The Three Sirens

by Irving Wallace

  Well, Dr. Hayden, we all trooped down to the beach. When we arrived there, it was dark, except for the light from a small part of the moon. Captain Rasmussen took the dinghy back to his flying boat, and soon returned with a supply of food. Moreturi had already gathered twigs and built a fire. Rasmussen cooked—efficiently, I must say—and while he cooked, we all sat on the sand, around the fire, and Courtney began his story of The Three Sirens.

  Courtney prefaced his narrative by saying that he could not reveal every detail of the history and practices of the Sirens group. What he promised was the barest outline. Speaking quietly, casually, he went back to the beginnings of the experiment. As he proceeded to modern times, he became more intense and earnest. For my part, I was so immediately engaged by the wonder of what I heard, that I hardly knew my food was before me.

  There was a brief interlude, as we ate in silence, and it was interrupted only when I told Courtney that I could not contain my thirst for more knowledge. I begged him to oblige me. Gradually, he began speaking again, and went on at length. I never took my eyes from him. We all consider ourselves judges of men, and I, too, consider myself perceptive in this respect, and it was my judgment that Courtney did not lie, did not embellish or exaggerate, that what he told was as factual as the best scientific papers. So intrigued was I by his account, that when it was done I thought no more than several minutes had passed. Actually, Courtney had been addressing me for one hour and a half. Now that Courtney had presented his case on behalf of his tribe—and I realized that part of his skill as storyteller was based on his experience as an attorney in Chicago, part on his love of the Sirens people—I was bursting with a hundred questions. I was civil enough to ask only the most pertinent ones. Some he replied to candidly, others he turned aside as being, in his words, “too personal, an invasion of privacy.”

  It was late evening, still warm but cooling slightly, when Courtney said to me, “Well, Professor Easterday, you have had the most elemental briefing on The Three Sirens. You have heard enough to know what it is in your power to destroy. What is your decision?”

  All through the latter part of Courtney’s recital, I had begun to entertain thoughts about you, Dr. Hayden. Every bizarre fact made me tell myself: ah, if only Dr. Maud Hayden were here, how much she would relish this. As Courtney continued, and I listened, I recollected your old request. I realized what a visit to The Three Sirens might mean to you, and, through you, to the entire world. Several times, I had heard you say that primitive cultures must be rescued, the old ways preserved, before they died out or were wiped out. You felt, you always said and wrote, that isolated primitive cultures could teach us every variety of human behavior and, in so doing, be applied to help us improve our own behavior. Clearly then, the odd and miniscule society on The Three Sirens deserved to be saved before I, or someone like myself, assisted modern technological society in obliterating it. I was gravely moved by my power for good or evil, and my responsibility to those who might be capable of using this island society as a laboratory for the better welfare of our society. Suddenly, the importance of your work—of which I am a poor and minor ally—made my duty to Mr. Trevor and the Canberra syndicate seem insignificant.

  Courtney had asked for my decision. Across the blaze, he awaited my reply.

  “I would like to make a deal with you,” I said, abruptly. “It would be, in effect, a trade.”

  “What kind of trade?” Courtney wanted to know.

  “Have you ever heard of Dr. Maud Hayden, the famous anthropologist?”

  “Of course, I have,” said Courtney. “I’ve read most of her books.”

  “What do you think of them?”

  “Brilliant,” said Courtney.

  “That is the trade I offer,” I said, “the price of my refraining to mention The Three Sirens to Canberra.”

  “I’m not sure I understand you,” said Courtney.

  I spoke slowly, with great emphasis on each word. “If you will permit Dr. Hayden, with her colleagues, to come here for a field trip in the next year, if you will allow her to make a record of this society for all time, I will guarantee my future silence and your future privacy.”

  Courtney allowed the proposal to sink in. After several reflective minutes, he exchanged glances with Moreturi and Rasmussen. Finally, he returned his gaze to me, as if appraising my good intentions. “Professor,” he said, “how can you vouch for the silence of Dr. Hayden and her staff?”

  My mind had anticipated this, and I was ready with an answer. “Of course,” I said, “Dr. Hayden and her colleagues will be sworn to absolute secrecy about the destination of the field trip. But human beings are frail, and I know that oral promises may not be enough to satisfy you. Therefore, I would suggest that Dr. Hayden and her colleagues be literally kept in the dark about where they are going. She and her group could come to Tahiti, and be brought to The Three Sirens by Captain Rasmussen in the middle of the night. None of the anthropologists will know latitude or longitude. Nor will they know if they are flying north or south, east or west. They will know only that they are somewhere in the South Pacific, on some dot in a maze of ten thousand or more islands. You will accommodate them, within the boundaries of your own restrictions. They will observe and hear what your Chief permits them to observe and hear. They will photograph what you wish them to photograph, and no more. When their study is concluded, they will leave as they came, in utter darkness. They will never know exactly where they had been. Yet they will possess their full scientific report of this society for the benefit of mankind. Thus, though the Sirens may one day become extinct, the record of its marvels, and excesses, too, will remain behind. These are my suggestions. I believe them to be fair.”

  “And no airfield,” said Courtney.

  “None, upon my word.”

  Courtney pursed his lips, thinking, then signaled to Moreturi. The pair lifted their naked bodies off the sand, and walked down the beach, along the water’s edge, deep in conversation until they disappeared in the night. After a while, Rasmussen flipped his cigar butt in the fire, rose, and went off in their direction.

  Within ten minutes, they had all returned, and I stood up to hear their verdict.

  “You have a deal,” said Courtney, briskly. “You are empowered by Chief Paoti Wright, on the pledge of his son, to inform Dr. Maud Hayden that she may come here, under the exact conditions you outlined, for no more than six weeks in June and July. You will employ Captain Rasmussen as your intermediary with us. Through him you will let us know if she is coming and exactly when she is coming and any modifications of this agreement. Captain Rasmussen drops down here one day every two weeks to pick up our exports in return for supplies we require. So he is constantly in touch with us. Now then, Professor, is everything understood?”

  “Everything,” I said.

  I shook hands with Courtney, bade Moreturi good-by, and accompanied Captain Rasmussen back to the seaplane, where Hapai was waiting.

  As we took off in the darkness for Papeete, I saw the fire on the beach extinguished. Soon, even the silhouette of The Three Sirens was lost to sight. During our journey homeward, I sat in the main cabin, alone, undisturbed, and with my notepaper and pen I jotted down what I could remember of that stimulating evening on the beach. Largely, I devoted myself to hastily recording the highlights of Courtney’s recital of the history and practices of The Three Sirens tribe.

  Reviewing my notes as I write you this long letter, Dr. Hay-den, I see there is more detail omitted than I had imagined. Whether this is the fault of my memory or Courtney’s deliberate omissions, I cannot say. Nevertheless, this unorganized outline should be more than sufficient for you to determine if you want to make this field trip.

  Briefly, then—

  In 1795, there lived on Skinner Street in London a struggling philosopher and pamphleteer named Daniel Wright, Esq., supported by a private income left him by his late father. Daniel Wright, Esq., had a wife, a son, and two daughters, and an obsession to improve or refor
m English society. He was much in the company of his neighbor, friend, and idol, William Godwin, then thirty-nine years old. Godwin, as certainly you will recall, was the author and bookseller who eventually married Mary Wollstonecraft and who later suffered Shelley for his son-in-law. The important fact is that in 1793, Godwin published An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, in which he advocated, among other things, doing away with marriage, penal punishments, and private property. Not only this work, but Godwin’s whole personality, had influence on the radical thinking of Daniel Wright, Esq. However, Daniel Wright was not so much interested in political reform as in matrimonial reform. He had been writing, with Godwin’s encouragement, a book entitled Eden Resurrected. The idea was that, through the Grace of God, Adam and Eve were given a second chance, an opportunity to return to Eden and start over again. Disenchanted with the state of connubiality as inherited and promulgated by them, they determined to practice, teach, and promote a new system of love, cohabitation, courtship, and marriage. An intriguing concept, I must admit.

  Wright’s book violently attacked the marital system and customs of love then prevailing in England, and went on to advocate an entirely different system. Wright drew not only from his own imagination, and Godwin’s ideas, but also upon ideas advocated earlier in Plato’s The Republic, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, and James Harrington’s The Rota. Along the way, Wright could not resist striking out at prevailing practices of government, law, education, public welfare, and religion. Wright found a courageous publisher, and by 1795 the first copies of the slender and explosive volume had come from the press. Before these copies could be distributed, Wright learned, through Godwin, that members of George Ill’s court had become informed of the contents of the radical book. Charges were being drawn to declare Wright’s marital Utopia as “youth-corrupting” and “subversive.” Confiscation of the book and imprisonment of its author were inevitable. Heeding the advice of Godwin and other friends, Wright packed a copy of his book, the most portable of his household goods, his savings, and, with his wife, family of three, and three disciples, rushed in the night to the Irish port of Kinsale. There, the party boarded a 180-ton vessel bound for Botany Bay, New Holland, later known as Sydney, Australia.

  According to Courtney’s story, based on original papers in the native village of The Three Sirens, Daniel Wright would not have fled England merely to save his skin. In truth, he was martyr-minded, and, on trial, would have enjoyed trumpeting his ideas to the authorities and the kingdom. What made him escape, as he did, was a motive more affirmative. For several years, he had toyed with the idea of going off to the young sixteen states in the New World, or to the recently explored Southern Seas, to practice what he preached, so to speak. That is, instead of merely writing about his visionary ideas on matrimony, he considered traveling to some remote place and putting them into actual practice. However, he was a sedentary scholar, a thinker not a doer, and he had the day-to-day responsibility of growing youngsters, and he could not rouse himself to make so dramatic a revolution in his life. The suppression of his book and the impending prison sentence in Newgate inflamed him, not only at the injustice of the government, but at the narrowness of the society in which he dwelled. It was this, then, that incited him to go off and do what he had always wanted to do anyway.

  During his long, weary voyage to Australia, he had the time to convert the Utopian fancies of his book into practical measures, at least on paper. All that was needed was a free place to try them out. Daniel Wright hoped Australia might prove such a place. No sooner had he and his company landed in Botany Bay than he knew that he was mistaken. The area, great morasses and mud, abandoned by the first colonists to naked blacks with spears and convicts with cutlasses, was a hell on earth. Hastily, Wright and his company moved on to Sydney Cove, the main colony of the English felons, established eight years before. Within a month, Wright knew that he must move on even further. Life in the convict colony was too harsh, violent, unwholesome, and there was no tolerance for an English crackpot reformer and zealot to live under His Majesty’s Governor.

  Possessing the romantic writings of both Louis Antoine de Bougainville and James Cook, who had explored the South Seas, Wright decided that this unsullied paradise was exactly where he belonged. After all, had not Bougainville written of the Tahiti of 1768 in his log: “The canoes were filled with women whose pleasing faces need concede nothing to the majority of Europeans and, for beauty of body, could rival any. Most of these nymphs were naked, for the men and old women with them removed the loincloths in which they usually wrapped themselves. At first they made from their canoes little teasing gestures. The men, simpler, or else freer, made matters clearer; they urged us to choose a girl, follow her to shore, and their unequivocal gestures showed the fashion in which we were to make their acquaintance”? And once ashore, had not Bougainville added: “It was like being in the garden of Eden … Everything is reminiscent and suggestive of love. The native girls have no complex about it. Everything around them invites them to follow their heart’s inclination or the call of nature”?

  This was enough for Daniel Wright, Esq. Beyond Australia lay a new and uninhibited civilization, practicing love and marriage in a manner compatible with his own best ideas. There, far from the wretched, restrictive practices of the West, he would combine his ideals with the similar practices of the Polynesians, and develop his perfect world in microcosm.

  Wright bought passage for his company on a small but seaworthy brig that was heading into the South Seas for trading purposes, with Otaheite, as the English then called Tahiti, its final destination. Wright asked the captain of the vessel if, for additional payment above the fares, he would journey beyond Tahiti, touching on half a dozen obscure, uncharted isles, until one was found where Wright, his family, and followers might remain. The captain was agreeable.

  The captain of the brig kept to his word. After the voyage to Tahiti, and an anchorage of two weeks, the captain continued far southward through Polynesia. Three times the brig lay offshore, while Wright and two male companions explored the small islands. One was made useless by mangrove forests, another lacked springs for drinking water and had not any fertile soil, and the third was infested with head-hunters. Wright urged the captain to resume his search. Two days later they sighted the island group shortly to be christened The Three Sirens.

  A day’s exploration of the main island convinced Wright that he had found his earthly Eden. The situation of a haven, which was off the trade routes and which possessed no natural harbor or deep anchorage, gave high promise of privacy. The interior of the island had abundant flora and fauna, clear streams, and other natural resources. Above all, Wright had come upon a village of forty Polynesians, and they proved gracious and hospitable.

  Through a native interpreter brought from Tahiti, Wright was able to speak at length with Tefaunni, Chief of the tribe. Wright learned the villagers were descendants of a Polynesian kin group of long ago who had gone colonizing in deep sea canoes and had found a refuge in this place. The Chief, who had never encountered a white man before or been the recipient of such magical gifts (a metal hatchet, for one thing, a whale oil lamp, for another), was in complete awe of Wright. He considered it great mana—a word Wright learned to mean, among many meanings, “prestige”—to have his visitor share the island and its rule with him. Taking Wright on a tour of the village, Tefaunni explained the habits of his people. In his journal, Wright would note that the people were “gay, free, sensible yet joyous of life and loving” and that their attitudes and manners would have “gladdened Bougainville’s heart.” The following day, Wright’s family and disciples, eight in all, himself included, were set ashore with their possessions, consisting also of several dogs, goats, chickens, and sheep. The brig sailed away, and Wright joined Tefaunni to set into being Eden Resurrected.

  There is much, much more to this unusual history, Dr. Hayden, but the details you will l
earn for yourself, if you are of that frame of mind. Within the limitations of this letter, I should prefer to devote the remainder of it to the customs of the society that ultimately developed from 1796 to the present day.

  A month after Wright and his company had physically settled into the Polynesian community, he undertook a serious study of their tribal traditions, rites, and practices. He noted these carefully, and alongside these he committed to paper his own ideas on how life should be lived on The Three Sirens. In the matter of government, the Polynesians believed in a hereditary chief. Wright believed in a committee of three men or women, who had been trained for leadership, and had survived all tests. It was a modification of Plato’s idea, as you know. Wright saw that his own system would not work on this lonely isle—where and how to set up a school to train universal-minded men in leadership?—and he conceded to the Polynesian idea of a hereditary chief.

  As to labor and property, each Polynesian kin group of relatives, while individually building and possessing its own home and furnishings, worked as a unit to grow or pick food and store it in a common family pool. Wright preferred a more stringent system, and one more communal. The Chief, he felt, should control all real property, and dole it out according to the size of each family. As a family expanded in size, so might the property. If a family contracted, so would the property. Furthermore, Wright felt, each adult male on The Three Sirens should labor four hours a day, at what best suited him, be it agriculture or fishing or carpentry or any other occupations found necessary. The products of these labors would go into a large community storehouse. Weekly, each family would take out of the storehouse a minimum amount of food and other supplies. This minimum amount would be equal for all. However, the more productive laborers of the village would exceed their minimum supplies with bonus amounts of what they preferred. In short, absolute equality, no poverty, yet a certain degree of incentive. Tefaunni readily gave in to this reform, and it was introduced in 1799.