Jarwin and Cuffy

by R. M. Ballantyne

“Ah! you are dumb, my poor man,” said the missionary, with a look of pity.

“Or tabooed,” suggested the lady; “his tongue may have been tabooed.”

There was some reason and probability in this, for the extraordinary custom of tabooing, by which various things are supposed to be rendered sacred, and therefore not to be used or touched, is extended by the South Sea Islanders to various parts of their bodies, as for instance, the hands; in which case the person so tabooed must, for a time, be fed by others, as he dare not use his hands.

Jarwin, being aware of the custom, was so tickled by the idea of his tongue being tabooed, that he burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter, to the intense amazement of his questioners. While in the midst of this laugh, he became horrified by the thought that that of itself would be sufficient to betray him, so he cleverly remedied the evil, and gave vent to his feelings by tapering the laugh off into a hideous yell, and rushed frantically from the spot.

“Strange,” observed the missionary, gazing after the fugitive mariner, “how like that was to an English laugh!”

“More like the cry of a South Sea maniac, I think,” said Mrs Williams, re-entering the house, followed by her husband.

The matter which the missionary said had been arranged so satisfactorily, and was to be begun at once, was neither more nor less than the building of a ship, in which to traverse the great island-studded breast of the Pacific.

In case some one, accustomed to think of the ponderous vessels which are built constantly in this land with such speed and facility, should be inclined to regard the building of a ship a small matter, we shall point out a few of the difficulties with which the missionary had to contend in this projected work.

In the first place, he was on what is sometimes styled a “savage island”—an island that lay far out of the usual track of ships, that had only been discovered a little more than a year at that time, and was inhabited by a blood-thirsty, savage, cruel, and ignorant race of human beings, who had renounced idolatry and embraced Christianity only a few months before. They knew no more of ship-building than the celebrated man in the moon, and their methods of building canoes were quite inapplicable to vessels of large capacity. Besides this, Mr Williams was the only white man on the island, and he had no suitable implements for shipbuilding, except axes and augurs, and a few of the smaller of the carpenter’s tools. In the building of a vessel, timbers and planks are indispensable, but he had no pit-saw wherewith to cut these. It is necessary to fasten planks and timbers together, but he had no nails to do this. Heavy iron forgings were required for some parts of the structure, but, although he possessed iron, he had no smith’s anvil, or hammer, or tongs, or bellows, wherewith to forge it. In these circumstances he commenced one of the greatest pieces of work ever undertaken by man—greatest, not only because of the mechanical difficulties overcome, but because of the influence for good that the ship, when completed, had upon the natives of the Southern Seas, as well as its reflex influence in exciting admiration, emulation, and enthusiasm in other lands.

The first difficulty was the bellows. Nothing could be done without these and the forge. There were four goats on the island. Three of these were sacrificed; their skins were cut up, and, along with two boards, converted into a pair of smith’s bellows in four days.