South Sea Tales

by Jack London

  “How—how many blacks have you on the plantation?” Bertie asked, with a sinking heart.

  “We’re working four hundred just now,” replied Mr. Harriwell, cheerfully; “but the three of us, with you, of course, and the skipper and mate of the Arla, can handle them all right.”

  Bertie turned to meet one McTavish, the storekeeper, who scarcely acknowledged the introduction, such was his eagerness to present his resignation.

  “It being that I’m a married man, Mr. Harriwell, I can’t very well afford to remain on longer. Trouble is working up, as plain as the nose on your face. The niggers are going to break out, and there’ll be another Hohono horror here.”

  “What’s a Hohono horror?” Bertie asked, after the storekeeper had been persuaded to remain until the end of the month.

  “Oh, he means Hohono Plantation, on Ysabel,” said the manager. “The niggers killed the five white men ashore, captured the schooner, killed the captain and mate, and escaped in a body to Malaita. But I always said they were careless on Hohono. They won’t catch us napping here. Come along, Mr. Arkwright, and see our view from the veranda.”

  Bertie was too busy wondering how he could get away to Tulagi to the Commissioner’s house, to see much of the view. He was still wondering, when a rifle exploded very near to him, behind his back. At the same moment his arm was nearly dislocated, so eagerly did Mr. Harriwell drag him indoors.

  “I say, old man, that was a close shave,” said the manager, pawing him over to see if he had been hit. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am. But it was broad daylight, and I never dreamed.”

  Bertie was beginning to turn pale.

  “They got the other manager that way,” McTavish vouchsafed. “And a dashed fine chap he was. Blew his brains out all over the veranda. You noticed that dark stain there between the steps and the door?”

  Bertie was ripe for the cocktail which Mr. Harriwell pitched in and compounded for him; but before he could drink it, a man in riding trousers and puttees entered.

  “What’s the matter now?” the manager asked, after one look at the newcomer’s face. “Is the river up again?”

  “River be blowed—it’s the niggers. Stepped out of the cane grass, not a dozen feet away, and whopped at me. It was a Snider, and he shot from the hip. Now what I want to know is where’d he get that Snider?—Oh, I beg pardon. Glad to know you, Mr. Arkwright.”

  “Mr. Brown is my assistant,” explained Mr. Harriwell. “And now let’s have that drink.”

  “But where’d he get that Snider?” Mr. Brown insisted. “I always objected to keeping those guns on the premises.”

  “They’re still there,” Mr. Harriwell said, with a show of heat.

  Mr. Brown smiled incredulously.

  “Come along and see,” said the manager.

  Bertie joined the procession into the office, where Mr. Harriwell pointed triumphantly at a big packing case in a dusty corner.

  “Well, then where did the beggar get that Snider?” harped Mr. Brown.

  But just then McTavish lifted the packing case. The manager started, then tore off the lid. The case was empty. They gazed at one another in horrified silence. Harriwell drooped wearily.

  Then McVeigh cursed.

  “What I contended all along—the house-boys are not to be trusted.”

  “It does look serious,” Harriwell admitted, “but we’ll come through it all right. What the sanguinary niggers need is a shaking up. Will you gentlemen please bring your rifles to dinner, and will you, Mr. Brown, kindly prepare forty or fifty sticks of dynamite. Make the fuses good and short. We’ll give them a lesson. And now, gentlemen, dinner is served.”

  One thing that Bertie detested was rice and curry, so it happened that he alone partook of an inviting omelet. He had quite finished his plate, when Harriwell helped himself to the omelet. One mouthful he tasted, then spat out vociferously.

  “That’s the second time,” McTavish announced ominously.

  Harriwell was still hawking and spitting.

  “Second time, what?” Bertie quavered.

  “Poison,” was the answer. “That cook will be hanged yet.”

  “That’s the way the bookkeeper went out at Cape March ,” Brown spoke up. “Died horribly. They said on the Jessie that they heard him screaming three miles away.”

  “I’ll put the cook in irons,” sputtered Harriwell. “Fortunately we discovered it in time.”

  Bertie sat paralyzed. There was no color in his face. He attempted to speak, but only an inarticulate gurgle resulted. All eyed him anxiously.

  “Don’t say it, don’t say it,” McTavish cried in a tense voice.

  “Yes, I ate it, plenty of it, a whole plateful!” Bertie cried explosively, like a diver suddenly regaining breath.

  The awful silence continued half a minute longer, and he read his fate in their eyes.

  “Maybe it wasn’t poison after all,” said Harriwell, dismally.

  “Call in the cook,” said Brown.

  In came the cook, a grinning black boy, nose-spiked and ear-plugged.

  “Here, you, Wi-wi, what name that?” Harriwell bellowed, pointing accusingly at the omelet.

  Wi-wi was very naturally frightened and embarrassed.

  “Him good fella kai-kai,” he murmured apologetically.

  “Make him eat it,” suggested McTavish. “That’s a proper test.”

  Harriwell filled a spoon with the stuff and jumped for the cook, who fled in panic.

  “That settles it,” was Brown’s solemn pronouncement. “He won’t eat it.”

  “Mr. Brown, will you please go and put the irons on him?” Harriwell turned cheerfully to Bertie. “It’s all right, old man, the Commissioner will deal with him, and if you die, depend upon it, he will be hanged.”

  “Don’t think the government’ll do it,” objected McTavish.

  “But gentlemen, gentlemen,” Bertie cried. “In the meantime think of me.”

  Harriwell shrugged his shoulders pityingly.

  “Sorry, old man, but it’s a native poison, and there are no known antidotes for native poisons. Try and compose yourself and if—”

  Two sharp reports of a rifle from without, interrupted the discourse, and Brown, entering, reloaded his rifle and sat down to table.

  “The cook’s dead,” he said. “Fever. A rather sudden attack.”

  “I was just telling Mr. Arkwright that there are no antidotes for native poisons—”

  “Except gin,” said Brown.

  Harriwell called himself an absent-minded idiot and rushed for the gin bottle.

  “Neat, man, neat,” he warned Bertie, who gulped down a tumbler two-thirds full of the raw spirits, and coughed and choked from the angry bite of it till the tears ran down his cheeks.

  Harriwell took his pulse and temperature, made a show of looking out for him, and doubted that the omelet had been poisoned. Brown and McTavish also doubted; but Bertie discerned an insincere ring in their voices. His appetite had left him, and he took his own pulse stealthily under the table. There was no question but what it was increasing, but he failed to ascribe it to the gin he had taken. McTavish, rifle in hand, went out on the veranda to reconnoiter.

  “They’re massing up at the cook-house,” was his report. “And they’ve no end of Sniders. My idea is to sneak around on the other side and take them in flank. Strike the first blow, you know. Will you come along, Brown?”

  Harriwell ate on steadily, while Bertie discovered that his pulse had leaped up five beats. Nevertheless, he could not help jumping when the rifles began to go off. Above the scattering of Sniders could be heard the pumping of Brown’s and McTavish’s Winchesters—all against a background of demoniacal screeching and yelling.

  “They’ve got them on the run,” Harriwell remarked, as voices and gunshots faded away in the distance.

  Scarcely were Brown and McTavish back at the table when the latter reconnoitered.

  “They’ve got dynamite,” he said.

 
“Then let’s charge them with dynamite,” Harriwell proposed.

  Thrusting half a dozen sticks each into their pockets and equipping themselves with lighted cigars, they started for the door. And just then it happened. They blamed McTavish for it afterward, and he admitted that the charge had been a trifle excessive. But at any rate it went off under the house, which lifted up cornerwise and settled back on its foundations. Half the china on the table was shattered, while the eight-day clock stopped. Yelling for vengeance, the three men rushed out into the night, and the bombardment began.

  When they returned, there was no Bertie. He had dragged himself away to the office, barricaded himself in, and sunk upon the floor in a gin-soaked nightmare, wherein he died a thousand deaths while the valorous fight went on around him. In the morning, sick and headachey from the gin, he crawled out to find the sun still in the sky and God presumable in heaven, for his hosts were alive and uninjured.

  Harriwell pressed him to stay on longer, but Bertie insisted on sailing immediately on the Arla for Tulagi, where, until the following steamer day, he stuck close by the Commissioner’s house. There were lady tourists on the outgoing steamer, and Bertie was again a hero, while Captain Malu, as usual, passed unnoticed. But Captain Malu sent back from Sydney two cases of the best Scotch whiskey on the market, for he was not able to make up his mind as to whether it was Captain Hansen or Mr Harriwell who had given Bertie Arkwright the more gorgeous insight into life in the Solomons.

  THE INEVITABLE WHITE MAN

  “The black will never understand the white, nor the white the black, as long as black is black and white is white.”

  So said Captain Woodward. We sat in the parlor of Charley Roberts’ pub in Apia, drinking long Abu Hameds compounded and shared with us by the aforesaid Charley Roberts, who claimed the recipe direct from Stevens, famous for having invented the Abu Hamed at a time when he was spurred on by Nile thirst—the Stevens who was responsible for “With Kitchener to Kartoun,” and who passed out at the siege of Ladysmith.

  Captain Woodward, short and squat, elderly, burned by forty years of tropic sun, and with the most beautiful liquid brown eyes I ever saw in a man, spoke from a vast experience. The crisscross of scars on his bald pate bespoke a tomahawk intimacy with the black, and of equal intimacy was the advertisement, front and rear, on the right side of his neck, where an arrow had at one time entered and been pulled clean through. As he explained, he had been in a hurry on that occasion—the arrow impeded his running—and he felt that he could not take the time to break off the head and pull out the shaft the way it had come in. At the present moment he was commander of the SAVAII, the big steamer that recruited labor from the westward for the German plantations on Samoa .

  “Half the trouble is the stupidity of the whites,” said Roberts, pausing to take a swig from his glass and to curse the Samoan bar-boy in affectionate terms. “If the white man would lay himself out a bit to understand the workings of the black man’s mind, most of the messes would be avoided.”

  “I’ve seen a few who claimed they understood niggers,” Captain Woodward retorted, “and I always took notice that they were the first to be kai-kai’d (eaten). Look at the missionaries in New Guinea and the New Hebrides —the martyr isle of Erromanga and all the rest. Look at the Austrian expedition that was cut to pieces in the Solomons, in the bush of Guadalcanar. And look at the traders themselves, with a score of years’ experience, making their brag that no nigger would ever get them, and whose heads to this day are ornamenting the rafters of the canoe houses. There was old Johnny Simons—twenty-six years on the raw edges of Melanesia, swore he knew the niggers like a book and that they’d never do for him, and he passed out at Marovo Lagoon, New Georgia, had his head sawed off by a black Mary (woman) and an old nigger with only one leg, having left the other leg in the mouth of a shark while diving for dynamited fish. There was Billy Watts, horrible reputation as a nigger killer, a man to scare the devil. I remember lying at Cape Little, New Ireland you know, when the niggers stole half a case of trade-tobacco—cost him about three dollars and a half. In retaliation he turned out, shot six niggers, smashed up their war canoes and burned two villages. And it was at Cape Little, four years afterward, that he was jumped along with fifty Buku boys he had with him fishing bкche-de-mer. In five minutes they were all dead, with the exception of three boys who got away in a canoe. Don’t talk to me about understanding the nigger. The white man’s mission is to farm the world, and it’s a big enough job cut out for him. What time has he got left to understand niggers anyway?”

  “Just so,” said Roberts. “And somehow it doesn’t seem necessary, after all, to understand the niggers. In direct proportion to the white man’s stupidity is his success in farming the world—”

  “And putting the fear of God into the nigger’s heart,” Captain Woodward blurted out. “Perhaps you’re right, Roberts. Perhaps it’s his stupidity that makes him succeed, and surely one phase of his stupidity is his inability to understand the niggers. But there’s one thing sure, the white has to run the niggers whether he understands them or not. It’s inevitable. It’s fate.”

  “And of course the white man is inevitable—it’s the niggers’ fate,” Roberts broke in. “Tell the white man there’s pearl shell in some lagoon infested by ten-thousand howling cannibals, and he’ll head there all by his lonely, with half a dozen kanaka divers and a tin alarm clock for chronometer, all packed like sardines on a commodious, five-ton ketch. Whisper that there’s a gold strike at the North Pole, and that same inevitable white-skinned creature will set out at once, armed with pick and shovel, a side of bacon, and the latest patent rocker—and what’s more, he’ll get there. Tip it off to him that there’s diamonds on the red-hot ramparts of hell, and Mr. White Man will storm the ramparts and set old Satan himself to pick-and-shovel work. That’s what comes of being stupid and inevitable.”

  “But I wonder what the black man must think of the—the inevitableness,” I said.

  Captain Woodward broke into quiet laughter. His eyes had a reminiscent gleam.

  “I’m just wondering what the niggers of Malu thought and still must be thinking of the one inevitable white man we had on board when we visited them in the DUCHESS,” he explained.

  Roberts mixed three more Abu Hameds.

  “That was twenty years ago. Saxtorph was his name. He was certainly the most stupid man I ever saw, but he was as inevitable as death. There was only one thing that chap could do, and that was shoot. I remember the first time I ran into him—right here in Apia , twenty years ago. That was before your time, Roberts. I was sleeping at Dutch Henry’s hotel, down where the market is now. Ever heard of him? He made a tidy stake smuggling arms in to the rebels, sold out his hotel, and was killed in Sydney just six weeks afterward in a saloon row.

  “But Saxtorph. One night I’d just got to sleep, when a couple of cats began to sing in the courtyard. It was out of bed and up window, water jug in hand. But just then I heard the window of the next room go up. Two shots were fired, and the window was closed. I fail to impress you with the celerity of the transaction. Ten seconds at the outside. Up went the window, bang bang went the revolver, and down went the window. Whoever it was, he had never stopped to see the effect of his shots. He knew. Do you follow me?—he KNEW. There was no more cat concert, and in the morning there lay the two offenders, stone dead. It was marvelous to me. It still is marvelous. First, it was starlight, and Saxtorph shot without drawing a bead; next, he shot so rapidly that the two reports were like a double report; and finally, he knew he had hit his marks without looking to see.

  “Two days afterward he came on board to see me. I was mate, then, on the Duchess, a whacking big one-hundred-and fifty-ton schooner, a blackbirder. And let me tell you that blackbirders were blackbirders in those days. There weren’t any government protection for US, either. It was rough work, give and take, if we were finished, and nothing said, and we ran niggers from every south sea island they didn’t kick us off from. W
ell, Saxtorph came on board, John Saxtorph was the name he gave. He was a sandy little man, hair sandy, complexion sandy, and eyes sandy, too. Nothing striking about him. His soul was as neutral as his color scheme. He said he was strapped and wanted to ship on board. Would go cabin boy, cook, supercargo, or common sailor. Didn’t know anything about any of the billets, but said that he was willing to learn. I didn’t want him, but his shooting had so impressed me that I took him as common sailor, wages three pounds per month.

  “He was willing to learn all right, I’ll say that much. But he was constitutionally unable to learn anything. He could no more box the compass than I could mix drinks like Roberts here. And as for steering, he gave me my first gray hairs. I never dared risk him at the wheel when we were running in a big sea, while full-and-by and close-and-by were insoluble mysteries. Couldn’t ever tell the difference between a sheet and a tackle, simply couldn’t. The fore-throat-jig and the jib-jig were all one to him. Tell him to slack off the mainsheet, and before you know it, he’d drop the peak. He fell overboard three times, and he couldn’t swim. But he was always cheerful, never seasick, and he was the most willing man I ever knew. He was an uncommunicative soul. Never talked about himself. His history, so far as we were concerned, began the day he signed on the DUCHESS. Where he learned to shoot, the stars alone can tell. He was a Yankee—that much we knew from the twang in his speech. And that was all we ever did know.

  “And now we begin to get to the point. We had bad luck in the New Hebrides , only fourteen boys for five weeks, and we ran up before the southeast for the Solomons. Malaita, then as now, was good recruiting ground, and we ran into Malu, on the northwestern corner. There’s a shore reef and an outer reef, and a mighty nervous anchorage; but we made it all right and fired off our dynamite as a signal to the niggers to come down and be recruited. In three days we got not a boy. The niggers came off to us in their canoes by hundreds, but they only laughed when we showed them beads and calico and hatchets and talked of the delights of plantation work in Samoa .