Half an hour of waiting went by, and then he was led up to that fire. There on the ground lay three more bodies—those of the first men to mutiny and go ashore without leave. Will was now more certain than ever that he was to serve as the main course of a cannibal feast. He was so dazed that his relief was not great even when he saw some dead hogs hauled up to the fire and put into the underground oven, their bodies filled with hot stones.
Will was then stripped of his trousers and taken to the north point of Lifuka Island. Then he was compelled to wade over a quarter of a mile of dead coral and sand to the adjoining island of Foa. Since his boots had also been taken from him, the knife-edged coral cut his bare feet cruelly. Soon the natives came out of the villages the party passed through, to jeer at the white lad’s blistering nakedness, to push him about and spit at him, and to throw sticks and pieces of sharp coconut shell at his body, which soon streamed with blood. This went on until a kindly woman gave him an apron of large ti leaves to wrap around his waist.
At the large village of Lotofoa, his captors stood around drinking kava, but none was offered to exhausted, thirsty Will. A man arrived in haste to lead the boy to High Chief Finau, ruler of Ha’apai, who would decide Will Mariner’s fate.
Will was taken to Finau’s house. It was long, with rounded ends, having walls of woven bamboo grass. The high-pitched roof was thatched with palm leaves and rested on many rafters supported by heavy posts, and the whole was tied together with sennit fiber. Will and his guides entered in the middle of the long side, and at once the party sat on the palm-leaf mattings covering the ground, as a sign of respect for the great chief.
Poor Will was garbed only in green leaves, his white skin burned scarlet, his fair hair unkempt, his face grimed with the dust of the powder magazine and the filth thrown at him by the villagers. As he hobbled into the house, a group of women at the chief’s left set up a cry of pity.
Finau, an imposing figure, sat on a fine mat. He beckoned the boy to him in a kindly way, and put his nose against Will’s forehead, a Tongan salutation between equals. Then he told one of the women to take the boy outside to wash himself in a pond of clear water. After he had a good bath, Will’s smarting wounds were soothed by a rubdown of sandalwood oil. The woman then clothed him in a large square of soft ngatu, or beaten-bark cloth, spread out a mat for him in a house, and fanned off the mosquitoes as Will, exhausted beyond endurance, fell asleep.
The change in Will’s treatment derived from a fact unknown to him. When Finau first came aboard the Port-au-Prince he had taken a sudden liking to the yellow-haired boy, who, he thought, was the captain’s son. He admired the air of courage in the lad, tall and strongly built for his age, and had given orders that during the taking of the ship, Will Mariner’s life was to be spared.
Will was awakened in the middle of the night by the woman, who realized that he had been given nothing to eat all day and offered him a supper of coconut juice, a cooked yam and a slice of pork just out of the dirt oven. Will ate the yam greedily, but feared to touch the pork, thinking in the dark that it might be human flesh. When he awoke from his second slumber at dawn, his scratches were beginning to heal and he could face the new life that had come to him on the island.
Finau sent to ask Will to accompany him aboard the Port-au-Prince. There Will was delighted to find about a dozen of her old crew, who had survived because they had been in villages ashore at the time of the massacre. Twenty-six of the crew, in all, had been saved in this providential way. Later, Finau had spared them in order to have someone to work the guns of the captured ship, since none of the Tongans could do so.
Finau’s plan was to beach the vessel and strip her of all fittings. The distance from deep water into an opening in the reef opposite the nearest village was only a mile and a half, but the passage was jagged with coral patches. Four hundred natives were swarming over the ship, but they could not sail her to shore. Faced by a seemingly insurmountable problem, High Chief Finau consulted young Will, who ordered the mob to sit down and keep quiet, while the white men worked the sails and steered the Port-au-Prince shoreward through the maze of the reef, until she grounded a few yards from the village.
During the next few days the ship was dismantled. Two of the carronades were brought ashore, along with eight barrels of gunpowder and all the remaining cannon balls. Every scrap of metal was hacked away and saved; even the hoops were knocked off the barrels of whale and sea-elephant oil in the hold, so that the precious oil floated on the water to a depth of several feet.
On December 9, spring tides enabled the natives to warp the doomed Port-au-Prince close to the shore to her last resting place. She was then set on fire, so that the woodwork would burn away and reveal the iron and copper bolts with which her timbers were fastened. She burned for hours.
Unknown to the Tongans, all the guns were still loaded. In the middle of the night they became heated enough to discharge themselves. The natives arose in alarm as the nine-pounders and twelve-pounders exploded, believing that the whole island of Lifuka would be sunk beneath the ocean. With the aid of his Hawaiian interpreter, Will reassured them that all would be well. From this day on he was constantly consulted as an authority on white-man matters.
After calming the natives, Will strolled down in the moonlight to see the last of his ship. She had now burned to the water line, and as he watched, a sizzling heap of metal sank under the waves. Mingled therein was a mass of fused silver, where coins and church plate had been stowed in the strong box. In melancholy Will recalled Margarita’s prophecy at Tola, that the ship and all her crew would be destroyed for the sacrilege in robbing the church at Ilo. Now it was certain that his floating home, the Port-au-Prince, would never reach England again. All the crew’s gains, in oil wrenched from two years of whaling, with the destruction of hundreds of sea creatures, had vanished in smoke. The privateersmen who had destroyed other ships had now lost their own.
While Will had been helping to dismantle the ship, he had taken the opportunity of bringing ashore in his sea chest, hidden in his own belongings, a number of books and papers—including the precious log of the Port-au-Prince. After the ship was burned, Will stayed in Finau’s house, where the chief often found him reading or writing down his experiences. One day Finau asked Will to hand over all his printed matter. The boy did so, but took the precaution of hiding the log book under his sleeping mat. It was well that he did, for he soon found that all his other books and papers had been burned. An escaped convict from Botany Bay, named Morgan, had blamed the nine missionaries stationed on Tongatapu to the south for causing a pestilence by means of the witchcraft of white-man’s books; and through the promptings of Kuikui, Finau had ordered the destruction of all the records of the English sailors.
With the burning of the ship began Will Mariner’s four years’ residence on a South Pacific island. But he was not to remain very long in the role of a common captive. At the behest of High Chief Finau he stayed indoors for about a week, until the highly inflamed emotions of the common people of the place had a chance to subside; for Finau had startling plans for the lad’s future.
Will got his first premonition of this on December 16 when he was invited to go shooting rats on a nearby island. This was a noble recreation which utilized the bow and arrow—weapons that had not been generally used in war until the Tongans had recently learned from the Fijians how to make large war bows to slay an enemy. During the hunt, Finau revealed his soaring ambitions to the white boy. Now that he possessed guns and white men to fire them, he was going to campaign in the European manner in a concerted attempt to bring all the Tongan islands under his sway.
When Captain Cook arrived in the Friendly group, he had found that they indulged little in warfare, but during the interim since his visit, the placid islanders had learned several bad habits from their fierce black neighbors of Fiji to the west, where the Tongans had sailed to obtain sandalwood for oil. In Fiji they not only were taught the use of the bow, but also improved t
heir throwing of the spear and imitated the Fijians in painting their faces and dressing in a way to inspire terror among their foes. The Tongans also picked up the loathsome idea that to eat one’s enemy was a manly and satisfying practice.
For years the men of Ha’apai had engaged in a ritualized annual attack on the major southern island of Tongatapu. Customarily such excursions involved little fighting and less death, but this year the warriors of Ha’apai had a major surprise in store for their cousins in Tongatapu. Ambitious Finau ordered Mariner and three other survivors to get four of the twelve-pound carronades ready for action. The Englishmen set to work and mounted the heavy guns on new carriages with high wheels made by native carpenters. The chief was fearful that the usual mode of Tongan fighting, consisting of sudden rushes and frequent retreats, would not fit in with his new type of warfare. Mariner and his comrades promised that they would remain with their guns in the forefront of the battle if the Tongan fighters would promise to stand firmly with them and not run away.
One day, while Mariner and the other Englishmen were collecting the shot salvaged from the burned ship and cutting sheet lead for other ammunition, Chief Finau asked Will if he had a mother living. When the boy said he had, the chief appeared grieved that he should be separated from a mother’s care, and forthwith appointed one of his wives to be Will’s adopted mother. This woman, the same one who had bathed his wounds the first day, took great joy in looking after him and furnishing him with food and other necessities, and soon gave him as much parental affection as if he had been her own son.
Kuikui, the villainous Hawaiian, was still agitating to have the survivors of the ship killed, including Will, on the plea that if an English warship should arrive and hear of the massacre, a terrible revenge would be taken on the Tongans. But Finau felt that the foreigners would be too forgiving in nature to hold such grudges. Besides, in his grandiose plans he had reserved an important role for the white men.
But although the survivors were not murdered, they lived miserably. Wherever they went they were subjected to insults. Their lack of food was most pressing, and they did not know how to supply it honestly in this strange land. Thus they were starving in the midst of luxurious gardens full of vegetables, of banana and breadfruit and coconut trees in profusion, of pigs and fowls running underfoot everywhere. The white men thought that to take any of these would be stealing—a crime which in England was still punishable by death. Pressed by hunger, they raided at night, but finding that Will was in favor with the chief, they got him to implore Finau to arrange for them to get meals regularly. They would work for them if required.
When Will told Finau of this, the Tongan was dumbfounded by the request and inquired how people got food at home in England. Will replied that every man earned food for himself and his family by his own labors. What happened in the case of strangers without homes and gardens? Will said that although a man might occasionally invite his personal friends to take a meal with him, no one would ask complete strangers—people wandering about on the roads—in to eat. Finau roared against the ill nature and selfishness of such foreigners. He told Will the Tongan custom was much better. Here anybody, friend or stranger, who felt hungry would merely go to a house where the people were eating and drinking, sit down without any invitation, and eat his fill.
At once the starving sailors took advantage of this genial custom. But as word of their plea to Finau spread, it became a standing joke, and when a native dropped in to a village hut, the host would say: “No, we shall treat you after the manner of the white men. Go home and eat what you have, and we shall eat what we have!”
At this time Finau II, as he was known throughout Tonga, controlled the middle and northern groups of islands, but, as he had confided to Mariner, his heart was set upon taking over the greatest group, Tongatapu and its outlying dependencies. Preparations for war were accordingly hurried along. Spears, clubs and slings were collected, and all the great canoes—some of them holding as many as a hundred men—were overhauled and made ready for the seventy-mile voyage.
Finau II, now about fifty-five, was a giant of a man, six feet two inches tall and muscular in proportion. His skin was a warm olive brown; his hair was straight and glossy, falling back from his very high forehead. His penetrating eyes could be gentle, but when they flashed fire, his subjects did well to beware. His nose was large and aquiline, and except for his skin color and prominent jaw, he might have passed for a handsome European.
He was a man of high mental powers and was intensely interested in new ideas. His chief trait was a ruthless desire for supreme command. To gain his ends he could be treacherous—for example, some years before he had helped his half-brother, Tubou-niua, to assassinate the rightful hereditary ruler of Tongatapu, a cruel tyrant, and to murder by night every man, woman and child in mat chief’s house. Finau was cursed by a rage so fierce that he had given orders to his courtiers to hold him down when these fits struck him, so that he would not commit some act that he would later bitterly regret. Yet he could still be sympathetic with suffering, and kind to such a captive lad as Will Mariner. His passionate attachment to his own children was later to be the cause of his downfall. He seldom smiled, but his laughter, when it came, was so loud and deep that it was renowned through the islands under his sway.
Finau II now directed that Will should appear in Tongan dress with a chief’s vala, or skirt, of fine patterned bark cloth, falling from waist to calf, with a wide, twisted girdle. His naked chest was as brown as that of any Tongan, and his bare feet had hardened since his first painful walk ashore. He was quick at languages, and the liquid Tongan words rippled off his tongue.
Finau’s admiration for the lad, still not yet sixteen, was so great that he now bestowed upon him the name of a beloved son who had died at about Will’s age. Thenceforth the name of Will Mariner was no longer pronounced in the islands. He was known to all the people as Toki Ukamea, the Iron Ax. Since his adopted mother was the daughter of a chief, Toki also took status as one of the eiki of Ha’apai, and he was able to bathe on the lovely leeward beaches reserved for those of high rank.
It was as Chief Toki, therefore, that Will embarked on his first military campaign. Finau’s half-brother, Tubou-niua, came down from Vava’u with thirty canoes of warriors to join the fleet of fourteen large double canoes of Ha’apai and many small ones. The four mounted carronades were loaded aboard the four largest double canoes. Most of the warriors had adopted the terrifying Fijian custom of covering their bodies with horrid designs to scare their foes. Since all Tongan men were tattooed in a close black pattern from the line of the navel to the knees, they looked as if they were wearing black short pants.
On the way south the fleet stopped at the islands of Uiha and Nomuka, and Finau II reviewed his troops ashore. He made a heartening speech to his men in his famous voice, which could be heard for a very long distance, and told them that the new style of fighting required them to stand their ground and defend the cannons, which could not be quickly moved. This the warriors promised to do, and the fleet of 170 canoes set forth upon the last stretch of sixty miles of open sea.
Late one evening the fleet reached a small island which stands on the reef fronting the north side of Tongatapu, about a mile from the shore. Across from this insignificant island was a sanctuary in which some of the highest chiefs were buried, including the great Finau I, father of the present leader. All the chiefs of the fleet and their attendants, including Will Mariner, dressed in mourning and accompanied their leader to the grave of his father, where the proper ceremony was held and the priests explained to the spirit of the former ruler the purpose of the present war party.
When they returned to the camp on the islet, they saw the enemy forces across the channel on Tongatapu, brandishing their clubs and yelling ceremonial threats, as in former years.
Tongatapu considered itself unassailable because of the great fortress which had been built on top of the hill at Nuku’alofa, and Finau realized that if he sough
t a real victory, he must destroy this strong place. It was circular and surrounded by deep ditches that shielded a central citadel which was protected by platforms latticed with woven bamboo. Under ordinary conditions of Tongan warfare such a stronghold could withstand a long siege.
Finau and his fleet arrived opposite the fort, where a large party lined up on the beach to oppose the landing of the Ha’apai army, now wading across the reef to shore. Fifteen survivors of the Port-au-Prince, armed with muskets, covered the operation. Their first salvo killed three defenders and wounded several more. The second salvo caused most of the Tongatapu warriors to bolt in terror back to the fort, and those few brave ones who stood firm were driven back by Finau’s warriors as they splashed to the beach.
The carronades, slung on poles, were then landed and quickly remounted on their wheels. Other natives brought the powder and cannon balls ashore, while the white gunners followed with flint and steel and slow match. Finau took up the position of general in command, sitting on a chair (looted from the Port-au-Prince) on the reef in a foot of water, and directed the proceedings. He had been asked by his chiefs not to expose himself, as he usually did, fighting in the van.
Firing commenced on the wickerwork stockades of the fort, but owing to the yielding nature of the bamboo lattices, the cannon balls went through them, leaving few marks. Finau had never seen a bombardment before, and had expected that the whole fort would be pulverized. He sent for Mariner and demanded to know why this had not happened. Will explained that even though there was little damage visible outside, when Finau got inside he would see that things were much different, for it was known that the fort was packed full of warriors and their families, who must be suffering from the cannon balls.
Rascals in Paradise Page 36
