YOU will not find Ahu Ahu—under that name—on any chart, and it would be equally useless to search for Nukutere; yet both islands exist, and I like their ancient names better than the modern ones. Glance at your maps and you will see the eastern Pacific dotted with islands bearing names like Jarvis, Malden, and Starbuck—names which suggest no more than the thought of some wandering skipper, immortalizing himself by adding new dangers to the chart. Then think of Nukutere—the immemorial name of an island known wherever the old Polynesians gathered to tell their tales; Nukutere: The Object of the War Fleet\'s Voyage ... it needs a dull imagination not to feel a stir.

It was on Nukutere that I found that curious fellow, Tari, at home. Friends often smile at my passion for wild fowl, yet I owe this peaceful adventure entirely to a duck. For several days I had been awaiting a chance to photograph the sky line of the island, and when, one afternoon, the clouds about the peaks dispersed, I put my camera into a small outrigger canoe and paddled down the lagoon, on the lookout for the viewpoint of greatest beauty. I had gone a number of 252 miles and the sun was low when I found the view I wanted; though the silhouette of Nukutere was clear-cut, there were clouds in the west and the light was not strong enough for an instantaneous picture. The lagoon is narrow at this point; there was nothing to do but paddle out to the reef and set up my tripod in the shallow wash of the sea. In this manner I made ten exposures—pretty things they must have been, with the long evening shadows, the foreshore of dark bush beyond the water, the high profile of peaks and jagged ridges against the sky.

I folded the steel tripod and stowed the camera in its case; just as I pushed off to paddle back to the village I heard the whimper of a duck\'s wings in leisurely flight. I have a very fair acquaintance with the ducks of the northern hemisphere, which winter in considerable numbers in Hawaii and occasionally drift down as far as Penrhyn Island, nine degrees south of the equator; but though it must be well known in scientific quarters, the odd nonmigratory duck of the South Seas is a puzzle to me. It is an unsocial bird, this Polynesian cousin of the mallard; a lover of solitude, a haunter of thick woods and lonely valleys; though I have seen them many times in the distance, I have been unable to obtain a specimen so far. I used to wonder how they survived the swarms of bloodthirsty island rats until a friend wrote me from the Cook group: "On top of the razor-back ridge behind the plantation, the dogs put up a duck almost under our feet. I found the nest well hidden in the fern—a beautifully constructed affair, edged with a coaming of down, curled inward. There were eight eggs, standing on end and arranged to occupy the least 253 possible space. When the ducklings appear the old bird must carry them down one at a time—a thousand feet or more—to the swampy feeding grounds."

I could tell by the sound of its wings that the duck approaching me over the lagoon was closer than any I had seen; in my eagerness for a glimpse I forgot all about cameras and canoes. I flung myself around to look, intent and open-mouthed. Next moment the outrigger heaved up with the speed of a rolling porpoise, described a flashing arc through the air, and smacked heavily into the water closing over my head. It was a fast bit of comedy. The coral anchor and my tripod went to the bottom; I caught the camera instinctively and rose, sputtering, to the surface, where I managed to balance it on the flat bottom of the canoe. Then, as the water was not deep, and I had on nothing but a singlet and a pareu, I swam down to get the tripod, and started for shore, pushing the canoe before me. Ahead on the beach two girls and a boy were dancing and rolling in the sand; as the water left my ears I could hear their screams of joy. For the moment I found myself unable to join in the mirth. My thoughts dwelt on cameras and on a story I had heard the night before—how a fisherman, not far from where I was, had felt a tug at his waist as he swam with face submerged, watching the bottom, and turned to see a shark of imposing size nip off the largest fish on his string.

The closer sight of me seemed to redouble the appreciation of my audience, but it was not until I was splashing in the shallows that I was able to smile. Then I saw that the elder of the girls was Apakura, the wife of Tari. She had been washing clothes at the 254 mouth of a little stream and came forward, bare-armed and smiling maliciously, to greet me.

"Ah, you have come to bathe in the sea," she said, as I took her hand, and at this enormous joke all three fell into such a convulsion of laughter that they were obliged to sink down on the sand once more. When she had caught her breath she turned to call her husband: "E Tari! E Tari e! Aere mai ikonei!" A moment later he stepped out of the bush, rubbing from his eyes the sleep of an afternoon nap, and I was shaking his hand.

I know Tari rather well, and have spent a good deal of time within a few miles of where he lives, yet I had been in his house only once before. This is characteristic of the islands. There is an agreeable indifference about the relations of white men down here, a careless friendliness I find pleasanter than the more strained and effusive sociality of civilized places. In every part of the world, of course, this tranquil simplicity—the essence of the finest manner—is to be found among the few who have studied the art of living, but the average one of us is neither sure enough of himself nor sufficiently indifferent to the opinion of others; handicapped by an abnormal sense of obligation, we permit ourselves both to bore and to be bored. In certain respects the native is a very well-bred man; perhaps the white intruder has caught something of his manner—or it may be that distance from home brings life into a truer focus; in any case, one deals with the white man of the islands without consciousness of an effort either to entertain or to impress. When you stop at the house of a strange planter he will offer you a whisky-and-soda—if you refuse, nothing more 255 will be said of the matter. At home, with a parching throat, it is quite conceivable that you might tell your chance host not to bother, looking forward with hopeful hypocrisy to his persuasion and your own inevitable acceptance. I think I liked Tari the better for not having asked me to his house; now that hazard had brought me to the door, he made me feel that I was really welcome.

The house was set on a little rise of land, with a view of the lagoon at the end of an avenue of tall coconut palms. The broad veranda, set with steamer chairs and scarlet-bordered Aitutaki mats, gave on a garden of small flowering trees—"Frangipani," "Tiare Tahiti," "Maid of Moorea," "Queen of the Night." Tari showed me to a corner room, and mixed a rum punch while his wife put buttons on a fresh suit of drill.

Dressed in his clothes, I strolled into the living room to wait while he was changing for dinner. The place was large, and one might have spent hours examining the things it contained—the fruit of twenty years in the South Seas. There were wreaths of bright-colored shell—the favorite parting gift of the islands—from the Paumotus, from Raiatea, from Aitutaki, and Mangaias. There were fans from Manihiki, woven in patterns of dyed pandanus, and Savage Island fans, decorated with human hair. Ranged on a series of shelves, I found a notable collection of penus—the taro-mashers of eastern Polynesia, implements in which the culture of each group expresses itself. I was able to recognize the pestle of Mangaia, eight-sided and carved with almost geometrical perfection from a stalactite of pink lime; the Marquesan penu 256 of dark volcanic stone with its curious phallic handle; the implement of old Tahiti, gracefully designed and smoothly finished by a people far removed from savagery; the rare and beautiful penu of Maupiti—unobtainable to-day—perfect as though turned on a lathe, and adorned with a fantastic handle of ancient and forgotten significance. Mother-of-pearl bonito hooks from a dozen groups were there, and on a table I saw a rare Toki Tiki from Mangaia, an odd thing which, for want of a better name, might be called a Peace Adze. It is a slender little tower of carved wood, set with tiers of windows and surmounted by a stone adze head, lashed on with wrappings of sennit, above which extend a pair of pointed ears. The carving—in the close-grained yellow wood of the Pua—is exquisitely done; I recognized the standard patterns of the islands—the Shark\'s Teeth, the Dropping Water, and the intricate Tiki Tangata. The significance of the Peace Adze was religious and ceremonial; the story goes that when, at the end of a period of fighting, two Mangaian clans decided to make peace, the adze played a leading part in the attendant ceremony. A handful of earth was dug up with its head to show that the ground might now be cultivated, and the people were told that they might come and go unmolested, freely as the air through the windowlike openings on its sides. Tari had real adzes as well—the tools with which trees were chopped down and canoes hollowed out—stone implements of a perfection I have never seen elsewhere, carved out of basaltic rock, hard and close as steel, smoothed by processes at which one can only guess, sharp and symmetrical as the product of modern machines.

The Marquesan curiosities interested me most of all—relics 257 of those dark valleys which harbored the most strangely fascinating of all the island peoples. There were ornaments of old men\'s beards, arranged in little sennit-bound tufts, crinkled and yellowish white; beaked clubs of ironwood, elegantly carved and smooth with countless oilings; ear pendants cut in delicate filigree from the teeth of sperm whales; grotesque little wooden gods, monstrous and bizarre; ceremonial food bowls of Tamanu, adorned with the rich and graceful designs of a culture now forever gone. One felt that the spirits of forgotten artists hovered about the place, beckoning one back to days a century before Melville set foot in the valley of Taipi, to scenes of a strange beauty on which mankind will never look again. Some day—perhaps in a future less remote than we like to fancy—nature\'s careless hand may once more set the stage for a similar experiment, but the people sequestered in those gloomy islands will be of another blood, and the result can never be the same. The Marquesans themselves—if one is to believe the students of antique mankind—were the result of a racial retrogression; their continental forebears knew iron and pottery and the culture of rice—things lost in the eastward push which brought them to the Nine Islands of Iva.

One curious trinket—labeled "Fatu Hiva"—caught my eye; a squat little figure carved in a sawn-off length of yellow ivory. I examined it closely; it had the air of being at least a hundred years old, and the concentric rings of the section showed it to be the tooth or tusk of some large animal. Where could the Marquesan carver have obtained such a lump of ivory on which to exercise his skill? Could it be possible 258 that this was the tusk of an elephant, carved not one hundred but many centuries ago, and preserved by the people of these distant islands—an immemorial relic of the days when their ancestors left Persia or the Indian hills? I looked again; it was large enough to be part of a small tusk, but the section was flatter than any elephant ivory I had seen. What could it be? Not the tooth of a hippopotamus—it was too large for that; not the sword of a narwhal, which shows a betraying spiral twist. Then I thought of a walrus tusk, and the story seemed clear. Seventy-five or a hundred years ago some whaling vessel, after a venture in the northern ice, must have sailed south and put in at Fatu Hiva for water or wood or fruit. They had killed walrus off Cape Lisburne or in the Kotzebue Sound and, as was the habit of whalers, some of the tusks had been kept for scrimshaw work. Knowing the Polynesian passion for ivory (in Tonga it was death for any but those of the highest rank to take the teeth of a stranded sperm whale) it is not difficult to imagine the rest—a lantern-jawed Yankee harpooner, perhaps, trading his walrus tusk for a canoeload of fruit or the favors of an exceptionally pretty girl.

I was examining a paddle from Manihiki—a graceful, narrow-bladed thing, carved out of porcupine wood and set with diamonds of mother-of-pearl—when Tari came in.

"A pretty paddle, isn\'t it?" he remarked. "You won\'t find a more curious one in the Pacific. Notice the way that reinforcing ridge runs down the blade from the haft? Everything has a meaning in primitive stuff of this sort; the original pattern from which this has descended probably came from a land of little trees, 259 where the paddles had to be made in two pieces—blade lashed to handle. Look at the shape of it—more like a Zulu assegai than anything else; it is a weapon, primarily; a thrust of it would kill a naked man. The Manihiki people spend a lot of their time in canoes on the open sea—after bonito by day and flying-fish by night—and those waters swarm with sharks. They have developed their paddle into a weapon of defence. The Samoans carried a special shark club for the same purpose."

I asked his opinion on the disputed question of sharks—whether, in general, the shark is a real menace to the swimmer or the paddler of a small canoe.

"I\'ve heard a lot of loose talk," he said; "how learned societies have offered rewards for a genuine instance of a shark attacking a man, but I have seen enough to know that there is no room for argument. Some idiot goes swimming off a vessel in shark-infested waters, and talks all the rest of his life, perhaps, of the silly fears of others—never realizing that he owes his life to the fact that none of the sharks about him chanced to be more than usually hungry. The really hungry shark is a ravening murderer—dangerous as a wounded buffalo, reckless as a mad dog.... I have seen one tear the paddle from the hand of a man beside me and sink its teeth, over and over again in a frenzy, in the bottom of a heavy canoe. How long do you suppose a swimmer would have lived? And it\'s not only the big sharks that are dangerous. I remember one day when a lot of us were bathing in Penrhyn lagoon. Suddenly one of the boys gave a shout and began to struggle with something in the waist-deep water—clouded with blood by the time I got there. 260 A small tiger shark, scarcely a yard long, had gouged a piece of flesh out of his leg, and continued to attack until a big Kanaka seized it by the tail and waded to the beach, holding the devilish little brute, snapping its jaws and writhing frantically, at arm\'s length. As he reached the dry sand the native allowed his arm to relax for an instant; the shark set its teeth in his side and tore out a mouthful that nearly cost the man his life."

The voice of Apakura was summoning us to eat. "Kaikai!" she called: "Aere mai korua!" Tari\'s dining room was a section of the side veranda, screened off with lattices of bamboo, where we found a table set for two, fresh with flowers and damask. Apakura sat cross-legged on a mat near by; she was weaving a hat of native grass and looked up from her work now and then to speak to the girl who served us—admonishing, scolding, and joking in turn. Tari followed my glance, and smiled as he caught the eye of his wife.

"It probably strikes you as odd that she doesn\'t sit with us," he said to me. "I tried to get her into the way of it at first, but it\'s no good. For generations the women of her family have been forbidden to eat in the presence of men, and the old tapu dies hard. Then she hates chairs; when she sits with me she is wretchedly uncomfortable, and bolts her food in a scared kind of way that puts me off my feed. It is best to let them follow their own customs; she likes to sit on the floor there and order her cousin about; when we\'ve finished they\'ll adjourn to the cook house for dinner and discuss you till your ears tingle. Housekeeping down here is a funny, haphazard business—hopeless 261 if one demands what one had at home; easy and pleasant if one is willing to compromise a bit. To a man who understands the natives at all the servant question does not exist; they will jump at a chance to attach themselves to your household—the trouble is to keep them away. It isn\'t wages they are after; I pay these people nothing at all for cooking and washing and looking after the place. They like to be where tea and sugar and ship\'s biscuit are in plenty, and they like to be amused. An occasional stranger, coming and going like yourself, gives them no end of food for talk; I have a phonograph I let them play, and a seine I let them take out for a day\'s fishing now and then. Once a month, perhaps, I kill a pig and give a bit of a party, and once or twice in a year I get a bullock and let them invite all their relatives to a real umukai. In return for all this they look after my fifty acres of coconuts, make my copra, do my housework, cooking, and laundry, and provide me with all the native food I can use. It strikes me as a fair bargain, from my point of view, at least. It is understood that they are not to bother me; unless there is work to do or they want to see me they never set foot in the house.

"My greatest trouble has been to get some idea of regularity into their heads. These people cannot understand why we prefer to eat our dinner at the same hour every day. Where contact with the white man has not changed their habits, they eat whenever they are hungry—at midnight or at four in the morning, if they chance to be awake. Even here they can\'t understand my feelings when dinner is an hour or two late."

262 The cousin of Apakura took away the remnants of a dish of raw fish and brought us a platter heaped with roast breadfruit, taro, yams, and sweet potatoes, served with a pitcher of tai akari—the sea water and coconut sauce, worthy of a place on any table. It is only the uncivilized white who turns up his nose at native food; the island\'s vegetables are both wholesome and delicious, and cannot be cooked better than in a Maori oven. A certain amount of European food is necessary to health, but the sallow, provincial white man, who takes a sort of racial pride in living on the contents of tins, need not be surprised that the climate of the islands does not agree with him. It is the same type, usually with no other cause for pride than the fact that he chanced to be born white, whose voice is most frequently heard declaiming on the subject of color. Everywhere in the islands, of course, the color line exists—a subtle barrier between the races, not to be crossed with impunity; but the better sort of white man is ready to admit that God, who presumably made him, also made the native, and made of the Polynesian a rather fine piece of work. Tari had stepped across with eyes open, counting the cost, realizing all that he must relinquish. He is not a man to make such a decision lightly; in his case the step meant severing the last material tie with home, giving up forever the Englishman\'s dreams of white children and an old age in the pleasant English countryside. His children—if children came to him—would have skins tinted by a hundred generations of hot sunlight, and look at him with strange, dark eyes, liquid and shy—the eyes of an elder race, begotten when the world was young. His old age would be spent on this remote and forgotten 263 bit of land, immensely isolated from the ancestral background to which most men return at last. As the shadows gathered in the evening of his life there would be long days of reading and reflection—stretched in a steamer chair on this same veranda, while the trade hummed through the palm tops and the sea rumbled softly on the reef. At night, lying wakeful as old men do, in a hush broken only by the murmur of a lonely sea, his thoughts would wander back—a little sadly, as the thoughts of an old man must—along a hundred winding paths of memory, through scenes wild and lovely, savage, stern, and gay. Dimly out of the past would appear the faces of men and women—long since dead and already only vaguely remembered—the companions of his youth, once individually vibrant with the current of life, now moldering alike in forgotten graves. They would be a strangely assorted company, Tari\'s ghosts: men of all the races, scholars, soldiers, sportsmen, skippers of trading vessels, pearl divers of the atolls, nurses of the Red Cross, Englishwomen of his own station in life, dark-eyed daughters of the islands, with shining hair and the beauty of sleek, wild creatures—bewitching and soulless, half bold and half afraid. Whether for good or ill, wisely or unwisely, as the case might be, no man could say that Tari had not lived; I wondered what the verdict would be when, in the days to come, he cast up the bal............