A Copra Island
I
MANUAE is a coral atoll near the South Sea island of Rarotonga. It is owned by J. A. Bunting, a former British naval officer who lives there with a score of native laborers and a half-dozen women and children. There are two islets on Manuae, each of about four hundred acres, perched precariously on a reef that drops steep-to into a thousand fathoms of sea. One islet is to the north and one to the south. Two miles of clear lagoon divide them, protected on the east and west by barrier reefs.
In the old days Manuae had a thriving native population; but the missionaries, wishing to centralize the South Sea Islanders and thereby simplify the teaching of the Gospel, moved them all to Aitutaki, sixty miles away. From then on for many years Manuae became a refuge for beach combers, adventurers, and fugitives from justice. Two decades ago it was leased from the descendants of the original inhabitants and converted into a copra island — an island whose only excuse for existence is to produce enough copra to pay the labor and rent and make a few hundred pounds for its owner.
Old residents among the Pacific islands claim that when you have seen one island you have seen them all. This is because their only interest centres about the copra the islands produce. To me each has a charm of its own, and I never tire of visiting them and disappearing for a few indolent months on their windswept islets.
None is more fascinating than Manuae. Each year I look forward to Bunting’s invitation to spend a few months with him — to whole days wading waist-deep in the reef foam, fishing for the hundred varieties of varicolored and strangely fashioned fish; to nights in the squawking pandemonium of the tropic-bird colony, Sundays on the far islet with old PikiPiki, evenings over the cribbage board with my host; or to a reacquaintance with Old Bill, the garrulous, irascible myna bird who gives us many a laugh and keeps his fellow birds in a continual state of noisy disorder.
I have little sentimental love for birds. The death of a meadow lark leaves me cold; the ‘full-throated’ song of a ‘light-winged Dryad of the trees’ bores me; I cannot sympathize with those who go into ecstasies over a nest of robins. But a noisy row of black crows perched on the ridge of a barn; a heron, effigy of evil, stalking down the beach with his head popping out and then bobbing back to be all but lost between his shoulder blades; a war-worn old rooster, scarred in many a battle for the love of hens — these, and a flock of obstreperous myna birds, fill me with delight.
And Old Bill is the choicest of them all. He will open this sketch of a copra island well enough, for he is one of our outstanding characters. He seems to be everywhere at the same time — cadging grated coconut from the fowls and fighting them successfully if need be, or perched on the back of a pig as he preens his ragged feathers and clacks his sentiments to the empty sky. Yet if you leave him and pass by the labor boys’ house to the outer beach, there Old Bill will be, in the midst of a circle of fifty screaming birds, refereeing a fight between two lady mynas — perhaps fighting himself and adding a few more scars to his already war-damaged head and breast.
As a character he reminds me of some of our contentious American politicians — such a one as Oklahoma’s Murray, for instance. I wonder what would happen if I caged him, and, like the Hindus, taught him to talk (I am referring to the bird).
Old Bill roosts with his brethren in a great tamanu tree near Bunting’s house. They go to roost as noisily as possible; but after night has set in they are quiet for a time. Then it is Bill who gives the alarm when a rat climbs the tree or a pig passes harmlessly beneath. We know his nasal danger signal. Invariably it is followed by a bedlam of voices, each one piping a distinct call of his own; then, abruptly, silence for a few seconds, after which Bill has the last word. He croaks sleepily, ‘Shut up your racket, shut up your racket!’ and then tucks his head under his wing and goes to sleep.
This occurs a half-dozen times during the night. His last attempt at selfexpression is at about five in the morning. Often I am awake listening for it. Outside my window a barely audible clicking among the leaves tells of two hermit crabs crawling under the falsecoffee hedge. Sometimes they are very annoying, keeping me awake with their faint click-click until in a rage I go outside to hunt for them and throw them far into the coconut groves. I do not care to kill them; they seem to be too much a part of the establishment. Louder noises do not bother me. I seldom hear the rumble of the surf unless heavy seas are on the reef, or the wind has died down and the roar comes deafeningly through the still air. I am only vaguely aware of the wind’s countless sounds: its low moaning in the hedge, sibilant whispering through the mosquito screening across the window, steady murmur in the palm fronds, or the tinkling sound it makes when a gust blows across the coral gravel, moving it slightly.
Abruptly these night noises are silenced by the throaty and discordant crow of a rooster. I wait five seconds, and then come, with wild and hilarious abandonment, the raucous haw-hawhaw, squawk, screech, yawl, and blatter of Old Bill, followed by the clamorous pandemonium of all his evil flock — a veritable babble of multisonous tongues from the tamanu tree.
I roll out of bed. It is just dawn. Old Bill has started another day for me on his copra island.
II
Noel, our cook, is a half-caste PortuguesePolynesian. He is a cheeky lad of twenty, but he cooks well and keeps his place if we scold him daily. Sometimes Bunting is very rough with him; then he weeps and for two days attends to our culinary requirements without further castigation.
He disapproves of my coming into the cookhouse at five in the morning, for he believes I should wait and have my coffee at seven with Bunting. I appease him with cigarettes, and, when they are unavailing, lecture him severely — an accomplishment I find difficult. But coffee I will have at five, and sometimes two poached eggs. This latter inflames Noel’s Portuguese blood; he glances at me evilly; turns sullenly to poach my eggs — and often to break one by way of revenge.
Dallying over my coffee, I can see the labor boys passing along the coral gravel path toward the groves in the interior of the island. They start early, for they have an allotted number of nuts to split and dig the meat from, and if they work hard they will finish by noon. What powerful fellows they are! Naked save for pants of the sketchiest type, they stroll past the cookhouse as gracefully as wild animals. In three pushcarts they carry axes and bags in which to bring back the coconut meat. Some of them come to Manuae quite sickly from too much orange beer and too many wild island girls at Rarotonga. The first week after their arrival they do one quarter of their allotted work, during the second week one half, and the full amount from then on. During these three weeks one can see them straighten up, their chests expand, the fat disappear, and their muscles harden until every one of them can heave a two-hundredpound bag of copra from the ground to his shoulder.
Only one of them is past thirty. He is Piki-Piki, an Aitutaki boat steerer who is a part owner of Manuae and to whom Bunting pays a small yearly rent. Piki-Piki’s muscles bulge out like knots in steel wire; his arms are long, his shoulders tremendous, his legs squat and lined with varicose veins, which do not seem to bother him in the least. When one first meets Piki-Piki it is surprising to hear him talk in a nasal twang like a boy with adenoids. But once I heard him threaten a giant from Aitutaki in this same aweless tone, and I noticed that he was respected in spite of his voice. Piki-Piki could take any two of the labor boys and bash their heads together until their skulls were crushed. It was the way his race killed their captives in the old days.
Piki-Piki and I spend many a pleasant Sunday together fishing for albacore in deep water beyond the reef or hunting pigs on the far islet. At such times he will often speak of the ancient days at Manuae, when his progenitors inhabited the island. In those days the islets were forested with great tamanu and tou trees, from which the people made canoes to voyage to distant islands. When the white men came, all these grand old trees were chopped down so that the island would produce more copra.
To-day it is difficult to believe that a copra island, with its rows of trees planted with mathematical precision, carefully cultivated and fertilized, once harbored a thriving Polynesian civilization. It seemed incredible when old Piki-Piki pointed out a stretch of land and said: ‘That is called Teauotu, because it was the kingdom of a great king named Tu. He warred on Atiu in the old days and brought back many captives.’ Or: ‘That strand, as you know, is Rau-Rau. This word formerly meant “many hundreds,” and the strand was so named because a bloody battle was fought there and many hundreds were slain. Now,’ with a derisive bite to his words, ’many hundreds of coconut trees grow there.’
As Piki-Piki is the foreman of the laborers, Bunting allows him to keep his wife and daughter at Manuae. The former is a little old woman with soft humorous eyes, a few rags of gray hair, and limbs shriveled and black from years in the blazing sun of Manuae. She is deaf save to the loudest shout close to her ears, has great difficulty in making herself understood, owing to her having forgotten most of her language, and is nearsighted; but she is a dear old soul, as simple and innocent as a child. I often see her far in the interior of the island, digging arrowroot or hunting for sprouting coconuts. At such times I approach her and we gesticulate and shout at one another; but only to part laughing over our inability to make ourselves understood. She thinks it great fun, and so do I.
Piki-Piki’s daughter, Ua, being eighteen, pretty, and unmarried, is one of the problems at Manuae. Each of the labor boys has had his turn flirting with her; but it never goes further than that, for she is the apple of Piki-Piki’s eye, and he is the terror of the boys. Sometimes of an evening Bunting and I will see one of the boys dressed in strange clothes for a copra island — white starched pants, squeaking shoes, striped socks, a flashy shirt and tie, and a loud checked hat. Also, he will be in a halo of strong perfume. Then we know that Ua has broken another heart. PikiPiki claims that he will never let a ‘Kanaka laborer’ marry his daughter; but if the laborer once arrives in Rarotonga and is paid off, Piki-Piki will have no objections. In the South Seas the stigma of manual labor is obliterated as soon as one renounces his work.
Ua is the only one at Manuae who can safely mock old Piki-Piki. One night at a himene singing, her father outdid himself. Bunting must have given him a glass of rum, for his nasal voice rose and trilled and crescendoed at unheard-of heights while he sat back with his eyes closed and a beatific expression on his leathery old face. With a sly glance at the labor boys, Ua held her nose and started singing as loudly as she could; but Piki-Piki could not hear her because of his own racket. In a few moments the labor boys dropped out, choking with mirth, leaving only Piki-Piki and his daughter to wheeze noisily to the stars.
III
Bunting’s settlement straggles over a considerable stretch of ground. First, there is his private home, built of coral blocks and roofed with red galvanized iron. It is somewhat reminiscent of Spanish architecture, with a court in back and wide-open verandahs on the front and sides. Fifty feet from it is a house used solely for dining, and next to it a cookhouse. At right angles to these stands a long narrow building used for a store, tool shed, and the home of the manager. Then, a hundred yards away, a copra shed, and farther still the house of Piki-Piki. Besides these, there are a large thatched copra shed near the beach and an equally large building for the reef boats, and, hidden in the brush to the south, a long partially open house for the labor boys.
But the settlement appears larger than this, for there are a half-dozen cement water tanks sunken in the ground and covered by red iron roofs, a big henhouse to shelter Bunting’s three hundred fowls, another place for the turkeys, a dynamite dump, also roofed, and twelve large copra-drying platforms with iron roofs that are slid away during the day. A little enclosure with three lonely graves lies to one side among the groves, and throughout the entire settlement flowering shrubs, hedges, and exotic trees grow in profusion.
Panapa and Tane are in charge of the copra driers. The former is a Rarotongan, the latter a Puka-Pukan. Their work is to rake over the drying coconut meat every day, pick off the little pieces of shell that adhere to it, roll the roofs over the platforms at night and when it rains, bag the copra, and take it to the sheds to be weighed and stored for the coming of the schooner. It is not hard work as the work on a copra island goes; but for many months Bunting wondered why both Panapa and Tane kept so fat, and why they managed to receive more than their share of Ua’s attentions.
I believe I gave the first intimation of the disgraceful truth. Tane came from my island of Puka-Puka, and I noticed that every evening after work he would wade into the shallows with a short pole and fish for grouper after the Puka-Puka fashion. This means that he would sneak up-current, crouched low in the lee of a coral mushroom so that not only would he be protected by the coral, but also the groupers’ heads would be turned away from him, for they would be swimming against the current. When close to a coral he would flip his hook over it, so that if there were any groupers beyond they would see his lure floating in a normal way down the current, but would see no sign of Tane. Also, he would tempt their palates by chewing some bait into fine chum and throwing it into the water. This finesse is unknown on other islands. I am sure that Tane caught a dozen or more groupers every evening, and, as he did not give them to the cook, it is reasonable to believe that he ate them himself.
Next, the foreman discovered that Panapa was an expert chicken thief. He could worm his way into the henhouse as silently as a moving shadow and with the invisibility of a black sea eel in the tall reef weed. And he could muzzle a few fat broilers so deftly that, even had Old Bill been there, he would have slept soundly through it all. Turkeys, also, were missing now and then; and finally a great crisis came when the pet gobbler, who was allowed to eat his fill of copra and had become too fat to strut, suddenly disappeared.
A few days later, while Bunting and I were walking across the island with our guns, we heard the call of some curlews on the outer beach. It was February, the month when they are fattening for their long flight north. We turned seaward, soon to come to a long stretch of infertile land where grows a hardy and all but impenetrable bush, interspersed with a few stunted coconuts. We followed a dim path leading into it, and in a moment or two came to a clearing where a coconut tree spread its fronds over the relic of many a feast. There were chicken and turkey feathers and bones strewn over the ground, the bones and heads of fish, a few beef tins, numerous Tridacna and periwinkle shells, a stick to husk coconuts, some palm-frond mats, the ashes of many a fire!
That night Bunting and I hid in the brush and waited an hour or more. Then came a crackling sound, hushed voices, and presently Panapa and Tane appeared, carrying fowls, fish, and coconuts sufficient for a grand feast. We did not disturb them; we watched them cook their ill-gotten feast and devour it — two fowls, a half-dozen fish, and four coconuts apiece!
The next morning Bunting sent for the two gourmands and told them about their feasting haunt and what they had eaten the night before. After lecturing them at length, while they smiled foolishly and hung their heads, he fined them heavily. Of course they started to lose weight after this; but I noticed that before the season was over they were again filling out to suspicious rotundity.
IV
Carl Marsters is the manager of Manuae. He belongs to the Pacificfamous Marsters family of Palmerston Island. This atoll was populated some eighty years ago by a sea captain named William Marsters who stole the island — the story is too long to relate — and, taking three wives with him, followed the Biblical counsel to increase and multiply.
Now there are about one hundred direct descendants of William Marsters. Some of them are rogues; but a few have proved themselves worthy of their white blood, and none more so than Carl. He is a man of forty, mercenary like all the people of the atoll world, shrewd, and a genius at managing a copra island. During the four years I have known him he has owned only one pair of pants. To-day those pants shame Jacob’s coat: patch has covered patch, intersected and overlapped until one’s eyes are involuntarily attracted by the pants before they glance up to see the garment’s owner. When they do glance up it is to note a powerful man with sharp cold little eyes and a continual smile on his lips. I believe Carl Marsters would smile when he hit a man, and this is an act he does not hesitate to perform if the man is intractable. He never hits but once — it is unnecessary.
Carl’s wife is just a native woman; but their four-year-old son, Tomi, vies with Old Bill as an interesting character. For some time it was difficult to gain the husky little rogue’s confidence; then one day I made him a pushcart and demonstrated it before his bewildered eyes. At first he would not touch the thing; he eyed it suspiciously, like a fish circling a bait before biting. Then he gave it a little push. It responded. Slowly a smile crossed Tomi’s chubby face, and after another tentative push or two he was scampering through the settlement, whooping with pleasure as he filled the cart with coconut husks and dumped them in the middle of the road before Bunting’s house. For several days after that, when the men came in with their carts full of coconut meat, young Tomi would be seen in their wake, proudly pushing his cart to the copra driers to have his day’s work weighed in with that of the rest of the labor boys.
It was not long before Tomi demonstrated that he had complete confidence in me. One afternoon he edged up to me, and talking through one side of his mouth while the other remained closed, a habit he acquired from a hard-boiled labor boy who in turn had acquired it from the movies, he said, ‘Faraoa tiamu,’ which means, ‘Bread and jam.’
I glanced guiltily toward the house; then remembered that Bunting had gone fishing. I knew he would not approve my befriending the youngster to the extent that he would eventually make himself a nuisance. Carl was with the labor boys; Noel was asleep. I slipped into the cookhouse, cut a thick slice of raisin bread, and plastered it with jam.
Outside again, I said to Tomi, ‘Come, let us walk,’ and then strode off on a little-used path into the groves, Tomi at my heels. When a safe distance away, I told him to keep the incident under his hat; then gave him the faraoa tiamu.
From then on he became an inseparable companion, and a pleasant one, too. Each morning he followed me on my three-mile walk, and though I had to carry him half the way I did not mind, for the walk was for exercise. And what a running conversation fell from one side of his mouth! He proved as garrulous as the old myna bird himself. As he followed me I would hear:—
‘Ropati, go a little slower. Don’t you see I got only one shoe? You’ve got two shoes. My papa won’t give me but one. It don’t fit, either, because it’s his, and it’s got a hole in the bottom of it. It’s hard to walk with only one shoe.’ And later: ‘Oh, Ropati, wait a minute. Ua’s got a new sweetheart. It’s Panapa, the man that swiped all the chickens. He used to give Ua a whole chicken sometimes. That’s why Ua always liked him. Nobody knows nothing about it but me. Why don’t you make Ua your sweetheart, Ropati? Bunting won’t mind your giving her chickens. Oh, look! There’s old Piki-Piki’s wife hunting land crabs. She can’t hear, Ropati, can’t hear nothing at all.’
And so on. All the gossip of the copra island would come out of the corner of his mouth with an odd intonation much better suited to an older person. Several times I have mentioned some rare bits of gossip to Bunting, and when he asked me from whence they came I was obliged to admit blushingly that Tomi was the disseminator. I am afraid my host must have thought me rather childish; but I will stand up for Tomi — his information proved more reliable than much one receives from an older person, and certainly it was given with less reluctance.
V
These are the inhabitants of Manuae copra island, and all of them, save Bunting and me, have enough work to keep them contented, though it is true that a native can arrive at that state of felicity without labor. We two whites amuse ourselves in a hundred ways: fishing beyond the reef, on the reef, in the shallows, in the lagoon, or along the shore; hunting for wild fowls, fat little sandpipers, or curlews; sailing to the far islet to hunt wild pigs or tropicbird fledglings; swimming in a lagoon indescribably pure and blue; gossiping with Carl or Piki-Piki; spending hours over a cribbage board or whole days in the library, a bottle of brandy and icecold soda at our elbows. (Manuae has its own miniature ice plant.)
Sometimes Bunting feels it is his duty to go on a tour of inspection, so after coffee he is off with a brisk businesslike stride and I see no more of him until night. I do not know what he does at such times, for Carl keeps the groves in a perfect state of cultivation. At other times, when the boys come in with their carts full of bagged coconut meat, Bunting will go to the copra driers, magnanimously motion Carl away, and weigh the bags himself, even unto that which Tomi brings proudly in his pushcart. And once a month he will call for the account books and spend a full day poring over them, seldom to find an error. After such gestures he sighs with satisfaction: he has done his duty as the owner of a copra island; he settles back to another indolent but healthful month.
Bunting and I keep very much apart except during meals and at night, for we have both been to sea and know that men living too closely together soon hate the sight of one another, no matter how old their friendship. We get along better than might be expected, for while I am splashing with Tomi in some deep pool near the reef my host will be casting his line off the beach at Rau-Rau. And sometimes I will go to the far islet for several days, a fishline and a few hooks, a pipe, tobacco, and matches in my pocket; and I will live there in a little wigwam of palm fronds, catching my own fish and finding my own food or going to bed hungry. But the latter seldom happens, for if the fish are not biting I can climb a pandanus tree at night, snatch a few birds from their roosts, broil them over a fire of coconut shells, and eat them like a savage, tearing their flesh with my teeth, perhaps growling as I do so.
Sometimes Bunting and I enjoy a little competitive fishing. He fishes for cavalla off the edge of the reef with a fly while I prefer to use live young red mullet hooked below the dorsal fin. I think we come out about even, though Bunting still holds the record of nineteen caught in one afternoon.
Thus the days pass. A nap after lunch, a book, a walk or a swim, and evening is soon upon us. Then the day’s coconut meat is weighed, — each man’s task is six hundred pounds, — and the store opens. Carl attends the store with as meticulous care as he does his own possessions, — his pants, for instance, — weighing the sugar to the last grain, computing the 20 per cent profit which the store is supposed to realize to the last farthing.
Tomi and I are there as soon as the door opens. We sit on empty beef cases, try to cadge biscuits from Carl, and make wise-cracks about the evening’s business. First, the labor boys’ cook arrives and is given the food for the next day: five pounds of sugar, a few ounces of tea, sufficient rice or flour to feed all, and a few fishhooks if the cook requires them. This busy lad is obliged to catch enough fish to supply twenty hungry men, as well as to gather one coconut apiece for them. If the weather is unsuitable for fishing he can pry Tridacna clams from the shallows.
When he has left, the labor boys crowd in for their daily ration of eight ship’s biscuits. These are not given to the cook, lest he pilfer some of them. This food, and one pound of beef per man on Sundays, is their entire allowance.
Some of the boys buy a few extra biscuits, but these are a luxury they do not need. Others buy tobacco, matches, soap, or, if they are courting Ua, perfume, neckties, picture handkerchiefs, lollypops, and such things. Their expenses are slight; a few of them have gone through the entire year without spending a penny. Most of them average about ten shillings a month, and, as they receive fortyeight pounds a year, a tidy sum is left to spend in Rarotonga. It would be ridiculously small for a white man; but a copra island can pay no more — its dividends are small in the best of times.
VI
After dinner Bunting and I sit down to as serious backgammon and cribbage games as men can play. It is a wonder we have not come to blows over the games, for they have taken such an important place in our lives that we sit at the table with gritted teeth; and when one of us loses he always has a dozen reasons to prove it was not owing to lack of skill, but rather to the fool’s luck of his opponent.
Perhaps the mellowing effect of the brandy helps out; or Bunting’s English good-sportsmanship influences him in refraining from too many disparaging remarks when he wins game after game, and the remembrance that I am his guest restrains me from jumping up and shaking my fists in a rage. Anyway, we would not do without our evening games. After them, we drink a brandy-and-soda by way of reconciliation, and, sitting back in easy-chairs, read far into the night.
Books mean little to me save when I am on lonely islands or at sea, and then only those which have weathered the heavy storms of time. One soon wearies of a quest for those few lilies that may blossom among the multitudinous dung hills of modern literature. Of the few books that stand by me, the surest and readiest is Taine’s English Literature. Do not laugh; a more erudite, informative, and even thrilling book has not been written. Taine is one of the few authors whose work I accept verbatim.
I believe that men who live gregariously are confused by the torrent of disparate thoughts they encounter in contemporary writings; but, if they isolate themselves, the words they read the night before remain with them during the day, to be digested, accepted, or rejected. They read critically, while elsewhere men are apt to accept printed statements for facts, merely because they are printed. A depressing case of this is evidenced in the thousands who say, ‘I know it is true because I read it in a book,’ or, worse, ‘because I read it in the newspaper.’
The recluse believes he obtains a clearer perspective of world events, though his perspective is six months or so posterior to that of the gregarious man. Concerning the latter, I wonder if Professor Eddington would say that he had merely a different frame of space and time. But where the recluse fails is in his evaluation of petty occurrences; he brings them into Tarasconian importance. War in Manchuria is nothing compared to his cribbage-game contentions; and what is the marriage of royalty to Ua’s flirtations, or a bank robbery to the pilferings of Panapa and Tane?
VII
I generally turn in before Bunting, for I am an early riser. With invariable thoughtfulness he blows out the light a few moments after I am in bed, and then goes on to the verandah to pace it quietly for an hour or more. This seems to give him great solace; it is a habit acquired during his years in the navy, when pacing the bridge was his only pastime through the long night watches at sea.
I lie back on my cot with my eyes closed. I am waiting for something and until it comes I know I cannot sleep. The night is very peaceful. I fill my lungs deeply with the good atoll air — air that has been purified by thousands of miles of journeying across the sea, and now, drifting lightly through the groves, brings me a faint, a somniferous attar of tropic vegetation. I am very sleepy; but still I wait, listening to the soft padding of Bunting’s feet, the hum of wind noises without.
Then it comes — raucous, abusive, obstreperous, shattering the quiet night like the yell of a banshee. The rest of the evil-omened birds join the clamor with shrieks and squawks; a madhouse of myna birds has been let loose in the tamanu tree.
But presently Old Bill has the last word, and the peace of a quiet night settles over the copra island. I fall asleep, untroubled until he shall again see fit to make the night hideous.