Читать книгу The Far Lands - James Norman Hall - Страница 4

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In the austral summer of the year 1921, I was voyaging in a sixty-ton trading schooner amongst “The Cloud of Islands,” more commonly known as the Tuamotu Archipelago: seventy-four lagoon islands scattered over a thousand miles of the eastern Pacific below the equator; the most distant from any continent of all the islands on the globe.

I was then a newcomer in the Pacific and fell under an island enchantment that remains to this day. Unknowingly, I had, it seems, been preparing from the days of a far-inland childhood on the prairies of Iowa for just this result. My first view of any ocean—the north Atlantic—came as a young man. That was a memorable experience but not to be compared with the later one when, shortly after the end of World War I, traveling through the solitudes of that Mother of Oceans, the Pacific, I saw my first lagoon island. The sight of any remote island in whatever latitude, though it be no more than a bare rock, still gives me something of a boy’s feeling of wonder and delight, tropical islands above all others. Their attraction never wanes, nor, I imagine, is it likely to after this distance of time.

On the occasion mentioned it was my good fortune to be traveling with Captain Winnie Brander, whose father’s establishment, the House of Brander, had once been the only important commercial and trading company in the eastern Pacific, with interests extending as far as Rapa Nui, the Easter Island of the mysterious stone images. In one of his letters, dated February 6th, 1891, Mr. Henry Adams—who, with his friend, John La Farge, the artist, was then sojourning on the island of Tahiti—has this to say of the Brander family:

The nine Brander children are now grown; five of them are handsome young men. Their father was the great merchant in these seas. His plantations produced millions of coconuts; his pearl fisheries sent tons of shell to Europe and his income was very great.... He sent all of his sons to Europe to be educated as royalties, and the boys duly coronetted their handkerchiefs and their gladstone bags and bore themselves so as to do credit to their uncle-cousin, the King of Tahiti. They were English subjects and Scotch gentlemen. Then their father died and his estate, when settled, shrank to the modest amount of a million dollars. The widow took half, leaving half-a-million to be divided equally among nine children. The boys who were educated on the scale of a million apiece, were reduced to practically nothing.

When I first came to Tahiti, in 1920, two of the Brander sons, Norman and Winnie, were still living there, and a few years later they were joined by their older brother, Arthur, who had long been absent in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. They were, as Mr. Adams had said, English subjects and Scotch gentlemen, but “Captain Winnie,” as everyone called him, was a true Polynesian in character. He must have received a greater share of his mother’s island blood: that of the old ariki, the class of chiefs and kings. The remnants of the Brander fortune had long since vanished and he earned a modest living as an independent trader whose home was the broad-beamed, weather-beaten little vessel in which I was traveling.

Captain Winnie had the dignity, courtesy and graciousness of manner of the ancient Polynesian aristocracy, although in appearance he looked more like a European than an islander. Seeing him at night, stretched out in his deck chair, his florid face with its finely modeled, high-beaked nose revealed by the light of a lantern hanging nearby, I could imagine that a white-haired Roman senator of the days of the Republic was sitting beside me, dressed in a Polynesian waistcloth instead of a toga, his brown feet bare of the sandals he should have worn. He was the perfection of hosts and companions, the kind I cherish above all others: one to enjoy long silences with, no shadow of embarrassment felt on either side. We would sit without speaking for half-hours at a time, but I always felt in complete wordless rapport with him. He had inherited nothing of his father’s commercial abilities or interests. One would have said that his voyages throughout eastern Polynesia were purely for his own pleasure and that of any guest who chanced to be with him.

On this particular afternoon we were beating up against a fresh southeast wind toward a lagoon island, the tops of its coconut palms barely visible above the horizon. The schooner was equipped with an ancient Fairbanks-Morse engine, but Captain Winnie was compelled to be frugal with gasoline and the engine was used only for entering or leaving the lagoons of those islands that had a passage to the sea, or for standing off and on beyond the reefs of those which had not. The island we were approaching had such a pass, but Winnie told me that because of several coral shoals above the surface of the water it was a difficult one to enter at night. “But they will have seen us coming,” he added. “The chief will have men alongshore to light us in.”

The breeze died away after sunset when we were still some distance out, and it was deep night before the native engineer got the Fairbanks-Morse to running. The quiet katuck-katuck-katuck of the exhaust sounded clearly in the stillness of the night. As we closed with the land, the passage could be clearly seen—a wide strip of starlit water. A moment later came bursts of flame from either side, revealing men, naked save for their loincloths, holding flares of dry palm fronds above their heads. The ruddy light was reflected with spectacular effect from the surf piling over the reefs, the quiet water of the passage, and from their brown bodies which stood out in clear relief against the dark background of the land. No hail was given either from the schooner or the men on shore as we entered the passage, and as soon as we were safely through, the torches were extinguished and the men holding them vanished, as though they had been given reality for the moment only, and for that particular service.

Except for the passage the lagoon was completely enclosed by the reef, threaded at intervals with dark ribbons of land, some of them miles in extent. This was one of the larger atolls with a lagoon thirty miles long by twenty broad in the widest part, and the islet-dotted reef stretched away on either side as far as the eye could reach. We anchored a short distance from the beach of one of these islets where a few dim lights revealed the site of the village. The thunder of the surf along the outer reefs seemed only to deepen the silence which the land enclosed; it could not disturb the peace within them, as flawless as the surface of the lagoon, bright with the reflections of the stars. The anchor—at the end of a rope, not a chain—splashed into the lagoon and the ripples moved outward in circles of white fire. A moment later the deck chair alongside my own creaked faintly as Captain Winnie lowered himself into it with a sigh of content. Barefoot, he moved as silently as a shadow about the decks of his little ship; often the slight creaking of his chair gave me the first intimation of his near presence.

“All snug, now,” he remarked. “I love this place. I don’t care how long we lie here.”

As the schooner swung gently to the anchor, the village was lost to view momentarily and we were looking down the full length of the lagoon.

Presently the stillness of the night was broken by a clear lonely call that seemed to come from horizons beyond horizons. The peace and beauty of mid-ocean had been given a human voice ... But no; it seemed rather to be that of some wandering spirit of the sea itself, giving a listener, if there should be one, a means to measure infinite silence by. It sent little shivers running up and down my spine.

I turned to the captain. “What in the world was that?” I asked.

“Some fisherman out there,” he replied. “He’s made a good catch, very likely.”

“What was it?”

“The fish?” said Winnie. “How should I know?”

“Not that,” I replied. “The call. What’s the meaning of it?”

Winnie sat up in his chair, turned to peer briefly at me, and leaned back once more without replying. His silence seemed to be a kind of reproof as though he were thinking, “What an absurd question!” I felt a little foolish, having been so strangely moved, and said nothing more, waiting for him to speak. A moment later we saw a small outrigger canoe, shadowy in the starlight, approaching the ship. “That’ll be Paraita,” Winnie remarked. “He’s the chief here.”

The canoe came alongside and a white-haired native of seventy or thereabout climbed over the rail, followed by a sturdy lad of ten years. He greeted the captain with a silent shake of the hand; then they spoke briefly together in the island tongue. Graciously Winnie introduced me to the chief. “And this is Maui, his grandson,” he added. “There’s a Maui or two on islands scattered all over this part of the Pacific; and a proud name it is, eh, Maui?” The boy, not understanding English, gave him a quick smile and resumed his sober scrutinizing appraisal of myself. After a little further conversation the chief and his grandson stepped down into the canoe and paddled back to the village. Captain Winnie returned to his chair beside me.

Presently he said: “Hall, many thanks.”

“For what?” I asked.

“For having been stirred by the call we heard just now. For giving me a whiff of the emotion I used to feel upon hearing it years ago. It’s ... well, out of this world. You must have felt that, judging by the way you spoke?”

“I did, very strongly,” I replied.

“I’ve lost the faculty of hearing it as I once did,” said Winnie. “It’s curious, your asking about its meaning. I am convinced that it did have meaning centuries ago.”

“It’s an ancient one, then?” I asked.

“I shouldn’t wonder if it’s as old as the Polynesian race,” he replied. “One still hears it in some of the songs handed down from the times of their remote ancestors. It may have been heard all of a thousand years ago when they were making their great voyages eastward, pushing farther and farther out into the Pacific in the search for new lands.”

“Where did the Polynesians come from in the first place?” I asked.

Winnie was silent for some time. At last he said:

“There has always been a difference of opinion as to the land of their origin. There are men even today who cling to the belief that they came from South America, basing the belief on the fact that the prevailing winds in this part of the Pacific are easterly; that the equatorial current would have carried them westward, and that the kumura, the sweet potato, which undoubtedly came from South America, was found on some of the islands when they were discovered by Europeans. It is possible, though far from probable, that a few South American aborigines, carried by chance far out to sea, may have drifted four thousand miles with the equatorial current, a survivor or two reaching one of the outlying islands of eastern Polynesia. But the great mass of evidence shows convincingly that the face came from the west. There is strong reason to believe that their original homeland was somewhere within the India of today.”

“Is anything known of their early history?” I asked.

“It had better be called pre-history,” Winnie replied. “They had no written language until a century and a quarter ago, when they were given one by the early missionaries. This was long after the period of their great voyages. Just where they came from in the first place; how long they remained in their legendary homeland; why they left it—some believe as early as 500 b.c.; what their fortunes were before they appeared upon the western borders of the Pacific, or when that may have been ... in these matters even the most painstaking students of the problem can hazard little more than a guess.”

“How could they have managed to cover so vast an area of the Pacific?” I asked. “What is your opinion, Captain? When did they come and how did they come?”

“I’ve spent many a day on many an island,” he replied, “dreaming out for myself the history, in its barest outlines, of the Polynesians of centuries ago. Imagination is of little help to begin with. One sees only the faintest of shadows moving through the mists of time past. Then I begin to see them, to my own satisfaction, at least: a hardy, intelligent, adventurous folk who, having been landsmen, eventually become seamen. I picture them as they first venture out from the Asiatic mainland, and hear the slow ticking of the centuries as they pass through and beyond the archipelagos and island continents of the western Pacific—the crude little craft of their ancestors are in the process of becoming the great outrigger and double-hulled sailing ships, miscalled ‘canoes,’ in which they push farther and farther eastward into the unknown sea. I see them in clans and fragments of clans—men, women and children crowded into the ships together, with their pigs and fowls and dogs, with food-bearing plants and young trees carefully preserved to be set out in lands they hope to find. I hear them singing their ancient songs to give them heart and hope as they ‘lift up the sky’ horizon beyond horizon. Some find the empty sea before them ... until the last one has perished. Others reach lands where they remain, for greater or lesser periods—building up their numbers once more, leaving scattered colonies of their blood behind them, but the more hardy and adventurous still sailing on in the direction of the rising sun. Guided by the sun by day, the moon and the stars at night—sailing close-hauled when needs must, or running free before the westerly winds that blow during the Austral summer—they pass far beyond the limits of the world known to men of their time; until, centuries before Magellan was born, they had discovered and peopled the remotest islands and archipelagos of the eastern Pacific.”

Captain Winnie was deeply stirred while telling me this. He was proud, and with reason, of the Polynesian blood that flowed in his veins.

“What men they must have been!” I said. “What splendid seamen!”

“And the women, too, and the children—don’t forget them,” he replied. “Whenever, before or since in human history, have men, women and children set out together in families to explore an unknown sea, hoping to find lands but with no assurance that they would be found, and with no expectation of return?”

“They were heroic people, no doubt of that,” I remarked.

“Perhaps I should not say this, being half Polynesian myself,” Winnie replied; “but in my opinion they were the greatest race of seafaring folk known in the long annals of the sea. If given their due, Pacific would be called by one of their own ancient names for it: Te-Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa, perhaps—the Great Sea of Kiwa. It was their sea long before it was ours.”

“What could have impelled them to make such voyages,” I asked, “in the mere hope of finding lands? Did war have something to do with it?”

“Undoubtedly,” said Winnie. “The ancient Polynesians were akin to other races in their love of war, although they did not make it the universal practice that men do in the modern world. But powerful clans amongst them worshiped the god of war in one form or another. Among these was Koro, or Oro, so powerful throughout eastern Polynesia when the islands were discovered by Europeans. And then, aside from war but often the cause of it, was the smallness of many of the lands found and the resultant scarcity of food for increasing populations. Some were compelled to go elsewhere in a search for new lands, and it was not always or necessarily the weaker. As I have said, they were a great seafaring folk; the love of exploration was in their bones and blood.”

Captain Winnie fell silent for a time. Presently he said:

“Once, while trying to piece together some shards, so to speak, of our ancient history, I caught a glimpse through the mists that stirred me profoundly. It was a saying, or proverb; it might well have been a fragment of ancient belief. I found it in one of those legendary tales written down so many centuries after the events in them had happened. This is what I read: ‘Sacred to Tangaroa is Man. He shall not be killed.’ Later I found a variant of this: ‘Life is sacred to Tané. Men shall not kill.’ ”

“I don’t wonder that you were stirred,” I said. “Do you think it possible that some of the ancient Polynesians were lovers of peace?”

“Why not?” Winnie replied. “In every age there have been men who loathed war. The Polynesians could not have been exceptional in this respect. I believe that some of their great voyages eastward over the Sea of Kiwa were led by men who, with their followers, were lovers of peace, searching for lands where they and their descendants might live, forever beyond the reach of Koro and of those who worshiped him. Unlike the search for peace in our day in a world completely known and exploited, their quest would have been one in terms of space, for the Great Sea of Kiwa was supposed to be measureless.”

“That is a fascinating possibility,” I said. “If there were such lovers of peace do you think it possible that some of them could have reached lands where they were able to enjoy it in complete security, and their descendants after them?”

“I could tell you the story of such a clan,” Winnie replied. “But if I do you are not to question me too closely as to how I succeeded in piecing together the fragments of legend and folklore to make a connected tale of them. Would you like to hear it?”

“Very much,” I said.

“Then I’ll tell you the story before we leave here. I’m in no hurry to push on. Are you?”

“Far from it,” I replied.

“Good!” said Winnie. “As I’ve told you I love this place and I’m sure that you will when you’ve had a chance to look around a bit.”

During the week that followed Captain Winnie said nothing more about the story and I did not press him for it. As for the island, I felt as he did about it: I didn’t care how long we might lie there.

There are periods in everyone’s life, I imagine, when one can say with truth: “This is happiness too deep for words—perfect, unalloyed, with nothing to mar its purity.” So I thought and felt during the fortnight that Captain Winnie’s schooner lay at anchor in the great peaceful lagoon we had entered in such memorable fashion. It was hard to believe that we were still in the world of reality. Even in these days, Polynesians living on remote islands strike one as being the fortunate descendants of those who, a thousand years ago, may have sought for lands where they could live in peace, beyond the threat or even the thought of war. The simplicity of life on such islands appeals to one’s deepest instincts; at least it does to mine. As I wandered over this particular island I caught glimpses of family life, communal life that had altered little through the centuries. The people living there seemed no more than a few steps distant from their Stone Age ancestors.

One evening, fifty or more of them, men and women together, gathered on the beach to sing some of their ancient songs. The night was profoundly still and Captain Winnie and I could hear them plainly from the ship. In one song the call I had heard from the lone fisherman on the night of our arrival floated high and clear above the voices of the others, and again I was deeply stirred as though listening to a voice not of Earth, coming from an immeasurable distance. Winnie told me they were singing some of the old Pari-Pari-Fenua, songs handed down generation after generation across the centuries.

“Some of them are so ancient,” he said, “that most of the meaning has been lost. I can close my eyes and imagine that I am being carried backward in time and westward through space to the days when our people were making their great voyages.”

“What of the story you promised?” I asked. “Wouldn’t this be a good time to begin it?”

“As good a time as any—if you really want to hear it?”

I assured him that I was not just being polite.

He reflected for some time; then he said: “I would like to give you the illusion, at least, of reality. Can you perform an act of faith?”

“I can try,” I replied.

“Imagine, then, that you are hearing the tale from some present-day descendant of the clan concerned in it. For anything I know to the contrary I may be one. I belong to the Teva Clan, but I will call these folk the Tongans.... The story begins at the time when they reach the Land of Kurapo.”