Читать книгу Atolls of the Sun - Frederick O'Brien - Страница 8

Table of Contents

Captain Moet tells of Mapuhi, the great Paumotuan—Kopcke tells about women—Virginia’s jealousy—An affrighting waterspout—The wrecked ship—Landing at Takaroa.

“Maintenant”, said Captain Moet, as he gave orders for the course, “we weel veesit ze king ov ze Paumotu. Monsieur O’Breeon, ’e got no nose, bot ’e ees magnifique. ’E like out ov ze story-book. Ze bigges’ tradaire, ze bes’ divaire, ze bon père ov ze Paumotu. An’ ’e ees reech, eef ’e don’ geeve ’way ev’rysing. Nevaire ’ave I know one hombre like ‘eem!”

“He’s lost his grip since he got old,” McHenry interrupted, in his contrary way. “They say he’s got a million francs out in bad accounts to natives. He’s rotten easy, and spoils trade for a decent white man, by cripes!”

“Nom d’une pipe!” cried the Marseillais. “Mac, you nevaire see anysing nice. ’E ees not easy; ’e ees not rotten. ’E ’as got old, an’ maintenant, ’e ees ’fraid ov ze devil, ze diablo malo. Mac, eef you waire so nice as Mapuhi, I geeve you wan hug an’ kees. ’E ees ’onnes’, Mac, vous savez! Mapuhi say somesing, eet ees true. Zat bad for you, eh?”

Photo by Brown Bros.

Typical and primitive native hut, Paumotu Archipelago

Mapuhi! In Tahiti, among the Paumotu traders at the Cercle Bougainville, his name was every-day mention. He was the outstanding figure of the Paumatuan race. Lying Bill had narrated a dozen stories about him over our glasses, and Goeltz, Hallman, all the skippers and supercargos, had spoken of him.

Copra drying

“Mapuhi’s som’mat for looks without ’is nose,” said Captain Pincher. “I’ve known ’im thirty years, an’ ’e’s the biggest man in the group in all that time. ’E’s got Mormonism stronger now, an’ ’e’s bloody well afraid of ’ell, the ’ell those Mormon missionaries tell about; but ’e’s the best navigator in these waters.”

“He’s past eighty now, big-hearted but shrewd, and loving his own people,” said Woronick, the Parisian, and cunningest of Tahiti pearl merchants, except Levy. “He’s gone on Mormonism, but he’s smart with all his religion. The trouble is he’s let charity run away with business principles, and divers and others get into him for hundreds of thousands of francs. I’d take his word for anything, and you know me! They didn’t keep me out of the United States because I’m a dummy, hein?”

“He’s a remarkable man, this Kanaka,” joined in Winnie Brander, master of a sieve of a schooner, as he drank his Doctor Funk. “When he was a boy he was a savage. His father ate his enemies. For fifty years Mapuhi has been sailing schooners in the Paumotus. He’s the richest man there, and the best skipper in these waters that ever weathered the New Year gales. I’m captain of a schooner and I have sailed the Group since a boy, but, matching my experience against his,—and I haven’t had a tenth of his,—Mapuhi knows more by instinct of weather, of reefs, of passes, and of seamanship than I have learned. He’s known from Samoa to Tahiti as a wizard for sailing. He knows every one of the eighty Paumotus by sight. Wake him up anywhere in the Group in sight of land, and he’ll take a squint and tell where they are. God knows that’s the hardest bit of spying there is, because these atolls are mostly all alike at a distance—just a few specks of green, then a bunch of palms, and a line of coral. It’s something uncanny the way this fellow can locate himself. They say he can tell them at night by the smell.”

“’E’s a bloody Rockefeller down ’ere,” Lying Bill took up the story. “’E’s combed this ’ere ’ole ocean. I remember when ’e lost the Tavaroa ’e ’ad built by Matthew Turner in California, and four other schooners, in the cyclone of 1906. Many a boat ’e built ’imself. ’E was the devil for women, with the pick of the group an’ ’im owin’ ’alf the families in debt. Then the Mormons got a ’olt of ’im, an’ ’e began prayin’ an’ preachin’, and stuck by ’is proper wife. You’ll see that big church, if you go to Takaroa, ’e built, an’ where ’is ol’ woman is buried.”

And now I was bound for the atoll of this mighty chief of his tribe, and was to see him face to face. From Kaukura, the Marara raced and lagged by turn. The glass fell, and I spoke to McHenry about it, pointing to the recording barometer.

“There’s trouble comin’,” he said, testily. “I know that. I don’t need any barometer. We South Sea men have got enough mercury in us to tell the weather without any barometer.”

The rain fell at intervals, but not hard enough for a bath on deck, the prized weather incident of these parts. With no fresh water in Niau, Anaa, or Kaukura, or not enough for bathing, and with only a dole on the Marara for hands and faces, I, with remembrance of Rupert Brooke’s complaint about the effect of sea-water on coral wounds, was about half-crazy for a torrential shower. But the rain passed, and the sunset soothed my sorrow. Never had I known such skies. In this heaven’s prism were hues not before seen by me. Manila, I had thought, was of all the world apart for the beauty and brilliancy of its sunsets. Such bepainted clouds as hung over the hill of Mariveles when I rode down the Malecon in the days of the Empire! But Manila was here surpassed in startling shape and blazing color.

A great bank of ocher held the western sky—a perfect curtain for a stage upon which gods might enact the fall of the angels. It depended in folds and fringes over stripes of gold—a startling, magnificent design which appeared too regular in form and color to be accident of clouds. One had to remember the bits of glass in the kaleidoscope.

The gold grew red, the stripes became a sheet of scarlet, and that vermilion and maroon, swiftly changing as deeper dipped the sun into the sea, until the entire sky was broken into mammoth fleecy white tiles, the tesselated ceiling of Olympus. The canopy grew gray, and night dropped abruptly. A wind came out of the darkness and caught the Marara under full canvas. It drove her through the fast-building waves at eleven knots. The hull groaned in tune with the shrieking cordage. The timbers that were long from the forest, and had fought a thousand gales, lamented their age in moans and whines, in grindings and fierce blows. The white water piled over the bows, deluged the deck, and foamed on the barrier of the cabin rise. I stripped and went forward to meet it. I could have danced in it for joy. Oh! the joy of sail! Steam and motor made swift the path of the ship, but they had in them no consonance with nature. They were blind and deaf to the wind and wave, which were the very life of the schooner. They brought no sense of participation in speed as did the white wings of the Marara, nor of kinship with the main. They were alive, those swelling and careening sheets of canvas, that swung to and fro with the mind of the breeze, and cried and laughed in stress of labor.

The rain blanketed the ocean, the vessel heeled over to starboard until her rail was salty, the jibs pleaded for relief, but man was implacable. For hours we held our course, driving fast in the obscure night toward the home of the wondrous diver, the man without a nose, Mapuhi, the uncrowned king of the Dangerous Isles.

But when the moon lit the road to Takaroa, she lulled the wind. The eleven knots fell to seven, and to five, and at midnight we drifted in a zephyr.

When I went below in a light squall, sure sign of near-by land, Kopcke, the handsome trader, and a native girl were asleep on a mat in the passageway beside and partly under my bunk. I had to step over them. Her red tunic was drawn up over her limbs in her restless slumber, and a sheet covered closely her head. He lay on his back, his eyes facing the cabin lamp, his breathing that of a happy child after a day of hard play. As a matter of fact he had drunk a half dozen tots of rum since he had brought me aboard.

Kopcke had failed at Kaukura, and like McHenry was bound for Takaroa, to set up a store for the diving season. He was a ne’er-do-well who existed without hard work merely because of familiarity with the people and languages of the islands. After a few glasses on board he had spilled his affairs to me, and especially his amorous adventures, in the boasting way of his kind. “Mary pity women!” A quarter-Tahitian, his father a European, and his mother French Tahitian, he was remarkably good-looking, in the style of a cinema idol. He had first married the half-caste daughter of Lying Bill, one of the many children of that Bedouin of the Pacific, who, in more than three decades of roaming the islands, had, according to his brag, scores of descendants. She had died, and Kopcke had left their child to charity, and taken up with another whom he had deserted after a year, leaving her their new-born infant.

“She would not obey me,” Kopcke explained to Virginie and me. “I was good to her, but she was obstinate, and I had to send her to Takepoto. She had a good thing but could not appreciate me. I then took this girl here, whose father is an old diver in Takaroa, with a good deal of money. He once picked up a single pearl worth a big fortune. She is sixteen, and is easily managed. You’ve got to get them young, mon ami, to learn your ways. That Takepoto girl feels sorry now. Women are queer, all of them, mon vieux, n’est-ce pas?”

Virginie was all Huguenot French blood though born in Tahiti, and Kopcke went against her puritan grain. She thought him a bad example for her Jean, who, though as devoted a husband as seaman, was dangerously attractive to the native girls. Moet could tutoyer them in their own tongue, with a roughish but alluring manner toward them that, though it crowded the trade-room of the Marara with customers for finery and cologne water, tortured Virginie. His endearing terms, his gentle slaps on their hips, and momentary arm about their waists, rended Virginie between jealousy and profits.

“Mais,” Jean would exclaim, after an interchange of bitter words, in which cochon had been applied to him, “how zat femme zink I do bees’ness. Wiz kicks ‘an go-to-’ells? She count ze money wiz plaisir, bot Jean Moet, ’er ’usbin’, ’e mos’ be like wan mutton. ’Sus-Maria! I will make show ’oo ees boss!”

Kopcke was rather more honest in his dealings with women than the white men. His quarter-native strain made him less ruthless, and more understanding of them. The ordinary European or American in the South Seas had not his own home’s standards in such affairs. He released himself with a prideful assertiveness from such restraints, and went to an opposite ethic in his breaking of the chain. His usual attitude to women here was that of the average man toward domesticated animals—to pet and feed them, and to abuse them when disobedient or at whim.

Of course, the white flotsam and jetsam of humanity in these islands, who in their own countries had probably starved for caresses, and who may never have known women other than the frowzy boughten ones of the cabaret and brothel, were here giving back to the sex what it had bestowed on them in more formalized circles. The soft, loving women of Polynesia paid for the sex starvation enforced by economic conditions among the superior whites. A feast brought the ingratitude of the beggar.

All day, with half a gale, we sailed past atolls and bare reefs, groves of palms and rudest rocks, primal strata and beaches of softest and whitest sand. The schooner went close to these islands, so that it appeared I could throw my hat upon them; but distances here were deceptive, and I suppose we were never less than a thousand feet away. Yet we were near enough to hear the smash of the surf and to see the big fish leap in the lagoon, to drink the intoxicating draft of oneness with the lonely places, and to feel the secrets of their isolation. I was happy that before I died I had again seen the Thing I had worshipped since I began to read.

I slipped off the coat of years and was a boy on a pirate schooner, my hand on Long Tom, the brass gun, ready to fire if the cannibals pushed nearer in their canoes. Again I had trained my hand and eye so that I brought down the wild pigeon with my sling, and I outran the furious turtle on the beach. I dived under the reef into the cave where the freebooters had stored their ill-gotten treasure, and reveled in the bags of pieces of eight, and the bars of virgin gold. I thought of Silver, and sang:

“Fifteen men on the Dead Man’s Chest—

Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”

“Mais vous êtes gai,” said Jean Moet. “Qu’est cela? You not drink wan bottle when I no look?”

At three o’clock in the afternoon the gale had almost died away. The sun was struggling to break through the lowering sky. McHenry and Kopcke were engaged in their usual bombast of personal achievement with women and drink, and I, to shut out their blague, was playing with Chocolat. Suddenly Kopcke broke off in a sentence and shouted to Moet, who was in the trade-room.

“Capitaine! Capitaine!” he called loudly through the window of the cabin. “There is a flood in air. Puahiohio! On deck! On deck!”

His voice vibrated with alarm, and Moet made three jumps and was at the wheel. He looked ahead, and I, too, saw, directly on the course we were steering, a convolute stem of water stretching from the sea to the sky. Well I knew what it was. I whirled McHenry around.

“Look!” I said, and pointed to the oncoming spectacle.

“A bloody waterspout!” yelled McHenry. “By cripes—here’s where we pay up!”

I heard the native passengers and the sailors forward shouting confusedly, and saw them throwing themselves flat on deck, where they held on to the hatch lashings and other stable objects. Moet, with a fierce oath, ordered the sailors to the halyards.

“Off with every stitch!” he commanded, as he threw the wheel hard over. “Vave! Vave!”

“Trombe!” he warned his wife, who was in the cabin with Kopcke’s girl. “Hold on, Virginie, hold on! Pray, and be quick about it!”

McHenry, Kopcke, and I sprang to the main boom, and helped to take down the canvas and make it fast. The jibs were still standing, when the Marara turned on her heel like a hare pursued by a hound. The waterspout was yet miles distant, but rushing toward us, as we made slow starboard progress from our previous wake. The daylight faded; the air seemed full of water. The sailors were again prone, and we, at the calm though sharp word of Moet, pulled over the companion cover. I shrank behind the house, and McHenry tucked his head into the bend of my body, while Kopcke, on his knees, held on to the traveler.

“Sacramento!” said Moet, as if to himself. “Maybe she no can meet zat!”

With pounding heart, but every sense alert, I watched the mad drive of the sable column. The Marara was now in smooth water,—the glassy circle of the Puahiohio,—and so near was the terrifying, twisting mass of dark foam and spindrift that it seemed impossible we could avoid it. Every inch the master, Moet alone stood up. Chocolat was huddled whimpering between his feet. I saw the captain pull up the straps that held the wheel when in light airs we drifted peacefully, and attach them so that the helm was fixed. There was a dreadful roaring a short way off and nearing every second. The spout was bigger than any of the great trees I had seen in the California forests, and from its base a leaden tower of hurrying water seemed to wind in a spiral stream to the clouds.

“She’s going to drop,” said McHenry in my ear. “Now hold on, and we’ll see who comes out of the bloody wash!”

The roar was that of a blast-furnace, and so close, so fearful, I ceased to breathe. Captain Moet crouched by the steadfast wheel, his hand on the spokes. Forward, I saw two Tahitians with their palms upon their ears.

Suddenly the Marara heeled over. The starboard rail was in the water, and Kopcke, McHenry, and I, a tangled heap against the rail, as we struggled to keep our heads above the foam. Farther and farther the schooner listed. It was certain to me that we must meet death under it in another instant. Moet’s feet were deep in the water, and now the wheel held him up. We clutched madly at the stanchions of the rail, as we choked with the salt flood.

Came the supreme moment. The waterspout rose above us on the port bow like a cliff, solid as stone. A million trumpets blew to me the call of Judgment Day. Then the wall of water passed by a hundred feet to port. In another breath the Marara regained her poise and was on an even keel. The peril was over.

“Mais, tonnère de Dieu!” cried Moet, excitedly, “zat was a cochon ov a watairespouse! Zere air many in zese latitude. Some time I see seex, seven, playin’ ‘round at wan time. I sink we make ze sail, and take wan drink queeck. Eh, Virginie, ici! Donne-moi un baiser, little cabbage! Deed you pray ’ard?”

Over his petit verre, the captain said to me, confidentially, “Moi, I was almos’ become a bon catholique again.”

Chocolat, who must have thought he had borne his part bravely in the crisis, frisked wildly about the wheel, risking his own brown hide at every leap, to testify his joy at his safety.

McHenry and Kopcke, with the heartening rum in their stomachs, resumed their palaver.

“That spout didn’t come within fifty feet of us,” said McHenry. “I’ve seen one in which a bird was bein’ carried up, whirlin’ round and round, and not able to fly away. It was comin’ toward us like lightnin’ when I jumped into the shrouds with a big tin tub, an’ banged it like bloody hell. It scared the spout away, an’ it busted far enough from us not to hurt us. Bill an’ Tommy Eustace can swear to that.”

“Diable!” Kopcke broke in. “Mapuhi and his daughter were in a cutter coming from Takepoto when they were attacked by a trombe. It did not strike them but the force of it overturned their cutter, four miles from shore, and knocked the girl insensible, so that Mapuhi had to swim to shore with her.”

They are fearsome spectacles at their best, these phenomena of the sea, comparable only in awe-inspiring qualities to the dread composants of St. Elmo’s Fire, those apparitions of flame which appear on mastheads and booms on tempestuous nights, as if the spirits of hell had come to welcome the sailor to Davy Jones’s locker. Waterspouts I had seen many times. They were common in these waters,—more frequent, perhaps, than anywhere else,—and to the native they were the most alarming manifestation of nature. Many a canoe had been sunk by them. There were legends of destruction by them, and of how the gods and devils used them as weapons to destroy the war fleets of the enemies of the legend-telling tribes.

When I went to sleep at ten o’clock that night, we were ranging up and down between Takepoto and Takaroa, steering no course but that of prudence, and waiting for the dawn.

I came on deck again at four. The moon was two thirds down the steep slope of the west, a golden sphere vaster than ever before. The sea was bright and quaking, and shoals of fish were waking and parting the shining surface of the water.

Suddenly from out of the gloom of the distance there loomed as strange a vision as ever startled a wayfarer.

A huge ship, under bare poles, solemn and lonely of aspect and almost out of the water, lifted a black bulk as if bearing down upon us. Somber and ominous, void of light or life, fancy peopled it with a ghostly crew. I almost expected to read upon its quarter the name of Vanderdecken’s specter-ship, and to hear the mournful voice of the Flying Dutchman’s skipper report that he had at last reached a haven.

The weirdness of this unexpected sight was incredibly surprising. It electrified me, dismayed me, as few phenomena have.

Piri a Tuahine, at the wheel, called down to the captain.

“Paparai te pahi matai!” he announced in the even tone of the Maori sailor. “The ship wrecked in the cyclone!”

Moet came on deck in pajamas, surveyed the spectacle of desolation, said “Bon jour!” to me, gave an order to the sailor to “Keep her off,” and returned to snatch another nap. I saw through the stripped masts of the wrecked ship the fires of the bakers who mix their flour with cocoanut-milk, and wrap their loaves in cocoanut-leaves to bake. They were comforting as tokens of the living, contrasted with the sorrowful skeleton of one-time glory in that isolated cradle of rocks. Kopcke stuck his head through the companionway to observe our bearings, squinted at the somber wraith through his heavy eyes,—he and McHenry had played écarté most of the night,—and replied to my query:

“As you say, mon garçon, it is the County of Roxburgh, that English ship. She lost her reckoning, and in a big hurricane crashed upon the reef. Her crew put over a boat but it was smashed at once, and those who reached the shore were badly bruised and broken by the coral. When the people of Takaroa—my girl’s father was one of them—rushed to succor them, they fought them off, because their books said the Paumotuans were savages and cannibals. It wasn’t till they saw Takauha, the gendarme, and he showed them his red stripe on the sleeve of his jacket, that they realized they were not on a cannibal isle. Takauha brought Monsieur George Fordham, an Englishman, to interpret for them, and they were taken care of. They had broken arms and legs, and heads, too. Mapuhi bought the ship from Lloyd’s for fifteen hundred francs. Think of that! He took everything off he could, but the hull, masts, and yards stayed on. He made thousands of dollars out of the ship, and in his store you will find the doors and chests and the glass. She was built in Scotland.”

Her hull and decks of heavy metal, and her masts and yards, great iron tubes, she had defied even that master wrecker, Mapuhi, to disrobe her of more than her ornaments. Carried over the reef upon a gigantic wave, and perched upon a bed of coral in which she now fitted as snugly as in a dry-dock, she had withstood the storms and tides of years, and doubtless must stay in that solitary spot until time should disintegrate her metal and dissolve its atoms in the eternal sea.

The palms on the atoll paraded in battalions, waving their dark heads like shakos, and the surf shone in silver splashes, as I sat on the cabin house and watched the dawn unfold. Slowly the moon withdrew. At half-past five o’clock, the mother of life and her coldly brilliant satellite were in concert, and the ocean was exquisitely divided by sunbeams and moonbeams matching for favor in my admiring eyes.

Kopcke reappeared with a cigarette. He had an unusual chance to find me alone, and was hungry for information.

“There is a passage in the reef at Takaroa,” he said, “but you can bet the Marara won’t go through it. It is plenty big enough to let her in, but that takes seamanship. Now, I have seen Mapuhi sail his schooner through this passage in half a gale of wind, and swing her about inside in the space most chauffeurs in Tahiti need to turn their automobiles. No one else would try it. He won’t go in; but Mapuhi would have his crew stand by, and, with the wheel in his own hands, would tear through the opening as if he had all the seven seas about him.”

I was below washing my hands, when the roar of the breakers came to my ears with the call of Moet that a boat was leaving. I rushed to the waist of the schooner and, catching hold of a belayed rope’s end, dropped on the dancing thwart. Chocolat made a bound and landed on his master’s lap. Moet swore, but we were away.

There was a high sea, and for a few seconds it was pitch and toss whether we could keep right side up. However, we struck the gait of the rollers, and, with Piri a Tuahine at the long steering oar, moved toward the beach, urged on by rowers and breakers, but opposed by a strong outsetting current.

The dexterity of the steersman saved us a dozen times from capsizing. Often we climbed waves that, but for an expert guidance, would have crashed over us. Many and many a boat turns over in these “landings” and spills its life freight to death or hurt. Nearing the passage, a white and brawling two hundred feet between murderous rocks, the boat had to be swung obliquely to enter, and we hung upon a comber’s peak for a seeming age, the rowers sweating furiously at the oars, until Piri a Tuahine gave a staccato signal. Oars inboard, we rushed down the shore side of the breaker, and were at peace in a lovely lagoon.

Of the many miles of circumference of Takaroa, a tiny motu was inhabited by the hundred and fifty people, and on it they had built a stone quay for small boats. We made fast to it and sprang ashore.