Two bells tinkles within the master’s cabin, and the quartermaster on the bridge repeats the announcement of nine o’clock with two strokes upon the bronze bell near his station at the wheel. It is sailing-time. The townspeople have turned out en masse to bid us farewell, and the open spaces on the new concrete wharf are ablaze with color. The chatter of a thousand voices comes to us as we stand upon the deck looking down on the scene. Every one seems happy. The great whistle on the ship’s funnel, after a preliminary gargling of its throat, shatters the tranquil air with a peremptory warning. The screw churns up a ma?lstrom beneath the overhanging stern, and we swing out into the channel amid a storm of adieus spoken in a 4dozen tongues. We are off for the land of the cannibal Kia Kias,—the Isle of Vanishing Men.
As the ship gathers way, Amboina, spice-scented “Ambon,” drops into the mists of the morning and we look around the deck for company. We are alone. Then we remember the information given us by the First Officer yesterday. We are the only first-cabin passengers on board, this trip. Few people find their way to the Isle of Vanishing Men. It offers little to the business man. The commercial traveler never goes there. Merauke, our destination, has but five white inhabitants, and their wants are few. One steamer a month carries to them the things they need and the mail from home.
We shall spend our time for the next few days in lazy languor, playing an occasional game of chess with the chief engineer, chatting now and then with the very amiable captain, or, as one learns to do in the Indies, just draping ourselves over most comfortable steamer chairs and daydreaming for hours on end. The air is like silk. The piping falsetto of the deck-hands as they sing at their work lulls one into reverie, and life 5glides by with a smoothness that takes no count of time.
There comes the day when the captain greets us at breakfast with the news that we shall arrive this evening. As he selects from the heaped platter of sliced sausage his favorite variety he tells us that we shall sight land at one this afternoon. We are agog with excitement. The cannibals are not far away now. We ply him with questions and as he spreads his bread with marmalade he tells us of the Kia Kias and what their name means. To be kikied, he avers, is to be eaten; the natives are eaters of men; hence the name.
He regales us with reminiscences of his former visits to the island and roars with merriment as he relates how on one voyage a few months ago he was accompanied by his wife. The natives thronged the little wharf, clad in their birthday suits, to witness the arrival of the ship. Some of them were allowed on board, where they were awed by the marvels of the white man’s great proa. The captain’s wife was 6the first white woman they had ever seen, and one of the natives—a son of a chief, by the way,—became enamored of her. He immediately offered the captain two fine pigs for her. The captain refused the offer, saying it was not enough. The man withdrew, his brow wrinkled with deep thought. He left the ship and was lost in the throng that strained the underpinning of the little wharf. Two hours later he returned, accompanied by several of his friends. Each of these carried a pig trussed up with rattan hobbles. He had sold his wife and three daughters for five pigs and was raising his ante, so the captain’s story ran, and was much put out when he learned that the price offered was still inadequate.
The lady in question was the object of so much attention from the well-meaning if somewhat amorous natives that she found it expedient to retire to the privacy of her husband’s cabin, whence she was able unseen to observe the visitors.
The little saloon in which we breakfast overlooks 7the main deck and the men there are making ready the winches and rigging preparatory to the unloading of cargo manifested for Merauke. Their work interrupts the captain in his narrative, for the rumbling remonstrances of the rusty machines make the morning hideous. We hasten to the upper deck, where after doing our customary half-mile constitutional we busy ourselves with the packing of our dunnage.
This will take us an hour and we look forward to a comfortable snooze before tiffin. By that time, or shortly after, the coast-line of New Guinea will have risen to view out of a murky horizon in the northeast. There is nothing to do until then. Our letters to those at home will not be written until the very last moment before the steamer sails, for we shall want to describe Merauke in them. It will be two months before the steamer calls again. In those two months we shall have visited the tribes living far from the little trading-station of Merauke and its very friendly population of five whites, many Chinese, 8a few Malays, and a hundred or so Kia Kias. The missionaries have brought these last from the interior and they live outside the town in kampongs or villages, the nearest of which is an hour’s walk from the dock.
The chief engineer—who, by the way, is a real character and something of a philosopher—disarranges our plans for forty winks. He has spent about forty-three years on the ships that ply the waters of the Indies, and has many tales to tell; for he loves to relive his earlier days, when the native girls were more beautiful to him than now. With the on-march of years the enervating climate and the demoralizing life of the kampongs have exacted a toll, and the overdrafts he made in those never-to-be-forgotten times have been collected in full by the Bank of Nature.
The old roué boasts of his conquests among the golden-skinned vahines of the Southern Islands and tells us now with shocking candor of the doubtful virtues of Nasia, an old flame of his who lived in Ambon. He sees her now 9and then in Saparoea, where she is the reputable wife of a half-caste government employee. To the native, marriage means that respectable status which permits of clandestine meetings with the wife, censured only by the husband. All others aid and abet the liaison, for does it not furnish delightful gossip in an otherwise somnolent community? He tells of a night when he and his chief (he was second engineer then) went in company with some others to a kampong back of Dobo in the Arus and proceeded to kiss all the girls in sight. The girls must have taken kindly to the demonstration, for they unearthed “square-face” gin in plenty and with dances and what not regaled the white Tuans (masters) until the east turned from violet to rose.
We cannot find it in our hearts to censure the chief, for the “custom of the country” has made its insidious way deep into his soul and has warped his point of view. One has to spend much time in the Indies fully to appreciate how this can be. Here life is stripped of many 10superfluities and conventions and love of life and of love become paramount factors. He shakes his head at what he calls our “Long Hair” ideas and tells us we should have brought with us two girls from Ambon, to keep house for us while we are in New Guinea. The Ambonese girls, he tells us, are much more comely than the Kia Kia girls.
“Wait till you see Reache’s girl in Merauke,” he says; “or the Controlleur’s up the coast,—Nona is her name. She came from Ambon. She is nineteen and as saucy a little trinket as you’d ever want to see.” Thereupon the chief laughs immoderately.
Seeking further information on the subject, we question him regarding certain eventualities had we made “temporary” matrimonial arrangements such as he recommends, and he waves a deprecating hand at us.
“Don’t worry about that,” he says. “When you get ready to leave ’em give ’em a new sarong, a little money, a ticket home, and they’ll bless you forever and maybe cry a little into the 11bargain because they hate to lose a good thing. In a week or two, though, they will be deep in a new affair and they’ll forget. Don’t let them fall in love, though, or they might get nasty. Best way is to tell ’em you’re going about ten minutes before you leave. It saves a lot of powwow an’ palaver. Otherwise it’ll cost you twice as much to save your face.”
The chiming of eight bells closes the engineer’s dissertation, as he stands watch until four in the afternoon. He leaves us reluctantly, for he regards us as babes in the woods who need much assistance and advice in this very interesting but usually taboo subject. Mayhap he is right, but, as the Englishman says, “We’ll muddle through somehow.” Somehow we can’t quite divest ourselves of our “old-fashioned” ideas.
While we talk over the chief’s code of morals, we wonder about many things. The sort of life he has led has been led by many white men, for four hundred years, in the Indies and every one seems happy and contented. True, there are 12many brown-skinned people with blue eyes and just as many fair-skinned ones with warm, dancing eyes of sloe black, but on the lips of each and every one of these there is a smile. They seem to know no trouble. The warm air makes us drowsy. Tiffin isn’t till one-thirty: why not take that snooze we planned for?