Meeting with Tommy Eustace, the trader—Strange soil of the atoll—A bath in the lagoon—Momuni, the thirsty bread baker—Off for Anaa.

THE crusader who entered Jerusalem had no deeper feeling of realization of a long-cherished hope than I when my foot imprinted its mold in the glistening sand of the atoll of Niau. I stood in my track and scanned it, as Crusoe the first human mark other than his own he saw on his lonely island. Not with his dismay, but yet with a slight panic, a pleasant but alarmed perturbation, an awe at the wonder of the scene. The moment had the tenseness of that when I saw my first cocoanut-palm; it mingled a fear that I had passed one of the great climacterics of visual emotion.

Here was I in the arcanum of romance, the promised land of chimera, after years of faint expectation. I was almost stunned by the reality, and I felt sensibly the need of some one to share the pathos that oppressed me. I did not forsake my love for Tahiti. That was fixed, but this atoll was not the same. Tahiti was an adored mistress, this a light o’ love, a dazzling, alien siren, with whom one could not rest in safety; a fanciful abode for a brief period, as incomparable to Tahiti as an ice-field to a garden.

“What the bloody hell’s eatin’ on you?” exclaimed the irked McHenry, questioningly as he glared at me. “Aren’t your feet mates? Let’s see Tommy Eustace! He might have a bottle o’ beer buried in a cool place.”

Moet was shaking the salt water from his long, inky hair. He had stumbled and dipped his head in the brine.

“’Sus-Maria!” he swore. “Virginie she say Jean been drink.”

A shed-like building of rough boards, with unpainted corrugated iron roof, was a hundred steps from the water, the store and warehouse of the single trader, who supplied the wants and ambitions of the hundred inhabitants of Niau and endeavored to monopolize a meager output of copra and pearl-shell. It was on a rude road, which stretched along the beach, edged by a dozen houses, small, wooden huts, or thatched straw shanties, much more primitive and poor than in Tahiti. All the remainder of Niau was coral, water, and cocoanut-trees, except a scanty vegetation.

Thomas Eustace, the trader, or TomÉ, as the natives called him, was in the doorway of his establishment, awaiting the sailors who had begun at once to carry the Marara’s freight from the boat through the moat. A quarter of a century ago, a broth of a boy from Ireland, he had stepped off a ship alongside the Papeete quay, and had never left the South Seas since.

“Faix, I had the divil’s own toime to shtay,” say TomÉ, as we four sat by an empty barrel head and drank the warmish beer he had offered us with instant hospitality.

“I waz that atthracted by the purty gir-ruls, the threes, and the foine-shmellin’ flowers that the ould man of the ship nivir could dhraw me back to the pots an’ pans iv the galley. I waz the flunky in the kitchin iv a wind-jammin’ Sassenach bark, peelin’ praties, an’ waitin’ on sailormin. The father iv a darlin’ hid me out be Fautaua falls, an’ the jondarmy hunted an’ hunted, wid nothin’ for their thrubble.”

A stoutish, quizzical man was TomÉ, with brown face and throat and hands, a stubby, chewed mustache and sleepy, laughing eyes. By the purling steam of Fautaua, where Loti had lived his idyl with Rarahu and I had walked with a princess, Thomas Eustace became TomÉ forever and ever. He was well satisfied to be bashaw of an atoll, unused to greater comfort as he was, and enamored of reef and palm, and the lazy, unstandardized life of the South Seas.

“Ye may picther me,” he went on, as he poured the beer, “jumpin’ out iv the p’isonous galley iv that wind-jammin’ man-killer, an’ fallin’, be the grace iv God, into a grove iv cocoanuts, wid roas’ pig, breadfruit, and oranges fur breakfus, deejunee, an’ dinner, to whistle low about a brown fairy that swung on the same branch wid me! The Emerald Isle the divil! ‘Tis Tahiti’s the Tir-na’n-Og! This beats the bogs an’ the peat an’ the stirabout, wid no peeler to move you on, an’ no soggarth to tell ye ye’re a sinner!”

TomÉ was ten years in Penrhyn, the noted pearl island belonging to New Zealand, and known as Tongareva. Lying Bill, McHenry, and Eustace were fellow-traders in that lonely spot. “Fellow” in such relations meant the affectionate intercourse of wolves who united to chase the sheep and quarrel over the carcass. McHenry and TomÉ had greeted each other with cold familiarity, each knowing the other through and through, wondering how the other would beat him, and yet not averse to an exchange of trade news and the gossip of Tahiti and the Group, as they called the Paumotus.

“How’s old Lovaina?” asked TomÉ.

“Chargin’ as much as ever for her cheap scoffin’s,” replied McHenry, who had never eaten a better meal than that served at the TiarÉ Hotel. Eustace, I doubted not, was a square and genial man, but among his business kind he had to fight bludgeon with bludgeon. He opened a fresh cocoanut and diverted the mouth of an infant from its natural fount to make it swallow a few drops. The mother, a handsome, young woman, proud of her armful, gestured smilingly that TomÉ was its father.

“Mavourneen dheelish!” he called her, and the baby, “Molly.”

Cocoanuts differ in kind and quality as much as apples, and Eustace gave me a kaipoa, which at his direction I ate, husks and all, and found it delicious.

Leaving the two merchants to continue their armed banter, I stepped outside the store and struck off the road toward the center of the island, through fields of broken coral, mysterious in its oppositeness from all other terrestrial formations. There was no earth that one could see or feel, but a matted vegetation in spots showed that even in these whited sepulchers of the coral animals outlandish plants had found the substance of life. The flora, though desperate in its poverty, was heartening in that it could survive at all. The lofty cocoanut-palm, standing straight as a mast or curving in singular grace, grew luxuriantly—the evergreen banner of this giant fleet of anchored ships of stone. Through a few hundred yards of this weird desert-jungle, I reached the lagoon which the inner marge of the great coral reef inclosed.

No lake that I have seen approached this mere in simple beauty, nor had artist’s vision wrought a more startling, extravagant, yet perfect work of color. The lagoon of Niau was small enough to encompass with a glance from where I stood. I felt myself in an enchanted spot. Niau was not all wooded. For long stretches only the white coral lined the shores, with here and there the plumy palms refreshing the eyes—brilliant in contrast with the bare sheen of the coral, and softly rustling in the breeze.

The water of the lagoon was palest blue, verging to green, clear almost as the pure air, and the beach shelved rapidly into depths.

The beach was made up of tiny shells crumbling into sand, billions and billions of them in the twenty miles about the lagoon. In each of the legion coral isles this was repeated, so that the mind contemplating them was confused at the incalculable prodigality of the life expended to build them and the oddity of the problem arranged by the power planning them.

“Every single atom, from the least particle to the largest fragment of rock, in this great pile,” said Darwin, “bears the stamp of having been subjected to organized arrangement. We feel surprised when travelers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals. This is a wonder which does not at first strike the eye of the body, but, after reflection, the eye of reason.”

I sat down under a dwarf cocoanut and let my eyes and mind dwell upon the gorgeousness of the prospect and the insight into nature’s reticences it afforded. Everywhere were the tombs or skeletons of the myriad creatures who had labored and died to construct these footstools of Might. Could man assume that these eons of years and countless births, efforts, and deaths, were for any concern of his? But else, he asked, why were they? To show the boundless power and caprice of the Creator? Was not the world made for humanity?

An atoll was to an island as a comet to a star—a freak or sport in the garden of the sea-gods. It was as if the Designer had planned to set up, in the thousand miles of ocean through which the Dangerous Islands stretched, a whimsical cluster of shallower salt lakes, and so had hidden trillions of tiny beings to inclose them. For, after all, an atoll was but a lagoon surrounded by a reef of coral, or rather two reefs, for in the plan of the Architect there was built a second reef for every atoll, and this outer barrier was sunken, as the one through which we had come, but yet took the brunt of the waves, and prevented them from washing away and destroying the inner and habitable reef on which I then sat.

This hidden shoal belted the beach regularly, so that it made a moat between the two; and yet in most atolls there was such an opening as that through which we had come, often a mere depression, sometimes a deep and wide mouth. One was forced to consider whether the Architect had not taken man into his scheme, for without such an opening no people could reach the shore and lagoon. But the grievous fact was that in some atolls the minute workers had left no door and that man himself had torn one open with tools and explosives. Even once within the moat, our boat was in comparative safety only in the mildest weather, for the moat was studded with lumps and boulders of coral, and the most crafty guardianship was imperative to keep our craft whole.

If there had been an entry through the inner shore into the peaceful lagoon by which I lolled, then would anchorage and calm have been assured. So, of course, nature had in some other atolls than Niau attended to this detail, and these I was to find more inhabited and more developed, for in some even schooners might seek the haven of the lake, and a fleet lie there in security. The lagoons were thus, generally, safe and unflurried, though sometimes terribly harried by cyclones, such as Lying Bill described the Dane as riding from sea to sea across the entire island of Anaa.

Each of the Paumotus was made up of a number of motus, or islets, parted by lower strata in which was the moat water. This string of motus assumed many dissimilar figures. One had fifty pieces in its puzzle—a puzzle not fully solved by science, or, at least, still in dispute. The motus were all formed of coral rock of comparatively recent origin geologically. Were these atolls the mountain-tops of a lost Atlantis or thrust-up marine plateaus? The wise men differed. A theory was that the atolls were coral formations upon volcanic islands that had slowly sunk, each a monument marking an engulfed island or mountain peak.

Another, that volcanic activity, which mothered the high islands in these seas, caused to rise from the bottom of the ocean a series of submerged tablelands, leveled by the currents and waves, on which the coral insects erected the reefs—reefs just peeping above the surface of the water—and on which the storms threw great blocks of madrepores and coral broken from the mass. When in this condition, mere rocky rings of milky coral, over which each billow swept, without life or aught else than the structures of the marvelous zoÖphytes, floors cut and broken here and there by the surging and pounding breakers, the hand of the Master raised them up, as through Polynesia other islands had been raised, and fixed these Paumotus as the fairest growths of Neptune’s park.

Lifted above the watery level, they were able to begin their task of usefulness. Seeds carried by currents, borne by the winds, or brought by those greatest of all pioneers and settlers of new countries, the sea-birds, were flung on these ready, but yet barren, atolls, and vegetation gave them an entrancing present.

Volcano and insect combined to make these coral blossoms of the South Seas so different from any other mundane formations that the man with any dreaming in his soul stood awe-struck at the wonder and artistry of nature. They were the most wonderful and simple of nature’s works. They eluded portrayal by brush and camera. No canvas or film could grasp their symmetry and grace, seize more than a fragment of their alluring form or hint of their admirable colors. Ravishing scenes from the deck of a ship, and marvels of construction and hue when upon them, they were sad and disappointing to the dweller, like a lovely woman who has a bad disposition.

Circles, ovals, and horseshoes, regular and irregular, a few miles or a hundred in circumference, the Paumotus were always essentially the same—the lagoon and the fringe of reef and palm. These Iles Dangereuses were the supreme in creation in harmonious light and shade. They were the very breath of imagination. My thoughts harked back to the dawn of life, and the struggle between the land and water in which continents and islands were drowned, and others rose to be the home of beast and man, when God said, “Let the dry land appear.”

These atolls had fought the ceaseless war which slowly, but eternally, shifted our terrestrial foothold. Makatea, nearer Tahiti, lifted its strange cliffs two hundred feet in the air. It had been raised by subterranean force thirty-five fathoms from the sea-level, and its coasts were vertical walls of that height.

The young Darwin’s theory appealed even with these examples of resurgence. It was improbable that an elevatory force would uplift through an immense area great, rocky banks within twenty or thirty fathoms of the surface of the sea, and not a single point above that level. Where on the surface of the globe was a chain of mountains, even a few hundred miles in length, with their many summits rising within a few feet of a given level, and not one pinnacle above it? Yet that was the condition in these atolls, for the coral animal could not live more than thirty fathoms or so below the atmosphere, so that the basic foundations of the atolls, on which the mites laid their offerings and their bones, were fewer than two hundred feet under the surface. The polyp gnome died from the pressure of water at greater depths. Just outside the reefs or between the atolls, the depths were often greater than a mile or two.

The vague science I possessed stimulated the memories of my reading of that oldest civilization in tradition, the immense continent of Pan, which a score of millenniums ago, according to the poet archÆologists, flourished in this Pacific Ocean. Its cryptogram attended in many spots the discovery of a new Rosetta stone. I myself had seen huge monoliths, half-buried pyramids and High Places, hieroglyphs and carvings, certainly the fashioning of no living races. Were these Paumotus, and many other islands from Japan to Easter, the tops of the submerged continent, Pan, which stretched its crippled body along the floor of the Pacific for thousands of leagues? There were legends, myths, customs, inexplicable absences of usages and knowledge on the part of present peoples, all perhaps capable of interpretation by this fascinating theory of a race lost to history before Sumer attained coherence or Babylon made bricks.

Over this land bridge, mayhap, ventured a Caucasian people, the dominant blood in Polynesia to-day, and when the connecting links in the chain to their cradle fell from the sights of sun and stars, the survivors were isolated for ages on the islands like Tahiti and the Marquesas. On the mountain-tops, plateaus beneath the water, the coral insect built up these atolls until they stood in their wondrous shapes splendid examples of nature’s self-arrested labor, sculptures of unbelievable brilliancy.

To them came first Caucasians who had been spared in the cataclysm, and later the new sailors of giant canoes who followed from Asia the line of islets and atolls, fighting with and conquering the Caucasians, and merging into them in the course of generations. These first and succeeding migrations must have been forced by devastating natural phenomena, by terrible economic pressure, by wars and tribal feuds. It was not probable that any people deliberately chose these atolls in preference to the higher lands, but that they occupied them in lieu of better on account of evil fortune.

These eighty Paumotu islands averaged about forty miles apart, with only two thousand people in all of them, which would allow, if equally distributed, only twenty-five inhabitants to each. On more than half of them no person lived, and all the others were scantily peopled. Three or four hundred might occupy one atoll where shell and cocoanuts were bountiful and fish plentiful and good, while two score and more atolls were left for the frigate-bird to build its nest and for the robber-crab to eat its full of nuts.

The thud of a cocoanut beside me stirred me from my reverie. I was wet with the wading ashore and the sweat of my walk, and so I removed my few garments and plunged into the lagoon. Going down to test the declivity a yard or so from the water’s edge I dropped twenty feet and touched no bottom. The water was limpid, delicious, and I could see the giant coral fans waving fifty feet below me.

As I loitered on my back in the water, and looked down into the crystal depths and at the cloudless sky, I had a moment’s phantasm of a great city, its lofty trade battlements, its crowded streets, the pale, set faces of its people, the splendor of the rich houses, the squalor of the tenements, the police with clubs and guns, and the shrieking traffic. Here was the sweetest contrast, where man had hardly touched the primitive work of nature. It was long from Sumer, and far from Gotham.

I was floating at ease when I heard a voice. It seemed to come out of the water. It was soft and almost etheric.

“Maitai!” it said, which meant, “You’re all right.”

I turned on my side, and by my garments was a long, gaunt Niauan, with a loose mouth, loafing there, with his eyes fawning upon me. He smiled sweetly, and said, “Goodanighta!”

As it was hardly seven o’clock in the morning, the sun a ball of fire, and the glare of the reef like the shine of a boy’s mirror in one’s eyes, I argued against his English education. But courtesy is not correction. I said in kind, “Goodanighta!” He came into the water and repaid me by shaking my hand, and with a movement toward the beach, said, “Damafina!”

“Maitai!” I corroborated his opinion, and then he beckoned to me to leave the lagoon and follow him. I dressed, all moist as I was, and we returned toward the village, I wondering what design on me he had.

“She canna fik (fix) you show Niau,” my cicerone explained, as he waved toward the island.

“All right, good, number one,” I assented.

He laughed with pleased vanity at his success in conversing with me in my tongue and at the envious looks of the people on their tiny porches as we passed them, and I saluted them.

“Momuni! Momuni!” they called after him with scornful laughter, and beckoned me to leave him and join them.

“Haere mai!” they said, sweetly to me. Come to us!

My guide did not like either the name they gave him or their efforts to alienate us. He retorted with an impolite gesticulation, and cried, “Popay! Popay!” Momuni, though, was plainly nervous, and afraid that I might be won over by the opposition. He plucked me by my wet sleeve and directed me to a shanty of old boards set upon a platform of coral rocks four feet from the bed of the atoll. In its single room on a white bedspread were a dozen loaves of bread, crisp and white, and smelling appetizingly. He lifted one, squeezed it to show its sponginess, and put it to my nose. He sniffed, and said, “She the greata coo-ooka.”

I guessed that he referred to himself as the baker. He pointed out toward the schooner and made me understand that this baking was a present to me. I was embarrassed, and with many flourishes explained that the Tahitian cook of the Marara could not be compared with him as a bread-maker, but that he was of a jealous disposition and might resent bitterly the gift. My companion was cast down for a moment, but brightened with another idea. Through a hundred yards more of coral bones we plowed to his oven, a huge, coral stove like a lime-kiln, with a roof, and bags of Victor flour from the Pacific Coast beside it. Pridefully he made me note everything, as an artist might his studio.

Momuni then touched my arm, and said, “Haere! We can do.”

We walked along the beach of the lagoon and found a road that paralleled the one we had come. It was lower than the other and the rain had flooded it. The water was brown and stagnant, even red in pools, like blood. Uncanny things shot past my feet or crawled upon them, and once something that had not the feel of anything I knew of climbed the calf of my leg, and when I turned and saw it dimly I leaped into the air and kicked it off. I heard it plop into the dark water.

Down this marsh we plodded and paddled, floundered and splashed for half a mile. The cocoanut-palms arched across it, but there was not a person nor a habitation in view. I wondered why “she the great cook” had led me into this morass. Momuni looked at me mysteriously several times, and his lips moved as if he had been about to speak.

He studied my countenance attentively, and several times he patted and rubbed my back affectionately and said, “You damafina.” Then, slimy and sloppy as I was, covered with the foul water up to my waist, when we were in the darkest spot Momuni halted and drew me under a palm.

He would either seek to borrow money or to cut my throat, I thought hastily. Again he scanned me closely, and I, to soften his heart and avert the evil, tried to appear firm and unafraid. To my astonishment he took from his pocket five five-franc notes, those ugly, red-inked bills which are current in all the Etablissements FranÇais de l’Oceanie, and held them under my nose. He smiled and then made the motion of pulling a cork, and of a bottle’s contents gurgling through his loose mouth and down his long neck.

I shuddered at my thoughts. Could it be that in this dry atoll, with intoxicants forbidden, and prison the penalty of selling or giving them to a native, this hospitable Niauan had offered me his bread and shown me his oven, and the glories of the isle, and was displaying those five red notes to seduce me into breaking the law, into smuggling ashore a bottle of rum or wine?

I was determined to know the worst. I drew from my drawers (I had worn no trousers) an imaginary corkscrew, and from my undershirt an unsubstantial bottle. I pulled a supposititious cork, and took a long drink of the unreal elixir. Momuni was transfixed. His jaws worked, and his tongue extended. He squeezed my hand with happiness and hope, and left in it the five scarlet tokens of the Banque de l’Indo-Chine.

“Wina damafina; rumma damafina,” he confided. The man would be content with anything, so it bit his throat and made him a king for an evil hour.

TomÉ was dealing out tobacco when we reached his store. His wife and baby, an Irish-Penrhyn baby, were now eating a can of salmon and Nabisco wafers.

“Who is this gentleman, Mr. Eustace?” I asked, pointing to Momuni.

“He’s an omadhaun, a nuisance, that he is, sure,” said TomÉ. “He’s a Mormon deacon that peddles bread an’ buys his flour from some one else because I won’t trust him. He’s the only Mormon in this blessed island. Every last soul is a Roman Cat’lic, except me, and I’m a believer in the leprechawn. Has that hooligan been thryin’ to work ye for a bottle of rum? He’ll talk a day for a drink.”

“What’s Momuni and Popay?”

“Momuni is the way they say ‘Mormons.’ The other’s the pope wid the accint on the last syllable. It’s the name for Cat’lics all over these seas, because they worship the pope iv Rome. The Popays run this island, but the Momunis have got Takaroa and some others by the tail.”

I turned to look at my guide, the bread-maker. I had new admiration for him. It took courage to be the one Mormon among a hundred Catholics, and to try to sell them the staff of life. But he could not withstand the withering glances of TomÉ, and fled, with gestures to me which I could only hazard to mean to meet him later in the fearsome swamp, with the rum.

“Does Momuni owe you any money?” I asked the trader, who was lighting his wife’s cigarette.

“Does he? He owes me forty francs for flour, and I’ll nivir see the shadow iv them. I’ll tell ye, though, he’s the best baker in the Group, an’ they’re crazy about his bread.”

Eustace had no cargo for us, and McHenry and I caught the last boat for the Marara, Moet having stayed for one trip only.

“Come an’ shtay wid us a month or two,” said TomÉ in farewell. “We’ll make ye happy and find ye a sweetheart! ’Tis here ye can shpend yer valibil time doin’ nawthin’ at all, at all.”

He laughed heartily at his joke on virtue, and as we dashed through the surf to climb into the boat I turned to see him telling the assembling villagers some story that might provoke a laugh and keep their copra a monopoly for him.