Long before our reënforcements were due to arrive, we began to feel uneasy on Vao. I found our neighbors far too friendly with the unregenerate Malekula bushmen to be entirely trustworthy. The bush people had no canoes. But when they wanted to visit Vao, they would sing out from the shore, and the Vao men would go after them and bring them over, fifteen or twenty of them at a time. The Malekula men never came near our clearing, but the knowledge that they were on the island made us uncomfortable. We were sure that they came to participate in savage orgies, for often after a group of them arrived, the sound of the tom-tom and of savage chanting drifted through the jungle from the native villages, and our little clearing seemed haunted by shadows that assumed menacing shapes. Finally, there occurred an incident that changed what had been merely nervous apprehension to vivid fear.
We had been a week on the island. The schooners we were awaiting had not yet arrived. We could expect them, now, any day, but things do not run by clockwork in the South Seas, so we knew that another week might pass before we should see them. It had been hot and rainy and steamy and disagreeable ever since our arrival, but to-night was clear, with a refreshing breeze. After our tinned dinner, Osa and I went down to the beach. The moon was full. The waves lazily washed up on the soft sand, white in the moonlight, and the fronds of the palm-trees along the shore whispered and rattled above our heads. Osa, in a romantic mood, was strumming very softly on the ukulele. All at once, we heard the whish-whish of canoe paddles coming around a rocky point. We moved back into the shelter of some bushes and watched.
Presently ten natives landed on the beach and drew their canoe up after them. From it they took two objects wrapped in leaves, one elongated and heavy—it took several men to handle it—the other small and round. Soon the men, with their burdens, disappeared down a dark pathway leading to the village.
For several minutes we did not dare to move. Then we hurried back to the house and got our revolvers and sat for a long time feeling very much alone, afraid to go to bed and afraid to go out in the open. After a while a weird chanting and the beating of tom-toms began in the village near by. The noise kept us awake all night.
Next morning, Arree came up with his story of the night’s revels. The packages, he said, had really contained the body and head of a man. The head had been impaled on a stick in the village square, and the natives had danced wildly around it. Then the body was spitted on a long pole and roasted over a great fire. The savages continued to dance and sing until the horrible meal was ready. The rest of the night was spent in feasting. Such orgies as this, Arree said, were fairly frequent. The natives often purchased slain enemies from the bush savages of Malekula, to eat as they would eat so many pigs.
Two days after this incident, Paul Mazouyer dropped anchor off Vao. We were glad to see him, and told him so in emphatic bêche-de-mer, the only common language at our disposal. We promptly put my apparatus aboard his little schooner, or cutter, as the craft was called in those waters, and set sail for the country of the Big Numbers. A hundred naked savages watched us in silence from the beach. The two other schooners had gone on ahead to meet us in Big Numbers Bay, known locally as Tanemarou. They were all recruiting schooners with experienced crews, armed with regulation rifles, as permitted and indeed insisted upon by the Government.
Recruiting labor for the rubber and sugar plantations of white settlers is a regular business in the New Hebrides and a dangerous one. A recruiter chooses his island and anchors in the offing. He then sets adrift a charge of dynamite, which is detonated as a signal to the natives. The roar of the explosion rolls through the valleys and echoes against the hills. On the day following, the savages come down to the beach to trade. Two boats then put off from the schooner. In the first is the white man with an unarmed crew, for the savages are not beyond rushing the boat for the sake of a gun. In the second, hovering a short distance away, is an armed crew, who cover the savages with their guns while their master parleys with the chiefs for recruits. At the first hostile move on the part of the natives, the boys in the covering boat open fire.
Despite such extreme precautions, tragedies happen. A friend of Paul Mazouyer’s had been killed at Malua, whither we were now bound. Paul told us the story. There were only a few savages on the beach at the time; but one of them promised to go into the bush to recruit if his people were given half a case of tobacco. The recruiter foolishly sent his covering boat back to the cutter for the tobacco, and the savages sat down on the beach to wait. While they were waiting, another savage came out of the jungle. He walked slowly down the beach with his hands behind him and waded out into the water until he could get behind the white man. Then he suddenly placed the muzzle of a gun against the white man’s back and pulled the trigger.
A French gunboat was sent from Nouméa to avenge the murder, and a month after the tragedy Paul led an expedition into the bush which razed a village and killed a number of savages.
In conclusion, Paul told us an incident that he thought was uproariously funny. The victor had brought the bodies of four of the natives down to the sea. Among the members of the expedition were a dozen “civilized” blacks of a tribe hostile to the Big Numbers. These twelve boys looked thoughtfully at the four dead bodies and then approached the commander with a spokesman at their head.