I bought nearly a thousand dollars’ worth of food and trade-stuffs from the four trading stores of Vila, but could not get a schooner or any native boys to take us on our trip around Malekula. So I decided to go on to the island of Espiritu Santo, two hundred miles to the north. We stopped at Api, to leave mail and supplies and to take on copra. In the harbor there, we again saw the old Snark at anchor. It was a black and shabby ship, manned by a black crew and used for recruiting labor for work in the white man’s sugar and copra plantations.
We found Segond Channel, off Southeastern Santo, filled with cutters and schooners, every one of which had white men aboard, who had been waiting a couple of weeks for the news and supplies brought by the Pacifique. In no time at all, I made arrangements for three schooners with big crews to accompany me on my visit to the tribe of the Big Numbers. Mr. Thomas, of Hog Harbor, promised he would send his boat to Vao in a week with as many boys as he could spare. Mr. Perrole, an experienced French recruiter, also agreed to charter a schooner and bring boys. We obtained a third schooner from a young Frenchman, Paul Mazouyer, one of the most picturesque dare-devils I have ever met. A giant in size and strength, boiling with energy, always singing, sometimes dancing with his boys, he did not understand the meaning of fear. He was a match for three white men, and he took chances on the beach that no other recruiter would dream of taking. I asked him once in bêche-de-mer—the only language in which we could converse—if the savages did not sometimes make him a little anxious.
“Ah,” he said, shifting his huge frame and stretching his arms, “my word! Suppose fifty men he come, me no fright!”
I believed him. He was a two-fisted adventurer of the old type, with the courage of unbeaten youth. He knew, as every white man in the New Hebrides knows, that he might expect short shrift once the natives got him in their power, but he trusted to fate and took reckless chances.
The captain of the Pacifique agreed to take us to Vao, although it was fifty miles off his course. We dropped anchor off the island just at daylight and were surrounded almost immediately by canoes filled with naked savages. The Pacifique was a marvel to the natives. She was one of the smallest steamers I had ever been aboard, but they had never in all their lives seen so large a vessel. The imposing size of the ship and the impressive quantity of my baggage—sixty-five trunks, crates and boxes—gave me a great deal of importance in their eyes. As we stood on the beach watching the unloading of the ship’s boat, they crowded about, regarding us with furtive curiosity. From time to time they opened their huge, slobbering mouths in loud guffaws, though there was apparently no cause for laughter.
When my things were all unloaded, the captain and officers shook hands with us and put off for the ship. In twenty minutes the Pacifique was steaming away. Before she gained speed, a big American flag was hoisted between the masts, and the engineer tooted encouragement to us. As she grew small in the distance, the flag at the stern of the vessel was dipped three times. We sat on the beach among our boxes and watched her until she was just a cloud of smoke on the horizon. We felt very lonely and very much shut off from our kind there, surrounded by a crowd of jabbering, naked savages, who stared at us with all the curiosity shown by people back home toward the wild man in a sideshow.
With a show of cheerfulness, we set about making ourselves comfortable for the weeks to come. The huts of the seventeen converts were deserted, and rapidly going to pieces: the former occupants had forsaken the lonely clearing for the crowded villages. But the little stone house in which Father Prin had lived was still standing, though one corner of the roof had fallen in. A proffer of tobacco secured me many willing black hands to repair the roof and thatch it with palm leaves. Other natives brought up our trunks and boxes. They cut big poles and lashed the boxes to them with vines, and, ten to twenty natives to a box, they carried the luggage from the beach in no time. By noon we had everything stored away safe from the weather. We spent the afternoon in unpacking the things needed for immediate use, and soon Osa and I had our little three-room dwelling shipshape.
We had learned a lesson from our first trip, with the result that, on this second expedition, we had brought with us every possible comfort and even some luxuries—from air-cushions and mattresses to hams, bacons, and cheeses specially prepared for us in Sydney. With a clear-flamed Primus stove and Osa to operate it, we were fairly certain of good food. Having promulgated the law of the New Hebrides and Solomons, that every native coming upon the clearing must leave his gun behind him and cover his nakedness with calico, we settled down for a long stay.
Vao is a very small island, no more than two miles in diameter, lying several miles off the northeast shore of Malekula. It is rimmed on the Malekula side by a broad, beautiful beach. Three small villages are hidden in the low, scrub jungle, but the only signs of habitation are three canoe houses that jut out from the fringe of bushes and hundreds of canoes drawn up in a careful line upon the beach.
About four hundred savages live in the three villages of Vao. Their huts—mere shelters, not high enough to permit a man to stand erect—contain nothing but a few bits of wood to feed the smoldering fires. Pigs wander freely in and out. Oftentimes these animals seem to be better favored than the human inmates, who are a poor lot, many of them afflicted with dreadful sores and weak eyes.