A Writer's Notebook (41 page)

We had brought them cases of various goods in the dinghy and having landed these, we got in and rowed back to the schooner. It was a pull of two or three miles and the rowers sang as they rowed. They shouted witticisms to the girls in the native huts by the shore.

In the evening, going ashore again, with the crew this time, we went to the house of a chief. Kava was made and drunk, pine-apple passed round, and then to the sound of a banjo and a ukulele the crew began to dance. The women of the house joined them. There was a Fijian, one of the sailors, almost coal black, with a mass of fuzzy hair, who was able to twist himself into all sorts of outrageous attitudes to the shrieking delight of the onlookers. The dancing grew more and more obscene. We went back to the schooner in the deep silence of the night.

Next day we set out for Apolima. We had arranged for a whale-boat to take us across the reef, and this, with its crew, we towed behind us in a rolling heavy sea. Several women, evidently prepared to make a picnic of it, came with the rowers. Apolima is a small island, almost circular, between Savaii and Manono. When we came to the reef we got into the whale-boat and rowed towards the shore. The opening of the reef is not more than twelve feet broad and on each side are great jagged rocks. The chief steered. We got to the opening and when a big wave came he shouted to the men, they pulled with all their might, their great muscles straining, and we were carried over into the lagoon. It was small and shallow.

The island is an extinct volcano, and when we got inside the lagoon, which covers the floor of the crater, it looked like the inside of a Stilton cheese all eaten away except the rind and one bit of this (the opening to the sea) gone too. There was a
village at the edge of the lagoon, almost the only flat part of the island, and from there the land, covered with coconuts, bananas and breadfruit, rose rapidly. We climbed up to the edge of the crater and looked out to sea; below us two turtles were sunning themselves on the beach. When we came down the chief asked us into his house for kava. By this time the wind was blowing hard and the whale-boat men looked doubtfully at the grey and stormy sea; they weren't sure whether it would be possible to get out against the waves that dashed furiously through the opening. But we got into the boat, and the chief, a fine-looking old man with white hair, came to help us. The women who had landed with us took their places at the oars. We pushed through the shallow water to the opening and watched the waves. After waiting a little they made the attempt, but the boat got jammed against the rock, and it looked as though the next wave must inevitably swamp us. I took off my shoes in case I had to swim. The old chief jumped out and pushed the boat off. Then, with a tremendous effort, the rowers, shouting their heads off, rowing like mad, the sea beating over the boat and soaking us to the skin, we got out. The chief swam out to us, and it was a fine sight to see the old man fighting against the great waves. He was hauled in and sat there panting. The schooner was far out and showed no signs of seeing us. We rowed towards her slowly, for an hour, and at last she bore down on us. She was rolling heavily, so that it was not easy to get on board. I jumped into the rigging as she swayed towards the boat, and the Chinese cook seized my wrist and helped me on.

Kava. It is made by a girl and she is supposed to be a virgin. A young man or another girl pounds the root on a stone, then gives it to her; she pours a little water in a bowl and puts in the powdered root, then mixes it with her hands. Then she draws a bundle of coconut fibre through the mixture to act as a sieve, squeezes it out, and hands it to the young man who
shakes it out on the air. This is done several times till all the root is melted. Then more water is added and the kava is ready. The virgin utters the prescribed words and the rest of the company clap their hands. The young man hands her a coconut bowl which she fills; the headman mentions a name and the bowl is taken to the most distinguished guest. He pours a little on the ground, says “health to the company”, drinks what he wants and then throws the rest away. He hands back the bowl and the next guest in order of age or honour is served.

The Lagoon. It is crossed by a bridge made of coconut trees laid end to end and supported by a forked branch driven into the bottom. There is a native hut here and there on the bank, surrounded by bananas, and all along coconut trees. You walk through the bush for a quarter of a mile and come to a shallow river surrounded by trees, where the natives bathe. The water is sweet except at high tide, when it is brackish from the lagoon into which it empties itself, very cold by contrast with the temperature, and clear. A lovely spot.

Wms. An Irishman. When he was a boy of fifteen he took on the paternity of a child got from some girl by the son of the local clergyman. This young man, after promising to pay for the child's keep, did not do so, and Wms had to pay half a crown a week till the child was fourteen. Twenty years later, on going back to Ireland, he sought the man out, then married and the father of children, and fought him till he made him ask his pardon.

For some time he was in New Zealand. One day he was shooting with a friend, a bank clerk, who had no gun licence: suddenly they saw a policeman, the clerk was in dismay, thinking he would be arrested, so Wms told him to keep on calmly and himself started running. The policeman pursued and they ran back to Auckland. Once there Wms stopped, the policeman came up, asked for his licence, which Wms immediately
produced. The policeman asked him why he had run away, whereupon he answered: “Well, you're an Irishman same as I am, if you promise to hold your tongue about it I'll tell you; the other fellow hadn't a licence.” The policeman burst out laughing and said: “You're a sport, come and have a drink.”

He is a gross, sensual man, and he loves to tell you about the women he's lived with. He's had ten children by Samoan women; one, a girl of fifteen, he keeps at school in New Zealand, but the rest he's handed over to the Mormon mission with a sum of money. He came out to the islands when he was twenty-six as a planter. He was one of the few white men settled in Savaii at the time of the German occupation and had already a certain influence with the natives. He loves them as much as it is in his selfish nature to love anybody. The Germans made him Amtmann, a position he occupied for sixteen years. On one occasion, having to call on Solf, the German minister for foreign affairs, Solf said to him: “Being governor of a German colony I suppose you speak German fluently.” “No,” he answered, “I only know one word,
prosit
, and I haven't heard that since my arrival in Berlin.” The minister laughed heartily and sent for a bottle of beer.

R. He is a thin, weedy youth, with the look of a clerk in a London stockbroker's office, and he has decayed teeth, crowned with gold, and a small peevish mouth. He is vulgar, illiterate and h-less. He has been on the islands for some years and is tattooed like a native. I wonder why he exposed himself to the torture of the operation. Perhaps the beauty of the place, the charm of those friendly people stirred his vulgar soul to what he thought was a romantic gesture. Perhaps he merely thought it made him more attractive to the women he slept with.

Savaii. After the rain, when the sun is shining and you walk through the bush, it is like a hot-house, seething, humid, sultry,
breathless, and you have a feeling that everything about you, trees, shrubs, climbing plants, is growing with an impetuous violence.

I travelled back to Apia in the
Marstal
. It is a cutter about thirty feet long and belongs to a kanaka. A ten-hour trip. It was loaded with sacks of copra and smelt rankly of coconut. There was no cabin, and I lay on deck over the engine, with a rug over me, and rested my head on the knobbly copra sacks. The crew consisted of the skipper at the tiller, a handsome, swarthy fellow, with somewhat the look of a later Roman emperor, inclined to corpulence, but with a fine strong face; another kanaka, stretched at full length and covered with sacking, who slept; and a Chinese, who sat looking idly at the moon and smoked cigarettes.