The Story of an Island: Marooned by Request

by ROBERT DEAN FRISBIE

1

THE trading ketch Hurry Home lumbered up to the boat passage at noon, and an hour later Captain Prospect came ashore. He was viewing life on the sunny side as he puffed prodigiously at the great calabash pipe that hung to the level of his Adam’s apple.

“I am glad to see you back at Pukapuka,” I said. “Sit down and tell me the news. Is there still a war going on?”

Captain Prospect folded his wiry self on a mat in a corner of the room. “Yes, yes, Ropati; we’re allies now,” he told me. “America fell into the war just before my radio battery ran down. That was about two weeks ago. The Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, sank half the Pacific Fleet, and they may be sinking my ship from under me if I don’t keep a sharp lookout. But on the other hand Hurry Home is a lucky ship, if I do say so myself. I’d just as soon take my chances on her as ashore.”

“Perhaps the children and I will take our chances on her, now that the U.S.A. is in the war,” I said after he had satisfied my many questions. “I’d like to get close to civilization.” Then, with a certain amount of sincerity, I added that I should prefer sailing on Hurry Home to any luxury vessel that ever tossed her proud head above the billows.

“Perhaps, per-haps,” Captain Prospect assented cautiously. “Of course that’s the way I feel about my ship; but to some passengers — the finical kind — she may have her drawbacks. But I’ll tell you one thing, Ropati: she has the big Rarotonga traders on their toes. And as for safety and comfort. . . .” And so on until I managed to turn him back to the subject of our departure from Pukapuka. He agreed to take us, and mentioned that if we cared to we could stop on uninhabited Suvorov Atoll a month or two while he refitted.

Late in the afternoon he left me, to take tea with the resident agent. While moving out the doorway he told me to be ready to go aboard at noon next day — which meant in two or three days.

“Hurry Home will call at Suvorov!” I exclaimed to myself as I left the house to look for the cowboys and tell them the exciting news. I pictured my four children — the cowboys — chasing fish in the reef shallows, hunting wide-awake eggs on the sand cays, exploring the jungle. It would be a fitting way to bid farewell to the island life.

“Bundle up your dresses,” I said to Johnny when I found her with the rest of the cowboys. “We’re sailing on Hurry Home. We’ll go to Suvorov, then to America, where we’ll ask our uncle for a job.”

“What uncle?” Johnny wanted to know.

“Uncle Sam,” I replied.

Formerly Captain Prospect was master of a schooner in the island trade. On his first departure from Rarotonga, Tenneb — his firm’s manager — told him to hurry round the Lower Group and hurry home. And on subsequent voyages the instructions were always the same: “Hurry home, hurry home.” Then Prospect bought his ketch and, perhaps in both drollery and resentment, christened her Hurry Home. But not even he, optimist that he is, would hint that his vessel is able to get home in a hurry.

In this vessel we sailed today — daughters Johnny, Elaine, and Nga; son Jakey; the old man; and among the household goods four camphorwood chests, a roll of mats, a case of books, and a Pukapuka sailing canoe — which last pretty well occupies the entire deck, but promises a grain of safety should Hurry Home meet with misadventure.

Hurry Home is of about twenty-five tons. She has no engine, she will not sail better than an average raft, and her topsides are from five to eight feet out of the water, giving her the appearance of a floating packing case. Her gear is rotten, her sails have to be patched after every puff of wind, her rope is gray and threadbare, and there is no spare rope or canvas aboard her. She has no passenger accommodations whatsoever, — yet often she carries from ten to twenty, — and she exudes a fetor that distinguishes her from all Portuguese sponge fishers, Chinese junks, and garbage scows.

Furthermore, she leaks on topsides and bottomsides; there is no w.c. or even a basin for washing one’s hands. In place of a galley there is a rusty tin trunk seized to the taffrail aft, with three iron bars driven through it for a grate, and in this strange contraption Oli-Oli, the Pukapuka cook, boils water and cooks a mess called stew.

The “galley” is on the starboard quarter aft of the tiller; the substitute for a w.c. is on the port quarter. About two feet forward from the transom an old spar has been fixed athwartship, from railtop to railtop, and from this spar hangs a piece of ragged canvas. It is there as a symbol of modesty, but because it blows in one’s face when the wind is forward and blows away from one when the wind is aft, one relies on the delicacy of the sailors and passengers more than on the canvas for privacy.

The captain’s cabin is forward of the galley, the w.c., and the tiller. About six feet fore and aft by the width of the vessel, there is a berth on either side, and between them a tiny table that is used for meals, cards, and a jumble of odds and ends. The starboard berth is the captain’s; the port berth and the rest of the cabin presents a scrambled heap of everything that should not be in a captain’s cabin.

Said the captain when we were drawing away from the land, headed for The Rock at the end of Tearai Reef: “Now, Ropati, the chronometer is out of order, the radio battery is run down, I’ve got only a 1930 nautical almanac, my Epitome is a hundred years old, my eyesight is failing, and I don’t know what day of the month it is — but my sailors will know that.” He cleared his throat, a waggish flicker came into his far-set eyes, and he asked: “Ropati, would you mind taking my ship to Suvorov?”

“Not at all,” I replied, “— if you mean it.”

“Of course I mean it,” he said. “You take charge; then I’ll have plenty of time to play cribbage with you.” He blinked a few times in rapid succession, thoughtfully, then amended: “I don’t mean that you are to interfere with my sailors. My mate Tangi is a thoroughly capable man; and when he’s below, my second mate Takataka takes charge; and when they’re both below, my cook Oli-Oli sails my ship. What I want you to do is to navigate — and be on hand for a game of cribbage.”

Just then my attention was turned to the children. We were beyond the lee of the west reef; Hurry Home was lurching and plunging, the children in the throes of seasickness. Poor cowboys! I had my hands full for the rest of the evening carrying buckets for them and trying to make them comfortable. When we had missed by inches The Rock’s fringing reef and had plunged and rolled through the tide rip that builds up beyond Tearai Reef the sun had set, the night had turned squally, and I had to get the cowboys below. Johnny and Jakey managed to lower themselves into the hold, but I had to carry Elaine while Oli-Oli carried Nga.

Below was a mass of cargo stowed in any old way. Heaps of rusty chain and rocks for ballast; trunks, chests, and bundles; bags of flour and cases of beef; several hundred baskets of dried fish that smelled to high heaven; the five water drums; and no ventilation whatsoever. But there was a smoky little lamp by the light of which I managed to stow the poor cowboys here and there. They were too ill to know or care whether they lay on chain or rocks.

Now they are asleep; it is raining hard; the air is so thick they must be close to suffocation; I myself am so near that state that I must close my journal.

“You’ve been to Suvorov before, of course, Ropati,” Captain Prospect said after his spirit had been mellowed by winning three games of cribbage; “but you’ve never seen the island in a really pristine state. Suvorov is grown up solid in jungle, right down to the water’s edge. The only place you can walk without cutting a path through the bush is in the clearing where the old trading post used to be. That’s the way Suvorov is now: it is a bird and crab and turtle sanctuary.”

Captain Prospect tapped the cards into their box and shoved them and the cribbage board to the back of the table. Then, after a glance at the clock, he continued: “H.M.S. Leith stopped at Suvorov for a few hours in 1938, and the yacht Lorna D. was there for two days in 1939, and I called in for a short visit last year; otherwise no one has been on Suvorov since you were there in 1934.”

I took the sextant on deck but did not bother to keep the sun on the horizon, for I knew the latitude within a mile or two, having sighted the breakers on Tema Reef at sunrise. Oli-Oli, the Pukapuka cook, sailor, and general roustabout, was at work by the tin-trunk stove. He was naked to the waist, but his fat buttocks were covered partially by a ragged pair of cotton shorts stiff with grease and grime.

Taka taka was at the pump, which is the only thing in good working order aboard Captain Prospect’s “ship.” He is a handsome half-caste from Palmerston Island, about forty, and strong as a bull. He speaks the curious provincial English that was brought to Palmerston originally by William Marsters, a trading skipper who settled on the island with his three wives and forthwith increased and multiplied with a vengeance.

Querulous old Tangi, Hurry Home’s mate, was asleep forward in the shade of the jib. An indifferent sailor, a mighty eater, finical and likable as an old woman, Captain Prospect calls him “my first officer,” or “my mate Tangi,” perhaps humoring himself with the idea that his ship carries a mate, as well as a second mate and a cook — common sailors being superfluous. But Tangi has none of the qualities of an officer. If he tells Takataka and Oli-Oli to take in sail, they tell him to do it himself, and he does it, in a mood at once resigned, peevish, and vindictive.

But when there are fish to be caught, Tangi is the man of the moment. There is something savage about the way he brings in the bonito and the albacore. His orders are snarled too fiercely to be disobeyed. Of the sport of fishing he knows naught; to him each bonito he swings over the side is food, and food is second to nothing—not even to fat women and grievances.

This is the mate to whom Captain Prospect gives complete charge of his ship. It seems all wrong, but the fact remains that, sooner or later, by guess or by God, without benefit of navigation or seamanship, Hurry Home often reaches her ports of call.

The sea is calm; not a ripple wrinkles her pinguid scalp. The sea louse crawls on the bald pate of the sea in a blue funk. Each watch, the sailors work a half hour at the pump. Shush shush, shush shush, the interminable sound wakens me when I am sleeping below, and it seems that I wait for hours for the gurgling sound that apprises me the pump has sucked.

The cowboys are well and have taken complete charge of the vessel, much to the annoyance of Tangi and the relief of Captain Prospect. Four-year-old Nga insists on climbing to the crosstrees several times a day to look for the land. This terrifies the captain; and his temper is not improved when I explain that the only danger lies in the rigging parting from the strain of her weight.

2

LOND ho!” Takataka sang out from the crosstrees. I climbed the tilted ratlines to where the Palmerston Islander was on lookout, and soon I made out a few dots seemingly suspended a little above the horizon. They were, of course, the tallest of the coconut trees on Anchorage Island, — Suvorov’s largest reef islet, — raised above the horizon before the rest of the trees were visible.

“Thar she lays,” said Takataka, grinning at me. “ Yo’re a good cap’n. The sailors ne’er changed yo’r course at all, at all, and you rose the lond o’er the bo’sprit! ”

Then Takataka climbed cautiously down the rigging, testing each ratline with his bare foot before risking his weight on it. I stayed aloft until the sun had set and the misty undulating line of treetops had risen above the sea marge and then faded in the darkening clouds.

It is midnight now, but I have no wish to sleep, with lonely, haunted Suvorov so close aboard. At eight o’clock I took the tiller for the first half of the watch; then Tangi relieved me, I went below, and, returning with my binocular, picked the island out of the darkness, stared at it, and recalled little idyls from the three months I had spent there on a former visit, when Desire was alive and Johnny and Jakey were babies.

Presently the sea fell calm. Then I heard resounding across the quiet water the thunder of breakers, far away on Suvorov’s barrier reef. The sound came low and mournful, rising and subsiding, calling with a dreadful and yet fascinating insistence. Emotion welled up in me. I thought. I could hear the voice of Desire in that far-away lonely call.

At 4.00 A.M. we were a half mile off Anchorage Island, with the passage into the lagoon dead ahead. There was a waning moon over our counter; the night was clear, the dawn close at hand. I remembered the landmarks and coral heads as well as though they were the familiar ones in Pukapuka lagoon, so I decided to take Hurry Home to the anchorage and not even apprise the captain. Having Prospect on deck would spoil the charm of this homecoming. How much better to sail in quietly, alone, breathing deeply betimes of the spirit of this Happy Isle!

Oli-Oli was at the tiller, half asleep as usual. I sent him to his stewpot of a forecastle, telling him not to call Tangi. The fat cook rolled greasily across the deck and plopped down the hatchway; a moment later Johnny and Jakey crawled aft to stand beside me. I told them not to speak lest they waken the captain.

It was only half light when we rounded the south point of Anchorage Island; then, out of the tidal swell, we became aware suddenly of the pattering of ripples on Hurry Home’s side, the soft unvarying plash of feathering water from her bow. Save for these scarcely audible sounds she moved in the lee of the land as silently as a ghost ship. When we were abreast of the stone wharf, I brought the vessel into the wind and gave Johnny and Jakey the tiller to hold hard alee.

On the north point I could see a few pemphis bushes growing at the water’s edge; then a stretch of beach mottled with dark-green dabs where young coconut trees grew; and above these the black wall of jungle crisscrossed by gray boles of older trees. The stone wharf stretched from the lagoon edge of the shallows a hundred yards to the beach, with a twelve-foot break where a floodgate let the tidal current pass through. At the shore end of the wharf I could sec where a path entered and was swallowed by the jungle.

To me Anchorage Island was alive with memories of men who had lived in her fastness, had dug gold, weighed pearls, loved native women, caroused, fought, and died. As I stood on the deck of Hurry Home, with Jakey and Johnny at my side, I remembered Angus Mackay the pearl farmer, and how immaculate the island had been kept in his day, how the graves of Jack Buckland and Robert Burr had been bedded with white coral gravel, the manager’s house had stood in a garden of flowering shrubs, and Mackay and I had sat on the veranda, drinking raisin wine as we talked of the past. Now time and the jungle had claimed Suvorov; now the creeping and the flying creatures had returned to the fastnesses; now only memories of the old days remained.

The sky turned red and then dissolved to lighter shades. The dull glimmer of light on the lagoon ripples brightened to the glint of diamonds. Now we could see, far across the lagoon, misty and unreal, the coconut islets and sand cays that are threaded on Suvorov’s reef. The Ton Group and Bird Islet lay six miles to the west, Turtle, One Tree, and Brushwood to the north. Seven Islands and the Gull Group were almost lost against a bank of clouds to the southeast; Entrance and New Islets lay like black squares above the horizon to the south; and Whale Islet, close at hand, seemed like a tiny and exquisite painting from a book of fairy tales.

With a pang of regret that the happiness of this moment must give place to the humdrum monotony of life in the world of the flesh, I went forward and let go the anchor. The jangle of chain grated on my spirit as harshly as it grated on its hawsepipe.

3

TANGI! Where’s Tangi?” Captain Prospect growled, poking his head out of the companionway. “Takataka! Turn out that Palmerston Islander! Get all the gear out of Ropati’s canoe! He’ll want to go ashore and sleep, now that he’s brought my ship to anchor! Oli-Oli! Where’s that lazy Pukapukan? Where’s my tea? Why ain’t you got the water boiling? You’ve been asleep? Asleep! My knee!” The captain is always irritable before he has gulped his morning’s cup of tea.

Tangi and Takataka helped us slide our sailing canoe into the water, the cowboys piled into it, I followed them, and we shoved off. Captain Prospect and his crew would come later, in their own canoe.

As we paddled through the shallows, alongside the stone wharf, hundreds of parrot fish finned past us with little spurts of fright, as though not knowing whether or not this strange tailless, finless fish were an enemy. The wharf itself, we noticed, was broken where heavy seas must have bashed it. After pulling the canoe up the beach, we moved inland along a weed-grown path to the clearing in the center of the island. The jungle of young coconuts, pemphis, and pandanus walled us in; it was so dense that we could scarcely hear the thunder of breakers on the fringing reef less than a quarter of a mile away. The air was damp, and heavy with jungle smells; but now and then a breath of wind would eddy down to touch us lightly, then vanish, leaving us with a vague feeling that we had smelled the sea.

The cowboys yelled their excitement. Within two minutes they had plunged into the jungle in search of sprouted coconuts, green drinking nuts, coconut crabs, and sea bird fledglings. As for me, I moved through the early-morning gloom of this uninhabited place with a feeling of awe. I felt that I was trespassing in a fairyland where only children are permitted to roam. The spell was complete until I came to the south side of the clearing and saw the galvanized-iron roof over the brick water tank, testifying that other mortals had dared to break into this sanctuary. The bright unpainted iron stood out in pleasing contrast against the deeply shadowed green.

The “clearing” — which formerly extended for two hundred yards down the center of Anchorage Island — is a clearing now only in contrast with the heavy jungle surrounding it. There are thickets of spiny-leaved pandanus, nonu, and tamanu saplings, a few clumps of bananas and mummy apples, breadfruit trees, young coconuts, all tangled with triumfetta vines, gardenia and fiscus bushes, and coarse atoll ferns. The only clear ground in the clearing is under five gigantic tamanu trees, which stand in a row about fifty yards from the tank; and it was there that I found an old pearling cutter, paintless, mastless, its hull full of leaves and dead branches from the tamanus.

At one side of the tamanus I stumbled on the wreck of the old trading post, now scarcely more than a heap of rusty iron and rotten wood, but with part of one wall standing by virtue of the supporting jungle. The door still hung in its doorway, for the hinges were of bronze. As I examined its flaking paint and termite-eaten wood a flood of memories surged through my brain.

But I could hear the cowboys whooping not far off, and I knew by their hungry yells that a meal would soon be under way.

Moving toward them, parting warily the fathomlong leaves of a clump of pandanus, I came to a last relic of the old trading days. It too was no more than a heap of rusty iron and rotten wood: but lying on top of the debris, like a notice to the antiquarian, was a sign, reading: —

LEVER BROTHERS PLANTATIONS LIMITED

The white painted letters were embossed where the weather had eaten away the unpainted wood.

Then I found the cowboys, and it was not long before we had kindled a fire, and not long thereafter before three coconut crabs and six fledglings were on the coals, sizzling and sputtering and filling the air with a savory odor. We made a meal of it, eating the food with our fingers, filling the odd corners with utos — the absorbing organs of sprouted coconuts — and washing it all down with cool drinkingnut water.

After the meal, a smoke, and a nap we built a wigwam of green coconut fronds in a little glade opening to the lagoon beach; and later we walked to the north point, where there is a deep hole on the edge of the shallows, and plunged in to turn somersaults, stand on our heads, swim sharkwise and turtlewise, and in other ways enjoy ourselves after the manner of old men and children.

And tonight, while writing these words by campfire and at times pausing to stare at the dim shape of Hurry Home riding at her anchor, I have wondered if it is fair play to be so happy when the rest of the world is in tears.

4

THIS afternoon Captain Prospect and I rummaged about the wreckage of the old trading post. We found some lumber good enough for the framework and floor of a temporary house, but all the iron roofing was rusted beyond further use — even to the captain’s sanguine eyes. Presently we stumbled on a brick bread oven, green with fungus, its baking chamber the hermitage of a hoary old coconut crab. Then we inspected the twenty-foot pearling cutter.

“Well, Ropati, there’s still some life left in the old boat,” the captain said as he pulled dead tamanu branches out of her and started thumping her planks and picking the scales of paint from her sides.

“Yes; she’s not beyond repair,” I admitted, and added that she might be useful.

“Hm, yes,” the captain agreed. “ I’ll put Oli-Oli to work on her right away. I’ll have him replace those rotten frames and those floors and knees. And that plank,” he added, kicking it and then pulling his foot out of the hole he had made — “yes, that plank will have to be renewed; and I think she’d better have a new stem and a sternpost too. The keel may be sound, but if it’s not, then Oli-Oli can cut a new keel from one of these big tamanu trees.” He stopped abruptly, grinned waggishly, and then told me that the chain plates, being bronze, were in good shape, so at worst Oli-Oli would simply have to build a new boat between them.

A few moments later we turned to the tamanu trees, standing in a row, close together, on the north side of the clearing. Each was as big as an English oak, had the same dark glossy leaves and gnarled limbs. Because they leaned at about forty-five degrees to the west, Captain Prospect found them easy to climb. In a moment he had clambered up one of them to where it forked twenty feet from the ground, and had perched birdlike on one of the smaller limbs. I followed, somewhat bewildered and with a lively sense of the unconventionality of climbing trees with a gray-haired skipper. I hoped First Mate Tangi would not see us.

“Nice place to build a house,” the captain opined, producing his calabash pipe and lighting it. Then, as he sighed with the satisfaction that only tobacco and weak tea bring him, he pointed out the vistas of reef and sea to the east and the lagoon to the west, and he called my attention to the light drafts of wind; and finally he told me that, in a little house in these trees, a man would be as safe in a hurricane as he would be aboard Hurry Home.

“That’s right,” I replied. “I’m going to build a house up here. I’m going to live in a tree, like Swiss Family Robinson.”

I had not thought of such a house until that moment, but, sitting in the tree with the captain, I at once realized how easily it could be built. There was another tree within eight feet of the one we were sitting in, and there were forks on it at about the same height. I visualized a beam stretched from this tree to that one, another yonder, a post here, and a brace there. In a moment the house was snugly nested in a great mass of foliage, a ladder led to the ground, and I myself was stretched out on a bunk by a big open window, feeling the wind on my bare cheat as I stared dreamily across the jungle to the passage, the reef, the open sea, the vagrant clouds.

“ I am quite serious,” I said when we had climbed down the tree and were studying the house site from ground level. “I’ll go to work on it right away.”

I was enthusiastic. It was not until later in the day that I decided to work leisurely on the house, timing the construction so that it would be only half finished when Hurry Home sailed to Nassau to discharge her cargo. The half-finished house would give me an excuse for remaining here with the cowboys until Prospect returned.

Takataka has finished the little native shack by the water-tank. It is about ten feet wide by sixteen long, with a frond roof, open sides, and a board floor: a good enough place to crawl into when it rains — and what more does a man want with a house in the tropics?

Oli-Oli is progressing famously with the pearling cutter. He finds that it is in better shape than we had thought. Apparently the plank that the captain kicked his toe through was the only rotten one in the boat. We have moved the cutter to the south side of the tank, at the end of the path leading to the lagoon. The captain has decided not to launch her until he returns from Nassau and Manihiki.

I have laid the floor of my tree-house. Captain Prospect is delighted—and at the same time exasperated because the work progresses so slowly. Tangi has been working on Hurry Home, puttering about every morning until about nine o’clock, when, the pangs of hunger telling him that another meal will soon be indicated, he gets out his fishline, baits his hook with hermit crabs, drops it over the side, and in no time catches enough fish for all of us.

5

CAPTAIN PROSPECT sailed at noon; the cowboys and I have been left on Suvorov until Hurry Home returns, in two or three months, from Nassau and Manihiki. We have been marooned by request, as the captain put it.

I went aboard early this morning to buy a few provisions and take ashore some odds and ends of personal gear; but when it came to my case of books, weighing fully two hundred pounds, I decided to leave it aboard for ballast. I had reading matter enough ashore anyway, with Montaigne, Lamb, Spengler, The Friendly Arctic, The Columbia Encyclopedia, and a few other books.

After we had carried our provisions from the beach to the clearing we sat on the end of the wharf and watched Hurry Home drag herself away from the anchorage. We went through the convention of waving; then we crossed the island to its east side, where we sat under a bush; and after an interminable time we saw Hurry Home nose her head around the south point and flounder into the passage.

There she seemed to take wing like T. S. Eliot’s hippopotamus. She struck the nasty tide rip; the wind fell light in the lee of the land; twice she was turned completely around; then she was laid squarely in the trough, rendered helpless, and given such a rolling that we could scarcely ascertain whether she was belly up or back up to the sky.

Poor old Captain Prospect and his crew must have been in a blue funk. We could all but hear their yells as each one of them, from the cook to the skipper, took charge at once, and each one yelled orders that were heard by only himself. The sails thrashed back and forth. First one rail was under water, then the other. The current swung her head to the sea and she buried her bows under, then her stern to the sea, and a nasty chop crashed down on her tin-trunk stove and her w.c. And when she had been whisked this way and that for a quarter of an hour, she was swept within yards of the point of reef on the west side of the entrance where the seas humped their backs before crashing down on the barrier reef. Apparently all hope was gone: her crew were doomed to feed the voracious sharks or be bashed to death on the jagged coral.

The cowboys were whooping now. Jakey and Nga had dashed down to the beach; Johnny sat by me, gripping my arm; Elaine was crying; and I — for the life of me I could feel no proper horror or even concern. The ‘potamus was about to take wing, I reflected.

My quotation was broken off suddenly. Johnny relaxed; Elaine stopped crying; Jakey and Nga stopped whooping. For Poseidon, girdler of the earth, sent a puff of wind into Hurry Home’s sails and literally pushed her sideways out of danger.

Then we ashore watched Captain Prospect’s “hollow ship” get snappily under way. She showed her scabby bottom to the barrier reef; up went her staysail, the tack where the peak should be; and away raged Hurry Home “over the wet ways of the teeming sea” at a good two knots if not a two-point-five. She was a mile off when the cowboys glanced over their shoulders in a meaningful way, then rose and led me back to the clearing and the cookhouse.