Mutiny on the Globe

The day of the massacre was February 24. When Lay was led away from the scene by his two protectors, he could look back at Rowland Jones and Payne and Oliver and Lilliston and Joe Brown and Columbus Worth and Rowland Coffin bleeding into the sand. Nothing was clear to the two survivors; in their Narrative they rolled all of their feelings into one phrase: “superlatively miserable.” But nothing was clear to the natives either. The whole situation was unprecedented. Violence the natives were capable of, like the hostilities that were threatening war at that very moment between the chief of the northwestern island of Naalo and an alliance of other chiefs of the atoll. And murder was not unknown on the islands. But this was an attack on the visitors from outer space, and not everyone was of one mind about it; in time they would hear from one of their chiefs that they had done an evil thing.

And the timing was bad. The dead bodies and the two survivors and the rubble of the Globe camp were going to need explaining to outsiders, for islanders from the far corners of the atoll would be arriving over the next three days for the celebration of a major ceremony. Some of them had heard about the ship and its strange people, but most had not. What were the chiefs to say to them? Who were the two men’s masters, and how did they come to have the white men in their care? How did this affect relations between chiefs, especially when the two men were thought of as prizes? How would the two fit into the routine of island life? It was the middle of the first of two pandanus seasons of the year, and there would be harvesting to do, and there was always fishing. Would there be two new hands for the work? And would they want to work? And could they be trusted?

These were matters for the chiefs to speculate and rule on. The irooj, chief, was the authority on an island or part of an island and was frequently obliged to be in Mili Mili for councils or official business. Most of the time, an irooj, even if he was coming from one of the remote eastern islands, was able to travel to Mili Mili within a few hours. All the chiefs were subordinate to the iroojlaplap, or high chief of the atoll, whose official residence was in Mili Mili. At the time Lay and Hussey were on the atoll, the iroojlaplap was Luttuon. All through their stay, the ultimate determination of their fate in serious matters lay with the chiefs. At some point early on the chiefs decided that Hussey should be made a ward of Lugoma, an irooj. Lay was assigned to the unnamed old man who had saved his life, but the old man was poor and hardly able to feed him, so the iroojlaplap intervened and arranged his adoption by a native named Ludjuan.

The next morning, February 25, Lay and Hussey, whom the natives were anxious to keep apart, were nonetheless brought by canoe back to the scene of the previous day’s slaughter. What hit the two men hardest was the sight of the bodies. They had to bury them, they knew, and communicated their desire to do so to the natives, who allowed them to dig graves and inter the mangled corpses. It was a lot of work, even though the soil was sandy, for there were seven to bury. And these dead, guilty and innocent alike, had been part of the flesh and blood drama that had tied them together for a month. It was a unique but potent intimacy that evoked, simultaneously, pathos and revulsion. Most of the bodies had crushed heads; Columbus Worth was covered with blood from stab wounds. Then there was Rowland Coffin, who had been suspiciously knowledgeable about the mutiny, but what did that matter now? What, in fact, did Payne and Oliver, whose viciousness did not even have the redeeming imagination of Samuel Comstock, matter? Gilbert Smith, if he had still been around, could have read a scriptural text over them as well as the others. And poor Joe Brown, who had signed on as one of the Honolulu replacements—Lay and Hussey did not know him well but could not help seeing him as one of the unluckiest. There was something brutalizing about the burial just as there had been about the cleaning up of the bloody cabin a month before; if Lay and Hussey weathered the experience with as much stability as they did, it may have owed something to their youth, their faith, or simply their terror of what was coming next. Mortal threats organize the psyche marvelously.

All around the two grave-diggers lay the relics of the Globe camp. The natives had stolen much since the day before and had pulled down the tent. When the two men completed the burials, they were sweating and worn out. They surveyed the despoiled camp to see if any food was left; there was, and the two indicated to their masters that they wanted to take some of it. The masters agreed and helped them load flour, bread, and pork into the largest canoe. They also brought into the canoe a blanket apiece, shoes, and books. The books included two Bibles; the natives would soon destroy Lay’s, but Hussey would manage to retain his.

The canoes headed back to where Lay and Hussey had been kept the night before. Even though they were held in the same place, they were allowed little contact with each other. Two things struck the natives as suspicious: any conversation between them in their incomprehensible language and any looking at those disturbing items, their books. The men tried to explain that the books contained ideas that they wanted to think about, but the native reaction was a replay of the process by which the English word glamour (the power to enchant) derived from the word grammar (the power to read and write). The books looked like the instruments of dark arts.

All the way back from the Globe camp Lay was growing hungrier, and he longed to eat some of the pork and bread being carried in the canoe. Would his master allow him to break into the pork supply? The permission was granted, partly, no doubt, out of concern for his need, but more out of curiosity—the natives wanted to see how the white men cut and prepared pork. For the occasion they even made the concession of allowing Hussey to eat with Lay. The preparation that Lay chose was, to give it an enhanced name, pork stew—to be precise, pork boiled in a large shell. That meant making a fire: someone had to fetch an eton, a pair of sticks from a dry tree, one of which had a straight groove cut into it and was held more or less upright between the legs while the other was rubbed rapidly in the groove, producing a fine sawdust that caught fire. The water in which the pork was cooked may have come from the shell itself, for one of the water-collecting techniques on the islands was to put large shells under the roots of pandanus trees and catch the runoff. The pandanus has a trunk that begins several feet above the ground and sends a skirt of exposed roots with open space between them down into the earth. Shells near the bottom of the roots catch the dripping water. As Lay and Hussey settled into their meal of boiled pork, one of the onlookers brought them a tin cup with water, for the natives had noticed back in the Globe camp that the white men drank when they ate. A tin cup was not an island utensil; it must have come from the Globe’s stores.

For the next three days, as canoes arrived from remote parts of the atoll to prepare for a major ceremony, Lay and Hussey were a sideshow. Their pale skin was a marvel, and their clothing, in the popular view, was unnatural. Over and over again the visitors urged the pale people to adopt their style of clothing; at this point the two held out, but in time they would relent.

On the morning of February 28 (the last precise date that Lay and Hussey record until their rescue twenty-one months later), the natives ornamented themselves for the feast. Probably more ornamented, because of their tattooing, than any humans that Lay and Hussey had laid eyes on, they rendered themselves glittering from annointings of coconut oil and hung about them strings of marmars, shell necklaces strung on fine coconut thread fibers. The gathering place was a flat piece of ground a half mile from the village where Lay and Hussey were detained; that had to be Mili Mili, for no place else on the atoll could have easily accommodated the more than three hundred participants that assembled.

“Hideous” was Lay’s word for the look of the crowd. He could have added ominous as well, for both he and his friend had one thing in mind as they approached the gathering place: it was going to be a cannibal rite, and they were the entrée. Tales of cannibalism circulated throughout the whaling fleets; the fear of it kept ships away from islands that would have otherwise been good victualling stops. This looked like one of the real cannibal moments. But the impression lasted only a few minutes, for it became clear that the occasion was a ritual dance, not a grimmer ritual.

There was still something terrifying about the scene, though. The dance was accompanied by the beat of drums and the strains of a chant. The aje, the small hourglass-shaped hardwood drums covered by the lining of shark’s stomach, were played by twenty or thirty women who also supplied the chant. The music began low and gradually crescendoed like Ravel’s Bolero; the three hundred or so dancers moved in an astonishing rhythm to it and joined in the sound; the effect was intense, breathtaking, and hypnotic. The women drummers were the lejm’aanjuri; they were well practiced, for it was their duty on the eve of battle to play the drums this way to piniktak—to urge on the warriors. To William Lay the vocal part of the performance was not music at all but yelling, and it was frightening. In what was a classic confrontation between the civilized New Englander and the representatives of a never-before-visited culture, the whole performance was not primitive art—it was hysteria. The dance went on through the day and ended in the evening. The visitors turned to their canoes to travel across the lagoon in the dark, but did not leave without another look at the sideshow: the oil- and sweat-coated dancers sought out and surrounded the two white men, not just to stare at them but to feel their skins. One of the weirdest things about the day was that Lay and Hussey had found themselves in the midst of a special time: it was as if two of the natives had been carried to as alien a place as Rio de Janeiro and just happened to arrive at carnival time. So, this was what life was like here? No, it’s not what life was like, most of the time.

Lay, Hussey, and their masters returned by canoe to their village, where the day ended with a hearty meal, thanks to the Globe supplies on hand. The pork came out again, but this time it was cooked more palatably on a bed of coals; the natives still did not like it, but they did fancy the bread, which proved more popular than the two seamen would have preferred. The woman, Lay says, whom he called mistress “ate, to use a sea phrase, her full allowance.”

All of this had happened in their first four days among the natives. In the months ahead, there was a lot of fitting in to do. The two would become used to the four native foods—breadfruit, pandanus, coconuts, and fish—and they would face periods of famine and drought when there would be barely enough of any of these to survive on. They would be forced to develop the skills of diplomats, never more so than when contending with native superstition. And they would be importuned to go native in their clothing and to have their earlobes bored and stretched. There was etiquette to learn for social occasions. There was even a quite practical toilet etiquette to observe: squatting at water’s edge at low tide to allow the rising water to flush the waste out to sea.

The month of March passed with nothing recorded except an increasing unwillingness on the part of the natives to let the two men speak with each other. Then the bad news came—Lay says it was around April 1, Hussey says the end of April: they were to be separated.

What happened to the two from this point up to the time of their rescue is reported in a less than complete and sometimes contradictory fashion in Lay and Hussey’s published Narrative and, to some extent, in the passage in Lieutenant Paulding’s Journal where Paulding summarizes what Lay had told him. Of the nine chapters in Lay and Hussey’s Narrative, only chapters 8 and 9 are attributed to Hussey; the rest are told in Lay’s voice. Dating is not easy: the Narrative makes passing reference to April and July of the first year the two spent on the atoll, but it is easier to date events during the twenty-one months that they were living with the natives by references to the seasons of crops. (Breadfruit ripened from May to August and from November to January; pandanus’s seasons were January to May and August to November.)

The separation amounted to no change of scene for Lay and to exile for Hussey. Lay stayed with Ludjuan on Mili Mili, and Hussey was taken to Lugoma’s island, Lukunor, about twenty-five miles to the east, possibly the very community to which the Globe had sent boats ashore to take off women on its first coming to the atoll three months before. It would be another three months before Lay would see Hussey again.

Lay watched his supply of pork and bread, gathered at the Globe camp the day after the massacre, dwindle. He obtained permission, probably in early May, for another trip to the camp for food, and a canoe was readied for the purpose. The camp was near, even within walking distance, but the purpose of the trip was the transportation of a considerable amount of food and that would require the canoe. Entering the canoe, Lay had one of those moments of misgiving that were to recur all too frequently during his time on the island: The natives carried clubs and spears. Were they planning to do something to him? The experience was a replay of his anxiety a few weeks before over whether or not he was being taken to a cannibal feast. Shortly it became clear that they were just going fishing. The natives found a shoal of fish, waded around them, and killed a number with their spears. A meal of these fish was prepared as soon as the canoe tied up at the Globe camp; the natives cooked them on a bed of wood burned to coals and generously offered Lay a share, but he was not in a mood for dining, for he was upset by what he saw when he looked around the camp. The barrels of beef, pork, and molasses had been smashed open and lay rotting in the sun—for how long he could only guess—it could have been for weeks. In addition to the waste of food, everything else at the site had been vandalized: clothing was torn to bits, and the ship’s instruments had been destroyed to make ornaments out of the parts. In spite of the pork’s decomposing state, Lay put some of it, along with some of the clothing, in the canoe for the short trip east.

May and June passed. The natives destroyed Lay’s books. Life was monotonous and lonely. Lay began to wonder whether, if his situation was truly hopeless, he could adjust to it. Then a ray of light: Luckiair, the son-in-law of his master Ludjuan, came for a visit from his home on the island of Jelbon at the far southeastern end of the atoll. Lay and Luckiair quickly became friends, and when Luckiair was preparing to return, he mentioned that he would be passing near the place where Hussey was living. Immediately Lay asked Ludjuan if he could accompany his son-in-law; it took persuading, but Ludjuan finally agreed to allow him to go.

The trip began with another stop at the Globe’s camp; the ship’s provisions were even more deteriorated, but Lay nonetheless took some of the food. Luckiair headed for the northern side of the lagoon despite the fact that his destination was on the south side, and they camped for the night in a deserted hut on a small island. Lay brought out the questionable Globe food and cooked the pork and some wet flour on the ashes, and they retired for the night in the hut.

Faced with the continuing strong east wind, Luckiair decided to stay where they were for another day. They gathered breadfruit, which was just beginning to ripen, and made a more formal preparation of the meat than they had the night before—they cooked it as they would cook a large fish. Lay describes the technique: They dig a large hole in the ground, fill it with wood, start the fire, and then cover the burning wood with stones. The wood burns down, and the stones fall to the bottom of the pit. When the fire is out, the stones are covered with green leaves, on which the fish or meat is placed, and covered with another layer of leaves. Earth is placed on top of these, and the buried food is cooked by the radiant heat from the stones. The process, Lay says, preserves the juices of the fish; what it did for rotten pork he does not say.

Before the day was over, the weather cleared, and Lay and Luckiair sailed east again, arriving near dusk at the island of Tokewa. Here they were well received; loaded with gifts of breadfruit and coconuts, they left for the south side of the lagoon and Hussey’s village, Lukunor. The reunion of the two, the first since they had been separated three months before, was extremely emotional but short-lived, just an hour. Lay told Hussey that the natives had torn up his Bible; Hussey told Lay that they had torn up his clothing, which explained why he was wearing the native dress, a wide belt of artistically braided pandanus leaves with front- and back-hanging tassels. He was so painfully burned from exposure to the sun that he could not lie down in comfort; he had tried to explain to the natives that that would happen if he was not able to keep his clothes, but his command of the language was not as good as Lay’s, and he could not convey the idea of sunburn to them. The natives had never heard of such a thing. Hussey had been employed in the breadfruit harvest and would have taken more part in the fishing but for the difficulty he had walking in his bare feet on the rough beaches.

Then the visit was over, and Lay and Luckiair were sailing east again to Jelbon. When they arrived, they found Luckiair’s wife and child busy making a fishing net; in the evening Lay and Luckiair gathered breadfruit, out of which a dinner was prepared. It was a family feast, for Lay’s status in Ludjuan’s family was almost that of a son, so that he was virtually a brother of Luckiair’s wife. The next day two native couples arrived from Lukunor with flour and a piece of meat, presumably part of the supplies that Lay had collected at the Globe camp and had left, intentionally or unintentionally, with Hussey’s guardians. Lay’s “vacation” in Jelbon lasted about a week.

Back in Mili Mili Lay was welcomed gleefully as if he had been absent for a long time. He describes a gift that he had been given by one of the chiefs: jekaka, which is the prepared version of bob, or pandanus. Pandanus, the fruit of which is a beautiful reddish orange, is arguably the most delicious of the island products. When not eaten fresh, it is preserved as something close to candy. The mode of preparation is to scrape the fruit finely and dry it in the sun, then put it into a cylinder of its own leaves (the cylinder is made by tying pandanus leaves around a piece of wood, then removing the wood).

It was around this time that Lay stopped wearing (but stored away) his American clothes for the same native style that Hussey had adopted, and with the same results: he was burned to a crisp. The folk in Mili Mili marveled at his red skin just as those in Lukunor had at Hussey’s.

In Lukunor Hussey was given the task of working on the repair of a canoe, a more interesting assignment than fishing or picking breadfruit because it introduced Hussey to the remarkable craft of Marshallese boat building. This was activity worthy of a seaman. There were three sizes of canoes: the smallest, the korkor, went out with one or two people in it and was used in the lagoon for fishing and traveling from one island to another; the larger tipnol carried up to ten people and could venture out into the open ocean; the very large walap carried forty along with food needed on extended voyages. They traveled at ten knots or faster and could easily outrace western boats.

The boats were an engineering triumph. They were made of boards cut from the breadfruit tree and painstakingly fayed into place. Perfect contours for watertight sealing between the boards were achieved by rubbing the edges to be joined with a burned piece of straight wood that would leave soot on the boards at points which were even slightly raised out of line. These bulges would then be worked down to a perfectly straight edge. The tools used on the wood were sharp shells (and for boring holes, sharks’ teeth). The finished boards were literally sewed together with coconut fiber cords.

The canoes had sharp, narrow keels, and double-ended hulls that permitted a reversal of direction, not by coming around, but by shifting the triangular sail setting so that the back of the boat became the front. This took less than a minute. The hull was not symmetrical: one side was nearly flat, while the other bayed out in a normal boat contour. The outrigger, like the hull, made of breadfruit wood, stood far out from the hull and was connected by a platform that could be used for carrying goods (that did not need to be kept dry) or people; weight on the platform had a ballast effect on the boat, especially in rough seas. To tie up the canoes someone would dive with a line and secure it to a rock or a coral projection. Lay had watched natives go thirty feet down with their lines.

Although Lay and Hussey say relatively little about the canoes at any point in their Narrative, they were in them constantly and could not help developing a sailor’s respect for them. It is likely that Hussey, who talks more about fishing than Lay does, learned how to handle the korkor that Lugoma fished from. Some of the trips between Lukunor and Mili Mili, on which fish and breadfruit were carried, would have been made in a tipnol, and on these Hussey may have acceded to the elevated position of handling steering oars and reversing sail, but he was very likely assigned to the middle place in the boat, the baler’s position.

Some time, probably in August, after he had finished his work on the canoe, Hussey was invited to join a foray of folk from the village delivering a tribute of breadfruit and fish to the atoll chiefs, who would have assembled at Mili Mili. The best thing about the trip for Hussey was that it was his second reunion with Lay, but as before, the natives allowed the two little time together.

It was clear to Lay that the reason for not letting him and Hussey spend time together was not mainly that they would be conspiring—what, after all, could they conspire to do?—but that their communication with each other was offensive to the supreme god, Anit. Anit was going to be an influential figure in the lives of Lay and Hussey. Anit had to be consulted before big and small decisions and undertakings. He was consulted for such business as whether candidates for tattooing were ready for the rite (he would announce his approval by an audible tone or whistle); Lay and Hussey were bigger business than tattooing, and they raised a lot of questions for Anit. At the critical moment months later when Lay and Hussey had a chance to escape from the island, Anit was invoked by the iroojlaplap, and on his answer the rescue to some extent depended.

The ethnographer Horatio Hale, who visited Mili a dozen or so years after Lay and Hussey were there, left some early impressions of Micronesian theology that harmonize with the two men’s account. The spirits that the Micronesians worship, Hale says, “are called at the Ladrones, aniti, at the Kingsmills, anti, at the Mulgraves, anit and anis, at Banabe, hani or ani. . . . They have neither temples, images, nor sacrifices. Their worship consists merely in praying and performing certain ceremonies.”

The supreme divinity was theologically simple, even generic, but the theology of the afterlife was a bit more elaborate. A good capsule treatment of it comes from none other than Lay himself. He ends chapter 7 of his Narrative with a paragraph that rather remarkably anticipates and accords with the observations of later anthropologists: “With regard to a future state of existence, they believe that the shadow, or what survives of the body, is after death, entirely happy; that it roves about at pleasure, and takes much delight in beholding everything that is transacted in this world;—and as they consider the world as an extensive plain, they suppose the disembodied spirits travel quite to the edge of the skies, where they think white people live, and then back again to their native Isles; and at times they fancy they can hear the spirits of departed friends whistling round their houses, and noticing all the transactions of the living.”

The detail is striking; even given Lay’s rapid acquisition of the native language, the concepts in this passage are sophisticated ones for him to have picked up in discourse with the natives, yet in the two and a half years between his rescue and the appearance of his Narrative in print, Lay had limited opportunity to talk about the anthropology of religion with anyone in the Pacific or in New England, at least not anyone who knew something about it. There was, however, one person in the Pacific with a keen interest in native ideas of the afterlife, and Lay did meet him, the Reverend Hiram Bingham, the most renowned of the Protestant missionaries in Oceania. When Lay’s rescue ship, the Dolphin, reached Honolulu, Mr. Bingham sought him out to quiz him about Milian vocabulary (see the headnote to Appendix C); it would have been quite in character for the assiduous missionary to have talked to Lay and Hussey at length about anything that would prove useful to him in proselytizing. For Lay the conversation could have had the stimulating effect that any good intellectual talk would have—it would sharpen recollections and organization. All that is speculation. But if the reader thinks it a sound speculation, what will he make of the lines that immediately follow the above-quoted passage? “Singular as some of these notions and opinions may appear, there is much to be met with in Christendom equally at variance with reason; and I have heard from the pulpit, in New England, the following language: ‘I have no doubt in my own mind that the blessed in Heaven look down on all the friends and scenes they left behind, and are fully sensible of all things that take place on earth!’ ” Not the words of Mr. Bingham. No voice as distinctive as a crotchet’s, but whose? We are clueless, for nothing like this comes up anywhere else in the Narrative. The ghostwriter has lifted his mask for a moment.

So reunion number two ended; Lay went back to the routine of the harvest of breadfruit, and Hussey left with his conductors after a couple of days. Hussey’s party headed not directly for Lukunor but for the northern island of Tokewa, where breadfruit was to be had in such abundance that the harvesters had to leave much of it to spoil on the ground. This route repeated the course taken by Luckiair and Lay when they came to Lukunor; it seems to have been a popular one, not merely for working the wind to advantage but for the avoidance of some shoals at low tide. At the same time that Hussey was working on Tokewa, Lay, at work with a group gathering a peculiarly large kind of breadfruit, heard a small boy who had run up to the natives say, “Uroit a-ro rayta mony la Wirrum”—the chiefs are going to kill William. Ludjuan, his master, saw that Lay had understood the words that were not intended for his ears. “Riab, riab,” Ludjuan insisted—it is false, it is false. The reassurance was not enough. Lay knew that there was something about him and Hussey that made the natives leery, even frightened of them. That night was a sleepless one for Lay, and the next day his agitation was too much to conceal from the natives: while working at the harvest, he burst into tears. When evening came he was no more successful in falling asleep than he had been the night before. Around midnight he overheard some of the natives saying that he was to be killed. When he confronted them and asked why, the natives denied everything; they were surprised that he had understood them. One of them who had been especially friendly to him in the past came over to his mat and stretched out next to him, assuring him that nothing would happen to him.

Nothing threatening did happen the next day; arrangements were under way for a harvest feast, and bwiro, cooked breadfruit with the taste of sweet potato, was being prepared for distribution to the chiefs. The feast marked the end of the breadfruit harvest, which meant for the moment the end of harvesting work for Lay; he was idle most of the time during the few days since he heard his death being discussed and thought it wise to stay out of sight in his hut as much as possible, especially since he sensed that he was under a new and suspicious surveillance.

Meanwhile Hussey was on Tokewa with his master, helping him to load more of the overabundant breadfruit. While they were at work, a canoe arrived with a message from “the highest chief” that Hussey was to be returned to Mili Mili and killed. This time the reason, which Lay had unsuccessfully been trying to pry from the natives, came out at once in the blunt announcement of the messengers that an alarming outbreak of disease (how widespread on the atoll is not stated) was attributed to the presence of the two Globe men among them.

The symptoms of the disease were swelling of the hands and feet, and in some cases the faces. Some young people had cheeks so swollen that they could not see for a few days. There were no fatalities, but the deformities were so shocking that it was easy to imagine that they were a prelude to death. When he was told about the disease, Hussey tried to explain that he and his friend could not have been the cause since no such disorder was known in his country. He could have saved his breath, for Lugoma did not need convincing, and back on Mili Mili, epidemiological arguments were not going to carry any weight: Lay and Hussey were the causes for preternatural reasons.

Lugoma wasted no time. Instead of returning to Lukunor to drop off the breadfruit he had been collecting on Tokewa, he bundled Hussey into the canoe and set off immediately for Mili Mili. His haste was not a sign that he was complying with the chief’s order—he was going there in order to get answers. On landing, Lugoma went immediately to Luttuon to find out how he justified the death sentence.

Hussey and Lugoma’s family stayed in the canoe while Lugoma (whom he calls “father”) was conferring on shore. It was there that Lay, accompanied by his master Ludjuan, found his friend. On this third and unanticipated reunion they did not have to tell each other how they felt. With the death sentence hanging over them, they wanted time together, but as before, they were allowed only a few minutes to speak. Shortly after Lay walked away with Ludjuan, Lugoma returned to the canoe and explained to his family what he had told the chiefs: if they wanted to kill Hussey, they would have to kill him first. Hussey’s grasp of the language was not good enough to take this in, but he was told of it later.

The night passed. Nothing but the decision of the chiefs stood in the way of Lay and Hussey being killed at any moment. Hussey does not say, but it is likely that he and his party slept on the beach at Mili Mili. In the morning Hussey asked his master for permission to visit Lay and was readily allowed. He and his master’s son set out for Lay’s hut, but as they came up to it, Lay called out that Hussey should not come because the natives did not want them together. Hussey turned away, but to his surprise was summoned back, not by Lay but by Lay’s master, Ludjuan. The young men talked death. Lay told Hussey that it was the design of the high chief to kill him; Hussey said that they were not only in the hands of the natives but also in the hands of God. Hussey went back to the canoe, expecting never to see his friend in this life.

Lay tried to defend himself “most solemnly” to the natives. Then he waited. The chiefs’ verdict was not slow in coming: it was a reprieve. It was all to the good that no one had died of the disease, but that was not what saved the two young men from execution. As Lay learned, grave matters like the imposition of a death sentence required a unanimous vote of the chiefs. When the fate of the two men came up in council, one of the chiefs held out. That chief is not identified, but if Hussey’s Lugoma had sufficient rank to be part of the council, he could well have been the one who saved the two from execution. In time the epidemic waned; when its victims began to regain their health, the focus on Lay and Hussey as its cause seemed to have been forgotten. But Lay could not stop thinking that the natives were capricious and volatile enough to replace one crisis with another.

The brief epidemic was dramatic and curious. It is possible to find a variety of exogenous causes of outbreaks of swelling: nutritional disorders like beriberi and kwashiorkor, and cardiac and renal diseases, which are not among the most likely causes of the symptoms observed; contact dermatitis can cause facial edema sufficient to encroach on the eyes, but the thickness of the skin on the hands and feet usually allows the extremities to be uninvolved.

The whole melodrama of the disease and the threatened deaths of Lay and Hussey occupied little more than two weeks, for with the return of general health to the island, the chiefs were making preparations for the most important annual tribute of breadfruit to any authority on any of the islands, and those preparations had already been under way when the disease broke out. The tribute in question was to Labuliet (“La-boo-woole-yet” in Lay’s account), the high chief on Arno, the nearest atoll to Mili, sixty miles to the north. The dispatch of the breadfruit to Arno did not exactly constitute international relations, but it was a diplomatic undertaking. Twelve canoes carrying the bwiro and about two hundred natives sailed for Arno to honor Labuliet, who maintained an overlordship from afar over Mili; his daughter (or granddaughter) was married to Luttuon, the iroojlaplap of Mili. Labuliet not only expected his annual tribute but threatened to wage war on Mili if it were not forthcoming.

The assembled flotilla may have been the largest Lay had ever seen. Since the preparations for the big voyage to Arno were being made all around him in Mili Mili, it is natural to wonder if Lay went along on it. The best reason to believe that he did not comes from Lieutenant Paulding’s account of the Dolphin’s stop at Arno after the rescue of Lay and Hussey, where the two Americans seem to be seeing the other atoll for the first time, and Labuliet seems to be seeing them for the first time. What then to make of Lay’s statement, “After an absence of four or five days, during which time we exchanged civilities with numerous chiefs, we returned to Milly, and hauled up the canoes,” or of Lay’s phrase in the next paragraph, “About two days after my return . . .”? What is easiest to make of it is that the ghostwriter for Lay and Hussey did not get the story right at this point. Indeed, with the chiefs of Mili Atoll assembled in Mili Mili before and after the trip to Arno, it would have been easy for Lay to have “exchanged civilities with numerous chiefs.” Lay does indicate that talk in this quarter led to his finding out after the return of the canoes that Labuliet, who had been told of the disease and of Lay and Hussey’s being blamed for it, had issued his verdict: the contemplated executions would have been wrong since the affliction that had come upon them resulted not from Lay and Hussey living among them but from the displeasure of the natives’ god over his votaries’ killing of the seven Globe people. Thus, the highest authority that the islanders recognized definitively closed the question of who was responsible for the epidemic, and vindicated the lone chief who had held out against a death sentence. In any event, the fact that the disease had completely disappeared was taken to mean that the natives’ guilt over the killings had been expiated, which, in Lay’s view, was all too easy a self-absolution—he adds “!” after the word “expiated.”

A couple of days after the return of the mission to Arno, a ship appeared off the coast of Mili Mili. The natives were in a flurry of excitement, which was nothing compared to the excited feelings that Lay was struggling not to betray. The chiefs who were still in Mili Mili after their trip from Arno thought that the ship was the Globe inexplicably returning. Lay knew it was not his old ship, but saw it as the first break in the clouds since the massacre six months before. Both Lay and Hussey imply that the ship appeared near the end of August. Lay and about three hundred natives went down to a vantage point, probably the southwest angle of Mili Mili, and watched the ship stand in toward land. Late in the day it took in its foresail and mizzen topgallant sails; there was every reason to expect to see a boat put ashore. But no boat was launched, and nothing further happened in the evening. Lay went back to his hut for a sleepless night; when in the morning he and Ludjuan went down to the beach, there was nothing to see but empty ocean. The ship of hope was gone.

The ship cannot be identified for sure, but if it had appeared only three months sooner than Lay and Hussey suggest, a first guess would be the French corvette Coquille, commanded by Captain Louis Duperrey. On May 26 the Coquille stood off Mili and sighted people ashore, but did not have any contact with them. It is possible that Lay and Hussey confused their chronology a bit and that they moved to August an event that had really happened three months before. If not, how was it possible for the Coquille to appear offshore and produce no reaction on the atoll that was worth recording? The ship that Lay and the natives did see created intense excitement; it was alarming for the natives and painfully hope-inspiring for Lay. It is almost impossible to believe that an event that created such turmoil in August would have been ignored in May.

The excitement ebbed among the natives, but the emotional force of a would-have-been rescue was still strong in the two seamen. They went back to their routines, fantasizing ships out of the blue. Routine meant work—fishing and harvesting. It also meant contending with entreaties of the natives to have their earlobes bored. The natives began ear cosmetology when a child was around four years old; sharpened sticks would make holes in the lobes, which were gradually lengthened by inserts until the ears reached almost down to the shoulders. Leaves were often inserted in the enlarged lobes as further decoration. It was considered a mark of great beauty, and the natives regarded the refusal of the Americans to have the operation done as something verging on ingratitude.

For Lay a more welcome communication from the natives was their sincere commendation of his command of the language. In roughly half a year he had become proficient enough to understand and speak with ease a language as heavy in consonants as Hawaiian is in vowels, alien in its syntax, and without English cognates. Good evidence of the achievement of the two men, Lay’s especially it seems, is the vocabulary of Marshallese words printed as an appendix to their Narrative (see Appendix C of this volume).

Lay and Hussey give different accounts of their fourth reunion. Hussey says that he and his master left for Mili Mili as soon as they had been brought word of the ship. Lay has him arriving a couple of weeks later. Lay may have conflated two of Hussey’s visits into one. On the first, Hussey says, he and Lay were allowed two brief conversations before he returned to Lukunor via Tokewa. On the next occasion, he says, he and Lay were together in a somewhat more relaxed setting than on previous occasions. Lay told Hussey that he was eating well and that the natives were considerate and shared food with him. There was a little exchange of food on this occasion: Hussey had brought Lay a basket of fish; keep them until nightfall, Lay asked, so that he would not have to share them with everyone he ran into. Lay picked up the fish after dark and brought them back to his master, who was pleased with the gift; in the morning Ludjuan gave Hussey some coconuts in return. When Hussey brought the coconuts back to the canoe, Lugoma asked him a bit suspiciously where they had come from—he did not want one of his people stealing.

Back in Lukunor Hussey settled into the routine of fishing, curing fish, and in short, being a servant. At some point his master was summoned to Mili Mili to face an investigation of the charge that he and Lay’s master were planning to leave Mili for Arno, taking Lay and Hussey along to exhibit them as curiosities. The charge was worrisome, since leaving the atoll without permission was a serious offense. The two charged with the plot denied it altogether and were acquitted, but Hussey knew that they were lying, as he had often heard them talking about the flight to Arno. Hussey could have spoken up but chose to say nothing, for, quite apart from questions of loyalty, the whole matter could have turned into the next crisis.

It was probably late in 1824 when a severe famine struck the atoll. Hussey, who was in Mili Mili part of the time, speaks of a four-month drought that dried up the breadfruit trees so completely that it even killed some of them on the smaller islands. He had to listen to the ongoing and, for him, vital debate between the natives who felt the drought was sent to punish them for keeping Lay and Hussey on the island and those who felt that it was a result of the murder of the seven Globe people; Hussey, needless to say, sided vigorously with the latter opinion. The debate was all too reminiscent of the judgment blaming the two men for the swelling disease, although Lay and Hussey seem to have had more defenders this time.

Everyone moved into a survival mode. Hussey describes the boiling of the small branches of trees and the drinking of the juice as food. One day when his master was looking for Hussey to help him with fishing, he found him lying in his hut. What was the matter, Lugoma asked. He was too weak from hunger, Hussey told him. Lugoma cooked him a fish, which was, Hussey says, “not half enough.” Back on Mili Mili Lay was getting by with half a coconut a day until he turned thief. Some of Ludjuan’s coconut trees were heavily laden; at night when all were asleep, Lay would climb the trees, take one of the coconuts in his mouth by the stem and one in each hand, and shimmy down the tree. It took as much skill as working in the rigging. He was careful not to make noise by dropping a coconut, overly careful, in fact, since coconuts falling from trees are regular nocturnal sounds to which everyone is habituated—the sounds would not have attracted attention. But Lay was taking no chances. He carried his loot off to a clump of bushes to feast on them night after night, until Ludjuan began noticing a drop in his coconut inventory and said something about it. Then it was back to being hungry. Neither Lay nor Hussey made it clear why everyone did not have more access to coconuts; they were normally so abundant. On a typical day, especially if the wind has been strong, the lagoon is spotted with floating coconuts blown from trees on shore and carried by high tide out into the water; they are sometimes so numerous that they look like hazards to navigation, almost like reefs, but they are easily swept aside by the hulls of boats.

One particular coconut created a crisis du jour, when Lay picked it up off a fresh grave. Anit did not like that: only after a certain amount of time had passed following burial was a man (never a woman) permitted to do what Lay had done. The bunch of natives who accused Lay did not threaten to do anything themselves to him, but warned him that if he did it again, he would bring sickness and death not only on himself but also on the island. The bawling out required Lay’s protestations of ignorance—he did not know that he was doing wrong—contrition, and promise of never again. He felt great relief when they left, for he was mentally prepared for serious trouble.

After four months the drought broke, and the rains came. The natives gathered in Mili Mili to sing their petitions to Anit to make the breadfruit crop abundant. Hussey describes the event in language suggesting that he was present in Mili Mili at the time. But chronicling every trip between Lukunor and Mili Mili and recording the days’ events in general began to seem less important to both Lay and Hussey as the months passed. The two men were “members” now, and there was even less concern on the part of the natives to keep them apart. Lieutenant Paulding seems to contradict the Narrative when he quotes Lay as saying, “[The high chief] was very kind to me in every respect. They have always brought Huzzy [sic] to me, or taken me to see him once a fortnight, or once a month, and suffered us to pass the day together.” That is certainly not the picture drawn in the Narrative, but it may be reconcilable with the Narrative, for most of the episodes recounted in the Narrative take place during the first year that Lay and Hussey spent on the atoll. By the second year the situation of the two had mellowed, and the benign permissiveness described in Paulding’s account may have become the reality.

One day a party of natives from Naalo (Lay calls it Alloo) in the northwestern part of the atoll came to exchange gifts with the chiefs at Mili Mili and to enjoy a bwiro feast. None of them had ever seen Lay before, and they became damned nuisances. They clustered around him, felt his skin, and joked about its color and his intact ears. The telling thing about the episode is that Lay now felt entitled to be annoyed. This was not the first time the natives had been so blithely rude; earlier in his stay Lay would have taken it as one more happening in the alien and inexplicable world of atoll life, no worse and no better than all the other strange events that filled his days. But now atoll life was no longer so alien and inexplicable, and Lay had as much right as anyone on Mili to standard privacy and courtesy.

Lay entertained the natives from time to time by firing muskets and on one occasion the heavy swivel gun taken from the Globe, throwing the natives into a terror that turned immediately to hilarity. That is a little detail of daily life. The Narrative turns more toward such details as the second year on the atoll begins. It is revealing that now the two men are not relating this-happened-to-me reports but are telling what they have observed almost in the manner of travel books. Lay’s chapter 7, in fact, is precisely that: The natives have broad faces, flat noses, and large mouths; they wear their hair long and tie it in a knot at the top of their heads, and the men have long beards; they love to dance in a manner similar to Hawaiians; they bathe a lot, and bathe their children from the day of their birth. When a person dies, the lamentation lasts for two days, day and night, and coconut trees are planted at the head and the foot of the grave. When not working, they visit, arriving and sitting down in silence without a word of greeting; after a pause the host brings out food, and when all have eaten, if there are leftovers, they “are very careful to secure them and carry them off when they return home; and the host would regard it as an imposition if his visitors were to neglect this important trait of politeness, and fashionable form of etiquette.”

Hussey witnessed a murder. Two natives with whom he had gone fishing fell into an argument over a negligible matter; one seized the other’s spear, broke it over his knee, and used the point to kill him. The dead man’s parents laid him out on a mat and, Hussey says, with uncharacteristic understatement, “appeared to regret their loss very much.” What threatened to be more bloody than the single murder was an impending war, which Hussey relates in a too-compact fashion. Bad feelings had grown between Luttuon, the iroojlaplap, and his brother Longerene, whose home was on the northwestern island of Naalo; Luttuon summoned his brother for a conference, which led to the adoption of a peace treaty between the two. A page later in his account, however, Hussey says he heard from some excited natives that Luttuon had killed several of the lower chiefs from Naalo, that Longerene had fled, and that war was about to break out. Luttuon summoned Lay and Hussey and informed them that they had been drafted: they were the artillery. They asked Luttuon if he had any powder for the muskets he wanted them to brandish. The powder was worthless, but the two men went through a charade of drying it in the sun, and the next morning joined the fleet of fifteen or sixteen canoes holding two hundred natives that sailed for Naalo. There, prepared to do battle, they discovered that the enemy had fled—Hussey does not name Longerene at this point, but he is the chief Luttuon’s forces were pursuing (the peace treaty having apparently been revoked). The pursuit was a failure, and after a few days at Naalo the war party returned home. “We . . . heard no more of the war,” Hussey says. The episode is treated so summarily that it is hard to get a picture of what was happening and even harder to determine what was going on inside Lay and Hussey. Did they know the whole thing would play out like a drill or an exercise? Or did they take seriously the possibility of killing or being killed? They were in the habit of taking things seriously, and the war looked like no small matter, but the authors bury this headline item in the back pages.

Etto amro pad ioon aneo—we have been a long time on the island. For twenty-two months the future of William Lay and Cyrus Hussey had hung by a thread, and the thread was the Globe. If the ship made it anywhere, and if anyone at that anywhere had an idea about mounting a rescue and the resources to act, then maybe Lay and Hussey had a chance of not growing old as the odd white (each year less white) denizens of the atoll. Among Pacific stereotypes is the castaway who, willingly or not in the beginning, goes native in dress, adapts to the food, accepts tattooing, learns the language, joins tribal wars, masters crafts, marries a native wife, even becomes a kind of eminence among the islanders, and then after twenty years is discovered when a whaler or trader sends a boat ashore—for a rescue? Not always; sometimes the acculturation trap has closed, and the white man does not want to return.

Lay and Hussey wanted desperately to return. What was the fate of the Globe?