A quiet inlet on the coast of Samoa
IN THE
TRACKS OF THE TRADES
THE ACCOUNT OF A FOURTEEN THOUSAND
MILE YACHTING CRUISE TO THE HAWAIIS,
MARQUESAS, SOCIETIES, SAMOAS AND FIJIS
BY
LEWIS R. FREEMAN
Author of "Many Fronts," "Stories of the Ships,"
"Sea-Hounds," "To Kiel in
the 'Hercules.'"
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
BY THE AUTHOR
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1920
Copyright, 1920,
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.
VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY
BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK
TO
THE MEMORY OF
'THE COMMODORE'
THE LATE H. H. SINCLAIR
"THE TRACKS OF THE TRADES"
Take me back, take me back to the Tracks of the Trade!
Let me wander again in the coco palms' shade,
Where the drums of the ocean, in pulsating roar,
Beat time for the waltz of the waves on the shore;
Where sunlight and starlight and moonlight conspire
To speed the gay hours on the Wings of Desire;
Let me clamber again through the orchid-bright glade—
Take me back, take me back to the Tracks of the Trade!
Oh, the hot flame of sunset, the tremulous light
When the afterglow fades to the velvet of night!
The star-stencilled headland in blank silhouette
Where the moonbeams are meshed in the flamboyant's net!
Oh, the purple of midnight, the grey mists of dawn,
And the amber flood after the darkness has gone!
The slow-heaving ocean of gold-spangled jade,
When the sun wakes the day in the Tracks of the Trade!
Let my heart thrill again as the tom-tom's dull boom
Floats out from the bush in the flower-fragrant gloom,
And the shriek of the conches, the hi-mi-ne's swell,
Brings word of the feast in the depths of the dell.
Lead my footsteps again to that forest crypt dim,
Where firelight throws shadows on bosom and limb
Of the billowing forms of the trim tropic maids,
When the song wakes the dance in the Tracks of the Trades!
Let my hands close again on the hard-kicking wheel,
As the schooner romps off on a rollicking reel,
To the humming of back-stay and sharp-slatting sail,
And the hiss of the comber that smothers the rail.
Oh, the cadenced lament of the chorusing shroud,
As the spindrift sweeps aft in a feathery cloud!
Oh, the storm-tumbled sea-ways traversed unafraid,
As the squalls spin the spume down the Tracks of the Trade!
Take me back, take me back to the Tracks of the Trade!
For 'tis weary I am of the city's parade,
Of the dust of the traffic, the grey cheerless skies,
And the long lines of people with spiritless eyes.
Take me back to my green sunny islands again,
Away from this treadmill of sorrow and pain,
Away from this tinsel and gilt masquerade—
Let me live, let me die in the Tracks of the Trade!
L. R. F.
Pasadena,
July, 1920.
CHAPTERPAGE
[I] San Pedro to Hilo and Honolulu
1
[II] Honolulu to Taio-Haie
26
[III] The Marquesas Today
52
[IV] Hunting in the Marquesas
72
[V] The Passion Play at Uahuka
99
[VI] Taio-Haie to Papeete
110
[VII] Circling Tahiti
134
[VIII] Society in the Societies
151
[IX] The Song and Dance in Tahiti
160
[X] By the Absinthe Route
182
[XI] Papeete to Pago Pago
195
[XII] In Pago Pago Bay
212
[XIII] Samoan Cricket: Fauga-Sa v. Pago Pago
232
[XIV] A Visit to Apia
246
[XV] Kava and the Siva
262
[XVI] Pago Pago to Suva
283
[XVII] In Suva and Mbau
296
[XVIII] Sharks
320
[XIX] His Wonders to Perform
334
[XX] Suva to Honolulu
357
[XXI] Honolulu to San Pedro
368
ILLUSTRATIONS
[A quiet inlet on the coast of Samoa]
Frontispiece
PAGE
[Lurline in drydock before sailing]
8
["The Commodore laboriously squinted out his first sights"]
9
[Waiohae Beach, Island of Hawaii]
20
["All of the images were covered with moss"]
62
["A hardened old offender who preferred white man to native
meat"]
63
[The best surviving example of Marquesan tattooing]
68
[ "Into it were thrown the bones of the victims after the feast
was over"]
69
["The part of Christ is taken by a native called Lurau"]
102
[Marquesan mother and child]
103
["Pontius Pilate has been played for twenty years by an old
chief—a quondam cannibal"]
108
["Just in time to respond to his 'cue' in the John the Baptist
tableau"]
109
["Hatiheu, the most sublime combination of mountain, vale and
sea that my eyes have ever rested on"]
112
[A Marquesan fisherman of Hatiheu]
113
[Native woman washing on the beach, Tahiti]
158
[A Mission bathing suit. Before the bath—and after]
159
[The inevitable end of every South Sea trading schooner]
200
[Chief Tufeli in the uniform of a sergeant of Fita-fitas]
215
[Faa-oo-pea, chieftainess of Pago Pago, making kava]
222
[Seuka, taupo of Pago Pago, illustrating a movement in the Siva]
223
[A Samoan house in the course of construction]
226
["Chief Tufeli came over for the express purpose of buying
the yacht"]
227
["Chief Mauga squared away to face the bowling of Chief Malatoba"]
236
[To-a, who made the best score for Pago Pago, facing the bowler]
237
["Whirling and yelling like dervishes they made a circuit of the
ground"]
244
["A sinewy brown figure starts clambering up the tree"]
245
[Lurline at anchor in Bay of Apia, Samoa]
250
["The London Missionary Society steamer, John Williams, lay
near us"]
251
[Maid of honour to the Taupo of Apia]
258
[The sitting Sivas are essentially dances of the arms]
274
["Never were seen such arms as in Samoa"]
275
[Fanua, who danced the swimming Siva by the light of the phosphorescent
waves]
280
[Forty years ago the Fijis were in a complete state of savagery]
298
[A Fijian head hunting canoe]
299
["Lurline's cutter finished a poor second"]
304
["Thakambau's great war canoe, over a hundred feet in length,
formerly launched over human bodies"]
305
[Shark on the beach at Mbau]
324
[Weaving the walls of a Fijian house]
342
[Interior of a Fijian house, showing how it is bound together
with coco fibre]
343
[Untying a reef in the mainsail]
363
IN THE TRACKS OF THE TRADES
[CHAPTER I]
SAN PEDRO TO HILO AND HONOLULU
The Weather Bureau, which for several weeks had been issuing bulletins of the "Possibly Showers" order, came out unequivocally with "Rain" on the morning of February 4th, and this, no less than the lead-coloured curtain that veiled the Sierra Madres and the windy shimmers in the tails of the clouds that went rushing across the zenith before the gushing east wind, made it plain that the elements, not to be outdone by our amiable friends, were getting together for a special demonstration on their own account in honour of Lurline's departure. The nature of this elemental diversion developed in good time.
Personal good-byes began at the Pasadena station and continued down through Los Angeles to the San Pedro quay. From there, out through the inner harbour, bon voyages became general, and from the engineer of the government dredge, who blew his whistle off with the force of his farewell toots, to the deck hand on a collier who, in lieu of a handkerchief, waved the shirt he was washing, everybody took a hand in the parting demonstration.
Rounding the jetty opposite Deadman's Island, Lurline was sighted lying a half mile to the westward in the backsweep of the outer bay. The crew stood at attention as the Commodore, with a score or more of friends who had come off for a final farewell, stepped aboard, immediately to turn to stowing the small mountain of hand luggage which had come off with the launch. Soon visitors began arriving from the other yachts of the South Coast fleet, and these, reinforced by several press representatives and a number of shore visitors from San Pedro, swelled the farewell party to a size that taxed the standing room capacity of quarter deck and cabin to the utmost.
Just before the sailing hour arrived presentation was made to the Commodore of a large silver loving cup, and this being filled, each visitor, ere he stepped down the gangway, proposed some appropriate toast and drank to a prosperous voyage and safe return.
Meanwhile the sail covers had been removed and the stops cast off, and as the last of the visitors stepped back aboard their waiting launches, all hands tailed on to the main throat and peak halyards and the big sail was smartly hoisted and swayed to place. Foresail, forestay-sail and jib followed. Finally the anchor, clinging tenaciously to the last California mud it was destined to hook its flukes into for many months, was broken out, and, close-hauled on the starboard tack to a light breeze, Lurline swung off past the breakwater and out of the harbour.
At four o'clock Point Firmin Light, distant five miles, bore N.W. by W., and at the same hour the barometer, which had risen rapidly since noon, registered 30.40, about the normal for the southern California coast. The gentle southerly breeze cleared the western sky toward evening and a warm hued sunset blazed out in defiance of the threatening signs of the morning. The yacht slipped easily through the light swell of the channel, her regular curtesies serving only to spangle her glossy sides with sparkling drops of brine and to punctuate her wake at even intervals with swelling knots of foam like the marks on a trailed sounding line.
"Fairweather sunset," said the mate; "but—" and he finished by shaking his head dubiously and proceeding to give orders for swinging the boats inboard and adding extra lashings to the spare spars and water-butts on the forward deck.
Early in the first watch, and not long after the thin wisp of a new moon had slipped down behind the jagged peaks of Catalina, the wind hauled suddenly to the southeast. Blowing with steadily increasing force, it drove a heavy pall of sooty clouds before it. This, quickly spreading out across the sky, rendered the night so dark that, beyond the ghostly reflections from the binnacle lamps, nothing was visible save the phosphorescent crests of the rapidly rising seas. With this slant of wind the best that we could do on the starboard tack was dead east, and this direction was held until the imminent loom of Point San Juan, and a not-overly-distant roar of breakers, warned us to put about and head off southwesterly between San Clemente and Catalina.
At midnight the barometer was well below 30, and the wind and sea were still rising. The mainsail and foresail were single reefed when the watch came on deck, and while sail was being shortened a heavy sea came aboard just forward of the beam and crashed through the galley skylight. The water rushed in with the roar of a miniature Niagara, but beyond washing the Japanese cook off the transom on which he had composed himself for sleep and bouncing him against the stove, no serious harm was done.
At two in the morning, with no abatement of force, the wind went back to S.S.W., and with Clemente rising darkly ahead the yacht was again put about. The barometer was down to 29.80, and the half-gale that met us as we came out from under the lee of the island quickly made it evident that further shortening of sail was imperative. The watch was called, and with no little difficulty two more reefs were tied in the mainsail, bringing it down almost to the proportions of a storm trysail. The foreboom was being hauled amidships preparatory to close-reefing the foresail, when a solid wall of green water came combing over the port bow and swept the deck like an avalanche. One of the sailors—Gus, a big Swede—who had been bracing a foot against the lee rail, lost his balance in the sudden lurch and, missing a frantic clutch at a shroud, went over the side. A rush was made for the life-buoys, but, before one could be thrown over, the lost man reappeared, coolly drawing himself in, hand over hand, on the foresheet, a bight of which he had carried with him in his fall.
"Mein Gott, der rain he stop not yet, hein!" was his only comment as he returned to the interrupted attack on the flopping foreboom. One would have thought that he had been gone ten hours instead of ten seconds.
After subduing and triple-reefing the threshing foresail the watch went below, but only to be called again almost immediately to take the bonnet out of the staysail, a measure made necessary by the fierce southwesterly squalls which kept winding into the now fully developed "sou'easter." Finally, as the storm showed no signs of abating, the forestay-sail was hauled to windward and, head-reaching, the yacht made good weather of the last hours of the night.
Day broke, cold and cloudy, and showed the bare, brown, rounded hills of Clemente ten miles distant on the starboard quarter. Towering, weighty seas, unbroken now by the islands, came charging up out of the southwest in billowing ranks, but so buoyant was the schooner under her shortened sail that the grey light of the morning showed the brine of the last wave that had swept her decks before she was put to head-reaching spangled in frost-like repouseé along the lee scuppers. Toward midday the wind shifted suddenly to northwest, and though still blowing a gale it was deemed best to risk a little more sail in an endeavour to get away from the islands before night closed down again. Accordingly, the reefs were shaken out of foresail and forestay-sail, and under these and a close-reefed mainsail twenty-four miles were run off in the afternoon watch. At four o'clock, when the barometer touched its minimum of 29.60, a nasty swell from the northeast, due to another shifting of the wind, began to make itself felt, and, though nothing carried away, the vicious twist of the cross surges made so bad a seaway that we were forced to reef down again and ride out the night head-reaching in a southwesterly direction.
By morning of the 6th the gale had blown itself out, and at the change of watch all the reefs were untied and the yacht appeared under all plain lower sail for the first time since the evening of departure. Toward noon the clouds began to break up and let filter through streaks of pale sunlight to dapple the olive-green hollows of the sea with vagrant patches of golden yellow. The chill of the air gradually melted away as the day advanced, and the opportunity to open skylights and portholes was warmly welcomed by the Mater and Claribel who had been kept to the cabin for nearly two days. A couple of the light sails were set at noon and carried until a heavy squall, working around from the northwest just before dark, was responsible for sending them down by the run. The runs to noon of the 5th and 6th, respectively, were sixty-three and ninety miles, in a course that approximated W.S.W.
Fair weather and light breezes were taken advantage of on the morning of the 7th to install a much-needed safety device in the form of a wire rail run all the way round the yacht at a height of eighteen inches above the main rail, a precaution the imperative necessity of which had been shown when one of the sailors had been thrown overboard during the storm. The yacht's rail, only two feet in height, while of some protection at the bows and stern, was almost useless amidships, where the deckhouse, separated from it by only a narrow passage, rose to an equal height. Three-quarter inch steel stanchions were set at intervals of eight feet along the rail, and through these a quarter-inch wire cable was run. The stanchions were fastened by a bolt on the under side of the rail in such a manner as to be easily removed, thus permitting the whole affair to be expeditiously taken down and stowed while in port. This simple and inexpensive precaution proved of incalculable value in insuring the safety of the decks on stormy nights, a usefulness which was put to the test many times in the course of the months that followed.
Clearing skies and a smoothing sea on the third day out brought the Mater and Claribel—two pathetic bundles of rugs—up on deck, where the sun and fresh air began the slow task of reviving in them an interest in life. All day they drooped in hollow-eyed wretchedness with their white faces turned toward the paradise of a terra firma beyond the eastern horizon which every moment was receding farther away. Through all of the bright noontide and the sparkling afternoon they kept their ceaseless vigil, and even when twilight came, with a freshening wind and heavier seas, they still refused to go below. Day and night were all the same to them now, they said. An hour later a black-visaged squall came boring down out of the night ahead, and the raindrops and the driving spray began to drum a duet to the accompaniment of the rising blasts of the wind.
"You'll be shivering with cold before long if you stay here," admonished the Commodore gently; "best get up and go below now."
"There is no heat or cold any more," one muttered listlessly, and they both drew their rugs closer and curled the tighter into the curve of the transoms.
A high-headed maverick of a comber came crashing over the weather rail and swept the muffled figures into a vortex of spinning foam where a ton of green water washed about the cockpit. We sprang to help them, but they only shuddered resignedly back into the wash of the clearing scuppers and disdained to move.
"You're both soaking wet," protested the Commodore; "please go below now and get into some dry clothes."
"There is no wet nor dry any more," bubbled the starboard bundle; "let us alone."
"A wave like that last one has been known to kill a strong man," ventured the Commodore weakly, at his wit's end for an argument that would have some effect. "Here's another coming now. Please—"
"There is no life nor death any more," broke in a sputter from the port bundle; "and even if there was we wouldn't—"
We picked up the two dripping bundles and bore them gently below just as a second comber, running wildly amuck, banged its head off against the rail and turned the cockpit into another maelstrom.
Save for shortening periods of introspective languor induced by whiffs from the galley or the clink of dishes, matters were better the next day, and the day following the sufferers were sufficiently revived to begin unpacking and—as they called it—"putting things trig and shipshape below." After that things began falling into the even routine which, save for its occasional disturbance in stormy weather, characterized our life at sea to the end of the voyage. But there never came a time when, for the Mater and Claribel, the first three or four days out of port did not hold the menace of that chaotic state in which there was no night or day, heat or cold, wetness or dryness, and in which if there was to have been a choosing between life and death the latter would have been the less bitter portion. A Pacific yachting cruise is not all an idyllic pleasaunce to the mal-de-mer subject, for the ocean which has not been pacific for many hours at a time since the day it was discovered and christened does not temper its moods for the small craft.
Lurline in drydock before sailing
"The Commodore laboriously squinted out his first
"Full-and-by"
sights"
In spite of restricted quarters, the days which followed seemed never long enough to do all we laid out for them. The Commodore was the busiest of us. To him it became evident before we were fairly out of sight of land that his pleasure cruise was going to have to be enjoyed to the accompaniment of a lot of hard work, for Lurline's former sailing master—whom he had shipped as mate and whom he subsequently let go in Honolulu—was absolutely incompetent as a navigator and only fairly so in the actual sailing of the yacht. This came as a very disconcerting surprise, for the man had been well recommended, and his incompetence meant that all of the work—to say nothing of the responsibility—of navigating the yacht through some of the stormiest and worst charted latitudes of the Seven Seas was to be thrown on the Commodore, whose deep-sea sailoring had been confined to a voyage around the Horn on a clipper when he was in his teens.
I have still a vivid mind picture of the Commodore when, after he had laboriously squinted out his first sights and was ready to try to figure the position of the yacht, he disappeared into his cabin behind an armful of tables and books on navigation and slammed and locked the door. The iterated luncheon call elicited only a grunt of impatience from the depths of the sanctum, and likewise the summons to tea and dinner. The Mater's timid knocking at bedtime brought no answer at all, and we were gathered in perplexed colloquy on deck as to what the next move would be, when a booming "Got it!" thundered out from the locked cabin, and a moment later the door was burst open by a pajama-clad figure, waving a slip of paper above its towel-bound head.
"Observation checks Dead-reckoning at last," cried the Commodore. "Give me some dinner."
Between mouthfuls he explained to us that the first time he worked out the sights they showed the yacht to be somewhere in Tibet. All the rest of the morning she kept turning up in various parts of Asia, Africa, Australia and Europe, the only time she was in the water being after a reckoning which gave the latitude and longitude of Victoria Nyanza. Shortly after noon the figuring in of some allowances hitherto neglected jumped the elusive craft into the Western Hemisphere, but as near as might be to a perch on the summit of Aconcagua. Tea time had her in the Klondike, and several other Canadian points were visited before Nebraska was reached at the call for dinner. An hour later she was actually in the Pacific, but floundering helplessly off the coast of Peru, from where she worked north in an encouraging fashion until a sudden jump landed her in the Colorado desert. She was perilously near being stranded on Catalina at the end of the second dog-watch, and it was the reckoning after this one—magnetic variation and a few other essentials being finally included—that checked with the Dead-reckoning and put the poor wanderer where she belonged. Day by day, navigation became simpler work after that titanic struggle, until, the morning we sighted the island of Hawaii, I saw the Commodore take and work out in ten minutes an observation which told him in which direction the harbour of Hilo was located.
Besides navigating and directing the sailing of the yacht, the Commodore always stood one of the night watches and at other times held himself ready to appear on deck at any emergency. It was a stiff undertaking, having suddenly to face the prospect of eight or ten months of day and night work on a small schooner in the treacherous South Pacific; but the Commodore buckled down to it with the enthusiasm of a youngster and carried it through with flying colours, as will be seen.
My own work was confined to the nominal duties of Volunteer Weather Observer for the U. S. Hydrographic Office,—a branch of the Bureau of Equipment of the Navy—occasional tricks at the wheel, and falling into line now and then at the tail of a sheet or halyard when "all hands and the cook" failed to muster sufficient power amongst them. As Weather Observer I became for eight months a small cog in the very comprehensive system by which the Hydrographic Office is gathering data on currents, winds, clouds, waves, storms, temperatures, etc., from all of the sailed-in sea-ways of the world to assist in perfecting its monthly weather charts on which—as the result of the accumulated observations of many years—the probable meteorological conditions likely to prevail at any given point are recorded. Twice a day I took the temperature of the air and water, recorded the direction and force of the wind—the latter on a scale of 1 to 10, from a calm to a full gale—the set and height of the seas, and on a circular chart of the heavens indicated which of the various kinds of clouds—nimbus, cirrus, cumulus, etc.—prevailed at the time in each of the twelve divisions into which it was divided. The difference between the position of the yacht by Dead-reckoning—that is, figured by the log and compass—and the position by Observation gave the direction and speed of the ocean current at that point. These data were set down in a little booklet, containing a page for each day of the month, which, when filled, was mailed to the San Francisco branch of the Hydrographic Office. (The monthly weather charts for the Pacific, with which we had been supplied through the courtesy of this office, proved most valuable for those latitudes which were crossed by regular trade routes, and in which, as a consequence, comprehensive observations extending over some years had been taken; but in the little-sailed latitudes of the South Pacific—many stretches of which are still unploughed by a keel for years at a time—they were, naturally, fragmentary and of little practical use.)
We often have been asked if time did not hang very heavily on our hands in the long, unbroken fifteen, twenty and even thirty day intervals between ports. Perhaps this will be as good a place as any to answer that question. For the Commodore and myself I will register an emphatic "No," while a partial list of the activities of the ladies, will, I think, answer for the balance of the passengers.
In comparison with Claribel, once those dreadful spells of post-departure indisposition had trailed away into bad memories, every one on the yacht—not excepting the cook and the Commodore—was a drone and a loafer. Her quenchless energy found expression in musical, linguistic, literary, culinary and manual activities throughout the voyage. A guitar and a banjo held the boards to Hawaii, where a eukelele was annexed and mastered, after which, group by group and island by island, every form of native musical instrument from hollow-tree tom-toms and war conches to coco shell rattles and shark's hide tambourines was taken up in turn and blown, beaten, shaken or twanged into yielding its full capacity of soul-stirring harmony. Most of these instruments she even rebuilt or imitated with good success. Vocally (Claribel has a really fine voice) simple ballads of the "tenderness-and-pathos, pull-at-the-heart-strings" type were favoured until our arrival at Hilo, where "Aloha-oe" and various swinging hulas had their turn; these giving way to plaintive Marquesan sonatas, rollicking Tahitian himines, lilting Samoan serenades and booming Fijian war-chants, as, one after another, these various isles of enchantment were put behind us. Her terpsichorean achievements were equally varied and multitudinous, for there were few poses in the primer postures of the hula-hula and the siva-siva that she did not imitate and embroider upon in a manner to awaken the envy of the nimble Fof-iti, the première danseuse of the court of King Pomare, or even of the sinuous Seuka, the peerless taupo who led the dance in the thatch palace of Chief Mauga at Pago-Pago.
When I mention that in addition to these things the indefatigable Claribel also set up a "native crafts" shop in the starboard lifeboat, where she produced wooden gods, shark-tooth necklaces, tortoise-shell combs (genuine shell), war clubs and axes, carved coco shells, tappa cloth and similar "tourist" curios of a character to defy detection (by us) and at a cost (figuring her time as worth nothing) effectively to defy native competition; that she read Goethe and Heine (complete) in German, and all of the 200 or more volumes in the yacht's library, including several works on navigation, ship-building and astronomy, as well; that she made herself a dozen or more tropical dresses (not native, but full-sized garments); that she mastered the technique of my typewriter and wrote a voluminous journal upon it, manifolding some scores of copies to send to friends at home; that she played the gramophone for us whenever the yacht was steady enough to allow that sensitive instrument to keep an even keel;—when I mention all of these various spheres of activity in which Claribel circulated, and then admit that I have still left the list incomplete for want of space, it will readily be seen that time had little chance to hang heavily on her nimble hands and that she had scant opportunity to learn the meaning of that hackneyed term, "the monotony of the voyage."
The Mater, when she was not being whirled in the back-wash of the comet-like wake of Claribel's multudinous activities, spent her time in quiet dignity with knitting or embroidery, reading and solitaire; but when the demon of ennui threatened to raise its Gorgon head in the form of an interval of idleness, the both of them would turn to and write "items of interest" for the "Ladies' Log," a diurnal record of feminine impressions de voyage which spared no one in the cabin, galley or fo'c'sl'—not even the editors themselves—in its trenchant columns of comment. I shall have occasion, doubtless, not infrequently to quote from its scintillant pages.
On the run from San Pedro to Hawaii our course was at first directed somewhat more southerly than the straight one to Hilo in the hope of the sooner intercepting the Northeast Trades, which, according to the government weather charts, should ordinarily be met with somewhere in the vicinity of the 27th parallel. During the morning watch of the 8th our expectations appeared to be realized. Just as the rising sun broke through a shoal of silver clouds a crackling breeze from the E.N.E. came humming over the taffrail, and, heeling the yacht over until the hissing brine curled off by her forefoot kissed the starboard rail, sent her spinning through the water at a good ten-knot gait.
"Northeast Trades!" chuckled the starboard watch to the port watch as the latter came on deck; "Northeast Trades—cheer up, the Hilo girls have got the tow-line!"
"Northeast Trades—now for a big day's run!" bellowed the mate to the Commodore, as he ordered the kites run up and the backstays set and tautened; and "Northeast Trades!" mused the cook to the bacon; and "Northeast Trades" chirped the ladies to their mirrors; and "Northeast Trades" hummed the sails to the sheets and the halyards to the shrouds. The air was vibrant with the good news, the sea was a-dance because of it, and the sun, when he awoke to a full realization of the import of what was on, broke into a smile so expansive and warm that the hovering mists of the morning took up their tents and hurried away.
This felicitous state of affairs lasted until eight o'clock, when the wind veered around through east and south, finally to settle itself comfortably so near S.S.W. that it kept the headsails flapping and the mainsails a-shiver at the mast to hold the yacht's head up to W.S.W., a good two points north of a course which, normally, we should have sailed "wing-and-wing." And that was the last we saw of the much-vaunted Northeast Trades until, five months afterwards on the run back to Hawaii from Fiji, they met us at the equator and headed us all the way to Honolulu.
For the remainder of the run the breeze, except in occasional squalls, blew steadily and with moderate force from all points between southeast and southwest. Several times, for a few hours at a stretch, it hauled around as far as W.S.W., and even west, on which occasions the booms were jibed to port and a few miles of the much-needed southing run off. A half dozen times we ran free for an hour or two when a favourable slant of wind offered, but oftener it was "full-and-by," or "by-the-wind," with the booms almost amidships in an endeavour to steal the last fraction of a point from the obstinate turncoat of a wind. Most of the time the yacht was too close to the wind to admit of the advantageous use of the main topmast staysail, but either our large or small sail of that class, as well as the club and jib topsails, were used whenever opportunity offered.
Runs of close to 190 miles were made on the 9th, 13th and 14th, and on the 19th the best run of the passage, 198 miles, was logged. On the 16th and 21st frequent squalls and light baffling airs were responsible for the shortest runs, fifty-seven and seventy-seven miles respectively. The average for the other days was in the vicinity of 130 miles. The general direction of the currents encountered was unfavourable, the prevailing one, which had a northeasterly set of about ten miles a day, having apparently hooked up with the contrary winds to cut down our southing and westing. Long before entering the torrid zone, which was done on the night of the 19th, the weather in its fitful uncertainty as well as in its mildness, savoured strongly of the tropics. There was no fog nor even the shortest periods in which the sky was completely overcast. There was only one occasion when the zenith was sufficiently obscured to make a latitude sight impossible at noonday, and no day whose morning was too cloudy for a longitude observation but which made amends with a clear afternoon.
No heavy seas were encountered after the storm of the first two days had been left astern. This was principally due to the fact that the constantly shifting wind never blew up a sea from one direction before it veered off to another and beat it down again. The resulting succession of cross swells was annoying, but never heavy enough really to be troublesome. The temperature of the water increased slowly but with almost absolute regularity as we approached the lower latitudes, while that of the air, though likewise increasing, was more variable, tending to jump up and down incessantly in the intervals of sunshine and squalls.
On the morning of the 15th a striking and unusual arrangement of clouds on the western horizon was responsible for no small excitement. A dull, dark line of stratus, hanging low above the water, was topped by a vivid, clean-lined triangle of frosty-white cirro-cumulus, producing an effect so wonderfully like a snow-capped mountain that the mate, without stopping to reflect that our position at noon of the previous day left us still almost a thousand miles from Hawaii, the nearest charted point where even so much as a rock pushed above the bosom of the Pacific, burst forth with a lusty cry of "Land on the starboard bow!" The look the Commodore gave the mate when, aroused from one of his short spells of sleep, he rushed on deck to discover this nebulous "landfall," was more eloquent than vocal expression. It was my impression that nothing was said, but I find that the "Ladies' Log" records that "Some words passed between the officers, most of them going in one direction." So it is just possible that the Commodore was not able to restrain his pent-up feelings after all.
The next day Claribel set to music a verse of Henry Lawson, the New Zealand poet, which goes something like this:
For the Southeast lands are dread lands
To the sailor in the shrouds,
When the low clouds loom like headlands,
And the headlands blur like clouds;
choosing the time of the mate's watch to come out upon the quarter deck and practise it. Wolfe, blushing furiously, retreated to the lee of the foresail for shelter, not to reappear until the watch was called at noon. He could never see a white cloud near the horizon after that without looking ashamed, which was very awkward in the tropics where it was cloudy all the time; yet our real landfall came in form so similar to the cloud island which had so completely deceived that functionary a week previously that every one—including the Commodore—gazed, silent and mistrustful, and waited for some one else to shout the news. Our Dead-reckoning showed us to be a hundred miles off shore at daybreak, and it seemed impossible that even the mountain tops could show so clearly at so great a distance. But as the morning sun gained strength the opaque sheets of strati along the horizon began to thin, and gradually out of the dissolving mists, clear as cut alabaster against the brilliant turquoise of the tropic sky, the funicular cone of a great snow-capped volcano took unmistakable shape, and we knew it for the mighty Mauna Kea, famous as one of the loftiest island mountain peaks in the world.
"Could we make Hilo by dark?" was now the question. The mate answered in the negative and advised proceeding under half sail and standing off-and-on till daybreak. But the Commodore, noting the strengthening breeze which since midnight had been working back into the east where it belonged, deemed the effort worth making, and accordingly ordered the sheets slacked off and more sail set. Up fluttered the big main topmast staysail, up the jib topsail and the flying jib, and up the main and fore gaff-topsails, every one of them drawing beautifully in the steady breeze that came gushing over the starboard quarter, and each after the other, as it was hoisted and filled, doing its full measure of work in forcing the yacht's lee rail deeper into the yeasty run of foam churned up by her lunging bows and driving her faster toward her goal.
When the great turtle-backed Mauna Loa, lying to the south of and beyond Mauna Kea, was sighted at noon we had been bowling along for three hours at a gait that had brought the black lava belts under the snowline above the horizon, and below these, still dim and indistinct as the figures on ancient tapestry, the perspectives of the gently undulating lower reaches of the windward slope of the largest of the Hawaiian Islands.
All through the afternoon watch the wind freshened until, from an average of ten knots in the morning, we increased to eleven in each of the hours from twelve to two, ran just over twelve knots from two to three, and but slightly under thirteen from three to four. Fortunately such sea as was running was with us, and though there was a constant smoke of spray about the bows, and though the sails, filled hard as sand bags, strained on the masts till the backstays sang like over-strung fiddles, no green water came aboard and nothing carried away.
At four-thirty the masts of ships were sighted a couple of points off the port bow, and taking in the light sails we headed up for what we knew must be Hilo harbour. Ten minutes after the course was altered a black squall which had been chasing the yacht passed astern of her and broke upon the land, its course being as clearly traceable across the velvet verdance of the rippling cane fields as across the heavens. Down the coast it raced us, gradually passing inland and leaving behind it a wake of freshness that glistened like a green satin ribbon in the last rays of the sun that was setting behind a shoulder of the towering Mauna Kea. There are several experiences in life that mark with indelible impression the pages of memory, but none to compare with the sensations that throng upon one at his first close-in sight of a tropical island.
Waiohae Beach, Island of Hawaii
Hula dancer with Eukalele
As the yacht stood into the entrance of Hilo harbour, which is little more than an open roadstead partially protected by the submerged Broom Reef, the wind hauled to the south and several short tacks were necessary to make a favourable anchorage that offered a couple of cables' length to the landward of a big 12,000-ton steamer of the American-Hawaiian fleet which was loading sugar. The anchor was let go in seven fathoms of water at a few minutes before six o'clock, the log, which had been taken in at the entrance of the harbour, registering 2,430 miles from San Pedro breakwater.
The praises of Hilo itself, of its kind and hospitable people, its unique and picturesque Japanese quarter, its avenues of palms and mangoes and its streams and waterfalls, have been sung so often and so well that I reluctantly forego more than the briefest mention here. Further along on the cruise there were occasions when we met with more sumptuous entertainment, saw harbours more picturesque and better protected, and mountains clothed in an even more reckless riot of tropical vegetation; but we found no place that ever seriously rivalled Hilo for first place in our hearts. It was our first love; our first tropical experience; the gateway to those mystical latitudes of enchantment, the South Pacific. During the ten days which Lurline lay in Hilo Bay visits were made to Kilauea, the largest active volcano in the world, to the peerless Onomea Gulch and to several interesting sugar mills and plantations. Our stay was a continuous round of luaus or native feasts, luncheons, dinners, teas and drives. On the yacht we entertained with several small dinners, an evening of fireworks and music, and an afternoon sail, the latter event being recorded in the irreverent "Ladies' Log" as a "Mal de Mer Party."
Early in the afternoon of the 26th two of the sailors, pulling ashore to bring off some visitors, ran into a nasty combination of surf and tide rip at the bar of the Wiluki River and upset. One of the men was caught under the boat, and but for the timely assistance of a Japanese who had been fishing from his sampan nearby, would undoubtedly have been drowned. While the plucky Jap was endeavouring to secure the painter of the overturned boat, his sampan drifted inside the breakers and was on the verge of being itself upset when rescued by a tug sent out from the landing stage.
At four A. M. of March 2nd anchor was tripped and sail made for the run to Honolulu. The wind at first was light and baffling, as a result of which but twenty-one miles up the coast of the island were run off by noon. After passing Alea Point, however, the change of course made it possible to slack off the sheets, and under all plain lower sail the yacht bowled along at a nine-knot gait until well after dark. For the next three or four hours heavy squalls were encountered, but midnight showed a clear sky, with the opaque mass of Maui, looming darkly, abeam to starboard. This big island, the second in size of the Hawaiian group, is famous for its extinct volcano of Haleakala, the crater of which, ten miles in diameter and with rims that rise in places to an altitude of 10,000 feet, is believed to be the largest that has existed in any era of the world's geological history.
Morning of the 3rd showed the gaunt, forbidding cliffs of Molokai on the port beam, and our glasses readily located the spot where, shut in by unscalable rock walls behind and cut off by cordons of breakers in front, the unfortunate inhabitants of the leper settlement of Kalaupapa drag out their sad existences.
The island of Oahu was sighted at nine, and shortly afterward we headed into Molokai Channel, said to be one of the deepest places in the Pacific Ocean, and, in the matter of baffling winds and waves and currents, undoubtedly one of the most treacherous and uncertain, as we were to learn on the return voyage. A strong breeze increased to a half gale by noon, and under double-reefed main and foresails the yacht made not any too good weather of it in the vicious cross tumble of waters that assailed her. About noon the smooth, round summit of Coco Head began to peer above the foam-tipped crests of the in-racing seas, and an hour later the sharp, incisive outline of Diamond Head showed clear against the northeastern skyline. As we brought its tall lighthouse abeam the beach and reef of Waikiki, with rows of white hotels and bungalows, and the odd looking crater of the Punchbowl tilted above Honolulu in the background, began to open up beyond. The Jack at the fore brought the pilot boat, rowed by a crew of stalwart, bare-chested Kanakas, out from the Head through a tortuous passage in the Reef, and, watching his chance, the pilot leapt to a footing on the ladder and clambered aboard without absorbing so much as a drop of the swinging comber which at the same instant swept and half swamped his plunging cutter.
Our next three miles to the entrance of Honolulu Harbour was over the regular track of the transpacific liners, and the unfolding panorama, like the unrolling of an ever-changing piece of rich Oriental brocade, has furnished the inspiration for descriptions,—good, bad and indifferent,—by every traveller not abashed by its beauty and grandeur who has sailed that way since the time of Cook. I throw up my hands and admit the futility of adequate description at the outset; but none the less eagerly love to turn back the pages of memory to a picture—blurred and impressionistic in detail, but unfading in the brilliancy of its colours—of that leeward stretch of Oahu between Diamond Head and Honolulu as it appeared on that gusty afternoon of our first arrival, a harmony in blues and greens—the sombre indigo of the cloud-shadowed sea, the lapis-lazuli above the coils of the hidden reefs, the sheeny verdancy of the palms and bananas along the foreshore, the verte emaraude of the slope up to where Tantalus and the Pali were lost in their crowns of cumulus and nimbus; and above all the transparent azure of the tropic sky.
The pilot took Lurline in through the narrow reef which constitutes the entrance to Honolulu Harbour under foresail and jib, handling her with consummate skill in the maze of cross currents and eddies which make the passage a dangerous one even for steamers. Immediately on gaining still water we were boarded by the harbour-master, who moored us neatly and expeditiously in a natural slip in the reef called "Rotten Row," scarce a cable's length from the docks of the Pacific Mail and the Australian liners. Here the yacht lay for three weeks, provisioning and refitting for the arduous months ahead in some of the almost unsailed corners of the South Pacific, while we—the Mater, Claribel, the Commodore and myself—lived ashore, enjoying to our utmost the hospitality of the gayest, richest, loveliest and most fascinating of all the Pacific island capitals.
[CHAPTER II]
HONOLULU TO TAIO-HAIE
With 2,000 miles of salt water stretching between its windward shores and the western coast of North America, with twice that distance separating it from Asia, and with more or less open water rolling limitlessly away to the Arctic and the Antarctic, it is only natural that Hawaii should harbour a race of sea-loving people. A hundred years ago the Hawaiians, bred true to their Samoan progenitors, fearlessly embarked in their sliver-like, cinnet-sewed canoes on voyages that today would be deemed hazardous for hundred-ton schooners; and a half century or more back they were hailed throughout the Seven Seas as the most daring whalers that ever drove lances or hurled harpoons. So in assuming at the beginning of this century the title of "The Yachting Centre of the Pacific," Hawaii is not attaining to a new distinction, but merely claiming in a modernized form a heritage of ancient days.
Honolulu, judged by the "timber and lines" of the men behind the sport there, is the peer of any yachting centre in the world, and the Royal Hawaiian Yacht Club is composed of as clean-cut, whole-souled a lot of gentlemen and sportsmen as one will meet east or west, north or south, in whatever country or under whatever burgee.
Kaleakaua, last king of the Hawaiians, was the first commodore of the yacht club, and at the time of our visit the late Prince Cupid, the Territory's representative in Washington and once in line of succession to the throne, was an active member. And only in the Yacht Club, of all Hawaiian organizations, have royalist and reactionary met on terms of frank and open friendship. The memories of the stirring days of the revolution are dimmed by the mists of more than a score of years, but still clear and distinct in island society is drawn the line of demarcation between the ever-loyal one-time adherents of Kaleakaua and those who were active in, or in sympathy with, his overthrow. Yet with the yachtsmen, even in the days of the by-no-means bloodless revolution, animosities, political, social and personal, were ever left ashore, and one saw leaders of the rival factions bending their backs and chorusing together as they broke out the same anchor, or, shoulder to shoulder and foot to foot, swayed up the same mainsail.
One of the stock stories they tell you at the yacht club is of an incident which occurred back in the days immediately preceding the revolution, a time when rumours of plots flew thick and fast and royalist and republican passed each other in highway and byway with distrustful sidelong glances, each with the fingers of his left hand raised to his hat in courteous salutation and the fingers of his right hand twitching on the butt of the stubby "forty-four" in his hip pocket. It chanced at this time that Sanford B. Dole, prominent from boyhood in island affairs and then at the head of the conspiracy to overthrow the monarchy, and Clarence McFarlane, brother of the King's Master of Ceremonies and a staunch upholder of the throne, were sailing mates on the old Aloha, a trim forty-foot sloop designed and built by Fife and brought out to the Islands on the deck of a sailing ship by way of the Horn. On the occasion in question Aloha had just cleared the passage and sheets were being slacked away for the run before the blustering Northeast Trade down to Maui. A sudden lurch of the boat caused Dole to lose his hitch on the bit, the sheet was jerked from his hand, and in lunging forward to regain his hold his patriarchal beard—nearly two feet in length and then, as now, his most distinguishing feature—whisked into the block and started to wind upon the whirling sheave. Slammed to the deck and in imminent danger of serious injury the moment his chin met the block, Dole's most frantic efforts had hardly more than checked the run of the sheet, when McFarlane leaped forward, jammed his limp fingers in above the sheave, and at the expense of a badly lacerated hand stopped its deadly rotation until Lorrin Thurston, at the wheel, brought the yacht's head to the wind and put an end to the danger. Two days later the revolution began which made Dole President, Thurston Minister to Washington, and left McFarlane and the rest of the royalists, politically, in obscurity. Yet these three still sail together now and then, and during our stay in Honolulu we of Lurline, both ashore and afloat, enjoyed their joint yachting reminiscences on many memorable occasions.
To read over a membership list of the Royal Hawaiian Yacht Club from its early days is to con a roster of the men who have made Hawaii what it is; and not a man who has held the tiller of the Insular ship of state and guided it through the storms that have threatened to engulf it so often during the last three decades but has owed something of the steadiness of his head and hand to the training of his yachting days.
Gentlemen of the Royal Hawaiian Yacht Club, I salute you! Here's to your summer seas, and your summer winds, and your summer skies, and the summer in your hearts. May you always have—I was going to say fair weather and other things to match, but I pause in time. Yours are the natures that make fair weather out of any storm that blows. So—here's to a sail above you, a plank beneath you, the blue-green Pacific about you, and the boisterous Trade wind blowing you on.
Honolulu hospitality is of so wide a fame that I will not lay myself open to the charge of trying to "gild refined gold or paint the rainbow" by telling here of the details of our sojourn in what is so happily called the "Pearl of the Pacific"; and yet—there was one incident that is so characteristic of the innate courtesy and gentility of the Hawaiian host that I may be pardoned for setting it down.
It was but a few days after our arrival in Honolulu that we were invited to attend a luau or native feast at the home of Col. Sam Parker, a prominent planter of the Islands and a relative of the late King Kaleakaua. The affair was to be informal, we were told, and the feast was to be spread on the lanai or open veranda. On the strength of these assurances, and because the night was a hot and sultry one, the Commodore and I thought that our duck yachting uniforms would fulfil all the requirements of the occasion, and proceeded to attend thus accoutred. Imagine our feelings, then, on finding the genial Colonel Parker waiting to receive us in full evening dress, and observing that every one of the hundred and fifty other guests were likewise impeccably garbed. Two white doves in a flock of ravens could not have been more conspicuous or out of place, and our discomfiture was no whit lessened on being led to the head of the long table and placed in the seats of honour beside Colonel Parker's step-daughters, the lovely Princess Kawanakoa and the no less beautiful Alice Campbell. Not till we were seated did I notice that our host's place was vacant.
For ten minutes the Commodore and I munched shamedly at our poi and boiled seaweed and avoided the I-told-you-so glances of the Mater and Claribel who, resplendent in "full racing rig," seemed palpably endeavouring to impress the assembled company with the fact that they had no connection whatever with the two ill-at-ease nautical-looking gentlemen in the duck jackets. The Princess and her sister were the souls of wit, tact and amiability, but we continued droopy and unresponsive even under the stimuli of their spirited sallies. There was only one thing that could happen to restore our shattered equanimity, and that—thanks to the inspiration which had doubtless seized upon our genial host the moment our mis-garbed figures had hove above his horizon—was the very thing that did happen. We were just passing from poi in calabashes to mullet boiled in ti leaves, when in breezed the Colonel, with only a quickened heaving of his ample chest indicating the lightning change he had been making, garbed in the undress uniform of a Commodore of the Royal Hawaiian Yacht Club, a position which he had held during the reign of the late King Kaleakaua. It was a most gracious act of kindly courtesy, and I was not in the least surprised to hear the Commodore spent most of the rest of the evening trying to persuade all the Parkers, root and branch, to get their things together and join us for our cruise in the South Pacific. In my own thankfulness, I distinctly remember offering several times to make a present of the yacht to both the Princess Kawanakoa and her sister before I pulled myself together sufficiently to realize that it was not mine to give.
The only unpleasant feature about letting go anchor in Honolulu Harbour is having to break it out again. After our week of scheduled stop had stretched out to two weeks, and finally to three, the realization that our reluctance to leave was but growing with every day that the inevitable moment was deferred brought us at length to the arbitrary setting of a sailing hour. Toward this we inflexibly directed the current of our resolutions, with the result that we really did get away in the end.
On the morning of sailing we were pleasantly surprised to receive word from the Spreckels Company—John D. Spreckels was the original owner of Lurline—that it was sending its big tug, Fearless, to tow us out of the passage and beyond the lee of the island to the breeze-swept channel. A little later a note came out from Governor Carter informing us that he was sending the Royal Hawaiian Band on the Fearless to pipe paeans of farewell.
We were not sailing until three o'clock on the afternoon of the 24th of March, but soon after daybreak boats commenced coming off laden with boxes and bags and parcels, remembrances from our kindly Island friends, and toward noon the tide of flowers set in—these mostly in the form of leis or garlands to be worn about the neck. By two o'clock the cabin was like the shipping room of a department store at the climax of the Christmas rush, and the deck a cross between a fruitstand and a conservatory. Nor was the forecastle unremembered. The sailors, too, appeared to have formed attachments. As the bluff bow of the Fearless came nosing out into the stream from under the stern of the big Siberia and all hands turned to on the anchor, we were treated to the spectacle of four brawny seamen, garlanded and festooned in trailing leis from head to heel, bending and swaying in unison and heaving up the chain to a chantey that was nothing more or less than an improvisation from a rollicking native hula.
The line from Fearless was passed aboard and made fast, and as the anchor was broken out the white-coated band, grouped picturesquely on the forward deck of the tug, struck up the opening bars of a familiar air, and Puilani Molina, the sweetest singer in all of the Hawaiias, advanced to the rail, tossed a bright-hued lei upon the water and began singing that most plaintive and tenderly sweet of all the world's songs of farewell, "Aloha-oe."
"Ha-a-heo ka-u-a-ina pa—li—."
Liquid silver, the full, clear notes floated out to us across the unrippling water, and from reef to shore the whole bay fell silent as she sang through the first verse. At the opening words of the chorus a score or more of friends clustered on the hurricane deck of the tug joined in. Instantly the air was taken up by the deep-voiced bandsmen; then by the deckhands and grimy stokers gathered at the door of the engine room, and then by the boatmen as they lay on their oars in the offing, until finally it reached the shore, to come back to us in broken snatches from the throats of the crowd that lined the quays and landings.
"Aloha-oe, Aloha-oe,
E-ke o-na-o-na no-ho i-ka li—po,
A fond embrace—A ho-i a-e-au,
Until we meet again."
Then the screw of the Fearless began revolving, her tautening hawser swung Lurline into line astern, and out through the narrow passage in the reef we were trailed in the bubbling wake of the tug. An hour later, with Coco Head abeam and Diamond Head bearing N.E. by N., five miles distant, sail was hoisted, the tow-line cast off, and Lurline, wing-and-wing to a light northwest breeze, curtesied gracefully to the rising swells of the channel and took her first mincing steps in the long dance to the Marquesas.
As we filled away, dipping our flag in a farewell salute, we saw the band, which since leaving the harbour had been doing its bravest to lift the sodden pall of parting with rollicking Kanaka airs and stirring patriotic selections, again stiffen to attention, and down the wind, despairingly, appealingly, soothingly by turns, as though wafted by the tug's broadside of fluttering handkerchiefs, came for the last time the strains of "Aloha-oe." There are many forms and fashions of the sweet sorrow of parting of which the poet sings, but for a long, long pull, with a yo-heave-ho, at the heart strings, nothing like that which steals over you as you listen to "Aloha-oe" with the tow-line in the water, the odor of Ilima leis heavy in the nostrils, and the skyline of fair Hawaii blurring dim through a mist of tears.
The course from Honolulu to the Marquesan island of Nukahiva is about S.E. by E., but in order to run as little chance as possible of being headed by the Southeast Trades after crossing the Line, it was deemed best to lay our course a couple of points to the east of this until the latitudes of this southern wind were reached and its prevailing direction at that season more accurately determined. This course we found we had managed to approximate at the end of two weeks' sailing, but only at the expense of being constantly on the wind; then to discover that the Trades in the South Pacific blow steadily between E.S.E. and east for nearly all of the year. This meant that we had put ourselves to a good deal of unnecessary trouble and made but a moderately good run where we might have made a very speedy one by heading directly for our destination. That from Hawaii to the Marquesas is one of the few long traverses in the Pacific where the most direct course is also the fastest.
The bleak rock of Lanaii loomed abeam to windward for several hours on the night of the 24th, and morning showed the dim blur of Maui's great crater, Haleakala, blotting out the eastern sky. At noon the snowy peaks of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa detached themselves from the fleecy cloud-racks down to E.S.E., and steadily loomed higher as the sun declined. In the first watch the wind began falling lighter, by midnight it was only coming in fluky puffs, and at daybreak Lurline found herself in the most windlessly somnolent patch of salt water in all the length and breadth of the Pacific, the lee of the two great 13,000-foot volcanoes that form the backbone of the island of Hawaii.
Probably no other place in the world presents such striking contrasts of meteorological conditions between almost contiguous points as those furnished by the windward and leeward sides of Hawaii. The lofty summits of its volcanoes tower so far above the raincloud line that practically no moisture whatever is able to pass to a large belt of country on the southwest side of the island, and where the annual precipitation in the vicinity of Hilo is occasionally in excess of two, and even three hundred inches, that of the Kona or leeward coast ranges from absolutely nothing to five or six. The rank tropical verdure of the windward slopes is unknown in this windless and rainless belt, and save in places where streams from the perpetual snows form thread-like oases, this leeward region is largely desert.
The windless area behind the volcanic barrier of Hawaii may be roughly defined as a triangle, sixty miles wide at its base, tapering off to an apex a hundred miles or more to leeward. It was well down toward the base of this triangle that we were trying to cross in an ill-advised effort to avoid the alternative of sailing the longer course to the windward of the island.
Morning of the 26th found us in a clear, mirror-like, unrippling sea, the surface of which, in its absence of motion, might have passed for that of a great freshwater lake. Scarcely a suggestion of a swell underran the satiny sheen of the level sea, and for all the motion of her decks the yacht might have been chocked up in a dry dock for repairs. The booms, hauled in amidship, lay as though spiked to the deck; and even the drowsy slatting of the lazy-lines and the brisk tattoo of the reef points—twin lullabies of the so-called calms of livelier seas—were unheard. The log, as though in emulation of a sounding lead, hung perpendicularly from the taffrail, its brass blades showing no less clearly in the lucent, unwinking depths than the feathery weed that fringed the motionless rudder.
Toward noon a few faint leakings of wind came edging in around the north shoulder of Mauna Kea, and for some time we had steerage way enough to allow the yacht to drift along at a mile or so an hour, the booms out now on one side and now on the other in an effort to intercept the elusive airs. At six o'clock even these vagrant puffs had ceased, and as twilight followed the sinking of the sun behind a ruled-line horizon calm succeeded to calmer, until the sails were finally taken in and we floated, lazily waiting, on the heavily breathing bosom of the deep; for now the shadow of a swell was running and imparting just enough motion to the yacht to set her decks rocking drowsily to and fro in accord with the somnolent peacefulness of the tropic night.
The afterglow kindled and faded in pale tints of amber and amethyst and dusky olive, and almost up to the zenith a filmy mass of cirrus cloud, torn by conflicting air currents too high to make themselves at sea level, flamed up in the reflected light for an instant and then broke and scattered into bits, like paper rose-leaves showered into a shaft of red calcium. Across the still expanse of the sea east nodded to west, north nodded to south, the sky stars blinked at the sea stars, and the sea stars blinked crookedly back; and under all ran the indolent ebony swells, gently rolling the yacht till she rocked like a sleepy old beldame, drowsing and catching herself and drowsing again.
Early in the middle watch a light breeze stole out again from landward—this time apparently coming from the Mauna Loa slope of the island—and by daylight we were twenty miles nearer the southerly deadline of the windless triangle. Then the puffs began falling light again, and for an hour or two we drifted without steerage way ten or a dozen miles off the entrance of the beautiful little bay of Kealakekua. With eyes straining through our glasses some of us fancied that we discerned the outlines of a tall shaft of white shining through the brown boles of the coconut palms, and told each other that we were gazing on the monument that marked the spot where Captain Cook, after innumerable hair-breadth escapes in every important island group of the Pacific, fell under the clubs of the warlike Hawaiians, fighting no less desperately to save the lives of his comrades than for his own.
One would have to cruise the Pacific for a lifetime to begin to come to an adequate appreciation of what the Great Navigator did, for the more one sees the more stupendous seems the sum of his achievement. From where the sub-Arctic waters wash the shores of Cook's Inlet, Alaska, to Cooktown in the lap of the Antipodean tropics, and Mount Cook raising its glacier-seamed sides above the bleak bluffs of New Zealand, there is hardly an important island whose strand his tireless foot did not press, and scarce a lump of coral rearing its head above the restless Pacific surges that his keen eye did not sweep. Nasty sailing, you think it, in these days of charts and steamers, when the lifeboats are swept from the hurricane deck off Cook's Inlet on your run to Nome; and "A frightful hole!" you say, when your "N.Y.K." steamer anchors every night as she feels her way along down the Great Barrier Reef; and every minute is your last, perhaps you think, when your "A and A" steamer is hove to in a Fijian hurricane, or you're locked in the cabin of your "A.U.S.N." packet in a spell of "southeast" weather between Dunedin and Sydney. Distinctly bad, you think all this; you on your 6,000-ton steamer that is equipped with every precautionary and emergency device known to science, with a powerful beacon on every headland and the bottom of the sea mapped out like a block of lower Broadway. Just try and imagine, then, if you please, what these same places must have been to Cook, who spent years among them in crazy old wooden ships, scarcely a one of which but ended by piling up on some rocky shore or coral beach. Columbus, Vespucci, and the rest of the deep-water navigators, simply turned the noses of their ships west and sailed till they got to somewhere—and then sailed back again. Cook spent years with a man at the masthead looking for hidden reefs, and with the sounding lead going every hour of the twenty-four.
In my own mind there are grave doubts as to whether any of us really saw the Cook monument during that long forenoon in which we lay becalmed off the leeward coast of Hawaii—in fact, I have since been told that it is not visible from the sea at all; but the sight of Kealakekua—yes, even at a distance of a dozen miles or more—is ample excuse for this slight tribute to one to whom no man that has ever sailed the Pacific will deny the title of "The Greatest Navigator of History."
Captain James Cook, sailor, diplomat and gentlemen:—Here's long and unbroken rest for your watch below in that quiet haven where you let go Life's anchor in the shadow of the towering Mauna Loa and within sound of the lap of the waves of that Pacific, so many of whose tracks you were the first to sail. Sleep sound, Master Mariner, for your work is done; and may your dreams bring you the messages of gratitude that arise from the hearts of those whose ways have been made easier and safer because of the dangers you braved and the sacrifices you made. Accept this acknowledgment of the obligation of one of those to whom you showed the way, James Cook.
A fluky three to five-knot breeze drew in from the E.S.E. about mid-day, every puff of which was taken advantage of to struggle on out of the lee of the blanketing island. Freshening slightly after nightfall, it carried us along at a little better than a four-mile gait during each hour of the first watch, near the end of which it hauled ahead and forced the yacht off to southwest until enough southing had been run to allow her to be put about on the other tack without danger of butting her nose into the volcanic bluffs of Hawaii.
Shortly after midnight the mate awakened the Commodore to report a reflection on the sky off to the northeast, an announcement which brought every one tumbling out on deck in short order. There was the reflection, surely enough; a dull red glare on our port quarter that shone and dulled and shone again like a blowed-on ember. The light was on a line with the point where the opaque mass of Hawaii blotted out the tail of the Great Bear, and because there was no sign of fire on the water we had about arrived at the conclusion that the glare might come from a ship or sugar mill burning on the windward side of the island, when the reflection suddenly flared from a dull cherry to a vivid flame-red, immediately to be quenched in tumbling masses of smoke or steam which went shooting into the air as though driven by the force of a mighty explosion.
"She's a steamer!" yelled the mate. "Them's her boilers a-bustin'!" Whereupon we all fell to speculating as to what particular steamer it might be. And it was not until six or seven minutes later when a great, deep-toned reverberation reached us—a sound so mighty that all of the steamers in the Pacific blowing up together would have passed unnoticed beside it—that light finally burst in upon us and we broke out in chorus with "Kilauea! in eruption again."
The actuality of this eruption—only a slight one as it chanced—we verified six weeks later when our file of San Francisco papers was received in Tahiti. In referring since to this most spectacular piece of volcanic pyrotechnics, we have always done so in the words of Claribel, then a recently emancipated prisoner from the grip of mal de mer. In the sentiently suffusing light the sea rolled a dark pit of ox-blood and the heavens arched a vault of purple-black studded with pale emeralds, the stars. The half-filled sails were hangings of amethyst silk, and the masts lances of fire grounded in patches of living flame where the polished brass work threw back the rosy glow of the Northeast.
"Look! look!" cried the sufferer, clapping her hands with excitement as the twisting pillar on the eastern flank of Mauna Loa took the momentary seeming of a colossal figure in the throes of a serpentine. "Isn't it worth being sea-sick all the way around the world to see? There's Madame Pelée dancing a hula! It's Kilauea's 'Aloha' to the Lurline!"
And "Kilauea's 'Aloha' to the Lurline" it has always been to us since.
Light and baffling southerly breezes made progress slow for the first two days after clearing the calm patch in the lee of Hawaii, and when on the 29th these suddenly straightened out into a blustering easterly blow the immediate necessity of proceeding under shortened canvas offset the advantage of the long-desired wind. For two days the yacht was close-hauled on a course which approximated southeast, bobbing up and down to the seas and making only moderately good weather under double-reefed mainsail and foresail.
Sea and wind were still heavy at noon of the 31st, but the latter had by then come up to northeast, allowing us to sail a point or two free on a course of S.E. by E. Under all plain lower sail we pounded into the hard-heaving seas all afternoon and through the night of the 31st, the decks constantly smothered in volleys of spray and more than a little green water finding its way aboard in some of the heavier plunges, yet averaging close to eight miles an hour all the time. Day broke on a sea of wind-tossed pampas plumes, the onslaughts of waves beneath which were responsible for a substantial shortening of sail when the morning watch was called. At ten o'clock, with the glass down to 29.70 and the wind increased to half a gale, the canvas was still further reduced, leaving the yacht doing a comfortable six knots under double-reefed mainsail and foresail, and with the jib taken in and the bonnet out of the foresail.
For two days, with the glass hovering about 29.60 and the wind blowing fiercely but steadily from E.N.E., we jolted along, full-and-by, at from five to seven knots an hour, logging 129 miles on the 2nd of April and 159 miles on the 3rd. By this time the torn, fussy seas of the first day of the gale had lengthened out to viciously-running combers, with a resistless power under their swinging upheaves and a decided sting in the blows of their hissing crests. The big third reef was tied into the mainsail at dawn of the 4th, after a top-heavy wall of reeling water had bumped its head on the starboard boat in an apparent endeavour to salute the rising sun, leaving that indispensable adjunct to our life-saving service wallowing in its slackened lashing with a started plank. This, with a stove-in galley sky-light, made up about the sum total of the damage inflicted by what would have been a really troublesome storm if there had been any land about to look out for. In the open waters of the Pacific the hardest kind of a straight blow is of little moment to a staunch schooner, even though—like the Lurline—it may have been built as much for racing as cruising. Where the real danger lurks for any kind of a craft is in the twisting hurricanes and the sudden and terrific squalls which attack unexpectedly among the islands. At sea, as on land, most of the menace is in the unforeseen, striking instances of which truth we had ample opportunity to observe before the voyage was over.
The wind began abating in strength shortly after daybreak of the 4th, and during the day the yacht was gradually restored to all plain sail. We must have passed under the sun at about 6° N. late in the forenoon of this day, for it inclined to the north when the noon sight showed our latitude to be 5° 57'. The air and water which had been showing a diurnal increase of temperature of about half a degree, Fahrenheit, registered 81° and 79°, respectively. There was no suggestion of oppressiveness in the air and a windsail was not necessary to keep the cabin fresh and cool.
In the early morning of the 5th the wind began to fall light and fluky, finally resolving itself into a tumultuous series of squalls, the last of which, though it drove the yacht off to the west of south at a terrific pace, fortunately abated before anything carried away. When it had passed the wind settled itself contentedly into E.S.E., from which point it continued amiably to purr—except on three notable occasions—through most of the four months which we spent south of the Line. We had literally run from the Northeast to the Southeast Trades in a single squall.
As we neared the Line the only indication of equatorial weather was in the ever-livelier butterfly chases of the sunshine and showers. The winds, except for increasingly fierce squalls which we began experiencing regularly in the early watches, were fresh and steady from E.S.E., and so far as any signs of being in the hated "horse-latitudes" were concerned, we might have been sailing through a week-long September afternoon off the Golden Gate. Considering the freshness of the wind, the sea was very light indeed, and we were able to carry most of the kites to good advantage as long as there was sufficient daylight to permit watching the approach of the ever-imminent squalls.
On the 7th, at three o'clock, in longitude 139° 50', we crossed the equator, just two weeks to an hour after weighing anchor in Honolulu. Air and water were slightly cooler than for some days—each registering 79°, Fahrenheit—and so fresh was the steady breeze from the southeast that we stood uncovered in the sun at noonday and in the shade of the sails felt no discomfort in a rug.
By this time we had made easting sufficient to place us well to the windward of our destination in any probable shift of wind. Sheets were slacked off, therefore, and freed from the griping luff under which she had chafed almost incessantly for the last fortnight, Lurline slipped away on a course of due south at a gait which ran up close to 190 miles on the log for the day ending at noon of the 9th. At this time, with 240 miles—part of it down a narrow island channel beset with swift currents and variable winds—remaining to be covered before we would begin to open up the bay of Taiohaie, Nukahiva, all practicable canvas was crowded on in an endeavour to make port the following day. Eight and nine knots we made all afternoon; good speed considering the force of the wind, yet hardly what might have been desired under the circumstances. But the breeze was stiffening as twilight came on, and realizing that failure to make anchorage before another evening would mean a night of standing off-and-on in a scant sea-way and uncertain winds, the Commodore, for the first time since entering those capricious latitudes, allowed the light sails to be carried into the darkness.
Sailing like a witch in the freshening breeze, Lurline reeled off a shade under twenty miles in the second dog watch, and 10.6, 10.8, 11.3 and 11.8 were successively run up on the log as the hours of the first watch slipped away. The night was balmy soft, the breeze a stream of warm milk, and in the air was discernible that faint, indefinable odour of something which heralds the presence of land to nostrils grown sensitive from inhaling for weeks the untainted atmosphere of the open sea. The heavens, save for a few hurriedly marching squads of the ever-shifting cirro-cumulus, were clear and unobscured, and the easy-running swells were as gentle as the night itself.
The yacht continued to reel off the miles like a liner during the early hours of the middle watch, but toward morning the appearance of several menacing turrets of cloud up to windward was the signal for the hurried taking in of the light sails and an easing off of the sheets. For a while it appeared that all of the three rapidly advancing squalls were going to pass astern of us, and so, in fact, two of them did. The third one took an unexpected spin at the last moment and came charging up after the yacht like a mad bull. There was just time hastily to furl the jib and station men at the fore and mainsail halyards before it broke upon the yacht with the explosive roar of a bursting bomb, and the timely letting go of those halyards as she hove down before the terrific force of the wind undoubtedly saved some canvas if nothing more.
The mainsail was checked half way in its run and the very considerable portion of it that fell overside went hopping and skipping along on the water like a great wounded bird as the yacht smoked away before the squall. For ten minutes, perhaps, we ran thus, half smothered in air and water; then the rain began falling, the wind fell lighter, and the squall, so far as we were concerned, had spent itself. Five minutes later the main boom had been hauled inboard, the sail hoisted, and Lurline was gliding off down to south'ard no whit worse for her rough raking. The main topmast staysail was run up when the morning watch was called, and dawn found her doing a comfortable nine knots an hour with the situation well in hand.
As the sun rose the somewhat vague land smell which we had noted during the night increased to a delicate but unmistakable odour of flowers, a perfume which we later learned is due to the presence in the air of the blown pollen of the cassi, a low bush-like plant which carpets the islands of the Marquesas and blooms perennially. So pungent and far-reaching is this odour that it has become a common saying with trading captains who sail these latitudes that you can smell the Marquesas farther than you can see them, a statement which is certainly literally true anywhere to the leeward of the group.
Shortly after eight o'clock the shattered peaks of the island of Uahuka were sighted dead ahead, and at nine the course was altered to S.W. by W. After an hour or so the dim outline of Nukahiva began taking shape in the dissolving mist, and when the scarped and buttressed summit of Cape Maartens came edging out from behind the abrupt heads to north'ard, we had something definite to go by, and promptly trimmed in sheets and headed up to clear a forbidding point of black basalt which our Directions told us jutted out into the sea to cut off the surges from the inner loop of the bay of Taio-haie.
Along the rugged coast we slipped, now close in to a sinister dirk-like point which reached out to divide and scatter the onrushing seas, and again standing across the opening of a bay or inlet which receded to a snowy beach backed by a lucent lagoon and a chasm full of unfathomable verdure. Beyond the furrowed brow of Cape Maartens a narrow bay, well protected and smooth as a mirror, ran inland beyond eye-scope, piercing the island like a sliver of silver. From where it disappeared in a dense mass of palms and pandanus a high-walled valley wound back among the serried ribs of the mountains, apparently to end abruptly against a lofty cliff, the sheer side of the towering backbone range of the island.
Here and there up the valley patches of dancing light, shining through the sombre green of the riot of trees and creepers, told of a swiftly-running stream, and down the face of the great cliff, literally leaping from the clouds to the earth in a single bound, was a waterfall. Lucent, glittering green it must have been up where it began its dizzy plunge in the heart of the murky mass of drifting nimbus which veiled its source, but white—snow-white—it gleamed where it appeared under the dark cloud line to fall in a brocade of shimmering satin into the misty depth below. We did not learn about it until the next day; but this fall was Typee Fall, the stream was Typee River, and the valley was Typee Valley, the scene of that most idyllic of all South Sea idylls, Herman Melville's "Typee."
We never attained nearer than five miles to the great fall during our stay in the Marquesas, and accurate figures regarding its height were not obtainable. Findlay's Directory gives it at 2,165 feet, which is probably too much; but the fact remains that it is one of the highest waterfalls in the world, and without a rival on any island whatever.
At four in the afternoon we doubled the gaunt black point toward which we had been steering for some hours, suddenly to find the panorama of the beautiful bay of Taio-haie unfolding before us. Pursuant to the instructions in the Sailing Directory, we ran up the Jack to the fore and stood off across the entrance waiting for the pilot, without whom, so we read, there was a heavy penalty for endeavouring to enter. Then we went about and ran back past the little island at the end of the point, all without awakening a sign of life along the drowsy shore where nestled the village. After repeating this manœuvre twice more, the Commodore ordered the sheets slacked off and gave the man at the wheel his bearing for the first leg of the run in.
"Perhaps the pilot has overslept on his siesta today," he remarked dryly; "and if that's the case our anchor gun may wake him up."
We went in neatly and expeditiously. "Keep the eastern outer bluff on the starboard," read the Directions, "rounding the island off it within a cable's length. All the eastern shores of the bay are steep-to and free from danger, and the wind will always lead off." And that was about all there was to it. We let go the anchor a few minutes after five, a quarter mile off the rickety wharf, in seven fathoms. Our time from Honolulu was just over seventeen days, the quickest passage of which there was any record. Had we sailed a course to avoid the windless area in the lee of Hawaii, and then headed directly for Nukahiva it is probable that the run would have been made in the vicinity of twelve or thirteen days.
The firing of our little signal cannon might have been the setting off of a mine under the village, so electric was the effect. Dark forms sprang up from nowhere and began darting hither and thither and yon, and following the appearance of a corpulent figure in pajamas at the door of what seemed to be the official residence, the tri-colour of France went jerking up to its flag-pole. Down the front street shortly came lumbering a ponderous figure in a brass-bound helmet and white uniform, followed by a trailing sword and a half dozen natives carrying oars on their shoulders. Two other white men, also white-clad and sun-helmeted, joined the procession as it passed what appeared to be a trading store, and the three proceeded together down to the wharf and put off in a big whaleboat.
Driven by the erratic but powerful strokes of the big natives, the boat was quickly alongside the yacht, and the official-looking gentleman came puffing up the ladder which had been hastily lowered for him. He was Brigadier Bouillard, the Harbour Master, Warden of the Prison and Chief of Police, he announced between gasps in broken English, and the other gentlemen following him over the rail were, respectively, Mr. Cramer, a German trader, and Mr. McGrath, a Canadian trader. Of the latter, one of the most interesting characters we met in the course of our whole cruise, we were destined to see much during our stay in Nukahiva.
"By the way," Monsieur le Capitaine, "where's your pilot?" asked the Commodore after the large official had examined our papers and admitted the yacht to practique. "Hasn't he overslept this afternoon?"
"Zee pilate! Mon Dieu, he ees no"—And at this point, with wild rollings of the eyes and swift gestures of uncertain import, the Brigadier relapsed into French so voluble and excited as to prove quite unintelligible to our untrained ears.
"The Brigadier," explained the blond Cramer in his exact Teutonic English, as the excited Frenchman paused for breath, "is trying to tell you, in effect, that the last pilot but one was killed and eaten by relatives of a trading schooner's crew who were drowned when that boat was piled up on the beach because the pilot had taken too much absinthe and mistook a firefly on the bowsprit for the light on the wharf. A similar fate also overtook his successor, apparently for no other reason than that the office had become an unpopular one with the natives. Since then," he added, "the government has been unable to find any one willing to accept the position under any inducements."
"Hardly to be wondered at," mused the Commodore. "But, I say, can any of you gentlemen tell me if this—er—antipathy of the Marquesan natives toward pilots extends to skippers who bring in their own ships? It's a little late for working out of the harbour before dark but the wind's fair most of the way and, anyhow, I'd rather be drowned than eaten."
The natives had always respected visiting yachts, they asseverated earnestly, and—as we learned later—truthfully. The Commodore took courage on hearing this and decided to chance it for a day or two. It was not until our arrival in Tahiti, a fortnight later, that we learned that perhaps the forbearance of the natives in the matter of visiting yachts may have been partly due to the fact that, previously to Lurline's coming, only three craft of that class had ever been to the Marquesas.
In the "Ladies Log" of this date I find the following entry:
"We sailed in ourselves and fired off our signal gun to wake up the pilot. Found out shortly that nothing of less calibre than Gabriel's Trumpet would have been equal to that task."
[CHAPTER III]
THE MARQUESAS TODAY
It is a strange anomaly that the Marquesan, by long odds the fastest disappearing of the Polynesian races, is made up of individuals of incomparably finer physique than those of any other of the islands of the South Pacific. Of a dozen natives picked at random from the beach of Taio-haie, there would probably be not over three or four who would not show more or less of his dark head above the end of a six-foot tape, and the breadth and muscling of each would be in proportion. The women are likewise of good size and figure, and, when undisfigured with tattooing, of considerable beauty as well. Both sexes accomplish prodigious feats of walking, swimming and rowing, and both invariably bear up remarkably under hardship and privation such as that incident to being cast away to sea for weeks in an open boat.
As a matter of fact, the startling decrease in the population of the Marquesan group, except for occasional epidemics, is due to scarcity of births and a lack of vitality in the children rather than to an abnormal number of deaths among the adults. This condition is largely traceable to the existence of a number of more or less active forms of blood disease introduced by the whites of the Pacific whaling fleet of half a century ago, and to certain vicious practices in connection with the prevention of child-bearing prevalent in the over-populous days of the group. Cannibalism and intertribal wars have frequently been assigned as potent factors in the decimation, but it is notable that neither has had such effect in the Solomon or New Hebridean groups, where both are prevalent today.
The early explorers estimated the population of the island of Nukahiva at from 30,000 to 40,000. In 1804 there was believed to be not over 18,000 on the island, and in 1836 but 8,000. A French census in 1856 enumerated but 2,960, which number had fallen to 800 by 1880. In 1889 Stevenson found Taio-haie a lively village with a club, barracks, hotel, numerous stores and a considerable colony of French officials; Hatiheu and Anaho were villages of upwards of a hundred natives each. At the time of our visit in the Lurline there remained in Taio-haie but three French officials, a single German trader, three or four missionaries and a native population just short of ninety. The villages of Hatiheu and Anaho had but a few over a hundred inhabitants between them.
In the veins of the Nukahivan of today course two strains of foreign blood of widely diverse origin. During the latter part of the 16th, and for most of the 17th century, the island was a rendezvous for a large colony of buccaneers who had chosen that location for the advantages it gave them in preying upon the Spanish galleons plying between Peru and the Isthmus of Panama, as well as in raiding settlements on the intervening coast of South America. These pirates, after some years of fighting, brought the natives of the Taio-haie and Hatiheu districts into a state of complete subjection, while their relations with the tribes of the interior appeared to have been in the nature of an armed neutrality. The subject natives were employed at sea as sailors and boatmen, and on land as gardeners and herdsmen. The cattle, pigs and goats brought to the island by the freebooters must have been the progenitors of the wild animals of these species which abound there today. With the natives of the interior some trading for food was carried on at times when the drought on the coast made short crops of coconuts, breadfruit and bananas.
When the streams of Incan gold from Peru began to run low and buccaneering became unprofitable as a consequence, the Nukahivan pirate colonies gradually changed back to native villages. After the last of the strangers had died, their descendants, through intermarriage with pure-blooded natives, reverted little by little to the predominating type, until the evidences of the blood of white men in their veins survived only in straighter hair and features, harder eyes, a sharper and more uncertain temper and an increased arrogance. They were a handsomer people physically, and a keener one mentally than the original Marquesan, but withal a race whose morals were in rags and tatters.
For some decades in the middle of the last century Nukahiva was the main base of a large portion of the Pacific whaling fleet. Ships spent months at a time at Taio-haie, refitting and reprovisioning, and the island gained many new and undesirable inhabitants through desertions from their crews. The worst epidemic of smallpox ever recorded in the South Pacific was started in Nukahiva by a maroon from a whaler, and the present-day prevalence of blood and skin disease is directly traceable to similar sources. The women were carried off to the ends of the earth on the whalers and few indeed of them ever found their way back; for the good of future generations it would have been better had none of them done so.
The moral laxity of the Marquesan of the present day is undoubtedly a legacy of these two occupations of the principal island by the lowest of the sea's riff-raff, pirates and whalers. In Nukahiva chastity is quite unknown to any class, and a century of work on the part of the French missionaries has left little mark upon the morals of the people. They are prone to throw themselves at every opportunity into the most unlicensed debauchery, and they know no law save that of the appetites. The feasts of the present generation of Nukahivans—aside from cannibalism, which is still practised whenever the chances for escaping detection are favourable—are howling orgies of two and three days' duration, their riotous excesses uninterrupted even by intervals of singing and dancing, as in Samoa, Tahiti and Fiji. The song and the dance, which represent to the Polynesian about all that religion, music and the drama combined do to us, have died out in the Marquesas even faster than the people.
The Marquesans of a century ago were the most completely and artistically tattooed people in the Pacific, and the practice is carried on among them to a certain extent even today. The really fine pieces of work, however, such as the famous right leg of the late Queen Vaekehu over which Stevenson waxed so enthusiastic, are confined entirely to the very old, and, what with wrinkles, deformities and the wear and tear of time, these have lost most of their original sharpness of colour and outline. None of the new generation appears to have the fortitude to endure the exquisite pain incident to having a whole limb picked out in a network of geometric design or the face barred and circled like a coarse spider's web.
Women are rarely tattooed at all now, and most of the young men are satisfied with a broad band of solid black—not unlike a highwayman's mask in effect—which reaches across the face from ear to ear, giving to their never overly-mild countenances an expression of amazing ferocity. That the art, and a certain pride connected with it, are not yet lost to the Marquesans, however, was amusingly shown by an incident which occurred the day after Lurline's arrival in Taio-haie. On this occasion, in testing some newly-opened shells, we fired ten or a dozen shots in rapid succession from the yacht's brass signal cannon. At the first report a bevy of Marquesan damsels, who had come off to sell sandalwood and shark-tooth necklaces, stampeded to their canoes and could not be induced to return until all activity in the firing line had ceased.
Then they all clambered gleefully aboard again, and one of them so far forgot herself as to sit down on the deck and lean languidly back with her plump brown shoulder against the sizzling hot breech of the signal gun. That was the last languid movement she made for some time. Came the sharp hiss of singed flesh and then, with the scream of a frightened wildcat, the girl cleared the low rail as though thrown from a catapult, swam half a hundred feet under water, to go lunging straight off for the shore the instant her head rose above the surface.
Now it chanced that across the breech of our little cannon was engraved the name "LURLINE," picked out in ornamental scrolleries, and beneath it, in rich reposé, the figure of a puffy dolphin in the act of gulping down a buxom mermaid. Such of this bas-relief as had come in contact with the fair Marquesienne's shoulder left its mark, which striking design was no sooner seen by the tribal tattooist than he needs must perpetuate what he feared, no doubt, was but an ephemeral impression.
So fishbone needles and black gum were hastily brought into play, and several days later, when the inflammation had subsided sufficiently to enable her to be about, the proud and grateful young beauty brought the decoration off for us to see. "RLINE" we read in wobbly reversed letters, and beneath, floundering desperately across a shoulder blade, a stub-tailed mermaid could be discerned in the act of disappearing into the impressionistic but unmistakable head of a dolphin. A half dozen of the now distinguished young person's girl friends accompanied her, and every one of the envious minxes persisted in embracing, leaning against and sitting upon that now cool but still ornamental signal-gun breech in anxious endeavours to get patterns of their own to take back to the village tattooist.
But the cunningest picture ever executed upon the body of any Marquesan, living or dead, pales to insignificance when compared to the amazing hieroglyphic record depicted upon the skin of a living Marqueso-American, John Hilyard. Readers of Stevenson may recall the tattooed man, who was the first resident of Taio-haie to discover the appearance of the strange schooner in the introductory chapter of "The Wreckers." A bit of the history of that strange character is also hinted at, I believe, but, according to the present-day gossip of the "beach" of Taio-haie, it is all wrong. For the real story I am indebted to our friend, McGrath, the trader of Hatiheu, who once nursed Hilyard through a spell of fever and attained to more of that queer outcast's confidence than any one else on the island. From Hilyard himself—now a man of about seventy, with his grotesquely figured body fully clothed and as much as possible of his face obscured with a bushy beard,—absolutely nothing can be learned, and I was considered to have done remarkably well in holding him during a ten-minute discussion of shark baits. I will outline here in a single paragraph a story which, measured in pangs of soul and body, would tax the compass of a modern novel adequately to depict.
Deserting from the American whaler, Nancy Dawson, when that ship was careened at Anaho in the 60's for calking, was a raw youth of twenty, who had run away from his home in a California mining camp and signed on in San Francisco. White men were scarce in the Marquesas, and after working for a while in a trading store in Taio-haie, he shortly became supercargo on a trading schooner, and at length the owner of a concession and boats of his own. It was at the height of his prosperity that he met and fell captive to the charms of Mariva, who was reputed beautiful and undoubtedly was coquettish, as the sequel shows. She accepted Hilyard's presents, but told him that, while she liked his personality well enough, she detested the sight of his white skin. Let the village tattooer remedy that and perhaps—The love lorn wretch was off to put himself under the needle before she had finished. Mariva dropped in occasionally upon the session of torture which followed and, now by criticism, now by approval, urged on the flagging artists to renewed effort. When geometric whorls and bands and parallelograms were exhausted, Mariva herself dipped a dainty forefinger in the black kuki-soot gum and began improvising designs. "That broad chest was made by nature to support a clump of bananas." "What could be daintier than some fat pigs gorging on mangoes in the hollow of that back?" She and an invited bevy of friends sang himines to drown Hilyard's groans while he was conscious, and when he fainted with the pain and lay in a stupor they seized spare needles and tried their own hands at tattooing. At the end of the second day, with designs two and three deep all over the body of the unconscious trader, they desisted, less from exhaustion than from a lack of further skin that would take an impression. Hilyard lay in a swoon all night, and in the morning was carried to the mission house with a raging fever. That night the faithless Mariva eloped with a half-caste missionary preacher, took possession of one of Hilyard's schooners, sailed it to the Paumotos, where they ultimately set up in trading on their own account and, as far as any one knows, lived happily ever afterwards. That Hilyard did not die from blood-poisoning was miraculous. As it was he hovered between life and death for a month, finally to pass from the kindly care of the missionaries so broken in mind and body that he was never again able to return to his trading business. The honest French Residente disposed of Hilyard's interests for a sum sufficient, when placed in a bank at Tahiti, to give the unlucky victim of love's madness enough to live comfortably upon, and for the last forty years he has done just that and nothing more, just existed—an object of scorn to the natives and of pity to the whites—upon the "beach" of Taio-haie.
Scenically the Marquesas are incomparably more beautiful than any of the other island groups of the Pacific, Hawaii not excepted. It is usual to hear the traveller who has covered Polynesia by the steamer route speak in similar terms of the Society Islands—especially Moorea and Tahiti—Samoa and Fiji, whichever may have chanced to tickle his fancy, quite losing sight of the fact that the route of his boat has been laid out along the lines of commerce irrespective of scenery. Not one steamer—save an occasional gunboat—goes to the Marquesas in a decade, the mail of the islands being carried to and from Tahiti every three or four months in a trading schooner. In the last twenty years scarce that number of strangers have visited the group, and a dozen or more of these came on the only three yachts that have ever found their way there. How little, therefore, the average South Sea tourist really knows of these islands may readily be seen.
The rock walls and cliffs of Moorea would be lost in the shadows of the great 4,000-foot spires that tower above the bay of Hatiheu; the 600-foot fall of Faatua, in Tahiti, might be shut from sight in the spray of the 2,000-foot fall of the Typee in Nukahiva; and the great cliff of Bora-Bora, the creeper-tapestried walls of the bay of Pago-Pago and the great gorge of the upper Rewa, in Fiji, could be hidden away in corners of the stupendous Atouna valley of Hiva-oa so effectually that they would pass unnoticed.
In the matter of riotous tropical growth, the Marquesas, being nearer the Line than any other of the South Sea islands that may lay claim to scenic beauty, have also all the best of the comparison. Nukahiva is an almost impenetrable jungle of lantana, burao, acacia, banana, guava and scores of other trees and bushes, nearly all of them flowering and fruit bearing. Indigenous to the island is the cassi plant, a thick shrub which covers patches of the lower hills in dense masses and which blossoms out in tiny yellow balls of almost solid pollen. The latter has a perfume of most penetrating sweetness, and in flowering time is blown by the Trades many leagues to the leeward of the island. This is the odour which I mentioned that we noted in the air while the yacht was still a hundred miles or more from land. Beating into the incomparable bay of Hatiheu at night with this perfumed breeze sweeping the deck, the wake a comet of golden-green light and the surf bursting in vivid spurts of phosphorescence along the silver-bright band of the beach, is to anticipate the approach to the mystical Islands of the Blest.
At a number of widely-separated points in the South Pacific—notably at Easter Island, Tahiti and Kusaie, of the Caroline group—are to be found great images of stone, the ruins of huge temples and other evidences of the existence of prehistoric races who, at least as builders, were far in advance of the Polynesian of today. French scientists had noted that in the Marquesas some of the abandoned house-foundations or pai-pais, contained far larger blocks of stone than any of those of later construction, but not until very recently was it known that there were works in the group not unworthy of comparison with the stone gods of Easter Island.
Just previous to our visit to Nukahiva, our friend McGrath, the trader of Hatiheu, while following up a wounded boar in the Typee Valley, chanced on an ancient Marquesan "Olympus," containing nine large stone images in a comparatively good state of preservation. Though this most interesting discovery lies within 300 yards of the main trail up the Typee Valley, no native on the island, either by actual knowledge or through tradition, has been able to shed light on its origin, purpose or probable age.
McGrath conducted our party to his "Goddery," as he facetiously called it, when we were crossing the island to pay a visit to the Queen of Hatiheu, and the several films which I exposed in a driving rainstorm resulted in what are undoubtedly the first photographs of these strange Marquesan images. The ancient shrine—for such it must have been—is situated on a terrace in the steeply-sloping side hill, and though the underbrush thins out somewhat in its immediate vicinity, the overarching bows of maupé and hau trees form so dense a screen that the heavens are completely obscured. Though it was full noonday when we visited the place, the light—partly, no doubt, on account of the rain—was as dim as that of an old cathedral, and my films, which were exposed four minutes each, would have turned out much better with ten.
The images, which had been set at regular intervals around an open stone-paved court, were from six to eight feet in height and averaged about three feet in thickness. We estimated each to contain from forty to sixty cubic feet of hard basaltic stone, the weight of which must have been several tons. As raising so great a weight up the sixty or seventy per cent. incline from the valley would have been almost impossible, and as no outcroppings of stone of similar nature appeared nearby, we were forced to the conclusion that the material for the images must have been quarried out at some point higher up the mountain and laboriously lowered to the terrace prepared for them.
"All of the images were covered with moss"
"A hardened old offender who preferred white man to
native meat"
All of the images were covered with an inch or more of solid moss, and on one which I photographed it was necessary to scrape some of this away to bring out the features. The figures were much alike in design, and, in a general way, of a not unremote resemblance to the Buddhas of the ancient Javan temples. Eleven of them were still in their original positions; one was blocked half way in its fall by the trunk of a hau tree, and one was prostrate and overgrown with moss and creepers. A search will undoubtedly reveal others now entirely covered with earth and undergrowth, as there are several unoccupied niches still remaining.
That this shrine is of considerable age is evidenced by the fact that a hau tree, three feet in diameter, has forced apart the heavy paving stones and is growing in the middle of the court. Trees of even greater size are growing out of the ruins of a small nearby building, which might once have been the foundation of the domicile of the attendant priests. Some of the roughly squared rocks in the foundation of the shrine are approximately three by three by ten feet in dimension, and must have taken a small army of men to move and set in place.
The Marquesas are the only islands of the eastern groups of the South Pacific where cannibalism has not long since ceased. This does not mean that one is likely to be pounced on and eaten as soon as he sets foot ashore—as I must frankly admit we all feared when we first heard of the fate of the late pilots of Taio-haie—but only that under certain favourable conditions, when there is small chance of its being brought to the attention of the French authorities, this barbarity is still resorted to. The French and the missionaries have been active in suppressing cannibalism and its attendant rites, but, principally on account of certain religious significances which appear to attach to it, the practice persists in bobbing up perennially. The dead in their tribal fights are still eaten when the opportunity offers, but only one white man and a Chinaman (the two pilots were half-castes) are known to have been eaten in the last decade.
Accuse a Marquesan of being a cannibal, and he will ordinarily deny the soft impeachment much after the manner of a school girl taxed with being a flirt. Some will brazen it out, however, and of such was a hardened old offender who explained to the Lurline forecastle one night that, of the various classes of "long-pig," he preferred white man to native because the meat of the latter was saltier and of a more pronounced flavour. Chinaman he had never eaten, he said, but—and here he cast an appraising look to where our recently shipped cook was shuddering at the door of the galley—he was going to try one at his first opportunity. The terrified Si-ah would not even go ashore to do the marketing during the remainder of our stay in Taio-haie.
The practice of cannibalism undoubtedly originated in the over-populated days of the island when, in the seasons of famine, the bodies of those killed in the intertribal raids were eaten by the survivors to escape starvation. Its survival into a period when the islands produce food a thousand-fold in excess of consumption, and in the face of the active opposition of the French, can be due only to certain superstitious attributes, such as the belief that the strength of a dead foe enters into the body of him who eats the flesh.
Human flesh is eaten in the Marquesas today only when the conditions are such that the chances of detection are the slightest, and never under any circumstances with the ceremonies which attended the rites of three or four decades ago. The "long-pig"—the polite euphemism by which man-meat is designated—may be quietly cut up and distributed among a hundred families in a half dozen different villages, each of which will partake of its precious tidbit in private and strictest secrecy. Again, the body may be buried after only a small portion has been reserved for eating. Just previous to our arrival in Nukahiva a body from which only the hands were missing was washed ashore at Anaho during a heavy southwester. Investigation showed it to be that of one Teona, a resident of Hatiheu, a native who, three days previously, had, according to the story of his companions, fallen from their canoe and been drowned. The latter, after four days' confinement in a dark cell at Taio-haie—the extremest torture to which the superstitious Marquesan may be subjected—confessed that they had killed Teona during a coconut wine debauch, and after cutting off his hands and eating them, had weighted the body with stones and dropped it out to sea. They were given the extreme penalty—two weeks' confinement in the dark, to be followed by a year of weed-cutting on the village street. One died of hysteria before the first week was out, and the other, at the end of ten days, killed himself by gashing his wrist on a jagged corner of the sheet iron wall of his prison.
The Marquesan's terror of the dark is so extreme that it is not a rare thing for men, women and children to die of fright during eclipses. In view of this, there seems some ground for the contention that the French practice of confining convicted, and occasionally suspected, murderers and cannibals in windowless sheet iron cells is scarcely less barbarous than the crimes for which punishment is being meted out.
The great cannibal feast grounds of Nukahiva and Hiva-oa are not only not used at the present time, but are even so strictly tabu that no native can be found who will venture within their forbidden confines. Stevenson writes of visiting the Hatiheu "high-place" in company with a French priest and a native boy; but on the occasion of our visit we held out every conceivable inducement in an endeavour to secure native guides to the same feast-ground, and quite in vain. Not even among the converts of the Catholic fathers could be found one who held the tabu lightly enough to dare to violate it. The best we could do was to persuade several of them to accompany us to the line of the tabu, and there to await our return, while we went over the ruins with McGrath. The following description is from notes taken by Claribel on this occasion, and subsequently amplified under the direction of McGrath, who, in the fifteen years he has maintained a trading store at Hatiheu, has missed no opportunity to push enquiries amongst the older natives regarding what is unquestionably the most interesting ruin of its kind in the South Pacific:
"On the seaward side of a spur of the mountain a level space, oval in general shape, had been partly excavated, partly built up, so that there was a smooth floor about 300 feet long by 200 feet wide. In a semi-circle, with the chief's house in the centre, were the little 'feast-houses' of the court dignitaries and the special guests. Beneath the posts of each house excavations have disclosed a number of human bones which bear witness to the sacrifice which accompanied the setting of every pillar. In these little booths the guests remained during the feasts, some of which, when food was plenty or some especially great event was to be celebrated, lasted over a week. Each guest brought some contribution to the feast, and when it was over he was privileged to gather up and carry home any fragments that he liked.
"The 'dining-room' was the space in front of the houses, and there, spread on the huge leaves of the banana and taro, the feast was laid. Meat was handled with big four-tined forks of wood; poi and other soft dishes in calabashes of coco shell and shallow wooden platters. The drinking cups, in which were served a fiery wine made from the juice of the tender shoots of the coconut, were the hollow shells of nuts. The food, in addition to human flesh or 'long-pig,' included the meat of the wild cattle, goats and pigs, roasted, boiled, fried and salted raw, and served with miti-hari, a most piquant sauce still in use and which is composed of a mixture of lime juice and the pressed-out milk of grated coconuts. Bananas and plantains, cooked and uncooked, were served; also taro in balls which looked like mud and tasted like sago and brown sugar; breadfruit, avocados, seaweed, squid, prawns and shrimps and an endless variety of indigenous tropical fruits.
"The general plan of the place was, roughly, as follows: Beginning at the right and running in a seaward direction, there was first the private stairway for an official who might be designated as the Captain of the Guard, a curving four-foot passage, the steps of which were cut into the earth and faced with stones. This stairway led up to the box where the Captain presided during the festivities, and was for his private use. Next came the main approach to the feast level, a stairway two paces in width, terminating between two round towers in which soldiers with clubs were stationed to welcome bona fide guests and intercept intruders. A functionary who stood at the head of the stairs greeted each guest on his arrival with a loud shout of welcome and a blast from a pao or conch trumpet, announcing him immediately afterwards to the company with a flowery recital of his personal career.
"Farther on was the stairway for the cooks, provision bearers and the human victims. This led to the 'kitchen,' where the firestones and chopping blocks were located. The firestones lined a circular depression in the earth, and after this had been thoroughly heated, the meat and fruit, all wrapped in ti leaves, were laid sociably together to cook. The blackened stones of this old cannibal oven are still in place, and a half-hour's work with an ax and cutlass would put it in shape for service.
The best surviving example of Marquesan tattooing
"Into it were thrown the bones of the victims after
the feast was over"
"Back of the kitchen was the 'larder,' a round, deep hole where the 'long-pig' was kept until ready for the oven. Directly over the mouth of this hole, and about forty feet above it, was the horizontally projecting limb of the sacred banyan, the only tree, by the way, which was permitted to grow within the walls. Over this limb hung a stout rope braided of the fibrous bark of the hau tree. When the call for more meat came from the 'kitchen,' the noosed end of this rope was lowered over the head of the victim next in order, and he was pushed over the brink of the hole, the fall usually breaking his neck. Dismemberment, according to prescribed rules, followed, the choice bits, such as the hands and eyes and ears, being laid aside for the chiefs.
"Beyond the oven, and not far from the chief's house, was what might be called the 'bone-hole,' a rock-lined, well-like sort of an affair about nine feet in diameter and twenty feet deep. Into it were thrown the bones of the victims after the feast was over, and above these gruesome remnants the priests performed certain ceremonies calculated to protect the living from the spirits of the outraged dead. Cutting around the rim of this hole with our cutlasses, we managed, after an hour of tugging and hauling, to dislodge and remove a great mass of creepers, disclosing a huge pile of human bones. A couple of pieces of mahogany, which must have been taken from some ship, were lying near the top of the heap, and led us to wonder how many of the bones mouldering in the pile beneath were those of white men.
"After the keen edges of their appetites had worn off, the feasters adjourned to the 'dance hall,' a rectangular subterranean chamber of about thirty by fifty feet. The most of this great room was a natural cave which pierced the mountain immediately under the feast ground, but to seaward a considerable extension of masonry had been added to give more space. The latter had been destroyed in a freshet and hurricane which occurred about two years previous to our visit, but the cave portion was still in a fair state of preservation. This had been roughly squared with walls of fitted boulders, and off from it opened numerous little retiring rooms which connected with private stairways with the group of guest-houses above. The floor of this chamber was covered with a cement made of coral lime and a puttylike clay, and still remains as smooth and hard as concrete.