Boat at island
Although, as I have said, there were only three of them, that is what they were, and you must separate them by the semicolons. Clearly they do not believe in overstaffing on Niué.
The first glad news to reach our ears was that we had missed a hurricane by three days. Oh, yes, Niué had them occasionally, and before now had been swept bare, but this particular one had passed like a ravening beast a few miles to the eastward. Had we seen or heard nothing of it?
We shook our heads in infinitely grateful negation, and the Postmaster—I beg his pardon, the Commissioner—exchanged a thoughtful glance with the Chief Medical Officer whom, it is to be feared, we had already christened "Doc." They had asked because the Cook-Group schooner that visited Niué with the unprecedented frequency of five times a year was considerably overdue. But we must come and live ashore; there was Government House, and the Law Courts, and the Gaol to spread ourselves over at a pinch.
And that was how we of the dream ship came to be so royally treated on Savage Island.
Legend has it that a great god of the past, with one foot firmly planted in the Tonga Group and the other on Raratonga, took it into his head to lift Niué out of the sea, and one can almost believe it. It is of weird formation, known scientifically as "upheave coral," and consists of two terraces, the lower ninety feet above sea level, and the other, two hundred and twenty feet, the intervening space being slashed with deep chasms. In short, Niué is nothing more than an atoll hurled bodily out of the sea by some mighty convulsion of the earth's past. One can clearly see that what was once the reef is now a mighty cliff and that the lagoon inside it is now a coral basin, pitched high and dry.
And this hybrid of an island is wonderfully fertile. On the terrace, that I cannot help looking upon as the reef, cocoanuts, bananas, and most other tropical products grow to perfection, while the lagoon—I should say valley—is thickly timbered with ebony and other hard woods. How came they to be there, considering they were never planted by human hand? Perhaps the Island Hercules who dragged the atoll from the sea saw fit also to cover its nakedness. No other solution of the problem presents itself.
"It's a queer spot," I was told during a motor tour of the Island by what is called "road," though it more closely resembles a coral switchback—"as queer as its people until you come to know them. But try and remember yourself at the age of thirteen, and you have the average adult Kanaka. Several of them joined up voluntarily with the Maori contingent during the war, and wear service ribbons in their hair if they can find no other place for them.
"Disease is our great trouble. The Niuéan has always been a born wanderer, and he brings things back with him; but we're getting it under by keeping them at home, and making failure to report a penal offence. They've always been hard workers, too. We planted fifteen thousand nuts on Armistice Day, and away back this was a favourite hunting ground for 'black-birders' on account of the Niuéan's appetite for toil. Bully Hayes, the well-known South Sea buccaneer, used to come here often, and, when he couldn't get men, took women—cargoes of them—to sell down in the leisure-loving Societies.