On his swing back, he revisited some of the spots which had seemed especially hostile. At Moim, for instance, he had used his diplomacy, plus a liberal gift of gimcracks, and distributed 95 tins. When he returned a few days later he got them all back in good order. On August 11, after having his canoe swamped in a gale, he reached the mouth of the Sepik and paid off his canoe boys. They charged him thirty shillings apiece, and Beach rounded off his diary by saying that it was no trouble at all to handle the Sepik natives, if you used a little common sense.
Well, the young cub got back to me, smiling and cheerful. It was a mad trip, but I rather envied him the adventure. I think its outstanding feature was Beach’s nonchalance in returning to the savage villages and collecting the tins he had left behind.
Now about that roll of £400 which he left in Eloisa’s keeping, just overnight. I learned about that later. In approximately three weeks of voyaging to hell and back, he had found time to shoot down a collection of birds of paradise which he sold to a handy trader somewhere on the way home. I sometimes wonder if poaching didn’t motivate that fearless voyage.
Byron Beach left me as picturesquely as he had come into my life. One fine afternoon, off the Solomon Islands, he sailed into the sunset in a trim little schooner that he had borrowed for the joy ride. He had also borrowed a trim little native girl. Neither Byron, boat nor beauty ever came back to that port, or any other that I know of. But I am inclined to believe that wherever he landed he landed on his feet.
CHAPTER X
KING SOLOMON’S GOLD
New Guinea was my jumping off place for the Solomon Islands, and “jumping off” well describes my first trip around that great island chain. I had only a few weeks to work in, and to draw conclusions which were to lead up to years of campaigning along 700 miles of that wild archipelago. If you will recall George Fulton, the man in evening dress whom I met in a smelly trader’s store, you will remember his half-promise to send me down to lost Rennell Island on the Lever Brothers’ yacht. Well, he had kept his promise—with reservations—and I was at last on the Levers’ Koonakarra, heading southeast. I had planned to go on the Government’s Bellama, but she was wrecked in a hurricane. To be transferred to George Fulton’s boat seemed like a stroke of luck. Now I could see Rennell Island....
It was nine years before I saw Rennell, for the very good reason that George Fulton didn’t want me to see it. He had changed his mind since I talked with him. Rennell might turn out to be a phosphate island, one of those volcanic freaks which quantities of bird guano and submersion in sea water have loaded with valuable crystalline fertilizer. Fulton didn’t want Rockefeller people snooping around his potential bonanza. A few years later he found that Rennell’s wealth was just another myth of King Solomon’s gold.
Alvaro Mendaña, who found these islands in 1568, returned to Spain and told King Philip that he had discovered the place where King Solomon got his gold. Philip rewarded the naughty liar by sending him on a second expedition; but when he returned to the isles of specious wealth he found that they had disappeared. Just another case of bad Renaissance navigation, but Mendaña died hunting for the vanished Solomons. They were lost for 200 years. Monsieur de Bougainville found them again in 1768.
As far as Rennell Island was concerned, for a long while I felt that I had been cheated of my gold. It was not idle curiosity which drew me toward that mysterious spot. If the people had been, as George Fulton said, “practically untouched for ages,” I might find there a clue to the origin of the Polynesian race. Many of the ancient invasions have been traced through the evidence of the hookworm. The public health physician, you see, must be a bit of an anthropologist, a bit of a politician and a bit of a historian....