Gabrielle of the Lagoon: A Romance of the South Seas

by W. H. Myddleton

The artful Papuan at first swore that he did not know Macka, shook his head and said: “Me no savee!”

Then Hillary took a handful of silver from his pocket and shook it before the Papuan’s eyes and hinted that if he could tell him of anyone who did know about Macka’s social position he would get well rewarded. In a moment the native’s manner changed. He took Hillary under the palms and told him a tale that fairly made the young apprentice gasp. And it was a story that would make anyone gasp.

It was from this native’s lips that Hillary heard for the first time that Macka was an ex-missionary from Honolulu, and that he was a native from one of the coastal tribal villages of New Guinea, a tribal race who were the most ferocious and god-forsaken heathens in the Pacific world. The half-caste native sailor turned out to be a rather intelligent man. Indeed it appeared that he too was a converted heathen and had first got acquainted with Macka while attending mission-rooms in New Britain.

“Do you mean to tell me that the Rajah Koo Macka is a member of a religious society?” gasped Hillary, as the native took a nip of his tobacco plug and then grinned from ear to ear.

“It am so, boss!” said the man. Then the native continued: “’E am Rajah Makee and belonger misselinaries everywheres. ’E kidnapper too, and often taker Papuan girls, boys, men and women by nighter when no one looker!”

“What do you mean?” said the apprentice with astonishment, only vaguely realising what “kidnapper” meant. Then the native calmly proceeded to enlighten him, and in a few moments Hillary had heard enough to convince him that the noble Rajah would not only be likely to abduct Gabrielle from her home, but old Everard and himself too if he thought they’d fetch a few dollars in the slave markets of the Bismarck Archipelago or elsewhere.

So did Hillary discover that Rajah Macka was an inveterate cannibal, living on the flesh and weakness of people of his own race. For it appeared that he had sailed the Pacific for years, creeping into the bays of remote isles and kidnapping girls, boys, men and women till his schooner’s hold was crammed up to the hatchways with a terrified human merchandise. He usually sold the girls to chiefs in the Bismarck Archipelago and New Guinea; the boys and men he disposed of in New Guinea for plantation work or to be fattened up for sacrificial festivals, the pièce de résistance of some mighty chief’s cannibalistic orgy. Macka was not the only one who dealt in the terrible blackbirding trade; Germans, Dutchmen and even English skippers made it their prime stock-in-trade.

Hillary could hardly believe his ears as he listened to the character of the man who had been Everard’s welcome guest. He took the native sailor into Parsons’s grog bar, primed him well with drink and finally got all the information necessary to follow on the Rajah’s track. He discovered that he was a native of New Guinea, that he possessed a tambu temple there and was known as the “great Rajah” for hundreds of miles in Dutch New Guinea because he had been well educated by his heathen parents, who had sent him to Honolulu to be initiated into the virtues of Christianity.

Though the sun was blazing down with terrific vigour from the cloudless sky, Hillary half ran as he stumbled across the tangled jungle growth on his way back to tell Everard all that he had heard about the Rajah. The native girls ran out of the little doors of the huts and begged him to give them one brass button from his apprenticeship suit. Crowds of native children, quite nude but for the hibiscus blossoms in their mop-heads and a wisp of a loin-cloth, rushed by the palms with loaded calabashes, crammed with fish caught in the shore lagoons. They were flying onward to the market village, the Billingsgate of the Solomon Isles; a place where shaggy-headed, sun-browned women exchanged shells for the fresh, shining fish. But Hillary had no eye for the scenes around him. He steamed like a wet shirt stuck out in the tropic sunlight as he hurried on; and the constellations of jungle mosquitoes and fat yellow sand-flies made their presence felt, driving their proboscis spears deep into his flesh, buzzing their musical appreciation to find he ate so well. The apprentice’s heart was beating like a drum; already the tale that he had heard had upset his ideas over the cause of Gabrielle’s absence. “Did she go off voluntarily with the Rajah, or had he kidnapped her?” That thought haunted him, tortured him. He stared towards the summits of the distant smoking volcanic ranges to the north-west and thought how they resembled his own heart, that was near to bursting with emotion, and how he too would like suddenly to shout his passionate desires to the sky. He sighed as he cut across the silver sands by the beach. He was going the long way round, for he dare not pass by the lagoon where Gabrielle had once sung to him.

He was nearly dead with fatigue when he arrived at the bungalow. “Found ’er, boy?” came the dismal query that always smote his ears when he returned to Gabrielle’s home. Hillary simply shook his head and stared into the glassy eyes of the old man. Then he sat down and told the ex-sailor every word he had heard about Macka’s schooner and his reputation as a clever kidnapper of native girls and men in the Pacific isles.