Ignorance is not virtue. Virtue is knowledge coupled with self-restraint. And so let me call attention to a people who are as directly opposed to us in their views of morality as could be imagined. These people are sex worshippers, and their ideas of right and wrong lead them to call attention to the very subjects we seek to hide and dismiss from our minds.
To go back to Suva, Fiji. Captain Warren was no longer a member of the Snark's crew. As we lay alongside the wharf at Suva, the crew painted and scraped masts, decks and booms, and after loading with water and provisions, we were again ready for sea. Tehei was dressed in his first suit of clothes, of which he was as proud as a peacock. Our compasses were swung and adjusted by an expert. Our chronometer was taken aboard an Australian steamer p271 and corrected, and we were ready to try our luck with Captain Jack London. And when I think of the crew of the Snark, I always think of the crew that sailed out of Fiji, and the same crew that stuck to the trip to the end. Up to this time, I had seen come and go three captains, two engineers, several sailors and a cabin-boy. The crew that sailed from Suva included Mr. and Mrs. London, myself, and four dark-skinned persons: Nakata, the Jap cabin-boy, Wada San, the Jap cook, and the two Tahitians, Tehei and Henry.
We cleared Suva Harbor at 12:30 on the afternoon of Saturday, June 6, 1908. The harbour master, with his crew of Fiji convicts, was the last to leave; then we just slid out of the bay with a strong beam wind, and in an hour had left Suva out of sight. We passed a small cutter, and her crew of bushy-haired Fijians cried good-bye in their own language, and dipped their flag. About four o'clock we got to the entrance of a very narrow channel and between two small islands. I took the wheel, and Jack sang out the course from the bow. By six o'clock we were through and headed for the open sea, at which everyone was glad, for reefs and small islands cause much worry.
The next day I cleaned up the engine room and did small carpentering jobs about the ship. The sea was quite rough, and we had the skylights battened down; but because of the clearness of the sky we did not expect very nasty weather. We were speeding at about seven knots. All day, Jack studied navigation. For p272 the first several days out of Fiji he had no time to write. He navigated by every method known to captains, and then proved his navigating as we used to prove our arithmetic problems at school. On Wednesday morning, I took the time while he got the sight; then we corrected the two compasses, he watching one compass and I the other. Jack figured that day that we had done ten thousand miles in the Snark since leaving San Francisco.
That evening, Jack announced that at a certain point on the compass, at sunrise next morning, would be the first island in the New Hebrides, called Futuna, and next morning at five o'clock there was a call for all hands on deck. I hurried up, expecting to see a storm closing in on us, but instead the sky was clear and Jack was excitedly pointing to a rocky island at the exact place he had told us of the night before. Jack said: "I told you so," and for the rest of that day he went around with his head up in the air, with the bearing of a person who knew much more than any others on board, and we all looked at him in awe and told him he was a great navigator.
Futuna was a high, flat rock, as seen from the sea. We did not go close enough to examine it. We had a good breeze, and all that day we passed small uninhabited islands, and that night slowed down, for the island of Tanna was directly ahead, and we were afraid to go into the bay at night; but early next morning we p273 dropped anchor opposite a mission station in a long, narrow bay.
The third cylinder igniters blew out when I tried to use the engine to help us into this bay, and we had trouble in finding an entrance, for the place seemed reef-locked, but we took a chance, and finally got in. We anchored one hundred yards off a high bluff, on the top of which was a little white church, almost hidden by the dense jungle. We saw clumsy canoes coming toward us, and soon two hundred of the puniest, dirtiest, most unhealthy little thieving natives came aboard. All afternoon they kept arriving in canoe-loads. All wore remnants of white men's clothing, filthy beyond description. Some had only an undershirt; some, old trousers; and there were old hats of all kinds. One carried an umbrella. Others, again, wore red singlets, so full of holes they would scarcely hang on their backs. Their ears were pierced with holes I could have stuck my thumb through. They were all missionaries from the mission school on the top of the hill—and great missionaries they were! In the afternoon, when we three whites started ashore, we cleared the deck of the natives, and they cleared the deck of any spare ropes or marlin they could find loose. We missed nearly everything that was small enough for the natives to get away with. We went ashore and had dinner with the only missionary on the island, Rev. Watt. He p274 had been for twenty-eight years at this station, and had managed to convert the coast natives only, but in the interior the natives were as savage and primitive as the day God had made them—he sighed when he told us of the interior natives. We asked him to take us on an excursion to see these natives, but he flung up his hands in horror. "No! It was no place for a woman," and we could not persuade him to alter his decision. He told us of a lawless trader living on the island, and for us to be careful of him, he was a very bad man; he was friendly with the bush natives. And right then Jack whispered to me that we must find that bad, wicked trader and get him to take us to visit the savages that we had sailed thousands and thousands of miles to see. On going aboard that night, we found the wicked trader sitting on our deck, smoking Jack's cigarettes. He was a big, jolly-looking Scotchman. He was overjoyed to see us, for it is mighty few white people that Trader Wiley ever sees in Tanna. He had been trading here for over seven years. In order to trade among the different tribes, he had learned their languages, and to gain their friendship had doctored the sick and set broken bones. He had been the means of bringing peace between several of the tribes that before his advent had been continually at war. But the missionary considered him a bad man because he had gained such a hold on the natives, and, doctoring their ills and injuries, refused to doctor their souls. p275
Mr. Wiley stayed for supper, and told us some interesting yarns of the island. Up to one year ago, the different tribes were at war with each other. No tribe dared go outside its own boundaries, unless it wished to precipitate a rumpus. But the English warship Cambrian came and threw bombs in some of the villages, and now the natives were quiet through fear of having their homes destroyed. It had been three years, Mr. Wiley said, since a cannibalistic feast took place, and he had been there to see it. Having the confidence of the natives because he smuggled old-fashioned "Springfield" rifles in to them, he was allowed to go and come as he pleased. He had gone up into the bush after copra one day, after one tribe had been defeated by the tribe he was visiting, and was asked to stay and watch the feast that night, which he did—he found four bodies cooked and ready to eat, with the heads off and the bowels removed.
Of course he would show us the bush people; but he warned us that they were not the kind of people that we had been used to. It was agreed that on Sunday, June 22, he was to take us up to the village where he had seen the cannibal feast. On Saturday, Jack and Mrs. London went to see one of the most noted volcanoes in the New Hebrides, which is located on this island. I wandered up and down the bay, looking in the village huts and trying to find curios, but the natives seemed to have none. One little four-foot grass hut p276 and a few dirty mats is all the average man here possesses.
I gossiped with Mr. Wiley and his partner, Mr. Stanton, in their little 10-x-15 store, where they ate, slept and traded. Very little money was in circulation; they traded out of their stock for copra. One stick of cheap tobacco bought ten cocoanuts; and three sticks would hire a man for one day to take the meat from the nut and dry it into copra; so it will be seen that the remuneration of labour in the New Hebrides is nothing magnificent. One stick of tobacco is worth a cent.