Chapter Eight
Nukahiva

Something more than ten thousand little fishes, dapper in burnished silver, and not one of them over a centimetre from top to tail, suddenly took it into their heads to proceed in a great hurry up the bay. Half-way across, they changed their collective mind and darted inshore, flirting through the water in elfin specks of light. A shadow passed over them, black, cool and velvety. Could organisms so tiny have known it? Much is denied the minor order of fishes. The ten thousand suspected nothing of the excitement for which even the Nukahivan palms seemed leaning seaward, craning their necks.

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Like a black swan, the shadow of the Active swam up the bay. From her decks proceeded an extraordinary sound – the laughter of white children. Escorted by the fairy shoal, the ship moved safely to her anchorage in the loveliest harbour of the Marquesan group.

The master of the Active had his guns trained on the white shore, and begged permission of the Sovereign Chief to announce their approach with a salvo… mayn't it impress the natives? Charles refused. To shatter that calm would have been most unlucky, like breaking a looking-glass. Besides, this was his world. He had recognised it the moment the scent of the orange-groves penetrated his consciousness.

For weeks everybody aboard ship, crew and passengers alike, had gone short of water. The 1,400 gallons with which the brig put out from Panama were plainly insufficient, but Panama was cursed with a tiny worm which riddled the wood of drinking-casks, making the stowage of large supplies impracticable. Two days they loitered at the dot-sized isle of Taboga, within fifteen miles of Panama City, taking on water and provisions. Here they jettisoned the armourer Charles had incautiously picked up in St. Thomas with the white and flamingo plumes and all the other opulence. It is all very fine for a king to possess an armourer, but this one bragged too openly that he meant to desert at Sydney and try his luck selling small arms to the bushrangers.

Strife did not precisely flee the Active when they dropped the armourer. Bertholini and Morel continued to be so rude. Unable to feed them to the sharks, unwilling to offend Salomon in the person of his lieutenants, Charles barred them from his cabin table. The rest, however, were good seafarers, and the children shared their water-ration so that Isabel's horse, Black Aladdin, too great a favourite to be left in Panama, travelled in comparative luxury.

The trades were too fresh for the Active to put in at James Island or the Albemarles, where she might have taken on water. So she beat towards the Marquesan group, and lay now at anchor before Nukahiva, one of the largest of this lonely peppering of islands.

It is hard, at times, to decide whether Charles's luck was incredibly bad or incredibly good. Look at this selection, for his first real glimpse of a native people, of Nukahiva. Anyone who wishes to idealise and etherealise the coloured races cannot possibly take a pot shot at the Pacific and come off with illusions undefeated. The Pacific, like other oceans, has its seamy side. page 64 There are whole archipelagos where few women past their early teens turn the scales at under twenty stone; islands where the inhabitants stiffen fuzzy hair with scarlet clay, practise scandalous methods of midwifery, abortion, head-hunting, and braggadocio; are rapacious, insolent, and dirty. The crimes of savagery have always a sort of innocent directness which may appeal to the mind nearly unhinged by its own complexity. But even Charles de Thierry could not very well have romanticised his reception, if they had showered coarse insults and spears upon him, and then proceeded to carve steaks from his thighs.

But Nukahiva!… Merely because the trades were fresh, and the Panama worm interfered with the carriage of water-supplies, to have hit on Nukahiva.

The long-boat was scarcely lowered before they were greeted in person by the islanders, who, slipping into the water, were soon splashing around the boat like so many seals. Dark heads bobbed up almost under the keel, brown hands clutched the gunwale. And there was laughter and a flashing of excellent teeth as some youth showing off his aquatic powers, rolled in the water. So the past became for Charles a great painted book of many pages, and out of it splashed the merry people of his dream.

The Nukahivans were very fair for an island race, and went naked to the waist, or, in the case of the young fry, untroubled by any clothing at all. On the perfect breasts of the girls lay a red-and-white laughter of flowers. (It is curious. Charles was eminently shockable, sometimes almost a prig. But not among these Nukahivans.) The hair of man and woman was straight, black and lustrous. They were peace-loving folk, a species of overgrown fairy, possessing the remnants of a tradition too old and severe for them, in those great stone platforms of debate to be found amid their orange-groves. Everywhere orange-groves. Green and gold moonlets of fruit, and that delicious breath of perfume. There again, you notice how the luck held? Almost anywhere else in the Pacific his nostrils would have been violently assaulted by rank copra.

In all this island there was not a single mark of cruelty or mistrust.

Thus, from a ship flying the de Thierry flag, landed in 1835 almost the first white men Nukahiva had ever seen; probably the first white women, Emily and her Margaret; indubitably, and of much more importance from the native idea, the first white children, the first horse, the first marmoset, the first long-faced, droop-tailed, and melancholy monkeys, the first scarlet-and-green page 65 macaw – sidling up and down Charles's arm, and swearing frightfully – the first green Mexican parrot.

All of which were well received. But the parrot was a sensation, and might have become Nukahiva's god had its owners wished to part with it. As for the monkeys, their trustful mugs and glum scolding were regarded most intently at first. Then the natives sensed the comedy of these sad little tailed men, and forthwith the tribe fell to laughing, as heartily as though laughter were their dinner.

White children, with their elegant pale skins, their remarkable eyes and hair, their clothing… the Nukahivans could not be held away from them. But all they did was to take possession of the young de Thierrys, petting them, fondling them, carrying them pick-a-back through the orange-groves, where the morning and the birds were disturbed by great gusty shouts of laughter. And the Active's useless guns showed there, black against that bluest sky, and for once Charles had reason to thank his God that he had sense enough to believe in the impossible.

Thus the two worlds met, the world of the waiting isle, the world of the seeking ship. They conversed by means of interpreter, the Active's third officer, a half-caste and a bit of a dab at Polynesian languages, having full play. The informal welcome went into stages of ceremonial punctilio. An old fellow with white-plumed hair, girdled in a snowy garment of tapa, stepped forward and delivered a harangue replete with poetic courtesies.

“With the full consent of the chieftains and people, I annexed Nukahiva for New Zealand,” writes Charles. He goes on to relate how the blue-and-crimson flag was hoisted there; how the Nukahivans, generous and simple creatures, had no objection at all to his becoming their king; and how they consecrated him with the ceremony and sacred oil of chieftainship. He makes an effort to explain that the isle would have been a valuable depot for ships between Panama and New Zealand, an addition to the latter's possessions.

But why give reasons for falling in love? That is precisely what the Baron de Thierry did, stepping off the Active into a little Eden. In the best sense, its people were his people. The most consistent act of his life was getting himself accepted as King of Nukahiva.

Sun had soaked into the world, into golden-brown bodies moving around him, into vividness of leaf and wing, the amazing sapphire arches of sea and sky. The ideas of the past, old and dishevelled, were no more than tattered garments, to be thrown page 66 off in the clean sunlight. After the banquet, one wanders, one discusses most eloquently the island's future. There is to be a harbour-master, who will collect dues from all trading vessels. (Only, it is consoling to remember, a dollar per ship.) This money, after the harbour-master has reimbursed himself, is to be devoted solely for the benefit of the natives. Who says so? “We, Charles, King of Nukahiva.”

In Nukahiva, also, it is not improper to fall asleep in the afternoon heat. Charles awoke in early twilight, a little bronze hand gently shaking his shoulder. And there was a face, looking down at him through the half-darkness of the palm-thatched hut, so merry, so intelligent, and so friendly that he would have given ten years of his life to be able to speak the stranger's tongue and say only the one word, “Brother”.

Little curious face, looking intently at me through the fronds of shadow, and so picturesque that probably you are simply some old idea of mine, a waif taking on elusive life for just one moment: tell me, what is it, then, that I can do for you?

I am different, I have a pinkish-white face, my watch-chain appeals to you, and the peculiarity of my clothes? Because my ship is larger than your canoe, you would possibly take me to be your superior, and even wish to be like me? Now, God forbid.

I am well enough in my way; but I need considerable modifications. There is something, Brother, something that we both desire. I more painfully than you. For the wistfulness only comes into the shallow brown glass of your eyes when you see the bright trinkets I have about me. Otherwise you are satisfied. But I… I am always conscious of my lack. There is something.… Brother, let us seek it together.

We have certain things in Europe: knowledge, an appreciation of the Arts, a distorted and much-abused regard for life and property, which we could possibly pull into the shape of decent law if we put our minds to it.

We have a God. But I must tell you that the road to Him is very painful. We did not, you see, explore behind Calvary.

You cannot imagine, Brother, how high the cathedral towers reach in Europe. And the higher they climb, poor suppliants, the farther they fall short of God. I am inclined to think that God is something very lowly. Perhaps He is the warm sand under the ball of your naked running foot.

Yet, on the whole, I think this is what I have to give you: aspiration, the words to express that vague, dumb longing which occasionally moves behind your eyes.

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I am not insolent in what I offer. You have a far greater thing to give me. Its name is Innocence.

Somewhere between us, lost, lies a state. Let us seek it together. O, my Brother, both of us are without homes. You lack the knowledge of your residence in immortality. I, how lost and orphaned I am, without your knowledge of the simple needs and beauty of the flesh.

I could not, of course, talk to you so freely, if we were more than two dreams in a twilight. Nay, I cannot talk to you, my words stumble. But my heart speaks. Let me touch your hand. We know one another in understanding, my Brother.

(Over this island lay the shadow of a destiny which for horror finds no equal in the story of the Pacific. Where the Active lay anchored, the Peruvian slave-ship would slink in like a jackal, and her gifts to the Nukahivans would be murder, slavery, outrage and death… death by the ravaging pests of smallpox and syphilis, death throttling in the stinking holds where she carried off hundreds. The English came; native labour was requisite. What was the best bribe? Not such foolish toys as made their eyes shine and their white teeth flash, when Charles de Thierry distributed gifts among them – but opium. Many years later, the author, Frederick O'Brien, visited Nukahiva, to find a handful of natives living in degradation and misery, where once a happy people had played with the first white children.)

Nukahiva.… Ah, the kings are doddering old fools nowadays; nobody listens to them. The dictator has the shouting part, the butcher presides over the shambles as to the manner born. But is it a wonder that your civilisation has grown senile, that its loins are drained of virtue, when these unexpiated crimes lie on its conscience?

Captain Phipps touched Charles on the shoulder. The long-boat had travelled again and again between ship and shore, weighed down to the gunwale with fruit, water, and coconuts. A rim of moon showed over the water's edge, red as the island flamboyants.

Perhaps there is still some such place in the world, which, for a day at least, by the appeal of its sheer helpless loveliness, can hold at bay the human heart.

So passed out of Nukahiva's story one man who saw it naked and beautiful as Eve's body in Paradise; who remembered it thus to the last day of his life.

So passed out of Charles de Thierry's reach the innocent kingdom which accepted him.