By Reef and Palm, George Lewis Becke [summer reading list .txt] 📗

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A hawk-bill turtle, huge, black, and misshapen, slid out from beneath the dark ledge of the reef, and swam slowly across the pool, and then, between the masts, sank to the bottom.

"'Twas six years ago," said Nerida, as we raised our heads.

That night, as the PALESTINE sped noiselessly before the trade wind to the westward she told me, in the old Funafuti tongue, the tragedy of the ALIDA.

* * * * *


"The schooner," she said, "sailed very quickly, for on the fifteenth day out from Funafuti we saw the far-off peaks of Strong's Island. I was glad, for Kusaie is not many days' sail from Ponape--and I hated to be on the ship. The man with the blue eyes filled me with fear when he looked at me; and he and the captain and mate were for ever talking amongst themselves in whispers.

"There were five native sailors on board--two were countrymen of mine, and three were Tafitos [Natives of the Gilbert Islands].

"One night we were close to a little island called Mokil [Duperrey's Island], and Taplin and I were awakened by a loud cry on deck; my two countrymen were calling on him to help them. He sprang on deck, pistol in hand, and, behold! the schooner was laid to the wind with the land close to, and the boat alongside, and the three white men were binding my country-men with ropes, because they would not get into the boat.

"'Help us, O friend!' they called to my husband in their own tongue; 'the white men say that if we go not ashore here at Mokil they will kill us. Help us--for they mean evil to thee and Nerida. He with the yellow moustache wants her for his wife.'

"There were quick, fierce words, and then my husband struck Motley on the head with his pistol and felled him, and then pointed it at the mate and the captain, and made them untie the men, and called to the two Tafito sailors who were in the boat to let her tow astern till morning.

"His face was white with the rage that burned in him, and all that night he walked to and fro and let me sleep on the deck near him.

"'To-morrow,' he said, 'I will make this captain land us on Mokil;' it was for that he would not let the sailors come up from the boat.

"At dawn I slept soundly. Then I awoke with a cry of fear, for I heard a shot, and then a groan, and my husband fell across me, and the blood poured out of his mouth and ran down my arms and neck. I struggled to rise, and he tried to draw his pistol, but the man with yellow hair and blue eyes, who stood over him, stabbed him twice in the back. Then the captain and mate seized him by the arms and lifted him up. As his head fell back I saw there was blood streaming from a hole in his chest."

She ceased, and leant her cheek against the face of the little girl, who looked in childish wonder at the tears that streamed down her mother's face.

* * * * *


"They cast him over into the sea with life yet in him, and ere he sank, Motley (that devil with the blue eyes) stood with one foot on the rail and fired another shot, and laughed when he saw the bullet strike. Then he and the other two talked.

"'Let us finish these Pelew men, ere mischief come of it,' said Riedermann, the captain.

"But the others dissuaded him. There was time enough, they said, to kill them. And if they killed them now, there would be but three sailors to work the ship. And Motley looked at me and laughed, and said he, for one, would do no sailor's work yet awhile.

"Then they all trooped below, and took me with them--me, with my husband's blood not yet dried on my hands and bosom. They made me get liquor for them to drink, and they drank and laughed, and Motley put his bloodied hand around my waist and kissed me, and the others laughed still more.

"In a little while Riedermann and the mate were so drunken that no words came from them, and they fell on the cabin floor. Then Motley, who could stand, but staggered as he walked, came and sat beside me and kissed me again, and said he had always loved me; but I pointed to the blood of my husband that stained my skin and clotted my hair together, and besought him to first let me wash it away.

"'Wash it there,' he said, and pointed to his cabin.

"'Nay,' said I, 'see my hair. Let me then go on deck, and I can pour water over my head.'

"But he held my hand tightly as we came up, and my heart died within me; for it was in my mind to spring overboard and follow my husband.

"He called to one of the Tafito men to bring water, but none came; for they, too, were drunken with liquor they had stolen from the hold, where there was plenty in red cases and white cases--gin and brandy. "But my two countrymen were sober; one of them steered the ship, and the other stood beside him with an axe in his hand, for they feared the Tafito men, who are devils when they drink grog.

"'Get some water,' said Motley, to Juan--he who held the axe; and as he brought it, he said, 'How is it, tattooed dog, that thou art so slow to move?' and he struck him in the teeth, and as he struck he fell.

"Ah! that was my time! Ere he could rise I sprang at him, and Juan raised the axe and struck off his right foot; and then Liro, the man who steered, handed me his knife. It was a sharp knife, and I stabbed him, even as he had stabbed my husband, till my arm was tired, and all my hate of him had died away in my heart.

* * * * *


"There was quick work then. My two countrymen went below into the cabin and took Motley's pistol from the table; ... then I heard two shots.

"GUK! He was a fat, heavy man, that Riedermann, the captain; the three of us could scarce drag him up on deck and cast him over the side, with the other two.

"Then Juan and Liro talked, and said: 'Now for these Tafito men; they, too, must die.' They brought up rifles, and went to the forepart of the schooner, where the Tafito men lay in a drunken sleep, and shot them dead.

"In two more days we saw land--the island we have left but now, and because that there were no people living there--only empty houses could we see--Juan and Liro sailed the schooner into the lagoon.

"We took such things on shore as we needed, and then Juan and Liro cut away the topmasts and towed the schooner to the deep pool, where they made holes in her, so that she sank, away out of the sight of men.

* * * * *


"Juan and Liro were kind to me, and when my child was born, five months after we landed, they cared for me tenderly, so that I soon became strong and well.

"Only two ships did we ever see, but they passed far-off like clouds upon the sea-rim; and we thought to live and die there by ourselves. Then there came a ship, bringing back the people who had once lived there. They killed Juan and Liro, but let me and the child live. The rest I have told you.... How is this captain named? ... He is a handsome man, and I like him."

* * * * *


We landed Nerida at Yap, in the Western Carolines. A year afterwards, when I left the PALESTINE, I heard that Packenham had given up the sea, was trading in the Pelew Group, and was permanently married, and that his wife was the only survivor of the ill-fated ALIDA.


THE CHILEAN BLUEJACKET


A Tale Of Easter Island

Alone, in the most solitary part of the Eastern Pacific, midway between the earthquake-shaken littoral of Chili and Peru, and the thousand palm-clad islets of the Low Archipelago, lies an island of the days "when the world was young." By the lithe-limbed, soft-eyed descendants of the forgotten and mysterious race that once quickened the land, this lonely outlier of the isles of the Southern Seas is called in their soft tongue Rapanui, or the Great Rapa.

* * * * *


A hundred and seventy years ago Roggewein, on the dawn of an Easter Sunday, discerned through the misty, tropic haze the grey outlines of an island under his lee beam, and sailed down upon it.

He landed, and even as the grim and hardy old navigator gazed upon and wondered at the mysteries of the strange island, so this day do the cunning men of science, who, perhaps once in thirty years, go thither in the vain effort to read the secret of an all-but-perished race. And they can tell us but vaguely that the stupendous existing evidences of past glories are of immense and untold age, and show their designers to have been coeval with the builders of the buried cities of Mexico and Peru; beyond that, they can tell us nothing.

Who can solve the problem? What manner of an island king was he who ruled the builders of the great terraced platforms of stone, the carvers of the huge blocks of lava, the hewers-out with rudest tools of the Sphinx-like images of trachyte, whose square, massive, and disdainful faces have for unnumbered centuries gazed upwards and outwards over the rolling, sailless swell of the mid-Pacific?

* * * * *


And the people of Rapa-nui of to-day? you may ask. Search the whole Pacific--from Pylstaart, the southern sentinel of the Friendlies, to the one-time buccaneer-haunted, far-away Pelews; thence eastward through the white-beached coral atolls of the Carolines and Marshalls, and southwards to the cloud-capped Marquesas and the sandy stretches of the Paumotu--and you will find no handsomer men or more graceful women than the light-skinned people of Rapa-nui.

* * * * *


Yet are they but the survivors of a race doomed--doomed from the day that Roggewein in his clumsy, high-pooped frigate first saw their land, and marvelled at the imperishable relics of a dead greatness. With smiling faces they welcomed him--a stranger from an unknown, outside world, with cutlass at waist and pistol in hand--as a god; he left them a legacy of civilisation--a hideous and cruel disease that swept through the amiable and unsuspicious race as an epidemic, and slew its thousands, and scaled with the hand of Death and Silence the eager life that had then filled the square houses of lava in many a town from the wave-beaten cliffs of Terano Kau to Ounipu in the west.

* * * * *


Ask of the people now, "Whence came ye? and whose were the hands that fashioned these mighty images and carved upon these stones?" and in their simple manner they will answer, "From Rapa, under the setting sun, came our fathers; and we were then a great people, even as the ONEONE [sand] of the beach.... Our Great King was it, he whose name is forgotten by us, that caused these temples and cemeteries