"Trig. Stations in the Sea"-Apia-Religious dilemma-Stevenson-Vaillile- Description of Samoa-SIVA: Performers and Audience-Tineāta Apia "In Full Dress"-Cocoanut-oil toilet-Second "Leading Lady"-Semi- pantomimic plays-Midnight call on prima donna's family-Sliding rock— Windward Islands-Fire-walkers-Suva: Botanic Gardens-Marriage explained -A Gilbertian situation--Schools-Domestic Service-English Rule- Lala-Food Regulations - Land Laws - Needs of White Settlers- "Our Colonials "-Rarotonga-Calling on a Queen-Maids of Honour on all fours-Royal love story-How to wash a shirt-"Te Torea" and Editress- assistant - Cocoanuts for the ladies Round the Island - A Queen's symphony-Sermon on blackboard-Where is the Salvation Army?— Efforts to make Rarotongans Self-governing - French meal hours- Aitutaki-Vast circle of Atolls-A tall yarn-Aratunga-Tautu-Waipi by candle-nut light-Why we did not stay all night - Prescribing by Tahiti-Papeete by sunrise-Papeëte in full sunshine-Sunday service-Con- gregation Tahitian Choir-Market Place-Morning and at night-Hotels -French bureaucracy-English beach-comber-Ecoles publiques-Land crabs-Déjeuner à l'indigène-Moorea-Excursion trip-Monde and demi- monde" Marseillaise"-" God Save the Queen "-Hole in Mountain- Scenery-Inhabitants — Raiatea —A little Rebellion-Was the English Consul a Frenchman dressed up?—Union Jack still flying-Gensdarmes— HE South Sea Islands! To us New Zealanders, when we were TH young in the "Sixties," what a charm they were of mystery, barratry, piracy, kidnapping; of tales of innocent, gentle southern natives torn from their paradises and sold into slavery by Englishspeaking devils; of more northern fierce cannibals, Fijians, New Hebrideans, and Solomon Islanders, down whose throats disappeared, in most satisfactory retribution, some of our compatriots! Most English boys would have to look up the dictionary if suddenly confronted with, and asked the meaning of, "barratry," but to us in "West Coast goldfield" days it was almost a household word. Handy schooners, filled at Dunedin with everything useful for an alluvial gold rush, were quite as handy for a South Sea island. At the new goldfield township of Hokitika, on the almost unknown, at any rate unexplored, west coast of the Middle Island of New Zealand, consignees waited long in vain. Then the brig Sarah, or the clipper-built, topsail schooner Rover, was given up as lost with all hands. Insurances were paid. The sailors' widows wept, and married again. The captain and crew died to New Zealand, and rose happily in the heaven of Tonga, Vavau, or Samoa. The Rover was painted afresh, out of ship's stores, or, may be, out of cargo. Her name was altered, a new set of papers forged, her cargo exchanged for pearl-shell and cocoanut-oil. Native men and women, bought at auction or from the chiefs at Nukualofa, or Leuka, or more economically deported, at first hand, from some lonely island, were "traded away"-a euphemistic form of speech, meaning that they B were sold into slavery, or worse, parted with one by one to the cannibal for his gruesome feasts. After these exploits the successful captain and crew had only to go modestly for a year or two into retreat among "The Thousand Isles,"1 and the very names of their vessels became forgotten by New Zealand and Australia in the excitement of new gold fevers and land settlement. Soon would these ship and slave stealers, or that percentage of them which managed to elude the cannibals, boldly retire with a competency into honourable private life in England, or settle as leading citizens in Fiji or Honolulu. The greatest of all these gentlemen was the late lamented "Bully Hayes." Imperfect sketches of him appear in A Modern Buccaneer and in Through Atolls and Islands in the Great South Sea, and in several other books; but they hardly touch the tragedies of this career. Those who knew most held their peace. The fact is, many of the island traders were either in complicity, or at least sympathised, with his plunderings, and would not tell against him while he was alive. After he was gone their tongues wagged. Then was the time to learn the whole truth about him. Our best modern writer of adventure, the late Robert Louis Stevenson, in his South Sea Island novel, The Wrecker, mentions Hayes casually, and evidently without the most distant conception, that in the life and adventures of this pirate, kidnapper, murderer, and ship-stealer was material for a book of adventure second to none that ever was written. By rare combination of circumstances the author of Kidnapped and Treasure Island was specially endowed with the necessary genius, fitted out with the necessary intellectual skill, and sent to live in the very spot where, in the circle of a few days' sailing, could have been collected all the materials for the true story of Hayes. From the lower standpoint of romantic fiction, even a novel on the subject would have been a much greater than either of those books on which his reputation is founded. Had they chanced to come together what collaborateurs in such a work would have been Stevenson and the author of the brilliant stories in By Reef and Palm, "Lui Becke," who knew the Pacific as few men alive or dead have ever known it! Becke cruised with the pirate for a time in some ordinary trading expeditions, and must have heard in his wanderings more than he chose to tell to his collaborateur. That Hayes, though not so piously and picturesquely bloodthirsty as his forerunner, the Buccaneer of New 1 The Paumotu Group, consisting of seventy-eight atolls or clusters of islets on coral reefs. Paumotu signifies "Cloud of islands." |