In the South Seas | Page 3

lovers and neighbours of the surf. 'The coral waxes, the palm grows,
but man departs,' says the sad Tahitian proverb; but they are all three,
so long as they endure, co-haunters of the beach. The mark of
anchorage was a blow-hole in the rocks, near the south-easterly corner
of the bay. Punctually to our use, the blow-hole spouted; the schooner
turned upon her heel; the anchor plunged. It was a small sound, a great
event; my soul went down with these moorings whence no windlass
may extract nor any diver fish it up; and I, and some part of my ship's
company, were from that hour the bondslaves of the isles of Vivien.
Before yet the anchor plunged a canoe was already paddling from the
hamlet. It contained two men: one white, one brown and tattooed
across the face with bands of blue, both in immaculate white European
clothes: the resident trader, Mr. Regler, and the native chief,
Taipi-Kikino. 'Captain, is it permitted to come on board?' were the first
words we heard among the islands. Canoe followed canoe till the ship
swarmed with stalwart, six-foot men in every stage of undress; some in
a shirt, some in a loin-cloth, one in a handkerchief imperfectly adjusted;

some, and these the more considerable, tattooed from head to foot in
awful patterns; some barbarous and knived; one, who sticks in my
memory as something bestial, squatting on his hams in a canoe,
sucking an orange and spitting it out again to alternate sides with
ape-like vivacity-- all talking, and we could not understand one word;
all trying to trade with us who had no thought of trading, or offering us
island curios at prices palpably absurd. There was no word of welcome;
no show of civility; no hand extended save that of the chief and Mr.
Regler. As we still continued to refuse the proffered articles, complaint
ran high and rude; and one, the jester of the party, railed upon our
meanness amid jeering laughter. Amongst other angry
pleasantries--'Here is a mighty fine ship,' said he, 'to have no money on
board!' I own I was inspired with sensible repugnance; even with alarm.
The ship was manifestly in their power; we had women on board; I
knew nothing of my guests beyond the fact that they were cannibals;
the Directory (my only guide) was full of timid cautions; and as for the
trader, whose presence might else have reassured me, were not whites
in the Pacific the usual instigators and accomplices of native outrage?
When he reads this confession, our kind friend, Mr. Regler, can afford
to smile.
Later in the day, as I sat writing up my journal, the cabin was filled
from end to end with Marquesans: three brown-skinned generations,
squatted cross-legged upon the floor, and regarding me in silence with
embarrassing eyes. The eyes of all Polynesians are large, luminous, and
melting; they are like the eyes of animals and some Italians. A kind of
despair came over me, to sit there helpless under all these staring orbs,
and be thus blocked in a corner of my cabin by this speechless crowd:
and a kind of rage to think they were beyond the reach of articulate
communication, like furred animals, or folk born deaf, or the dwellers
of some alien planet.
To cross the Channel is, for a boy of twelve, to change heavens; to
cross the Atlantic, for a man of twenty-four, is hardly to modify his diet.
But I was now escaped out of the shadow of the Roman empire, under
whose toppling monuments we were all cradled, whose laws and letters
are on every hand of us, constraining and preventing. I was now to see
what men might be whose fathers had never studied Virgil, had never
been conquered by Caesar, and never been ruled by the wisdom of

Gaius or Papinian. By the same step I had journeyed forth out of that
comfortable zone of kindred languages, where the curse of Babel is so
easy to be remedied; and my new fellow-creatures sat before me dumb
like images. Methought, in my travels, all human relation was to be
excluded; and when I returned home (for in those days I still projected
my return) I should have but dipped into a picture-book without a text.
Nay, and I even questioned if my travels should be much prolonged;
perhaps they were destined to a speedy end; perhaps my subsequent
friend, Kauanui, whom I remarked there, sitting silent with the rest, for
a man of some authority, might leap from his hams with an ear-splitting
signal, the ship be carried at a rush, and the ship's company butchered
for the table.
There could be nothing more natural than these apprehensions, nor
anything more groundless. In my experience of the islands,