CHAPTER X
MURDER AND SHIPWRECK
We found the island in a state of excitement. Two whaleships had arrived, bringing half a dozen white men, and who had a retinue of nearly a hundred natives from Ocean and Pleasant Islands. The white men had to leave Pleasant Island on account of a general engagement which had taken place; had fled to the ships for safety, taking with them their native wives, families, and adherents.
The other men were from Ocean Island, a famine having set in from drought in that lovely isle. They had also taken passage with their native following, to seek a more temporarily favoured spot. The fertility of Kusaie (Strong's Island) had decided them to remain.
Strange characters, in truth, were these same traders, now all quartered at Chabral harbour! They were not without means, and so far had conducted themselves decently. But their retinue of savage warriors had struck terror into the hearts of the milder natives of Kusaie.
Let me draw from the life one of the patriarchs of the movement, on the occasion of his embarkation.
Ocean Island, lat. 0° 50′ south, long. 168° east.
A fantastic, lonely, forbidding-looking spot. Circular in form, with rounded summit, and a cruel upheaved coral coast, split up into ravines running deep into the land. Here and there, on ledges overlooking the sea, are perched tiny villages, inhabited by as fierce and intractable a race of Malayo-Polynesians as ever lacerated each other's bodies with sharks'-tooth daggers, after the mad drunkenness produced by sour toddy.
Mister Robert Ridley, aged seventy, sitting on a case in his house, on the south-west point of Paanopa, as its people call Ocean Island, with a bottle of "square face" before him, from which he refreshes himself, without the intervention of a glass, is one of the few successful deserters from the convict army of New South Wales. At the present moment he is an ill-used man. For seven years he has been the boss white man of Paanopa, ever since he left the neighbouring Naura or Pleasant Island, after seeing his comrades fall in the ranks one by one, slain by bullet or the scarce less deadly drink demon. Now, solitary and saturnine, he has to bow to Fate and quit his equatorial cave of Adullam, because a mysterious Providence has afflicted his island with a drought.