CHAPTER XXV ~ A BIT OF GOOD LUCK
Between the southern end of the great island of New Guinea and the Solomon Group there is a cluster of islands marked on the chart as “Woodlark Islands,” but the native name is Mayu. Practically they were not discovered until 1836, when the master of the Sydney sandal-wooding barque Woodlark made a survey of the group. The southern part of the cluster consists of a number of small well-wooded islands, all inhabited by a race of Papuans, who, said Captain Grimes of the Woodlark, had certainly never before seen a white man, although they had long years before seen ships in the far distance.
It was on these islands that I met with the most profitable bit of trading that ever befel me during more than a quarter of a century's experience in the South Seas.
Nearly thirty years passed since Grimes's visit without the natives seeing more than half a dozen ships. These were American or Hobart Town whalers, and none of them came to an anchor—they laid off and on, and bartered with the natives for fresh provisions, but from the many inquiries I made, I am sure that no one from these ships put foot on shore; for the inhabitants were not to be trusted, being warlike, savage and treacherous.
The master of one of these ships was told by the natives—or rather made to understand, for no one of them knew a word of English—that about twelve months previously a large vessel had run on shore one wild night on the south side of the group and that all on board had perished. Fourteen bodies had been washed on shore at a little island named Elaue, all dreadfully battered about, and the ship herself had disappeared and nothing remained of her but pieces of wreckage. She had evidently struck on the reef near Elaue with tremendous violence, then slipped off and sunk. The natives asked the captain to come on shore and be shown the spot where the men had been buried, but he was too cautious a man to trust himself among them.
On his reporting the matter to the colonial shipping authorities at Sydney, he learned that two vessels were missing—one a Dutch barque of seven hundred tons which left Sydney for Dutch New Guinea, and the other a full-rigged English ship bound to Shanghai. No tidings had been heard of them for over eighteen months, and it was concluded that the vessel lost on Woodlark Island was one or the other, as that island lay in the course both would have taken.
In 1868-69 there was a great outburst of trading operations in the North-West Pacific Islands—then in most instances a terra incognita, and there was a keen rivalry between the English and German trading firms to get a footing on such new islands as promised them a lucrative return for their ventures. Scores of adventurous white men lost their lives in a few months, some by the deadly malarial fever, others by the treacherous and cannibalistic savages. But others quickly took their places—nothing daunted—for the coco-nut oil trade, the then staple industry of the North-West Pacific, was very profitable and men made fortunes rapidly. What mattered it if every returning ship brought news of some bloody tragedy—such and such a brig or schooner having been cut off and all hands murdered, cooked and eaten, the vessel plundered and then burnt? Such things occur in the North-West Pacific in the present times, but the outside world now hears of them through the press and also of the punitive expeditions by war-ships of England, France or Germany.
Then in those old days we traders would merely say to one another that “So-and-So 'had gone'”. He and his ship's company had been cut off at such-and-such a place, and the matter, in the eager rush for wealth, would be forgotten.
At that time I was in Levuka—the old capital of Fiji—supercargo of a little topsail schooner of seventy-five tons. She was owned and sailed by a man named White, an extremely adventurous and daring fellow, though very quiet—almost solemn—in his manner.