Uninhabited Island
I
THE yawl rounded the sand cay and headed for the passage, a fair wind over her quarter, her flying topsail set, a bone in her teeth. When abreast of the main islet her captain came on deck with his glasses. Soon he made us out huddled on the outer beach; then we could see him motion to the helmsman, who turned the wheel over to him and, moving aft, dipped the ensign. After a little the vessel rose to the seas beyond the passage, and shaped her course for the Northern Islands; but we stayed on, watching until her topsails were lost below the horizon. Then we rose and broke through the jungle to the lagoon beach. We were alone on Uninhabited Island.
There are six islets and innumerable sand cays on the reef of this atoll, the former from a hundred yards to a half mile long, green with coconuts and pandanus, the latter patches of sand and bush where thousands of sea birds nest, turtles crawl ashore to lay their eggs, fat land crabs scuttle about, gorging on eggs and fledglings. The reef itself encloses a lagoon that is deep, blue, and mysterious, as clear as the tropic sky, yet as changeable as the sea. Its submarine canons are rich in mother-of-pearl and bêche-de-mer; but these treasures are watched over by as vicious sharks as one will find in the Pacific.
For years no one has lived on Uninhabited Island; but formerly labor gangs came here from the Northern Islands to make copra. This work soon was done. While waiting for the trading schooner’s return the men would feast on birds’ eggs, fledglings, coconut crabs, the fattest of the fish; and many tubs of coconut-husk beer would be brewed, and shouts of revelry would rise from the lonely groves. Here Captain William (Bully) Hayes had been marooned for a year, until an American sloop had picked him up; the islandfamous Jack Buckland had died a violent death; gold is said to have been buried by the early Spaniards; valuable pearls have been found when divers would risk their limbs. But now the islets are heavy with a jungle of young coconuts, pandanus, and bush; the few houses are in decay; the sharks and conger eels have recaptured their lagoon, the coconut crabs and rats their islets, the birds and turtles their sand cays.
On the northeastern reef there is a deep bight where, imbedded in the coral, more than one anchor tells of oldtime sailing ships that have been piled high and dry. And two miles from the passage islet, within the same bight, the boiler of a steamer stands high on the reef, a roosting place for longbeaked frigate birds.
We built a thatched hut above the lagoon beach, under a great Barringtonia tree. There the days passed quickly, with plenty of work to occupy our time. The yawl having left us no provisions, we were obliged to live as had the first savages who populated the Pacific Islands, gathering what food the sand islets produced and cooking it over coals, or in a Polynesian oven of hot stones with its covering of leaves. At dusk we would sip the warm and pleasantly acrid water from baked drinking nuts; then Nga would lie back on her frond mat, with her two children cuddled in her arms, instantly to fall asleep. I would light my pipe, throw a baited hook and line into the lagoon, and fish leisurely.
II
Across the islet the seas mutter on the outer reef; behind me is the sustained tintinnabulation of the wind in the palm fronds. A dove coos from the black jungle; there is the clicking of coral gravel as the hermit crabs promenade by the water’s edge; the clap of little waves; the dissonant clamor of the birds on the sand cays. The new moon sinks behind a wall of clouds; the lagoon blackens; the contours of the great constellations emerge, brighten, and are perfected.
Here about me is a self-contained world of creeping and flying things.
The sun rises over colonies of wideawakes and tropic birds, gawky mano’-war hawks and graceful boobies; the wind blows, the rain falls, the moon waxes and wanes, the stars shine with the same soft light as on places populated by man. On Uninhabited Island the gifts of Nature are showered prodigally on the land. At first one feels that they are wasted, but later he realizes that the creeping and flying creatures are as important in the scheme of things as is man himself.
Inland, countless coconut crabs burrow among the fallen nuts and fronds. They are like gigantic hermit crabs that have outgrown their shells: lobsters inveigled ashore by the promise of security and high living. Their proboscidiform eyes glow redly at night; their great claws are powerful enough to husk and break a coconut, to tear a sea bird to shreds. And there are the fat little mice that the Mangaians love to grill over pandanus-nut coals. Their greedy eyes flash and their whiskers twitch as they nibble the oily meat left by the crabs. Gold-streaked lizards, sleek as eels, scurry over the islet, feeding on beetles and butterflies, for there are no mosquitoes or flies on Uninhabited Island. They lay their eggs in the forks of the trees; and, when one hatches, the little lizard bursts from his shell, leaps forward a few inches, glances this way and that, and darts off in search of a meal. This little creature requires no mother’s training. The hermit crabs laboriously drag their shells along the sand, their eyes peeled for some legendary danger. Save for an occasional curlew, they have scarcely an enemy, yet at the least untoward trembling of a leaf they will clap into their shells and barricade their doors effectively with tightly folded claws. Perhaps their dim consciousness is still disturbed by an inherited memory of the days when they inhabited the reef, when octopuses and parrot fish crushed their shells and ate them.
Immaculate white ghost terns flutter in the pandanus thickets. Their ridiculous fuzzy fledglings perch on the angular limbs with mouths agape and eyes strangely savage for such gentle creatures. Wide-awakes circle low over the islet, screaming in a note that suggests mingled petulance and loneliness. At night they come from sea in their thousands, when the place becomes a bedlam of piercing voices until the last one has tucked his head under his wing. Higher in the air are the tropic birds, with long slim tail feathers scarlet-red against the sky, white breasts tinged with the blue reflection of the lagoon. And higher still, black flaws against the crystal sky, the frigate birds soar without a tremor of their wings, seemingly as immobile as the stars.
In the lagoon is incredible life. An old mama-turtle bobs up her head to breathe, stares phlegmatically at the lagoon beach, and decides, mayhap, on the best place in the shore bush to lay her eggs. Perhaps she feels some vague misgiving about the hut on the beach, remembering dimly a time, decades before, when there had been a similar house on a beach where she had laid her eggs, and when she had waddled into the lagoon scarcely in time to save her carapace shell. A yellow-fin shark cruises about, frightening the South Sea demoiselles into their sprays of antler coral. Great conger eels slither in and about the coral heads; and sometimes they come ashore, twenty feet up the beach, to stalk the sandpipers. Perhaps, some day ages hence, one will at last decide that shore life is more satisfactory than that of the sea, and with a valedictory flip of the tail he will squirm into the coconut thickets, there to remain. Tridacnæ and motherof-pearl bivalves gape deep down in the lagoon, waiting, as they have been doing these millions of years, for inexperienced protozoa to drift into their mouths. Octopuses stare coldly and fixedly from their submarine caverns; countless grotesquely shaped fish fin through the clear blue water in a kaleidoscope of color.
Midway across the passage islet the tottering sheds and houses of the former labor gangs stand by virtue of the thick supporting jungle. A few breadfruit trees rise above the bush to spread their fluted leaves over the main house, and there are clumps of bananas whose pale yellow leaves reach vainly toward the light. At one time a hedged path led from the lagoon beach to the manager’s house, but now its borders have grown solid across the way.
The manager’s house is a two-roomed affair with wide verandahs, a hurricane cellar, store shelves, and barnlike sliding doors. Names, dates, and caricatures cover the walls, while on the front door someone has written in large block letters:—
I HAVE FOUND GOLD ON THE NORTHEAST POINT AND THIS THE 26TH DAY OF APRIL HAVE SAILED IN A NORTHWEST DIRECTION
GENTE DE RAZON
Perhaps he did find gold, for it is known that several Spanish coins have been picked from the sand of Uninhabited Island; and many traders and pearl divers have searched for an arrow, a cross, or a heap of stones that might mark the hiding place of brassbound treasure chests.
A copra shed stands close to the main house. Above its door is a sign, reading: —
SUNLIGHT TRADING COMPANY OF AUCKLAND
The white-painted letters are embossed where the weather has eaten away the unpainted wood. Behind the shed, a lean-to protects a mouldering pearldiving boat; and hidden elsewhere in the bush are the laborers’ huts, a cookhouse, a cement water tank, a brick oven, the grave of Jack Buckland.
III
The reef was dry when we started for Tou Islet, three miles away. I carried two-year-old Daughter on my shoulder while Nga carried four-month-old Son suspended in a net on her back. We each had a staff to frighten away the sharks, and in my pockets were matches and tobacco, a knife, fishline and hooks.
The first mile was delightful, for the sun was still low in the sky and only the largest waves washed over the reef to its inner edge where we walked. In the pools were scores of bright-red parrot fish. They finned for cover at our approach, or, ostrich-like, thrust their heads into the holes and crevices, leaving the greater part of their bodies exposed. We could have caught them with our bare hands, but we left them undisturbed, for there would be plenty of sea food close to Tou.
After the first mile we came to a tiny coconut islet. It reminded me of the ones pictured in comic papers: a quarter acre of sand, a dozen coconut trees, and a fringe of bush. Only the castaway sailor, his wrecked raft, and his signal flag were missing. There we stopped to pull down drinking nuts with a split frond tied together at its outer extremity, and to drink them.
The next mile was over a series of sand cays broken by channels where the waves washed into the lagoon, a foot or two deep; and where inordinately inquisitive, or hungry,— I have never been sure which, — sharks rushed toward us, only to be frightened away by a great beating on the water with our staffs. At times even this did not suffice, and we must jump from the water when the brutes were only a few inches from our legs, often to land on their backs.
But on the sand cays we forgot the dangers of the reef, for the great colonies of birds were a sight to fill one with astonishment. Their eggs were so closely set that it was well-nigh impossible to avoid trampling them. Under the bush, the sand was black with nesting birds; above our heads was a cloud of screaming wide-awakes; and in every ngangie bush, their eyes staring like idols of evil gods, perched rows of gray boobies and gawky mano’-war hawks. They eyed us coldly; it seemed that there was a sneer on each hook-beaked face. Not until we had approached to within a yard did they emit throaty squawks and rise clumsily to coast down-wind to the next bush.
On one of the sand cays six giant turtles dozed in the sun. They opened their eyes when we approached to stare at us as coldly as had the man-o’-war hawks. Perhaps they were aware of the faultiness of flippers as vehicles of propulsion on land, for none of them moved.
‘There is a lot of good turtle steak going to waste,’ Nga opined. ‘Now, if they’d only come ashore on my island . .
On the farthest of the sand cays, in a copse of light green and greasy-leaved tai’inu trees, a colony of ghost terns had laid their eggs in the forks of the branches, and now the limbs were spotted with white fledglings. We could see on the top of each fuzzy head the black stripe they had inherited from their famous ancestor whom the god Maui had marked with his firebrand. The mother birds, returned from sea, fluttered like butterflies in the deep shadows.
Over the sand cays, in and out of the bush, crawled the coconut crabs, breaking the eggs to feed on embryonic chicks or yolk, tearing the fledglings to gorge on their raw flesh, attacking the nesting wide-awakes and even climbing the bush to grapple with full-grown frigate birds. Above each crab a flock of birds screamed and circled; but the latter seemed fully aware of the nature of a crab’s claws, for they gave them a wide berth. At a safe estimate, the crabs destroy three quarters of the sea birds’ eggs and fledglings on Uninhabited Island. For months they gorge themselves, till their bodies are a solid mass of hard, bright-red fat; and this fat, costing the lives of many birds, is a delicacy unsurpassed. We caught one of the largest crabs, killed it by tearing open its head horizontally from the mandibles backward, and took it with us to Tou.
There was a mile of open reef between the last sand cay and the islet, and now, with the tide coming in, it was waist-deep with flowing water. Apprehensively we started across, knowing that danger was remote, but aware that, should a shark set his heart on a human meal, there would be short shrift for the lot of us. Once blood was let, we should have every shark on the reef charging us, for the brutes have some occult means of scenting a good meal though it be miles away.
There were plenty of them about. When one circled or rushed for our legs, his black-tipped dorsal fin cutting through the water and trailing a white feather on either side, Daughter whooped with delight. It was great fun for her to watch Nga and Papa step down from their dignity to beat the water with sticks, yell, and dance like clowns. But we did not appreciate her sense of humor, nor did Son, who watched with ‘withers unwrung’ the struggle to keep the family intact.
The last of the walk was through a channel shoulder-deep. But the sharks kept at a healthy distance, as they generally do when one is in deep water. Perhaps seeing more of the man below the surface, they realize that he may turn out to be a dangerous enemy, while when only his legs are visible they see nothing to prevent their enjoying an unusual morsel. But we knew that a shark would mean business should he attack us here.
IV
We found Tou to be the richest and most beautiful of all the islets. There were forty acres or so, heavily wooded with Barringtonia and tamanu trees, coconuts aplenty, pandanus, a few breadfruits in bearing. The rest of the islet was overgrown with bush and copses of tai’inu. In the shore bush was a colony of tens of thousands of tropic birds. We had seen them from the sand cays, circling over their nests; and as we approached we could hear their sustained clamor.
They are white-breasted birds with plumage of silky texture, yellow beaks, and a stippling of gray on their backs. Both the male and female have two long tail feathers of scarlet-red, slim, delicate, and straight as an arrow. Their eyes, like those of most sea birds, have a malicious glint, bright-red and cold as those of an old she-snake. The tropic birds come here each year in November to nest and rear their young on the sand under the ngangie bushes. By March most of the fledglings have learned to fly, and the colony scatters to the uttermost regions of the tropic seas. In the lonely places of the sea they spend eight months, often, I believe, never sighting land, fishing by day and sleeping on the water at night.
On the ground the tropic birds are clumsy fellows; their little atrophied legs will no more than support them. In order to leave the ground they push themselves along feebly, at the same time flapping their wings like a barnyard duck; but after a few clumsy attempts they are away, soaring as gracefully as an albatross. Usually they make no attempt to leave the ground when surprised by the approach of men; they seem to sense the futility of attempting escape. We broke through the heart of the colony, the birds screaming about us, their fledglings scattering into the densest of the bush. Some of the young were no larger than a canary, covered with pure white down; others were nearly ready to fly, and of these I chose three of the fattest to be grilled for supper.
We built a wigwam of palm fronds on the edge of the colony; then Nga cleaned the birds and started to grill them and the big coconut crab, while I went in search of drinking nuts. And when I had returned with a half-dozen nuts the fledglings were done to a fine crisp brown, while the fat from the crab oozed on the coals, sputtering and filling the air with a savory odor.
We feasted that night. Daughter ate a whole tropic bird; Son mouthed the bones and chortled; Nga and I ate enough red crab fat to make six civilized men violently ill. We were midway in the meal when Nga motioned to one side where three coconut crabs had crawled into the firelight. They were semaphoring to us with their great claws, while their little anterior prehensile legs worked back and forth toward their mouths, mimicking us perhaps, or beckoning for us to follow them into the black jungle to feast on raw flesh and coconut meat, or mayhap intimating that they too could do with a little cooked food. Gradually they approached us; and by the time we were gnawing the last wing bones they had adopted themselves into the family. We threw them scraps of their fellow coconut crab, which they devoured with the gratitude of cannibals. Before crawling into the wigwam for the night, Nga picked up the cheeky crabs and flung them into the bush, lest they try to share her bed as well as her meal, and eat her children as well as their cousin from the reef. She had no faith in the integrity of coconut crabs.
I lay on a bed of leaves outside the wigwam to smoke and gaze into the starlit sky. The chill of the night breeze was tempered by its passage over the lagoon, so that I needed no coverlet. Never had a place seemed more solitary, seemed farther removed from the haunts of mankind. It was a solitude within a solitude, for stretching away on all sides, horizon beyond horizon, lay the empty sea. This savage place had never been conquered: it had changed no more than the life of the tropic birds had changed; it was like a land on the far side of the moon. Involuntarily I turned my eyes to eastward, and, as though in response to my last thought, the waning moon appeared, hanging low over the ngangie bushes.
A sudden clamor of the birds broke in on my thoughts, rising in volume to die away in a sleepy twittering. There was something rhythmical in these outbursts as though a group impulse seized the birds. Suddenly it became quite plain to me: they were conversing about the months spent at sea, out of sight of land; of the problems of eating, sleeping, living; of the best methods of training their fledglings and strengthening their wings. Before long the colony must leave; then these youngsters must be able to brave the storms, to soar into the upper layers of air and rest motionless, riding the light breeze.
The old birds were certainly swapping stories about the enormous concourses of fish they had discovered in far oceans: great schools of squid that whitened the sea; enormous whales and their death battles with killers; stretches of ocean where thousands of flying fish skimmed the waves and the birds fattened for their long flight to the nesting islands. And mayhap they were grumbling about the trained cormorants that were loosed from the Chinese junks to attack them; the danger from sharks when sleeping on the water; the odious frigate birds that swooped down and forced them to disgorge their food.
V
We returned to the passage islet to spend February, the worst month of the hurricane season. This year the weather was particularly bad, the wind blowing for days from the northwest, a ‘double-reefed topsail breeze’ in sailor parlance, a full gale to a landsman. It was impossible to go to the sand cays for eggs and birds, and the lagoon was too rough for fishing, so we depended almost entirely on a diet of coconut crabs.
During the full of the moon the coconut crabs burrow deep in the piles of husks and fronds to lay their eggs and hibernate for a time; and because of this irrelevant habit we found the grave. For several hours Nga and I had been crab-hunting in a particularly dense stretch of jungle, cutting our way, a few inches at a time, into the all but solid green wall. Deeper and deeper we worked into the undergrowth. The air became foul with the miasma of rotting vegetation; land crabs, etiolated by generations in the dark jungle, were uncovered and scurried away; centipedes wound among the rotten husks; scores of lizards leaped over our bodies; hermit crabs, climbing among the fronds and the branches, clapped into their shells and dropped to the ground with a thumping noise. Still no coconut crabs were found, and we began to believe that they had migrated in a body to the sand cays for the rest of the wideawake season. Nga reckoned that some might have burrowed into the sand, so, cutting a stick, she started prodding the ground in likely places. I worked deeper and deeper into the jungle, at times hacking a path through the young trees, then stopping to scatter away a heap of rubbish and curse mildly when I uncovered only rats and centipedes. A drizzling rain came down. Slashing my knife into a tree trunk, I sat on one of its roots to rest, and there Nga joined me. She had found one coconut crab, so, tying a strip of frond midrib bark about its body, she tethered it to her prodding stick. In the meantime I had rolled a cigarette, and this we enjoyed together.
The roar of the outer reef came dully through the thick wall of jungle; above us the clamor of the wide-awakes seemed both angry and forlorn. A gust of wind screamed through the trees; then a few moments’ downpour of rain, and the squall had passed and shafts of sunlight were breaking through the dripping jungle. It was then that we saw, only a few yards before us, the wooden headpiece of the grave, shadowed by a dense clump of pandanus. It was in too complete harmony with the cheerless place to surprise us; even the name printed across it was far from discordant: —
JACK BUCKLAND October 1, 1914
Almost immediately the name became associated in my mind with romantic places, deeds, people: Sydney, Midway Island, Butaritari, Samoa, Robert Louis Stevenson, The Wrecker, the indefatigable Tommy Haddon, and G. E. L. Westbrook, the oldest of the Wallis Island pioneers. I will let Westbrook explain the grave in the jungle by quoting a letter he wrote to me some years ago: —
‘I knew Jack Buckland (R. L. Stevenson’s Tommy Haddon). He was a remittance man and had a peculiar history. Jack, I believe, was of very poor family. A doctor took a fancy to him as a boy, and had him educated and when he died left him his income. Jack was very eccentric and spent his income freely and then would go trading and do a freeze for a time till his money again accumulated. I believe his lawyer, who had charge of his money, played ducks and drakes with it. The time I saw most of Jack Buckland was when Stevenson was alive. He arrived from the Gilbert Islands, where he had been trading. He was apparently in funds at the time, and was spending his money rather freely. He appeared to be on intimate terms with the R. L. S. family, also with B. M. Haggard (a brother of Rider Haggard),who was the British Land Commissioner appointed by the three great powers who at the time controlled Samoa’s destiny. The last I heard of Jack he was on Uninhabited Island, in charge of a few natives. When the vessel attending him eventually called at the island, there was no Buckland to receive it. The natives reported that he had sat on a keg of gunpowder and was blown to pieces.’
Nga and I talked about the grave for a little time. She said it was terrible to be buried in such a lonely place, so far from one’s people; I could not agree with her. Presently we rose to follow our path back to the little hut on the beach. There was only one coconut crab for us that day.
VI
This is Uninhabited Island, — Jack Buckland’s Island, — an atoll lonely, fragile, and perilous. There is none of the voluptuousness of the high islands here, where life is a constant struggle for the survival of the fittest, where the creeping creatures devour the flying creatures, which in turn devour the swimming creatures, which in turn devour one another. And always the sea and the wind are here, dominant things of immense potential power, touching the island lightly now, but ready at a trembling of the sea’s bottom or a decrease in the air’s pressure to destroy the place with one imperious sweep.
Life is precarious on Uninhabited Island, and yet there is a subtle charm such as one experiences on examining a piece of old china or on reading the works of such a master as Walter Pater. One realizes that here is a delicacy and fragility that has endured in spite of the sea’s rough usage. One great storm might wash the island away, one seismic wave make a clean sweep of this insular world; yet one feels that the sea and the wind would recoil at such vandalism, as a rough hand would recoil at destroying a delicate artifact of ancient times.
We were fishing from a great boulder on the passage reef when the yawl returned. It was evening, the bad weather was a thing of the past, the trade blew fresh from the southeast, and the little fair-weather clouds were back again. I had asked Nga if she would remain with me on Uninhabited Island, and, with a glance at the children sleeping beside her, she had shaken her head.
‘No,’ she had said; ‘if one of us died . . .‘
Only a few moments later she pointed to sea, where a speck of white sail rose and fell above the serrated line of the Pacific swell.
The next day we sailed on, as we have been doing these past fifteen years, in a primitive South Seas that is yearly narrowing as the tourist steamers encroach on the trading-schooner routes. But I fancy that some day we shall return to Jack Buckland’s island, with a few natives to keep us company, and settle there; and I fancy that it will be long before it is robbed of its lonely charm.