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PREFACE ix

PREFACE The islands of the South Seas are places of an interest curiously limited. The ethnological problem presented by the native is interesting only to men of science, commerce is negligible, there is little real agriculture, and no industry at all. There remains the charm of living among people whose outlook upon life is basically different from our own; of living with a simplicity foreign to anything in one's experience, amid surroundings of a beauty unreal both in actuality and in retrospect.

It is impossible to write of the islands as one would write of France or Mexico or Japan--the accepted viewpoint of the traveler is not applicable here. A simple attempt to impart information would prove singularly monotonous, and one is driven to essay a different task; to pry into the life of the mingling races, hoping to catch something of its significance and atmosphere. In making such an attempt it is necessary at times to dig deeper than would be consistent with good taste if names were mentioned, and for this reason--in the case of certain small islands--the ancient Polynesian names have been used instead of those given on the chart. All of the islands described are to be found in the Paumotu, Society, and Hervey groups.

J. N. H. C. B. N.

Landfall

Faery Lands Of the South Seas

A Leisurely Approach

I don't remember precisely when it was that Nordhoff and I first talked of this adventure. The idea had grown upon us, one might say, with the gradual splendor of a tropical sunrise. We were far removed from the tropics at that time. We were, in fact, in Paris and had behind us the greatest adventure we shall ever know. On the Place de la Concorde and along the Champs-?lys?es stood rank on rank of German cannon, silent enough now, but still menacing, their muzzles tilted skyward at that ominous slant one came to know so well. For a month we had seen them so, children perched astride them on sunny afternoons, rolling pebbles down their smooth black throats; veterans in soiled and faded horizon blue, with the joy of this new quiet world bright on their faces, opening breech-blocks, examining mechanism with the skill of long use at such employment; with a kind of wondering hesitation in their movements too, as though at any moment they expected those sinister monsters in the fantastic colors of Harlequin to spring into life again.

Those were glorious days! Never again, I think, will there be such a happy time as that in Paris. The boulevards were crowded, the tables filled under every awning in front of the caf?s; and yet there seemed to be a deep silence everywhere, a silence intensified by the faint rustling of autumn leaves and the tramping of innumerable feet. One heard the sound of voices, of laughter, of singing, the subdued, continuous rumble of traffic; but not a harsh cry, not a discordant note. All the world seemed to be making holiday at the passing of a solemn, happy festival.

Well, we had kept it with the others--Nordhoff and I--and have the memory of it now, to be enjoyed over and over again as the years pass. But there was danger that we might outstay the freshness of that period. We were anxious to avoid that for the sake of our memories, if for nothing else. While we were not yet free to order our movements as we chose, we pretended that we were, and so one rainy evening in the December following the armistice we decided to call that chapter of experience closed and to go forward with the making of new plans.

For we meant to have further adventure of one kind or another--adventure in the sense of unexpected incident rather than of hazardous activity. That had been a settled thing between us for a long time. We had no craving for excitement, but turned to plans for uneventful wanderings which we had sketched in broad outlines months before. They had been left, of necessity, vague; but now that any of them might be made realities, now that we had leisure and a reasonable hope for the fulfillment of plans--well, we had cause for a contentment which was something deeper than happiness.

The best of it was that the close of the war found us with nothing to prevent our doing pretty much as we chose. We might have had houses or lands to anchor us, or promising careers to drag us back into the bewilderments of modern civilization; but, fortunately or unfortunately, there were none of these things. The chance of war had given us a freedom far beyond anyone's desert. We had some misgivings about accepting so splendid a gift, which the event sometimes proves to be the most doubtful of benefits. Viewed in the light of our longings, however, our capacity for it seemed incalculable, and so, by degrees, we allowed our minds to turn to an old allurement--the South Pacific. It became irresistible the more we talked of it, longing as we then were for the solitude of islands. The objection to this choice was that the groups of islands which we meant to visit have been endowed with an atmosphere of pseudoromance displeasing to the fastidious mind.

But there was not the slightest chance of our being pioneers wherever we might go. We could not hope to see with the eyes of the old explorers who first came upon those far-off places. We must expect great changes. But much as we might regret for the purposes of this adventure that we had not been born two hundred years earlier, comfort was not wanting to our situation. Had we been contemporaries and fellow-explorers with De Quiros, or Cook, or Bougainville we should have missed the Great War.

We came within view of Tahiti one windless February morning--such a view as Pedro Fernandez de Quiros himself must have had more than three hundred years before. The sky to the west was still bright with stars and but barely touched with the very ghost of light, giving it the appearance of a great water, with a few clouds, like islands, immeasurably distant. Half an hour later the islands themselves lay in full sunlight, jagged peaks falling away in steep ridges to the sea. Against sheer walls still in shadow in upland valleys one could see a few terns; but there was no other movement, no sound, nor any sign of a human habitation--nothing to shatter the illusion of primitive loveliness.

It was illusion, of course, but the reality was nothing like so disappointing as I had feared it would be. Outwardly, two hundred years of progress have wrought no great amount of havoc. There is a little port, a busy place on boat days. But when the steamer has emptied the town of her passengers, the silence flows down again from the hills. Off the main harbor-front thoroughfare streets lie empty to the eye for half hours at a time. Chinese merchants sit at the doorways of their shops, waiting for trade. Now and then broad pools of sunlight flow over the gayly flowered dresses of a group of native women, scarcely to be seen otherwise as they move slowly through tunnels of moist green gloom; or a small schooner, like a detail gifted with sudden mobility in a picture, will back away from shore, cross the harbor, bright with the reflections of clouds, and stand out to sea. In the stillness of the noon siesta one hears at infrequent intervals the resounding thud of ripe fruits as they tear their way to the ground through barriers of foliage; and at night the melancholy thunder of the surf on the reef outside the harbor, and the slithering of bare feet in the moonlit streets.

Coming from a populous exile, doubly attracted for that reason by the lure of unpeopled places, Nordhoff and I sought here an indication of what we might find later elsewhere. The few thousands of natives, whites, Orientals, half-castes, live in a charmed circle of low land fronting the sea, conscious of their mountains, no doubt, but the whites without curiosity, the Orientals without desire, the natives without remembrance. There must have been a maze of trails in the old days, leading down from the rich valleys. Now they are overgrown, untraveled, lost. Since the old life is no more than a memory, one is glad for the desolation, and grateful to the French lack of enterprise which surely is the only way to account for it.

But one can't be wholly matter of fact in writing of these islands. They are not real in the ordinary sense, but belong, rather, to the realm of the imagination. And it is only in the imagination that you can conceive of your ever having been there, once you are back again in a well-plowed sea track. As for the people, whether native or alien, in order to focus them in a world of reality it is necessary to remember what they said or did; what they ate; what sort of clothing they wore. Otherwise they elude you just as the islands do.

"Now, there's Tikehau," one of them said to me before I had been out there. "That's a round atoll; and Rahiroa is sort o' square like, an' so on. Some with passes and a good anchorage inside the lagoon. Others you got to lay outside an' take your cargo off the reef in a small boat."

But, to go back to Crichton, no one knew who he was or where he came from. The manager of the Inter-Island Trading Company had lived in Papeete for years and had never seen him until the day when he turned up at the water front trundling a wheelbarrow loaded with four crates of chickens and an odd lot of plantation tools and fishing tackle. Following him were two native boys carrying a weather-blackened sea chest, and an old woman with an enormous roll of bedding tied loosely in a pandanus mat. That was about an hour before the schooner weighed anchor. He stacked his gear neatly on the beach and then went on board, asking for passage to Tanao.

"No, sir," the manager said, in telling about it afterward, "I never laid eyes on him until that moment, and I don't know anyone who had. Where's he been hiding himself? And why in the name of common sense does he want to go to Tanao? There's no copra or pearl shell there--not enough, anyway, to make it worth a man's while going after it."

Tino, the supercargo, was equally puzzled.

He was not able to figure it out in this case. The old woman was talkative; but the information he gathered from her only stimulated his curiosity the more. She owned Tanao, an atom of an atoll miles out of the beaten track even of the Paumotu schooners. There had never been more than a score of people living on it, she said, and now there was no one. Crichton had taken a long lease on it, and was going out there--as he told me afterward--"to do my writing and thinking undisturbed."

The women, with one exception, were barefooted, bareheaded, but otherwise conventionally dressed according to European or American standards. This, I suppose, is an outrageous betrayal of a trade secret, if one may say that writers of South Sea narratives belong to a trade. Those seriously interested in the islands have, of course, known the truth about them for years; but I believe it is still a popular misconception that the women who inhabit them--no one seems to be interested in the men--are even to this day half-savage, unself-conscious creatures who display their charms to the general gaze with na?ve indifference. Half-savage they may still be, but not unself-conscious in the old sense. There are a few, to be sure, who, by means of the bribes or the entreaties of itinerant journalists and photographers, may be persuaded to disrobe before the camera for a moment's space; and in this way the primitive legend is preserved to the outside world. But, as I told Nordhoff, although we are itinerant, we may as well be occasionally truthful and so gain, perhaps, a certain amount of begrudged credit.

The one exception was a girl of about nineteen. She came on board balancing unsteadily on high French heels, her brown legs darkening the sheen of her white-cotton stockings. I had seen her the day before as she passed below the veranda of Le Cercle Bougainville, the everyman's club of the port. She walked with the same air of precarious balance, and her broad-brimmed straw hat was set at the jaunty angle American women affect.

There was another girl sitting on the deck not far from me, with an illustrated supplement of an American paper spread out before her. It was an ancient copy. There were pictures of battlefields in France; of soldiers marching down Fifth Avenue; a tennis tournament at Longwood; aeroplanes in flight; motor races at Indianapolis; actresses, society women, dressmakers' models making a display of corsets and other women's equipment--pictures out of the welter of modern life. The little Paumotuan girl appeared to be deeply interested. With her chin resting on her hands and her elbows braced against her knees, she went from picture to picture, but looked longest at those of the women who smiled or posed self-consciously, or looked disdainfully at her from the pages. I would have given a good deal to know what, if anything, was passing in her mind. All at once she gave a little sigh, crumpled the paper into a ball, and threw it at the monkey, who caught it and began tearing it in pieces. She laughed and clapped her hands at this, called the attention of the others, and in a moment men, women, and children had gathered round, laughing and shouting, throwing bits of coconut shell, mango seeds, banana skins, faster than the monkey could catch them.

The spontaneity of the merriment did one's heart good. Even the old men and women laughed, not in the indulgent manner of parents or grandparents, but as heartily as the children themselves. Unconscious of the uproar, one of the Chinese merchants was lying on a thin mattress against the cabin skylight. Although he was sound asleep, his teeth were bare in a grin of ghastly suavity, and his left eye was partly open, giving him an air of constant watchfulness. He was dreaming, I suppose, of copra, of pearl shell--in kilos, tons, shiploads; of its market value in Papeete, in San Francisco, in Marseilles, etc. Well, the whites get their share of these commodities and the Chinamen theirs; but the natives have a commodity of laughter which is vastly more precious, and as long as they do have it one need not feel very sorry for them.

Dusk gathered rapidly while I was thinking of these things. Heavy clouds hung over Tahiti and Moorea, clinging about the shoulders of the mountains whose peaks, rising above them, were still faintly visible against the somber glory of the sky. They seemed islands of sheer fancy, looked at from the sea. It would have been worth all that one could give to have seen them then as De Quiros saw them, or Cook, or the early missionaries; to have added to one's own sense of their majesty, the solemn and more childlike awe of the old explorers, born of their feeling of utter isolation from their kind with the presence of the unknown on every hand. It is this feeling of awe, rarely to be known by travelers in these modern days, which pervades many of the old tales of wanderings in remote places; which one senses in looking at old sketches made from the decks of ships, of the shores of heathen lands.

The wind freshened, then came a deluge of cool water, blotting out the rugged outlines against the sky. When it had passed it was deep night. The forward deck was a huddle of shelters made of mats and bits of canvas, but these were being taken down now that the rain had stopped. I saw an old woman sitting near the companionway, her head in clear relief against a shaft of yellow light. She was wet through and the mild misfortune broke the ice between us, if one may use a metaphor very inapt for the tropics. With her face half in shadow she reminded me of the typical, Anglo-Saxon grandmother, although no grandmother of my acquaintance would have sat unperturbed through that squall and indifferent to her wet clothing afterward. She didn't appear to mind it in the least, and now that it was over fished a paper of tobacco and a strip of pandanus leaf out of the bundle on which she was sitting. She rolled a pinch of tobacco in the leaf, twisting it into a tight corkscrew, and lit it at the first attempt. Then she began talking in a deep, resonant voice, and by a simplicity and an extraordinary lucidity of gesture conveyed the greater part of her meaning even to an alien like myself. It was not, alas! a typical accomplishment. I have not since found others similarly gifted.

She was Crichton's landlady, the owner of Tanao. "Pupure" she called him, because of his fair hair. I couldn't make out what she was driving at for a little while. I understood at last that she wanted to know about his family--where his father was, and his mother. I suppose she thought I must know him, being a white man. They have queer ideas of the size of our world. He was young. He must have people somewhere. She, too, couldn't understand his wanting to go to Tanao; and I gathered from her perplexity that he hadn't confided his purposes to her to any extent. I couldn't enlighten her, of course, and at length, realizing this, she wrapped herself in her mat to preserve the damp warmth of her body, and dozed off to sleep.

I went below for a blanket and some dry clothing, for the night air was uncomfortably cool after the rain. The cabin floor was strewn with sleeping forms. Three children were curled up in a corner like puppies in a box of sawdust. Little brown babies lay snugly bedded on bundles of clothing, the mothers themselves sleeping in the careless, trustful attitudes of children. The light from a swinging lamp threw leaping shadows on the walls; flowed smoothly over brown arms and legs; was caught in fault gleams in masses of loose black hair. And to complete the picture and make it wholly true to fact, cockroaches of the enormous winged variety ran with incredible speed over the oilcloth of the cabin table, or made sudden flying sallies out of dark corners to the food lockers and back again.

Some one came aft, walking along the rail in his bare feet. It was Oro, the cabin boy, who is taken with an enviable kind of madness at the full of the moon. He looked carefully around to make sure that everyone was asleep, then stood clasping and unclasping his hands in ecstasy, carrying on a one-sided conversation in a confidential undertone. Now and then he would smile and straightway become serious again, gazing with rapt, listening attention at the world of pure light; nodding his head at intervals in vigorous confirmation of some occult confidence. At length his figure receded, blurred, took on the quality of the moonlight, and I saw him no more.

In the Cloud of Islands

Ruau, the old Paumotuan woman, and the owner of Tanao, was the last of her family. There were relatives by marriage, but none of them would consent to live on so poor an atoll; and the original population, never large, had diminished, through death and migration, until at last she was left alone, living in her memories of other days, awed by the companionship of spirits present to her in strange and terrible shapes. At last she felt that she could endure it no longer; but it was many months before the smoke of one of her signal fires was seen by a passing schooner. She returned with it to Tahiti, and if she had been lonely before, she was tenfold lonelier there, so far from the graves of her husband and children. It was at this time that Crichton met her. He had been living at Tahiti for more than a year, on the lookout for just such an opportunity as Ruau offered him. Although only twenty-eight, he was in the tenth year of his wanderings, and had almost despaired of finding the place he had so long dreamed of and searched for. During that period he had been moving slowly eastward, through Borneo, New Guinea, the Solomons, the New Hebrides, the Tongas, the Cook Group. In some of these islands the climate was too powerful an enemy for a white man to contend with; in others there was no land available, or they lacked the solitude he wanted. This latter embarrassment was the one he had met at Tahiti. The fact is an illuminating commentary on his character. Most men would find exceptional opportunities for seclusion there; not on the seaboard but in the mountains; in the valleys winding deeply among them, where no one goes from year's end to year's end. Even those leading out to the sea are but little frequented in their upward reaches. But Crichton was very exacting in his requirements in this respect. He was one of those men who make few or no friends--one of those lonely spirits without the ties or the kindly human associations which make life pleasant to most of us. They wander the thinly peopled places of the earth, interested in a large way at what they see from afar or faintly hear, but looking on with quiet eyes; taking no part, being blessed or cursed by nature with a love of silence, of the unchanging peace of great solitudes. One reads of them now and then in fiction, and if they live in fiction it is because of men like Crichton, their prototypes in reality, seen for a moment as they slip apprehensively across some by-path leading from the outside world.

He had a little place at Tahiti, a walk of two hours and a quarter, he said, from the government offices in the port. He had to go there sometimes to attend to the usual formalities, and I have no doubt that he knew within ten seconds the length of the journey which would be a very distasteful one to him. I can imagine his uneasiness at what he saw and heard on those infrequent visits. An after-the-war renewal of activity, talk of trade, development, progress, would startle him into a waiting, listening attitude. Returning home, maps and charts would be got out and plans made against the day when it would be necessary for him to move on. He told me of his accidental meeting with Ruau, as he called the old Paumotuan woman. It came only a few days after the arrival from San Francisco of one of the monthly steamers. A crowd of tourists--stop-over passengers of a day--had somehow discovered the dim trail leading to his house. "They were much pleased with it," he said, adding, with restraint: "They took a good many pictures. I was rather annoyed at this, although, of course, I said nothing." No doubt they made the usual remarks: "Charming! So quaint!" etc.

It was the last straw for Crichton. So he made another visit to the government offices where he had his passport vis?ed. He meant to go to Maketea, a high phosphate island which stands like a gateway at the northwestern approach to the Low Archipelago. The phosphate would be worked out in time and the place abandoned, as other islands of that nature had been, to the seabirds. But on that same evening, while he was having dinner at a Chinaman's shop in town, he overheard Ruau trying to persuade some of her relatives to return with her to Tanao. He knew of the island. He is one of the few men who would know of it. He had often looked at it on his charts, being attracted by its isolated position. The very place for him! And the old woman, he said, when she learned that he wanted to go there, that he wanted to stay always--all his life--gripped his hands in both of hers and held them, crying softly, without saying anything more. The relatives made some objections to the arrangement at first. But the island being remote, poverty-stricken, haunted, they were soon persuaded to consent to a ten years' lease, with the option of renewal. Crichton promised, of course, to take care of Ruau as long as she lived, and at her death to bury her decently beside her husband.

"I wish I had come out here years ago. They appeal to the imagination, don't you think, all these islands?"

His volubility startled me. It was a shock to the senses, like the crash of a coconut on a tin roof heard in the profound stillness of an island night. There was my opportunity to throw off reserve and I lost it through my surprise. I merely said, "Yes, very much." An hour later we saw the captain, no larger than a penny doll, at the end of a long vista of empty beach, beckoning us to come back. We went aboard without having spoken again. It was an odd sort of relationship for two white men thrown into close contact on a small trading schooner in the loneliest ocean in the world, as Nordhoff put it. We were no more companionable in the ordinary sense than a pair of hermit crabs.

Crichton, I believe, was beyond the desire to keep in touch with the world he had left so many years before. His experiences there may have been bitter ones. At any rate, he never spoke of them, and I doubt if he thought of them often. People had little interest for him, not even those of the atolls which we visited. When on shore I usually found him on the outer beaches, away from the villages which lie along the lagoon. In most of the atolls the distance from beach to beach is only a few hundred yards, but the ocean side is unfrequented and solitary. On calm days when the tide begins to ebb the silence there is unearthly. The wide shore, hot and glaring in the sun, stretches away as far as the eye can reach, empty of life except for thousands of small hermit crabs moving into the shade of the palms. They snap into their shells at your approach and make fast the door as their houses fall, with a sound like the tinkling of hailstones, among heaps of broken coral. We waded along the shallows at low tide. When the wind was onshore and a heavy surf breaking over the outer edge of the reef, we sat as close to it as we could, watching the seas gathering far out, rising in sheer walls fringed with wind-whipped spray, which seemed higher than the island itself as they approached. It was a fascinating sight--the reef hidden in many places in a perpetual smoke of sunlight-filtered mist, through which the oncoming breakers could be seen dimly as they swept forward, curled, and fell. But one could not avoid a feeling of uneasiness, of insecurity, thinking of what had happened in those islands--most of them only a meter or two above sea level--in the hurricanes of the past; and of what would happen again at the coming of the next great storm.

We made landfalls at dawn, in midafternoon, late at night--saw the islands in aspects of beauty exceeding one's strangest imaginings. We penetrated farther and farther into a thousand-mile area of atoll-dotted ocean, discharging our cargo of lumber and corrugated iron, rice and flour and canned goods; taking on copra; carrying native passengers from one place to another. Sometimes we were out of sight of land for several days, beating into head winds under a slowly moving pageantry of clouds which alone gave assurance of the rotundity of the earth. When at last land appeared it seemed inaccessibly remote, at the summit of a long slope of water which we would never be able to climb. Sometimes for as long a period we skirted the shore line of a single atoll, the water deepening and shoaling under our keel in splotches of vague or vivid coloring. From a vantage point in the rigging one could see a segment of a vast circle of islands strung at haphazard on a thread of reef which showed a thin, clear line of changing red and white under the incessant battering of the surf. Several times upon going ashore we found the villages deserted, the inhabitants having gone to distant parts of the atoll for the copra-making season. In one village we came upon an old man too feeble to go with the others, apparently, sitting in the shade playing a phonograph. He had but three records: "Away to the Forest," "The Dance of the Nymphs Schottische," and "Just a Song at Twilight." The disks were as old as the instrument itself, no doubt, and the needles so badly worn that one could barely hear the music above the rasping of the mechanism. There was a groove on the vocal record where the needle caught, and the singer, a woman with a high, quavery voice, repeated the same phrase, "when the lights are low," over and over again. I can still hear it, even at this distance of time and place, and recall vividly to mind the silent houses, the wide, vacant street bright with fugitive sunshine, the lagoon at the end of it mottled with the shadows of clouds.

The sense of our remoteness grew upon me as the weeks and months passed. Once, rounding a point of land, we came upon two schooners lying inside the reef of a small atoll. One of them had left Papeete only a short while before. Her skipper gave us a bundle of old newspapers. Glancing through them that evening, I heard as in a dream the far-off clamor of the outside world--the shrieking of whistles, the roar of trains, the strident warnings of motors; but there was no reality, no allurement in the sound. I saw men carrying trivial burdens with an air of immense effort, of grotesque self-importance; scurrying in breathless haste on useless errands; gorging food without relish; sleeping without refreshment; taking their leisure without enjoyment; living without the knowledge of content; dying without ever having lived. The pictures which came to mind as I read were distorted, untrue, no doubt; for by that time I was almost as much attracted by the lonely life of the islands as my friend Crichton. My old feeling of restlessness was gone. In its place had come a certitude of happiness, a sense of well-being for which I can find no parallel this side of boyhood.

It was largely the result of living among people who are as permanently happy, I believe, as it is possible for humankind to be. And the more remote the island, the more slender the thread of communication with civilization as we know it, the happier they were. It was not in my imagination that I found this true, or that I had determined beforehand to see only so much of their life as might be agreeable and pleasant to me. On the contrary, if I had any bias at first, it was on the other side. Disillusionment is a sad experience and I had no desire to lay myself open to it. Therefore I listened willingly to the less favorable stories of native character which the traders, and others who know them, had to tell. But summed up dispassionately later, in the light of my own observations, it seemed to me that the faults of character of which they were accused were more like the natural shortcomings of children. In many respects the Paumotuans, like other divisions of the Polynesian family, are children who have never grown up, and one can't blame them for a lack of the artificial virtues which come only with maturity. They are without guile. They have little of the shrewdness or craftiness of some primitive peoples. At least so it appeared to me, making as careful a judgment of them as I could. I have often noticed how like children they are in their amazing trustfulness, their impulsive generosity, and in the intensity and briefness of their emotions.

The more I saw of their life, the more desirable it seemed that they might continue to escape any serious encroachments of European or American civilization. They have no doctors, because illness is almost unknown in their islands. Crime, insanity, feeblemindedness, evils all too common with us, are of such rare occurrence that one may say they do not exist. It may be said, too, without overstatement, that their community life very nearly approaches perfection. Every atoll is a little world to itself with a population varying from twenty-five to perhaps three hundred inhabitants. The chief, who is chosen informally by the men, serves for a period of four years under the sanction of the French government. He has very little to do in the exercise of his authority, for the people govern themselves, are law-abiding without law.

When I first learned that there are no schools throughout the islands I thought the French guilty of criminal neglect, but later I reversed this opinion. After all, why should they have schools? No education of ours could make them more generous, more kindly disposed to one another, more hospitable and courteous toward strangers, happier than they are now. Certainly it could not make them less selfish, covetous, rapacious, for most of them are as innocent of those vices as their own children. In a few of the richer, more accessible islands they are slowly changing in these respects, owing to the example set them by men of our own race. In another fifty years, perhaps, they may have learned to believe that material wealth is the only thing worth striving for. Then will come pride in their possessions, envy of those who have greater, contempt and suspicion for those who have less, and so an end to their happiness.

I had never before seen children growing up in a state of nature and I made full use of the rare opportunity. I spent most of my time with them; played on shore with them; went fishing and swimming with them; and found in the experience something better than a renewal of boyhood because of a keener sense of beauty, a more conscious, mature appreciation of the happiness one has in the simplest kinds of pleasures. Sometimes we started on our excursions at dawn; sometimes we made them by moonlight. I became a collector of shells in order to give some purpose to our expeditions along the reef. I couldn't have chosen a better interest, for they knew all about shells, where and when to find the best ones, and they could indulge their love of giving to a limitless extent. In the afternoons we went swimming in the lagoon. There I saw them at their best and happiest, in an element as necessary and familiar to them as it is to their parents. It is always a pleasure to watch children at play in the water, but those Paumotuan youngsters with their natural grace at swimming and diving put one under an enchantment. Many of the boys had water glasses and small spears of their own and went far from shore, catching fish. They lay face down on the surface of the water, swimming easily, with a great economy of motion, turning their heads now and then for a breath of air; and when they saw their prey they dived after it as skillfully as their fathers do and with nearly as much success. Seen against the bright floor of the lagoon, with swarms of brilliantly colored fish scattering before them, they seemed doubtfully human, the children of some forsaken merman rather than creatures who have need of air to breathe and solid earth to stand on. If education is the suitable preparation for life, the children of the atolls have it at its best and happiest without knowing that it is education. They are skillful in the pursuits and learned in the interests which touch their lives, and one can wish them no better fortune than that they may remain in ignorance of those which do not.

Their parents, as I have said, are but children of mature stature, with the same gift of frank, generous laughter, the same delight in the new and strange. Very little is required to amuse them. I had a mandolin which I used to take ashore with me at various atolls, after I had become convinced that their enjoyment of my music was not feigned. At first I was suspicious, for I had no illusions about my virtuosity, and even when I thought of it in the most flattering way their pleasure seemed out of all proportion to the quality of the performance. But there was no doubting the genuineness of it. The whole village would assemble to hear me play. I had a limited repertoire, but that seemed to matter very little. They liked to hear the same tunes played over and over again. I learned some of the old missionary hymns which they knew: "From Greenland's Icy Mountains," "Oh, Happy Day," "We're Marching to Zion," and others.

It was strange to find those songs, belonging, fortunately, to a bygone period in English and American life, living still in that remote part of the world, not because of anything universal in their appeal, but merely because they had been carried there years ago by representatives of the missionary societies. Many eccentric changes had been made in both the rhythm and melody, greatly to the improvement of both, but no amount of changing could make them other than what they are--the uncouth expression of a narrow and ugly kind of religious sentiment. I don't think the Paumotuans care much for them, either. They always seemed glad to turn from them to their own songs, which have nothing either of modern or old-time missionary feeling. A woman usually began the singing, in a high-pitched, nasal, or throaty voice, which she modulated in an extraordinary way. Immediately other women joined in, then several men whose voices were of tenor quality, followed by other men in basses and barytones, chanting in two or three tones which, for rhythm and tone quality, were like the beating of kettledrums. The weird blending of harmonies was unlike anything I had ever heard before. There is nothing in our music which even remotely resembles theirs, so that it is impossible to describe the effect of the full chorus. Some of the songs make a strong appeal to savage instincts. The less resolute of the early missionaries, hearing them, must have thrown up their hands in despair at the thought of the long, difficult task of conversion awaiting them. But if there were any irresolute missionaries, they were evidently overruled by their sterner brothers and sisters.

On nearly every island there is now a church, either Protestant or Catholic. In the Protestant ones the native population practice the only true faith, largely to the accompaniment of this old barbaric music. Those unsightly little structures rock to the sound of exultant choruses which ought never to be sung withindoors. The Paumotuans themselves know best the natural setting for their songs--the lagoon beach with a great fire of coconut husks blazing in the center of the group of singers. I liked to hear them from a distance where I could get their full effect; to look on from the schooner lying a few hundred yards offshore. All the inhabitants of the village would be gathered within the circle of the firelight, which brought their figures and the white, straight stems of the coconut palms into clear relief against a background of deep shadow. The singing continued far into the night, so that I often fell asleep while listening, and heard the music dying away, mingling at last with the interminable booming of the surf.

The storm blew itself out toward sundown and the night fell clear--a night for stars to make one wary of thought; but the moon rose about nine, softening the pitiless distances, throwing a veil of mild light across the black voids in the Milky Way, seen so clearly in those latitudes. The schooner was riding a heavy swell, and, burdened as she was, rose clumsily to it, sticking her nose into the slope of every sea. Ruau was at her accustomed place against the cabin ventilator, unmindful of the showers of spray, maintaining her position on the slanting deck with the skill of three months' practice. The thought that I must soon bid her good-by saddened me, for I knew there was small chance that I should ever meet her again. I envied Crichton his opportunity for friendship with that noble old woman, so proud of her race, so true to her own beliefs, to her own way of living. Her type is none too common among Polynesians in these days. One gets all too frequently an impression of a consciousness of inferiority on their part, a sense of shame because of their simple way of living as compared with ours. Ruau was not guilty of it. She never could be, I think, under any circumstances. I learned afterward of an attempt which had been made to convert her to Christianity during her stay at Tahiti. Evidently she had not been at all convinced by the priest's arguments, and when he made some slighting remark about the ghosts and spirits which were so real to her, she refused to listen any longer. Frightened though she was of spirits, she was not willing that they should be ridiculed.

The two traders started off at once on a tour of inspection and we saw nothing more of them until late in the evening. Meanwhile I went with Ruau and Crichton across the island to the lagoon beach where her house was. As in most of the atolls, the ground was nearly free from undergrowth, the soil affording nourishment only to the trees and a few hardy shrubs. Coconuts and dead fronds were scattered everywhere. A few half-wild pigs, feeding on the shoots of sprouted nuts, gazed up with an odd air of incredulity, of amazement as we approached, then galloped off at top speed and disappeared far in the distance. Ruau stopped when we were about halfway across and held up her hand for silence. A bird was singing somewhere, a melodious varied song like that of the hermit thrush. I had heard it before and had once seen the bird, a shy, solitary little thing, one of the few species of land birds found on the atolls.

While we were standing there, listening to the faint music, Crichton took me by the arm. He said nothing, and in a moment withdrew his hand. I was deeply moved by that manifestation of friendliness, an unusual one for him to make. He had some unaccountable defect in his character which kept him aloof from any relationship approaching real intimacy. I believe he was constantly aware of it, that he had made many futile attempts to overcome it. It may have been that which first set him on his wanderings, now happily at an end. It was plain to me the moment we set foot on shore that he would have to seek no farther for asylum. Tanao is one of the undoubted ends of the earth. No one would ever disturb him there. He himself was not so sure of this. Once, I remember, when we were looking at the place on the chart, he spoke of the island of Pitcairn, the old-time refuge of the Bounty mutineers. Before the opening of the Panama Canal it had been as far removed from contact with the outside world as an island could be. Now it lies not far off the route through the Canal to New Zealand and is visited from time to time by the crews of tramp steamers and schooners. Tanao, however, is much farther to the north, and there is very slight possibility that its empty horizons will ever be stained by a smudge of smoke. As for an actual visit, one glance at the reef through the binoculars would convince any skipper of the folly of the attempt.

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