WHEN VIGGO LEFT ME on Puka-Puka I gave little thought to my personal provisions. The captain urged me to supply myself generously from the schooner’s stock of tinned food, but I had done so sparingly, believing that I could live almost entirely on native food. I remembered having ‘gone native’ on Tahiti; but I had forgotten that there had always been a few pounds of sugar in the house, that every morning a Chinese baker had brought me bread, and that Tahiti is rich in foods unknown on a coral atoll.
So I started living on a semi-native diet, with the addition of sugar, coffee, bread and butter, onions, and a few other delicacies of the sort. Leeward Village agreed to supply me with native food. I paid them two pounds ten shillings a month (I still do), in return for which they brought me an abundance of fish and taro, occasionally a chicken or a bunch of bananas, and six drinking-coconuts a day. The forty men of the village took turns fishing for me. Sometimes they would bring me an albacore, some days lobsters and other shellfish, milk mullet or a fat sea eel. On the first Sunday of each month I would roast a young pig and on other Sundays a fowl.
Thus, with eggs, at sixpence a dozen, coffee and bread and butter, I lived well enough for more than four months. But one morning when I sat down to my coffee I found that the sugar bag was empty. A few days later I scraped the last of the butter from my last tin. Then when bread-making day came I realised that I could not make yeast without sugar. I took the matter philosophically at first, for I wanted to prove to myself that I could live comfortably without imported foods. But it was useless. When, at length, the coffee gave out I was in a miserable state. In the morning I would fry some unleavened dough and try to convince myself that I enjoyed the rubbery stuff; at noon, after eating taro and fish to repletion, I would rise from the table unsatisfied. I felt constantly the need of sugar. One day this want became so acute that I went to the government house, where a few medicines were stored, and sucked the sugar coating from two hundred Dover Powder pills. Unluckily (or luckily), they were only sugar-coated ones. I afterward obtained a sugar substitute by tapping coconut buds after the manner in which toddy is made; but this did not occur to me until just before Viggo’s return.
I had been without coffee for a month, when one day I mentioned the fact to Sea Foam. The worthy preacher scratched his head thoughtfully for some time; then he rose with a magnanimous smile and, crooking his index finger, motioned me to follow him. He led me into a dingy room of the mission-house, opened a back door to let in the light, and started rummaging through a dozen old packing-cases.
Presently he rose from his knees, holding a rust-eaten tin in his hand. On the label, age-worn and faded, I read: ‘Van Camp’s Pork and Beans’. If the parson had produced a bowl of goldfish from his shirt-sleeve it could not have surprised me more. My mouth watered, my fingers tingled as I reached for it.
Sea Foam shook his head in a very decided way. ‘No,’ he said, ‘this is not coffee; this is a tin of beans. Now let me see: it must have been the white missionary, Mr Judson, in Papua, who gave me this tin nine years ago when I was going up-river to preach to some cannibals. It makes a fine decoration for my table at Christmas when we Puka-Pukans load our tables with food and then walk through the village to see who has got the best Christmas dinner.’
After another dive into the packing-case, Sea Foam brought forth a tin of American butter. It was red with rust, but I could still make out the label. After fondling the tin for a moment, Sea Foam said: ‘Yes, it was the Reverend Johns who gave this to my father many years ago during his first visit to the island. I remember that he brought two tins ashore. He ate one and left the other for my father.’
One by one Sea Foam produced relics from the white man’s civilisation as though he were unearthing antiques of a vanished race – archaic bronzes or amphoræ. There were tins of soup, milk, succotash, a package of tea covered with the mould of years, a tin of stewed prunes, some cape oysters, a bag containing what had once been oatmeal – bottles and cartons from which the labels had long since disappeared.
I stared in astonishment at these decayed provisions. ‘Why haven’t you eaten these things, Sea Foam,’ I said, ‘instead of letting them spoil?’
‘Eat them!’ the parson cried. ‘And what earthly good would they be to me if I ate them? No! Never would I eat them! No house in Puka-Puka can show such wealth as mine, and on Christmas day everyone envies me when they see all these fine foods spread on my table.’
‘And it’s not safe,’ he went on, ‘to eat these foreign foods. Once, I remember, a doctor who came with Captain McCullough in the Sea Maiden, gave me a box of some kind of candy. They were little things about half as big as a marble, and were coated with chocolate, but inside they were very bitter. The doctor said they were to be eaten when one had pains in the stomach. Well, I ate them all one afternoon and they nearly killed me. I was so sick that I couldn’t preach my sermon the next day. No, Ropati-Cowboy, these things are all very well to put on my table at Christmastime, but I shall never again eat any of the white man’s food.’
He pulled a dusty gunny-sack from one of the packing-cases. ‘Ah, this is the coffee,’ he said.
I seized the bag eagerly, broke the twine, and looked in. It was half-full of hoary berries that must have lain in the mission-house for at least a decade. Nevertheless, I took a cupful home, roasted it, ground it, and made a potful of coffee as black as sin and as strong as old man Jackson’s mule.
I drank cup after cup and then sank back with the sensation of having eaten my first square meal in months. It was a delicious beverage, by far the finest coffee that I have ever tasted. My long period of abstinence may have had something to do with my relish for it, but my conclusion was that coffee, like brandy, improves with age. The new supply I received on Viggo’s return seemed tasteless stuff in comparison with Sea Foam’s archaic brand.
That night Little Sea wondered why I wouldn’t let her sleep. I sat up in the mosquito-net, telling her stories of Cowboyland, of Buffalo Bill (who had metamorphosed into myself) and other absurd tales of hair-raising adventure. I discovered on this occasion that a ‘coffee jag’ is something more than a myth.