Lands of the South Seas

by James Norman Hall; Charles Nordhoff

His volubility startled me. It was a shock to the senses, like the crash of a coconut on a tin roof heard in the profound stillness of an island night. There was my opportunity to throw off reserve and I lost it through my surprise. I merely said, "Yes, very much." An hour later we saw the captain, no larger than a penny doll, at the end of a long vista of empty beach, beckoning us to come back. We went aboard without having spoken again. It was an odd sort of relationship for two white men thrown into close contact on a small trading schooner in the loneliest ocean in the world, as Nordhoff put it. We were no more companionable in the ordinary sense than a pair of hermit crabs.

But the need for talking drops away from men under such circumstances and neither of us found the long silences embarrassing. The spell of the islands was upon us both. I can understand Crichton's speaking of their appeal to the imagination while we were in the midst of them; for our presence there seemed an illusion—a dream more radiant than any reality could be. In fact, my only hold upon reality during that voyage was the Caleb S. Winship, and sometimes even that substantial old vessel suffered sea changes; was metamorphosed in a moment; and it was hard to believe that she was a boat built by men's hands. Often as she lay at anchor in a lagoon of dreamlike beauty I paddled out from shore in a small canoe, and, making fast under her stern, spent an afternoon watching the upward play of the reflections from the water and the blue shadows underneath, rippling out and vanishing in the light like flames of fire. For me her homely, rugged New England name was a pleasant link with the past. I liked to read the print of it. The word "Boston," her old home port, was still faintly legible through a coat of white paint. It brought to mind old memories and the faces of old friends, hard to visualize in those surroundings without such practical help. Far below lay the floor of the lagoon where all the rainbows of the world have authentic end. The water was so clear, and the sunlight streamed through it with so little loss in brightness that one seemed to be suspended in mid-air above the forests of branching coral, the deep, cool valleys, and the wide, sandy plains of that strange continent.

Crichton, I believe, was beyond the desire to keep in touch with the world he had left so many years before. His experiences there may have been bitter ones. At any rate, he never spoke of them, and I doubt if he thought of them often. People had little interest for him, not even those of the atolls which we visited. When on shore I usually found him on the outer beaches, away from the villages which lie along the lagoon. In most of the atolls the distance from beach to beach is only a few hundred yards, but the ocean side is unfrequented and solitary. On calm days when the tide begins to ebb the silence there is unearthly. The wide shore, hot and glaring in the sun, stretches away as far as the eye can reach, empty of life except for thousands of small hermit crabs moving into the shade of the palms. They snap into their shells at your approach and make fast the door as their houses fall, with a sound like the tinkling of hailstones, among heaps of broken coral. We waded along the shallows at low tide. When the wind was onshore and a heavy surf breaking over the outer edge of the reef, we sat as close to it as we could, watching the seas gathering far out, rising in sheer walls fringed with wind-whipped spray, which seemed higher than the island itself as they approached. It was a fascinating sight—the reef hidden in many places in a perpetual smoke of sunlight-filtered mist, through which the oncoming breakers could be seen dimly as they swept forward, curled, and fell. But one could not avoid a feeling of uneasiness, of insecurity, thinking of what had happened in those islands—most of them only a meter or two above sea level—in the hurricanes of the past; and of what would happen again at the coming of the next great storm.

We made landfalls at dawn, in midafternoon, late at night—saw the islands in aspects of beauty exceeding one's strangest imaginings. We penetrated farther and farther into a thousand-mile area of atoll-dotted ocean, discharging our cargo of lumber and corrugated iron, rice and flour and canned goods; taking on copra; carrying native passengers from one place to another. Sometimes we were out of sight of land for several days, beating into head winds under a slowly moving pageantry of clouds which alone gave assurance of the rotundity of the earth. When at last land appeared it seemed inaccessibly remote, at the summit of a long slope of water which we would never be able to climb. Sometimes for as long a period we skirted the shore line of a single atoll, the water deepening and shoaling under our keel in splotches of vague or vivid coloring. From a vantage point in the rigging one could see a segment of a vast circle of islands strung at haphazard on a thread of reef which showed a thin, clear line of changing red and white under the incessant battering of the surf. Several times upon going ashore we found the villages deserted, the inhabitants having gone to distant parts of the atoll for the copra-making season. In one village we came upon an old man too feeble to go with the others, apparently, sitting in the shade playing a phonograph. He had but three records: "Away to the Forest," "The Dance of the Nymphs Schottische," and "Just a Song at Twilight." The disks were as old as the instrument itself, no doubt, and the needles so badly worn that one could barely hear the music above the rasping of the mechanism. There was a groove on the vocal record where the needle caught, and the singer, a woman with a high, quavery voice, repeated the same phrase, "when the lights are low," over and over again. I can still hear it, even at this distance of time and place, and recall vividly to mind the silent houses, the wide, vacant street bright with fugitive sunshine, the lagoon at the end of it mottled with the shadows of clouds.

The sense of our remoteness grew upon me as the weeks and months passed. Once, rounding a point of land, we came upon two schooners lying inside the reef of a small atoll. One of them had left Papeete only a short while before. Her skipper gave us a bundle of old newspapers. Glancing through them that evening, I heard as in a dream the far-off clamor of the outside world—the shrieking of whistles, the roar of trains, the strident warnings of motors; but there was no reality, no allurement in the sound. I saw men carrying trivial burdens with an air of immense effort, of grotesque self-importance; scurrying in breathless haste on useless errands; gorging food without relish; sleeping without refreshment; taking their leisure without enjoyment; living without the knowledge of content; dying without ever having lived. The pictures which came to mind as I read were distorted, untrue, no doubt; for by that time I was almost as much attracted by the lonely life of the islands as my friend Crichton. My old feeling of restlessness was gone. In its place had come a certitude of happiness, a sense of well-being for which I can find no parallel this side of boyhood.

It was largely the result of living among people who are as permanently happy, I believe, as it is possible for humankind to be. And the more remote the island, the more slender the thread of communication with civilization as we know it, the happier they were. It was not in my imagination that I found this true, or that I had determined beforehand to see only so much of their life as might be agreeable and pleasant to me. On the contrary, if I had any bias at first, it was on the other side. Disillusionment is a sad experience and I had no desire to lay myself open to it. Therefore I listened willingly to the less favorable stories of native character which the traders, and others who know them, had to tell. But summed up dispassionately later, in the light of my own observations, it seemed to me that the faults of character of which they were accused were more like the natural shortcomings of children. In many respects the Paumotuans, like other divisions of the Polynesian family, are children who have never grown up, and one can't blame them for a lack of the artificial virtues which come only with maturity. They are without guile. They have little of the shrewdness or craftiness of some primitive peoples. At least so it appeared to me, making as careful a judgment of them as I could. I have often noticed how like children they are in their amazing trustfulness, their impulsive generosity, and in the intensity and briefness of their emotions.

The more I saw of their life, the more desirable it seemed that they might continue to escape any serious encroachments of European or American civilization. They have no doctors, because illness is almost unknown in their islands. Crime, insanity, feeble-mindedness, evils all too common with us, are of such rare occurrence that one may say they do not exist. It may be said, too, without overstatement, that their community life very nearly approaches perfection. Every atoll is a little world to itself with a population varying from twenty-five to perhaps three hundred inhabitants. The chief, who is chosen informally by the men, serves for a period of four years under the sanction of the French government. He has very little to do in the exercise of his authority, for the people govern themselves, are law-abiding without law.

When I first learned that there are no schools throughout the islands I thought the French guilty of criminal neglect, but later I reversed this opinion. Alter all, why should they have schools? No education of ours could make them more generous, more kindly disposed to one another, more hospitable and courteous toward strangers, happier than they are now. Certainly it could not make them less selfish, covetous, rapacious, for most of them are as innocent of those vices as their own children. In a few of the richer, more accessible islands they are slowly changing in these respects, owing to the example set them by men of our own race. In another fifty years, perhaps, they may have learned to believe that material wealth is the only thing worth striving for. Then will come pride in their possessions, envy of those who have greater, contempt and suspicion for those who have less, and so an end to their happiness.

I had never before seen children growing up in a state of nature and I made full use of the rare opportunity. I spent most of my time with them; played on shore with them; went fishing and swimming with them; and found in the experience something better than a renewal of boyhood because of a keener sense of beauty, a more conscious, mature appreciation of the happiness one has in the simplest kinds of pleasures. Sometimes we started on our excursions at dawn; sometimes we made them by moonlight. I became a collector of shells in order to give some purpose to our expeditions along the reef. I couldn't have chosen a better interest, for they knew all about shells, where and when to find the best ones, and they could indulge their love of giving to a limitless extent. In the afternoons we went swimming in the lagoon. There I saw them at their best and happiest, in an element as necessary and familiar to them as it is to their parents. It is always a pleasure to watch children at play in the water, but those Paumotuan youngsters with their natural grace at swimming and diving put one under an enchantment. Many of the boys had water glasses and small spears of their own and went far from shore, catching fish. They lay face down on the surface of the water, swimming easily, with a great economy of motion, turning their heads now and then for a breath of air; and when they saw their prey they dived after it as skillfully as their fathers do and with nearly as much success. Seen against the bright floor of the lagoon, with swarms of brilliantly colored fish scattering before them, they seemed doubtfully human, the children of some forsaken merman rather than creatures who have need of air to breathe and solid earth to stand on. If education is the suitable preparation for life, the children of the atolls have it at its best and happiest without knowing that it is education. They are skillful in the pursuits and learned in the interests which touch their lives, and one can wish them no better fortune than that they may remain in ignorance of those which do not.

Their parents, as I have said, are but children of mature stature, with the same gift of frank, generous laughter, the same delight in the new and strange. Very little is required to amuse them. I had a mandolin which I used to take ashore with me at various atolls, after I had become convinced that their enjoyment of my music was not feigned. At first I was suspicious, for I had no illusions about my virtuosity, and even when I thought of it in the most flattering way their pleasure seemed out of all proportion to the quality of the performance. But there was no doubting the genuineness of it. The whole village would assemble to hear me play. I had a limited repertoire, but that seemed to matter very little. They liked to hear the same tunes played over and over again. I learned some of the old missionary hymns which they knew: "From Greenland's Icy Mountains," "Oh, Happy Day," "We're Marching to Zion," and others.