Contrasts—A South Sea Bar-room—I meet Robert Louis Stevenson—An Old Time Trader’s Morals—Shell-backs

Alas, a good many of those brown men and women of the old days have passed away for ever, and in their place, over the islands of the South Seas, roam the varied offspring of men from many lands, the half-caste children of white traders, Chinese mongrels, Polynesian niggers, descendants of wandering, adventurous viciousness, mixed up with the outcasts of civilisation, and more often than quite enough the puny offspring of touring American and German missionaries, and English too. I don’t know which has won in the race to populate the lonely and beautifully secret-keeping isles of those far-away seas, but I think the good old flag is still to the front, flying to the breeze, represented in the sparkling, dancing eyes of the romping children on the wooded South Sea slopes—pretty violet eyes they have too, some grey and some grey-brown, little laughing angels of innocence, as they gaze up at you and go tumbling head over heels, revealing their tiny plump white-splashed backs, and the good old missionary sprees hidden in the dark of the unrecorded! For true it is that sometimes the virtuous and the good have their weak moments, those sad lapses which are not on any account recorded in the delightfully innocent autobiography of the returned, weary but still earnest traveller, beautifully written, and sold for ten shillings and sixpence net, circulated among the numerous British, German, and American Christian Societies, and read by the benevolent old gentlemen and ladies of their native land, which is so overrun with poverty and misery.

I knew one old Samoan chief, who was a cute, intellectual fellow, and could speak “pigeon English” well enough to ply me with numerous questions concerning my native English land. I often remember how his bright eyes lit up with astonishment when I told him of the far-away sorrows of London Town, so different to the warm moonlit forest of his own Island. I told him how men slept on door-steps, shivering, clothed in verminous rags which fluttered in the cold night winds as they half covered starved skin and bone of dead men who still breathed—men who had dropped out of the fighting ranks of life, lost the forlorn hope, and did not believe in God, for they had sorrowed in life and found hell in the death of breathing-despair. I told him of tiny wistful eyes of children starving as they gazed into shop windows watching the mist rise from the steaming foods, and yet nothing in their little pinched bellies. I told him of vast cathedrals pointing their steeples up to the grey English skies, costing millions of money to build, while far below their stone walls, stealing along the wet cold streets, those tiny trembling prayers, God’s helpless children, crept without food and clothing. I told him of women, dishevelled and weary, sleeping out on the Embankment and huddled in dark corners and ditches, some fallen through drink, and some through loving too well the man who had betrayed their trust; and I told him of their more fortunate sisters who had loved and been unbetrayed by the object of their lucky trust, and how terribly bitter those very women were towards their fallen, lost sisters. I was young then, otherwise how much more could I have told the astonished old chap as he raised his eyes and hands to heaven and wiped the perspiration from his heathen brow!

Yes, to hear how we lived under the banner of the sign of the Cross, wherefrom only the shadow falls over the pale-faced multitudes as they tramp to the clank of the chains of conventionality, chains gold-plated with eighteen-carat hypocrisy.

“And then Englis come to here,” he said, as he opened his South Sea mouth in astonishment. He was an unmarried man, and having no fine-looking daughters had not suffered as some of the Samoans had, the why and the wherefore I leave the reader to guess. I also leave the reader of my autobiography to remember that the South Sea Islands’ so-called savages are men just like ourselves, with inclinations and dreams and religions based on mythology and the gods of their ancient histories, and were they a powerful and mighty race, owning three parts of the world, with all the advantages of climatic conditions and education that the Western world has had, they would most assuredly emigrate from their Isles and seek to reform men to their ways of thinking, and doubtless they would find a good harvest in our modern cities for their pious endeavours. I am sure we should all, under their influence, make a grand stride towards that far-off goal of perfect good. I know that there are many men stealing across the earth who do not think as I think, but this is the autobiography of my life, and not of another life.

I was a lad in the days that I am telling you of, and had the opportunities that other men who were older and more respected did not get. I have often rushed in where the angel feared to tread, and the devil also. R.L.S. and others only saw the traders, the Samoans and other tribes, as they stood before him in one light, and the missionaries with the halo of feverish goodness to reform shining around their brows. I was a boy, my opinion unrespected, a young beachcomber who knew more than they thought he did, so they let go, and out came the true man, glorious and joyous in the wild sprees of those long-ago Samoan nights! Mind you, there were good men in the South Seas of those days, but over most of their heads, in the cemetery where the whites were buried, the flowers grew. I have stood gazing on those forgotten graves at sunset and wondered what dead desires lay beneath those crosses and stones, what sad crimes and what memories of their native lands, for the Islands, as well as Australia, were the happy hiding places of men who were flying from justice, and were I to tell you the yarns, the terrible tales of escaped innocence being hunted and cursed through miscarriages of justice, I should have to fill a book with nothing else but those tales.

I will now return to where I left the South Sea Island girl Papoo, for that I discovered was her name. As the drunken trader swayed to his tub and her frizzly-headed brown father rolled a tobacco leaf into a cigarette with two fingers and stood by the one-roomed Samoan Hotel I spoke to the girl who had so attracted my attention.

“You like music,” I said.

“Nein spoke,” she answered, but her eyes spoke for her, and I shifted my seat and got closer and read that poem of curves and shoulders, bright eyes and hair, yes, all the mystery of a woman’s eyes, lit by the magic light of sincerity.

I will not tell you all the many details of my romantic love affair; but I can often hear in my dreams the cry of the night bird and the hushed intervals, as the sea-surf rose and thundered over the shore barrier by the forest track near Vaea Mountain’s thickly wooded slopes as I sat by Papoo and made love to her, just the very same as English boys do to the girls in the London suburbs to-day. Papoo was just the same in her manner, modest to a fault, betraying her modesty by adding another garment over her ridi, which looked to me very much like the half of a discarded red nightshirt of some cranky old skipper. I played the violin to Papoo by the thatched hut where she lived and she sang weird Samoan songs, which stealing into my ears from her lips trembled with lyrical beauty, the soul of which was in my own head. Nights followed nights and I would creep behind her thatched hut on all-fours and meet her secretly. I got so deeply in love with her that I asked her to clear from the Island and go with me to Australia; and then the end came, in the sense that we could not meet so often. Her father found us out! I thought he would kill me at first, but the anger in his dark eyes sank down and he jabbered in South Sea lingo tremendously for a time. I hung my head and pretended to be heartily ashamed of myself, and so he forgave me, but kept his weather eye on me just the same; and my dear Papoo crept in the hut door, gazed over her shoulder at me as she disappeared, and pointed to the shore, and I knew that she would meet me and bolt at the first opportunity.

It was the day after that episode that I was sitting by a dead banyan-tree, when a white man, whom I thought was a rather respectable trader, emerged from the forest just by. It was Robert Louis Stevenson. He had intellectual keen eyes and a sad emotional-looking face, and looked a bit of a dreamer. Of course I did not know him then, nor can I remember much what he said at that moment. I know that I had climbed a tree and was looking at a bird’s egg when he came up to me and asked me what bird’s egg it was; I could not tell him, but I did as he requested, climbed up the tree and placed it back into the nest. Had I known he was a great author and poet I should have taken more stock of him. I remember that we strolled across the slope together and I gave him some tobacco and climbed several more trees as he stood below calling up to me to show him the eggs. It was not till nearly a week after, when I was on the beach talking to a trader friend who said to me “That’s Stevenson, the writer,” that I asked about him, but even then I did not gather that he was as famous as he was. I remember the very next day as I and Papoo lay hidden by some coco-palms we saw him lying full length, leaning half on his elbow gazing seaward, writing now and again on a slip of paper that he held in his hand. He had his boots off, for they stood beside him. I think he must have been bathing in one of the creeks by the Bay and afterwards crept up to the seclusion of the banyan-trees to dream and write down his thoughts. Papoo and I watched him for a moment, and then arose and stole away, as she had the household duties to attend to and I did not want her father to catch her again.

Almost every night I would go down by the beach and mix with sailors and traders—men from all countries they were, a good many Germans among them, especially when the Lubeck arrived from Sydney, bringing passengers and a varied cargo. The crew would come ashore and have a regular spree, some of them drinking the vile concoction sold at a shanty bar by the beach. There was one old chap who hailed from “Nuka Hiva.” He would sit drinking and smoking and yarning away for hours, telling us his experiences; he knew all the Islands, had been married over and over again, and as he was growing old and infirm through drink and temper (for he had a terribly fiery head) he would sit and curse the memory of his numerous family, not one of whom would help him. He had grown-up sons and daughters on most of the Isles of the South Seas round about; some of his children were as blackish as their mothers, and some half white and half brown. He would sit for hours while I played and strummed on the violin, telling me of the strange habits of the different tribes and their marriage customs. We would sit together and roar with laughter as he (half drunk) crawled on the shanty floor illustrating the way he solemnised the marriage of his eighth wife in Fiji, describing how he kissed her feet, and how he went through ceremonies of a most extraordinary kind in the many weddings that he had attended as bridegroom. I could not very well write here the tales he told, and moreover I do not believe all that he said was true, though he would pull his billy-goat whiskers, lift his hat from his extraordinary high bald head, and seal every detail with a blasphemous oath of “God’s truth.” He was interesting at first, but I soon wearied of his adventures, for he told the same yarn night after night, and as I slept in the same room with him my life became a burden to me. Just as I was going off to sleep he would suddenly sit up, half drunk, and say: “Did I ever tell you of my marriage with Betsy Brownlegs, the Fiji chief’s daughter?” And then, notwithstanding that I quickly answered “Yes, you have told me and everyone else in Samoa,” he would sit up and start off, pouring out the old tales.

One night I got him in a decent mood, played him some old English songs, and then he revealed the best side of his character, that all men have, and with tears in his eyes looked up at me and said, “Matey, that ’ere old song makes me remember—she sang that, and I killed her!” And then out came the sorrow of his life, why he was a drunken exile in the South Seas. As a young man when in England, for he was an Englishman, he had fallen madly in love with a pretty girl in a Kent village. All went well for a time; then a rival came on the scene who was more polished than poor Hornecastle, and the object of his affections cooled down towards him and gave every encouragement to the suitor who wore a top hat and white cuffs. I can still see the gleaming of Hornecastle’s eyes as he told me of that rival of his, how he caught his village sweetheart one night sitting on a stile with the top hat hanging on a post beside her and the cuffs round her neck. “I did for her,” he said; “I meant the shot for him.” And then, though many years had passed since that tragedy which had made him fly from his native land, the tears of remorse crept up to his eyes, but they quickly brightened as he told me that he had read in an old newspaper that the second shot had succeeded, and his rival had died in the hospital. So ended my strange comrade’s courtship—the girl and the rival in the grave, and Hornecastle an exile in the South Seas, and on the slopes his many wives and children romping with glee, brought into existence by the top hat and white cuffs episode. How strange and inscrutable are the ways of Fate.

I made the acquaintance of another old chap who had a mania for eating hard-boiled eggs. He had been a sailor, travelled the world over, done many misdeeds and many good ones. He spoke with a Yankee twang and I believe was an American. He would sit in the grog shanty telling all the traders and sailors in the bar, when his turn came round, of other lands, and invariably finished up by condemning the country in question or praising it according to the quality of the hard-boiled eggs that he had eaten while residing there. They were real old “Shell-backs,” the men of those days, had sailed the seas, lived on “hard tack,” slept “all standing” in wind and rain, and as the various yarns were told they would listen and quietly sip their beer, spitting over their shoulders out of the grog shanty windows without missing, in a way that struck me as wonderful. They were wild times, those that I am writing of, not so long ago either, as I am still a young man. You see I started young and saw more of life before I reached man’s estate (which is the only estate I ever possessed) than a good many men see in their threescore and ten years. As I write and dream on I can see those Isles glittering under the tropic sun, with the shoreward surfs rising and breaking into rainbow-flushed colours, thundering over the reefs. They are still breaking and curling to spray out there, as on the beach through the tracks of moonlight pass and repass the semi-savage-looking figures of Samoan men and women, and still I can hear the songs of those who fish in the Bay as they glide along from shore to shore in the strange outrigged canoes, while the half-caste and white traders loaf, lean, smoke and spit by the shore shanties, tugging at their short beards.

Time went on till Papoo and I drifted apart, and since I must tell the truth, this being no romance, one of her own tribe courted her. She still had her eye on me, but the novelty was wearing off, and I went off to Tonga in a small trading schooner. When I returned to Samoa after about six months, I found that Papoo and her family had left the Island. I never saw her again, and so ended my second love affair.