Our dead captain now lay in a simple but tasteful coffin and was shrouded in a gaily-coloured cloth. When I looked more closely I saw that it was the Chilean flag which a sewing party at Constitucion had given us before our departure. Presumably, some of the islanders had found it on the shore near the scene of the disaster and given it to the clergyman, whose knowledge of foreign countries’ flags was evidently a trifle hazy. In any case, there was no Tricolor on the island, and it would only have been painful to all parties to try to correct the mistake, so we pretended not to notice it. For that matter it was really not so unsuitable that the Chilean flag should accompany Eric to the grave, for he had loved Chile as a second fatherland and it was only thanks to Chilean help that we had been able to build our second raft.
Another thing which also worried me a little for a few moments was that Eric had formally belonged to the Catholic church. But he had never been a believing Catholic, and the only religion in which he had ever taken any interest was the old heathen Polynesian one. So all things considered it did not to my mind matter in the least that a Protestant clergyman was reading the funeral service.
After several long prayers and two movingly beautiful hymns four men lifted the coffin, and on a sign from the priest we all rose and followed them out of the church. The distance from the church to the cemetery was only a few hundred yards, but before we were halfway I was overcome by weariness and began to have unpleasant feelings of nausea. I saw as in a mist first Juanito and then Jean faint and be carried away. What happened to Hans I had no idea. Only with the greatest difficulty I succeeded in keeping on my legs till the grave had been filled, after which Turuta took me home and laid me down on the sleeping mat on the verandah, where I at once fell into a deep sleep.
When Turuta woke me again I felt so rested and well that I first suspected that I had slept for several days on end. But it was only Monday, and the sole reason why Turuta had not let me sleep longer was that the administrator of the northern Cook Islands had just arrived. He was accompanied by a judge, and when the two of them had listened to our story the judge declared that in accordance with the law he would hold an inquiry into the loss of the raft as soon as he had dealt with the few cases on hand. These were concerned mostly with stray pigs which had rooted up gardens and too-hilarious young men who had made disturbances at night. Nor did the administrator’s task seem particularly exacting, for both Turuta and his brother had discharged their functions fauldessly. As we had nothing else to do we devoted the rest of the day to two occupations which still held the charm of novelty: we ate and slept.
The inquiry into the wreck made it necessary for us to go through the painful drama of the last few days in detail, and we were still depressed when we left the village hall, where all legal proceedings took place. But we soon had something else to think about. A telegram had come from Tahiti saying that a gunboat had been sent out to fetch us and might be expected to arrive at Rakahanga on Thursday afternoon. We began to search for objects from the wreck with renewed energy, and pack up the few things we had found already. Jean even went so far as to begin diving into the surf with a few athletic fellows, at the place where the raft had capsized. But the result was meagre in the extreme, for the only thing he succeeded in fishing up was our ruined radio apparatus. The various patrols which combed the shore from one end of the island to the other had much better luck, and when at last all the finds were neatly laid out in the village hall I found among them, to my boundless joy, not only our Polynesian wooden god but also, severely damaged, the galvanized iron jar in which, just before the shipwreck, I had stowed the log, the charts, my personal diary and my eight rolls of film. I trembled with eagerness as I emptied out the contents. Both the papers and the rolls of film were quite undamaged.
The French gunboat Lotus arrived early in the afternoon of September 4th, and as there was no gap in the reef through which she could enter the lagoon she laid to just outside the reef on the lee side of the island. The chief Turuta promptly manned several canoes and told the administrator and myself to take seats in the canoe which was under his own command.
The first person I ran up against on board Lotus was our devoted secretary, Carlos Garcia-Palacios, who embraced me with tears in his eyes. The next to embrace me was my comrade from the outward voyage in Tahiti Nui I, Francis Cowan. Behind him several French officers in well-preserved uniforms were waiting. Jean, Hans and Juanito followed closely in another canoe, and soon questions and answers were flying to and fro. In the deafening noise which arose our conversation soon became confused and inaudible in quality. But it did not matter. The main thing was that we could somehow give expression to our long pent-up feelings.
Turuta, as we expected, showed himself fully equal to the situation, for as soon as his new guests had landed he took them straight to the village hall, where the whole population was formed up in a square and greeted us with God Save the Queen. Of course this was followed by a tremendous dinner, and we astonished both ourselves and our friends by the huge quantities of food we put away. But practice, as everyone knows, makes perfect.
The captain of Lotus had orders to take Eric’s body to Tahiti, so as soon as the dinner was over we went along to the pretty little cemetery and cautiously opened the fresh grave. We had hardly finished this melancholy task when it was time to dress for the great ball which the people of Rakahanga had resolved to hold in our honour. To many people such a mingling of sorrow and joy may seem lacking in taste, and we too had at first resisted the islanders’ proposal. Chief Turuta and his subordinates had naturally misunderstood our unwillingness, for as they—and all Polynesians—see things, the dead, whose whole existence is one long feast, cannot possibly object to those who are left behind trying to find a little pleasure and diversion. At last we let them have their way, for we were convinced that it would be only humbug to try to make them respect a convention which to them was meaningless, and Eric hated nothing so much as humbug. But to tell the truth, I could not take part in the ball with the same enthusiasm as my Polynesian friends, and if— as often happens in those latitudes—the women had not repeatedly asked me to dance, I do not think I should have gone on to the floor at all.
I had not danced since February 14th, i.e., the evening before we left Constitucion, and I was still sore and stiff after the unusual exercise when I dragged myself up from my sleeping mat long after sunrise next morning. One of the main attractions of the ball had of course been a magnificent supper, whose aftereffects I still felt in my abdominal region. So I showed only very moderate enthusiasm when Chief Turuta came trotting up and announced that a last farewell meal had been laid for us and our friends from Lotus in the village hall, and I limped off slowly by a roundabout route so that I might become more or less myself again.
The good people of Rakahanga were evidently convinced that we were still on the verge of starvation, for they had again served up an incredible number of powerfully nourishing dishes and made sure that we did our duty by them. If half a dozen speeches in Polynesian, English and French had not give me a little breathing space, I really do not know how I should got to and through the last dish, which was a gluey, stodgy pudding.
Feeling completely done up, we tottered out into the square in front of the village hall, where all the inhabitants of the island, washed and in their Sunday clothes, were already formed up two by two in a long column. A few minutes later a party of grave-faced men appeared with Eric’s coffin covered by a flag and this time the commander of Lotus had seen that it was the right flag. The men marched up to the head of the column, but left a carefully calculated gap so that our friends from Lotus, Chief Turuta and his brother, and we four survivors from Tahiti Nui III, could fall in behind them.
As the long procession wound slowly on over the coral reef, the depression which had tormented me for months past began at last to lift. It may have been that all my worries and all my responsibilities were now over for ever, that it was such a brilliantly fine day; anyway, I felt
just as if I was recovering from a long and severe illness. I even felt physically more active than for a long time past. When the time came to say goodbye I embraced Turuta and his brother with real emotion and jumped down quickly into the waiting canoe. At the same moment some women, with tears in their eyes, struck up the melancholy Tahiti Nui song. It is indicative of my changed mood that this time my first thought was not of our tragic expedition but of the wonderful island below the horizon, to which I was now going home.
From Raft to Raft Page 21