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p. vINTRODUCTION

Table of Contents

People ask me whether I travel for pleasure or profit, but I am unable to say. I should make a great deal more money if I stayed at home, in Pimlico or Putney, writing books about the Pacific: about places I have never seen; about the people I should hate to meet. But I do not desire only to make money, though I desire that passionately enough at times, times when I feel like a poor relation. If I must work to live,—and thank God for the necessity!—a thousand thousand times more must I live to work. In addition to this I am terribly afraid of being hustled off to another world before I have had time to find the one perfect spot in this. And is there not always, always the something more! Perhaps this is why I find myself unable to rest. There are people who go to the same English seaside resort every summer of their lives, and they are—well, that sort of people. And very nice, truly sane people, too. Or is it only that their madness lies in some altogether different direction?

p. viFor myself, I am always thinking, “There is something better: other places, other people.”

Boredom drives me; the dust and ashes of the easily obtainable drive me; strangeness draws me like a master hand on my heartstrings.

And yet I do not know why. I am happy in a house of my own, or a single room of my own. I love my books, my own household gods. But there is something else, another self—and I would give much to know how many other people are charmed and tortured by this other self—which is like a bird deep within me; deep in some dark and tropical forest, among trees so high that no wind touches it; nesting quiet beneath the leaves until something or some one whistles it away out of its wood. I am drawn by some instinct akin to that which sets the swallow, while suns are yet warm in England, longing beyond all denial for Africa—that glare and glamour and heartbreak which is Africa. Drawn like a lark from its happy nest in the grass, aspiring to the skies.

One is not really happy traveling, one is most happy in remembering. It is, indeed, like hanging one’s memory with a magic web in which one must have done all one’s own weaving, with much hard work, with weariness and many denials. A web of gold and drab and black and opal tints; a p. viiweb like the canopy of the Milky Way, with dark patches toward which one never once looks back. For altogether safe and comfortable traveling, in which one is surrounded by everything to which one is accustomed—and how many people ask, “Was it comfortable?” and not “Was it wonderful?”—is nothing to be accounted of.

To live wonderfully, to live adventurously, to live by the skin of one’s teeth. It would be an ill world if every one were like this, but I cannot help myself, that’s how I am. And, though it is altogether as a shifting magic web that I look back upon my adventure, I feel it best to leave the greater part of it in this book just as I wrote it, sitting in boats or canoes, standing in crowded streets or market-places, in a native hut or at the door of my tent, as much in the moment and upon the spot as though I were drawing actual portraits of places, of people, and of my own impression of them.

The real loss in writing about such a venture lies in the fact that the scenes, at first so strange, the people, the material of life itself, one’s altogether changed method of meeting it, become in so short a time a commonplace, that one forgets that there are still many people to whom it is all glamour or altogether unknown.

p. viiiA ship so quickly becomes a home, with all the queer little ups and downs of home life, an endless succession of strange ports no more wonderful than a succession of strange streets less than a mile away from one’s own doorstep, that, far from exaggerating, it is with difficulty that one can jerk one’s memory back to the wonder of the first keen impression: the effect upon one of the first flight of flying-fish, like fine elfin silver scimitars of the sea, the first fringe of palms upon a white strand. It is hard to realize that there are many thousands who have never seen a Portuguese man-of-war, or nautilus, with all its tiny orchid-like sails set, indomitably sailing a momentary tranquil, perfectly blue, and yet to it—no larger in all its pride and panoply than half a thumb’s length—unending ocean. Only by an effort does one remember that there are still, even in these days, many who have not so much as edged upon the unexplored desert of the Sargasso Sea; been in the company of a man who has dined upon his fellows, with relish and without self-consciousness; consorted with widows who regard it as no more than a commonplace decency of mourning to blacken themselves from head to foot, wear an assortment of their husbands’ bones slung about their necks, so that the fact of any one of them choosing to pose for p. ixher photograph with the dear departed’s skull clasped in both hands upon her knee seems no whit more peculiar than that English beauties should be pictured showing every tooth—which is, after all, no more than a sort of bone, made to be decently covered by the lips—in an unending and unvarying smirk.

But, then, what an amazing thing is this affair of modes and morals. One’s own quick readaptation. Upon the Trobriand Islands, for instance,—where for some happy and never-to-be-forgotten weeks I reigned as king,—it was regarded as in some ways a want of delicacy to allow worms to devour your dead relatives when you might so well, and with profit, perform that last office for yourself; whereas in Fiji, even in the fiercest days of cannibalism, it was looked upon as the worst sort of form to dish up your own relative, even an in-law. Again, to show the difficulty there is in preserving any kind of fixed standard, we have that curious custom of the people in the Marquesas Islands in which, far from virginity being counted as a virtue, the bride gains in value, in consideration, by the number of men of her own village with whom she has consorted upon the night before her marriage; while one can imagine no more vile crime in the eyes of any truly p. xmoral Marquesan than the denial involved in taking the veil.

Is it strange, then, that among all these changes one finds oneself doing quite naturally things which one never could, at home in England, have imagined oneself as doing? Though there is still the liability of a sudden, sweeping wonder as to how you come to be where you are, or if it is, indeed, you yourself; a longing for the little dog of the nursery rhyme to prove to you your own identity:

If this be I, as I should hope it be,

I’ve a little dog at home and he’ll know me.

And it could but end in one way:

Home went the little woman all in the dark,

Up jumped the little dog and he began to bark.

I remember well at one odd little hotel where I was stranded, waiting for a boat—a place frequented by gold-diggers, searchers after osmium-iridium and oil, missionaries, pearl-buyers, and people who purchased ancient vessels for no other reason than to insure and wreck them—getting so tired of the sound of a violent and noisy quarrel, which went on late into the night in a neighboring room, sounds which at home in England would p. xihave scared and shocked me, that, rising in my wrath, slipping into a dressing-gown, I went off to find out what could be done to stop it.

I can see that scene now. It was a very small room, full of men in pajamas or trousers and singlets,—the latter so torn open that they did not count,—beer bottles and glasses; how the most enraged of them found space to fling up and down it, I don’t know, but he did, while I myself was drawn by the eddy to a seat on the bed between two other men.

The dispute was upon an affair which really did touch the striding man’s honor, but still there was no necessity to make such a bellow about it. When I pointed this out, said that if they would all stop talking at once I might get at something of the truth, far from telling me to go back to my own room, mind my own business, they all turned to me, appealed to me, with a: “Look here, you’re a woman of the world, and you know . . . He said . . .” and “He said . . .” and “He said . . .”

In their eagerness the men beside me caught my arms and tugged until I got to my feet and, snatching the aggrieved one by the sleeve, entreated him to cease making an ass of himself.

It was all settled at last by my promise to go p. xiiout at seven next morning, the moment the wireless office was open, and myself, at my own expense, send off a message with a prepaid answer which would clench the matter once for all. And I remember how it ended too—what I said:

“And now stop making a nuisance of yourself, and get off to bed, for the Lord’s sake!”

That was one of the occasions when, returning to my own room, I found myself wondering if this was, indeed, I.

And again, though a very different setting, this: The dense black-velvet mask of a moonless and starless tropical night; one of those nights when you hear the swish of the palms above your head, the sea at your feet, and see nothing, not so much as the ghost of a crested wave, the tremor of a pale-gray stem; when the very fireflies seem abashed into darkness by the immensity of unilluminated space. At such a time was I carried on shore upon a strange island, having put off in a dinghy from a cutter, wind-driven with a force which separated us as entirely from civilization as though the main and altogether sophisticated island of the group were the width of the Atlantic away; borne in the arms of a gigantic native through the water to the shore and deposited there, with the sound, the gentle stir, of a multitude of p. xiiistrange, totally unseen people all around me. My pack, with a few personal belongings which might have helped me to prove my own identity to myself, with the help of Cash’s woven names,—though Heaven knows that names which nobody can read or pronounce, giving no indication of tribe or “pigeon,” mean little enough to anybody once you are off the beaten path and there is nobody to bolster up your dignity by taking it for granted that you are one of the so-and-so’s of so-and-so,—was awash in a very insecurely anchored boat, the best part of a quarter of a mile out to sea.

But here I am forestalling myself, for this is a tale to be told in its proper place and at its proper time, more especially recorded because it was the only time when I ever felt really and truly frightened. Not that this is any boast or proof of courage, but rather that, sliding eastward by the West as I did, everything seemed in its own time and place to be so inevitable, and so altogether as it should be.