Islands and Adventures—What about the Missionary?—The Lotus Eaters—How to hunt the Robber-Crab—The Ship that would not sail—Proper Place of a Passenger—One Way to get wrecked—The Pirate and the Pearls.

MAUKE, Manuwai, and Takutea still remained to be seen, before the Duchess could spread her wings for Raratonga again. We sailed from one to another in the course of a few days. There was no hurry, and a day wasted here or there troubled none of us.

Sometimes the “trades,” which are very fickle about here, came up and caught our towering canvas in a cool embrace; then the great hollows of the sails hummed with the music that the ocean wanderer loves, and the Duchess skimmed the rolling blue hills like a flying-fish. Sometimes the wind fell, and the booms swung and creaked lazily above the burning deck; then we trolled for albacore and bonito, shrieking with savage joy when our bit of long-desired fresh food came flapping and fighting over the rail; or we watched the crew hook devil-faced grey sharks, which, “took charge” of the deck when captured, hitting terrible blows with their tails, and snapping stout ropes with their savage teeth; or we got out boats, and rowed them for miles between the double furnaces of the blazing sun and the glowing sea, coming back to the ship scorched into cinders, stiff with exertion, but happy. At night the Southern Cross burned white in the velvet sky, and the coral rocks about the lagoons showed in shimmering pale blue underneath fifty feet or more of clear, moonlit water. Lying on the poop, like seals on sand, the little knot of passengers, captain, and mate, “yarned” for hour after hour—strange, wild tales of frontier life in new lands; of adventures in unknown seas; of fights, and more fights, and fights yet again—literature in the rough, a very gallery of vivid pictures wasted unseen... and yet, what should any man who had the rich reality care about its pale shadow, Story? “Do you care much for reading?” “Well, no,” answers the bare-footed officer lying with his head in a coil of rope; “books aren’t very interesting, are they?”

I, watching the mizzen truck swing among the stars, look back over the long, long trail—long both in distance and in time—that separates this small heaving deck in the midst of the tropic seas from the rush of the wintry Strand, Nights in islands of ill reputation, when I slept with “one eye open” and one hand within touch of my revolver (for there are incidents of my wanderings that I have not told, and only those who know the Eastern Pacific may guess at them); days when only a fifty-to-one chance kept the little schooner from piling her bones on a spouting coral reef in mid-ocean—rough fare, hard lodging, and long fatigue, sometimes, all to be “eaten as helped,” without comment or complaint, for that is the rule of island life—the pungent taste of danger, now and then, gratefully slaking some deep, half-conscious thirst derived from fiercer centuries; the sight of many lands and many peoples—these, and other pictures, painted themselves among the little gold stars swept by the rocking masts, as I lay^ remembering. I thought of the pile of untouched “shockers” in my cabin; of grey London and its pyramids of books and armies of writers; of the mirror that they hold up to life, and the “magic web of colours gay” they weave, always looking, like the Lady of Shalott, in the mirror, and seldom joining the merry rout outside, where no one cares a pin for coloured tapestries, and looking-glasses are left to half-grown girls. No, truly; “books are not interesting,” when you can have life instead.

Upon which some one proposed “Consequences” in the cabin, and I made haste to climb down.

Another day, gold and blue as are almost all the days of the “winter” season, and another island, burning white and blazing green, and another tumbling reef to jump, with the help of a powerful boat-holder, who stands in the midst of the surf, and drags the dinghy forward at the right moment. This is Mauke: we are getting on with the group, and begin to realise that some time or other, even in these timeless regions, will actually see us back at Raratonga.

Mauke proves to be a pretty little place, some six miles in circumference, “low” in type, but park-like and gardenlike and dainty enough to wake covetous desires in the heart of almost any traveller. It has the finest oranges in the group—growing completely wild—and we are greeted on the shore by the usual crowd of flower-wreathed natives, bearing splendid branches of rich yellow fruit, which they present to every one with eager generosity. There are only three hundred and seventy natives in the island, and much of the land lies waste, though it is exceedingly fertile. The Mauke folk take things easy on the whole, and are not keen on trading. They export some oranges, some copra, a few bunches of dried bananas, and they buy a fair amount of cotton cloth, and shirts, and cutlery, from the white trader’s store. But no one, so far, has grown fat on what Mauke makes or buys.

There were, at the time of my visit, only one or two whites in the place. The greater portion of the land available for planting lay unused. Probable rents, on long leases, were quoted to me as a shilling or so an acre.

The call at Mauke was short, and I saw little of the island. The natives insisted, however, that I should come up to the village and look at their church, of which they are very proud, so I headed the inevitable procession through the orange and lime and guava groves, to the little group of houses, partly thatch and reed, partly whitewashed concrete, that made up the settlement. The church was, of course, much the least interesting thing in the island. South Sea churches, with one or two happy exceptions, are blots in a world of beauty, monuments of bad taste, extravagance, and folly, that do very little credit to the religions they represent. In the days when most of them were built, the one idea of the missionary was the assimilation of the native to white men’s ways and customs, as far as was possible, by any means conceivable—wise, or otherwise. In building churches for the new converts, the pattern followed was that set by Europeans for use in a cold climate, on sites that had a distinct money value per yard. Consequently, while South Sea houses, for coolness, are made almost all window and door, or else built, native fashion, in such a way that the air blows through the walls, South Sea churches are almost without ventilation, and (because the style of architecture selected is that of the whitewashed barn description) quite without beauty of any kind. In most cases, they have cost the islands appalling sums to build, and continue to demand a good deal to keep them in repair. There are happy exceptions here and there. Niué, of which place I have more to say later on, possesses a church built with exquisite taste and perfect regard to convenience, and the Catholic cathedral in Samoa is designed with much consideration as to climate, and appearance as well.

Mauke’s church, however, is not one of the exceptions, being exceedingly bald and ugly, and it is furthermore disfigured by the most horrible lapse of taste to be seen in almost any island church—the decoration of the pulpit and communion rails with silver dollars nailed on in rows. I told the crowd of natives, eager to hear the praises of their wonderful church, that I had never seen anything like it in my life—which seemed to afford them much gratification. I did not add what I thought—that I sincerely hoped I might never see anything like it again.

A statement made only once or twice is fairly sure to miss the observation of the average reader, so I make no apology for saying here, as I have said in other parts of this book, that I am not one of those people who are opposed to mission work, or indifferent to religion; neither am I inclined to minimise the effects of the work done by missionaries in converting and civilising the Pacific generally. That the missionaries are infallible and always wise, however, in their methods of dealing with the natives, I do deny—which is only equivalent to saying that they are human, like the people at home. Nor do I think that, in these days, the missionary who takes up work in the Southern and Eastern Pacific has any need to wear the martyr aureole which is so persistently fitted on to the heads of all who go to “labour” in the island world. We are not in the days of Cook: cannibalism, over most of the Pacific, is dead and forgotten, violence to white people of any kind is unheard of, the climates are usually excellent, the islands beautiful, fertile, and happy, and the missionary’s work is much the same as that of any country clergyman at home, save for the fact that his congregation are infinitely more submissive than whites would be, and incline to regard their teacher as a sovereign, not only spiritual, but temporal. The mission house is always much the finest building on the island, and the best furnished and provided. The missionary’s children are usually sent away to be educated at good home or colonial boarding schools, and afterwards return to take up their parents’ work, or possibly to settle in the islands in other capacities. The life, though busy, is devoid of all stress and strain, and there is no apparent difficulty in “making both ends meet”—and overlap. In the Southern and Eastern Pacific, the missionaries are conveyed from group to group in a mission steamer that is little inferior to the yacht of a millionaire, for comfort and elegance. They are constantly assisted by gifts of all kinds, and treated with consideration wherever they go, and in most cases enjoy a social position much better than that originally possessed at home. It is hard to see why a profession, which is so pleasant and profitable, should be exalted over the work of thousands of struggling pastors and clergymen at home, who too often know the pinch of actual want, and are in many cases obliged to lead lives of the greyest and narrowest monotony.

What is the moral? That one should not give money to missions? Certainly not. But if I were a millionaire, and had thousands to give in such a cause, I would give them carefully, with inquiry, directed to more sources than one, and would distribute them so that they should be used, if possible, in adding to the numbers of the Christian Church, rather than in teaching geography and English grammar and dressmaking to amiable brown people who are, and have been for generations, a good deal more Christian than ninety in a hundred whites. I believe firmly that most of the older missions in the Pacific could be continued perfectly well with the aid of native teachers, at one-twentieth the present cost—much as the teaching of outlying far-away islands, where residence is unpleasant for white families, is carried on to-day, with the aid of a yearly visit or so. That the present system will ever be modified, however, I do not believe. The reasons for such a conclusion are too obvious to need discussion.

I have wandered a good way from the church at Mauke. But there are many points on this subject of island missions, nevertheless, on which I have not touched.

Some of the men of Mauke were very busy on the shore, when our party passed down again to the boat. They made a bright picture, in their gay pareos of scarlet and yellow, and the snowy coronets of scented island flowers that they had twined about their heads. But the most picturesque thing about them was their occupation, which was neither more nor less than sand-castle building! There they sat, those big grown men, with never a child among them to make excuse for their play, building up churches and houses of the milk-white coral sand, scooping dark windows in the edifices, training green creepers up them, and planting out odd little gardens of branching coral twigs off the reef, in the surrounding pleasances. They had bundles of good things tied up in green leaves, lying somewhere in the shade of the guava bushes, and they had brought a pile of husked cocoanuts down to the shore with them, to drink when they pleased. They may have been waiting for a native boat, or they may have been simply making a day of it. In any case, they were sublimely happy.

(Cold rain on the miry road; faint gold sunset fading to stormy grey; wet leaves a-shiver in the dusk—and the long, long way before the tired feet. A day of toil, a comfortless night. A handful of coppers in the pocket; food and fire that must be bought with silver; freedom, rest, enjoyment, that cost unattainable gold. The sacred right of labour; a white man’s freedom. O, brown half-naked islanders, playing at sand-castles on your sun-bathed shore, with unbought food lying among the unpurchased fruits beside you, what would you give to be one of the master race?)

Takutea we did not call at, since it was uninhabited, but the Duchess, under her daring little pirate of a captain, made no bones about running as close to anything, anywhere, as her passengers might desire, so we saw the fascinating place at fairly close quarters. In 1904, when I saw it, it was a real “desolate island,” being twelve miles out in the open sea from the nearest land (Atiu), and totally uninhabited. Its extent is four or five hundred acres; it is thickly wooded with cocoanuts-, and has a good spring of water. The beautiful “bo’sun bird,” whose long red and white tail feathers have a considerable commercial value, is common on the island. No one had visited it for a long time when we sailed by; the wide white beach was empty, the cocoanut palms dropped their nuts unheeded into earth that received them gladly, and set them forth again in fountain-like sprays of green. The surf crumbled softly on the irregular fringing reef; the ripples of the lagoon laid their ridgy footsteps along the empty strand, and no Man Friday came to trample them out-with a step of awful significance. I wanted Takutea very badly indeed, all for myself; but I shall not have it now, neither will the reader, for some one else has bought it, and it is to be turned into a cocoanut plantation.

Manuwai, better known as Hervey Island, is not many miles away, but we took a day or more to reach it, partly because the winds were contrary, partly because (with apologies to the Admiralty Surveys) it was wrongly charted, and could not be found, at first, in a slight sea-fog. Manuwai has changed its ownership and its use, of late, but in 1904 it was a penal settlement and a copra plantation combined, being used as a place of punishment for sinful Cook Islanders, who were compulsorily let out as labourers to the Company renting the two islets of which this so-called group is composed.

The islands between them cover about fifteen hundred acres, according to the estimate given me. They have no permanent inhabitants, and when first taken up for planting, were quite desolate of life. A far-away, melancholy little place looked Manuwai, under the rays of the declining sun, as we came up to the reef. The two low islands, with their thick pluming of palms, are enclosed in the same lagoon, sheltered by a reef of oval form. There were a couple of drying-huts on the beach, and some heaps of oily smelling copra, when our boat pulled in. About twenty men, some convicts, some hired labourers, were gathered on the shore, fairly dancing with excitement, and the rest of the population—one white overseer, and one half-caste—were waiting on the very edge of the water, hardly less agitated. No ships ever called except the Duchess, and she was long overdue.

I stepped on shore, and was immediately shaken hands with, and congratulated on being the first white woman to set foot on the island. Then we all went for a walk, while the native crew fell into the arms of the labourers, and with cries of joy began exchanging gossip, tobacco, hats, and shirts, bartering oranges from the ship for cocoanut crabs from the island, and eagerly discussing the question of who was going home in the Duchess, and who would have to stop over till her next call, perhaps six months hence.

Manuwai is not one of the most beautiful of the islands, but anything in the way of solid ground was welcome after the gymnastics of the too-lively Duchess. The cocoa-nut plantations, and the new clearings, where the bush was being burned away, interested the officials from Raratonga, and the “boulevard” planted by the overseer—a handsome double row of palms, composing an avenue that facetiously began in nothing, and led to nowhere, received due admiration. We heard a good deal about the depredations of the cocoanut crabs, and as these creatures are among the strangest things that ever furnished food for travellers’ tales, I shall give their history as I gathered it, both in Manuwai and other places.

One must not, by the way, believe all that one hears, or even half, among the “sunny isles of Eden.” Flowers of the imagination flourish quite as freely as flowers and fruits of the earth, and are much less satisfactory in kind. Also, it is a recognised sport to “spin yarns” to a newcomer, with the pious object of seeing how much he—or she—will swallow; and where so much is strange, bizarre, and almost incredible, among undoubted facts, it is hard to sift out the fictions of the playful resident.

However, the cocoanut crab is an undeniable fact, with which many a planter has had to wrestle, much to his loss. It must be confessed that I had expected something very exciting indeed, when I heard in Tahiti that cocoanut or robber crabs were still to be found in some parts of the Cook Group. One of the most grisly bugbears of my youth had been the descriptions of the terrible cocoanut crab that attacked the “Swiss Family Robinson” on their wonderful island. It was described, if my memory serves me, as “about the size of a turtle.” and was dark blue in colour; it descended rapidly backwards down a tree, and immediately went to the attack of a Robinson youth, who repulsed it at the peril of his life.... On the whole, I thought it would make things interesting, if it really was in the Cook Group.

I never was more disappointed in my life than when I really saw one. It was dead, and cured in formalin, and only brought down from an island house as a show, but that was not the trouble. It was not more than two and a half feet long, lobster tail and all; it was not in the least like a turtle, and any small boy armed with a good stick could have faced it without fear, at its worst. No, decidedly the terrible crab was not up to the travellers’ tales that had been told about it.

Still, it was worth seeing, for it was like nothing on the earth or in the sea that I had ever encountered. It had been excellently preserved, and looked wonderfully alive, when laid on the sand at the foot of a cocoanut palm. Its colour, as in life, was a gay mixture of red and blue. It had a long body like a colossal lobster, and two claws, one slight and thin, the other big enough to crack the ankle-bone of a man. It was an ugly and a wicked-looking thing, and I was not surprised to hear that it fights fiercely, if caught away from its hole, sitting up and threatening man or beast with its formidable claw, and showing no fear whatever.

In the daylight, however, it is very seldom seen abroad. We walked through groves that were riddled with its holes that afternoon, but never even heard the scuffle of a claw. The creature lives in rabbit-like burrows at the foot of palm-trees, and the natives can always tell the size of the inmate by a glance at the diameter of the hole by which it enters its burrow. At night it comes out, climbs the nearest palm, and gets in among the raffle of young and old leaves, fibre, stalks, and nuts, in the crown, there it selects a good nut, nips the stalk in two with its claw, and lets the booty drop with a thump to the earth, seventy or eighty feel below. Then the marauder backs cautiously down the tree, finds the nut, and proceeds to rip and rend the tough husk until the nut as we know it at home is laid bare. A cocoanut shell is no easy thing to crack, as most people know, but the robber crab with its huge claws makes nothing more of it than we should make of an egg, and in a minute the rich oily meat is at the mercy of the thief, and another fraction of a ton of copra is lost to the planter. It goes without saying that any stray nuts lying on the ground have been opened and destroyed, before the crab will trouble itself to climb.

Cocoanut crab is very good eating, and as it is mostly found in barren coral islands where little or nothing will grow but palms, the natives are always keen on hunting the “robber.” Sometimes he is secured by thrusting a lighted torch down a hole which possesses two exits—the crab hurrying out at the unopposed side as soon as the flame invades his dwelling. Sometimes the islanders secure him by the simple process of feeling for him in his burrow, and stabbing him at the end of it with a knife. This is decidedly risky, however, and may result in a smashed hand or wrist for the invader. A favourite plan is the following: Slip out in the dark, barefoot and silent, and hide yourself in a cocoanut grove till you see or hear a crab making his way up a tree. Wait till he is up at the top, and then climb half-way up, and tie a band of grass round the trunk. Now hurry down and pile a heap of rough coral stones from the beach at the foot of the tree. Slip away into the shadow again, and wait. The crab will start to come down presently, backing carefully, tail first, for he has a bare and unprotected end to his armoured body, and uses it to inform himself of his arrival on the safe ground below. Half-way down the tree he touches your cunning band of grass. “Down so soon?” he remarks to himself, and lets go. Crack! he has shot down forty feet through air, and landed smashingly on the pile of stones that you carefully prepared for his reception.

He is badly injured, ten to one, and you will have little trouble in finishing him off with your knife, and carrying home a savoury supper that is well worth the’ waiting for. That is the native way of hunting robber crabs.

When one lives on a cocoanut plantation, on an island that contains practically nothing else, one comes in time to know everything that is to be known about cocoanuts in general. But even the manager of Manuwai could not solve for me a problem that had been perplexing me ever since I had first seen a cocoanut palm—a problem, indeed, that after several more years of island travel, remains unanswered yet.

Why is no one ever killed by a cocoanut?

The question seems an idle one, if one thinks of cocoa-nuts as they are seen in British shops—small brown ovals of little weight or size—and if one has never seen them growing, or heard them fall. But when one knows that, the smallest nuts alone reach England (since they are sold by number, not by weight) and that the ordinary nut, in its husk and on its native tree, is as big as one’s own head, and as heavy as a solid lump of hard wood—that most trees bear seventy or eighty nuts a year, and that every one of those nuts has the height of a four-storey house to drop before it reaches the ground—that native houses are usually placed in the middle of a palm grove, and that every one in the islands, brown or white, walks underneath hundreds of laden cocoanut trees every day in the year—it then becomes a miracle of the largest kind that no one is ever killed, and very rarely injured, by the fall of the nuts. Nor can the reason be sought in the fact that the nuts cannot hurt. One is sure to see them fall from time to time, and they shoot down from the crown of the palm like flying bomb-shells, making a most portentous thump as they reach the earth. So extremely rare are accidents, however, that in nearly three years I did not hear of any mishap, past or present, save the single case of a man who was struck by a falling nut in the Cook Islands, and knocked insensible for an hour or two. This is certainly not a bad record for a tour extending over so many thousand miles, and including most of the important island groups—every one of which grows cocoanut palms by the thousand, in some cases, by the hundred thousand.

Travellers are often a little nervous at first, when riding or walking all day long through woods of palm, heavily laden with ponderous nuts. But the feeling never lasts more than a few days. One does not know why one is never hit by these cannon-balls of Nature—but one never is, neither is anybody else, so all uneasiness dies out very quickly, and one acquiesces placidly in the universal miracle.

Planters say that most of the nuts fall at night, when the dew has relaxed the fibres of the stalks. This would be an excellent reason, but for the fact that the nuts don’t fall any more at night than in the daytime, if one takes the trouble to observe, and that damp, or dew, tightens up fibres of all kind, instead of relaxing them. If one asks the natives, the usual answer is: “It just happens that way”; and I fancy that is as near as any............