Читать книгу Wild Life in Southern Seas - Becke Louis - Страница 5

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Dots only. And if the ship that carries you is running past them in the night, with the steady force of the south-east trades filling her canvas, you would never know that land lay within a few miles, save for the flashing of lights along the low sandy beaches or, mayhap, the dulled roar of the beating surf thrashing the reef on the windward side of the island. This, of course, implies that when ships pass in the night they do so on the lee-side. It is not a safe thing for even a daring trading schooner to have a long, long stretch of low-lying reef-encircled islets for a lee; for sometimes Matagi toe lau (as the brown-skinned people call the trade wind) is apt, a few hours before dawn, to lull itself to slumber for a space, till the sun, bursting from the ocean, wakes it to life again. And should the schooner have drifted down upon the land with the stealthy westerly current there is no such thing as trusting even to good ground tackle on the weather side of an Ellice Group atoll. Did the ocean slumber too, and the black ledges of the windward reef were laved but by the gentlest movement of the water, there would be no anchorage, unless the ship were loaded with a cable long enough; and ere the sun has dried the dews of the night on the coconuts the merry trade wind pipes up again, the smooth surface of the ocean swells and undulates, the rollers sweep in from the eastward and charge wildly against the black wall of coral rock, smothering it in a maddened tumble of froth and foam, the while the smoky sea-spume is carried on high to fall in drenching showers upon the first line of coco-palms and puka scrub growing down close to the iron-bound shore. And of the eight islands of the Ellice Group all are alike in this respect—a wild tumultuous surf for ever beats upon the weather shore even under the influence of the ordinary trade wind; and, on the lee, there lies a sea as placid and motionless as a mountain lake.

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Four years ago the Gilbert and Kingsmill Groups (known collectively as the Line Islands) and the Ellice Group were annexed by Great Britain; and although people in Australia hear and read a good deal about the Gilberts and Kingsmills by reason of their being the location of the newly-appointed British Resident and Deputy-Commissioner for the Western Pacific, seldom is anything heard about or told of the almost equally important Ellice Group. The reason for this is not far to seek. The Line Islanders — fierce, turbulent, and war-loving people, island hating island with the same savage animosity that characterised the Highland clans of the thirteenth century—are a difficult race to govern, and although the London Missionary Society has done much good, the Resident has his work cut out to prevent the people of his sixteen islands shooting and cutting each other’s throats as they did in the good old days. For when Captain Davis, of Her Majesty’s ship Royalist, hoisted the English flag, he sternly intimated that there was to be no more fighting, and later on the High Commissioner, Sir John Thurston, in the Rapid, made them disarm; but scarce had the smoke from the steamer’s funnel vanished from the horizon than the old leaven worked, and rifles, carefully hidden away from the naval men, were brought forth from their concealment and put to use. And so every few months or so the Australian newspapers notify that “there has been fresh trouble in the Gilbert Group.” However, all this will be a thing of the past in another year or two, although it is safe to predict that it will be long ere the Gilbert Islander—man or woman —gives up the manufacture and use of sharks’ teeth swords and daggers. And as these weapons are not necessarily fatal, and are time-honoured arguments for settling public and family differences, perhaps it will be as well for the High Commissioner to let them possess the means of letting out in a moderate degree some of their quick, hot blood.

But the people of the Ellice Group show the other side of the picture, and their calm, placid existence, undisturbed except by a family quarrel, explains why—saving the visit of a surveying ship—no men-of-war steam up to the anchorages outside the reefs, or into the lagoons, and hold courts of inquiry into native outbreaks or private shootings. The Ellice Islanders never fight, for they have a horror of bloodshed, and except for a few fowling-pieces used for shooting pigeons, there are no firearms in the group— save those in the possession of the white traders.

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Six hundred miles from Samoa, sailing northwesterly, the first of the group, Sophia Island, is sighted. It is the south-easterly outlier of the Ellices, and is the only one of sufficient height to be seen from the vessel’s deck at a distance of twenty miles. Until a few years ago it was uninhabited, although the people of the next island, Nukulaelae, say that “in the old, old time many people lived there.” It is about three and a half miles in circumference, has but few coconuts growing upon it, and would have remained untenanted in its loneliness to this day but for the discovery of a fairly valuable deposit of guano. Then it was taken possession of by an enterprising American store-keeper in Samoa named Moors, who landed native labourers and worked, and is still working, the deposit. The old native name of this spot is Ulakita—a name, by the way, that is almost unknown even to the local traders in the Ellice Group, and the present generation of natives.

Eighty or ninety miles away is Nukulaelae, a cluster of thirteen low-lying islets, forming a perfect atoll, and enclosing with a passageless and continuous reef a lagoon five miles in length by three in width. This narrow belt of land— in no case is any one of the islets over a mile in width—is densely covered with coconuts, and, seen from the ship, presents an enchanting appearance of the brightest green, accentuated on the westerly or lee shore by beaches of the most dazzling white. Thirty years ago Nukulaelae had a population of four hundred natives.

Then one day, in 1866, there came along two strange vessels, a barque and a brig, and hove-to close to the reef, and in a few hours nearly two hundred of the unfortunate, unsuspecting, and amiable natives were seized and taken on board by the Peruvian cut-throats and kidnappers that had swept down upon them, and, with other companions in misery, torn from their island homes, taken away to slavery in the guano pits of the Chincha Islands, on the coast of South America. Of the Nukulaelae people none but two ever returned—they all perished miserably under their cruel taskmasters on the gloomy Chinchas. In 1873 it was the writer’s lot to meet, in the Caroline Islands, with one of the two survivors of this dreadful outrage. By some means he had escaped in an English guano ship to Liverpool, and then, after years of wandering in American whalers among the islands of the Pacific, he settled down among the natives of Las Matelotas, in the Carolines, thousands of miles away from his birthplace; and although sorely tempted to accept the offer made to him by our captain of a passage to Nukulaelae, the Matelotas people refused to let him go, as he had married a girl of the island and had a family. (Apropos of these Peruvian slavers, it may be mentioned that a few months after their visit to Nukulaelae, joined by another barque, they made a similar descent upon the people of Rapa-nui—the mysterious Easter Island—and secured three hundred and ten victims.) At present the population of Nukulaelae is about one hundred and fifty, all of whom are Christians. Like all the other islands of this group, the population is showing a slow but certain increase.

Within a few hours’ sail lies Funafuti, an extensive chain of some thirty-four or thirty-five islands similar in appearance to the islets of Nukulaelae, but enclosing a noble lagoon, entrance to which is given by good passages both on the south-west and north-west sides. The Russian navigator Kotzebue sailed his frigate through Funafuti Lagoon from one end to the other with a strong breeze blowing, and found, what trading vessels to-day know well, that unless a vessel is making something like eight knots it is almost impossible to stem the fierce current that sweeps through the passages at half-tide. But once well within the lagoon, and away from the trend of the passage current, there is room for half a dozen or more battleships in which to manœuvre. About six miles from the southwest entrance the ship may drop anchor off the main island of the chain; and here the native settlement is situated. Fifty years ago nearly every island in the lagoon supported a population; to-day there are but four or five hundred natives all told, all of whom live on the island from which the whole group takes its general name, Funafuti.

The natives are a hospitable, good-tempered, and intelligent lot, and express themselves as being delighted to be included as British subjects. And there can be but little doubt that in a few years, once assured of the good intentions of the English authorities to them, they will agree to lease out to traders and copra-buyers the long stretch of dense but narrow sea-girt coconut forests that form the southern boundary of the lagoon. At present, and, indeed, for the past forty years, some millions of coconut palms are there allowed to fruiten and literally cover the ground with coconuts from year to year without the natives gathering more than will provide them with their few wants in the way of clothing, tobacco, etc., which they purchase from the one or two resident traders. Time after time have the people been approached by white agents of trading firms—notably in years past by Godeffroy’s of Hamburg—on the subject of leasing one particularly noble island, named Funafala, for the purpose of making the coconuts into copra. Liberal terms—and for a South Sea trading firm to offer liberal terms to natives shows the value of the concessions sought—were offered, but the Funafutans would have none of the white men on Funafala. A solitary trader or so they would tolerate in the only village, but no body of strange, dissolute foreigners would they have to live among them, accompanied by wild people from the Gilbert Islands, who fought with sharks’-teeth swords among themselves, and got madly drunk on toddy every few days. And so the trading firms retired discomfited, and the coconuts rotted away quietly in millions, and the rotting thereof troubled the careless owners not a whit. Time was when there were three thousand people to eat them, and, save for a cask of coconut oil sold now and then to some whaleship, white men visited them but at long intervals. But things are different now, and even these tiny spots that dot the broad bosom of the blue Pacific are sought out to appease the earth-hunger of the men of the civilised world. Yet not, be it said, altogether for their coconuts’ money value, but because of the new Pacific cable that is soon to be; for among these equatorial isles it is to be laid, thousands of fathoms deep, and no Power but England must possess a foot of soil in the mid-Pacific that would serve an enemy as a lair whence to issue and seize upon any of the islands that break the cable’s length.

Take Funafuti and its people as a fair type of the other islands of the group, save Nui—of which more anon. Sixty or seventy years ago, so the American whaleship captains of those days said, there were three thousand people in the thirty and odd islets. Then, for the next thirty years, unknown and terrible diseases, introduced by the white men, ravaged not Funafuti alone, but the whole group, and where there were once thousands, only hundreds could be counted; and until about 1860 it looked as if the total extinction of the whole race was but a matter of another decade. But, fortunately, such was not the case. In 1870 the writer counted 160 people; in 1882 they had increased to nearly 200; and now, through better means of intercourse with the people of the other islands of the group, which has brought about a consequent and rapid intermarriage, the people of Funafuti number over 500, and show a gradual but steady increase.

Oaitupu (literally “the fountain of water”) is, although nearly the smallest, the most thickly populated of all the Ellices. It has no lagoon accessible from the sea, and even landing is not always easy. Here, although the soil is better than that of the other islands, and the natives have taro, bananas, and pumpkins to vary the monotonous diet of coconut and fish obtaining elsewhere in the Ellices, they are very subject to that species of eczema known as tinea desquamans (locally it is called “lafa”). While not incapacitating them from labour, or affecting their stamina or physique, it gives the subject a most unpleasant and disgusting appearance. It is, however, often curable by a residence in a colder climate, such as New Zealand.

Nui, the island alluded to as possessing distinct and peculiar racial characteristics from the others, has a population of about six hundred. Unlike their neighbours, both to the north and south, whose language, customs, and traditions have a purely Samoan basis, the people of Nui are plainly the descendants of some wandering or drifted voyagers from the Gilbert Group, the inhabitants of which they resemble in language, customs, appearance, and demeanour. From what particular island the original people of Nui came is a mystery. There are no really reliable traditions of the present race that can throw any light on the matter. So far as they know they were always “Tafitos”—namely, people from the Gilberts; but how they came to be on Nui they cannot tell. To show the sharp line of racial distinction between the natives of Nui and those of the surrounding islands, it may be mentioned that the translations of the Old and New Testaments, published by the Boston Board of Missions for the use of the people of the Gilbert Islands, are used by the natives of Nui, while in every other island of the Ellice Group the Samoan version is alone understood and read. And although they can communicate with the inhabitants of the rest of the group in a peculiar, bastard patois, and of late years have intermarried with them, they always will be Gilbert Islanders, and preserve their vernacular and other racial characteristics.

Nanomaga, the Hudson Island of Commodore Wilkes, is the smallest of the group. It is barely a mile and a half long, and not one in width, yet supports a population of six hundred people. The writer, who in 1870 spent a year on the island, can bear testimony to the kindly nature and honesty of its people. During all the time he lived there as agent for Messrs. Tom De Wolf and Co., of Liverpool, he never had as much as a scrap of tobacco stolen from him, although his trade goods were piled up indiscriminately on the floor of his house, which had neither doors, locks, nor a bolt of any kind. In this, however, the Nanomagans are peculiar — the other islanders are not so particular.

The last of the group is Nanomea, a fine island, or rather two islands connected by a reef dry at very low tides. The people of Nanomea have long been known in the Pacific for their great size and muscular development. Indeed, the Rev. J. S. Whitmee, of the L.M.S., considers them a race of giants, and believes “that nine out of ten would measure six feet or more high, and their breadth is proportionate to their height.” This, however, since their adoption of clothing is not so noticeable. However, they certainly are a fine race, and almost free from tinea desquamans. There were, last year, 830 people on the two islands, Nanomea and Lakena.

The group suffers but seldom from droughts or hurricanes, although the terrible drought experienced in the near-to Gilbert Group in 1892 also affected the Ellices, and during 1893-4 Nanomea and Nanomaga presented a parched-up appearance. A heavy blow in 1890 also did terrible havoc among the coconuts, which thus had not the strength to bear up against the drought.

The whole group of the nine islands or subgroups lies between lat. 5.35 deg. and 11.20 deg. S., and between 171 and 176 deg. W. longitude.