I met him first in a
hurricane; and though we had gone through the
hurricane on the same schooner, it was not until the
schooner had gone to pieces under us that I first
laid eyes on him. Without doubt I had seen him with
the rest of the kanaka crew on board, but I had not
consciously been aware of his existence, for the
Petite Jeanne was rather overcrowded. In addition to
her eight or ten kanaka seamen, her white captain,
mate, and supercargo, and her six cabin passengers,
she sailed from Rangiroa with something like
eighty-five deck passengers-- Paumotans and
Tahitians, men, women, and children each with a
trade box, to say nothing of sleeping mats,
blankets, and clothes bundles.
The pearling season in the Paumotus
was over, and all hands were returning to Tahiti.
The six of us cabin passengers were pearl buyers.
Two were Americans, one was Ah Choon (the whitest
Chinese I have ever known), one was a German, one
was a Polish Jew, and I completed the half dozen.
It had been a prosperous season. Not
one of us had cause for complaint, nor one of the
eighty-five deck passengers either. All had done
well, and all were looking forward to a rest-off and
a good time in Papeete.
Of course, the Petite Jeanne was
overloaded. She was only seventy tons, and she had
no right to carry a tithe of the mob she had on
board. Beneath her hatches she was crammed and
jammed with pearl shell and copra. Even the trade
room was packed full with shell. It was a miracle
that the sailors could work her. There was no moving
about the decks. They simply climbed back and forth
along the rails.
In the night time they walked upon
the sleepers, who carpeted the deck, I'll swear, two
deep. Oh! And there were pigs and chickens on deck,
and sacks of yams, while every conceivable place was
festooned with strings of drinking cocoanuts and
bunches of bananas. On both sides, between the fore
and main shrouds, guys had been stretched, just low
enough for the foreboom to swing clear; and from
each of these guys at least fifty bunches of bananas
were suspended.
It promised to be a messy passage,
even if we did make it in the two or three days that
would have been required if the southeast trades had
been blowing fresh. But they weren't blowing fresh.
After the first five hours the trade died away in a
dozen or so gasping fans. The calm continued all
that night and the next day--one of those glaring,
glassy, calms, when the very thought of opening
one's eyes to look at it is sufficient to cause a
headache.
The second day a man died--an Easter
Islander, one of the best divers that season in the
lagoon. Smallpox--that is what it was; though how
smallpox could come on board, when there had been no
known cases ashore when we left Rangiroa, is beyond
me. There it was, though--smallpox, a man dead, and
three others down on their backs.
There was nothing to be done. We
could not segregate the sick, nor could we care for
them. We were packed like sardines. There was
nothing to do but rot and die--that is, there was
nothing to do after the night that followed the
first death. On that night, the mate, the
supercargo, the Polish Jew, and four native divers
sneaked away in the large whale boat. They were
never heard of again. In the morning the captain
promptly scuttled the remaining boats, and there we
were.
That day there were two deaths; the
following day three; then it jumped to eight. It was
curious to see how we took it. The natives, for
instance, fell into a condition of dumb, stolid
fear. The captain--Oudouse, his name was, a
Frenchman--became very nervous and voluble. He
actually got the twitches. He was a large fleshy
man, weighing at least two hundred pounds, and he
quickly became a faithful representation of a
quivering jelly-mountain of fat.
The German, the two Americans, and
myself bought up all the Scotch whiskey, and
proceeded to stay drunk. The theory was
beautiful--namely, if we kept ourselves soaked in
alcohol, every smallpox germ that came into contact
with us would immediately be scorched to a cinder.
And the theory worked, though I must confess that
neither Captain Oudouse nor Ah Choon were attacked
by the disease either. The Frenchman did not drink
at all, while Ah Choon restricted himself to one
drink daily.
It was a pretty time. The sun, going
into northern declination, was straight overhead.
There was no wind, except for frequent squalls,
which blew fiercely for from five minutes to half an
hour, and wound up by deluging us with rain. After
each squall, the awful sun would come out, drawing
clouds of steam from the soaked decks.
The steam was not nice. It was the
vapor of death, freighted with millions and millions
of germs. We always took another drink when we saw
it going up from the dead and dying, and usually we
took two or three more drinks, mixing them
exceptionally stiff. Also, we made it a rule to take
an additional several each time they hove the dead
over to the sharks that swarmed about us.
We had a week of it, and then the
whiskey gave out. It is just as well, or I shouldn't
be alive now. It took a sober man to pull through
what followed, as you will agree when I mention the
little fact that only two men did pull through. The
other man was the heathen--at least, that was what I
heard Captain Oudouse call him at the moment I first
became aware of the heathen's existence. But to come
back.
It was at the end of the week, with
the whiskey gone, and the pearl buyers sober, that I
happened to glance at the barometer that hung in the
cabin companionway. Its normal register in the
Paumotus was 29.90, and it was quite customary to
see it vacillate between 29.85 and 30.00, or even
30.05; but to see it as I saw it, down to 29.62, was
sufficient to sober the most drunken pearl buyer
that ever incinerated smallpox microbes in Scotch
whiskey.
I called Captain Oudouse's attention
to it, only to be informed that he had watched it
going down for several hours. There was little to
do, but that little he did very well, considering
the circumstances. He took off the light sails,
shortened right down to storm canvas, spread life
lines, and waited for the wind. His mistake lay in
what he did after the wind came. He hove to on the
port tack, which was the right thing to do south of
the Equator, if--and there was the rub--if one were
not in the direct path of the hurricane.
We were in the direct path. I could
see that by the steady increase of the wind and the
equally steady fall of the barometer. I wanted him
to turn and run with the wind on the port quarter
until the barometer ceased falling, and then to
heave to. We argued till he was reduced to hysteria,
but budge he would not. The worst of it was that I
could not get the rest of the pearl buyers to back
me up. Who was I, anyway, to know more about the sea
and its ways than a properly qualified captain? was
what was in their minds, I knew.
Of course, the sea rose with the wind
frightfully; and I shall never forget the first
three seas the Petite Jeanne shipped. She had fallen
off, as vessels do at times when hove to, and the
first sea made a clean breach. The life lines were
only for the strong and well, and little good were
they even for them when the women and children, the
bananas and cocoanuts, the pigs and trade boxes, the
sick and the dying, were swept along in a solid,
screeching, groaning mass.
The second sea filled the Petite
Jeanne'S decks flush with the rails; and, as her
stern sank down and her bow tossed skyward, all the
miserable dunnage of life and luggage poured aft. It
was a human torrent. They came head first, feet
first, sidewise, rolling over and over, twisting,
squirming, writhing, and crumpling up. Now and again
one caught a grip on a stanchion or a rope; but the
weight of the bodies behind tore such grips loose.
One man I noticed fetch up, head on
and square on, with the starboard bitt. His head
cracked like an egg. I saw what was coming, sprang
on top of the cabin, and from there into the
mainsail itself. Ah Choon and one of the Americans
tried to follow me, but I was one jump ahead of
them. The American was swept away and over the stern
like a piece of chaff. Ah Choon caught a spoke of
the wheel, and swung in behind it. But a strapping
Raratonga vahine (woman)--she must have weighed two
hundred and fifty--brought up against him, and got
an arm around his neck. He clutched the kanaka
steersman with his other hand; and just at that
moment the schooner flung down to starboard.
The rush of bodies and sea that was
coming along the port runway between the cabin and
the rail turned abruptly and poured to starboard.
Away they went--vahine, Ah Choon, and steersman; and
I swear I saw Ah Choon grin at me with philosophic
resignation as he cleared the rail and went under.
The third sea--the biggest of the
three--did not do so much damage. By the time it
arrived nearly everybody was in the rigging. On deck
perhaps a dozen gasping, half-drowned, and
half-stunned wretches were rolling about or
attempting to crawl into safety. They went by the
board, as did the wreckage of the two remaining
boats. The other pearl buyers and myself, between
seas, managed to get about fifteen women and
children into the cabin, and battened down. Little
good it did the poor creatures in the end.
Wind? Out of all my experience I
could not have believed it possible for the wind to
blow as it did. There is no describing it. How can
one describe a nightmare? It was the same way with
that wind. It tore the clothes off our bodies. I say
tore them off, and I mean it. I am not asking you to
believe it. I am merely telling something that I saw
and felt. There are times when I do not believe it
myself. I went through it, and that is enough. One
could not face that wind and live. It was a
monstrous thing, and the most monstrous thing about
it was that it increased and continued to increase.
Imagine countless millions and
billions of tons of sand. Imagine this sand tearing
along at ninety, a hundred, a hundred and twenty, or
any other number of miles per hour. Imagine,
further, this sand to be invisible, impalpable, yet
to retain all the weight and density of sand. Do all
this, and you may get a vague inkling of what that
wind was like.
Perhaps sand is not the right
comparison. Consider it mud, invisible, impalpable,
but heavy as mud. Nay, it goes beyond that. Consider
every molecule of air to be a mudbank in itself.
Then try to imagine the multitudinous impact of
mudbanks. No; it is beyond me. Language may be
adequate to express the ordinary conditions of life,
but it cannot possibly express any of the conditions
of so enormous a blast of wind. It would have been
better had I stuck by my original intention of not
attempting a description.
I will say this much: The sea, which
had risen at first, was beaten down by that wind.
'more: it seemed as if the whole ocean had been
sucked up in the maw of the hurricane, and hurled on
through that portion of space which previously had
been occupied by the air.
Of course, our canvas had gone long
before. But Captain Oudouse had on the Petite Jeanne
something I had never before seen on a South Sea
schooner--a sea anchor. It was a conical canvas bag,
the mouth of which was kept open by a huge loop of
iron. The sea anchor was bridled something like a
kite, so that it bit into the water as a kite bites
into the air, but with a difference. The sea anchor
remained just under the surface of the ocean in a
perpendicular position. A long line, in turn,
connected it with the schooner. As a result, the
Petite Jeanne rode bow on to the wind and to what
sea there was.
The situation really would have been
favorable had we not been in the path of the storm.
True, the wind itself tore our canvas out of the
gaskets, jerked out our topmasts, and made a raffle
of our running gear, but still we would have come
through nicely had we not been square in front of
the advancing storm center. That was what fixed us.
I was in a state of stunned, numbed, paralyzed
collapse from enduring the impact of the wind, and I
think I was just about ready to give up and die when
the center smote us. The blow we received was an
absolute lull. There was not a breath of air. The
effect on one was sickening.
Remember that for hours we had been
at terrific muscular tension, withstanding the awful
pressure of that wind. And then, suddenly, the
pressure was removed. I know that I felt as though I
was about to expand, to fly apart in all directions.
It seemed as if every atom composing my body was
repelling every other atom and was on the verge of
rushing off irresistibly into space. But that lasted
only for a moment. Destruction was upon us.
In the absence of the wind and
pressure the sea rose. It jumped, it leaped, it
soared straight toward the clouds. Remember, from
every point of the compass that inconceivable wind
was blowing in toward the center of calm. The result
was that the seas sprang up from every point of the
compass. There was no wind to check them. They
popped up like corks released from the bottom of a
pail of water. There was no system to them, no
stability. They were hollow, maniacal seas. They
were eighty feet high at the least. They were not
seas at all. They resembled no sea a man had ever
seen.
They were splashes, monstrous
splashes--that is all. Splashes that were eighty
feet high. Eighty! They were more than eighty. They
went over our mastheads. They were spouts,
explosions. They were drunken. They fell anywhere,
anyhow. They jostled one another; they collided.
They rushed together and collapsed upon one another,
or fell apart like a thousand waterfalls all at
once. It was no ocean any man had ever dreamed of,
that hurricane center. It was confusion thrice
confounded. It was anarchy. It was a hell pit of sea
water gone mad.
The Heathen Jack London
art b.jpg
The Petite Jeanne? I don't know. The
heathen told me afterwards that he did not know. She
was literally torn apart, ripped wide open, beaten
into a pulp, smashed into kindling wood,
annihilated. When I came to I was in the water,
swimming automatically, though I was about
two-thirds drowned. How I got there I had no
recollection. I remembered seeing the Petite Jeanne
fly to pieces at what must have been the instant
that my own consciousness was buffeted out of me.
But there I was, with nothing to do but make the
best of it, and in that best there was little
promise. The wind was blowing again, the sea was
much smaller and more regular, and I knew that I had
passed through the center. Fortunately, there were
no sharks about. The hurricane had dissipated the
ravenous horde that had surrounded the death ship
and fed off the dead.
It was about midday when the Petite
Jeanne went to pieces, and it must have been two
hours afterwards when I picked up with one of her
hatch covers. Thick rain was driving at the time;
and it was the merest chance that flung me and the
hatch cover together. A short length of line was
trailing from the rope handle; and I knew that I was
good for a day, at least, if the sharks did not
return. Three hours later, possibly a little longer,
sticking close to the cover, and with closed eyes,
concentrating my whole soul upon the task of
breathing in enough air to keep me going and at the
same time of avoiding breathing in enough water to
drown me, it seemed to me that I heard voices. The
rain had ceased, and wind and sea were easing
marvelously. Not twenty feet away from me, on
another hatch cover were Captain Oudouse and the
heathen. They were fighting over the possession of
the cover--at least, the Frenchman was. "Paien
noir!" I heard him scream, and at the same time I
saw him kick the kanaka.
Now, Captain Oudouse had lost all his
clothes, except his shoes, and they were heavy
brogans. It was a cruel blow, for it caught the
heathen on the mouth and the point of the chin, half
stunning him. I looked for him to retaliate, but he
contented himself with swimming about forlornly a
safe ten feet away. Whenever a fling of the sea
threw him closer, the Frenchman, hanging on with his
hands, kicked out at him with both feet. Also, at
the moment of delivering each kick, he called the
kanaka a black heathen.
"For two centimes I'd come over there
and drown you, you white beast!" I yelled.
The only reason I did not go was that
I felt too tired. The very thought of the effort to
swim over was nauseating. So I called to the kanaka
to come to me, and proceeded to share the hatch
cover with him. Otoo, he told me his name was
(pronounced o-to-o ); also, he told me that he was a
native of Bora Bora, the most westerly of the
Society Group. As I learned afterward, he had got
the hatch cover first, and, after some time,
encountering Captain Oudouse, had offered to share
it with him, and had been kicked off for his pains.
And that was how Otoo and I first
came together. He was no fighter. He was all
sweetness and gentleness, a love creature, though he
stood nearly six feet tall and was muscled like a
gladiator. He was no fighter, but he was also no
coward. He had the heart of a lion; and in the years
that followed I have seen him run risks that I would
never dream of taking. What I mean is that while he
was no fighter, and while he always avoided
precipitating a row, he never ran away from trouble
when it started. And it was "Ware shoal!" when once
Otoo went into action. I shall never forget what he
did to Bill King. It occurred in German Samoa. Bill
King was hailed the champion heavyweight of the
American Navy. He was a big brute of a man, a
veritable gorilla, one of those hard-hitting,
rough-housing chaps, and clever with his fists as
well. He picked the quarrel, and he kicked Otoo
twice and struck him once before Otoo felt it to be
necessary to fight. I don't think it lasted four
minutes, at the end of which time Bill King was the
unhappy possessor of four broken ribs, a broken
forearm, and a dislocated shoulder blade. Otoo knew
nothing of scientific boxing. He was merely a
manhandler; and Bill King was something like three
months in recovering from the bit of manhandling he
received that afternoon on Apia beach.
We took turn and turn about, one
lying flat on the cover and resting, while the
other,
submerged to the neck, merely held on with his
hands.
In the end, Otoo saved my life; for I
came to lying on the beach twenty feet from the
water, sheltered from the sun by a couple of
cocoanut leaves. No one but Otoo could have dragged
me there and stuck up the leaves for shade. He was
lying beside me. I went off again; and the next time
I came round, it was cool and starry night, and Otoo
was pressing a drinking cocoanut to my lips.
We were the sole survivors of the
Petite Jeanne. Captain Oudouse must have succumbed
to exhaustion, for several days later his hatch
cover drifted ashore without him. Otoo and I lived
with the natives of the atoll for a week, when we
were rescued by the French cruiser and taken to
Tahiti. In the meantime, however, we had performed
the ceremony of exchanging names. In the South Seas
such a ceremony binds two men closer together than
blood brothership. The initiative had been mine; and
Otoo was rapturously delighted when I suggested it.
"It is well," he said, in Tahitian.
"For we have been mates together for two days on the
lips of Death."
"But death stuttered," I smiled.
"It was a brave deed you did,
master," he replied, "and Death was not vile enough
to speak."
"Why do you 'master' me?" I demanded,
with a show of hurt feelings. "We have exchanged
names. To you I am Otoo. To me you are Charley. And
between you and me, forever and forever, you shall
be Charley, and I shall be Otoo. It is the way of
the custom. And when we die, if it does happen that
we live again somewhere beyond the stars and the
sky, still shall you be Charley to me, and I Otoo to
you."
"Yes, master," he answered, his eyes
luminous and soft with joy.
"There you go!" I cried indignantly.
"What does it matter what my lips
utter?" he argued. "They are only my lips. But I
shall think Otoo always. Whenever I think of myself,
I shall think of you. Whenever men call me by name,
I shall think of you. And beyond the sky and beyond
the stars, always and forever, you shall be Otoo to
me. Is it well, master?"
I hid my smile, and answered that it
was well.
We parted at Papeete. I remained
ashore to recuperate; and he went on in a cutter to
his own island, Bora Bora. Six weeks later he was
back. I was surprised, for he had told me of his
wife, and said that he was returning to her, and
would give over sailing on far voyages.
"Where do you go, master?" he asked,
after our first greetings.
I shrugged my shoulders. It was a
hard question.
"All the world," was my answer--"all
the world, all the sea, and all the islands that are
in the sea."
"I will go with you," he said simply.
"My wife is dead."
I never had a brother; but from what
I have seen of other men's brothers, I doubt if any
man ever had a brother that was to him what Otoo was
to me. He was brother and father and mother as well.
And this I know: I lived a straighter and better man
because of Otoo. I cared little for other men, but I
had to live straight in Otoo's eyes. Because of him
I dared not tarnish myself. He made me his ideal,
compounding me, I fear, chiefly out of his own love
and worship and there were times when I stood close
to the steep pitch of hell, and would have taken the
plunge had not the thought of Otoo restrained me.
His pride in me entered into me, until it became one
of the major rules in my personal code to do nothing
that would diminish that pride of his.
Naturally, I did not learn right away
what his feelings were toward me. He never
criticized, never censured; and slowly the exalted
place I held in his eyes dawned upon me, and slowly
I grew to comprehend the hurt I could inflict upon
him by being anything less than my best.
For seventeen years we were together;
for seventeen years he was at my shoulder, watching
while I slept, nursing me through fever and
wounds--ay, and receiving wounds in fighting for me.
He signed on the same ships with me; and together we
ranged the Pacific from Hawaii to Sydney Head, and
from Torres Straits to the Galapagos. We blackbirded
from the New Hebrides and the Line Islands over to
the westward clear through the Louisades, New
Britain, New Ireland, and New Hanover. We were
wrecked three times--in the Gilberts, in the Santa
Cruz group, and in the Fijis. And we traded and
salved wherever a dollar promised in the way of
pearl and pearl shell, copra, beche-de-mer, hawkbill
turtle shell, and stranded wrecks.
It began in Papeete, immediately
after his announcement that he was going with me
over all the sea, and the islands in the midst
thereof. There was a club in those days in Papeete,
where the pearlers, traders, captains, and riffraff
of South Sea adventurers forgathered. The play ran
high, and the drink ran high; and I am very much
afraid that I kept later hours than were becoming or
proper. No matter what the hour was when I left the
club, there was Otoo waiting to see me safely home.
At first I smiled; next I chided him.
Then I told him flatly that I stood in need of no
wet-nursing. After that I did not see him when I
came out of the club. Quite by accident, a week or
so later, I discovered that he still saw me home,
lurking across the street among the shadows of the
mango trees. What could I do? I know what I did do.
Insensibly I began to keep better
hours. On wet and stormy nights, in the thick of the
folly and the fun, the thought would persist in
coming to me of Otoo keeping his dreary vigil under
the dripping mangoes. Truly, he made a better man of
me. Yet he was not strait-laced. And he knew nothing
of common Christian morality. All the people on Bora
Bora were Christians; but he was a heathen, the only
unbeliever on the island, a gross materialist, who
believed that when he died he was dead. He believed
merely in fair play and square dealing. Petty
meanness, in his code, was almost as serious as
wanton homicide; and I do believe that he respected
a murderer more than a man given to small practices.
Concerning me, personally, he
objected to my doing anything that was hurtful to
me. Gambling was all right. He was an ardent gambler
himself. But late hours, he explained, were bad for
one's health. He had seen men who did not take care
of themselves die of fever. He was no teetotaler,
and welcomed a stiff nip any time when it was wet
work in the boats. On the other hand, he believed in
liquor in moderation. He had seen many men killed or
disgraced by square-face or Scotch.
Otoo had my welfare always at heart.
He thought ahead for me, weighed my plans, and took
a greater interest in them than I did myself. At
first, when I was unaware of this interest of his in
my affairs, he had to divine my intentions, as, for
instance, at Papeete, when I contemplated going
partners with a knavish fellow-countryman on a guano
venture. I did not know he was a knave. Nor did any
white man in Papeete. Neither did Otoo know, but he
saw how thick we were getting, and found out for me,
and without my asking him. Native sailors from the
ends of the seas knock about on the beach in Tahiti;
and Otoo, suspicious merely, went among them till he
had gathered sufficient data to justify his
suspicions. Oh, it was a nice history, that of
Randolph Waters. I couldn't believe it when Otoo
first narrated it; but when I sheeted it home to
Waters he gave in without a murmur, and got away on
the first steamer to Aukland.
At first, I am free to confess, I
couldn't help resenting Otoo's poking his nose into
my business. But I knew that he was wholly
unselfish; and soon I had to acknowledge his wisdom
and discretion. He had his eyes open always to my
main chance, and he was both keen-sighted and
far-sighted. In time he became my counselor, until
he knew more of my business than I did myself. He
really had my interest at heart more than I did.
'mine was the magnificent carelessness of youth, for
I preferred romance to dollars, and adventure to a
comfortable billet with all night in. So it was well
that I had some one to look out for me. I know that
if it had not been for Otoo, I should not be here
today.
Of numerous instances, let me give
one. I had had some experience in blackbirding
before I went pearling in the Paumotus. Otoo and I
were on the beach in Samoa--we really were on the
beach and hard aground--when my chance came to go as
recruiter on a blackbird brig. Otoo signed on before
the mast; and for the next half-dozen years, in as
many ships, we knocked about the wildest portions of
Melanesia. Otoo saw to it that he always pulled
stroke-oar in my boat. Our custom in recruiting
labor was to land the recruiter on the beach. The
covering boat always lay on its oars several hundred
feet off shore, while the recruiter's boat, also
lying on its oars, kept afloat on the edge of the
beach. When I landed with my trade goods, leaving my
steering sweep apeak, Otoo left his stroke position
and came into the stern sheets, where a Winchester
lay ready to hand under a flap of canvas. The boat's
crew was also armed, the Sniders concealed under
canvas flaps that ran the length of the gunwales.
While I was busy arguing and
persuading the woolly-headed cannibals to come and
labor on the Queensland plantations Otoo kept watch.
And often and often his low voice warned me of
suspicious actions and impending treachery.
Sometimes it was the quick shot from his rifle,
knocking a nigger over, that was the first warning I
received. And in my rush to the boat his hand was
always there to jerk me flying aboard. Once, I
remember, on Santa Anna, the boat grounded just as
the trouble began. The covering boat was dashing to
our assistance, but the several score of savages
would have wiped us out before it arrived. Otoo took
a flying leap ashore, dug both hands into the trade
goods, and scattered tobacco, beads, tomahawks,
knives, and calicoes in all directions.
This was too much for the
woolly-heads. While they scrambled for the
treasures, the boat was shoved clear, and we were
aboard and forty feet away. And I got thirty
recruits off that very beach in the next four hours.
The particular instance I have in
mind was on Malaita, the most savage island in the
easterly Solomons. The natives had been remarkably
friendly; and how were we to know that the whole
village had been taking up a collection for over two
years with which to buy a white man's head? The
beggars are all head-hunters, and they especially
esteem a white man's head. The fellow who captured
the head would receive the whole collection. As I
say, they appeared very friendly; and on this day I
was fully a hundred yards down the beach from the
boat. Otoo had cautioned me; and, as usual when I
did not heed him, I came to grief.
The first I knew, a cloud of spears
sailed out of the mangrove swamp at me. At least a
dozen were sticking into me. I started to run, but
tripped over one that was fast in my calf, and went
down. The woolly-heads made a run for me, each with
a long-handled, fantail tomahawk with which to hack
off my head. They were so eager for the prize that
they got in one another's way. In the confusion, I
avoided several hacks by throwing myself right and
left on the sand.
Then Otoo arrived--Otoo the
manhandler. In some way he had got hold of a heavy
war club, and at close quarters it was a far more
efficient weapon than a rifle. He was right in the
thick of them, so that they could not spear him,
while their tomahawks seemed worse than useless. He
was fighting for me, and he was in a true Berserker
rage. The way he handled that club was amazing.
Their skulls squashed like overripe
oranges. It was not until he had driven them back,
picked me up in his arms, and started to run, that
he received his first wounds. He arrived in the boat
with four spear thrusts, got his Winchester, and
with it got a man for every shot. Then we pulled
aboard the schooner, and doctored up.
Seventeen years we were together. He
made me. I should today be a supercargo, a
recruiter, or a memory, if it had not been for him.
"You spend your money, and you go out
and get more," he said one day. "It is easy to get
money now. But when you get old, your money will be
spent, and you will not be able to go out and get
more. I know, master. I have studied the way of
white men. On the beaches are many old men who were
young once, and who could get money just like you.
Now they are old, and they have nothing, and they
wait about for the young men like you to come ashore
and buy drinks for them.
"The black boy is a slave on the
plantations. He gets twenty dollars a year. He works
hard. The overseer does not work hard.
He rides a horse and watches the
black boy work. He gets twelve hundred dollars a
year. I am a sailor on the schooner. I get fifteen
dollars a month. That is because I am a good sailor.
I work hard. The captain has a double awning, and
drinks beer out of long bottles. I have never seen
him haul a rope or pull an oar. He gets one hundred
and fifty dollars a month. I am a sailor. He is a
navigator. 'master, I think it would be very good
for you to know navigation."
Otoo spurred me on to it. He sailed
with me as second mate on my first schooner, and he
was far prouder of my command than I was myself.
Later on it was:
"The captain is well paid, master;
but the ship is in his keeping, and he is never free
from the burden. It is the owner who is better
paid--the owner who sits ashore with many servants
and turns his money over."
"True, but a schooner costs five
thousand dollars--an old schooner at that," I
objected. "I should be an old man before I saved
five thousand dollars."
"There be short ways for white men to
make money," he went on, pointing ashore at the
cocoanut-fringed beach.
We were in the Solomons at the time,
picking up a cargo of ivory nuts along the east
coast of Guadalcanar.
"Between this river mouth and the
next it is two miles," he said.
"The flat land runs far
back. It is worth nothing now. Next year--who
knows?--or the year after, men will pay much money
for that land. The anchorage is good. Big steamers
can lie close up. You can buy the land four miles
deep from the old chief for ten thousand sticks of
tobacco, ten bottles of square-face, and a Snider,
which will cost you, maybe, one hundred dollars.
Then you place the deed with the commissioner; and
the next year, or the year after, you sell and
become the owner of a ship."
I followed his lead, and his words
came true, though in three years, instead of two.
Next came the grasslands deal on Guadalcanar--twenty
thousand acres, on a governmental nine hundred and
ninety-nine years' lease at a nominal sum. I owned
the lease for precisely ninety days, when I sold it
to a company for half a fortune. Always it was Otoo
who looked ahead and saw the opportunity. He was
responsible for the salving of the Doncaster--bought
in at auction for a hundred pounds, and clearing
three thousand after every expense was paid. He led
me into the Savaii plantation and the cocoa venture
on Upolu.
We did not go seafaring so much as in
the old days. I was too well off. I married, and my
standard of living rose; but Otoo remained the same
old-time Otoo, moving about the house or trailing
through the office, his wooden pipe in his mouth, a
shilling undershirt on his back, and a four-shilling
lava-lava about his loins. I could not get him to
spend money. There was no way of repaying him except
with love, and God knows he got that in full measure
from all of us. The children worshipped him; and if
he had been spoilable, my wife would surely have
been his undoing.
The children! He really was the one
who showed them the way of their feet in the world
practical. He began by teaching them to walk. He sat
up with them when they were sick. One by one, when
they were scarcely toddlers, he took them down to
the lagoon, and made them into amphibians. He taught
them more than I ever knew of the habits of fish and
the ways of catching them. In the bush it was the
same thing. At seven, Tom knew more woodcraft than I
ever dreamed existed. At six, Mary went over the
Sliding Rock without a quiver, and I have seen
strong men balk at that feat. And when Frank had
just turned six he could bring up shillings from the
bottom in three fathoms.
"My people in Bora Bora do not like
heathen--they are all Christians; and I do not like
Bora Bora Christians," he said one day, when I, with
the idea of getting him to spend some of the money
that was rightfully his, had been trying to persuade
him to make a visit to his own island in one of our
schooners--a special voyage which I had hoped to
make a record breaker in the matter of prodigal
expense.
I say one of our schooners, though
legally at the time they belonged to me. I struggled
long with him to enter into partnership.
"We have been partners from the day
the Petite Jeanne went down," he said at last. "But
if your heart so wishes, then shall we become
partners by the law. I have no work to do, yet are
my expenses large. I drink and eat and smoke in
plenty--it costs much, I know. I do not pay for the
playing of billiards, for I play on your table; but
still the money goes. Fishing on the reef is only a
rich man's pleasure. It is shocking, the cost of
hooks and cotton line. Yes; it is necessary that we
be partners by the law. I need the money. I shall
get it from the head clerk in the office."
So the papers were made out and
recorded. A year later I was compelled to complain.
"Charley," said I, "you are a wicked
old fraud, a miserly skinflint, a miserable land
crab. Behold, your share for the year in all our
partnership has been thousands of dollars. The head
clerk has given me this paper. It says that in the
year you have drawn just eighty-seven dollars and
twenty cents."
"Is there any owing me?" he asked
anxiously.
"I tell you thousands and thousands,"
I answered.
His face brightened, as with an
immense relief.
"It is well," he said. "See that the
head clerk keeps good account of it. When I want it,
I shall want it, and there must not be a cent
missing.
"If there is,:" he added fiercely,
after a pause, "it must come out of the clerk's
wages."
And all the time, as I afterwards
learned, his will, drawn up by Carruthers, and
making me sole beneficiary, lay in the American
consul's safe.
But the end came, as the end must
come to all human associations.
It occurred in the Solomons, where
our wildest work had been done in the wild young
days, and where we were once more-- principally on a
holiday, incidentally to look after our holdings on
Florida Island and to look over the pearling
possibilities of the Mboli Pass. We were lying at
Savo, having run in to trade for curios.
Now, Savo is alive with sharks. The
custom of the woolly-heads of burying their dead in
the sea did not tend to discourage the sharks from
making the adjacent waters a hangout. It was my luck
to be coming aboard in a tiny, overloaded, native
canoe, when the thing capsized. There were four
woolly-heads and myself in it, or rather, hanging to
it. The schooner was a hundred yards away.
I was just hailing for a boat when
one of the woolly-heads began to scream. Holding on
to the end of the canoe, both he and that portion of
the canoe were dragged under several times. Then he
loosed his clutch and disappeared. A shark had got
him.
The three remaining niggers tried to
climb out of the water upon the bottom of the canoe.
I yelled and cursed and struck at the nearest with
my fist, but it was no use. They were in a blind
funk. The canoe could barely have supported one of
them. Under the three it upended and rolled
sidewise, throwing them back into the water.
I abandoned the canoe and started to
swim toward the schooner, expecting to be picked up
by the boat before I got there. One of the niggers
elected to come with me, and we swam along silently,
side by side, now and again putting our faces into
the water and peering about for sharks. The screams
of the man who stayed by the canoe informed us that
he was taken. I was peering into the water when I
saw a big shark pass directly beneath me. He was
fully sixteen feet in length. I saw the whole thing.
He got the woolly-head by the middle, and away he
went, the poor devil, head, shoulders, and arms out
of the water all the time, screeching in a
heart-rending way. He was carried along in this
fashion for several hundred feet, when he was
dragged beneath the surface.
I swam doggedly on, hoping that that
was the last unattached shark. But there was
another. Whether it was one that had attacked the
natives earlier, or whether it was one that had made
a good meal elsewhere, I do not know. At any rate,
he was not in such haste as the others. I could not
swim so rapidly now, for a large part of my effort
was devoted to keeping track of him. I was watching
him when he made his first attack. By good luck I
got both hands on his nose, and, though his momentum
nearly shoved me under, I managed to keep him off.
He veered clear, and began circling about again. A
second time I escaped him by the same manoeuvre. The
third rush was a miss on both sides. He sheered at
the moment my hands should have landed on his nose,
but his sandpaper hide (I had on a sleeveless
undershirt) scraped the skin off one arm from elbow
to shoulder.
By this time I was played out, and
gave up hope. The schooner was still two hundred
feet away. My face was in the water, and I was
watching him manoeuvre for another attempt, when I
saw a brown body pass between us. It was Otoo.
"Swim for the schooner, master!" he
said. And he spoke gayly, as though the affair was a
mere lark. "I know sharks. The shark is my brother."
I obeyed, swimming slowly on, while
Otoo swam about me, keeping always between me and
the shark, foiling his rushes and encouraging me.
"The davit tackle carried away, and
they are rigging the falls," he explained, a minute
or so later, and then went under to head off another
attack.
By the time the schooner was thirty
feet away I was about done for. I could scarcely
move. They were heaving lines at us from on board,
but they continually fell short. The shark, finding
that it was receiving no hurt, had become bolder.
Several times it nearly got me, but each time Otoo
was there just the moment before it was too late. Of
course, Otoo could have saved himself any time. But
he stuck by me.
"Good-by, Charley! I'm finished!" I
just managed to gasp.
I knew that the end had come, and
that the next moment I should throw up my hands and
go down.
But Otoo laughed in my face, saying:
"I will show you a new trick. I will
make that shark feel sick!"
He dropped in behind me, where the
shark was preparing to come at me.
"A little more to the left!" he next
called out. "There is a line there on the water. To
the left, master--to the left!"
I changed my course and struck out
blindly. I was by that time barely conscious. As my
hand closed on the line I heard an exclamation from
on board. I turned and looked. There was no sign of
Otoo. The next instant he broke surface. Both hands
were off at the wrist, the stumps spouting blood.
"Otoo!" he called softly. And I could
see in his gaze the love that thrilled in his voice.
Then, and then only, at the very last
of all our years, he called me by that name.
"Good-by, Otoo!" he called.
Then he was dragged under, and I was
hauled aboard, where I fainted in the captain's
arms.
And so passed Otoo, who saved me and
made me a man, and who saved me in the end. We met
in the maw of a hurricane, and parted in the maw of
a shark, with seventeen intervening years of
comradeship, the like of which I dare to assert has
never befallen two men, the one brown and the other
white. If Jehovah be from His high place watching
every sparrow fall, not least in His kingdom shall
be Otoo, the one heathen of Bora Bora.
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