Becke’s career as a free-lance writer was well paid, although he sold his books outright rather than on a royalty basis. He dashed off his volumes and articles, including book reviews and “London Notes,” in the extemporizing, yarn-spinning style he had taught himself. During most of the last twenty years of his life he turned out at least one book annually, and contributed to many newspapers and magazines in England and Australia, sometimes using the pseudonyms “Ula Tula,” “Te Matau,” “Papalagi” and “A South Sea Trader.” Like most writers on the South Pacific, he received many hundreds of letters from male readers asking how to get to the Pacific islands, the cost of living there and so on. “But,” he adds, “they invariably wound up by some very pointed questions concerning the ways of the Brown Woman.…”
Notable, a generation before the revival of critical interest in Herman Melville, was Becke’s lifelong advocacy of the whaleman of the Acushnet, “the one man who knew his subject and knew how to write about it.” In his introduction to a 1901 edition of Moby Dick, which he thought one of the best sea books ever written, Becke said: “His writings possess that power and fascination that no other seawriter, excepting Marryat, can exercise. He was of the sea; he loved it. Its hardships, its miseries, its starvation, its brutalities, and the grossness and wickedness that everywhere surrounded him in his wanderings through the two Pacifies, held but little place in the mind of a man who, ragged and unkempt as was too often his condition, had a soul as deep and wide and pure as the ocean itself.”
Becke’s generous treatment of other writers was in marked contrast to the disgraceful plagiarism he himself suffered. Unknown and penniless, several years before his first book was to come out, Louis was staying in the home of Thomas Alexander Browne, who under the pseudonym of “Rolf Boldrewood” had won deserved popularity with such books as Robbery Under Arms and The Miner’s Right. Browne was working on a novel about the islands, and for a cash payment of £12 10 s. and a gentlemen’s agreement to pay more upon publication, Becke supplied Browne with a manuscript he had written about his exciting life with Bully Hayes. This was to be used as raw background material for a Boldrewood novel. But Becke wrote so well that Browne adopted his material, virtually unchanged, as the main body of his novel, A Modern Buccaneer, which appeared in 1894 without a word of acknowledgment to Becke. The best part of the novel, in Becke’s straightforward style, deals with the adventures of a supercargo serving under “William Henry Hayston”—a pseudonym for Bully Hayes—and his experiences among Pacific isles, including the wrecking of the brig Leonora at Kusaie.
On August 6, 1894, Becke complained to Browne: “You bought the manuscript for the purpose of weaving the incidents in my narrative into a romance of your own.… I certainly did not imagine that the manuscript would go, without alteration, into your book as your work. It was a shock to find that instead of my material being used as a framework for A Modern Buccaneer, to be clothed in your picturesque language, it was used verb et lit and actually constitutes the book itself. I thought that under your skillful hands the story would be so changed and improved as to render my work entirely unrecognizable.”
Becke then consulted his solicitor, “Banjo” Paterson, who as Australia’s greatest balladist supplied the words of its unacknowledged national anthem, “Waltzing Matilda.” Paterson advised Browne to admit publicly Becke’s contribution, which was done in an advertisement in the Sydney Daily Telegraph of November 3, 1894, as well as in the one-volume edition of the novel that appeared in 1895. But Louis never got any of the promised money from the sale of the book. In Browne he had met a “modern buccaneer” worse than Bully Hayes!
Through the years, Becke changed his residence from London to Ireland to France, and traveled in Jamaica, the eastern United States, and Canada. But he missed the islands. They haunted him and lured him back to their sun-swept coral beaches. So in 1908, at the age of fifty-three, he and his entire family turned up in Wellington, N.Z., full of plans to carry out a twenty-month scientific expedition through the Pacific islands. Louis was now a member of the Royal Geographical Society and an earnest researcher. The expedition actually sailed, and by December had reached Fiji, armed with phonograph recording devices for taking down the native songs and stories of Melanesia. But for some unknown reason, the big adventure collapsed, and Louis Becke went disconsolately back to New Zealand.
The family returned to Sydney in 1911. Becke’s health had been deteriorating for some years, although there survives a large newspaper advertisement in which his portrait is accompanied by a testimonial praising Jones’ Australian Oil as a sovereign remedy for his muscular rheumatism, as well as for occasional bruises and sprains. He does not look well in the photograph, although his eyes are as luminous as ever. About this time Norman Lindsay described Louis as a “thin, hawk-faced, emaciated man with a ragged, drooping mustache, muffled up in an ulster and speaking in a husky voice that had lost all resonance.” Actually, Becke was suffering from cancer of the throat.
For a time he was in a private hospital, but he recovered enough to take up residence at the Hotel York—indistinguishable from dozens of other Sydney licensed premises. On the morning of February 18, 1913, a chambermaid found Louis Becke dead in his chair, with the manuscript of an unfinished short story scattered on a table in front of him.
Once, when recalling his halcyon days in the islands, Becke may have had a premonition of the manner of his death, for he wrote: “Denison [Becke’s fictional alter ego] often wishes he could live those seven months in Leassé over again, and let this, his latter-day respectability, go hang; because to men like him, respectability means tradesmen’s bills, and a deranged liver, and a feeling that he will die on a bed with his boots off, and be pawed about by shabby ghouls smelling of gin.” Louis Becke should have died at sea or on one of the golden atolls he had served as a solitary trader. There he could have been appropriately buried. Instead, he was interred with a Church of England service in a smug Sydney suburb, attended by his widow, a nephew and three elder brothers. The grave, in the highest part of the Waverley Cemetery, is still remembered and tended by those who love Australian literature. There is one redeeming feature: the spot overlooks the swells of the sparkling Tasman Sea.
As a boy growing up in Sydney, Louis Becke had dreamed of becoming a pirate; and before he was twenty, he was charged with piracy. Unquestionably the climax of Becke’s life came when he was eighteen and served under Bully Hayes, but the facts of his association with that wild buccaneer are difficult to pin down. In three different works Becke speaks of specific meetings with Hayes, and by combining them we can construct a rough timetable. In “Bully Hayes, Buccaneer,” published the year before Becke died, he reports having met Hayes in a San Francisco saloon and says that “five years later” he became Bully’s supercargo. In “Skippers I Have Sailed With” he says, “During the two years I was with Bully Hayes we visited many hundreds of islands.” In September, 1914, the magazine Adventure posthumously published a Becke letter about Bully: “I knew him when I was quite a boy, and sailed with him as supercargo and labor-recruiter for over four years.”
Thus we find that Becke knew Hayes in many different places, sailed with him for over four years, and visited with him many hundreds of islands. Unfortunately, each of these statements is false. Here are the facts.
It is doubtful that Becke could have seen Hayes in San Francisco, since there appears to have been no date when the two seamen were in that city at the same time. Becke probably did see Hayes once or twice while the young Australian was working as a clerk in Mrs. Macfarland’s store in Apia, Samoa. On December 3, 1873, Becke was sent by this same Mrs. Macfarland to deliver a worm-eaten ketch, the E. A. Williams, to Captain Hayes, who was waiting in the Marshalls, where he had cooked up a shady deal to hoodwink an unsuspecting native chief by palming off the worthless ketch for good money.
Becke sailed to Mili Atoll and delivered the ship to Hayes on January 17, 1874, on which date his service in the Leonora beg
an. He could not have sailed on the ship for more than fifty-seven days, for on March 15 the vessel was totally destroyed in a hurricane, after which Hayes and Becke were ashore together as castaways until the warship Rosario arrived at Kusaie and the two were separated forever. But even during these six months ashore, Becke saw little of Bully, for as we shall learn shortly, Becke soon deserted his wild captain and went to live by himself at Leassé on the other side of the island. Of this time Becke wrote: “And the memories of the seven happy months he spent there remain with him still, though he has grown grizzled and respectable and goes trading no more.”
So Becke was not with Hayes for four years; he was on the roster of the Leonora for fifty-seven days, and most of them were spent ashore at one or another island. He did not touch “many hundreds of islands,” though; possibly they put in to three after leaving Mili. And he did not associate with Hayes for “over four years”; he knew him for eight months, by far the larger number of which were passed as a fugitive from the wrath of that unpredictable buccaneer.
But Louis Becke was not a liar; he was a writer. And Bully Hayes was the hero of his red-letter days. From here on, in retelling the adventures of that youthful time, we shall not again question in niggardly manner what happened on the memorable cruise of the Leonora, for what Becke wrote in his various accounts of it was mostly true, and all who love the Pacific quickly fall within the spell of that robust episode. This is what should have happened to an eighteen-year-old lad as he set forth from Samoa to deliver a rickety sixty-ton ketch to the greatest buccaneer of his day, who was waiting for him far across the expanses of the Pacific.
The trip to the northwest was a miserable affair. After forty-two days of rolling through Pacific swells under the command of a gin-sodden Dutch captain, the Williams staggered into Mili Atoll, where the Globe mutineers had landed exactly half a century before. There, on the shore where Sam Comstock had planned a cathedral, waited bearded Bully Hayes, cursing at the long delay in his plans. “We’ll sail that ketch to Arno in the morning,” he fumed.
But as soon as Hayes piloted the leaking ketch into the anchorage, Becke packed his gear and informed Bully that he refused to sail another day in the Williams, unless she traveled on the deck of another vessel. Bully poked his thumb through her hull, consulted Ah So, his Chinese carpenter, and decided to beach the Williams and abandon her.
“We can keep her from sinking that way,” he announced, “and maybe come back later and sell her. But I can’t wait around for the chance. Now, young Becke, you have no way to get back to Samoa. Why not sign aboard as my supercargo?”
In this way Louis Becke joined up with Bully Hayes, who was later to be his most memorable literary creation. One incident of the saga occurred a few minutes after Becke first boarded the Leonora. Three men, hard cases put ashore by the captain of a New Bedford whaler, came out and asked Bully to ship them. He refused in such unnecessary language that the leader of the gang offered to put a head on him. Hayes at once had the deck cleared and, taking the men in turn, knocked out each of them in one round. He then gave them a glass of grog apiece, and sent them ashore with a bottle of arnica to rub on their bruises.
It was in the Leonora that Becke voyaged to Kusaie, that soaring, lovely island where he was to spend the happiest months of his life. Until his death, his mind constantly returned to Kusaie and the delectable days he spent there among the friendly brown people.
His introduction to Kusaie was dramatic. As late as 1825 the island had contained about eleven thousand handsome, virile and warlike natives. Then European diseases, particularly measles, ravaged the inhabitants, followed by American missionaries who introduced clothes, which in turn brought pulmonary diseases. When Becke landed there, only four hundred people survived. The frightened, worn-out men confided. that in the old days they had been afraid of nobody, but since so many strange things had happened to the island, they had become bewildered and all the fight had gone out of them. Now they were being persecuted and killed off by a gang of invaders from Pleasant Island.
King Togusa, a wizened old man of about sixty, crippled by rheumatism, received Hayes and Becke in his thatched palace beside the cosy harbor of Lele. He was dressed in a black frock coat, white duck trousers and patent-leather shoes. While Louis chatted with the handsome and flirtatious Queen Sa, the king drank Bully’s brandy and explained how the invaders held Kusaie in a grip of terror.
Hayes, as we have shown in the preceding chapter, quickly gained control of the situation and agreed to take the invading Pleasant Islanders, and the white traders who led them, to settle on one of Bully’s favorite islands. Just before the Leonora got under way in the harbor, the old king and his young queen came aboard to make some purchases in Louis Becke’s trade room. After buying about $200 worth of printed cloth and cutlery, the king retired to drink brandy in Bully’s comfortable cabin, while Louis, as he said later, “had the distinguished honor of fitting on and selling Queen Sa a yellow silk blouse and two pairs of patent-leather shoes.”
The overcrowded brig then departed for Port Lottin, a few miles to the south, to take on final provisions before leaving Kusaie. At 7:00 A.M. they dropped anchor in fourteen fathoms abreast of the inner reef of that port, with two New Bedford whalers, St. George and Europa, between them and the deep but narrow passage out to the open sea.
By dusk young Louis, who had been weighing and paying for the pigs and yams being loaded, began to think of the dinner to which he had been invited on one of the whalers. Just then, the trade wind that had been blowing all day suddenly lulled—a dangerous sign at that time of year. The barometer began to fall rapidly.
Hayes, weather-wise, sent over a boat to warn the whalers and advise them to head out to sea, but they decided not to risk towing through the jaws of the reef, since they were at good moorings. That meant the Leonora could not escape; and she was left in a bad spot, close to shore, with almost no room to swing. The rising swell prevented them from shortening her cable, for it would soon have parted.
Bully ordered the royal and topgallant yards sent down, decks cleared of lumber, boats slung inboard by the davits and native passengers sent below, out of the way. Although not a breath of wind was stirring, the mountainous swell threw the brig almost on her beam ends. The air was so close and oppressive that the Pleasant Island natives could be kept below only by threats that the first one to come on deck would be shot. When some of them begged to be allowed to swim ashore and spend the night, Hayes let them go. At once ten men and six women sprang overboard into the shark-infested waters and swam toward the village of Utwe, invisible now in jet darkness.
Then, as if belched from a cannon, a hot gust hit from the south, rising to hurricane force. The sea was tremendous. Louis Becke had never heard anything like the thunder of the surf on the reef, now only a couple of cables’ lengths from the brig. The sound of the huge seas as they tumbled upon the hollow crust of coral made his hair stand up like wires. A strange humming undertone terrified the fierce Pleasant Islanders, and the rest of them begged Hayes to let them come on deck, because “the belly of the world was about to burst.” Bully consented, and in a few minutes the natives, after stowing their Snider carbines in Becke’s trade room to protect them from the salt water, thronged the heaving deck.
The trade room had become a mess because of the rolling, and the floor was a jumble of broken cases of liquor, gunpowder, concertinas and women’s fancy hats. Beckoning a couple of native sailors to help him, Louis was just going to clean it up when Bully Hayes called sharply to his officers to stand by.
From the northwest came a droning roar, and in half a minute the Leonora heeled in the fury of the first gust of wind, rain, spume and palm leaves. She brought up on her anchors with a jerk. Blown sheets of water lashed her bows and waist.
Bully Hayes stood in the stern, sounding the depths, as calm as if he had been trout fishing. “Don’t bother about the trade room!” he told Louis quietly. “Get all the arms and ammunition you ca
n ready to put in the boats. I can’t give her more than another ten fathoms of cable—there are a lot of coral mushrooms right aft, and the first one we touch will knock a hole in our hull. We’ll get smothered in the seas in another ten minutes—if the cables don’t part before then!”
During a strange lull, in which the glass fell steadily, Becke began loading heavy trade chests with chronometers, sextants, charts, the ship’s books, some silver plate and about six thousand silver dollars. He also stowed in some Winchester rifles and cartridges. He was helped by a young Easter Island half-caste girl named Lalia. The other natives were terrified, but Lalia took a cutlass from the rack and, cursing freely in French, English, Spanish and whalemanese, threatened to murder every one of them if they did not hurry.
Louis got the first box sent up the companion and into one of the whaleboats just when a sea crashed over the waist and all the women but Lalia bolted. Sea after sea tumbled in over the bulwarks with crashing clamor, carrying away the forward deckhouse and sweeping it overboard, killing four men in the main rigging, and flooding the cabin.
The ship rolled, and two starboard guns broke away and rammed to port, carrying away the two guns on that side. The same sea knocked the longboat overboard, but half a dozen Rotuma sailors leaped over and, using canoe paddles, saved her from the crunching coral. Becke was ordered to take charge of her, but before he could do so, a second comber fairly buried the ship. Becke and the Chinese carpenter, Ah So, saved themselves only by tangling in the falls of one of the quarter-boats.
The dismal drone of the gale rose again. Louis heard Hayes shout to the carpenter to stand by and cut away the masts, for the seas were now sweeping the deck like a torrent. Soon the Leonora gave such a terrible roll to port that it seemed the end had come. Six big water tanks amidships had gone adrift. But the big masts were hacked off and sent plunging overside, and the brig stood up again.
Rascals in Paradise Page 33
