Back on deck I saw the woman making up to Bella, the cook’s powerful helper. There was danger ahead, I feared. Not the danger of being clubbed to death, as they had clubbed the mission teachers; but the trouble that comes to any island visitor when crews go ashore to “refresh.”
The people who had come aboard spoke a little queer pidgin English, just a word here and there which they had picked up God knows where. They didn’t know much of it, for when we first spoke to them they returned a polite, blank stare. Then the woman saw an empty beer bottle, and said “Me want,” in a pretty, husky contralto. But when we tried more pidgin on her she was dumb. “What does she want with an empty beer bottle?” I asked Hamlin, and he explained, “The men break them up to shave with. Until beer bottles came the older men were all bearded. The young bucks pulled ’em out by using clam shells, like tweezers. I guess you could buy the island for a dozen razor blades.”
Then a few more canoes straggled out to let men, women and children clamber aboard, to make themselves at home. They had never heard of privacy. Why should they have heard of it? They were the primitives of primitives, therefore naïvely communistic. They poked their fingers into every hole in the main cabin, turned up our mattresses and wondered what they were, tried to find out why locked boxes and cupboards wouldn’t open. Occasionally they would slip some small thing like a shoelace or a beer-bottle cap into their tapa sashes. A few of the girls could say, “Me want knifie,” putting a caress into their voices as they handled our shirt collars. Late that night unmistakable sounds from the crew’s quarters indicated that some local beauties had remained to earn a knife or bottle.
******
(Here I paused to give Templeton Crocker the last cup of coffee in the pot. Then I went on.)
******
When we were at meals they’d leave us alone—and that was the only time, why I don’t know. Right after dinner or breakfast they’d be back. We tried to play cards, but with beautiful torsos pressing against our shoulders, backs and arms, it was hard to concentrate.... Two new arrivals came into the cabin, and Hamlin recognized a friend of his former trip. He got up and rubbed noses solemnly with a bright-eyed, nuggety little fellow, whose look was quick with intelligence. “This is Buia of Kanava,” Hamlin said, and then of the taller, younger one, “he’s named Buia too. He’s Buia the Bastard. Buia of Kanava is heir to one of the Big Masters—that’s what they call their chiefs here—and he speaks a little pidgin.”
At once I decided that Buia of Kanava should be my very own for the duration of the trip. His pidgin was quite bad, but intelligible. When I asked him how he learned it, he said the Japanese sailors had taught him. He was a progressive spirit, far beyond the island average. One day he had swum out to a Japanese pearler, lying offshore, and offered his services for a trip of a few hundred miles. He was there to learn the white man’s ways; Japanese or Swedes were all the same to him.
To bind his service securely I took Buia to my cabin and laid an offering out on my berth; an adze, a hatchet, a trade-knife with a six-inch blade and one of the pasteboard lock-boxes Hamlin had been foresighted enough to buy. He gazed, dumb with fascination; he was like Aladdin at first sight of the jewel-filled cave. “Belong me?” he murmured. Yes, they were all for him, if he would be goodfellow boy, show me everything and tell me everything. When I got a key and opened the box Buia was mine for a lifetime, if I wanted him that long. I replaced the treasures in a cupboard, but every afternoon while we were on the island he would appear in my cabin and beseech me to let him look at them again. I would lay them out on the berth and watch him gloat, rubbing his hands. He would be a very rich man.
By piecing Buia’s words together I gained some knowledge of a religious and social structure which had only moved forward a third of the distance from the Glacial Period.