Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1086 page)

“... Gilfillan, a good fellow, I think, and far from a stupid, kept up his hard Lowland Scottish talk in the boat while the sister was covering her face; but I believe he knew, and did it (partly) in embarrassment, and part perhaps in mistaken kindness. And that was one reason, too, why I made my speech to them. Partly, too, I did it because I was ashamed to do so, and remembered one of my golden rules, ‘When you are ashamed to speak, speak up at once.’ But, mind you, that rule is only golden with strangers; with your own folks, there are other considerations.”1

His general conclusions at the time were thus expressed: — “On the whole, the spectacle of life in this marred and moribund community, with its idleness, its furnished table, its horse-riding, music, and gallantries under the shadow of death, confounds the expectations of the visitor. He cannot observe with candour, but he must see it is not only good for the world, but best for the lepers themselves to be thus set apart. The place is a huge hospital, but a hospital under extraordinary conditions; in which the disease, though both 1 Letters, ii. 154-156. ugly and incurable, is of a slow advance; in which the patients are rarely in pain, often capable of violent exertion, all bent on pleasure, and all, within the limits of the precinct, free. . . . The case of the children is by far the most sad; and yet (thanks to Damien, and that great Hawaiian lady, the kind Mrs. Bishop, and to the kind sisters) their hardship has been minimised. Even the boys in the still rude boys’ home at Kalawao appeared cheerful and youthful; they interchange diversions in the boy’s way; one week are all for football, and the next the devotees of marbles or of kites: have fiddles, drums, guitars, and penny whistles: some can touch the organ, and all combine in concerts. As for the girls in the Bishop Home, of the many beautiful things I have been privileged to see in life, they, and what has been done for them, are not the least beautiful. When I came there first, the sisters and the majority of the boarders were gone up the hill upon a weekly treat, guava-hunting; and only Mother Mary Anne and the specially sick were left at home. I was told things which I heard with tears, of which I sometimes think at night, and which I spare the reader; I was shown the sufferers then at home; one, I remember, white with pain, the tears standing in her eyes. But, thank God, pain is not the rule in this revolting malady: and the general impression of the house was one of cheerfulness, cleanliness, and comfort. The dormitories were airy, the beds neatly made; at every bed-head was a trophy of Christmas cards, pictures, and photographs, some framed with shells, and all arranged with care and taste. In many of the beds, besides, a doll lay pillowed. I was told that, in that artificial life, the eldest and the youngest were equally concerned with these infantile playthings, and the dressmaking, in particular, was found an inexhaustible resource. Plays of their own arrangement were a favourite evening pastime. They had a croquet set; and it was my single useful employment during my stay in the lazaretto to help them with that game.1 I know not if the interest in croquet survived my departure, but it was lively while I stayed; and the last time I passed there on my way to the steamer’s boat and freedom, the children crowded to the fence and hailed and summoned me with cries of welcome. 1 wonder I found the heart to refuse the invitation.”

After leaving the confines of the leper settlement the steamer landed him upon another part of the island, where he and the captain took horse and rode a long way to the house of some Irish folk, where Stevenson slept. Next day he continued with a native guide until he reached the summit of the pass above Kalawao, down which alone the settlement could be entered by land. Here the overseer lived, and with him Stevenson stayed and had much talk.

Of his ride across the island he wrote: — “Maui behind us towered into clouds and the shadow of clouds. The bare opposite island of Lanai — the reef far out, enclosing a dirty, shoal lagoon — a range of fishponds, large as docks, and the slope of the shady beach 1 He was advised by Mother Mary Anne to wear gloves when he played croquet with the leper children. He would not do it, however, as he thought it might remind them of their condition. After he returned to Honolulu he sent Mother Mary Anne a grand piano for her leper girls.

on which we mostly rode, occupied the left hand. On the right hand the mountain rose in steeps of red clay and spouts of disintegrated rock, sparsely dotted with the white-flowering cow-thistle. Here and there along the foreshore stood a lone pandanus, and once a trinity of dishevelled palms. In all the first part of that journey, I recall but three houses and a single church. Plenty of horses, kine, and sullen-looking bulls were there, but not a human countenance. ‘Where are the people?’ I asked. ‘Pau Kanaka maki: done: people dead,’ replied the guide, with the singular childish giggle which the traveller soon learns to be a mark of Polynesian sensibility.

“We rode all the time by the side of the great fishponds, the labour (you would say) of generations. The riches and the agriculture of Molokai awoke of yore the envy of neighbouring kings. Only last century a battle was fought upon this island in which it has been computed that thousands were engaged; and he who made the computation, though he lived long after, had seen and counted, when the wind blew aside the sands, the multitude of bones and skulls. There remains the evidence of the churches, not yet old and already standing in a desert, the monuments of vanished congregations. Pau Kanaka maht. A sense of survival attended me upon my ride, and the nervous laughter of Apaka sounded in my ears not quite unpleasantly. The place of the dead is clean; there is a poetry in empty lands.

‘‘A greener track received us; smooth shore-side grass was shaded with groves and islets of acacias; the hills behind, from the red colour of the soil and the sin- gularity ot the formation, had the air of a bare Scottish moorland in the bleak end of autumn; and the resemblance set a higher value on the warmth of the sun and the brightness of the sea. I wakened suddenly to remember Kalaupapa and my playmates of two days before. Could I have forgotten? Was I happy again? Had the shadow, the sorrow, and the obligation faded already?”

From this expedition he returned to complete his preparations for immediate departure. The family now possessed an unrivalled fund of information about “the Islands,” and had accumulated not only the necessary stores but also a collection of all the resources of civilisation best fitted to appeal to the native heart, ranging from magic lanterns and American hand-organs to “ cheap and bad cigars.” The only difficulty was the ship, and the Morning Star not being available, the Equator, a trading schooner of sixty-two tons register, Captain Denis Reid, was chartered. The terms agreed upon were original and entertaining; Stevenson paid a lump sum down for a four months’ cruise, with a proviso for renewal, if necessary. The ship agreed for a fixed daily extra price to land at any place in the line of its trading cruise on Stevenson’s written demand. On the other hand, when it stopped anywhere for its own business, were it only to land a sewing-machine or to take on board a ton of copra, it was bound, if the charterer so desired, to remain there three days without extra charge.

The 24th of June arrived: Stevenson and his wife and stepson were on board with the indispensable Ah Fu, and the schooner was ready to cast off. At the last moment two fine carriages drove down at full speed to the wharf and there deposited King Kalakaua and a party of his native musicians. There was but a minute for good-bye and a parting glass, for Kalakaua had none of Ori’s scruples over champagne. The king returned to shore and stood there waving his hand, while from the musicians, lined up on the very edge of the wharf, came the tender strains of a farewell.

CHAPTER XIV

SOUTH SEA CRUISES — THE CENTRAL PACIFIC, JUNE, 1889 — APRIL, 1891

“I will never leave the sea, I think; it is only there that a Briton lives: my poor grandfather, it is from him that 1 inherit the taste, I fancy, and he was round many islands in his day; but I, please God, shall beat him at that before the recall is sounded. . . . Life is far better fun than people dream who fall asleep among the chimney- stacks and telegraph wires.” — Letters, ii. 162.

The object of the new cruise for Stevenson was to visit a native race of a different character from those he had already seen, living as far as was still possible under purely natural conditions. The Gilberts are a group of some sixteen low islands of no great size, densely populated, situated close to the Equator. At this time they were independent, nearly every island being governed by its own king or council of elders. Scenery in all of them is reduced to the simplest elements, a strand with cocoanut-palms and pandanus, and the sea — one island differing from another only in having or not having an accessible lagoon in its centre; in none of them is the highest point of land as much as twenty feet above sea-level. This very flatness and absence of striking features render the islands a more perfect theatre for effects of light and cloud, while the splendours of the sea are further enhanced by the contrast of the rollers breaking on the reef and the still lagoon sleeping within the barrier, of the dark depths of ocean outside and the brilliant shoal-water varying infinitely in hue with the inequalities of the shallows within.

Stevenson’s former experience lay, his future was almost entirely to lie, among the Polynesians — the tall, fine, copper-coloured race, speaking closely allied dialects of the same language, and including among their family the Hawaiians, Marquesans, Tahitians, Samoans, and the Maoris of New Zealand. The Gilbert and Marshall natives, on the other hand, are Micronesians — darker, shorter, and to my taste less comely folk- speaking languages widely removed from the Polynesian — people with a dash of black blood, stricter in morals and more ferocious, with an energy and backbone which the others but rarely possess. It is noteworthy that Polynesians never commit suicide; on the Line jt is not uncommon; and the frequent causes are unrequited love, or grief for the dead.

When this visit should be finished, the travellers were not finally committed to any plan, but their latest intention was to proceed to the Marshalls and thence to the Carolines, and so “ return to the light of day by way of Manila and the China ports.”

Scarcely, however, were they at sea before these schemes were modified. One moonlight night, in the neighbourhood of Johnstone Island, the talk fell upon the strange history of the loss of the brigantine Wandering Minstrel, and from this germ was quickly developed the plot of The Wrecker. The life of cruising was for the time all that Stevenson could desire: after the depression of Honolulu he had entirely recovered his health and spirits on the open sea, and the only difficulty in continuing his cure was its great expense. Surely if he possessed a schooner of his own, he might make his home on board and pay the current charges, at all events in part, by trading. So Tbe Wrecker was to be written and sent to a publisher from Samoa, and there with the proceeds they were to buy a schooner, stock the trade-room, and start upon their wanderings under the guidance of Denis Reid, who threw himself heart and soul into the spirit of the new venture.

It was a wild scheme. Versatile as Stevenson was, it is impossible even to think of him as a “ South Sea merchant,” haggling with natives over the price of copra1 and retailing European goods to them at a necessarily exorbitant rate. But the project, though never realised, did finally determine the course of his life, for instead of taking him to Ponape, Guam, and the Philippines, it sent him south to Samoa, there to take up his abode and live and die.

In the meanwhile the first part of the voyage was safely performed, and the schooner arrived at the town of Butaritari in the island of Great Makin. Under ordinary conditions a white man, if he conducted himself reasonably, might wander through all the group in perfect safety, but the arrival of the Equator fell at an unpropitious moment. For the first and probably the only time in his wanderings, Stevenson was in real danger of violence from natives.

The two principal firms trading in Butaritari belonged to San Francisco; the missionaries in the group were sent there by the Boston Society, and the influence of American ideas was considerable. Nine days before 1 The dried kernel of the cocoanut, largely used in making soap, candles, oil-cake, etc.

Stevensons arrival was the Fourth of July; the king of Butaritari had observed the festival with enthusiasm, but not wisely, nor in accordance with missionary views, for he had removed the taboo upon spirits which ordinarily was imposed for all his subjects.

Neither sovereign nor courtiers had been sober since, and though, with a lofty Sabbatarianism, the king declined to be photographed upon a Sunday, it was not to be supposed that he could be refused more drink if he offered to purchase it at the usual price. There was this further difficulty in the way of restoring sobriety to his dominions, that even if one firm declined to supply him, there was the rival house, which, having as yet sold less of its liquor, might be less anxious for the special open season to come to an end. So the carnival continued for ten days more, and all the white men could do was to get out their pistols and show in public such skill as they possessed in shooting at a mark.

Twice a large stone was hurled at Stevenson as he sat in his verandah at dusk, just as the lamp was brought out and placed beside him. He now entered into negotiations with the German manager of the other firm, whom he found to take a far more serious view of the situation than any of them, and whom he induced by diplomacy to discontinue to supply the natives. The crisis was now reached: would the populace, irritated by refusal, carry either of the bars with a rush?

Fortunately all passed off smoothly. The king came to his senses, and the taboo was re-imposed. Quiet was restored, and only just in time, for a day or two later a large body of rather turbulent natives arrived from the next island for a dance competition, quite ready to profit by any political trouble.