Castaway: From Med to Mum. Iv

I

THE distance from the outer to the lagoon beach was not more than one hundred yards. The soil was of coarse coral gravel, and there were large areas, particularly along the outer beach, covered with nothing but sun-blackened coral fragments, covered in turn by luxuriant masses of gnapata, a wide-spreading, shrub-like vine that seems to want no better nourishment than what it finds in such places. Wading through this, I came to higher ground shaded with groves of pandanus and miki-miki trees and a few scattered coconut palms. A little beyond stretched the lagoon, bordered by a wide beach of yellow sand, smooth and untrodden, and crossed by long shadows.

A more peaceful sight, after a night of shipwreck, could not be dreamed of or wished for. The lagoon, I estimated, was about three miles long by two wide, and I could count fourteen small islands threaded around it. These oases in mid-ocean have all the beauty of those in mid-desert, but one needs music to describe them. Chopin, if ever he had seen a coral island such as Timoe, would have carried it away with him in manuscript, but it is useless for me to make the attempt.

To see it was enough, remembering what I had felt and thought at about three-five that morning: to see the boobies perched in the trees and the bosun birds nesting under them, and small fledglings, all white fluff, looking at the world, as I did, with fresh eyes. Occasionally one of the older birds would waddle out to the beach, make a clumsy start, and skim away across the lagoon, anything but clumsily. Through the cloud bank retiring to the westward I caught an occasional glimpse of Manga Reva, twenty-five miles away, and the peak of Mount Duff, where I had sat, eight days before, looking over at Timoe and wishing that I might visit the island. Sometimes wishes are horses — wild sea horses.

I seated myself under a pandanus tree, so thoroughly content to be still extant that for a considerable time I mused upon that indubitable fact, wanting no other subject for reflection.

A globed cluster of pandanus nuts lay on the sand beside me, with half a dozen hermit crabs feeding on them. It was interesting to watch the feeding process. Clinging to the cluster, upsidedown or right-side-up, a crab would pinch the nut with one of its claws, fraying the smooth skin of it into threads. It would then thrust the claw back toward its mouth, and as it did so a tiny pair of knobbed hands at the end of long arms would be thrown down to take what was offered with the abrupt, expert motion of a catcher receiving a low ball. The action was so swift that it was impossible to see what the hands received, but it appeared to be nothing but a dab of juice.

There is a difference of about a metre and a half in the tides at Timoe. When I returned to the outer beach it was low tide, and the reef we had waded across in the night was bare save for scattered pools among the rocks. Some of the seas were now breaking a little beyond the schooner, although the larger ones still hit her full force. The standing rigging was hanging slack, and the masts looked wobbly indeed, but they stood.

Before the day was over we had gotten off flour and rice, cases of tinned food, — beef, milk, jam, fruit, and the like, — and some cases of ship’s biscuits. We also landed some onehundred-gallon drums and siphoned water into them by means of a piece of rubber hose. Nearly all of our personal belongings were saved. My few books, which I had kept in a rack above my bunk, were still as dry as some of the articles in the MED to MUM volume. I was glad indeed to have them again, particularly Wordsworth’s Poems, a volume that had traveled with me for more than twenty years, and the copy of Barrow’s Bounty, bought in Paris in 1916. Standing, or rather braced on the slanting floor of the tiny cabin I had occupied all the way from Tahiti, I glanced into this latter volume, some of whose pages bore grease stains seventeen years old, transferred from the Anzani engines of Blériot monoplanes at the Buc École d’Aviation. What a kaleidoscope of pictures and emotions the well-thumbed pages evoked! They were spongy with memories, and yet, not to the point of saturation. As though they had been so many bound cards of blotting paper, they were absorbing others even as I stood there. ‘Twenty years hence,’ I mused, ‘if I survive the vicissitudes of the future as successfully as I have those of the past, they will give off a yet more intricate odor of associations. And forty years hence, when doubtless I shall be as dead as I expected to be early this morning, this old volume may still be extant. Perhaps some idler in a secondhand bookshop will take it up from among the others on the ten-cent counter, and so learn for the first time of Captain Bligh and Fletcher Christian and the mutiny on the Bounty; but he will never know what layers upon layers of another man’s memories are smeared on the margins and dusted transparently over the pages of text.’

These reflections passed through my mind more rapidly, of course, than I have been able to set them down here. For all the fact that the sea was much calmer, an occasional thudding blow which made the Pro Patna rock and showered her decks with spray convinced me that the ledge of Timoe’s outer reef offered no suitable place in which to sort over one’s memories. Therefore I wrapped my books in a large piece of oilcloth cut from the cabin table, preparatory to going ashore. Mr. Miller looked in at that moment.

‘How long do you think she will hold together?’ I asked.

‘For three or four days, at least,’ he replied; ‘and longer if the sea goes down. She’s solidly wedged and not chafing much. We must watch the masts, though.’

He was stuffing loose articles into copra bags, passing them out to men on deck, who passed them on to others on the reef. There were thirty-two men in our company, eight on the schooner and the others ashore, and the work of salvage went forward rapidly during the hours of low tide. One group acted as porters across the reef, and another carried things across the island to the lagoon beach where the camp was to be made.

II

The wheel was still leaning crazily over toward the binnacle, but the sight was pathetic, now, rather than shocking; there had been time to accustom one’s self to the Pro Patria’s status as a wreck. The top of the wheel box lay where it had been jammed when the rudder was smashed. I had skidded against the steering gear the night before and smeared myself with grease, most of which was transferred to the starboard rail where I hung on while the schooner was bashing against the reef. The prints of my fingers were still plainly visible there, which rather surprised me, considering the lustres that seemed to have passed since I had clung there.

It was interesting to see how the schooner lay. She was eight or ten yards from the outer edge of the reef. As the broken water sucked back between the combers, I had some vivid glimpses of the wall of the reef falling almost perpendicularly into the depths. A brief examination fully satisfied my curiosity, and the active ghost of my feeling at 3.10 A.M. haunted me speedily ashore. The others followed a few moments later, for the tide was flowing again; but before leaving, Mr. Miller had run up the French flag. ‘She shall wear that as long as the sea will let her,’ he said; and she did.

By the evening of the third day a well-trodden path led across the island to the lagoon beach. Along this had been carried well-nigh everything portable that the schooner had contained. The foresail, mainsail, and deck awning made three fine tents, and in one of them was a store of supplies sufficient to have kept us in comfort for a considerable time. We sat down to meals even better than those we had enjoyed at sea, for we had at hand an inexhaustible supply of fish, lobsters, pahuas, and other sea food. Even I could spear fish at Timoe; as for our Polynesian sailors, two or three of them could secure in half an hour more than enough for the whole company. We at once prepared a Maori oven, of course, and Terii, the cook, made a bread-baking oven by digging a square hole in the ground, lining the bottom with stones, and the sides as well as the bottom with tin cut from ship’s-biscuit containers. The bread that came from this primitive oven reminded me, by its fragrance, its crisp brown crust, and its delicious flavor, of the good homemade bread of boyhood; and there was butter to spread on it — excellent New Zealand butter, out of tins.

The heavy rains had left many pools of fresh water among the rocks along the outer beaches; we used these for bathing and washing our clothes, and later we discovered and cleared out an ancient well containing water only slightly brackish.

The days that followed were as pleasant as any I have ever spent. We were cut off from the world, for the time being, at least, as completely as Fletcher Christian and the Bounty folk had been on Pitcairn. Manga Reva was only twenty-five miles away, but the wind had veered round to the southwest, and we could not leave Timoe until it hauled into the east again. Meanwhile the other ship’s boat had been salvaged and brought into the lagoon by a narrow channel between two of the islands.

Once the camp was established, there was little work for spare hands, but I spent none of my abundant leisure in reading. Uninhabited islands are supposed to be places to which one goes to read books; or, if one does n’t actually go, a choice is made of the one or the ten books to be taken if one were to go. My Timoe experience inclines me to think that none should be taken. It may very well be that the desert places where books are most essential are those teeming with humanity, where one sees such a deal of misery and injustice and indifference to the welfare of others. Certainly, on Timoe, I had no desire to read — no desire for distraction other than that furnished by the island itself. I became increasingly convinced that I had found the best of halfway stations on the voyage toward the experiment in solitude, and made plans against the day when I might, perhaps, return alone. The place is solitary enough, but with Manga Reva within view, on clear days, one would have a comforting sense of the presence there of others, even though they could not be reached. Then, the apprenticeship having been served, one could go on to Tematangi, or perhaps to Ducie, three hundred miles beyond and west of Pitcairn, for the bath, pure and cold, of solitude at its best — or worst.

Timoe was once inhabited, but it was long ago, and at no time could there have been more than a handful of people. Their number, probably, did not greatly exceed that of the Pro Patria’s company. The island was discovered by Captain Wilson, in the Duff, and I remembered that Captain Beechey had passed that way in 1825, after leaving Pitcairn, and had counted thirty or forty naked savages along the beach. From the masthead of the Blossom he could overlook the island, but he saw no signs of cultivated lands and no trees save the pandanus. The surf was too high at the time of his visit to permit a landing to be made, and as he sailed past he wondered how its inhabitants managed to live on so poor a place. Along the outer beaches he observed what appeared to be stone huts, which he rightly surmised were not dwellings but places of interment for the dead. These rude memorial structures still stand on Timoe, or most of them do. They are formed of coral slabs piled up to a height of five or six feet and about as many in diameter. Most of them are cylindrical in shape. Some of them have fallen down, but I found others with scarcely a slab misplaced, and I could easily follow an ancient pathway across those desolate wastes, made of similar flat coral slabs.

III

While we waited for the wind to change, one of the ship’s boats was made ready for the voyage to Manga Reva. The spar to which it had been lashed on the davits did service as a mast, and a small square sail was cut from a piece of the deck awning. When the boat was ready we shifted our camp to an island about three miles distant at the leeward end of the lagoon and nearest to Manga Reva, sailing down with the other boat in tow and rowing back for another load of supplies.

On September 20 the wind came back into its usual quarter, and on the twenty-first one boat was hauled across the reef for the voyage to Manga Reva. Fifteen of us were to go in her and send a cutter back from Manga Reva to fetch the others.

The day had promised to be fair, but shortly after sunrise clouds blew up from the east and the wind freshened considerably. However, we were on the lee side of the island and there was little surf on the reef. The second boat was used for loading, and Mr. Miller, knowing that the Manga Revans had little food to spare for hungry strangers, decided that we must carry with us as many of our salvaged supplies as possible. By the time the boat was ready for her human freight she was well down in the water. With the fifteen of us on board, I could span with thumb and forefinger the space between the gunwale and the water line, amidships. Captain Bligh’s launch, in which he made the voyage to Timor, had an inch or two more freeboard with her load of eighteen men. They also had farther to go — some 3550 miles farther.

I could imagine that departure, late in the evening, from Tofoa — Norton, the quartermaster, who had tried to save the launch’s grapnel, lying dead on the beach, battered past human semblance by the savages, and most of the men in the launch badly hurt by the showers of stones the natives had hurled at them. A solemn moment that must have been, when, safely out of the cove and beyond pursuit by the savages, the launch was headed westward across a sea as little known then as it is well known now. They had twenty-eight gallons of water, one hundred and fifty pounds of ship’s bread, twenty pounds of salt pork, three bottles of wine, five quarts of rum, a few coconuts, and some breadfruit that had been trampled into a muddy paste in the confusion and excitement of their narrow escape from the misnamed Friendly Islanders. They had four cutlasses to defend themselves with. They had no chart — nothing save Captain Bligh’s recollection of latitudes and longitudes of the scattered, little-known archipelagoes of the western Pacific; and they knew that they could expect no help until they reached Timor, in the Dutch East Indies, more than twelve hundred leagues distant.

Thus were they forlornly equipped, but they had the courage of desperate men, and the leadership of one whose resourcefulness, firmness of character, and skill as a navigator were to carry them all safely to their destination after the most remarkable open-boat voyage that white men have ever made.

I was thinking of the Bounty’s launch as our little square sail bellied out to the following wind and Timoe was dropping away astern. What a trifle, a less-than-nothing, our voyage was, compared with Bligh’s! And yet, twenty-five miles of sea can be as rough, on a given day, as thirty-six hundred miles of it, and a small, heavily laden boat, whether bound for Manga Reva or Timor, can take only so much water over her gunwales. Captain Bligh could have had no rougher sea on some of his anxious days than we found awaiting us beyond the lee of Timoe. The wind did not wholly explain it, nor that of the previous three or four days. We decided that there must have been a considerable blow beyond horizons to the eastward, and that the strong swell was running counter to an equally strong current. Small and confused mountain ranges — so they looked to us — pursued a course oblique to our own, and as we met them they managed to scrape off a considerable part of their snowy summits along our gunwales.

Two wells through the cargo had been arranged for bailing purposes. I sat at the after one, provided with half a coconut shell for gathering up the finer débris from the mountain peaks, and with a three-gallon can for the heavier segments. There was little respite during the next six hours, and I gained an excellent, first-hand knowledge of the exacting and tedious nature of the task which had occupied Bligh’s men during a period of forty-one days. One throws out a scoopful of water, which seems such a significant amount as one lifts the can to toss it over the side, and so ridiculously small as it plops into the vast reservoir of the sea. During the second or two that one’s back is turned, over the weather side comes more, often twice or half a dozen times the amount just tossed out; and the conviction grows that the whole of the Pacific means to get itself shifted in this manner across the battens of a twenty-foot boat.

Matuku, the Pro Patria’s boatswain, stood at the steering oar. There are no better boat steerers than the seamen of eastern Polynesia, accustomed to crossing the reefs of the Low Islands, and Matuku was a worthy representative of his class; but he was not accustomed to a whaleboat under sail, and a square sail at that, and a little time was needed for him to get the hang of her behavior under those conditions. Once he had, most of the mountain ranges foamed under rather than over us.

IV

It seems to have been ordered by Chance that the open-boat voyage of fifteen of the Pro Patria’s company was to be a replica in miniature of that of the Bounty’s launch. We, too, were rained upon — not day after day and night after night, for weeks, but minute after minute for a time sufficient to wet us as thoroughly as skin and clothing may be wetted. And the fresh wind, blowing against our bodies, caused the rapid evaporation of moisture which had so often chilled theirs to the bone. We, too, sat in cramped positions, and, save for the fortunate bailers, were unable to change them.

For two hours we saw nothing of Manga Reva, the island being hidden by clouds. There had been a little talk upon first leaving Timoe; then everyone fell silent, awed, perhaps, by the sea which made our boat seem so tiny, particularly when it slid steeply down into the troughs, when the sail would hang limp for a few seconds, filling altogether too suddenly for our liking as we rose to the crest of the next sea. I tried to imagine what my feeling would be, granted that we had a voyage of a thousand miles before us, to say nothing of thirty-six hundred miles, and if Manga Reva were peopled with hostile savages and we knew that we must pass it without daring to halt for rest and other refreshment. In this way I seemed to gain a vivid sense of the hopelessness, the utter weariness, the Bounty’s people must have felt, and of the all but superhuman courage and power of endurance of some of their number.

We left Timoe at nine-thirty, and toward noon we began to catch glimpses of Mount Duff through the cloud rack. Three hours later, turning my head after a brisk period of bailing, I found that we were within a mile of Kamaka, a small rocky island that stands at the entrance to the southwest pass into Manga Reva lagoon. What a relief it was to enter that calm, reef-protected sea! And what relief, raised to the thousandth power of our own, must Bligh’s men have felt, in the early hours of the morning of June 14, 1789, when they passed beyond the promontories of Coupang Bay, so peaceful in the light of the waning moon, and Captain Bligh, pointing ahead to the dark mass of the fort, remarked, quietly: ‘There it lies, my lads. Yonder is the Dutch settlement.’ Thus, often, are the great, the truly heroic achievements in human history brought quietly and obscurely to their conclusion.

Few English seamen, I imagine, have been the cause of more heated controversies than was Captain Bligh during his lifetime. It is difficult at this distance to get a clear picture of him, but, after reading every scrap of information I have been able to lay hands on, my belief is that his disciplinary measures at sea were no more severe than those of many other ships’ captains of his day — no more so, in fact, than those of Captain Cook, whom most of us consider to have been a humane and forbearing commander. But there is this distinction to be made between them: Bligh was harsh and Cook was stern. The punishments inflicted by Bligh were often the result of his outbursts of ungovernable temper. Furthermore, he had not an atom of tact, and he lacked Cook’s ability, which must have been like that of Lord Nelson, to endear himself to his men; to punish them, — only when they deserved punishment, — retaining at the same time their liking and respect. No shadow of excuse can be found for Bligh in his treatment of his officers. He reviled and humiliated them in the presence of the seamen, and was so unjust in his treatment that anyone, having read the complete records of the mutiny, would agree, I think, that he had only himself to blame for the melancholy ending of the breadfruit voyage.

But one quite forgets his defects of character in thinking of the open-boat voyage. There he was superb — a man in ten thousand. How many seamen has England produced — or France, or Spain, or Holland, or Germany, or the U. S. A. — who could have done what he did?

v

The people of Manga Reva were, in a sense, as surprised at our arrival as the Dutch had been at the sight of the Bounty’s launch. They had been expecting our return for a week past, but it was the Pro Patria they had thought to see threading its way among the shoals to the inner bay. Having seen the little boat from afar, all the two hundred inhabitants of Riketea had gathered on the wharf, and standing in the forefront was Monsieur T-, the Administrator. I could see him peering toward us, his hands on his knees; then he would straighten up and turn to those nearest him, as though for confirmation of what he saw. Presently his arms began to wave and his shoulders heave. The eloquence of his gestures carried far, and revealed him passing from the early dawn of puzzled astonishment to the mid-morning of growing enlightenment, to the high noon of conviction, dismay, and chagrin. He had expected to return with us to Tahiti for a long-awaited holiday, and his final arms-folded posture as we drew near the wharf said as plainly as though the words had been written in letters three feet high across the sheer face of Mount Duff: ‘Je suis f—u encore! ’ Months earlier, it seems, Monsieur Twas awaiting another schooner in which he expected to go to Tahiti. That vessel had been wrecked as well, before reaching him!

Despite his natural disappointment, he was kindness itself to us. He took us at once to his house, for hot coffee laced with cognac, followed shortly by an excellent dinner. Our bellies needed no gentle nursing toward the accommodation of food, as was the case with Bligh’s men, and we ate heartily.

The native Manga Re vans are as kind-hearted as their Administrator. The company in the Bounty’s launch, who deserved so much more, could have fared no better at the hands of the Dutch than we are faring here. The last of the Pro Patria’s company have now arrived from Timoe, and we are accommodated at various houses scattered through the village. In my own case, I have a dwelling to myself. The family owning it bundled out of it and bundled me in. All that I required was a small room, or a screened-off corner of the verandah. What I have is the entire verandah and four rooms behind it, with a separate kitchen still farther back. Manga Revan hospitality is offered as lavishly as it is ungrudgingly.

Monsieur Thas given us the run of his splendid library, of more than seven thousand volumes, and it was there that I discovered a copy of Moerenhout’s Voyages aux Îles du Grand Océan. I again read, with increased interest, Moerenhout’s account of his visit to Pitcairn, in January 1829, only four years after Captain Beechey’s visit. Thursday October, Fletcher Christian’s son and the firstborn on the island, was then about thirty-seven years old. Moerenhout says: —

I went first to the house of the old Adams. The paths which lead from one dwelling to another on this island are truly charming; one walks nearly always under coconut palms, breadfruit and other beautiful trees, and from Young’s house, where I dined, to that of Adams, I walked continually in the shade, although it was a considerable distance. As I approached this latter dwelling, the son of Adams, aged about twenty-two or twenty-four, and his wife, Polly Young, went before me. This woman is beautiful, but, like most of the others of the island, a little masculine and of a too tall stature, for she measures at least five and one-half feet.

In the house, which is of oblong form and built of wood, like the others of the island, and roofed with pandanus thatch, I found, on the second floor which serves only as a sleeping room, the wife of John Adams. When they told her that I was there she began to speak in her own tongue, but without raising her eyes . . . and her son told me that she had been blind for several years. This poor woman, after a few moments, begged me to give her my hand and kissed it several times, caressing me as a mother would her son, and ending by weeping. It was evident that she was an object of the most tender care, not only on the part of Adams and his family, but on that of all the inhabitants of the island. . . .

Adams’s house is situated in a charming spot on a little hill, at the extremity of a pretty lawn, bordered on the side toward the sea by three small houses, one serving as a kitchen, the second as a washhouse, and the third for the making of tapa cloth. ... I then went to the house of Thursday October Christian, the first-born on the island. His wife died, I believe, several years before my visit, leaving to him several children who are more beautiful than one could imagine. His oldest daughter, whom I found making tapa with some other women, is as white as a European. About seventeen years old, she is a great consolation to her father, taking care of the house and bringing up her sisters and brothers, much younger than she, with the tenderness of a mother. The cleanliness and order of the house would do honor to the bestregulated home in Europe.

Moerenhout visited Pitcairn two months after the arrival of John Hunn Nobbs and his mysterious companion, Bunker. The Pitcairners were quite naturally mystified by the appearance of these two men, and Moerenhout himself was equally so, particularly by Bunker. His opinion of Nobbs bears out the estimate of the man formed at a distance by Sir John Barrow. He tells of sitting down to supper with the Youngs, and he goes on to say: —

Several minutes afterward, Nobbs arrived, who placed himself at the table with us after having also said his prayer, but with his eyes closed and in lamentable tones in which one could detect something affected and pharisaical. The good Pitcairners think him a saint. Heaven send they be not mistaken!

After the meal I went for a stroll while the women were clearing the tables. The night was cool and serene; the moon, already risen, lighted with its mild rays this happy and hospitable land. Seeing the children playing about me on the lawn, the young people talking and laughing, — all of these folk living at peace with each other and in abundance, — I could not help thinking how happy one could be who, without ambition, good and virtuous like themselves, should decide to live and die in their midst. At this moment Nobbs accosted me, and, as though he had divined my thoughts, ‘Is it not true, sir,’ he said, ‘that many people, if they knew of these brave Pitcairners, would like nothing better than to partake of their happiness?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied, a little brusquely, ‘but it would be necessary to understand them well, to have their tastes and their virtues.’ I continued, becoming somewhat heated, perhaps, for I had commenced to take a lively interest in my friends of Pitcairn, and I had no very good opinion of this man, nor of his sick comrade.

How I envied Moerenhout his opportunity to see Pitcairn at a time when neither its religion nor its manners had yet been corrupted by Nobbs’s influence; but I must forbear from quoting him further, lest I add page after page of his narrative to my own.

There is one more brief quotation, however, concerning Manga Reva, that needs to be set down here. Captain Beechey and the members of the Blossom’s company are supposed to have been the first white men ever to set foot on any of the Gambier Islands, but Moerenhout, who visited the group in 1834, six months before the arrival of the first Picputian missionaries, says:

The natives speak of a ship which preceded by a long time that of Captain Beechey. They even show the spot where the vessel was at anchor, and they remember having had a quarrel with the ship’s company when several of them were killed. This seems all the more likely because, upon the arrival of the Blossom, the inhabitants of the Gambiers knew iron and cultivated watermelons, which are not indigenous to the island.

There is little doubt in my mind that the unknown ship was His Majesty’s armed transport, Bounty, with Fletcher Christian and his fellow mutineers on board. Christian was carrying with him not only native products from Tahiti; he also had various kinds of seeds of European trees and foodbearing plants, and, while it cannot be proved, it seems likely that watermelon seeds were among these. Certainly, melons were growing on Pitcairn at the time of Moerenhout’s visit. It may very well be that Christian and his men, having sighted the Gambiers, made an attempt to settle there before going on in the proposed search for Pitcairn, and that the attempt ended disastrously, like the one at Tubuai.

Captain Beechey was puzzled to account for the watermelons at Manga Reva. Who else could have left them there if Christian did not? Captain Wilson, who discovered the Gambiers, merely passed them at a distance. He did not even send a boat ashore. It could not have been he.

VI

I have now brought my story down to the present moment: about 9.30 A.M., October 10, 1933. I foresee a sojourn of considerable length on Manga Reva. Its only connection with the outside world is via Tahiti, nine hundred miles away. It is visited by Papeete trading schooners every three or four or five months. Another is not expected before the end of December. There is no wireless station here, so the loss of the Pro Patria cannot be reported. Convenient as such a station would be for us at the moment, I am glad that none exists. The world has been made quite small enough as matters stand — much too small, in my opinion, for humanity’s good, to say nothing of that of individuals. What does all our rapid transportation and communication amount to, humanly considered? How much closer has it drawn nations or races in understanding, sympathy, and forbearance? Looking at the matter as clear-sightedly as possible, it seems to me that they are farther apart now than ever they were in the days when each was chiefly concerned with its own affairs. The little that has been gained has been more than offset by the much that has been lost.

And the individual — what of him? Our common ancestors merely tasted of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We gorge upon it, make an alderman’s dinner upon it, half a dozen times a day, and there appears to be so much more evil than good in the fruit. What don’t we know concerning the illfare of our millions of near neighbors! We are all forced to become amateur Atlases, and those who lead us, professedly to our good, point proudly to the smallness of the world we must carry. ‘And we’ll make it smaller still!’ they boast. And so they do — smaller as time goes, as space goes, but what a deceitful smallness is that! It would be better for us all if the globe had its old spacious lightness, each man bearing that reasonable part of it he was equipped by nature to carry.

So they still do on Manga Reva; there are no amateur Atlases here, which accounts, perhaps, for the gayety of the younger folk and the expressions of serenity, of well-being, common to the faces of the older folk. They do not ‘look at you and wish you ill’ as they pass you on the village street.

I wish, for the moment, that rapid transportation had become so miraculously rapid that the one street of Riketea village might be carried, in the winking of an eye, to New York, and superimposed for an hour on Fifth Avenue, say between Thirty-Second and Forty-Second Streets. Just as it is this morning, without the Manga Revans knowing anything about it, of course, and without my being on it. What an astonishing and thoughtprovoking experience it would be to some New Yorker stepping into it unexpectedly as he walked uptown beyond Thirty-First Street! I say nothing of the beauty of the scene, with the roadway interlaced with the moving shadows of palm fronds and pandanus trees and the reflected light from the lagoon shimmering against the masses of foliage on the farther side. It is the human aspect that the New Yorker might remember most vividly and regretfully as he stepped out again at Forty-Second Street and turned to descend to the subway at the Grand Central Terminal for the shuttle train to Times Square. And, as he examined the faces of the people seated opposite him in the train, he might reflect that the Manga Revans need not be pitied for their remoteness from the world and for the simplicity of their lives.

On the other hand, the reflection might be: ‘Thank God I am again in New York!’ Calling to mind New Yorkers I know, I am by no means sure that this thought would not be the one immediately and fervently expressed.

In my own case, I am content to be on Manga Reva. I am not pressed for time and have no important engagements to keep.

It occurs to me that the experience of the Pro Patria’s company demands, perhaps, a yet closer approximation to that of Captain Bligh and the Bounty’s company. Should we not proceed to Tahiti in our open boats? The distance is but a quarter of that he covered in the launch. Furthermore, the islands that lie between are known and charted, and their inhabitants friendly; and by taking a selected course we should have but little more than two hundred miles of open sea to cross between any two of them.

At this point I seem to hear Captain Bligh’s own voice, and in no uncertain terms: —

‘Sir, the man who tempts Fate is a fool! The sea is not to be trifled with —• let me tell you that! Chances that must be taken should be taken, in a cheerful and resolute spirit; but he who would seek them, prompted by nothing save the silly spirit of adventure, betrays a lack of consideration for others equaled only by his lack of common sense!’

Bligh would say this, I believe, if the matter could be presented to him for an opinion. The advice has the authentic ring of soundness. Captain Bof the Pro Patria has not made even a tentative suggestion that we should thus proceed, and there is no doubt that we are very well off where we are. It will be best, I believe, to wait for the chances that must be taken. They present themselves often enough in the course of a lifetime.

A sojourn, however long, on Manga Reva, one of the most beautiful as well as the most interesting islands in French Polynesia, can hardly prove tedious, and a vessel of some sort will arrive, eventually, to take us home. The return will, I trust, be uneventful. Fate could not be so ungenerous or Chance so unresourceful as to rewreck the already shipwrecked on their homeward passage. Whatever may happen, I have seen Pitcairn, and as my anticipations carried me no farther than that, the first of my proposed voyages may be considered over.

Volume XVIII of the Encyclopaedia Britannica reminds me that the second is far from over. MED lies well astern, but horizons beyond horizons still stretch between me and MUM.

(To be concluded)