by Louis Becke
Produced by Col Choat. HTML version by Al Haines.
By Reef and Palm
by
Louis Becke
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION CHALLIS THE DOUBTER "'TIS IN THE BLOOD" THE REVENGE OF MACY O'SHEA THE RANGERS OF TIA KAU PALLOU'S TALOI A BASKET OF BREAD-FRUIT ENDERBY'S COURTSHIP LONG CHARLEY'S GOOD LITTLE WIFE THE METHODICAL MR BURR OF MAJURU A TRULY GREAT MAN THE DOCTOR'S WIFE THE FATE OF THE ALIDA THE CHILIAN BLUEJACKET BRANTLEY OF VAHITAHI
INTRODUCTION
When in October, 1870, I sailed into the harbour of Apia, Samoa, in theill-fated ALBATROSS, Mr Louis Becke was gaining his first experiencesof island life as a trader on his own account by running a cutterbetween Apia and Savai'i.
It was rather a notable moment in Apia, for two reasons. In the firstplace, the German traders were shaking in their shoes for fear of whatthe French squadron might do to them, and we were the bearers of thegood news from Tahiti that the chivalrous Admiral Clouet, with a veryproper magnanimity, had decided not to molest them; and, secondly, thebeach was still seething with excitement over the departure on theprevious day of the pirate Pease, carrying with him the yet moreillustrious "Bully" Hayes.
It happened in this wise. A month or two before our arrival, Hayes haddropped anchor in Apia, and some ugly stories of recent irregularitiesin the labour trade had come to the ears of Mr Williams, the EnglishConsul. Mr Williams, with the assistance of the natives, very cleverlyseized his vessel in the night, and ran her ashore, and detained MrHayes pending the arrival of an English man-of-war to which he could begiven in charge. But in those happy days there were no prisons inSamoa, so that his confinement was not irksome, and his only hardlabour was picnics, of which he was the life and soul. All wentpleasantly until Mr Pease--a degenerate sort of pirate who made hisliving by half bullying, half swindling lonely white men on smallislands out of their coconut oil, and unarmed merchantmen out of theirstores--came to Apia in an armed ship with a Malay crew. From thatmoment Hayes' life became less idyllic. Hayes and Pease conceived amost violent hatred of each other, and poor old Mr Williams was reallyworried into an attack of elephantiasis (which answers to the gout inthose latitudes) by his continual efforts to prevent the twodesperadoes from flying at each other's throat. Heartily glad was hewhen Pease--who was the sort of man that always observed LESCONVENANCES when possible, and who fired a salute of twenty-one guns onthe Queen's Birthday--came one afternoon to get his papers "allregular," and clear for sea. But lo! the next morning, when his vesselhad disappeared, it was found that his enemy Captain Hayes haddisappeared also, and the ladies of Samoa were left disconsolate at thedeparture of the most agreeable man they had ever known.
However, all this is another story, as Mr Kipling says, and one which Ihope Mr Becke will tell us more fully some day, for he knew Hayes well,having acted as supercargo on board his ship, and shared a shipwreckand other adventures with him.
But even before this date Mr Becke had had as much experience as fallsto most men of adventures in the Pacific Ocean.
Born at Port Macquarrie in Australia, where his father was clerk ofpetty sessions, he was seized at the age of fourteen with an intenselonging to go to sea. It is possible that he inherited this passionthrough his mother, for her father, Charles Beilby, who was privatesecretary to the Duke of Cumberland, invested a legacy that fell to himin a small vessel, and sailed with his family to the then very newworld of Australia. However this may be, it was impossible to keepLouis Becke at home; and, as an alternative, a uncle undertook to sendhim, and a brother two years older, to a mercantile house inCalifornia. His first voyage was a terrible one. There were nosteamers, of course, in those days, and they sailed for San Franciscoin a wretched old barque. For over a month they were drifting about thestormy sea between Australia and New Zealand, a partially dismasted andleaking wreck. The crew mutinied--they had bitter cause to--and onlyafter calling at Rurutu, in the Tubuai Group, and obtaining fresh food,did they permit the captain to resume command of the half-sunken oldcraft. They were ninety days in reaching Honolulu, and another forty inmaking the Californian coast.
The two lads did not find the routine of a merchant's office at all totheir taste; and while the elder obtained employment on a sheep rancheat San Juan, Louis, still faithful to the sea, got a berth as a clerkin a steamship company, and traded to the Southern ports. In a year'stime he had money enough to take passage in a schooner bound on ashark-catching cruise to the equatorial islands of the North Pacific.The life was a very rough one, and full of incident andadventure--which I hope he will relate some day. Returning to Honolulu,he fell in with an old captain who had bought a schooner for a tradingventure amongst the Western Carolines. Becke put in $1000, and sailedwith him as supercargo, he and the skipper being the only white men onboard. He soon discovered that, though a good seaman, the old man knewnothing of navigation. In a few weeks they were among the MarshallIslands, and the captain went mad from DELIRIUM TREMENS. Becke and thethree native sailors ran the vessel into a little uninhabited atoll,and for a week had to keep the captain tied up to prevent his killinghimself. They got him right at last, and stood to the westward. Ontheir voyage they were witnesses of a tragedy (in this instancefortunately not complete), on which the pitiless sun of the Pacific haslooked down very often. They fell in with a big Marshall Island sailingcanoe that had been blown out of sight of land, and had drifted sixhundred miles to the westward. Out of her complement of fifty people,thirty were dead. They gave them provisions and water, and left them tomake Strong's Island (Kusaie), which was in sight. Becke and the chiefswore Marshall Island BRUDERSCHAFT with each other. Years afterwards,when he came to live in the Marshall Group, the chief proved hisfriendship in a signal manner.
The cruise proved a profitable one, and from that time Mr Beckedetermined to become a trader, and to learn to know the people of thenorth-west Pacific; and returning to California, he made for Samoa, andfrom thence to Sydney. But at this time the Palmer River gold rush hadjust broken out in North Queensland, and a brother, who was a bankmanager on the celebrated Charters Towers goldfields, invited him tocome up, as every one seemed to be making his fortune. He wanderedbetween the rushes for two years, not making a fortune, but acquiringmuch useful experience, learning, amongst other things, the art of ablacksmith, and becoming a crack shot with a rifle. Returning toSydney, he sailed for the Friendly Islands (Tonga) in company with theking of Tonga's yacht--the TAUFAAHAU. The Friendly Islandersdisappointed him (at which no one that knows them will wonder), and hewent on to Samoa, and set up as a trader on his own account for thefirst time. He and a Manhiki half-caste--the "Allan" who so frequentlyfigures in his stories--bought a cutter, and went trading throughoutthe group. This was the time of Colonel Steinberger's brief tenure ofpower. The natives were fighting, and the cutter was seized on twooccasions. When the war was over he made a voyage to the north-west,and became a great favourite with the natives, as indeed seems to havebeen the case in most of the places he went to in Polynesia andMicronesia. Later on he was sent away from Samoa in charge of a vesselunder sealed orders to the Marshall Islands. These orders were to handthe vessel over to the notorious Captain "Bully" Hayes. (Some day hepromises that he will give us the details of this very curiousadventure). He found Hayes awaiting him in his famous brig LEONORA inMilli Lagoon. He handed over his charge and took service with him assupercargo. After some months' cruising in the Carolines they werewrecked on Strong's Island (Kusaie). Hayes made himself the ruler ofthe island, and Mr Becke and he had a bitter quarrel. The nativestreated the latter with great kindness, and gave him land on the leeside of the island, where he lived happily enough for five months.Hayes was captured by an English man-of-war, but escaped and went toGuam. Mr Becke went back in the cr
uiser to the Colonies, and then againsailed for Eastern Polynesia, trading in the Gambiers, Paumotus, andEaster and Pitcairn Islands. In this part of the ocean he picked up anabandoned French barque on a reef, floated her, and loaded her withcoconuts, intending to sail her to New Zealand with a native crew, butthey went ashore in a hurricane and lost everything. Meeting with MrTom de Wolf, the managing partner of a Liverpool firm, he took servicewith him as a trader in the Ellice and Tokelau Groups, finally settlingdown as a residential trader. Then he took passage once more for theCarolines, and was wrecked on Peru, one of the Gilbert Islands (latelyannexed), losing every dollar that he possessed. He returned to Samoaand engaged as a "recruiter" in the labour trade. He got badly hurt inan encounter with some natives, and went to New Zealand to recover.Then he sailed to New Britain on a trading venture, and fell in with,and had much to do with, the ill-fated colonising expedition of theMarquis de Ray in New Ireland. A bad attack of malarial fever, and awound in the neck (labour recruiting or even trading among the blacksof Melanesia seems to have been a much less pleasant business thanresidence among the gentle brown folk of the Eastern Pacific) made himleave and return to the Marshall Islands, where Lailik, the chief whomhe had succoured at sea years before, made him welcome. He left on afruitless quest after an imaginary guano island, and from then untiltwo years ago he has been living on various islands in both the Northand South Pacific, leading what he calls "a wandering and lonely butnot unhappy existence," "Lui," as they call him, being a man both likedand trusted by the natives from lonely Easter Island to the farawayPelews. He is still in the prime of life, and whether he will now remainwithin the bounds of civilisation, or whether some day he will return tohis wanderings, as Odysseus is fabled to have done in his old age, I fancythat he hardly knows himself. But when once the charm of a wild rovinglife has got into a man's blood, the trammels of civilisation are irksomeand its atmosphere is hard to breathe. It will be seen from thisall-too-condensed sketch of Mr Becke's career that he knows the Pacificas few men alive or dead have ever known it. He is one of the rare menwho have led a very wild life, and have the culture and talentnecessary to give some account of it. As a rule, the men who know don'twrite, and the men who write don't know.
Every one who has a taste for good stories will feel, I believe, theforce of these. Every one who knows the South Seas, and, I believe,many who do not, will feel that they have the unmistakable stamp oftruth. And truth to nature is a great merit in a story, not onlybecause of that thrill of pleasure hard to analyse, but largely made upof associations, memories, and suggestions that faithfulness ofrepresentation in picture or book gives to the natural man; but becauseof the fact that nature is almost infinitely rich, and the unassistedimagination of man but a poor and sterile thing, tending constantlytowards some ossified convention. "Treasure Island" is a much betterstory than "The Wreckers," yet I, for one, shall never cease to regretthat Mr Stevenson did not possess, when he wrote "Treasure Island,"that knowledge of what men and schooners do in wild seas that was hiswhen he gave us "The Wreckers." The detail would have been so muchricher and more convincing.
It is open to any one to say that these tales are barbarous, and whatMrs Meynell, in a very clever and amusing essay, has called"decivilised." Certainly there is a wide gulf separating life on aPacific island from the accumulated culture of centuries ofcivilisation in the midst of which such as Mrs Meynell move and havetheir being. And if there can be nothing good in literature that doesnot spring from that culture, these stories must stand condemned. Butsuch a view is surely too narrow. Much as I admire that lady'swritings, I never can think of a world from which everything waseliminated that did not commend itself to the dainty taste of herselfand her friends, without a feeling of impatience and suffocation. Ittakes a huge variety of men and things to make a good world. Andranches and CANONS, veldts and prairies, tropical forests and coralislands, and all that goes to make up the wild life in the face ofNature or among primitive races, far and free from the artificialconditions of an elaborate civilisation, form an element in the world,the loss of which would be bitterly felt by many a man who has neverset foot outside his native land.
There is a certain monotony, perhaps, about these stories. To someextent this is inevitable. The interest and passions of South SeaIsland life are neither numerous nor complex, and action is apt to berapid and direct. A novelist of that modern school that fills itsvolumes, often fascinatingly enough, by refining upon the shadowyrefinements of civilised thought and feeling, would find it hard to plyhis trade in South Sea Island society. His models would always becutting short in five minutes the hesitations and subtleties that oughtto have lasted them through a quarter of a life-time. But I think it ispossible that the English reader might gather from this little book anunduly strong impression of the uniformity of Island life. The loves ofwhite men and brown women, often cynical and brutal, sometimesexquisitely tender and pathetic, necessarily fill a large space in anytrue picture of the South Sea Islands, and Mr Becke, no doubt of setartistic purpose, has confined himself in the collection of tales nowoffered almost entirely to this facet of the life. I do not questionthat he is right in deciding to detract nothing from the strikingeffect of these powerful stories, taken as a whole, by interspersingamongst them others of a different character. But I hope it may beremembered that the present selection is only an instalment, and that,if it finds favour with the British public, we may expect from him someof those tales of adventure, and of purely native life and custom,which no one could tell so well as he.
PEMBROKE.
