Now he had no legs, but still he would not leave the atolls. Fitted with crutches, he became a cherished figure about the Pacific, a man with wonderful humor and delicate insights into beauty. Small government jobs were found for him, always on some distant island, and there he lived, tramping the deck of his boat, studying the charts of new atolls across the world.
One night a storm came and Bunner Langdale swung his crutches across the wet deck. They slipped. Unseen, he plunged toward the railing and fell noiselessly into the deep waters of the lagoon. I found out later they recovered the body.
One of the old hands in the atolls said to me, “They’re dreadful places, really. They house diseases you’ve never heard of. They are lonely and desolate. If the white men who live there told the truth they’d admit the islands are hellish. I’ve watched such men go crazy. What’s worse, I’ve seen them die on their feet. There isn’t one who wouldn’t leave if he had the money and the chance.”
Captain Bobby Crookshank, a sea dog if there ever was one, is an honest judge of atoll life. An officer in the Royal Navy, he came at last to the Pacific where his bright Scotch-Irish wit made him famous. As a youngster he was boxing champion of the British Navy and carries with him a silver beer mug inscribed with the details of his championship. If he runs into trouble with some contentious character, he quietly serves a mug of beer, inscription-side toward the face. “Suddenly,” he says, “the chap begins to see things my way.”
Bobby has shipped into many of the atolls and vows he never yet has seen one a decent man could live on. “They’re low dirty places. If you get enough rain, you also get malaria. If you escape the fever, there’s no water to drink. A single kitchen can hold a million flies. Land crabs pester you, and if you kill them, they stink up the atmosphere. Rats are as big as coconuts. Why, the average motu is less than a mile wide and you can walk all over it in one afternoon. There are no pretty birds, only the cawing kind, darned few flowers and no meat. I tell you, a man’s already half crazy when he first steps onto such a place.”
Recalling certain atolls I had known, I challenged Captain Bobby and said, “You’re spreading it a bit thick, aren’t you? Admit it. You’ve seen at least one atoll you considered beautiful.”
He rubbed his white hair for a moment, ordered me a beer and laughed. “You’ve got me there,” he confessed. “There was such an island. One evening I saw it at sunset. I remarked at the time that it looked right pretty lying there astern of the ship. Because I was leaving the goddamned place.”
The American who best knew the atolls was a tragic man, the novelist Robert Dean Frisbie. During the war I heard of him many times. Wherever I went east of Fiji, people would say, “If you’re interested in the islands, you must meet Frisbie.” It was astonishing how much I learned about this strange man. He had been thrown out of several islands. He had infuriated governments and encouraged native rebellion. In the midst of his world weariness he married a magnificent Polynesian girl who bore him five children and then died He had protected his children through an atoll hurricane when the giant seas poured over the motus, and he had written as perceptively about atoll life as any modern writer.
One day we heard he was dying in Tongareva, a thousand miles from anywhere. The Navy sent a plane up to bring him back to the American hospital in Samoa. I remember the trip because we picked up a Chinaman in Tahiti, bound for Honolulu. As we neared Tongareva we got into difficulty and had to ditch the cargo. Out went the Chinaman’s gear, out went the food, everything. When we closed the hatch we were astounded to find that the Chinaman, too, was gone. A frantic search disclosed him jammed into a corner. He came out praying, and approached us with resignation. He assumed that we would pitch him out next.
Well, we found Frisbie in terrible condition. He was totally emaciated, and with his deep eyes and protruding lower jaw he looked like the dying Robert Louis Stevenson. He pleaded for morphine to ease the pain, but we were warned that it was forbidden him.
He was tended solely by his daughter Johnnie, a thirteen-year-old girl. We discussed with her what must be done, and she agreed to stay on the atoll and care for her younger brothers and sisters. She said brokenly that she did not think her father would live, and in the morning the children gathered at the plane to bid him a weeping good-bye.
We packed him into the baggage compartment, spreading three blankets on the floor to keep him warm. On the long, bitterly cold flight I sat with him and became convinced that he would not die. We even planned a book we would one day write together and he told me of his feelings about atolls.
We were over Manihiki, one of the most lovely. It lay below us like embracing arms enclosing a lake of placid wonder. “I saw Manihiki first about twenty years ago,” he said. “They can joke about white men in the islands, but out here I’ve experienced the full meaning of life. Believe me, when you’re on an atoll and the hurricane piles the seas over … You’ve seen about all nature can show.
“And I’ve liked the people. Pettiness seems to be on a smaller scale. Goodness on a more generous one. In America I suppose you hear a lot of nonsense about the alluring women. Actually the men are more to be wondered at. They have the courage of heroes, but they can weep like children. As crew on a small ship in trouble they can’t be beat.”
Frisbie was in great pain, aggravated by the unaccustomed cold. He spoke of the reading he had done on the atolls, of his essays in the Atlantic Monthly which made him famous, and of the sales of his latest books. His great problem was the future of his children. Since they were half-caste Polynesians he had to get them back to school in America if he wanted them to become American citizens. He said his oldest girl was quite intelligent and wondered how he could afford to send her to the States. He said he thought she might be able to write a book that would be a best seller, and even though he knew how rarely anyone gets rich from writing books, he insisted upon dreaming of that chance.
Then he grew moody and said, “It’s a hell of a life, by God it is. You sit on those damned islands with no one to talk to. You read till your eyes are sore and when you try to write, all you can do is ‘chronicle small beer.’ I tell you, I’ve been so lonely down there I’d have talked with a fish, if he’d had a grain of intelligence.” He was silent for a while and then laughed. “I felt the same way in California,” he admitted.
The doctors in Samoa fixed him up and to everybody’s surprise he got a job teaching school. Half a year later I found him under a pandanus tree drinking bush beer while his daughter Johnnie taught his classes, “because she can keep discipline better than I can.” Each night he instructed her in the next day’s lesson and she would stand barefooted in a sarong hammering English at the heads of nineteen-year-old oafs.
“If she can do that,” I said, “she can write a book.”
“She will, too!” Frisbie insisted.
“If she does,” I said impulsively, “I’ll get it published.”
Frisbie was eager to discuss the book he and I were going to write. “We’ll limit it to Polynesia and we’ll describe everything as the eye of God might see it. We’ll tell about the beauty, yes, but we’ll also speak honestly of the desolate bitterness.” He was well now and became excited, for he wanted to narrate the simple truths of island life.
I last saw Frisbie in Samoa. Already he was beginning to get into trouble. He fled from Pago to Apia to Tahiti and back to Rarotonga, from which he had been exiled years before. I received aching letters from him. His grand dreams were fading in the daylight. Only once did he speak of our book but there was no glow of hope and he never referred to it again.
His ambitions now centered in Johnnie’s work, and to my astonishment—for one is always meeting people who “are going to write a book” but who never do—one day it arrived. I read it with great nostalgia, for Frisbie had obviously poured all his energies into correcting and polishing his daughter’s naiad remembrances of atoll life. It was good, very good, and within a week I found a publisher. Now Frisbie’s l
etters were full of the things he would do. With the money Johnnie would make from her book the children would come to America, where he would write a great novel about a ship.
But when his daughter’s book was published—even as the reviews were reporting it to be a delightful evocation of atoll life—Frisbie with the jutting jaw was dead in Rarotonga. His children were destitute. There was no money, no home, no legacy but debt. Friends took up a collection to bury him. After his death I received a letter he had posted long before. He was now uncertain about the books he had planned. Things seemed more difficult than they used to be. He thought another book by Johnnie might be the thing. Certainly he would do his part and help her with the spelling. I read the letter with dull pain, for already I had been told that he had been responsible for his own death. He had used once too often a rusty hypodermic needle.
I liked Frisbie, I respected his basic honesty. If ever I knew a man who destroyed himself through the search for beauty, Frisbie was that man. I can respect the uncompromising artist, and I never once met Frisbie but what I pitied him and liked him, too. There were other atoll men of whom I could not say as much.
Let’s call him Rackham. He was forty-eight, a scrawny fellow who had sailed more than fifty miles to see me. He thought I had an authority which was not mine, that I could somehow find him passage to the States. “I came out here twenty years ago,” he complained. “I didn’t get the breaks. This is my woman. The kids are mine, too. Now get me straight, Lieutenant. I wouldn’t desert this woman and those kids for anything. But I was wondering if you could … That is, perhaps there might be a place … Maybe I … But you understand, I won’t leave the woman behind.”
He pestered me for days. He was a real wreck of the islands, a no-good, forlorn bum. He had sponged on one native family after another, debauching their daughters, making drunken sots of the sons. The Pacific war brought powerful memories to Rackham. He saw Americans again, clean men with money of their own. For six years he had been without teeth. Now he wheedled an Army dentist into whipping him up a set. He told me of the wonderful things he was going to do, but he always ended by saying he wouldn’t desert the woman.
When he talked with me this woman stood in a corner, or behind a tree. Usually she had one of the children with her, and in time she came to hate me, because she knew what I didn’t know.
Finally Rackham came out with it. “Lieutenant,” he whined, “so help me God, I wouldn’t desert the woman. But I’m an American.” He dropped his head on the table and mumbled, “So help me God, I want to go home.”
There was a long silence. Then he looked up and began to plead: “I’ve got to get back. A plane. A cargo ship. Maybe a destroyer? You’ve got to help me!” He gripped his knuckles in anguish. “I’m an American citizen,” he said.
There was nothing we could do. We had an aching compassion for this fellow countryman, but there was nothing we could do. The atolls had ruined him. He was beyond help. I last saw him leaving the lagoon, his woman and the two children with him in the boat.
But I must not cite Rackham as representative of the island white man. I know many men who have led wonderful lives out there. Matt Wells, for example. I hope I look half as good at fifty as he does at sixty-three. He has a full head of hair, strong teeth, a tremendous appetite for life. How many children he has had no one can say, but during the war he became famous because our soldiers started the rumor that he was the illegitimate son of H. G. Wells. If such speculation ever reached Matt, he didn’t bother to deny it, a fact which I had to forgive, for many American naval officers were convinced that I was the son—illegitimate or otherwise—of Admiral Marc Mitscher. I corrected neither their error nor their spelling, for it was because of my supposed kinship to the great aviation tactician that I was allowed the privilege of traveling to so many islands in search of characters like Matt.
We disagreed on only one point. Matt considered missionaries the lowest form of animal life, whereas I insisted that I had known some who were a greater credit to the white race than any other men who had invaded the islands.
“Name one!” Matt roared.
“Bishop Jones,” I suggested.
Grudgingly Matt said, “You’ve got me there. Bishop Jones is one of the finest men I ever knew. Clean-spoken, honest, I’d trust that man anywhere—except with small boys.”
My favorite atoll man, however, is Fred Archer. He has lived on the lonely islands for many years, a lean, handsome, courageous man. He told me, “Certainly, I’ve watched six or seven of my friends go mad on atolls. They get a glassy look in the eye. They retreat farther and farther into a dream world. I recall one atoll in the Ninigos where my two predecessors had died. The last one disappeared mysteriously. On gloomy nights, as trading vessels left the lagoon, captains would cry, ‘Mark my words, Fred. He didn’t die. The natives murdered him. They’ve got his body in the bush. You watch out, Fred. They’ll do you in next!’ ”
He said that reading and sport had kept him happy, plus the fact that he was an accomplished seamstress. “Every meal I’d have a red dictionary by my plate, a novel and a shotgun. I once heard my native boy instructing his assistant. ‘Suppose Mastuh he got red book here, green book here, rifle here. Then table he set good too much.’ I never took less than an hour for meals, because I frequently looked up to study the beach. Gray cranes eat chicken eggs, and whenever I saw one at the water’s edge, I’d put down the novel, lift up the rifle and pot him.”
Archer had a house bordered with flowers, walks lined with croton and whitewashed rocks. He had a dinner service for eight and received each month a shipment of new books from Sydney. As for the sewing, a dear old lady in England got his name under the totally mistaken idea that he was a missionary. She sent him a life subscription to what she considered an appropriate magazine: a monthly devoted to wholesome family living with an insert containing a pattern and full sewing instructions. Fred was amused by the patterns until one day he needed some new pajamas and remembered that some months back there had been a pattern for a “radical new idea of night clothes that would not bind in the crotch.” He rummaged through the recent issues until he found the instructions and then discovered that he had a knack for cutting out garments. He bought a sewing machine and taught a Polynesian girl to use it. He adds, “There used to be some embarrassment when visiting women asked the girl where she had learned to make such beautiful clothes. ‘Mastuh, he teach me,’ the girl said proudly, whereupon I had to produce the magazine by way of explanation.”
Archer says the most perfect atoll he ever heard of was Maty in the Ninigos. It was owned by a meticulous German and managed by an expansive Swede. “It was magnificent. Every stone was in place. The house was a thing of beauty. The Swede used to invite maybe a dozen planters from various islands. A native lay under the table with a switch to drive mosquitoes away from ankles. Behind each guest stood a Polynesian girl to serve the meal and to spend the night if necessary. Life on Maty was simple and beautiful and placid.”
But even Fred Archer bears witness to the ultimate desolation of atoll living. “This Battersby was a planter who had made a multitude of enemies. He was afflicted by what the natives call ‘the big cross.’ He hated everybody. But as he grew older he decided that he must erase his bitterness. Accordingly he planned a great feast, and in careful longhand wrote out more than thirty invitations to his past enemies. He gave them to his boy to take by pinnace to all the nearby islands.
“ ‘But Mastuh …’ the boy protested.
“ ‘Take them all!’ Battersby cried in exultation. ‘Tell all fellow men big cross he stop long me no more!’
“In sad bewilderment the native took the letters and buried them under a rock by the lagoon. He said nothing, even helped prepare the feast.
“But when Battersby stood anxiously by the shore waiting for the craft that would never come, the native could bear it no longer and cried out, ‘Mastuh! All fellow he no come!’
“Battersby looked up in bew
ilderment. ‘No come? You took the letters, didn’t you?’
“ ‘No, Mastuh. Me no take. Me put here.’
“In anguish Battersby dug up the invitations and looked at the faded addresses. With a great curse he began to beat the native who cried, ‘Mastuh, no! Me no take letters because men he all dead finish!’
“One by one the belated invitations fell from Battersby’s trembling hands. He looked at the names. ‘Master Friedhoffer?’ he mumbled.
“ ‘He dead finish long time, Mastuh.’
“ ‘Master Kleinschmidt?’
“He stop long dead long time too, Mastuh.’
“The old man let out a scream. ‘They’re all dead?’ he cried.
“ ‘They all dead finish true, Mastuh,’ the native said. Gently the black man tried to lead the old planter to the verandah where the feast was spread, but Battersby would not go.
“ ‘You run long,’ he said in a despairing whisper. ‘Tell all boy they kai kai meat, wine, all thing.’ And so as the natives feasted, the white man blew out his brains.”
The atolls are beautiful. They are among the most beautiful features of this earth, and it is no wonder they have lured many men. Not even the wild hurricanes, the loneliness, the stinging flies or the bitterness of a life slipped past can subtract one portion of the crystal beauty of these miraculous circles in the sea. In spite of all the men who have died of atoll fever, the lagoon and the pounding surf are incomparably wonderful.
Much romantic nonsense has been written about the atolls. Even the word lagoon has been debased far below its true currency. On the motus the beautiful girls have been ridiculed; the patient native men have been burlesqued. A thousand wastrels have befouled the islands; a hundred sentimentalists have defamed them.
But there still remains this fact: when the great seas pound upon the reef, when the stars shine down upon the lagoon, there is a mysterious, fragile something that no amount of misrepresentation can destroy. To say that men have died in such places, engulfed in disillusion and despair, is merely to point out that on a lonely atoll, as in most cities, good men find loveliness, weak men find evil.
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