Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  What was referred to in court as ‘night trespass’ but was more popularly, known as ‘creepin” – young men attempting by stealth to deflower sleeping maidens (a common misdemeanour) – was punishable by six months in jail or a $200 fine. That was a much heavier penalty than the two months’ prison (or $40 fine) you’d get for ‘spreading panic by making magic’, or casting spells to induce impotence in a rival, and so on.

  Superstitions had to be learnt. Kingfishers, for example, bring rain. Fireflies are spirits of the dead. It’s a good sign if a butterfly wishes to enter your house. Thunderstorms are good, too; they mean visitors are on their way.

  We talked of Jack London, and Freeman said Malaitans were certainly quite savage until the twenties and thirties. ‘Headhunters, certainly.’

  ‘You’re never worried?’ He and his wife were quite unprotected, alone here.

  ‘Oh, no. But there are some quite wild places here still.’

  Back in his battered, friendly little house, eating avocados and cold roast beef, his wife said, ‘You’ve heard about Malaita’s famous murder, of course? One of John’s predecessors was murdered.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘You haven’t?’ She sounded amazed. ‘A district officer of Malaita, in the 1920s. Name of Bell.’

  ‘No. Sorry.’

  Freeman said, ‘Yes, I’m surprised you haven’t heard of Bell.’

  But then I remembered that I had read about Bell in Bride in the Solomons. And from what Freeman related and a re-reading of Osa Johnson’s book, the story of the Solomons’ most famous massacre came together.

  William Robert Bell was fifty-one years old when, in 1927, he fell dead across his desk with a broken skull. He had been a district officer in Malaita for twelve years. In his younger days he had fought in South Africa in the Boer War where, inexplicably, after having been tried for cowardice, he was awarded a medal for valour. His photographs, taken at the time he came to Malaita, show him to have been the prototype of almost any white hunter from the Boy’s Own Paper: large, big-boned, ‘eyes blue as steel’ (someone said), his jaw ‘strongly-set’. He was a dedicated man and a solitary one, so he was not easy to live with. Or so some visitors said. Mr and Mrs Johnson from America, an intrepid, newly wed pair of travellers out for adventure and offbeat photographs, stayed with him in Malaita in 1917, and though they came with an introduction from the Governor they got a discouraging reception. Mr Bell seemed ‘more pleased to receive his week’s mail than to see us,’ Mrs Johnson admitted. He was ‘extremely cool and formal’, and Osa Johnson winced as he shook her hand, and saw that ‘he was going to be no man to cross’. But, she asked herself a trifle guiltily, was she partly to blame? Was he upset by her loud checked gingham dress and enormous straw hat after so much healthy native semi-nudity around him? Was it possible that he resented the pet cockatoos that perched on each of her shoulders wherever she went? He stared at them, then –‘“There will be tea, if you like,” said Mr Bell abruptly. And sat down to his mail.’

  Still, he did put them up in his house, and even played them his beloved Gilbert and Sullivan on the gramophone after dinner. And then Osa Johnson boldly brought out her ukelele and sang her Pacific medley: ‘Honolulu Tomboy’, ‘Aloha’, and ‘Sweet Little Maori Girl’. Bell also took the Johnsons on treks through the island and its waters, always by canoe or on foot (he had no motor transport), even though the island was evidently a dangerous place.

  Bell talked to them calmly, without bragging, of his first ‘brush’ with a headhunting chief: an ambush. ‘Arrows flew,’ he said, ‘from every side. But we fired into the bush and stopped the attack. Next day, the chief sent a messenger with a warning that Mr Bell should stay away unless he wanted to leave his head.’ Bell sent word that if he heard any more such nonsense he’d wipe out the entire tribe, but that if the chief wanted peace he should let him know. In a few days a messenger returned from the chief with a basket containing a bloody head of a Malaitan. It was a peace offering. ‘We’re on very friendly terms now,’ Bell told the Johnsons with satisfaction. Evidently he was almost fanatically devoted to Malaita and to his job. But he had no illusions that he was universally loved, or that his life was not in constant danger. When Osa Johnson strayed away into an area taboo to women, after having been warned not to, he exploded in fury.

  ‘You bloody little fool.’ His hand trembled and he struggled to control his lips. ‘Do you know that hundreds, probably thousands of people have been murdered within sight of where you are sitting at this moment? And that I spend every hour here at my peril? I have expected the house to be rushed any night and have had special guards posted. Why, this place reeks with murder and headcutting. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they have my head one day!’

  Mr Johnson turned ‘white with this unpleasantness’. He stammered out that he and his wife would leave at once: a local schooner had turned up whose master, an Englishman, they had met in Guadalcanal. ‘Capital!’ snapped Bell; and he strode off to the drill ground.

  The master of the schooner to which the Johnsons fled, Creswell by name, was a different type of Old Hand (he reminded Osa of a handsome British colonel she’d met in Sydney), but his message was much the same as Bell’s. He had drawn up a personal code of do’s and don’t’s for expatriates in the Solomons. Through years of local trading he had come to know the islands as well as he knew his old island bosun, whose name was Satan and who wore bone ornaments in his fuzz, shell earrings, and a large bone ring through his nose. (‘How did he manage to eat with such a piece hanging over his mouth?’ Osa Johnson wondered.)

  ‘However peculiar the Malaitans may look to you,’ Creswell advised (as he might well do today, if he were living), ‘treat them as though they were very wise and entitled to every respect. Don’t be cocky; these people think they are actually better than you are. Remember, lassitude, drink, the climate can do for the whites in ten years.’ Now came a piece of timely practical advice. ‘Don’t turn your back on them, or let them surround you. Don’t touch spears and arrows. They may have poisoned tips and are sure death. Don’t pick flowers until you know which ones are taboo.’ Creswell added, for Osa Johnson’s benefit, that this must be pretty discouraging, ‘but I don’t want your head with those blonde pigtails, to hang in some Solomons headhouse’. His advice to visiting boatmen was succinct: ‘Keep your stern to shore and within good running distance.’

  Creswell moved about the islands filling his boat with copra in exchange for cases of tobacco, which the chiefs found irresistible. One old man wanted to trade two women for a full bokkus tobacu. Creswell knew how to parry that. ‘Mi no wantum two-pela more mary [woman], chief,’ he said, genially. ‘Wanpela mary bilong me, he trouble too much.’ The old chief grunted understandingly.

  Creswell was amazingly prescient. He obviously was no mere old renegade island salt. He had visions of the future, realistic and humane. Of the Malaitans, he had this to say to Mrs Johnson: ‘They aren’t much different from the rest of us. Some day, the idealists, like Mr Bell, will calm them down and show them they can get along better with each other by peace than by war, and by reasoning better than by magic and superstition. The only remaining difference between them and us will be colour.’ These were hardly the sentiments Asterisk was hearing at that very time from the mouths of his ‘Orstryliun’ acquaintances on the not-too-distant plantations of the New Hebrides.

  However, they were decidedly the sentiments of the dedicated Mr Bell, as he progressed down the lagoons in his ‘war-canoe’, twenty feet long, its sides inlaid with mother of pearl and cowrie shells, its twenty paddlers moving and grunting in rhythm; or as he sweated up the steep, slippery jungle paths, freezing, with his gun raised, at any sudden sound that might be the swift and only warning of an ambush. Bell was no mere nigger hater. This was his theory:

  ‘These house-boys,’ he said, pointing to the Malaitans working with him, ‘they’re right out of the bush. They’ve learned to be clean and obedient. They have plenty of tal
ent and capacity. I’ve always believed that our civilization is only skin-deep. Give me a hundred boys from England and put them into this jungle on their own or with the natives, and they will survive; but with the same standards as the natives. Take a hundred of these boys and put them through good schools at home and you will have fine English clerks, shopkeepers, and scholars. At least that is my opinion – and I am making it work, so far.’

  He made it work in the rough, unbending fashion of the time. A photograph shows Bell sitting beefily on his verandah in an old swivel chair with a lace cloth over a table on which are two ponderous-looking law books. Three native constables stand alertly to attention, in knee-length cotton kilts but otherwise naked, their chests muscular, their fuzz-hair shooting up fiercely, their bright eyes on the camera. They flank another Malaitan, similarly kilted, muscled and camera-conscious but in handcuffs. The caption says: ‘Mr Bell holding court. The shackled native was found guilty of murder, taken to his village, and executed.’

  The purpose of Bell’s last and fatal tour, in 1927, was to collect taxes, gather in unlicensed firearms – the ‘Sniders’ – and initiate a programme of village sanitation. But the tour was more than that. It had the special significance of a display of government power in a recalcitrant district. The paying of taxes had aroused a great deal of anger in the bush and, when it was heard that Bell himself was coming, a man named Basiana began to confront him with force. When Bell had last come, in 1926, there had been a fierce demonstration with tribesmen shaking their spears and dancing round the tax house. But they had paid. This time it was different.

  Disembarking from their boat, Bell and a cadet called Lillies seated themselves in the open, side by side at two tables at which the tax monies were to be paid. They were flanked only by two constables and a clerk. And now Bell did something extraordinary. He ordered his escort of armed constables to fall out and to wait huddled inside the tax house behind him – this despite the fact that, as Philip Smiley pointed out to me, Bell had been warned by local chiefs that an attack had been planned. (Smiley added that in those days such an attack could be expected at almost any time in one of the wildest parts of the Solomon Islands.) Bell’s extraordinary action has been put down by some people to downright stupidity, by others to suicidal bravery, and by still others to a romantic but overblown trust in his own charisma. At any rate, he disregarded one of Creswell’s rules for basic security: ‘Don’t let them surround you.’

  When the tribes arrived, Bell told them brusquely to lay down their weapons, and then to form into two lines, to pay their taxes at his and Lillies’ tables. This they began to do, and the line of queuing tribesmen stretched from the tables to the rear of the tax house where the policemen were, but after about twenty people had paid Basiana picked up his gun – which he had laid down twelve feet away – broke through the queue and struck Bell on the top of the head as he bent over the table. Bell died instandy. Poor Lillies, the clerk, and twelve constables (they had had no time to raise their rifles before the leaf walls of the tax house were broken down) were speared and chopped to death before more than a single shot could be fired. Two constables, badly wounded, managed to bolt into the jungle and swim out to the government ship. The massacre itself was all over in a few minutes. The culprits fled. Soon Bell and Lillies were buried on a nearby island by a government landing party.

  The aftermath was tragi-comedy. Within two weeks, a punitive expedition was on its way to Malaita. A force of thirty local expatriate volunteers had been enrolled as special constables: most of them planters, some minor government officials and foremen. Few of them were young. They were shipped to Malaita not long after the arrival from Sydney of an Australian warship, HMS Adelaide, which lobbed a few shells into the bush to keep native heads down. Innocent heads probably, because neither the warship nor the special force of over-age and overweight planters proved capable of efficient retribution for the death of William Bell. The planters blundered about panting and wheezing in the bush (they quickly became known as the ‘Breathless Army’), downing case after case of whisky – although apologists for this consumption claimed that whisky kept malaria at bay – and making so much noise shouting to each other that the guilty tribesmen had plenty of time to hide. The innocent, who thought they had no need to hide, suffered for their naivety. People not involved in the attack on Bell were meant to wear a headband of red calico, but the ‘Breathless Army’ paid little attention to sartorial detail, shooting the wrong people and destroying gardens and several coastal villages quite uninvolved in the massacre. Luckily, despite the formidable consumption of whisky, many volunteers soon went down with malaria; weak leadership and lack of success led to serious quarrelling, and the ‘Breathless Army’ (about which no doubt Asterisk would have had some ribald things to say) was disbanded in ignominy.

  A later, effective, punitive expedition consisted of real Solomon Island policemen, some of whose relatives had been among those killed in the massacre. They were ruthless. In an assessment for an Honiara newspaper on the fiftieth anniversary of the tragedy, Philip Smiley wrote that the number of men, women and children killed indiscriminately will never be known, but 198 people were arrested. They included the ringleader, Basiana, who walked to the coast and gave himself up to avoid further bloodshed. He and five others were tried and hanged.

  That was sixty years ago. In those days, district officers had cabinets built into their walls to house racks of rifles and revolvers in holsters, all clean and shining. Now, John and Alison Freeman slept in their little ramshackle house without so much as a popgun between them. Since 1978 there had been a Solomon Islander in the President’s office in Honiara, an island Prime Minister and an island Parliament. Only in the judiciary are Britons to be found. That is why the Chief Justice of the Solomons is Francis Daley, an Englishman of long experience in the Islands, with a parakeet in Auki named after him. Before I left the Solomons he invited me to his seaside house in Guadalcanal, and over dinner his affection for the Islanders and their traditions became movingly clear. He had served in Malaita, and in his experience the tribesmen called Kwaio, whose grandparents had killed Bell, were as independent in spirit as they have ever been.

  ‘I get on with them,’ he said. ‘My Kwaio is quite good.’ From his verandah we looked out across the Sound towards Auki and the Langa Langa lagoon which lay invisible and far away but which the darkness seemed to bring very close. The walls of the room behind us were tapestried with the books Daley and his wife Joyce collected – not a rifle cabinet in sight. Mosquitoes evidently colonized the trees in the garden; we slapped them off our arms and the back of our necks.

  ‘They have a will of their own, though, you know,’ Daley said. ‘Imagine I visit them. The chief and I sit chatting; we get on well; we laugh. All very friendly. Then I happen to let drop that the police patrol will be here, passing through, tomorrow. The chief smiles. “Oh, yes, of course. Let them come.” But that talk is just for my benefit. Next day when the police actually do come without me, the Kwaio won’t let them pass. It’s a question of pride.’

  I seemed to be hearing the voice of a gentler Bell.

  I said, ‘How can they stop them?’

  ‘Well, the Kwaio live two thousand feet up a very steep and narrow place. You have to scrabble your way up for three hours – but you can slide down on your bottom in thirty minutes, if you’re not very careful. The Kwaio could stop you simply by lobbing stones down on you. And they might.’

  ‘So what do you do?’

  ‘I have to go back there with the policemen. If I go the Kwaio will let them through – because of me being there. And I used to go with the police to get the government presence up there. It’s something I think needs to be done, although,’ he smiled, ‘I suppose I care about that more than the Government itself does.’

  ‘I imagine you could get your men up there by helicopter?’

  Daley laughed. ‘Well, we haven’t got one. Anyway, we won’t use force. We wouldn’t risk damagin
g their taboos – their ancestral skulls and so on. The Government wouldn’t sanction anything like that. Quite rightly.’

  My neck and arms were burning with needle pricks. High insect whines filled the air. I squashed a mosquito on my wrist, and Francis Daley leaned forward to give our ankles a squirt of insect repellent.

  ‘Tinkering with the skulls –’ he continued, shaking his head.

  Mrs Daley said, ‘The ancestors could get back at you.’

  ‘Give you a hell of a run of bad luck,’ Daley agreed.

  He went into the house and came back with a book. ‘I was just reminded. D.H. Lawrence. His poem ‘The Mosquito’ is his best, I think, don’t you? At least it’s got some humour. He’s not all that full of humour, is he?’

  When do you start your tricks,

  Monsieur?

  I heard a woman call you the Winged Victory

  In sluggish Venice.

  You turn your head towards your tail, and smile …

  I behold you stand

  For a second enspasmed in oblivion,

  Obscenely ecstasied

  Sucking live blood,

  My blood.

  Away with a paean of derision,

  You winged blood-drop.

  Fireflies danced in the warm darkness under the trees. Spirits of the sea, I said to them soundlessly, I am glad to see you happy. The mosquitoes – ‘you winged blood-drops’ – could go to hell.

  Fifteen

  In the sweet by-and-by, we shall meet on the

  bee-oot-iful shore.

  The day I left Auki to return to Honiara was a rainy Sunday. Rivers of water flowed past a small, open-sided church near the Auki Lodge; the sound of singing drifted after me as I walked to the jetty. ‘… On the bee-oot-iful shore’, I sang with them. ‘We shall me-ee-et….’

  On a bench under a shop’s awning across the flooded road from the Golden Dragon Bar, two Malaitan men were sitting staring at the puddles. Drenched, I joined them, sat down and poured the water out of my shoes. They looked from the puddles to me, and said, ‘Hi!’ One was middle-aged and very fat; the other, nearer me, was quite young and a uniform tawny colour from the top of his frizzy hair to his naked feet, like the Lion in The Wizard of Oz. He wore knee-length jeans and a shirt open down the front but his face, chest, arms and legs were all lion-coloured. Three horizontal lines tattooed on each cheek had the effect of whiskers. I expected him to open his mouth and roar. A knitted tam o’shanter sat on top of his yellow fuzz – a hideous thing of pink, magenta and yellow, with a purple pom-pom the size of a cricket ball.