Meanwhile, from the shore an old sailor, a castaway from some long-departed man-of-war, had brought out his longboat, manned by half a dozen of his half-caste sons, to try to rescue a number of the women and children. The rescuers could be seen only by the glare of the foam-whipped sea. Then suddenly the longboat and all its hands vanished in the dark, and during a five-minute lull, Hayes urged the remaining women to jump over and make for the shore, as the brig’s deck was now awash.
While Louis stood by, one powerfully built mother from Ocean Island, whose baby had been lashed to her back with bands of sennit, rushed up to Hayes, shouting, “Captain, if I die, I die!,” rubbed noses with him and leaped over the stern into the surf. She was found next morning on the beach, dead of cruel coral gashes, but beside her was the baby, alive and sleeping soundly, for with her dying energy she had sheltered it under a bower of grass and leaves.
The end was near. The brig had been moored with her head toward shore. Now the stern hawsers parted one after another. The Leonora spun like a top, and headed into the wind on her short cable, with the breakers on the reef less than fifty yards astern. The big coral heads which had been safely distant now showed like huge fangs in a sneering mouth as the ring of broken water rose and fell right under the vessel’s counter.
The native girl Lalia was almost exhausted, but she had refused to jump into the ship’s lifeboat, saying she would stay with Louis and help pack the remaining valuables. She ran below, and in a few minutes reappeared with a powerful Pleasant Island native named Karta, carrying the Chinese cook, Ah Ho, who was paralyzed with fear and drink. In fury, Hayes tossed the cook overside, but he landed near a boat whose crew amazingly picked him up.
Becke went below once more with Lalia to haul up another of the boxes, and aided by Karta had got it halfway up the companion ladder when the last cable parted. The brig reared her stern high in the mountainous sea and came down with a terrific smash on a coral boulder. The rudder was ripped from the stern post and sent clean through the deck.
Lalia fell backwards into the cabin and the heavy chest slipped down on top of her, crushing her left foot cruelly and jamming her slender body underneath. Karta and Becke tried vainly to release the tortured girl until, hearing their cries, some Rotuma sailors ran down and got her clear. She had fainted, and was put on the steward’s bunk.
As this final chest of treasure was tossed into a boat, the brig came down again on the coral head with an impact that smashed a big hole in her timbers under the starboard counter. She began to fill.
“It’s all up with her, boys!” roared Bully stoically. “Jump for the boats—but wait for a rising sea, or you’ll get smashed on the coral.” Most of the natives preferred swimming in the seething water to taking a chance in one of the darting boats. More than a few were drowned—despite the fact that it is pretty hard to drown a Micronesian—or else were banged against the razor-sharp reef until they bled to death.
Louis Becke suddenly remembered that Lalia was still below, and with Karta and a Manila man went to rescue her. She was sitting up in Ah Ho’s bunk in the dimly lit cabin, her hair unloosed, her eyes shining with terror. The cabin had three feet of water sloshing about.
Becke lifted her out. She tore off her dress, stripped to the waist, and hand in hand with him succeeded in gaining the companionway just as a cascade came down and put out the lamps. The same wave brought in the body of a little native boy who, crouching on the stair, had been crushed to death by the wheel falling on him when the rudder carried away.
Half drowned, Becke struggled to the deck, with Karta carrying the girl in his arms. The Leonora was now broadside to the reef and well under water forward; the after part was hung up on the coral mushroom, wounded by every wave. Bully Hayes snatched the girl from Karta’s arms just as the ship lobbed over on her bilge and a thumping swell swept the mass of them over the stern. As the backwash lurched seaward again it rolled the brig off the reef, to sink under the jagged ledge in fourteen fathoms, with only the stump of her foretopmast sticking above the swells.
Nothing of the brave Manila man was ever seen again—except his right arm and shoulder, all that the sharks of South Harbor had left of him. Hayes reached shore in the longboat, which was swept over the inner reef by a giant roller, and at once began to direct the work of salvaging the goods from the sunken brig.
The girl, Lalia, Becke and Karta clung to the fragments of a boat and drifted into a mangrove swamp a mile down the shore. They were badly knocked about. Louis was so generally bruised and skinned by coral that he would never have reached shore had he not been buoyed up by Karta and the courageous Lalia, who clung to him when he wanted to let go and drown quietly.
At dawn, the castaways saw, as they gazed seaward, that the two whale ships which had ridden out the hurricane in safety were scuttling through the narrow passage and out to sea. Their captains wisely feared that, since Bully Hayes had lost his own ship, he would not be too particular about taking another near to hand. And they were right; Hayes and the other hard-boiled survivors would have been happy to seize one of the ships of the blubber hunters. But the Yankee skippers, knowing Bully’s evil reputation, outwitted him and left him and his crew marooned on Kusaie.
Ashore, a reign of terror began, and the Pleasant Islanders continued their persecution of the gentle Kusaieans. “One night, therefore,” Becke later told a newspaperman, “our other South Sea islanders attacked these Pleasant Islanders with rifles, knives, stones, and bludgeons, and I went out under the idea that I could put a stop to the fray. They were all fighting like madmen, and I was promptly knocked down and a knife stuck in my head. It went right through the bone.”
We have seen in the chapter on Hayes how he ran wild on Kusaie, indulging in behavior that bespoke a madman. Becke observed this insanity with growing alarm, and then one day realized that there was no hope. Bully had found that one of his trade ledgers was missing. Jumping from his seat in rage, he roared that he had not lost it himself. He strode into his bedroom, driving the women out with savage oaths, and next moment reappeared with his arms full of chronometers. Standing in the doorway he tore the costly instruments from their cases and dashed them to pieces on the coral flagstones at his feet. Then, vowing that he would set a torch to the trading station he had built and roast everyone in it, with his hands beating the air and his face grimacing with passion, he staggered like a drunken man to the beach and sat alone on a boulder.
This was enough for nineteen-year-old Louis Becke. He boldly informed Hayes that he was going to leave him.
“Where will you live?” Hayes growled.
“Across the island, away from here,” Becke replied.
“You’re a damned young fool to take things so hotly,” Hayes grumbled, but when he saw that his young aide was determined, he put his big arm around Louis and handed him a quart of gin. With this fatherly gift, he bade Becke the best of luck.
For the remainder of his months on Kusaie, while the rest of the island reeked of mutiny and drunken violence, Louis Becke spent an idyllic existence as the guest of the dying tribes who lived near Coquille Harbor at the poetic village of Leassé.
Here he dwelt in a small grass-thatched hut and led a somnolent existence that would haunt him for the rest of his days with a memory of peace. He wrote of it: “At daybreak he would awaken, and, lying on his bed of mats upon the cane-work floor, listen to the song of the surf on the barrier reef a mile away. If it sounded quick and clear it meant no fishing in the blue water beyond, for the surf would be heavy and the current strong; if it but gently murmured, he and Kusis and a dozen other brown-skinned men … would eat a hurried meal of fish and baked taro, and then carry their red-painted canoes down to the water, and, paddling out through the passage in the reef, fish for bonito with thick rods of pua wood and baitless hooks of iridescent shell.
“Then, as the sun came out hot and strong and the trade wind flecked the ocean swell with white, they would head back for shining Leassé beach, on whi
ch the women and girls awaited their return, some with baskets in their hands to carry home the fish, and some with gourds of water which, as the fishermen bent their bodies low, they poured upon them to wash away the stains of salty spray.”
And then, as if the gods of the Pacific were determined to include everything possible in Louis Becke’s great adventure, it ended in the most dramatic way possible. A British warship, the Rosario, put into Kusaie determined to bring Bully Hayes to justice. The captain, with a full complement of marines, formally arrested Louis Becke on a charge of piracy. In Samoa the storekeeper, Mrs. Macfarland, had accused him of stealing the worm-eaten old ketch E. A. Williams, which he and Hayes had abandoned on the reef at Mili, and he was put in confinement and hauled off to Australia to stand trial as a proper pirate. But fortunately he had kept a copy of the power-of-attorney given him by Mrs. Macfarland, and this proved that he had been within his rights in disposing of the ship according to his best judgment. At the ripe age of nineteen he thus cleared his name of piracy, and was free to move on to other Pacific adventures.
It was from such experiences that Louis Becke wrote. His protagonists are usually white men caught up in tropic life. They are traders, sailors, drunken captains, beachcombers. They customarily have native wives, though few of the stories deal with romantic love affairs. The native wife is accepted as a matter of course and rarely is there much moralizing about the problem. Marriage in the Western sense is not usually indulged in, but liaisons often last through twenty or thirty years.
The traditional Becke hero has sometimes had to flee a more stable society because of murder or theft or drunkenness; more often he is merely a drifter. In the islands he faces new problems of violence, and it is a rare story that does not include some extraordinary outburst of passion, which is reported in matter-of-fact phrases. A murder is rarely built up into fictitious levels of interest; a beachcomber murders someone and that is that.
There is no standard Becke villain. One time it will be a native who has gone mad and murdered nearly twenty helpless victims. Another time it will be a surly white man, or an evil supercargo, or a revengeful mate. A surprising number of Becke’s stories end in sudden and even gruesome death but without the effect of horror or even regret. That was the way men died in the late-nineteenth-century Pacific and the author is merely relating a normal experience.
All critics of Becke’s work have mentioned the monotony of his plots, and this stems from the fact that he used the same kind of protagonist repeatedly. This Becke island man is not a philosopher, not a poet, nor a heroic figure, nor a deviser nor an empire builder. He is simply an average man caught up in the average situations of a wild and violent ocean. Part of Becke’s charm is that one can start almost any story and be instantly in the middle of it, because the chief character, whatever his name, is the same familiar hero one has met endlessly before.
Becke’s women are even more standardized. The white women—and far more of these appear in his stories than the reader at first realizes—often exhibit courage, but they are a dreary group, wasting their lives away on remote islands. The native women are surprisingly undifferentiated. They wander in and out of stories, support their men in crisis, bear children and say little. Often they are not even named. Rarely does one catch a glimpse of why a white man marries a brown woman other than for convenience, and after reading a batch of Becke yarns, one concludes properly that it was nothing but convenience that motivated most of these matches.
Becke was a very poor novelist and it requires a patient reader to plough through to the end of one of his more lengthy tales. The characterizations are not skilled, the incidents are apt to be repetitious, and the interlocking of major and minor plots is completely unsophisticated. If the author had written novels only, he would now enjoy no reputation whatever.
But as a short story writer—if that designation be elastically defined—Becke had real power. It is deceptive. The newcomer to Becke, trained in the great Russian, French or American masterpieces in this form, will surely be thrown off balance by Becke’s casual opening paragraphs: “I stayed once at Rotoava—in the Low Archipelago, Eastern Polynesia—while suffering from injuries received in a boating accident one wild night.…” But with surprising speed Becke lures his reader into a real situation. With apparent deficiency of art he states bluntly the apex of his story, then adds some irrelevant ending, and the yarn is done. But when the reader thinks back upon his reading experience, he acknowledges that in some strange way Becke has conveyed a sense of the island setting, a feeling for the dreadful averageness of the characters involved, and a lasting appreciation of the varied life of the Pacific.
It is probably unfair to call these artless tales short stories—they are more properly sketches; but some impart a surging power. Sharks devour a group of wanderers; a drunken sailor rows off into the night with his enemy’s child, a lover who has been badly wronged tips his hat to the woman who did the wrong; a murdering deserter commits suicide rather than face recapture. These incidents remain vividly in the mind.
Technically, Becke was adroit in setting the stage for his yarns. He roams the entire Pacific, refers to the most memorable islands, the staunchest ships, the worst buccaneers. With admirable spareness he indicates exactly where each action takes place: “One night, as the bark was slipping quietly through the water, and the misty mountain heights of Bougainville Island showed ghostly gray under myriad stars, Rothesay came on deck an hour or two before dawn.” Through such indications of setting, Becke takes his reader endlessly back and forth across the Pacific as no other writer can.
He was not good at sustaining dialogue, but often his awkward and stilted reports of what men said invoke a feeling of the period, and if they lack dramatic tension, they send forward the mood and the sense of time. It is difficult to find any Becke dialogue referring to values; it is the talk of men who face perils or who have such mundane problems as murder and piracy to attend to.
It should therefore be obvious that Louis Becke does not warrant comparison with gifted writers like Melville and Stevenson; nor with polished storytellers like James Norman Hall and the colorful John Russell. He lacks the poetry of Robert Dean Frisbie and the rare artistic integrity of his New Zealand successor, Katherine Mansfield. Nor does he have the social conscience of his Australian contemporary Henry Lawson.
But what other author born and brought up in the Pacific region in the nineteenth century is better than Becke? He merits a secure place in the literary history of the Pacific, primarily because his very lack of polish reflects the rude and lawless period in which he lived. (To most old Pacific hands it is positively impossible to get a single breath of ocean air from Stevenson, for example.) And in his ability to end a story with some apparently irrelevant afterthought, which somehow sums up the entire yarn, and the age, and the ocean, too, Becke is without compare. Once he told a very rambling tale about a garrulous old man who had sailed with Will Mariner to Tonga. The story is utterly tedious, but at the finish Becke throws in an unanticipated paragraph which reflects his art. He has the old man write a farewell note to Becke and the visiting ship captain: “And now, Mr. Denison and Captain Packenham, as I think we shall never meet again, I want you to be good to my [sons] Tom and Sam, and warn them both against the drink. It is kind, generous gentlemen like you who, meaning no harm, send so many half-caste lads to hell.”
Nobody but Louis Becke could have written such a paragraph.
9
Will Mariner, the Boy Chief of Tonga
When one reviews the tragedy and defeat that attended most attempts to find in the Pacific the earthly paradise that Europeans and Americans sought, it is refreshing to come upon the story of a young English boy to whom, in the years 1806 to 1810, the dream was given in richest fulfillment. Not only was he able to go to sea at the age of thirteen as a full-fledged privateersman marauding in the New World, but he experienced one of the strangest adventures in the Pacific, rising to the rank of an authentic boy
chieftain and military counselor to the ruler of one of the most interesting groups of islands. His story has always fascinated the Pacific wanderer, for this youth proved that it could be done. A boy could survive the massacre of a ship’s crew and in a few months become lord of all he surveyed.
His story became known in 1811, when a successful London doctor named John Martin happened to overhear some exciting news. Dr. Martin, inspired by reading about the voyages of Cook and others in the Pacific, had become a sort of amateur ethnologist, and had just learned that a young fellow had sailed into the Thames after four years of living on the remote Tonga Islands.
Dr. Martin immediately took steps to meet this lad, who was now barely twenty-one years old. His name was Will Mariner. He was tall, fair-haired and bronzed by his years in the tropics. His manner was rather taciturn, but after several attempts Martin, who was not much older than he, got him to talk. Young Will had an amazing memory, and under the doctor’s questioning revealed a familiarity with the Tongan language and customs greater than anything hitherto known in Europe.
Unfortunately, Will could not relate much then, for he was scheduled to leave on a voyage to the West Indies; but Dr. Martin got him to promise that, while away on the trip, he would note down everything he could recall about his life in Tonga. When he returned to London, the doctor worked with him day after day, writing a book that would reveal the boy’s astounding story. Will was not inclined to embroider his tale, for to him the events seemed neither odd nor romantic. “Having been thrown upon those islands at an early age,” wrote Dr. Martin, “his young and flexible mind had so accorded itself with the habits and circumstances of the natives that he evinced no disposition to overrate or embellish what to him was neither strange nor new.”
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