Horror in Paradise

by Anthology

  Louis Becke

  A Basket of Breadfruit

  George Lewis Becke (1855-1913) is generally acclaimed as the best writer of South Sea stories to have lived for many years in the region he evoked in his fact and fiction.

  After spending two decades as a trader, beachcomber, black-birder, and wanderer “from Rapa to Palau,” Louis Becke at the age of thirty-eight began to write stories for the famed Sydney Bulletin, and in 1896 went to London to embark on a literary career. Before his death he published thirty-five books about the Pacific, six of them in collaboration with Walter James Jeffery. This selection comes from Becke’s first book, By Reef and Palm (1894).

  “A Basket of Breadfruit,” the adventures of a trader during the civil war days in Samoa when Colonel Albert Barnes Steinberger, an American filibuster, was intervening in the three-way struggle of the chiefs for supremacy, has the ring of truth. In fewer than two thousand words, the reader is plunged into a life-or-death situation, following the involvement of a South Sea trader hurrying his small schooner inside the perilous reef.

  IT WAS in Steinberger’s time. A trader had come up to Apia in his boat from the end of Savaii, the largest of the Samoan group, and was on his way home again when the falling tide caused him to stop awhile at Mulinu’u Point, about two miles from Apia. Here he designed to smoke and talk and drink kava at the great camp with some hospitable native acquaintances during the rising of the water. Soon he was taking his ease on a soft mat, watching the bevy of aua luma [the local girls] “chawing” kava.

  Now the trader lived at Falealupo, at the extreme westerly end of Savaii; but the Samoans, by reason of its isolation and extremity, have for ages called it by another name—an unprintable one—and so some of the people present began to jest with the trader for living in such a place. He fell in with their humor, and said that if those present would find him for a wife a girl unseared by the breath of scandal, he would leave Falealupo for Safune, where he had bought land.

  “Malie!” said an old dame, with one eye and white hair, “the papalagi [foreigner] is inspired to speak wisdom tonight; for at Safune grow the sweetest nuts and the biggest taro and breadfruit; and, lo! here among the kavachewers is a young maid from Safune—mine own granddaughter Salome. And against her name can no one in Samoa laugh in the hollow of his hand,” and the old creature, amid laughter and cries of Isa! e le ma le lo matua [the old woman is without shame], crept over to the trader, and, with one skinny hand on his knee, gazed steadily into his face with her one eye.

  The trader looked at the girl—at Salome. She had, at her grandmother’s speech, turned her head aside, and taking the “chaw” of kava root from her pretty mouth, dissolved into shamefaced tears. The trader was a man of quick perceptions, and he made up his mind to do in earnest what he had said in jest—this because of the tears of Salome. He quickly whispered to the old woman, “Come to the boat before the full of the tide and we will talk.”

  When the kava was ready for drinking, the others present had forgotten all about the old woman and Salome, who had both crept away unobserved, and an hour or two was passed in merriment, for the trader was a man well liked. Then, when he rose and said to fa, they begged him not to attempt to pass down in his boat inside the reef, as he was sure to be fired upon, for how were their people to tell a friend from an enemy in the black night? But he smiled, and said his boat was too heavily laden to face the ocean swell. So they bade him to fa, and called out manuia oe! [Bless you!] as he lifted the door of thatch and went.

  The old woman awaited him, holding the girl by the hand. On the ground lay a basket, strongly tied up. Salome still wept, but the old woman angrily bade her cease and enter the boat, which the crew had now pushed bow-on to the beach. The old woman lifted the basket and carefully put it on board.

  “Be sure,” she said to the crew, “not to sit on it, for it is but ripe breadfruit I am taking to my people in Manono.”

  “Give them here to me,” said the trader, and he put the basket in the stem out of the way. The old woman came aft, too, and crouched at his feet and smoked a sului. The cool land-breeze freshened as the sail was hoisted, and then the crew besought the trader not to run down inside the reef. Bullets, they said, if fired in plenty, always hit something, and the sea was fairly smooth outside the reef. And old Lupetea grasped his hand and muttered in his ear, “For the sake of this my little daughter, go outside. See, now, I am old, and to lie when so near death as I am is foolish. Be warned by me and be wise; sail out into the ocean, and at daylight we will be at Salua in Manono. Then thou canst set my feet on the shore—I and the basket. But the girl shall go with thee. Thou canst marry her, if that be to thy mind, in the fashion of the papalagi, or take her fa’a Samoa. Thus will I keep faith with thee. If the girl be false, her neck is but little and thy fingers strong.”

  Now the trader thought in this wise: “This is well for me, for if I get the girl away thus quietly from all her relations I will save much in presents,” and his heart rejoiced, for although not mean he was a careful man. So he steered his boat between the seething surf that boiled and hissed on both sides of the boat passage.

  As the boat sailed past the misty line of cloud-capped Upolu, the trader lifted the girl up beside him and spoke to her. She was not afraid of him, she said, for many had told her he was a good man, and not a ula vale [scamp], but she wept because now, save her old grandmother, all her kinsfolk were dead. Even but a day and a half ago her one brother was killed with her cousin. They were strong men, but the bullets were swift, and so they died. And their heads had been shown at Matautu. For that she had grieved and wept and eaten nothing, and the world was cold to her.

  “Poor little devil!” said the trader to himself—“hungry.” Then he opened a locker and found a tin of sardines. Not a scrap of biscuit. There was plenty of biscuit, though, in the boat, in fifty-pound tins, but on these mats were spread, whereon his crew were sleeping. He was about to rouse them when he remembered the old dame’s basket of ripe breadfruit. He laughed and looked at her. She, too, slept, coiled up at his feet. But first he opened the sardines and placed them beside the girl, and motioned her to steer. Her eyes gleamed like diamonds in the darkness as she answered his glance, and her soft fingers grasped the tiller. Very quickly, then, he felt among the packages aft till he came to the basket.

  A quick stroke of his knife cut the sennit that lashed the sides together. He felt inside. “Only two, after all, but big ones, and no mistake. Wrapped in cloth, too! I wonder—Hell and furies, what’s this?”—as his fingers came in contact with something that felt like a human eye. Drawing his hand quickly back, he fumbled in his pockets for a match, and struck it.

  Breadfruit? No. Two heads with closed eyes, and livid lips blue with the pallor of death, showing their white teeth. And Salome covered her face and slid down in the bottom of the boat again, and wept afresh for her cousin and brother, and the boat came up in the wind, but no one awoke.

  The trader was angry. But after he had tied up the basket again, he put the boat on her course once more and called to the girl. She crept close to him and nestled under his overcoat, for the morning air came across the sea from the dewladen forests and she was chilled. Then she told the story of how her grandma had begged the heads from those of Malietoa’s troops who had taken them at Matautu, and then gone to the camp at Mulinu’u in the hope of getting a passage in some boat to Manono, her country, where she would fain bury them. And that night he had come, and old Lupetea had rejoiced and sworn her to secrecy about the heads in the basket. And that also was why Lupetea was afraid for the boat to go down inside the passage, for there were many enemies to be met with, and they would have shot old Lupetea because she was of Manono. That was all. Then she ate the sardines, and, leaning her head against the trader’s bosom, fell asleep.

  As the first note of the great grey pigeon sounded the dawn, the trader’s boat sailed softly up to the Salua beach, and old Lupetea rose, and, bidding the crew goodbye, and calling
down blessings on the head of the good and clever white man as she rubbed his and the girl’s noses against her own, she grasped her basket of breadfruit and went ashore. Then the trader, with Salome by his side, sailed out again into the ocean.

  Samuel L. Clemens [Mark Twain]

  The Burning of

  the Clipper Ship Hornet

  Samuel L. Clemens (1835-1910), whose arrival in Honolulu on March 18, 1866, was noted on the passenger list under his recently adopted pseudonym of “Mark Twain,” spent four months in the “Sandwich Islands” as a newspaper correspondent. Traveling around the group, he described life as he saw it more than a century ago in the future fiftieth state.

  While on a horseback tour of the Kona Coast of Hawaii, the reporter came upon a large temple platform “which was built,” he wrote, “in a single night, in the midst of storm and thunder and rain, by the ghastly hands of dead men! Tradition says that by the weird glare of the lightning a noiseless multitude of phantoms were seen at their strange labor far up the mountainside at dead of night—flitting hither and thither and bearing great lava blocks clasped in their nerveless fingers—appearing and disappearing as the pallid luster fell upon their forms and faded away again. Even to this day, it is said, the natives hold this dread structure in awe and reverence, and will not pass it in the night.”

  While he was in Honolulu, some survivors of one of the most amazing episodes in Pacific annals arrived in the hospital in that port. The clipper ship Hornet had accidentally been set on fire near the equator, and Captain Josiah Mitchell and fourteen men had made their way in the ship’s longboat to Laupahoehoe on the island of Hawaii, a disastrous voyage of four thousand miles.

  Clemens spent the night interviewing the seamen and writing the story of their adventures for the Sacramento, California, Weekly Union. Next morning the manuscript was tossed aboard a schooner which had already cast off for San Francisco. This “grand scoop” was widely reprinted, and on his return to California “Mark” boldly billed the newspaper for $300, a sum fifteen times his usual rate for an article. This exciting piece of early reporting made its writer for the first time a “literary personage,” and, in his own words, “about the best-known honest man on the Pacific Coast.”

  Honolulu, June 25, 1866.

  IN THE postscript to a letter which I wrote two or three days ago and sent by the ship Live Yankee, I gave you the substance of a letter received here from Hilo by Walker, Allen & Co., informing them that a boat containing fifteen men, in a helpless and starving condition, had drifted ashore at Laupahoehoe, Island of Hawaii, and that they had belonged to the clipper ship Hornet, Mitchell master, and had been afloat on the ocean since the burning of that vessel, about one hundred miles north of the equator, on the 3d of May—forty-three days.

  The third mate and ten of the seamen have arrived here and are now in the hospital. Captain Mitchell, one seaman named Antonio Passene, and two passengers (Samuel and Henry Ferguson, of New York City, young gentlemen aged respectively eighteen and twenty-eight) are still at Hilo, but are expected here within the week.

  In the captain’s modest epitome of this terrible romance, which you have probably published, you detect the fine old hero through it. It reads like Grant.

  I have talked with the seamen and with John S. Thomas, third mate, but their accounts are so nearly alike in all substantial points that I will merely give the officer’s statement and weave into it such matters as the men mentioned in the way of incidents, experiences, emotions, etc. Thomas is a very intelligent and a very cool and self-possessed young man and seems to have kept a pretty accurate log of his remarkable voyage in his head. He told his story, of three hours’ length, in a plain, straight-forward way, and with no attempt at display and no straining after effect. Wherever any incident may be noted in this paper where any individual has betrayed any emotion, or enthusiasm, or has departed from strict, stoical self-possession, or had a solitary thought that was not an utterly unpoetical and essentially practical one, remember that Thomas, the third mate, was not that person. He has been eleven days on shore, and already looks sufficiently sound and healthy to pass almost anywhere without being taken for an invalid. He has the marks of a hard experience about him, though, when one looks closely. He is very much sunburned and weatherbeaten, and looks thirty-two years old. He is only twenty-four, however, and has been a sailor fifteen years. He was born in Richmond, Maine, and still considers that place his home. The following is the substance of what Thomas said:

  The Hornet left New York on the 15th of January last, unusually well manned, fitted, and provisioned—as fast and as handsome a clipper ship as ever sailed out of that port. She had a general cargo—a little of everything: a large quantity of kerosene oil in barrels; several hundred cases of candles; also four hundred tons Pacific Railroad iron, and three engines. The third mate thinks they were dock engines, and one of the seamen thought they were locomotives. Had no gales and no bad weather; nothing but fine sailing weather, and she went along steadily and well—fast, very fast, in fact. Had uncommonly good weather off Cape Horn; he had been around that Cape seven times—each way—and had never seen such fine weather there before. On the 12th of April, in latitude, say, 35° S. and longitude 95° W., signaled a Prussian bark; she set Prussian ensign, and the Hornet responded with her name, expressed by means of Merritt’s system of signals. She was sailing west—probably bound for Australia. This was the last vessel ever seen by the Hornet’s people until they floated ashore in Hawaii in the longboat—a space of sixty-four days.

  At seven o’clock on the morning of the 3d of May, the chief mate and two men started down into the hold to draw some “bright varnish” from a cask. The captain told him to bring the cask on deck—that it was dangerous to have it where it was, in the hold. The mate, instead of obeying the order, proceeded to draw a canful of the varnish first. He had an open light in his hand, and the liquid took fire; the can was dropped, the officer in his consternation neglected to close the bung, and in a few seconds the fiery torrent had run in every direction, under bales of rope, cases of candles, barrels of kerosene, and all sorts of freight, and tongues of flame were shooting upward through every aperture and crevice toward the deck.

  The ship was moving along under easy sail, the watch on duty were idling here and there in such shade as they could find, and the listlessness and repose of morning in the tropics was upon the vessel and her belongings. But as six bells chimed, the cry of “Fire!” rang through the ship and woke every man to life and action. And following the fearful warning, and almost as fleetly, came the fire itself. It sprang through hatchways, seized upon chairs, table, cordage, anything, everything—and almost before the bewildered men could realize what the trouble was and what was to be done the cabin was a hell of angry flames. The mainmast was on fire—its rigging was burned asunder! One man said all this had happened within eighteen or twenty minutes after the first alarm—two others say in ten minutes. All say that one hour after the alarm, the main and mizzenmasts were burned in two and fell overboard.

  Captain Mitchell ordered the three boats to be launched instantly, which was done—and so hurriedly that the longboat (the one he left the vessel in himself) had a hole as large as a man’s head stove in her bottom. A blanket was stuffed into the opening and fastened to its place. Not a single thing was saved, except such food and other articles as lay about the cabin and could be quickly seized and thrown on deck. Thomas was sent into the longboat to receive its proportion of these things, and, being barefooted at the time, and bareheaded, and having no clothing on save an undershirt and pantaloons, of course he never got a chance afterward to add to his dress. He lost everything he had, including his logbook, which he had faithfully kept from the first. Forty minutes after the fire alarm the provisions and passengers were on board the three boats, and they rowed away from the ship—and to some distance, too, for the heat was very great. Twenty minutes afterward the two masts I have mentioned, with their rigging and their broad sheets of
canvas wreathed in flames, crashed into the sea.

  All night long the thirty-one unfortunates sat in their frail boats and watched the gallant ship burn; and felt as men feel when they see a tried friend perishing and are powerless to help him. The sea was illuminated for miles around, and the clouds above were tinged with a ruddy hue; the faces of the men glowed in the strong light as they shaded their eyes with their hands and peered out anxiously upon the wild picture, and the gunwales of the boats and the idle oars shone like polished gold.

  At five o’clock on the morning after the disaster, in latitude 2° 20’ N., longitude 112° 8’ W., the ship went down, and the crew of the Hornet were alone on the great deep, or, as one of the seamen expressed it, “We felt as if somebody or something had gone away—as if we hadn’t any home any more.”

  Captain Mitchell divided his boat’s crew into two watches and gave the third mate charge of one and took the other himself. He had saved a studding sail from the ship, and out of this the men fashioned a rude sail with their knives; they hoisted it, and taking the first and second mates’ boats in tow, they bore away upon the ship’s course (northwest) and kept in the track of vessels bound to or from San Francisco, in the hope of being picked up.

  I have said that in the few minutes’ time allowed him, Captain Mitchell was only able to seize upon the few articles of food and other necessaries that happened to lie about the cabin. Here is the list: Four hams; seven pieces of salt pork (each piece weighed about four pounds); one box of raisins; one hundred pounds of bread (about one barrel); twelve two-pound cans of oysters, clams, and assorted meats; six buckets of raw potatoes (which rotted so fast they got but little benefit from them); a keg with four pounds of butter in it; twelve gallons of water in a forty-gallon tierce or scuttle butt; four one-gallon demijohns full of water; three bottles of brandy, the property of passengers; some pipes, matches, and a hundred pounds of tobacco; they had no medicines. That was all these poor fellows had to live on for forty-three days—the whole thirty-one of them!