Back in Samoa—My Friend the Missionary—Musings

Next day we sailed away, and being lucky with a fair wind blowing steadily behind us we soon arrived back safely at the Samoan Islands. It was a long trip and I was jolly glad to see my berth ashore again as I did not get much sleep at sea—room being scarce I had slept on deck the whole time, and I had to sleep in the sloop scupper as she lay over with so great a list. Everything was just about the same, and very quiet. The Lubeck had been in and left again for Sydney. Hornecastle had a heavy drinking bout. There were several American sailors hanging round who had been left stranded by the wrecks of the man-o’-war ships that were blown ashore. I once more felt a longing to get away to the civilised world. Our comrade the poet got a job on a schooner and went away, and I was sorry to see him go. I still had my violin and started practising again in the evenings and often went into my old friend the shell-seller’s big den on the beach and yarned to him in “pigeon-English,” and it was there that I met Mrs Stevenson. I was playing the violin and she took a great interest in me. She was a real Bohemian and invited me to her home at once, but I was young and nervous, and at that time I was getting pretty shabby too—my blue serge suit had almost turned yellow through fading under the tropic sun—so I pretended to have an important job on that very night and got out of that invitation. I played several melodies at her request and I well remember playing “Alice, where art thou?” to her, to which she sang the refrain quietly as I played. She was attractive-looking and looked as though she had spent her life exploring the tropics. At first I thought she was some passenger just arrived on one of the boats till she introduced herself and told me her name.

There were a good many whites about at that time and also a lot of buildings going up for them, and for a time I had a job looking after the natives who did all the hard graft, but had to be kept watch over by the whites. I do not think a brown man has ever been known to work industriously in the South Seas when no one was looking, unless, of course, he was doing something completely on his own account. I got to know many of the Americans, English and Germans who were there at that time, some staying only a day or two before going off to the Marquesan group, Fijis, etc. Some I think were missionaries, others were travellers sight-seeing. One of the missionaries I got to know well and he struck me as a very decent fellow, had a fine sense of humour, was devoid of hypocrisy, and though earnest enough in his mission he could see quite vividly the light and dark shades of the whole of the Christianising schemes. We often smoked and yarned together, and though I was much younger than he, he seemed to prefer my companionship to the society of the men of his own profession. I taught him to play tunes on the violin by ear, and a very good ear he had too, as well as a refined taste for melodies with something in them, and if he ever reads my autobiography he is sure to remember me.

A “Man-o’-War” ship called in at Samoa about that time. When the crew got ashore that night it sounded like civilised Europe and home again. I must say that the Samoan ladies are nearly as bad over sailormen as the English middle-class girls are, and the jolly Jack Tars had a fine time of it roaming about the beach, on terra-firma again after so long a sea voyage. They bolted off in all directions, visiting the native huts along the shore, most of them in the hands of a cute-looking native guide who knew all the ropes and also all those Samoan ladies who were mostly addicted to easy virtue. These men guides work on commission, and some of them claim half of the proceeds as the foreign ships arrive, and so they do very well, and you can well imagine that Berlin, London, Paris and New York to-day are well represented in the South Seas as far as the different stock of the world’s sailormen is concerned. There they are out there to-day (the half-castes I mean), while the fathers, pensioned-off sailors in the civilised cities of the world, are bringing up legitimate families, respectable young men and women who do not dream of their half sisters and brothers toiling on the plantations lashed by the overseers’ whip in the far-away Pacific, and many a cosy vicarage retreat of Puritan England, standing like the very emblem of sedateness and purity by the village roadside, is the ancestral hall of some savage South Sea man or woman with eyes that gaze longingly seaward from their native Isle, knowing not why. And so the world jogs along and I suppose all for the best.

It was about this time that I am speaking of that Mataafa and Laupepa were enjoying their resumed power over the Island. Laupepa had been exiled by the German Government, and had at last been allowed to return. There had been a good deal of fighting going on among the German and American sailors, and Samoans, but all seemed pretty quiet in my time. A terrible hurricane had struck the Islands, lifted the warships up on tremendous waves and tossed them ashore as though they were canoes. Many lives were lost, and the storm did more damage in a couple of hours than all the warships and threatening natives.