At three o'clock, Jack told me to start the engine, as the breeze was dying out, and he was afraid of being caught on a bad coast with no moon to steer by and reefs all about. We decided to stop at a small island six miles off San Christoval—Ugi is its name, and it has a good harbour. When we were about five miles off, a whale-boat with a white man and half a dozen black boys came alongside, and I stopped the engine until he got aboard; then we pushed on again with his boat towing behind. He was a Mr. Drew, a member of the Melanesian Missionary Society, stationed on p299 San Christoval. He accompanied us to Ugi, and decided to go to Florida Island with us. We got in just at dark, and were met by a trader in his dingy, who piloted us to a good anchorage alongside his little ketch, a hundred yards off shore. His name was Hammond. He was an Australian who had only been here one month. The last man got frightened and left, for the natives of Malaita, a very savage island, had come down in canoes and killed nearly every trader that ever set up in business here; and he had got word from one of his boys that they were coming again. Hammond had been in the Solomons for eleven years, however, and spoke the language well. He told us that two years before he had landed at Port Mary—our last anchorage—just as the natives were coming back from San Christoval, victorious in a fight with one of the hostile tribes; and these Port Mary natives were heavily laden with war trophies, such as heads, arms and legs.
The two men stayed for supper, and we held long and interesting conversations with them, in the course of which we learned many new things of the dark islands into which we had poked the Snark's nose.
The next morning, July 3, we had the best treat we had had for ages—milk, sweet, fresh cow's milk! One glass apiece! Mr. Hammond had sent it over before we were up. I had almost forgotten that milk grew in anything except cans. Mr. and Mrs. London went ashore to see the natives, while I stayed aboard p300 to give my clothing a good overhauling, and to sew for myself some lava-lavas. Several natives came out to trade curios, but they had the same things we had gotten in Port Mary, so I did not buy.
The next day, Saturday, was the Fourth of July. In the morning we discharged a round of ammunition from each of our guns, and that was our celebration—quite different from the one the year before at Honolulu. At ten o'clock the trader came alongside in his whale-boat, manned by his Santa Cruz boys, and we went to the village. A crowd met us at the beach. The women here were clothed, each in a yard of calico. They were all Christians, so they said; but I confess that the heathens we had previously met were far more hospitable and were better looking. The old chief led us around the village, which, like the one at Port Mary, was enclosed by a low fence. The huts all faced a narrow street, and the rear of the huts was flush with the fence. The huts themselves were the dirtiest things I ever saw—of grass and sides and roof, very low, with a bamboo porch in front. On the inside was a dirty sleeping bunk of bamboo. Of other furniture there was little or none.
We returned late that afternoon, and went aboard the Snark. Jack went through the medicine chest, trying to find something that would cure the large ulcer on my shin. Every day found this growing in size and soreness; and I became seriously concerned. At Port Mary, I had asked the trader, Butler, about it, p301 and he had told me that it was a "yaw," or Solomon Island sore, to which all white men were subject. Corrosive sublimate, he further declared, was the thing to cure it. Now the result of corrosive sublimate on a large raw surface like that! It burnt like fire, but it seemed to help.
We now set out for a leisurely circuit of the larger islands. In this circuit, it was our luck to see thousands of cannibals, and also to observe the work done by the missionaries among these benighted savages. Right here, let me explain that cannibalism is not practised because of any love of human flesh, but rather because the natives believe that they acquire the fighting qualities of the men that they eat. Thus they hope to get the strength and prowess in battle of their enemies; and for his reason, they like to eat white men, whose skill and courage they admire.
We never saw a cannibal feast, but we saw plenty of evidence of the practice in the thousands of human bones on shores and reefs.
All these cannibals are head-hunters. One may see tiny mummified heads stuck up outside the huts. The more heads a man has, the stronger he imagines himself to be. A man with fifteen heads reckons himself as strong as fifteen men. The mummified heads are taken from enemies in battle. The bones are all drawn out, and then the head is dried until it is only the size of one's fist. To possess the head of a white man is a special honour. A village with a white man's p302 head considers that it has a wonderful talisman. Naturally, we took great care not to become luck-bringers for any of the natives among whom we sojourned.
Some years ago, a party of German scientists landed at Malaita, one of the most inaccessible islands in the group, to explore. They very much wanted to take back some of these heads as relics, and offered fifteen sticks of plug tobacco for each. The market was brisk for a few days, but soon all the posts outside the huts had been stripped, and the supply slackened. Then suddenly trade revived again—but it was noticed that the heads brought in were fresh! It turned out that the natives had been doing a little private killing in order to keep up the supply. One native had sacrificed several relatives in his desire to please the Germans and get their tobacco.
And then the missionaries. There are so many different kinds of missionaries in the South Seas that I must divide them into their classes and try to tell of these different classes as they appeared to me. Probably another person going among them would see them in a different light from what I did. Of course, I cannot pretend to know all about what the missionaries are doing in the South Seas, but I do know what some of them were doing. Some of them were engaged in excellent work—the noblest work in the world. And some were doing absolutely no work. Let me tell of both kinds, at the same time explaining that if some of the missionaries are not doing what they ought, p303 it is no reason why we should shut our eyes to the fact that there are others who toil eternally and well in their allotted paths. For that matter, it is the frauds who make it so hard for the missionary who works in good faith for the regeneration of the savages.