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IN this volume of reminiscences and impressions I have endeavoured to express some of the elements of romance that remain in my memory of wanderings in the South Seas.

My characters are all taken from life, both the settlers and the natives. I have striven to give an account of native life, modes and codes, and to describe the general characteristics of certain island tribes that are now extinct.

My attempt is not so much the wanderer’s usual book with its inevitable blemishes, for the reason that it is one voluminous blemish, but I’m hoping that, after a lapse of years, my mind has retained the something that’s worth the recording. Besides, I’ve smashed about so much in this grey, swashbuckling world of Grand Old Liars, knighted thieves, rogues and successful hypocrites, that the background of my life in early boyhood seems a dim fairyland, whereover I roamed at will from wonder to wonder, laden with the wealth of cheek and impudence enormous. Reaping such wonders I fail to find in pages of romance experiences that outrival those of my boyhood, which leads me to imagine that I can paint down, out of the Past, some of the sparkling atmosphere that buoyed me up in the wide travels of my youth.

Wonderful and unsuspected are the unheard harmonies that guide the footsteps of romantic vagabonds. They know not that deep in the heart of their existence bubble the eternal springs of beauty, and, as they tramp on, their footsteps beat to the rhythm of the song they will not hear—until they be older! And stranger still have been my own immediate experiences. I once officiated as chief mourner at the burial of a romantic old trader who had suddenly died through the effects of a great spree! He had a wooden leg, a limb that he had extemporised from good, green wood. We stuck that sad heritage (it was all that he could leave us) over his grave in the forest, having made a cross of it. On visiting the spot about three months afterwards I observed that the old wooden leg had burst into leaf—had blossomed forth into pretty blue flowers! Sure am I that neither our old dead pal, in his wildest and most romantic moods, nor indeed one of us, had dreamed of the hidden potentialities of that wooden leg—how one day it would once more come to the poor body’s assistance, making his very grave in the solitude beautiful.

Well, in a way, I would think that my book is like unto that wooden leg; for, as that artificial member—being green—did not snap as it helped our stumbling pal along, so has the romance in these pages helped me along on my travels, buoying me up in my weakest hours. And now I feel that, like my old pal’s wooden leg, my half-remembered romance, reviving, may blossom over the long-buried light of other days.

So, should anyone notice that I sometimes write in a reflective strain when describing my experiences and those of my characters, it is because it is in that way the past is now presented to my mind. All that I wish to attempt is to throw my different characters into clear relief, and bring to the surface a hint of the undercurrents that moved them on their wandering ways.

Looking back, it seems like some wild dream that I arrived in that romantic world of islands when a boy; that I once stood in the presence of tawny, majestic, tattooed potentates who loved to hear me play the violin. Yet ’tis true enough. I have lingered by the side of dethroned kings and romantic queens, taken their hands in fellowship, lending a willing ear to their griefs. For I was in at the death of that tottering, barbarian dynasty of mythological splendour—the aristocratic world of force—which has now faded into the historic pages of romantic, far-off, forgotten things.

Not only those chiefs and chiefesses of the forests impressed my imagination, but also the white men, the settlers of those days. They were self-exiled men. Some belonged to the lost brigade, drifting to the security of those palmy isles.

When I think of that wild crew, their manly ways, keen eyes and strong, sunburnt faces, their diversified types, their brave, strangely original characters, it almost seems that I went away ages ago to another world, where I explored the regions of wonderful minds. And now I stare across the years into the nebulous memories of far-off, bright constellations of friendly eyes and hopes. Such hopes!

I now recall those rough men revealed to me the best and most interesting phases of the human mind roaming the plains of life, some staring at the stars with earnest wonder, and some searching for the lights of distant grog shanties!

Much of my apparently strained philosophical reflections may appear like strange digressions and slightly unbalanced rhapsodies. My excuse for this is, that I am endowed with a strange mixture of misanthropy and misplaced humour. Humour is like poetry, it cannot be defined. The humour that I possess is something of an unrecognisable quality, and I have often spent sleepless nights laughing convulsively over my own jokes! Often have I sat in some South Sea grog shanty telling my most exquisite joke, only to look up to see all the rough men burst into tears! On one occasion I told what I thought to be the most pathetic incident I knew—lo! men smacked me on the back and were seized with paroxysms of ecstatic laughter!

When I dwelt for a brief period in England I listened to many thousands of British jokes, but I cannot recall that I laughed more than twice. This fact alone convinces me that I am incorrigibly dull and devoid of recognised mirth. So, whoever takes up my book with the idea of gathering laughter will lay it down disappointed. I feel that it is better to make this confession at the outset.

Well, the men who travelled the South Seas in the days when I was a boy will vouch for the truth of what I say about the strange characters who lived in those wild parts—and they were wild in those days. I guarantee that, as I proceed with my chapters, my only artificial colouring will be introduced to enable me to touch up some of my characters so that they may be presented to polite readers in polite form.

When I think of those castaways from civilised lands, how I tramped across vast plains in their company, sat by their camp-fires far away in the Australian and New Zealand bush, I feel that I once met humanity in its most blessed state. Often they would sit and sing some old English, Irish or Scots song, as the whimpering ’possums leapt across the moonlit branches of our roof. Listening to their tales of better days, it seemed incredible that there really was a civilised world thousands of miles across the seas. The memories of the great cities appeared like far-off opéra bouffe, where the actors rushed across the phantom limelight in some terrified fright from their own dreams. The thought of vigilant policemen on London’s streets, the cataclysm of running wheels, crowds of huddled women and men staring in lamp-lit, serrated shop windows, pale-faced street arabs shouting “Evening News! Star and Echo!” swearing bus-men, shrieking engines, trains pulling back to the suburbs cargoes of wretched people who thought they were intensely happy—seemed something absurd, something that I dreamed before my soul fledged its wings and flew away from the homestead surrounded by the windy poplar trees—away to the steppes of another world.

Yet—and strange it is—had an English thrush, in some mysterious way, commenced to sing somewhere down the wide groves of banyans and karri-karri trees, our hearts’ blood would have pulsed to the soul of England!

One may ask, in this sceptical old world, why such fine fellows as my old beachcombers and shellbacks turned out such apparent rogues. I must say that I, too, have pondered on the mystery of it all. The only conclusion that I can arrive at is, that they were, very often, men who had been spirited, courageous, romantic-minded boys, and so had once aspired beyond the beaten track and made a bold plunge into pioneer life.

All men have some besetting sin, and it is so easy to slip and fall by the wayside, to wrap one’s robe of shattered dreams about one, and tell the civilised communities to go and hang themselves.

In reference to the half-caste girl and the white girl, Waylaos and Paulines exist in this grey old world by millions, and will do so as long as skies are blue and fields are green. Waylao was a half-caste Marquesan girl; and Pauline—well, she was Pauline! Neither are the leper lovers introduced for scenic effects. They, too, were terribly real. Their whitened bones still lie clasped together in the island cave in the lone Pacific. Terrible as their fate may appear, believe me, the terror, the horror of the leper dramas enacted on the desolate seas by Hawaii are only faintly touched upon in my book.

Old Matafa and his wife I number amongst my dearest Samoan comrades. It was with them that I stayed during my last two sojourns in Apia. The grog shanty near Tai-o-hae has possibly vanished. Could I be convinced that it still stands beneath the plumed palms, with its little door facing the moonlit sea, the dead men, out of their graves, roaring their rollicking sea chanteys, what should I do? I would long to speed across the seas, to become some swift, silent old sea-gull. Yes, to be numbered with the dead so that I might rejoin those ghosts and find such good company again.

As for Abduh Allah, the Malay Indian, I have expressed my opinion of that worthy in the book. I have no personal grudge against Mohammedanism in the South Seas, any more than I have for the Mohammedans and their white converts in the Western Seas. The islands—especially Fiji—through the immigration of men from the Indian, China, and Malay archipelagos are rapidly becoming South Sea India, the white man’s creed being converted into a kind of pot-pourri of Eastern, Southern and Western theology, doing the can-can.

When I, as a lad, arrived at the islands, the Marquesan race was fast ebbing to the grave. So my readers may take these incidents, of their dances, songs, ideas and laughter, as the last record of the Marquesans.

We are but wandering bundles of dreams!—Swagmen tramping across the drought-stricken track on the great, gold rush of this life’s Never-Never-Land.

I recall to mind how I once met a derelict old sundowner. I was quite a lad then, tramping alone across the Australian bush on the borders of Queensland. He hove into sight as a real godsend to me, and looked an awe-inspiring being. His ancient wardrobe, his enormous bushy grey beard, made him appear like a wonderful, emblematical ship’s figurehead from some wreck on the coast with all the crew lost; an apostolic figurehead, that had in some mysterious way become endowed with life and was curiously roaming inland. Approaching IT with considerable trepidation, I played a tender, conciliatory strain on my violin. Having the desired effect, we chummed together, and, notwithstanding his peculiarities, he became a boon and a blessing to me. His enormous grey beard, clotted with spittle and tobacco juice of other years, attracted all the irritating bush flies, and gyrating bunches of hungry, fierce mosquitoes. And as I kept to leeward of him, I travelled on quite untormented by the buzz of his mighty beard. Indeed I felt like some Pied Piper of Hamelin as I fiddled away by his side, happy as one could well be, all the flies dancing, like the singing spheres, to the leeward of that beard, as we tramped southward bound for Bummer’s Creek!

I recall that strange old sundowner because I cannot help feeling that his old beard, hoarding all the flies, bringing me intense relief beneath the scorching, tropical suns, resembled the vast cities of the world, which are like dirty, old, tangled, smelling beards that collect hungry, aspiring humanity, whilst the happy, musical vagabond, tramps along untormented by flies or men, out in the wide spaces of the world, breathing the transcendent beauty of God’s blue heaven. And now I could half imagine that that old man was like unto God Himself as he tramped across the spaces, his monstrous beard followed by the singing spheres—the fireflies by night—till, with his swag on his back, he disappears for ever from my sight, passing away into the silence of the ragged gum-trees on the sky-line.

So one may perceive that I have had more advantages than most men in this world where men stare fiercely, or kindly, at each other as they express their own opinions, and then depart!

Thus do I—by reviewing the shadowy pageantry of the sympathetic period of my career—apologise to myself for my book.

Gone the mediæval, heroic age of my existence, when chivalry’s wondrous light glistened in the deep eyes and on the tangled, kingly beards of strange, apostolic old men, and on the bronzed faces of hairy-chested sailormen. But the ineffable, eternal glory of romantic beauty still shines in the sad eyes of mysterious, homeless women and girls, men and yearning boys, who are, to me, the lost, wandering children of some far-off Israel of the great, glorious Bible of Youth—the shrivelled, fingered pages of the unforgotten light of other days—the light that warms the world.

A. S. M.

I cast my bread on the waters

In dreams of feverish haste,

But it came back after many days

Buttered with phosphorous paste!

New Proverb.