Concerning "Bully" Hayes

III

Three or four years passed by, during which time the writer cruised about from island to island in the North and South Pacific—sometimes living ashore as a trader, sometimes voyaging to and fro among the many groups as supercargo or recruiter in the labour trader; and then one day the schooner, in which I then served as supercargo, reached Samoa, and there I accepted the dignified but unsatisfactory financial position of inter-island supercargo to a firm of merchants doing business in Apia, the distracted little capital of the Navigator's Island. At this time, the late Earl of Pembroke, the joint author with Dr. Kingsley of "South Sea Bubbles," was in Apia Harbour in his schooner yacht Albatross, and every day we expected to see the French Pacific Squadron steam into the port and capture the numerous German ships then laying at anchor there. But the gallant Admiral Clouet, who commanded, disdained such work as this—he was willing and eager to fight any German warships that he could come across, but had no inclination for the inglorious task of seizing unarmed merchantmen.

For two years or so I remained in the employ of the trading firm. Hayes then lived in Apia—or rather at Matautu, on the east side of Apia Harbour. When I say lived there, I mean that Samoa was his headquarters, for he was absent six months out of the twelve, cruising away in the North West Pacific among the Caroline and Marshall Groups. His house at Matautu Point was sweetly embowered in a grove of coco-nut and breadfruit trees, and here the so-called pirate exercised the most unbounded hospitality to the residents and to any captains (not Germans) visiting Samoa. Sometimes we would meet, and whenever we did he would urge me to come away with him on a cruise to the north-west; but duty tied me down to my own miserable little craft, a wretched little ketch of sixty tons register, that leaked like a basket and swarmed with myriads of cockroaches and quite a respectable number of centipedes and scorpions.

But it so came about that that cruise with Bully Hayes was to eventuate after all; for one day he returned to Samoa from one of his periodical cruises and told the owners of the aforesaid basket that he could sell her for them to the King of Arhnu—one of the Marshall Islands—for quite a nice sum. And the owners, being properly anxious to get rid of such a dangerous and unprofitable craft before she fell to pieces, at once consented.

Hayes sailed in the Leonora in the month of November, and it was agreed that I was to follow in The Williams (that being the name of my semi-floating abode of misery) in the following month, and meet him at Milli Lagoon, in the Marshall Islands. Here we were to doctor up the wretched little vessel as well as we possibly could, and then send her over to the Island of Arhnu in the same group, and defraud the monarch of that place of £1,000 by handing over the vessel to him.

Of the miseries and hardships of that voyage from Samoa to the Marshall Islands, I shall not speak. After a passage of forty-three days we reached Milli Lagoon, where we found Hayes awaiting us in the Leonora. The moment our anchor had touched bottom, I packed up my traps and told Hayes I had done with The Williams, and refused to go any further in her unless she was carried on the deck of another vessel. With his carpenter—a pig-eyed Chinaman—he made a survey of the vessel, and then told me that she was so rotten and unseaworthy that he would not take delivery of her. The captain, a gin-sodden little Dutchman, and the crew were given quarters on shore at the house of Hayes's local trader, where they were to remain till some passing ship gave them a passage back to Samoa. The ketch was then beached, as Hayes considered that she might eventually be patched up sufficiently to sell to the King of Arhnu, when the Leonora returned from her cruise to the islands of the North-west Pacific, in six months' time. As I had received no salary from my employers for nearly twelve months (and did not expect any), I consented very cheerfully to this arrangement, and then agreed to sail with Hayes as supercargo.

We sailed from Milli Lagoon for the Kingsmill Group a week later, and visited nearly every island in the cluster, buying coco-nut oil and other produce from the natives and the few scattered white traders. At Arorai, the southernmost island of the group, we found the natives in a state of famine owing to a long and disastrous drought. The condition of these poor people was truly pitiable to see, and the tears came to my eyes when I saw them, scarcely able to stand, crawling over our bulwarks, and eagerly seizing the biscuits and dishes of boiled rice that Hayes gave them with an unstinting hand. They begged us most piteously to take them away somewhere—they cared not where, Samoa, Fiji or Queensland—where they could work on the plantations and at least get food. Five of them ate so voraciously, despite all our endeavours to prevent it, that they died the following day. On the following morning, Hayes called several of the head men of the island into his cabin, and told them that if they were willing, he would take one hundred of the people—men, women, and children—to the German trading station and plantation at Ponapé in the Caroline Islands. Here, he told them, they would have to work for three years for 5 dollars per month each. If, at the end of six months, they found that the Germans did not treat them well, he would bring them back again to their own island on his next voyage to Ponapé. They accepted his offer with the strongest protestations of gratitude, and before noon we sailed with over a hundred of the poor people on board. Before we left, however, Hayes gave the remainder of the population nearly a ton of rice and several casks of biscuits. "You can pay me when the sky of brass has broken and the rain falls, and the land is fertile once more," said the so-called pirate.

We made a quick passage to the Caroline Islands, touching at Kusaie or Strong's Island on our way, and on a Sunday evening swept into Jakoits Harbour on the island of Ponapé before a strong trade-wind. Here we made engagements for our passengers with a German planter, and two days later we again were at sea, bound for the western portion of the Carolines.

For the following three or four months, the brig cruised among the other islands of the Western Carolines, buying copra and turtle-shell in considerable quantities; for the much-maligned "Bully," despite his moral obliquity of vision in his commercial dealings with the merchants of Tahiti and other Polynesian ports, yet possessed the confidence of the wild Caroline Islanders to a remarkable degree. Then we returned to Ponapé, where we remained a month, wooding and watering and cleaning the ship's bottom by the aid of native divers of both sexes.

Leaving Ponapé we drifted rather than sailed back to the eastward, and one morning in March we again saw the verdant heights of beautiful Kusaie or Strong's Island, about ten miles away. On our first visit we had anchored at Coquille Harbour, a lovely lake of deepest blue, on the lee side of the island, where the king had supplied us with all the provisions we wanted; and Hayes had promised to return again in six months and buy a large quantity of coco-nut oil that his Majesty was keeping for him: and in pursuance of that promise the Leonora had now returned to the island.

As the breeze freshened we worked up to Lelé, the principal harbour of the island, where Togusâ, the king, resided, and in a few hours we were boarded by a number of white men, whom we had last seen at two lonely spots near the equator called Pleasant and Ocean Islands. In a few minutes we learnt that in consequence of their lives being in imminent danger from the natives, they, accompanied by their native wives, families, and over one hundred natives connected with them by marriage, had escaped from the islands in two whaleships, and landed at Kusaie, where they were at that moment causing old King Togusà a terrible amount of trouble by their wild and insolent demeanour. Their leader was a white-haired old ex-man-of-war's man, named Harry Terry. He was the doyen of the hardy, adventurous class among whom he had lived for over fifty years, and though exceedingly fond of square gin, was a thoroughly decent old fellow, and tried to restrain his own and his comrades' native followers as much as possible. Harry, when he came on board, was accompanied by about half a dozen other white men, all armed with revolvers, and all half-seas over. After a brief consultation with Hayes, they agreed to pay him a thousand dollars to take them and their belongings to Eniwetok (or Brown's Range) and Arrecifos (Providence Island) two large atolls situated about 10 degrees North. Both of these places were very thinly populated, and Arrecifos was Hayes's secret rendezvous in the North Pacific. His was the first ship that had ever sailed into its lagoon, and the vast groves of coco-nuts that clothed the low-lying island had decided him to return there at some future time with native labourers and turn the coco-nuts into oil. The traders were highly delighted at the prospect of securing homes in two such places to themselves, and agreed to sell Hayes all the oil they produced during the next five years, and give him one barrel out of every five as a tribute of recognition of his ownership of Providence Island and Eniwetok.

On the following day the whole lot came on board, and we left Lelé Harbour to proceed down the coast to a little harbour named Utwe, where Hayes intended to water the ship and buy fresh provisions for the voyage to Providence Island. Just before we sailed, the King and Queen—the latter a very pretty and charming little woman about five-and-twenty years of age—came on board to make some purchases from my trade-room, and I had the distinguished honour of fitting on and selling to Queen Se a yellow silk blouse and two pairs of patent leather shoes. His Majesty, who was a curious combination of piety and inborn wickedness, and spoke whaler's English with great facility, bought about 200 dollar's worth of prints and cutlery, and then proceeded to get drunk. He said that he was very glad the Leonora was taking all the white men away from Kusaie, as he was afraid of their Pleasant Island retinue killing him and all his people, and taking possession of the island.

By the time Queen Se had finished and paid for her purchases her royal husband fell in a heap upon the cabin floor, and a number of twenty-dollar gold pieces, which he carried in a leather pouch at his waist, fell out and rolled all over the cabin. The Queen at once picked them up, and concealed them in the bosom of her dress, telling me with a smile that she would come on board again when we returned from Arrecifos, or as she called it, Ujilong, and spend them. Shortly afterward, her women attendants carried his Majesty up on deck, and Hayes sent him ashore in one of our boats; and then, with our decks filled with the noisy, excitable Pleasant and Ocean Islanders, and the white traders rolling about among them in a state of noisy intoxication, we got under way, and, with our yards squared, ran down the coast within a cable length of the reef.

Three days later we were driven ashore in a fierce north-westerly gale and the trim little Leonora sank in Utwe Harbour in fourteen fathoms of water.

The story of the wreck of the Leonora in Utwe Harbour has been told by the writer in another work, so I will now merely describe some incidents of our stay on the island. First of all, however, let me make some brief mention of the island and its people. Kusaie is about thirty-five miles in circumference and of basaltic formation, and from the coast to the lofty summit of Mount Buache, 2,200 feet high, is clothed with the richest verdure imaginable. The northern part of the island rises precipitously from the sea, and has no outlying barrier reef, but from the centre the land trends westward and southward in a graceful slope towards the beautiful shores of Coquille Harbour. The southern portion is enclosed by a chain of palm-clad coral islets, connected at low water by reefs, forming a long, deep lagoon, the waters of which teem with fish and turtle. This lagoon was used as a means of communication between the village of Utwe Harbour, where the Leonora was wrecked, and the village at Coquille, and all day long one might see the red-painted canoes of the natives passing to and fro over its glassy waters, which were, from their enclosed position, seldom raffled by any wind, except daring the rainy or westerly wind season. There were but three villages of any size on the island—that at Lelé, where the King and his principal chiefs lived, Utwe or Port Lottin, and Moût or Leasee, on the shores of Coquille Harbour. At this latter place I lived most of the time during my stay on the island.

We were enabled to save a considerable amount of stores from the wreck, as well as some arms and ammunition. There were also a bull and two cows, which formed the remainder of a herd of cattle that Hayes had running on the island of Ponapé; the rest—some forty head or so—had been stolen from there by his one-time bosom friend and colleague, the notorious Captain Ben Peese.

The natives of Strong's Island were but few in number—about four hundred all told—and although a very handsome race and possessed of the very greatest intelligence, were dying out rapidly. In 1825, when Duperrey, the French navigator, visited the island he estimated the population at eleven thousand, and Don Felipe Tompson, an Englishman in the Spanish Navy, who was there long before Duperrey, relates that the houses of the people formed an almost continuous line around the southern and western coasts. The introduction of European diseases made terrible ravages among them in 1828, and then about the year 1856, when the whole of the population were converted by American missionaries and adopted European clothing, pulmonary disease made its appearance and swept them away literally in hundreds.

Within a week after the loss of the brig Hayes and our passengers came to an agreement to build a town on the south shore of Utwe. They were to give Hayes the services of their native followers and help him to build dwelling-houses and store-houses for the manufacture of coco-nut oil. Hayes had accused—and with perfect truth—the Strong's Islanders of stealing a number of articles from the wreck, and demanded compensation from the King, who agreed to pay him an indemnity of a million coco-nuts. These were to be collected by our crew and the Ocean and Pleasant Islanders belonging to the traders. It was Hayes's intention to remain on the island till a passing sperm-whaler called there, and then charter her to take the ship's company and all the rest of the traders and natives to either Providence Island or Samoa.

In a month quite a town had been built, and a great sea wall of coral stones built to keep the sea from encroaching on the northern side. Standing apart from the rest of the houses was Captain Hayes's dwelling-house—an enormous structure, a hundred and fifty feet long and fifty wide. Here he ruled in state, and from his door watched his boats, manned by their savage crews, pulling to and fro on their mission of collecting coco-nuts. These, as soon as the boats touched the stone wharf he had built on the west side of the sea-wall, were carried up to the "Plaza" of the town, where they were quickly husked by women, who threw them to others to break open and scrape the white flesh into a pulp. This was then placed in slanting troughs to rot and let the oil percolate down into casks placed at the lower end. On the other side of the "plaza" were the forge, carpenter's shop, and boat-builder's sheds, all of which bustled with activity, especially when the dreaded eye of the captain looked over toward them. Two hundred yards away was the Kusaiean village of Utwe, a collection of about twenty handsomely built houses, and all day long the pale olive-faced Kusaiean men and women would sit gazing in wondering fear at the fierce Pleasant Island women, who, clothed in short girdles of grass called "aireere," sang a savage chant as they husked the nuts. In front of Hayes's house was hung the Leonora's bell, and at noon and at six in the evening, when it was struck, the whole of the people who toiled at the oil-making and boat-building would hurry away with loud clamour for their meals. It was a truly exciting scene to witness, and were it not for the continual drunkenness of most of the white traders, who could be seen staggering about the "plaza" almost at any time, a pleasant one.