19
The Dance of the Virgins on Atafu
At Papua we all put in to the marine hospital for treatment. One of the most dangerous things to do after starvation and scurvy is to eat, but it is almost impossible to keep from gorging oneself on food at the first opportunity. I traded a plug of tobacco with a native for a dozen bananas and I ate ten of them. The result was that my stomach swelled and I took on the proportions of a fat turtle in pain.
We were in port for a month, while the ship was being repaired and the sailors were recovering. If Father could have found any sailors at Papua he would have shipped them in a minute, but they are scarce in that part of the world, and beachcombers or halfbreed natives were the only crew he could assemble as he struck out once more from Papua to the Union Group of Islands, which are situated about twenty-eight degrees south of the Equator and one hundred sixty-seven longitude west.
All of the hardship of the trip thus far was paid for as far as I was concerned when we made Atafu. This is the largest island of the Union Group, and at that it is only three miles long by half a mile wide. It is atoll shaped, around a blue lagoon of clear water. Atafu is what is known as one of the coral islands, for its base is pale pink coral. The island rises about three feet above sea level, and is covered with thick tropical foliage. The palms are thirty to forty feet high, and the underbrush is a tangled jungle of tropic vines.
Breadfruit trees, coconuts, yarrow root, banana and plantain palms, blossoming hibiscus flowers, poisonous wild peas, giant morning-glory vines and little native berry plants grow there in such profusion that as you approach the southeast side of the island it looks like a solidly woven mat of green and white. The beauty of Atafu is distinct from other South Sea islands. The sand on its horse-shoe beach is an orange gold, the coral jutting out under the white spray of the surf a delicate pink against the transparent green sea. Then within almost a stone’s throw from the beach inland lies the opalescent, bottomless lagoon. The natives say that at the bottom of the lagoon, which is so deep it has never been fathomed, in the “Sunset Land”: their heaven. They will tell you in all earnestness that that lagoon reaches to the other side of the earth where the sunsets are painted, and as natives worship beauty that far away the place at the pit of the lagoon is to them the “hereafter.”
The village which nestles on the edge of the jungle is composed of queer little three-cornered houses of coconut fibre matting. These houses are movable, and if the wind veers around or rain comes, the native husband turns his hut around to keep out the storm. The huts are only about four by six feet, and can be lifted by one man—it is no uncommon sight to sail up to Atafu and find the whole village gone. Not a sign of a hut or a living thing anywhere. That happens in the hurricane months, which are June and July in the tropics. The island is so low to sea level, that the giant breakers whipped up by a hurricane wash far upshore, even to the edge of the lagoon. The natives spend six months a year preparing for their winter. On the lee of the island, they dig caves and barricade them with twigs and woven palm leaves to shut out the wind. The women dry fruit and fish and bury it in the bottom of the cave for provision during the two months of hiding. One of the rarest delicacies they preserve is sun-dried plantains. These plantains are a species of banana. They let the intense heat of the sun crystallize them to sugar, then wrap them in damp leaves of morning-glory plants. The plantain thus wrapped turns to a sugary wine. They are wrapped up in little bundles that look like a Spanish tamale. I knew of some travellers who were touring the South Seas and their charts gave an accurate position of the native villages on each island in that group. When they returned to Australia they reported that they had found no sign of life. That was because they arrived there during hurricane time. I once asked a native Chief if his people didn’t grow restless during the two months they were buried alive on the island, and he said “No, they all get very no-doing,” which means drunk. The native men take coconuts and punch holes in the nut to let air get to the milk. Then they stop it up and let it ferment, thus brewing a liquor that is more deadly than any pre-Volstead drink ever conceived. I saw one of our sailors take a couple of drinks of coconut wine, and topple over me as if he had been hit on the head with a belaying pin, so I never pitied those natives who were forced by the elements to lie in a cave and suck wine while the sailors at sea had to struggle to keep a ship afloat.
The trip to Atafu was uneventful, except for Father’s vocabulary of profanity which he developed in finding expletives to describe his landlubber crew’s seamanship.
About five o’clock of the night of October 19th, we hove to off Atafu. There is no anchorage there so we had to drop extra sail and keep the ship up in the wind. The natives had evidently sighted us long before we saw Atafu, for the beach was a swarming mass of black men, wildly gesticulating to us.
Father called to me, “You get your trading stuff on the poop deck, Joan, we want to get a chance to trade before you cheat them out of their breech clouts.” I have always been able to get more from the natives by trading than any six sailors, and Father said I must be cheating! My particular store of goods to trade consisted of pieces of tinfoil off chewing gum and tobacco which I had begged from the sailors, boxes of matches, ivory soap, and red calico. The natives were crazy to get the tinfoil. They rolled it into little knobs and put it on their bushy hair like jewels. The matches were my next best bet for a good trade. I would give them two matches for a Panama hat or a handful of bird of paradise feathers. Ivory soap was especially valuable in trading. The old natives would give me a rare mat, or a box of sandalwood inlaid with raw pearl for a cake of it. No, they didn’t want the soap to wash in; they ate it for dessert! The red calico was for the women. From them I would coax a ring of tortoise-shell inlaid with blue mother-of-pearl, or fans painted on palm leaves with berry juices.