By Reef and Palm | Page 3

the Ellice and Tokelau Groups, finally
settling down as a residential trader. Then he took passage once more
for the Carolines, and was wrecked on Peru, one of the Gilbert Islands
(lately annexed), losing every dollar that he possessed. He returned to
Samoa and engaged as a "recruiter" in the labour trade. He got badly
hurt in an 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 the

Marquis de Ray in New Ireland. A bad attack of malarial fever, and a
wound in the neck (labour recruiting or even trading among the blacks
of Melanesia seems to have been a much less pleasant business than
residence among the gentle brown folk of the Eastern Pacific) made
him leave and return to the Marshall Islands, where Lailik, the chief
whom he had succoured at sea years before, made him welcome. He
left on a fruitless quest after an imaginary guano island, and from then
until two years ago he has been living on various islands in both the
North and South Pacific, leading what he calls "a wandering and lonely
but not unhappy existence," "Lui," as they call him, being a man both
liked and trusted by the natives from lonely Easter Island to the
faraway Pelews. He is still in the prime of life, and whether he will now
remain within the bounds of civilisation, or whether some day he will
return to his wanderings, as Odysseus is fabled to have done in his old
age, I fancy that he hardly knows himself. But when once the charm of
a wild roving life has got into a man's blood, the trammels of
civilisation are irksome and its atmosphere is hard to breathe. It will be
seen from this all-too-condensed sketch of Mr Becke's career that he
knows the Pacific as few men alive or dead have ever known it. He is
one of the rare men who have led a very wild life, and have the culture
and talent necessary to give some account of it. As a rule, the men who
know don't write, and the men who write don't know.
Every one who has a taste for good stories will feel, I believe, the force
of these. Every one who knows the South Seas, and, I believe, many
who do not, will feel that they have the unmistakable stamp of truth.
And truth to nature is a great merit in a story, not only because of that
thrill of pleasure hard to analyse, but largely made up of associations,
memories, and suggestions that faithfulness of representation in picture
or book gives to the natural man; but because of the fact that nature is
almost infinitely rich, and the unassisted imagination of man but a poor
and sterile thing, tending constantly towards some ossified convention.
"Treasure Island" is a much better story than "The Wreckers," yet I, for
one, shall never cease to regret that Mr Stevenson did not possess,
when he wrote "Treasure Island," that knowledge of what men and
schooners do in wild seas that was his when he gave us "The
Wreckers." The detail would have been so much richer and more

convincing.
It is open to any one to say that these tales are barbarous, and what Mrs
Meynell, in a very clever and amusing essay, has called "decivilised."
Certainly there is a wide gulf separating life on a Pacific island from
the accumulated culture of centuries of civilisation in the midst of
which such as Mrs Meynell move and have their being. And if there
can be nothing good in literature that does not spring from that culture,
these stories must stand condemned. But such a view is surely too
narrow. Much as I admire that lady's writings, I never can think of a
world from which everything was eliminated that did not commend
itself to the dainty taste of herself and her friends, without a feeling of
impatience and suffocation. It takes a huge variety of men and things to
make a good world. And ranches and CANONS, veldts and prairies,
tropical forests and coral islands, and all that goes to make up the wild
life in the face of Nature or among primitive races, far and free from
the artificial conditions of an elaborate civilisation, form an element in
the world, the loss of which would be bitterly felt by many a man who
has never set foot outside his native land.
There is a certain monotony, perhaps, about these stories. To some
extent this is inevitable. The interest and passions of South Sea Island
life are neither numerous nor complex, and action is apt to