From that time on everything in Nature took on a different meaning to me. Ashore on the islands I sought out native women to play with. I was afraid to ask them questions but I wanted to watch them to see if I was just as they were. One day, on a little island about eighty miles south of Suva, I went ashore with four of our crew and Stitches to get some breadfruit and guavas. We took a sack of nails and rope to use as commodities of trade. Once ashore, Stitches and I left the sailors and wandered through the village streets. We hadn’t gone more than a quarter of a mile before we were attracted to a group of natives playing tom-toms. We pushed through the outer circle of natives to see what was happening. There in the center of the group I saw a native mother in childbirth. Unaided by any other woman, when her time came, she squatted on the sand. The tom-toms were being played in celebration of a child’s being born to their tribe. Just at the moment the baby came from the mother the natives broke into an ecstatic song of triumph. Apparently paying no attention to her audience, the native mother broke the navel cord that bound the infant to her and tied the end of it with a piece of coconut fiber. Then she took her baby down to the surf and washed it in the cold sea water which brought its first cry of life. The natives lost interest in her as soon as they heard the baby’s tiny voice, and they scattered, leaving her to her task of nurturing the little life.
“Your Old Man will get sore if he finds out I’m letting you watch this, Skipper,” observed Stitches. “But there’s no telling when you’ll ever see the likes of this again.”
I didn’t care what happened to me afterwards for I was so fascinated with the native mother that I didn’t want to leave her. She put the baby to her breast to suckle it. After it had its first meal she scraped a place in the sand under the warm sun for it to sleep in, then she lay beside it, full of pride and content. I thought it must be fun to have a baby and have a lot of natives singing and dancing to celebrate the event, but I was to learn years later that most civilized women didn’t agree with me.
When we returned to the ship I was full of my latest experience. But somehow life had turned from a simple thing into something so full of puzzling contradictions that I longed to leave the ship and live on shore where I thought I would find an answer to everything that bewildered me.
Within a year from that time I found out that sailors’ loves were not all beautiful. They talked of the women on the waterfront they gave their pay to for a night’s love; they remembered young sweethearts in the Old Country; and I heard them say they were sweet on the little native girls. But their affairs were confused in my mind. One day I asked Swede, while he was standing at the helm, if he had ever been in love.
“Sure, Skipper, all us sailormen are in love—with the same woman!”
“How do you mean, Swede?” I queried.
“Yep, the same woman satisfies us all. You know how the sails look at night, filled out in firm curves by the wind?”
“Yes,” I answered, but I failed to see the connection of sails with Swede’s sweetheart.
“Well,” he went on, “them sails are so pretty and round, that with the moon lighting them up they looks like a woman’s breasts and us sailormen stand aft at the helm just content to follow them wherever they lead.”