CHAPTER XXVII

Journey on the Roberta; the winged cockroaches; arrival at a Swiss paradise in the valley of Oomoa.

I sailed from Tai-o-hae for an unknown port, carried by the schooner Roberta, which had brought the white mare from Atuona and whose skipper had bore so well the white banner of Joan in the procession that did her honor. The Roberta was the only vessel in those waters and, sailing as she did at the whim of her captain and the necessities of trade, none knew when she might return to Nuka-hiva, so I could but accept the opportunity she offered of reaching the southern group of islands again, and trust to fortune or favor to return me to my own island of Hiva-oa.

The Roberta lay low in the water, not so heavily sparred as the Morning Star, or with her under-cut stern, but old and battered, built for the business of a thief-catcher, and with a history as scarred as her hull and as slippery as her decks. Was she not once the Herman, and before that something else, and yet earlier something else, built for the Russians to capture the artful poachers of the Smoky Sea? And later a poacher herself, and still later stealing men, a black-birder, seizing the unoffending natives of these South Seas and selling them into slavery of mine or plantation, of guano-heap and sickening alien clime. Her decks have run blood, and heard the wailing of the gentle savage torn from his beloved home and lashed or clubbed into submission by the superior white. Name and color and rig had changed time and again, owners and masters had gone to Davy Jones's locker; the old brass cannon on her deck had raked the villages of the Marquesans and witnessed a thousand deeds of murder and rapine.

I pulled myself aboard by a topping-lift, climbed upon the low cabin-house, and jumped down to the tiny poop where Jerome Capriata held the helm.

This Corsican, with his more than sixty years, most of them in these waters, was a Marquesan in his intuitive skill in handling his schooner in all weather, for knowing these islands by a glimpse of rock or tree, for landing and taking cargo in all seas. Old and worn, like the Roberta, he was known to all who ranged the southern ocean. What romances he had lived and seen were hidden in his grizzled bosom, for he said little, and nothing of himself.

The supercargo, Henry Lee, a Norwegian of twenty-five years, six of which he had passed among the islands, set out the rum and wine and a clay bottle of water. He introduced me to Père Olivier, a priest of the mission, whose charge was in the island of Fatu-hiva. From him I learned that the Roberta was bound for Oomoa, a port of that Island.

That I had not been given the vaguest idea what our first landfall would be was indicative of the secrecy maintained by these traders in the competition for copra. The supply being limited, often it is the first vessel on the spot after a harvest that is able to buy it, and captains of schooners guard their movements as an army its own during a campaign. The traders trust one another as a cat with a mouse trusts another cat.

The priest was sitting on a ledge below the taffrail, and I spoke to him in Spanish, as I had heard it was his tongue. His buenos dias in reply was hearty, and his voice soft and rich. A handsome man was Padre Olivier, though in sad disorder. His black soutane, cut like the woolen gown of our grandmothers, was soaking wet, and his low rough shoes were muddy. A soiled bandana was about his head. His finely chiseled features, benign and intelligent, were framed by a snow-white beard, and his eyes, large and limpid, looked benevolence itself. He was all affability, and eager to talk about everything in the world.

The rain, which all day had been falling at intervals, began again, and as the Roberta entered the open sea, she began to kick up her heels. Our conversation languished. When the supercargo called us below for dinner, pride and not appetite made me go. The priest answered with a groan. Padre Olivier was prostrate on the deck, his noble head on a pillow, his one piece of luggage, embroidered with the monogram of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the needlework of the nuns of Atuona.

"I am seasick if I wade in the surf," said the priest, in mournful jest.

The Roberta's cabin was a dark and noisome hole, filled with demijohns and merchandise, with two or three untidy bunks in corners, the air soaked with the smells of thirty years of bilge-water, sealskins, copra, and the cargoes of island traffic. Capriata, Harry Lee, and I sat on boxes at a rough table, which we clutched as the Roberta pitched and rolled.

When the ragged cook brought the first dish, unmistakably a cat swimming in a liquid I could have sworn by my nose to be drippings from an ammonia tank, I protested a lack of hunger for any food. My ruse passed for the moment, but was exposed by a flock or swarm of cockroaches, which, scenting a favorite food, suddenly sprang upon the table and upon us, leaping and flying into the plates and drawing Corsican curses from Capriata and Norwegian maledictions from Lee. I did not wait to see them throwing the invaders from the battlements of the table into the moat of salt water and spilt wine below, but quickly, though feebly, climbed to the deck and laid myself beside Père Olivier, nor could cries that the enemy had been defeated and that "only a few" were flying about, summon me below again.

Père Olivier and I stayed prone all night in alternate pelting rain and flooding moonlight, as a fair wind bowled us along at six knots an hour. Padre Olivier, between naps, recited his rosary to take his mind from his woes. I could tell when he finished a decade by his involuntary start as he began a new one. I had no such comfort as beads and prayers, and the flight of those schooner griffins had struck me in the solar plexus of imagination.

"Accept them as stations of the cross," said the priest. "This life is but a step to heaven."

I replied with some comments indicating my belief that cockroaches belonged on a still lower rung, and going in an opposite direction.

"I know those blattes, those saligauds," he said with sympathy. "They are sent by Satan to provoke us to blasphemy. I never go below."

Those pests of insects can hardly be estimated at their true dreadfulness by persons unacquainted with the infamous habits of the nocturnal beetle of the tropics. Sluggish creatures in the temperate zone, in warm countries they develop the power of flying, and obstacles successfully interposed to their progress in countries where they merely crawl are ineffectual here. They had entire possession of the Roberta.

The supercargo, Lee, was not to be blamed, for he told me that once he had taken time in port to capture by poisonous lures a number he calculated at eight thousand, and that within a month those who had escaped had repopulated the old schooner as before. Then he despaired, and let them have sway. To sleep or eat among them was not possible to me, and the voyage was a nightmare not relieved by an incident of the second night.

Capriata, whose feet were calloused from going bare for years, awoke from a deep slumber that had been aided by rum, to find that the cockroaches in his berth had eaten through the half inch or more of hard skin and had begun to devour his flesh. With blasphemous and blood-chilling yells he bounded on deck, where he sat treating the wounds and cursing unrestrainedly for some time before joining Père Olivier and me in democratic slumber on the bare boards. Several weeks later his feet had not recovered from their envenomed sores.

When eight bells sounded the hour of four, I got upon my feet and in the mellow dawn saw a panorama of peak and precipice, dark and threatening, the coast of Fatu-hiva and the entrance to Oomoa Bay, the southernmost island of the Marquesas, and the harbor in which the first white men who saw the islands anchored over three hundred years ago.

Those Spaniards, on whose ships the cross was seen in cabin and forecastle, on gun and halberd, murdered many Marquesans at Oomoa to glut their taste for blood. The standard of death the white flew then has never been lowered. Oomoa and Hanavave, the adjacent bay and village, were resorts for whalers, who brought a plague of ills that reduced the population of Fatu-hiva from many thousands to less than three hundred. Consumption was first brought to the islands by one of these whalers, and made such alarming inroads on the people of Hanavave that most of the remainder forsook their homes and crossed to the island of Tahuata, to escape the devil the white man had let loose among them.

We sailed on very slowly after the mountains had robbed us of the breeze, and when daylight succeeded the false dawn, we dropped our mud hooks a thousand feet from the beach. On it we could see a little wooden church and two dwellings, dwarfed to miniature by the grim pinnacles of rock, crude replicas of the towers of the Alhambra, slender minarets beside the giant cliffs, which were clothed with creeping plants in places and in places bare as the sides of a living volcano.

The fantastic and majestic assemblage of rock shapes on the shores of Fatu-hiva appeared as if some Herculean sculptor with disordered brain and mighty hand had labored to reproduce the fearful chimeras of his dreams.

The priest and I, with the supercargo, went ashore in a boat at six o'clock, and reached a beach as smooth and inviting as that of Atuona. A canoe was waiting for Père Olivier; he climbed into it at once, his black wet robe clinging to him, and called "Adios!" as his men paddled rapidly for Hanavave, where he was to say mass and hear confessions.

Lee and I took a road lined with a wall of rocks, and passing many sorts of trees and plants entered an enclosure through a gate.

After a considerable walk through a thrifty plantation, we were in front of a European house which gave signs of comfort and taste. At the head of a flight of stairs on the broad veranda was a man in gold-rimmed eye-glasses and a red breechclout. His well-shaped, bald head and punctilious manner would have commanded attention in any attire.

I was introduced to Monsieur François Grelet, a Swiss, who had lived here for more than twenty years, and who during that time had never been farther away than a few miles. Not even Tahiti had drawn him to it. Since he arrived, at the age of twenty-four years, he had dwelt contentedly in Oomoa.

After we had chatted for a few moments he invited me to be his guest. I thought of the Roberta and those two kinds of cockroaches, the Blatta orientalis and the Blatta germanica, who raid by night and by day respectively; I looked at Grelet's surroundings, and I accepted. While the Roberta gathered what copra she could and flitted, I became a resident of Oomoa until such time as chance should give me passage to my own island.

Twenty years before my host had planted the trees that embowered his home. With the Swiss farmer's love of order, he had neglected nothing to make neat, as nature had made beautiful, his surroundings.

"I learned agriculture and dairying on my father's farm in Switzerland," said Grelet. "At school I learned more of their theory, and when I had seen the gay cities of Europe, I went to the new world to live. I was first at Pecos City, New Mexico, where I had several hundred acres' of government land. I brought grape-vines from Fresno, in California, but the water was insufficient for the sterile soil, and I was forced to give up my land. From San Francisco I sailed on the brig Galilee for Tahiti. I have never finished the journey, for when the brig arrived at Tai-o-hae I left her and installed myself on the Eunice, a small trading-schooner, and for a year I remained aboard her, visiting all the islands of the Marquesas and becoming so attached to them that I bought land and settled down here."

Grelet looked about him and smiled.

"It isn't bad, hein?"

It was not. From the little cove where his boat-house stood a road swept windingly to his house through a garden of luxuriant verdure. Mango and limes, breadfruit and cocoanut, pomme de Cythère, orange and papaws, banana and alligator-pear, candlenut and chestnut, mulberry and sandalwood, tou, the bastard ebony, and rosewood, the rose-apple with purple tasseled flowers and delicious fruit, the pistachio and the badamier, scores of shrubs and bushes and magnificent tree-ferns, all on a tangled sward of white spider-lilies, great, sweet-smelling plants, an acre of them, and with them other ferns of many kinds, and mosses, the nodding taro leaves and the ti, the leaves which the Fatu-hivans make into girdles and wreaths; all grew luxuriantly, friendly neighbors to the Swiss, set there by him or volunteering for service in the generous way of the tropics.

The lilies, oranges, and pandanus trees yielded food for the bees, whose thatched homes stood thick on the hillside above the house. Grelet was a skilled apiarist, and replenished his melliferous flocks by wild swarms enticed from the forests. The honey he strained and bottled, and it was sought of him by messengers from all the islands.

Orchard and garden beyond the house gave us Valencia and Mandarin oranges, lemons, feis, Guinea cherries, pineapples, Barbadoes cherries, sugar-cane, sweet-potatoes, watermelons, cantaloups, Chile peppers, and pumpkins. Watercress came fresh from the river.

Cows and goats browsed about the garden, but Grelet banned pigs to a secluded valley to run wild. One of the cows was twenty-two years old, but daily gave brimming buckets of milk for our refreshment. Beef and fish, breadfruit and taro, good bread from American flour, rum, and wine both red and white, with bowls of milk and green cocoanuts, were always on the table, a box of cigars, packages of the veritable Scaferlati Supérieur tobacco, and the Job papers, and a dozen pipes. No king could fare more royally than this Swiss, who during twenty years had never left the forgotten little island of Fatu-hiva.

His house, set in this bower of greenery, of flowers and perfumes, was airy and neat, whitewashed both inside and out, with a broad veranda painted black. Two bedrooms, a storeroom in which he sold his merchandise, and a workroom, sufficed for all his needs. The veranda was living-room and dining-room; raised ten feet from the earth on breadfruit-tree pillars placed on stone, it provided a roof for his forge, for his saddle-and-bridle room, and for the small kitchen.

The ceilings in the house were of wood, but on the veranda he had cleverly hung a canvas a foot below the roof. The air circulated above it, bellying it out like a sail and making the atmosphere cool. Under this was his dining-table, near a very handsome buffet, both made by Grelet of the false ebony, for he was a good carpenter as he was a crack boatsman, farmer, cowboy, and hunter. Here we sat over pipe and cigarette after dinner, wine at our elbows, the garden before us, and discussed many things.

Grelet had innumerable books in French and German, all the great authors old and modern; he took the important reviews of Germany and France, and several newspapers. He knew much more than I of history past and present, of the happenings in the great world, art and music and invention, finances and politics. He could name the cabinets of Europe, the characters and records of their members, or discuss the quality of Caruso's voice as compared with Jean de Reszke's, though he had heard neither. Twenty-two years ago he had left everything called civilization, he had never been out of the Marquesas since that time; he lived in a lonely valley in which there was no other man of his tastes and education, and he was content.

"I have everything I want; I grow it or I make it. My horses and cattle roam the hills; if I want meat, beef or goat or pig, I go or I send a man to kill an animal and bring it to me. Fish are in the river and the bay; there is honey in the hives; fruit and vegetables in the garden, wood for my furniture, bark for the tanning of hides. I cure the leather for saddles or chair-seats with the bark of the rose-wood. Do you know why it is called rose-wood? I will show you. Its bark has the odor of roses when freshly cut. Yes, I have all that I want. What do I need from the great cities?"

He tamped down the tobacco in his pipe and puffed it meditatively.

"A man lives only a little while, hein? He should ask himself what he wants from life. He should look at the world as it is. These traders want money, buying and selling and cheating to get it. What is money compared to life? Their life goes in buying and selling and cheating. Life is made to be lived pleasantly. Me, I do what I want to do with mine, and I do it in a pleasant place."

His pipe went out while he gazed at the garden murmurous in the twilight. He knocked out the dottle, refilled the bowl and lighted the tobacco.

"You should have seen this island when I came. These natives die too fast. Ah, if I could only get labor, I could make this valley produce enough for ten thousand people. I could load the ships with copra and cotton and coffee."

He was twenty-two years and many thousands of miles from the great cities of Europe, but he voiced the wail of the successful man the world over. If he could get labor, he could turn it into building his dreams to reality, into filling his ships with his goods for his profit. But he had not the labor, for the fruits of a commercial civilization had killed the islanders who had had their own dreams, their own ships, and their own pleasures and profits in life.