In the South Seas | Page 9

beach. As for the cook (whose
conscience was not clear), he never afterwards set foot on shore, and
twice, when the Casco appeared to be driving on the rocks, it was
amusing to observe that man's alacrity; death, he was persuaded,
awaiting him upon the beach. It was more than a year later, in the
Gilberts, that the explanation dawned upon myself. The natives were
drawing palm-tree wine, a thing forbidden by law; and when the wind
thus suddenly revealed them, they were doubtless more troubled than
ourselves.

At the top of the den there dwelt an old, melancholy, grizzled man of
the name of Tari (Charlie) Coffin. He was a native of Oahu, in the
Sandwich Islands; and had gone to sea in his youth in the American
whalers; a circumstance to which he owed his name, his English, his
down-east twang, and the misfortune of his innocent life. For one
captain, sailing out of New Bedford, carried him to Nuka-hiva and
marooned him there among the cannibals. The motive for this act was
inconceivably small; poor Tari's wages, which were thus economised,
would scarce have shook the credit of the New Bedford owners. And
the act itself was simply murder. Tari's life must have hung in the
beginning by a hair. In the grief and terror of that time, it is not unlikely
he went mad, an infirmity to which he was still liable; or perhaps a
child may have taken a fancy to him and ordained him to be spared. He
escaped at least alive, married in the island, and when I knew him was
a widower with a married son and a granddaughter. But the thought of
Oahu haunted him; its praise was for ever on his lips; he beheld it,
looking back, as a place of ceaseless feasting, song, and dance; and in
his dreams I daresay he revisits it with joy. I wonder what he would
think if he could be carried there indeed, and see the modern town of
Honolulu brisk with traffic, and the palace with its guards, and the great
hotel, and Mr. Berger's band with their uniforms and outlandish
instruments; or what he would think to see the brown faces grown so
few and the white so many; and his father's land sold, for planting sugar,
and his father's house quite perished, or perhaps the last of them struck
leprous and immured between the surf and the cliffs on Molokai? So
simply, even in South Sea Islands, and so sadly, the changes come.
Tari was poor, and poorly lodged. His house was a wooden frame, run
up by Europeans; it was indeed his official residence, for Tari was the
shepherd of the promontory sheep. I can give a perfect inventory of its
contents: three kegs, a tin biscuit-box, an iron saucepan, several
cocoa-shell cups, a lantern, and three bottles, probably containing oil;
while the clothes of the family and a few mats were thrown across the
open rafters. Upon my first meeting with this exile he had conceived
for me one of the baseless island friendships, had given me nuts to
drink, and carried me up the den 'to see my house'--the only
entertainment that he had to offer. He liked the 'Amelican,' he said, and
the 'Inglisman,' but the 'Flessman' was his abhorrence; and he was

careful to explain that if he had thought us 'Fless,' we should have had
none of his nuts, and never a sight of his house. His distaste for the
French I can partly understand, but not at all his toleration of the
Anglo- Saxon. The next day he brought me a pig, and some days later
one of our party going ashore found him in act to bring a second. We
were still strange to the islands; we were pained by the poor man's
generosity, which he could ill afford, and, by a natural enough but quite
unpardonable blunder, we refused the pig. Had Tari been a Marquesan
we should have seen him no more; being what he was, the most mild,
long-suffering, melancholy man, he took a revenge a hundred times
more painful. Scarce had the canoe with the nine villagers put off from
their farewell before the Casco was boarded from the other side. It was
Tari; coming thus late because he had no canoe of his own, and had
found it hard to borrow one; coming thus solitary (as indeed we always
saw him), because he was a stranger in the land, and the dreariest of
company. The rest of my family basely fled from the encounter. I must
receive our injured friend alone; and the interview must have lasted
hard upon an hour, for he was loath to tear himself away. 'You go 'way.
I see you no more--no, sir!' he