CHAPTER XXVII

Journey on the _Roberta_; the winged cockroaches; arrival at a Swiss paradise in the valley of Oomoa.

I sailed from Tai-o-hae for an unknown port, carried by the schooner _Roberta_, which had brought the white mare from Atuona and whose skipper had bore so well the white banner of Joan in the procession that did her honor. The _Roberta_ was the only vessel in those waters and, sailing as she did at the whim of her captain and the necessities of trade, none knew when she might return to Nuka-hiva, so I could but accept the opportunity she offered of reaching the southern group of islands again, and trust to fortune or favor to return me to my own island of Hiva-oa.

The _Roberta_ lay low in the water, not so heavily sparred as the _Morning Star_, or with her under-cut stern, but old and battered, built for the business of a thief-catcher, and with a history as scarred as her hull and as slippery as her decks. Was she not once the _Herman_, and before that something else, and yet earlier something else, built for the Russians to capture the artful poachers of the Smoky Sea? And later a poacher herself, and still later stealing men, a black-birder, seizing the unoffending natives of these South Seas and selling them into slavery of mine or plantation, of guano-heap and sickening alien clime. Her decks have run blood, and heard the wailing of the gentle savage torn from his beloved home and lashed or clubbed into submission by the superior white. Name and color and rig had changed time and again, owners and masters had gone to Davy Jones's locker; the old brass cannon on her deck had raked the villages of the Marquesans and witnessed a thousand deeds of murder and rapine.

I pulled myself aboard by a topping-lift, climbed upon the low cabin-house, and jumped down to the tiny poop where Jerome Capriata held the helm.

This Corsican, with his more than sixty years, most of them in these waters, was a Marquesan in his intuitive skill in handling his schooner in all weather, for knowing these islands by a glimpse of rock or tree, for landing and taking cargo in all seas. Old and worn, like the _Roberta_, he was known to all who ranged the southern ocean. What romances he had lived and seen were hidden in his grizzled bosom, for he said little, and nothing of himself.

The supercargo, Henry Lee, a Norwegian of twenty-five years, six of which he had passed among the islands, set out the rum and wine and a clay bottle of water. He introduced me to Père Olivier, a priest of the mission, whose charge was in the island of Fatu-hiva. From him I learned that the _Roberta_ was bound for Oomoa, a port of that Island.

That I had not been given the vaguest idea what our first landfall would be was indicative of the secrecy maintained by these traders in the competition for copra. The supply being limited, often it is the first vessel on the spot after a harvest that is able to buy it, and captains of schooners guard their movements as an army its own during a campaign. The traders trust one another as a cat with a mouse trusts another cat.

The priest was sitting on a ledge below the taffrail, and I spoke to him in Spanish, as I had heard it was his tongue. His _buenos dias_ in reply was hearty, and his voice soft and rich. A handsome man was Padre Olivier, though in sad disorder. His black soutane, cut like the woolen gown of our grandmothers, was soaking wet, and his low rough shoes were muddy. A soiled bandana was about his head. His finely chiseled features, benign and intelligent, were framed by a snow-white beard, and his eyes, large and limpid, looked benevolence itself. He was all affability, and eager to talk about everything in the world.

The rain, which all day had been falling at intervals, began again, and as the _Roberta_ entered the open sea, she began to kick up her heels. Our conversation languished. When the supercargo called us below for dinner, pride and not appetite made me go. The priest answered with a groan. Padre Olivier was prostrate on the deck, his noble head on a pillow, his one piece of luggage, embroidered with the monogram of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the needlework of the nuns of Atuona.

"I am seasick if I wade in the surf," said the priest, in mournful jest.

The _Roberta's_ cabin was a dark and noisome hole, filled with demijohns and merchandise, with two or three untidy bunks in corners, the air soaked with the smells of thirty years of bilge-water, sealskins, copra, and the cargoes of island traffic. Capriata, Harry Lee, and I sat on boxes at a rough table, which we clutched as the _Roberta_ pitched and rolled.

[Illustration: Near the Mission at Hanavave]

[Illustration: Starting from Hanavave for Oomoa]

When the ragged cook brought the first dish, unmistakably a cat swimming in a liquid I could have sworn by my nose to be drippings from an ammonia tank, I protested a lack of hunger for any food. My ruse passed for the moment, but was exposed by a flock or swarm of cockroaches, which, scenting a favorite food, suddenly sprang upon the table and upon us, leaping and flying into the plates and drawing Corsican curses from Capriata and Norwegian maledictions from Lee. I did not wait to see them throwing the invaders from the battlements of the table into the moat of salt water and spilt wine below, but quickly, though feebly, climbed to the deck and laid myself beside Père Olivier, nor could cries that the enemy had been defeated and that "only a few" were flying about, summon me below again.

Père Olivier and I stayed prone all night in alternate pelting rain and flooding moonlight, as a fair wind bowled us along at six knots an hour. Padre Olivier, between naps, recited his rosary to take his mind from his woes. I could tell when he finished a decade by his involuntary start as he began a new one. I had no such comfort as beads and prayers, and the flight of those schooner griffins had struck me in the solar plexus of imagination.

"Accept them as stations of the cross," said the priest. "This life is but a step to heaven."

I replied with some comments indicating my belief that cockroaches belonged on a still lower rung, and going in an opposite direction.

"I know those _blattes_, those _saligauds_," he said with sympathy. "They are sent by Satan to provoke us to blasphemy. I never go below."

Those pests of insects can hardly be estimated at their true dreadfulness by persons unacquainted with the infamous habits of the nocturnal beetle of the tropics. Sluggish creatures in the temperate zone, in warm countries they develop the power of flying, and obstacles successfully interposed to their progress in countries where they merely crawl are ineffectual here. They had entire possession of the _Roberta_.

The supercargo, Lee, was not to be blamed, for he told me that once he had taken time in port to capture by poisonous lures a number he calculated at eight thousand, and that within a month those who had escaped had repopulated the old schooner as before. Then he despaired, and let them have sway. To sleep or eat among them was not possible to me, and the voyage was a nightmare not relieved by an incident of the second night.

Capriata, whose feet were calloused from going bare for years, awoke from a deep slumber that had been aided by rum, to find that the cockroaches in his berth had eaten through the half inch or more of hard skin and had begun to devour his flesh. With blasphemous and blood-chilling yells he bounded on deck, where he sat treating the wounds and cursing unrestrainedly for some time before joining Père Olivier and me in democratic slumber on the bare boards. Several weeks later his feet had not recovered from their envenomed sores.

When eight bells sounded the hour of four, I got upon my feet and in the mellow dawn saw a panorama of peak and precipice, dark and threatening, the coast of Fatu-hiva and the entrance to Oomoa Bay, the southernmost island of the Marquesas, and the harbor in which the first white men who saw the islands anchored over three hundred years ago.

Those Spaniards, on whose ships the cross was seen in cabin and forecastle, on gun and halberd, murdered many Marquesans at Oomoa to glut their taste for blood. The standard of death the white flew then has never been lowered. Oomoa and Hanavave, the adjacent bay and village, were resorts for whalers, who brought a plague of ills that reduced the population of Fatu-hiva from many thousands to less than three hundred. Consumption was first brought to the islands by one of these whalers, and made such alarming inroads on the people of Hanavave that most of the remainder forsook their homes and crossed to the island of Tahuata, to escape the devil the white man had let loose among them.

We sailed on very slowly after the mountains had robbed us of the breeze, and when daylight succeeded the false dawn, we dropped our mud hooks a thousand feet from the beach. On it we could see a little wooden church and two dwellings, dwarfed to miniature by the grim pinnacles of rock, crude replicas of the towers of the Alhambra, slender minarets beside the giant cliffs, which were clothed with creeping plants in places and in places bare as the sides of a living volcano.

The fantastic and majestic assemblage of rock shapes on the shores of Fatu-hiva appeared as if some Herculean sculptor with disordered brain and mighty hand had labored to reproduce the fearful chimeras of his dreams.

The priest and I, with the supercargo, went ashore in a boat at six o'clock, and reached a beach as smooth and inviting as that of Atuona. A canoe was waiting for Père Olivier; he climbed into it at once, his black wet robe clinging to him, and called "_Adios!_" as his men paddled rapidly for Hanavave, where he was to say mass and hear confessions.

Lee and I took a road lined with a wall of rocks, and passing many sorts of trees and plants entered an enclosure through a gate.

After a considerable walk through a thrifty plantation, we were in front of a European house which gave signs of comfort and taste. At the head of a flight of stairs on the broad veranda was a man in gold-rimmed eye-glasses and a red breechclout. His well-shaped, bald head and punctilious manner would have commanded attention in any attire.

I was introduced to Monsieur François Grelet, a Swiss, who had lived here for more than twenty years, and who during that time had never been farther away than a few miles. Not even Tahiti had drawn him to it. Since he arrived, at the age of twenty-four years, he