CHAPTER VII
THE NOBLE SAVAGE
The morning after our motion-picture show on the beach at Malekula found us anchored off Vao. We got our luggage ashore as quickly as possible and then turned in to make up for lost sleep. We had slept little during our eight days in the village of Nagapate. We had been in such constant fear of treachery that the thud of a falling coconut or the sound of a branch crackling in the jungle would set our nerves atingle and keep us awake for hours. Now we felt safe. We knew that the four hundred savages of Vao, though at heart as fierce and as cruel as any of the Malekula tribes, lived in wholesome fear of the British gunboat; so we slept well and long.
The next morning we said good-bye to Paul Mazouyer and he chugged away to Santo in the little schooner that for two weeks had been our home. Osa and I were alone on Vao. We turned back to our bungalow to make things comfortable, for we did not know how many days it would be before Mr. King, who had promised to call for us, would appear.
As we walked slowly up from the beach, we heard a shout. We turned and saw a savage running toward us. He was a man of about forty; yet he was little larger than a child and as naked as when he was born. From his almost unintelligible bêche-de-mer, we gathered that he wanted to be our servant. We could scarcely believe our ears. Here was a man who wanted to work! We wondered how he came to have a desire so contrary to Vao nature, until we discovered, after a little further conversation in bêche-de-mer, that he was half-witted! Since we were in need of native help, we decided not to let his mental deficiencies stand in his way and we hired him on the spot. Then came the first hitch. We could not find out his name. Over and over, we asked him, “What name belong you?” but with no result. He shook his head uncomprehendingly. Finally, Osa pointed to the tracks he had left in the sand. They led down to the shore and vanished at the water’s edge. “His name is Friday,” she said triumphantly. And so we called him.
From that moment, Friday was a member of our household. We gave him a singlet and a lava-lava, or loin-cloth, of red calico, and from somewhere he dug up an ancient derby hat. Some mornings he presented himself dressed in nothing but the hat. He was always on hand bright and early, begging for work, but, unfortunately, there was nothing that he could do. We tried him at washing clothes, and they appeared on the line dirtier than they had been before he touched them. We tried him at carrying water, but he brought us liquid mud, with sticks and leaves floating on the top. The only thing he was good for was digging bait and paddling the canoe gently to keep it from drifting while Osa fished.
That was, indeed, a service of some value; for Osa was an indefatigable fisherwoman. Every day, she went out and brought back from ten to thirty one- and two-pound fish, and one day she caught two great fish that must have weighed ten pounds each. It took the combined efforts of Friday and herself to land them.
I am convinced that, for bright color and strange markings, there are no fish in the world like those of Vao. Osa called them Impossible Fish. There were seldom two of the same color or shape in her day’s catch. They were orange and red and green and silver, and sometimes varicolored. But the most noticeable were little blue fish about the size of sardines which went in schools of thousands through the still sea, coloring it with streaks of the most brilliant shimmering blue you can imagine. In addition to the Impossible Fish, there were many octopi, which measured about three feet from tentacle to tentacle, and there were shellfish by the thousand. On the opposite side of the island from that on which we lived, oysters grew on the roots of mangrove trees at the water’s edge, and at low tide we used to walk along and pick them off as if they had been fruit.
We worked hard for the first week or so after our return to Vao, for we had about a hundred and fifty plates and nearly two hundred kodak films to develop. Previous to this trip, I had been forced to develop motion-picture films, as well as kodak films and plates, as I went along. Like most photographers, I had depended upon a formalin solution to harden the gelatin films and keep them from melting in the heat. Though such a solution aids in the preservation of the film, it interferes considerably with the quality of the picture, which often is harsh in outline as a result of the thickening of the film, and it is not a guarantee against mildew or against the “fogging” of negatives. Before starting for the New Hebrides, however, I had worked out a method of treating films that did not affect the quality of the picture, and yet made it possible to develop films successfully at a temperature much higher than 65°. Still better, it permitted me to seal my film after exposure and await a favorable opportunity for developing. Only lately I have developed in a New York workshop films that were exposed nineteen months ago in the New Hebrides and that were carried about for several months under the blaze of a tropical sun. They are among the best pictures I have ever taken.
Any one who has tried motion-picture photography in the tropics will realize what it means to be freed from the burden of developing all films on the spot. To work from three o’clock until sunrise, after a day of hard work in enervating heat, is usually sheer agony. Many a time I have gone through with the experience only to see the entire result of my work ruined by an accident. I have hung up a film to dry (in the humid atmosphere of the tropics drying often requires forty-eight hours instead of half as many minutes) and found it covered with tiny insects or bits of sand or pollen blown against it by the wind and embedded deep in the gelatin. I have covered it with mosquito-net in an effort to avoid a repetition of the tragedy and the mosquito-net has shut off the air and caused the gelatin to melt. I have had films mildew and thicken and cloud and spot, in spite of every effort to care for them. On this trip, though even so simple an operation as the changing of motion-picture film and the sealing of negatives was an arduous task when it had to be performed in cramped quarters, it was a great relief to be able to seal up my film and forget it after exposure. The plates that I used in my small camera had to be promptly attended to, however, for to have treated them as I treated the motion-picture film would have meant adding considerably to the bulk and weight of the equipment we were forced to carry about with us.
We worked at the developing several hours a day, and between times we explored the island, learning what we could of native life. Arree, the boy who acted as our maid-of-all-work, supplied me with native words until I had a fairly respectable vocabulary, but, when I tried to use it, I made the interesting discovery that the old men and the young men spoke different tongues. Language changes rapidly among savage tribes. No one troubles to get the correct pronunciation of a word. The younger generation adopt abbreviations or new words at will and incorporate into their speech strange corruptions of English or French words learned from the whites. Some of the words I learned from Arree were absolutely unintelligible to many of the older men. I found, too, that the language varied considerably from village to village, and though many of the Vao men were refugees from Malekula, it was very different from that of any of the tribes on the big island. I once estimated the number of languages spoken in the South Seas at four hundred. I am now convinced that as many as that are used by the black races alone.