SEA FOAM’S LA MAISON is a two-storey building with thick walls made from blocks of chipped coral. There are two large rooms below for the store and two above for living quarters, opening to verandas both front and back. The front veranda overlooks the road and the central village, with the schoolhouse directly opposite and the church a little to the right. The back veranda faces the lagoon and is only a few feet from the water’s edge, so that when I sit there, cooled by the trade wind, I can easily imagine that I am living on an otherwise uninhabited island. Now and then, to be sure, the silence is broken by a sleepy voice behind me, the crowing of a cock or the monotonous drumming on coconut shells by the village children, but these are such common, familiar sounds that often I am no more aware of them than of the wind humming through the fronds of the palms.
At other times the children’s perpetual tapping on coconut shells exasperates me. In the midst of day dreams, when extravagant desires seem to become realities and my air-castles become almost palpable to the eye, I will start suddenly, the dreams vanish into thin air, and I hear the persistent tap, tap-tap, tap, tap-tap stabbing through the silence with horrible distinctness. I realise that I have been thus annoyed for hours; a roar of Yankee curses thunders through the sleeping village, a high-pitched woman’s voice scolds from an adjacent hut, the drumming ceases at once, and silence falls again, a silence so profound that I can hardly believe it has ever been broken.
At night I prefer sitting on my front veranda, where I can watch the village life passing below; for on this topsy-turvy little island people wake at sunset, stumble sleepily into the lagoon for a bath, and having thus refreshed themselves, start the day’s activities.
On my first night at Puka-Puka I was alone. Ever-efficient Prendergast had checked over the trade goods and returned to the ship. Sea Foam brought me a mat and a mosquito-net, so I had nothing to do but unpack a few of my belongings and loll on the veranda watching the villagers waking from their long siestas.
As dusk deepened, fishermen put out in canoes, some with torches and nets for flying-fish, others with spears for the lobsters and parrot-fish of the reef. Fires flared among the houses, and groups of chattering natives strolled up and down the village street, as they have done from time immemorial. Now and then I heard a gurgle of laughter and, looking round, saw the chubby head of a naked urchin who had scrambled up one of my veranda posts to have a near view of the absurd white man. The moment he was detected he would let go, fall with a thump, and rush whooping off into the darkness.
Presently a youth of about eighteen stopped in front of my house with a number of his friends. Although it was growing dark, I could make out that he was dressed in a heavy British army overcoat, and his shoes squeaked gloriously. Placing his arms akimbo and generally striking a bombastic attitude he delivered a long harangue in Puka-Pukan. I did not know what he was saying; nevertheless, I can give here an almost literal translation of his speech, for these little night monologues are much the same. When a young Puka-Pukan feels that he has grown to manhood, he simply has to let off steam, and one method of doing it is to walk through the villages with his friends, stopping before every other house to make a speech.
His address of welcome to me was about as follows: ‘Noo akalelei kotou kia akalongo i toku tara-tara! Sit down prettily you people and listen to my speech! I, George, being a man of the village of Yato, son of the exceptional man whose name is Abraham, and of the woman of the village Ngake whom everybody knows to be the daughter of Ura, chief of police and sometime deacon of the church – I, Georgeman, take it upon myself to inform you of the new talk that has come to my ears. I have heard that a white man has come to this island and he is called Ropati, so I lose no time in warning him to keep his pigs tied up and not to steal taro from me, my father, or my mother, who is the daughter of the great Ura, chief of police and sometimes deacon of the church. Moreover, I warn the man, Ropati, not to steal taro, chickens or coconuts from any of my relatives; but if he is hungry and must steal something, let him steal from my enemies.
‘I, George-man, of Yato Village, a grandson of the redoubtable Ura [etc., etc.], further warn this person, Ropati, that the young women of this island are dear to the hearts of me and my friends, and if –’ but at this point George becomes altogether too outspoken and explicit to permit of translation.
He rambles on, repeating himself and taking promptings from his companions. When at last he is out of breath, his friends gather round him and all grunt a delightfully obscene chant peculiar to the island. Everybody, old and young, laughs uproariously at this and immediately forgets all about it. George and his boon companions have let off steam; they have had their fun and the little show is at an end.
About ten o’clock the fishing canoes returned. Then, like magic, the islet was transformed. Scores of coconut-shell fires blazed with their characteristic glaring white flame, throwing grotesque shadows on the brown thatched huts, dancing in fairylike shimmerings among the domes of coconut fronds, casting ghostly reaches of light through the adjacent graveyards, and silhouetting the forms of pareu-clad natives at work cleaning their fish or laying them on the live coals to broil.
I rose from my mat and walked through the village, hungrily sniffing the fragrance of fish roasting on scentless coconut-shell coals, for I had eaten nothing since morning. Now I was greeted on every side with ‘Ulekaina!’ and ‘moe ai koe!’ The first greeting is not translatable; the other means much the same as our ‘Pleasant dreams’, an appropriate greeting, certainly, for such a somnolent little island. Everything is dreamlike here: the island itself is a dream come true so that romanticists who are patient enough and adventurous enough may see vindicated their faith in lonely lands beyond the farthest horizon.
On the outskirts of the Central Village, beyond the groves and the taro-beds, where lugubrious shadows played fitfully, I halted abruptly and stared at a vision so lovely that for a moment I was all but convinced it was only a vision created by my own romantic fancy. A girl of about fourteen was sitting cross-legged, gazing into a fire of coconut husks. She was naked save for the short girdle of fern leaves about her waist, and her thick dark hair hung loosely about her shoulders. Her skin, of that velvety texture found only among Polynesian women, gave back the firelight in soft gleams. Her slim brown body was as graceful as the stem of a young coconut palm, and light and shadow played over it caressingly. She glanced up quickly at my approach and smiled, unconscious of her nakedness. I smiled back – a foolish smile it must have been – and hurried on, conscious of the hot blood throbbing in my temples.
Upon returning, I came to Mama’s house, where William hobbled out to insist on my eating with them. Old Mama seconded the invitation, gesticulating and grinning with all her might. They made an amusing pair and seemed peculiarly suited to one another. I was by no means sorry to have them for next-door neighbours.
Mama gave me a fine malau served on a clean banana leaf, and a piece of taro pudding. Both the fish and the pudding were wonderfully appetising after my long ship’s diet of tinned meats.
After the meal William and I talked for a long time while Mama hovered around, feeling my hair, running her long bony fingers into my pockets to examine their contents with childish delight. Everything they contained amused her, and at each discovery she would clasp her hands and make all sorts of funny little noises. She chattered ceaselessly, asking William questions to which he would reply in an offhand, disdainful manner.
Soon a crowd of natives gathered round, when William, waiting for the psychological moment, produced the tobacco he had stolen from me. He ceremoniously filled his pipe with an air that seemed to say that he never smoked any but the very finest brands of white men’s tobacco, and pompously lit it with a coal from the fire. But a little later, when the others had gone, he knocked out the half-smoked tobacco with disgust and refilled the pipe with his own mule-killing twist.
The next morning I went out to say goodbye to Viggo and Prendergast. Viggo assumed a cheery offhand manner, but I could see that he was worried, doubtful as to the advisability of leaving me here alone. Had I wished it, I am sure that he would gladly have gone to the trouble of bringing all my goods back to the ship.
But there were no misgivings in my mind as I paddled back across the reef; then I sat on the gunwales, the canoe aground in shallow water, and watched the Tiaré getting under way. Rounding the northern point, she swung her beam to me and I could see Viggo on the break of the poop, waving his cap; then the schooner slipped behind the coconut palms of the leeward point. For a time the tops of her sails were visible, then only the tops of her pole-masts, until, of a sudden, she was lost wholly to view. I was now irrevocably isolated from the world, but with a light heart I called to Benny (Peni), my newly acquired store boy. He jumped from the canoe and pulled it over the shallows to the bay.
In the course of time the store was ready. One room was equipped with rough shelves and one reserved for a storeroom. Upstairs I had my bedroom and a living-room, furnished with a table, a lamp and an easy chair, where I stacked my books and laid out my kegs of rum. I hung an oil painting of the brig Sea Foam, by Viggo, over the door and tacked a calendar by the table. These sufficed for decorative purposes.
The rest of the establishment consisted of a little cook-house where William and Mama presided in leisurely fashion, to the envy of the neighbours. They prepared all my food, which was just to my taste, for there was an abundance of seafood to satisfy my ichthyophagian appetite. Then I could buy fat young friers at a shilling each, and eggs at sixpence per dozen; so, after teaching Mama that a chicken should be decapitated before frying – a waste she greatly lamented – and that when I said the coffee was too weak it did not mean that she was to make it as thick as porridge the next morning, I got along very nicely.
When William was not fishing, chopping wood or sleeping, he would sit in the cook-house and order Mama about with thundering curses, like some tyrannical old whaling skipper who had made the ribs of his vessel tremble with his bellowing voice. But dear old Mama was accustomed to this and did not pay the slightest attention.
I opened the store early one Monday morning. Benny and I assumed the proper attitudes behind the counter, with all our little trinkets arranged behind us in glittering rows of gilt and paint – and not a soul came to buy. Several hours passed, but towards noon a child peeped around the edge of the door holding a coconut out at arm’s length. We were all attention, but unluckily, just as our first customer was about to make a purchase, his courage failed him and he rushed whooping away. Whereupon Benny and I closed the station.
No sooner were the doors closed than some of the villagers started to wake up; and while Benny and I were eating our taro tops and roast chicken, with Mama waving her arms wildly over our heads in a vain effort to keep the flies away, a little crowd of natives gathered about the store. Then they surrounded the cook-house to watch the foolish white man eating with a knife and fork. This sight always interested them.
‘Ah!’ said Benny, his mouth full of taro, ‘if we had only waited a few minutes longer we would have sold something.’ Benny’s favourite word was ‘if’ (naringa), as it is with all Puka-Pukans. Every day one continually hears such phrases as: ‘If I had gone fishing I would have had something to eat’; ‘If I had not been under the coconut tree the nut would not have fallen on me’; ‘If I had put a new roof on my house’ – if I had done this, that and the other. But Benny was not so bad in this respect as the other islanders. He had been to Rarotonga, where he had not only learned the language but had also acquired industrious habits. I gave him a little lecture on the futility of using the word ‘if’, but I doubt whether he heard me, for he was crunching chicken bones with an appalling racket.
When we reopened the store the little space between the counter and the door was jammed with people. An old man, whom I shall call Ezekiel because his name sounds something like that, was the first customer. Elbowing his way through the crowd, he laid a pound note on the counter and in a halting voice asked for a tin of talcum powder. He gazed timidly at the surrounding crowd, smiling when he saw a dozen heads bobbing in approbation. As I reached for the tin, there was a buzz of voices from the open doorway at the back, from the two windows, and from the crowd in front. I caught two words in the chatter: ‘paura’ (powder) and ‘Ezekiel’. This was the old dog’s day, and he was enormously puffed up with the stir he was making.
I wrapped the tin in a piece of illustrated newspaper and handed it to the old man. When I turned to count out his change he moved to the door, where he became the centre of an envious group, who examined the paper while a young girl took the tin and shook the powder into her hair with screams of delight. Then everyone’s attention was turned to the girl; they smelled her hair, commenting in guttural tones on the fragrance of the powder, while they wrinkled up their noses and rolled out their lips like braying donkeys. At last Ezekiel retrieved his half-emptied tin and turned to leave the store. I had Benny call him back and put the change – seventeen and sixpence – in his hand.
He gazed in stupid amazement at the money, at me, at Benny, and back again at the money. Gradually a light came into his watery eyes – he understood that somehow or other it did not require all his pound to pay for a tin of talc.
His next purchase was a long strip of fiery red pongee, and the same dumfounded expression came into his eyes when I took only a part of his money. Then he bought a box of matches: he decided to play the game with this remarkable white man, to get as much as possible for his money, for it was evident that Captain Viggo’s new trader didn’t understand his business. Next he bought some tobacco, brass wire, fish-hooks and a tin whistle. At last there was only sixpence left. He gazed long and wistfully at the various flashy trade goods, finally setting his choice on a red-and-yellow-striped shirt worth – or, rather, priced – ten shillings. I tried to explain that there was not enough money left to pay for it, but he could not understand and went from the store convinced, I think, that I was cheating him.
My next customer was Ears (Taringa), the policeman of Leeward Village, Yato. A very garrulous person, he approached the counter in a fog of verbiage. A thin, shark-toothed woman, his wife, followed in his wake, casting sharp, malicious glances at all the other possible customers. She looked enviously at Ezekiel, who was still standing in the doorway gazing at his lone sixpence; then she nudged her husband and demanded that he buy her two tins of talcum powder, for it would be a shame to let the Ezekiel faction outdo her in powder.
Ears pretended to know how to count money. ‘How much for one?’ he cried above the din of voices, rolling his eyes knowingly.
‘Two and sixpence.’
He laid down one and threepence with an air of great intelligence and then gazed abstractedly at the ceiling.
His face lengthened when I called for more, but in a moment he broke into a bellow of laughter. ‘A wise man, this white man,’ he said to the others. ‘I thought he might be poor at counting money, but now I see that he knows arithmetic as well as I do.’
Then he scratched his head, glanced questioningly at his wife, and tucked his pareu more tightly about his waist. Finally he shoved ten shillings across the counter and again gazed at the ceiling. I took the correct change and shoved the rest back.
He stared at the money with a perplexed frown; then he nodded his head in a self-important manner and said: ‘I see that he is honest, this white man! I was testing him, I being the policeman of Leeward Village. I wanted to see if he would steal my money, but he’s all right. He has given me the correct change to the last farthing!’ Then with a grandiose display of erudition he fingered the coins in a mock attempt at counting, whereupon he walked out of the store very well pleased with himself. He came back later when the others had gone, to complete his purchases.
At that time, of course, I knew little of the Puka-Pukan language; it was Benny who explained later what the talk was all about. I realised that my honesty would be sorely tried on Puka-Puka, for I could charge a penny or a pound and, with the exception of a half-dozen of the ultra-learned, no one would be the wiser. I resolved on that first day never to cheat these simple-minded folk.
It was Benny, too, who told me about Ura’s One Pound Trading Company, a story which fully explained Ezekiel’s surprise at receiving change from his pound note.
A few years before, a gullible Papeete trading company, disastrously managed by the island-famous (and Jack-London-famous) Paumotuan, Mapuhi, established a trading station on Puka-Puka, with Ura (chief of police and sometimes deacon of the church) as trader. Although Ura was crafty, he was but little better at arithmetic than his satellite, Ears, the policeman of Leeward Village. Therefore, in order to be certain that no money was lost, Ura charged a pound sterling for each article in his store, no matter whether it was a pair of trousers or a sixpenny bottle of scent. Tobacco, matches and fish-hooks were exceptions; these he traded for coconuts as Mapuhi had directed.
Ura weighed in copra at a pound for five bags, always going through the process of weighing for the appearance of the thing, but always paying the same price. He bought no smaller lots, claiming that his scales would not weigh less than five bags. They were steelyard scales, and, when not in service, Ura used the counterpoise iron weight for a canoe anchor. Eventually he lost the weight, but he blandly twisted a piece of wire around a lump of coral and used that quite as successfully, for five bags of copra still came to exactly one pound sterling.
Thus Mapuhi’s store prospered until one day when a hurricane struck the island. The crafty chief of police managed to save the bags of store money before the seas sweeping over the island sent him up a coconut palm. The store was completely destroyed, and when Mapuhi returned, Ura met him with a long face, deploring the act of God that had swept away the store and all the bags of money as well. But it is an open secret on the island that when other ships came, Ura spent handfuls of Chili dollars, for years wearing nothing but red silk shirts and buying bully beef by the case.
A few days later, observing a number of children gathered outside the store, I opened a tin of lemon-drops, marked ‘lollies’, after the New Zealand fashion. Benny and I ate a few and made it known that they were very good and cost only one coconut each. But the candy business was a failure until William came to the rescue, bringing a couple of coconuts he had filched from my cook-house. When he had made his purchase and was crunching his lemon-drops, I explained that although it was quite correct for men to eat this confection, it was best suited to the tastes of the children. Despite this suggestion the old men and women started bringing me their nuts, and by noon that day every adult on the island was sucking lollies. I realised a good 500 per cent profit, which trading companies consider but a modest return from their commodities, but in so far as I know, none of the children benefited in the candy trade.
The money Viggo had paid for the island’s copra was soon exhausted; then the coconut trade started in earnest. I made a price-list for Benny which still hangs in the store. It reads:
| 1 stick tobacco | 8 coconuts |
| 1 ship’s biscuit | 2 coconuts or 2 eggs |
| 1 box matches | 2 coconuts or 2 eggs |
| 1 fish-hook | 1 coconut or 1 egg |
| 1 yard brass wire | 1 coconut or 1 egg |
| 1 lollie | 1 coconut or 1 egg |
From that time on, Benny looked after the sales most of the time. He was but little more of a mathematician than Ears, but he could count coconuts and read my list. If a man called for a stick of tobacco and a box of matches, Benny would be at a loss to estimate their combined price in coconuts, so I made it a rule that he should sell but one thing at a time. Thus he would count the eight coconuts and deliver the stick of tobacco, afterwards counting the remaining two for the box of matches. When anyone came into the store with money, he always called upon me lest the business should degenerate into the Ura One Pound Trading Company class.
I soon learned all the peculiarities of the Puka-Puka trade. Success depended upon stocking the store with articles of no earthly use to the islanders, avoiding everything that might have some intrinsic value. How like children my customers were! Why should they spend their money on umbrellas, or trousers, or toothbrushes when they could buy toy balloons, popguns and firecrackers?
But there surely was a run on talcum powder; my entire supply of it was exhausted on the day the store opened, and six bottles of Shampoo d’Or were snapped up the second day. Perfume, too, was bought in large quantities and used internally, as medicine; but once I saw a village dandy pour a whole bottle of it over himself after his salt-water bath. Then he was off to the sea side of the islet, where, no doubt, he was highly successful in his lovemaking.