Part 19
"How in hell do I know?" the resident responded wearily. "Everything goes to the bloody war, and we don't see anything around here but these Kanakas." He continued in this strain and cursed his boredom on the island.
The resident was still rambling on in his lazy monotone when along came a man who wore a cassock and had a beard down to his waist. He was a French missionary priest who was overjoyed when we saluted him with a few words of French. The resident and an English trader were the only two white men on the island besides himself, and neither talked any French.
"_Allons, allons_," he shouted, "by Joe, boys, you must pay me a visit."
And straightway he seized our arms and took us over to his mission house. There he poured out glasses of excellent wine.
"You are Americans," he cried, "you fight for la France? You are Hollanders? Ah, it is too bad that your country is not in the war with France. But I can see that you love la belle France."
With that he put on the gramophone a record of _La Marseillaise_, and had us sing it along with him, which we did with all our lungs. Since it had been written and dedicated to my great-grandfather, I didn't mind a bit. He chattered in French incessantly, in an ecstasy over having someone with whom he could talk his native tongue. He embraced us a dozen times and made us sit down to dinner. It was an excellent meal. The wine was particularly good. The conversation made us squirm a little. The good father was the best fellow possible, but patriotic to the very finger tips. He treated us to some choice denunciations of the Germans.
After another rendition of the _Marseillaise_, we took our leave.
"What will be your next stop?" asked the jovial missionary in parting.
"I think we will put in at Aitutaki," I replied. That was the nearest island and the next field of action in our hunt for a ship.
"Fine," exclaimed the priest cordially. "I have a friend there. You must call on him. Just mention my name. He will be delighted to see you. He is a Hollander, too."
A Hollander, too? And our knowledge of the Dutch language was so strongly salted with a German accent! In that case, when we got to Aitutaki we certainly would be anything but Hollanders, probably Norwegians.
Everywhere on the island were trees and fruits, cocoanuts, bananas, mangoes, and oranges. On the streets of the village, with its thatched huts, were South Sea beauties who wore wreaths of flowers and had dark, flashing eyes. They gazed with interest on the foreign sportsmen, the story of whose cruise on a bet had spread among the natives. We took aboard what provisions we needed and set sail for Aitutaki.
The weather turned miserable, by Joe. It rained every day, those drenching tropical downpours. Our sailcloth covering was not tight enough to hold the water out. The sea was heavy and continually washed into the boat. Often we bailed as many as two hundred and fifty pails an hour. Everything not stowed in the side tanks got wet. When the rain stopped for a while, the waves and spray kept things from drying. We were soaked to the skin and never did get dry. Our blankets and mattresses were dripping wet. When we lay in the sodden bedding, we were freezing cold, and could sleep scarcely at all. Often it was a relief to be called to go on watch. Then at least we could thresh our arms about and get warm. Cooking was almost impossible now, and we seldom ever got coffee anything like hot.
Once we saw a waterspout forming right before our eyes. A fine, whirling drizzle close to the water attracted our eyes. It revolved ever more rapidly, seizing wider masses of water. In the sky was a little black thundercloud extending downward in the shape of a funnel. The whirl of spray on the water ran up swiftly. The cone of the thundercloud stretched down to meet it. They came together and united. A roaring and sound of bursting, a tremendous suction of water, and sky and sea were connected by a whirling column. Gyrating and swaying, it moved in our direction. Our boat lay in a calm. Not a breath of air around us. Will this wandering giant strike us and break upon us, deluge and swamp us? Automatically Leudemann at the rudder tries to steer us. Without wind our boat cannot move, much less steer. But the roaring monster collapses with a deafening clap. Its mass of water falls upon the sea, and from it a circular swell spreads out. We rock uncomfortably and thank heaven. During our voyages among the islands we narrowly escaped several similar spouts.
After three days we found ourselves steering our way through the maze of reefs, very beautiful but perilous, that extend out in front of the landing place at Aitutaki. Again there was no ship in sight, but again one might be scheduled to arrive within some reasonable time. That was our hope. A crowd of natives gathered to watch us come in, also half a dozen white men, among whom was the British resident. He was a tall, lanky fellow who wore glasses, and looked a perfect picture of President Wilson. We found this resident to be full of the same British suspicion. Unlike his colleague at Atiu, he was in no wise lost in tropical indolence, but was active and shrewd. We saw that he entertained the liveliest doubts about us. Might we not be wandering Germans? Of course, he could not venture any forcible measures to investigate our case, such as searching our boat, for if we really were Germans we would doubtless be armed to the teeth, and in that case where would he be? He had no force to match ours. We tried our level best to quiet his suspicions by our offhand natural behaviour. We thought our sporting voyage explanation and our request for a certificate, such as we had got from the resident at Atiu, plausible enough. It was too bad that we could not use the other resident's certificate, but in it were written our supposed Dutch names, and now we were Norwegians.
The resident began by saying to us that we would no doubt be delighted to meet a fellow countryman of ours. This "countryman" turned out to be a Norwegian carpenter. We surmised at once that he had been instructed by the resident to talk with us and see whether we were really Norwegians. My Norwegian was bad, but Kircheiss spoke the language like a native. I kept severely out of the way, and let Kircheiss have a long, friendly talk with the carpenter. Kircheiss convinced his man that he was as Norse as the Vikings. The carpenter was delighted to meet a fellow countryman so jovial and, as Kircheiss represented, so wealthy. He promptly reported to the resident that we were the truest Norsemen alive and could in no wise be Germans.
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[Illustration: Alfred Kling, second officer of the _Seeadler_, was left in command at Mopelia. A passing French schooner, the _Lutece_, saw the wreck, came near to investigate, and was captured. Then Kling and his companions re-named the schooner the _Fortuna_ and set sail for Easter Island.]
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[Illustration: German prisoners in the internment camp on the little island in Hauraki Gulf.
The New Zealand prison camp motor launch in which the Count made his getaway.]
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The resident, with his inscrutable President Wilson face, invited me to his house for dinner. I accepted. A British merchant named Low invited my lieutenant to his house. We suspected it was a dodge to separate us. Seemingly, the Norwegian's assurance had not fully allayed the mistrust of these uneasy Britons. Kircheiss and I made every excuse we could to keep together, but the hospitality was so pressing that we could not refuse any longer without practically giving ourselves away.
"Even if we are apart," I said to Kircheiss on the side, "we have our pistols and hand grenades, by Joe. We will keep our eyes open, and we can take care of ourselves single-handed. If anything looks wrong, we will fight our way to the boat."
At the resident's house, a fine stone structure, I had a much-needed bath and shave. When I rejoined him, the resident studied my smooth jaws.
"Why," he exclaimed, "you are shaved."
"Yes, thanks to you, and I feel a hundred per cent. better."
"But one doesn't shave on a sporting trip, does one?"
He did not believe in anything, that Englishman. He was a true sceptic.
We dined pleasantly enough. The resident talked a lot, although he did not seem to be naturally a talkative kind. He asked me many questions, which I answered cautiously. A native servant brought him a note, and he scribbled a note in return. After a few minutes, the servant brought him another message, and again he answered it. This happened several times.
"Important messages?" I asked.
"Oh, no," he replied hastily, "they are from my friend Low. He wants to arrange to have us all take coffee at his bungalow."
It was very queer. I was prepared, though, and thanked my stars for the pistol and hand grenade in my pockets. I learned later that their scheme was, in fact, to question Kircheiss and me separately. The purpose of the notes was to arrange questions to be asked of us, so that they might check up our separate answers to the same questions. These answers, it happened, had jibed fairly well, although not well enough to disarm suspicion altogether.
I thought it an imprudent time to ask when a ship might be expected, and hoped that some voluntary information on the subject might be vouchsafed. None was, however. I resolved to let the subject wait. People suspected of being a boatload of armed Germans might too readily be suspected of being interested in the arrival of ships.
When the time for leaving came, the resident told me that, if we would return on the following day, he would give us the certificate we desired, certifying that in the course of our sporting voyage we had called at the island of Aitutaki. The delay about the certificate was, of course, to detain us a day longer.
Away from this unsatisfactory interview, we encountered the Norwegian carpenter who informed Kircheiss that the natives believed we were Germans. The British had been recruiting soldiery among them for service in France, and for the purpose of getting recruits had stirred them up with a bit of war fever. The islanders therefore hoped that we were enemies so they could seize us. They planned to get our boat ashore and capture it. Upon hearing of this, I ordered that two men be on watch all the time, ready to repel any attack.
"Any ships expected in port?" Kircheiss asked the carpenter.
"There may be one to-morrow," was the reply, "or it may not be here for a month."
We held a council of war that night. Should we sail straight on? That would make them certain that we were Germans, but there was no wireless station on the island, and they could not warn the other islands until a ship arrived to take away the news. Or should we capture the island, which we could easily do with our extensive armament, and then wait for a ship? Or should we still try to convince the resident that we were the Norwegian sportsmen we pretended? This latter temporizing measure we adopted, and decided to call on the resident the following day and try to get our certificate from him. In preparation for the visit, I instructed the men who remained behind to be ready for trouble ashore. If we needed them, they would hear a pistol shot. They should immediately open fire with machine guns and hand grenades. They should shoot into the air and throw the grenades into the water, where they would make the most noise. The row would create a diversion, and then they should hurry ashore with machine guns, rifles, and grenades to rescue us if need be.
The following day provided us with plenty of thrills. When Kircheiss and I went to the resident's house, crowds of natives followed us. The resident greeted us with a worried expression but came straight to the point.
"I shall have to examine your boat and papers," he said sternly.
"How so?" said I.
"The natives think you are Germans. I know you are not, but I must inspect your boat to satisfy them."
He vacillated between the desire of not letting us get away and the fear of a fight.
Outside, the Polynesians were gathering from all quarters. They made a menacing, ugly-looking mob. Left hand in pocket, I attached a carbine hook to the fuse of the grenade. With that mob of heathens on the rampage, there was no use in trying to carry the deception any further.
"It is true," I said to the resident, "we are Germans. But don't you think it would be better if we remained friends? We are white men. I am with you in front of these natives. Act the part that will impress them. Come and examine our boat."
"Very well," he replied, growing pale, "but you won't take me with you?"
"No, upon my word, no."
When we stepped out on the porch, the islanders raised a howl. I never thought there were so many Polynesians in the world. I had never before stood in the face of a mob. Sailors or soldiers would not have made me so afraid.
"Don't be a coward," I said to myself. "On, by Joe, on."
Kircheiss and I stayed close together. The resident led us through the mob, which was overawed by his presence. We were halfway to the boat when a native in Colonial uniform stepped up. He had seen service with the British in France, we were afterward told.
"Shall I arrest them, sir?" he asked.
"Arrest what?" I shouted. "Shut your trap. Why should a fool like you try to arrest Norwegians?" Then I muttered to the resident: "If that fellow makes any fuss, I'll shoot him dead."
"Don't talk that way," he replied nervously, and waved the native soldier away.
The crowd followed us to the landing. A small rowboat picked us up.
"You won't keep me with you?" the resident asked again.
I assured him that we would not. So we rowed over and climbed into my boat, impelled less by his own desire than by the attitude of the natives.
"Here is the log," Kircheiss, with an impassive face, handed him a log we had taken from one of our captured ships. He perfunctorily turned the pages and came upon a chronometric diary we kept in the book. Above was stamped in fat type: KAISERLICHE MARINE.
"What is that?" he stammered.
"Something in Norwegian," Kircheiss grinned sardonically. "I don't understand it."
The resident saw: GAND UND STAND.
"What language is that?" This time he was a trifle ironical.
"Oh, Norwegian, of course," said Kircheiss.
The resident raised a tarpaulin, but dropped it quickly. He had seen rifles. He raised another. There were neat rows of hand grenades, as easy to pick up as apples.
"Keep those covered," he exclaimed, as pale as ashes.
"Well," I asked, "how do you find everything?"
"Quite all right--quite all right." He smiled a very acid smile.
"Won't you tell your people here that everything is all right?" I suggested.
He turned to the crowd on the pier.
"Everything is in order," he called. "These gentlemen are Norwegian sportsmen, as they say."
"And now the certificate," I reminded him.
He wrote a note just as the resident at Aitu had done.
"You don't intend to take me with you?" he repeated.
"No," I responded, "but I should like to have your company until we can get some fruit and tobacco."
I stood chatting with him on the pier while Kircheiss went to procure the fruit and tobacco. Hadn't we better take the island and wait for a ship instead of sailing off? I debated the question with myself, and then decided we had better go.
The last scene of this little drama was played as the resident and I shook hands and bade each other an apparently cordial farewell. He was a decent fellow, even if he had been suspicious, and I had eaten an excellent dinner at his house. I was glad that we didn't have to humiliate him before the natives, a dreadful fate for an Englishman.
As we hoisted anchor and raised sail, a cheer went up from the natives lined along the shore. They were trying to make amends for having treated us so shabbily and for having taken us for Germans!
But there at Aitutaki I had made the great mistake of our cruise. We should have captured that island. Three days later a schooner arrived. We could have taken it, rejoined our comrades, and continued our raids. Instead, the resident told the officers the story of our visit. The schooner sailed the next day and in a little while met a steamer to which it transferred the news about us. The steamer in turn radioed a warning to the whole South Seas. So we were now in for a warm welcome.
XXVII
THROUGH A SEA OF FLOATING BRIMSTONE TO FIJI
At Rarotonga, another island of the Cook group, we had a fright. By Joe, we were scared. It was night. We suddenly saw, right before us, in the shadow of the shore, a big steamer. She had no lights. She must be an auxiliary cruiser. Hard on the helm and every stitch of canvas up. We turned and sailed the other way as fast as the wind would carry us. We expected every moment to be spotted by their lookout and then see the ghostlike searchlight beam fingering toward us through the dark.
"Our luck is with us," I said to Leudemann, when finally we were far enough out at sea to consider ourselves past danger.
Months later, while discussing our adventures with a group of ship's officers, I was told by one of them that the supposed auxiliary cruiser that had frightened us at Rarotonga was really nothing more than a wreck. Several months before our approach to the island, a steamer had gone aground on a reef just offshore, and had been abandoned. The position of the wreck was such that at night it might readily be taken for a ship lying at anchor.
But we had decided when we got well away from Rarotonga that the Cook group of islands was no place for us. At Atiu we had found no ship to capture. At Aitutaki no ship either, only a lot of trouble, including the misfortune of being recognized as Germans. And now at Rarotonga we had nearly sailed into what we supposed to be an auxiliary cruiser in the dark.
"By Joe," I said to the boys, "we'd better clear out of here and try our luck in other waters."
"Aye, but where? The Fijis?"
"The Fijis," I responded. "We'll find plenty of ships there."
We had all along figured that we might have to go to the Fiji Islands, where a constant stream of sailing ships was always taking aboard copra for the munition factories in the United States. But we also were fully aware that sailing in a little open boat from the Cook Islands to the Fijis might easily be a perilous venture. Our voyage so far had gone fairly smoothly. There had been no hurricanes, and we thanked God for that. Our itinerary from our starting point at Mopelia in the Society group to the adjoining Cook group and among the islands of the latter represented jumps of several hundred miles each and quite a few days at sea. On to the Fijis, however, meant a sail across twenty degrees of longitude. The first half of the jaunt, or about a thousand miles, was over a vast open space of sea where there were no islands on which to find fresh food or on which to take refuge in case of need. In fact, we were to sail for thirteen days out of sight of land. We had expected, when we left Mopelia, that the leg to the Fijis would be a hard one, even if we had fair weather all the way. But now the weather turned against us for a whole week, and we began to think we had run across St. Swithin's day. We had forgotten--if we had ever known it--that this was the time when the equinoctial storms broke in those waters. Had we known it, we never would have headed for the Fijis.
For ten days we sailed through a drenching downpour, the rainy season. The sea was choppy. The wind whipped the spray and the crests of waves over us in driving sheets. In our cockleshell, things were afloat, and it was bitter cold o' nights. We threw our mattresses overboard. In their soaked condition they were far worse to sleep on than the wet planks, and there was no use keeping them any longer. When the sun occasionally shone, our drenched clothes would dry quickly and stiffen like boards of salt. They rubbed and scratched the skin off our bodies. When they got wet again, which they promptly did, the salt would soak into the raw flesh and inflame it. Our bodies felt as though they were on fire. We had no regular sleep. Instead, a man would doze away suddenly at almost any time. Even the helmsman would drowse off like that, and, with a free rudder, the boat would veer around crazily.
One morning, when dawn came, we could hardly believe our eyes. The sea had turned from its normal blue to yellow. On scooping up a pail of it we found a scum that we concluded must be brimstone and ash. We were sailing through a field of brimstone. For three days we saw from horizon to horizon this yellowish expanse of volcanic dust. It no doubt came from some submarine eruption, perhaps the one we could thank for the tidal wave that had wrecked the _Seeadler_. The waves carried the gritty dust into the boat. It penetrated everything. Every surface became like sandpaper. Our skin grew rough and caked with it. Our blankets were like sandpaper, and so were our clothes.