In the South Seas

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Роберт Стивенсон. In the South Seas

PART 1: THE MARQUESAS

CHAPTER I – AN ISLAND LANDFALL

CHAPTER II – MAKING FRIENDS

CHAPTER III – THE MAROON

CHAPTER IV – DEATH

CHAPTER V – DEPOPULATION

CHAPTER VI – CHIEFS AND TAPUS

CHAPTER VII – HATIHEU

CHAPTER VIII – THE PORT OF ENTRY

CHAPTER IX – THE HOUSE OF TEMOANA

CHAPTER X – A PORTRAIT AND A STORY

CHAPTER XI – LONG-PIG – A CANNIBAL HIGH PLACE

CHAPTER XII – THE STORY OF A PLANTATION

CHAPTER XIII – CHARACTERS

CHAPTER XIV – IN A CANNIBAL VALLEY

CHAPTER XV – THE TWO CHIEFS OF ATUONA

PART II: THE PAUMOTUS

CHAPTER I – THE DANGEROUS ARCHIPELAGO – ATOLLS AT A DISTANCE

CHAPTER II – FAKARAVA: AN ATOLL AT HAND

CHAPTER III – A HOUSE TO LET IN A LOW ISLAND

CHAPTER IV – TRAITS AND SECTS IN THE PAUMOTUS

CHAPTER V – A PAUMOTUAN FUNERAL

CHAPTER VI – GRAVEYARD STORIES

PART III: THE GILBERTS

CHAPTER I – BUTARITARI

CHAPTER II – THE FOUR BROTHERS

CHAPTER III – AROUND OUR HOUSE

CHAPTER IV – A TALE OF A TAPU

CHAPTER V – A TALE OF A TAPU —continued

CHAPTER VI – THE FIVE DAYS’ FESTIVAL

CHAPTER VII – HUSBAND AND WIFE

PART IV: THE GILBERTS – APEMAMA

CHAPTER I – THE KING OF APEMAMA: THE ROYAL TRADER

CHAPTER II – THE KING OF APEMAMA: FOUNDATION OF EQUATOR TOWN

CHAPTER III – THE KING OF APEMAMA: THE PALACE OF MANY WOMEN

CHAPTER IV – THE KING OF APEMAMA: EQUATOR TOWN AND THE PALACE

CHAPTER V – KING AND COMMONS

CHAPTER VI – THE KING OF APEMAMA: DEVIL-WORK

CHAPTER VII – THE KING OF APEMAMA

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For nearly ten years my health had been declining; and for some while before I set forth upon my voyage, I believed I was come to the afterpiece of life, and had only the nurse and undertaker to expect. It was suggested that I should try the South Seas; and I was not unwilling to visit like a ghost, and be carried like a bale, among scenes that had attracted me in youth and health. I chartered accordingly Dr. Merrit’s schooner yacht, the Casco, seventy-four tons register; sailed from San Francisco towards the end of June 1888, visited the eastern islands, and was left early the next year at Honolulu. Hence, lacking courage to return to my old life of the house and sick-room, I set forth to leeward in a trading schooner, the Equator, of a little over seventy tons, spent four months among the atolls (low coral islands) of the Gilbert group, and reached Samoa towards the close of ’89. By that time gratitude and habit were beginning to attach me to the islands; I had gained a competency of strength; I had made friends; I had learned new interests; the time of my voyages had passed like days in fairyland; and I decided to remain. I began to prepare these pages at sea, on a third cruise, in the trading steamer Janet Nicoll. If more days are granted me, they shall be passed where I have found life most pleasant and man most interesting; the axes of my black boys are already clearing the foundations of my future house; and I must learn to address readers from the uttermost parts of the sea.

That I should thus have reversed the verdict of Lord Tennyson’s hero is less eccentric than appears. Few men who come to the islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm shades and the trade-wind fans them till they die, perhaps cherishing to the last the fancy of a visit home, which is rarely made, more rarely enjoyed, and yet more rarely repeated. No part of the world exerts the same attractive power upon the visitor, and the task before me is to communicate to fireside travellers some sense of its seduction, and to describe the life, at sea and ashore, of many hundred thousand persons, some of our own blood and language, all our contemporaries, and yet as remote in thought and habit as Rob Roy or Barbarossa, the Apostles or the Cæsars.

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Under the eastern shore, our schooner, now bereft of any breeze, continued to creep in: the smart creature, when once under way, appearing motive in herself. From close aboard arose the bleating of young lambs; a bird sang in the hillside; the scent of the land and of a hundred fruits or flowers flowed forth to meet us; and, presently, a house or two appeared, standing high upon the ankles of the hills, and one of these surrounded with what seemed a garden. These conspicuous habitations, that patch of culture, had we but known it, were a mark of the passage of whites; and we might have approached a hundred islands and not found their parallel. It was longer ere we spied the native village, standing (in the universal fashion) close upon a curve of beach, close under a grove of palms; the sea in front growling and whitening on a concave arc of reef. For the cocoa-tree and the island man are both lovers and neighbours of the surf. ‘The coral waxes, the palm grows, but man departs,’ says the sad Tahitian proverb; but they are all three, so long as they endure, co-haunters of the beach. The mark of anchorage was a blow-hole in the rocks, near the south-easterly corner of the bay. Punctually to our use, the blow-hole spouted; the schooner turned upon her heel; the anchor plunged. It was a small sound, a great event; my soul went down with these moorings whence no windlass may extract nor any diver fish it up; and I, and some part of my ship’s company, were from that hour the bondslaves of the isles of Vivien.

Before yet the anchor plunged a canoe was already paddling from the hamlet. It contained two men: one white, one brown and tattooed across the face with bands of blue, both in immaculate white European clothes: the resident trader, Mr. Regler, and the native chief, Taipi-Kikino. ‘Captain, is it permitted to come on board?’ were the first words we heard among the islands. Canoe followed canoe till the ship swarmed with stalwart, six-foot men in every stage of undress; some in a shirt, some in a loin-cloth, one in a handkerchief imperfectly adjusted; some, and these the more considerable, tattooed from head to foot in awful patterns; some barbarous and knived; one, who sticks in my memory as something bestial, squatting on his hams in a canoe, sucking an orange and spitting it out again to alternate sides with ape-like vivacity – all talking, and we could not understand one word; all trying to trade with us who had no thought of trading, or offering us island curios at prices palpably absurd. There was no word of welcome; no show of civility; no hand extended save that of the chief and Mr. Regler. As we still continued to refuse the proffered articles, complaint ran high and rude; and one, the jester of the party, railed upon our meanness amid jeering laughter. Amongst other angry pleasantries – ‘Here is a mighty fine ship,’ said he, ‘to have no money on board!’ I own I was inspired with sensible repugnance; even with alarm. The ship was manifestly in their power; we had women on board; I knew nothing of my guests beyond the fact that they were cannibals; the Directory (my only guide) was full of timid cautions; and as for the trader, whose presence might else have reassured me, were not whites in the Pacific the usual instigators and accomplices of native outrage? When he reads this confession, our kind friend, Mr. Regler, can afford to smile.

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