We examined Eric as well as we could. He was quite unconscious but had no visible injury. We therefore were sure that we could save him if we could only get him ashore quickly and apply artificial respiration. It was not far to the beach: a hundred yards at most. But the raft was held back by the backwash from the breakers. Hans and Juanito tried to drag her nearer to the beach, but the end of that was that they got underneath her and were in danger of having their heads crushed. To swim to the beach with Eric, through the treacherous eddies which barred the way, was a dangerous undertaking which we dared not attempt in our exhausted state. Jean and I, therefore, remained sitting helplessly on the raft with Eric between us till at last an unusually big wave drew her in towards the beach. Halfway, however, she ran on to a block of coral and stuck fast. When Jean slid cautiously down into the water he found that he touched bottom without difficulty, so we hastened to wade ashore with Eric. I happened to catch sight of the illuminated hands of my wrist-watch, and hardly believed my eyes when I saw that it was a quarter to twelve: almost three hours had passed since the raft had capsized.
Hans came to meet and help us some time before we reached the shore. He had fallen down into a hole in the coral reef and his face was badly cut. Nevertheless he was not half as anxious on his own account as on Juanito’s. He told us that Juanito had scrambled up on the beach more than an hour before and had disappeared at once. We told Hans to go and look for Juanito and hurriedly prepared a bed of dry palm leaves, on which we laid Eric.
We had no matches, so that we could not see if he was breathing, but when I laid my ear against his breast I thought I heard a faint sound. This gave us hope and we started artificial respiration without delay. Time passed, and we relieved one another more frequently as we panted from our exertions. Our greatest worry in the increasing night cold and wind was how to keep Eric warm, and when Jean got the idea that waves might have thrown up a sail, in which we could wrap him, I told him to make a short reconnaissance along the shore. But he soon came back and in a melancholy voice told me that the raft had disappeared. The only useful object he had found was a little bottle of pure alcohol, which had evidently fallen out of the medicine chest. We eagerly moistened Eric’s tongue and gums, and then obstinately continued our attempts to revive him. Not until Eric’s limbs began to stiffen did we grasp at last the reason why he had been cold for so long.
Worn out and dumb with despair, we sank down on the ground beside our dead captain. It was four o’clock. Neither Juanito nor Hans had returned. There was no sign that the island was inhabited.
Chapter 9
RAKAHANGA
Suddenly a slight noise made us start. We listened intently and could clearly hear the scrunching sound of crushed coral stones. Someone seemed to be making his way through the scrub. I had not yet decided whether to call to the invisible walker or not when the silhouette of a short, familiar figure appeared against the pale sky quite close to us. Much relieved, I said:
‘Where have you been, Juanito?’
‘I’ve been looking for help. But what has happened? Is Eric-?’
‘Yes, he’s dead.’
Juanito bowed his head, and next moment I heard him break into agonized sobs. His genuine despair suddenly made me feel tenderly towards him, and I forgave him for all the wrong he had done to Eric and me.
‘Calm down now and tell me what you’ve been up to.’
I said kindly a little later, when he seemed unable to pull himself together.
‘I saw a light,’ he said in a tearful voice. ‘Somewhere to the south. Not very far off. I’d nearly got to it when I turned back.’
‘But why did you turn back? Wasn’t it your idea to get help?’
‘Yes, but I wanted to let you know as soon as possible that I had seen a light.’
Warned by my depressing experiences in the past, I made no attempt to understand Juanito’s proceedings and simply asked if he had seen anything of Hans. He shook his head vigorously.
While waiting for Hans to turn up I walked down to the beach to see if by any chance any more things had been washed up from the wreck, but to my disappointment I only found a few tins of Nescafe. A cup of good hot coffee was just what we needed, but unfortunately we had neither matches nor drinking water. So the sight of the tins only annoyed me and I kicked them away as far I could. I waded aimlessly out into the surf and without any definite plan. The only reward for my trouble was that I immediately detected a triangular shark’s fin moving uneasily to and fro just at the place where the raft had capsized. Could it really be the brown shark which had followed us so faithfully for several months? If so, it was not surprising if it was now both bewildered and disappointed. I returned to our primitive camping place empty-handed and disgruntled.
I did not need to worry for long as to what might have happened to Hans, for only a quarter of an hour later there was a crackling in the scrub again, and he staggered towards us and sank down on the ground weary to the point of collapse. He had gone northward and he too had seen a light. Convinced by Juanito’s and Hans’s independent evidence that the island was inhabited, I resolved to get help as quickly as possible. As Hans was too exhausted for another long walk, I asked him to stay and watch over our dead captain, and told Juanito to show Jean and me the way to the light which he had seen.
The sky had already begun to lighten, and we could now clearly distinguish through the palm trunks a shining lagoon on the other side of the strip of land on which we now were. After a search we found a narrow path which followed the edge of the lagoon southwards, and set out along it. Here and there along the path lay great heaps of coconuts recently cut in half, but nowhere did we see the human beings who must have carried out this work. After half an hour’s quick walking we came to a wide natural channel which joined the sea and the lagoon, and as Juanito eagerly assured us that he had crossed the channel on his night walk we jumped in. We could only just get a foothold, and the current was so strong that we were nearly washed out into the sea several times. When we had swum and waded over four or five more of these wide channels in quick succession, Juanito was no longer sure that we were going the right way. But we had no desire to turn back, especially as we now saw with our own eyes that the island was absolutely round. We therefore went on, in the certainty that we must come upon the inhabitants sooner or later, even if Juanito might have got the points of the compass a bit confused.
It was a few minutes past seven, so that we had been going for nearly two hours, when we came out into a glade close to the shore of the lagoon and saw a village consisting of two rows of houses on both sides of a straight street. Most of the houses were made of plaited palm leaves and bamboos, but there were also a few built of planks and stones with ugly rusty roofs of corrugated iron. Every house was surrounded by a garden with coconut palms, bread-fruit trees and brilliant flower-beds. There was no one at all in the impeccably clean main street, which was covered with coral sand, and this surprised me a good deal until I remembered that it was The first person we came upon was a well-built middle-aged Polynesian in a red loin-cloth who was strolling about in the garden in front of a yellow bamboo hut. When he caught sight of us he turned pale with terror— no doubt he thought we were ghosts, an understandable mistake, as we looked so awful—and turned to flee.
‘A tiairii (wait a minute),’ I tried on him in Tahitian.
He stopped short, and his features showed clearly that fear was giving place to intense curiosity.
(Ua ite oe i te farcin Tahiti? (Can you speak Tahitian?)’ I continued without much hope of getting an answer in the affirmative.
A broad smile cleft the man's face and he answered quickly in excellent Tahitian.
‘You’ve come to the right man. I’m the only person on the island who speaks Tahitian. I learnt the language in my young days, when I was a seaman in a Tahitian schooner.’
I hastened to tell him, in the fewest possible words, what had happened. The news was too remarkable for the man to be able
to keep to himself a second longer than necessary, and he rushed out into the village street yelling like a newspaper boy trying to get rid of the last extra edition. The villagers came running at once from every direction, as if they had just been sitting and waiting for something of the kind to happen, and we were soon surrounded by at least a hundred chattering men, women and children. Their language closely resembled the Polynesian dialect which is spoken in the Tuamotu Islands, so that I understood them very well. Also, some of them could speak a little English. I explained to them again and again, in Tahitian and English, that one of our comrades had been left in the palm grove and asked them to show us the way to the chief’s house, but they were all too busy discussing our persons to accede to our wish.
At last my Tahitian-speaking friend seemed to take pity on me, and gave me his hand. But instead of going to see the chief he took me straight to his own house, of which I was not aware until he had forced me down into a chair and placed before me a large dish of grilled flying fish and bread-fruit. I tried to protest, but he immediately brushed aside all my objections with a curt:
‘Be quiet and eat!’
The temptation was too great, and to the evident delight of my host I attacked the flying fish (which smelt delicious) and the bread-fruit with a voracious appetite. If I had been on a French island I should certainly have been given a bottle of red wine with which to wash down my food, but Rakahanga was under British (or to be more correct, New Zealand) sovereignty, so of course I got a large cup of tea instead. Just as I was swallowing the last morsel of bread-fruit a messenger arrived and curtly ordered me to accompany him. The messenger made for a large cement house farther down the street, and there I found Jean and Juanito. They had been looked after by other families and were as full of food as I was.
A few seconds later a powerfully built man came out of the cement house, and I realized at once from his dignified bearing and majestic appearance that he was the island chief. His name was Turuta, and he spoke excellent English. Without wasting any time on long preliminary phrases, such as Polynesian etiquette really demanded, I told him impatiently what had happened. Turuta replied, quite unruffled:
‘I have sent two canoes already to fetch your comrade and your dead captain. But we must not forget you. Please come in.’
I had thought that the cement house was Chief Turuta’s office or official residence, but when I obeyed him, to my surprise I entered a tittle hospital. My first instinct was to say right out that we were not so done up that we needed to be taken to hospital, but then I remembered all our cuts and scratches and sat down obediently on the wooden bench to which Turuta ushered us.
The treatment began curiously enough with the male nurse, who was Turuta’s brother, producing a bottle and pouring out a small glass of the contents for each of us. We sniffed cautiously at the clear, mahogany-coloured liquid. It was brandy! We emptied our glasses at a draught and held them out to be refilled. The male nurse, however, declared gravely that it was the only bottle of spirits in the island and put it back into the medicine chest. We regretted at once that we had not tried to look rather more ill. The next stage of the treatment was almost as pleasant, for it consisted of a shower-bath of cool rainwater from one of the large cisterns next to the hospital. Finally the male nurse put plenty of iodine and sticking-plaster on our badly damaged arms and legs.
Just as we were leaving the hospital, wearing clean clothes borrowed for us in the village by the male nurse, the men whom the chief has sent out to the scene of the disaster returned, carrying Eric’s dead body between them on a modem stretcher. He still wore the same triumphant smile which I had seen just before we were drawn into the surf—clearly showing that the only thing that mattered for him at the time of his death, as during all his life, was to realize his dreams. Poor Hans, hollow-eyed and exhausted, came tottering along far behind. When he had been given the same treatment as the rest of us, he recovered sufficiently to limp across to a neighbouring house, where some kind villagers had prepared a good meal.
Chief Turuta’s men told us that they had also found the shattered outrigger raft. They assured us that it was only the wooden frame which had been smashed, and they wondered very much where we had got the fine aluminium tanks. We suddenly felt impelled to write at once to the Belgian chemist in Lima who had almost forced them on us and thank him for having saved our lives. But unfortunately none of us could remember his name, so I hope that he will some day read this book and realize what an invaluable service he had rendered us.
While we were talking to Hans and the stretcher-bearers the chief has disappeared, but before long he came back and announced that by a lucky chance the administrator of the northern Cook Islands was just about to make his annual tour of inspection and would probably arrive at Rakahanga the very next day. When I asked how he knew this, Turuta replied with pride that there there was, of course, a wireless station on the island and that another of his brothers was its superintendent. With Turuta’s kind permission we trudged over to the wireless station at once and sent a telegram to our expedition secretary Carlos Garcia-Palacios in Tahiti, who by that time must certainly have been rather anxious about us.
When we returned to the hospital Turuta’s nursing brother had already dressed Eric in trousers, sandals, a white shirt and a striped tie. If I had not already seen many funeral wakes elsewhere in Polynesia I should certainly have made some objection to this rig-out, but knowing as I did that it was the natives’ usual way of clothing their dead for burial, I said nothing. But one unusual detail struck me almost at once. Eric had also a white bandage round his head on a level with his forehead. When Turuta saw my astonished face, he handed me without a word a neat death certificate which he had just filled up. I read, in a regular and pretty hand, the words ‘cause of death: Injuries to the back of the head and a broken neck’. There could no longer be any doubt. Eric had died from a blow on the back of the head when the raft turned round and not from drowning. So the many heavy clothes he had been wearing when we stranded had been of no significance whatever. I laid the death certificate down with a slight sense of relief. Turuta waited tactfully for some time before he spoke again. Then he said:
‘Your captain died yesterday evening. According to our laws here in Cook Islands all deceased persons must be buried within twenty-four hours. I propose, therefore, that we bury your captain at three o’clock.’
The same law, dictated by reasons of health, exists in French Polynesia. I was therefore not in the least surprised at such haste and nodded approval.
‘Good,’ said Turuta. ‘Now come with me and have a bit of food. It must be something awful to go hungry as you’ve been doing.’
We replied that it was not so long since we had eaten a good breakfast and that we had never been in serious danger of dying of starvation. But Turuta regarded these remarks as mere polite excuses, and without replying led us off to the village hall, a pretty house in the Polynesian style which was open on three sides. On the fourth side was a wall on which hung a long row of portraits of British kings and queens. The islanders’ loyalty had fortunately not extended to the cooking of an English meal, for the dishes, which were all set out on an oblong table, in the middle of the hall, consisted exclusively of such Polynesian delicacies as chicken baked in an earth oven, roast bread-fruit, a salad of coconut sprouts and green drinking nuts.
Places were laid and chairs drawn up for only four, but practically the whole population of the island had assembled to wait on us. What we particularly appreciated was that two women immediately posted themselves behind each chair to chase away any flies which dared to disturb our meal. As at all Polynesian banquets, we were naturally also entertained by a party of men and women with good voices. To my surprise they had several Tahitian songs on their programme, but this, as I ought to have understood at once, was simply because they often listened to Radio Papeete. One of these songs was Tahiti Nui, a melancholy Tahitian song in praise of the island and having nothing but the name
in common with our expedition. Evidently thinking, quite understandably, that we particularly liked this song, the natives sang it over and over again. The continually repeated refrain about Tahiti Nui, however, made me think of nothing but our disastrous raft expedition and depressed me. I therefore asked our private choir to sing a song about Rakahanga instead, and heard a rattling lively tune.
The only way in which we could show our keen appreciation of the islanders’ kindness was, of course, to do honour to the dishes laid before us, so we methodically disposed of one course after another. Our heroic efforts were fortunately made a good deal easier by the unusual deliciousness of all the dishes, which stimulated our appetite and made it possible for us to put away far greater quantities of food than we had thought possible. So when the struggle was over and we looked round us in victorious pride, the dishes were almost empty. Unluckily Turuta came to the rather hasty conclusion that we had not yet had enough, and scarcely had we, with great difficulty, managed to rise from the table when he kindly invited us to accompany him home and take a light meal. We tried to explain to him that we needed a few hours’ rest rather than more food, but for all our resistance we were compelled to swallow quite a lot more food before at last he let us sink down on to a few cool pandanus mats on his verandah.
Only after prolonged efforts was Turuta able to recall us to consciousness just before three o’clock. On the way to the church he proudly pointed out the school-house, a pretty building of coral stone. I asked in all innocence who did the teaching, and Turuta replied, with a certain surprise at my having asked such a stupid question, that of course he was also the island’s schoolmaster. I was almost sure that in the next breath he would inform me that he was the island’s clergyman as well, but when we arrived at the church it appeared that for some reason he had let one of his many brothers occupy this post.
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