Horror in Paradise (36 page)

Apart from this slip, Hayes behaved well on the trip. When the missionaries suggested that they might hold service on the schooner, Hayes asked them not to be afraid of making the service too long as he wanted to get as much of it as he could while he had the chance. He said that he felt that the voyage was going to do him a great deal of good. On the first Sunday Hayes was there for the service but no other member of the crew:

“Just wait a minute,” said Hayes, “I won’t have any skulking.” The leading missionary said that if the crew did not wish to come he would rather not have them at the service. “I don’t care a curse,” replied Hayes. “They are on a missionary ship now and as long as you are on board I guess they will have to reform.”

About this time Hayes had a supercargo who may, or may not, have been Louis Becke. They quarrelled and Hayes battered his supercargo over the head with a bag containing $250. Then Hayes threw the bag, and the dollars, overboard, saying that the dollars were not fit to keep after touching such a skunk. It was on the same trip that Hayes rebuked the mate for swearing as he went up into the rigging-

“Come down, you skunk,” roared Hayes. “If there is any swearing to be done on this trip I’ll do it.”

A favorite practice of Hayes and one that led to much confusion was to disappear for months and to spread reports that he was dead. Then he would turn up in some quite different region and begin all over again.

He is said to have stolen a vessel at Batavia, in addition to his ship-stealing at San Francisco, Singapore, and other ports up and down the Pacific. He was stopped by an English warship but told so plausible a tale that he was allowed to proceed, after borrowing a few articles from the captain.

After this he returned to San Francisco and conspired with a man, who had once been his cook, to steal a cutter. This, evidently, was the third vessel he had stolen from San Francisco. Hayes stole also the wife of the captain of the cutter and they went cruising in the Pacific.

One day in 1876, as they were sailing among the Line Islands, the cook was steering and something annoyed Hayes. He kicked the cook, who naturally resented this. Hayes, in one of his furious rages, went below to secure his revolver. As he came up on deck again the cook, leaving the steering-wheel to itself, struck the bully over the head with the iron handle of the tiller. Hayes was killed instantly. Such was his reputation, however, that even the slayer (whose name is said to have been Janssen, though others call him Peters) could hardly believe that he was really dead at last.

The cook tied the body to a small anchor and threw it over the side, remarking: “For sure he’s dead this time.” So perished Bully Hayes and that was his only epitaph.

On St. George’s Day, April 23, 1869, the brig
Pioneer,
or
Leonora,
sailed into Port Lloyd in the Bonin Islands. Pease played the part of a gentleman with large but vague interests in various parts of the Pacific. He passed as the owner of the brig while Hayes was the master. Pease persuaded Thomas Webb, one of the most substantial settlers on this remote group, that he had in his gift a profitable post as superintendent of sawmills to be set up on the island of Ascension in the Carolines. Webb placed all his stock at the disposal of the plausible Pease and shipped with all his family on the
Pioneer.
Pease married an island girl, Susan Robinson. Like his associate Hayes, Pease had a habit of marrying. He landed Webb and his family on the island of Ascension and sailed away, stating that he had to hasten on his cruise. Webb found there
was
a sawmill on Ascension, but that Pease had no more to do with it than the man in the moon, and that there was no vacancy for a superintendent. As for Pease’s new wife, a Bonin Islander who saw her at the end of the honeymoon trip writes: “Susan is well but not contented, for Captain Pease carried two native women besides her on the vessel.”

Mrs. Susan Pease had been one of the heroines of a strange story in which blackbirding and murder were mixed up with a Bonins’ feud. Her father, George Robinson, had left a whaler at the Bonins and had settled on the South Island, where he had cleared a good deal of land. After eight years of life on this lonely island he went with his family, including Susan, to Guam and Saipan in the Ladrones. Three years later he returned, bringing with him some natives of the Kingsmill Islands, whom he proposed to employ on his farm. He found the land, however, in the possession of James Mutley, an old-timer who had come to the Bonins in 1846. Mutley refused to give it up.

The kanakas whom Robinson had brought with him left him and sided with Mutley. On the other hand, an exwhaler named Bob who had been taken in by Mutley came over to the Robinson party. One day in 1860 the Kingsmill Islanders attacked Bob. He fought bravely and defended himself for a time by getting into a cleft amongst the rocks. Finally the kanakas overpowered him, killed him, and savagely mutilated the body. Robinson fled into the bush with three of his six children. The kanakas pursued and caught the fugitives and brought them to Mutley, who arranged for them to be taken away from the island on a passing whaler.

The other three Robinson children escaped with their old nurse, a woman from the Raven Islands called Hypa. These children were Caroline, the eldest girl, who was nineteen; Susan, and a boy Charles. They crossed the island and stayed there for eleven months, hiding in the bush and living on shell-fish and wild berries. They were then picked up and taken to Port Lloyd by the master of a whaling vessel, Captain William Marsh. Thomas Webb, a leading settler, took them in. He later married Caroline, while Susan in due course married Benjamin Pease. She came back to the Bonins and survived Pease by thirty years, dying in 1912. Hypa, the Raven Island nurse, died in 1897 at the reputed age of one hundred and twelve. At her express wish, she was baptized just before her death.

On what terms Robinson secured the Kingsmill Islanders whom he brought to the Bonins is not stated, but a document signed by Ebenezer F. Nye, master of the bark
Helen Snow,
and dated June 1, 1860, tells of the bringing to the Bonins of some natives of the Marquesas group. It looks as if Ebenezer had been doing a little blackbirding, for he protests rather too much. His statement reads:

“This is to certify that I have brought to this port from Wellington Island at their own request three women, one man, and a child and given them their passage free, and they are at perfect liberty to go where they please and to stop with whom they please, and no one, I hope, will take advantage of them or misuse them in any way.”

There is no harm in hoping.

Pease paid further visits to the Bonin Islands and settled there for a time, in the intervals of more exciting episodes such as blackbirding, stealing a schooner from a Frenchman, stealing whale oil, and standing his trial at Shanghai for the murder of his cooper—a charge on which he was acquitted. The end came in 1881, when Pease was master of the schooner
Lotus
(perhaps the one that Hayes had stolen from San Francisco), trading in the Marshall Islands. When the
Lotus
was on her way from Jaluit to Ebon Island, the kanaka crew mutinied and threw Pease overboard, no doubt for good reasons. The schooner was making little way and Pease started to swim after her, calling to the kanakas and asking them to pick him up. The kanakas threw Pease’s seachest overboard and told him to go back to Jaluit on it.

Thomas Henry Huxley

One of the greatest English biologists, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), as a young man spent almost five years as assistant surgeon on the exploring vessel H.M.S.
Rattlesnake
in the South Pacific. Huxley Island in the Louisiade Archipelago was given his name. The following brief extract from his journal, edited by his grandson Julian Huxley, shows some of the literary skill that was to make “Darwin’s bulldog” the most readable biologist of his time.

The heroine of the event, who had been cast away on Possession Island and who lived for about five years among the cannibal natives of the Prince of Wales Islands near the tip of Cape York, furnished much information about the manners and superstitions of these aboriginal islanders.

October 6, 1849

THE MOST remarkable occurrence that has yet befallen us happened yesterday. A large party of natives came on from the islands and shortly after their arrival Scott (the captain’s coxswain) and several seamen wandering about fell in with a party of them—gins—among whom was a white woman disfigured by dirt and the effect of the sun on her almost uncovered body; her face was nevertheless clean enough, and before the men had time to recover from their astonishment she advanced towards them and in hesitating broken language cried “I am a Christian—I am ashamed.” The men immediately escorted her down to Heath’s party, ashore watering, who of course immediately took her under their protection, and the cutter arriving very shortly to take the party on board, she found herself once more safe among her own people. Three natives accompanied her off in the canoe whom she called her brothers and who appeared much interested in her.

This is her story, told in half Scotch, half native dialect, for she has been so long among these people as nearly to forget her mother tongue.

Her name is Thompson and her maiden name was Crawford. She was born in Aberdeen and her father was a tinsmith who emigrated when she was about eight years old to Australia. From her account he appears to have been at first in very good business in Sydney but latterly became unsteady and consequently descending lower in the scale, was, when she left him, only a journeyman.

When between fifteen and sixteen she left her father’s house without his knowledge or consent and making her way up to Moreton Bay with a lover of hers was there married to him. She wrote to her father to tell him that she was happy and doing well but has never since heard anything of him. The husband was a sailor and appears to have been a very handy sort of man; according to her account he could make everything for himself from the shoes on his feet to the hat on his head and furthermore fitted up very well a small cutter rather larger than our
Asp.

She tells me he was a great favorite with Captain Wickham and might have done very well at Moreton Bay. However, the tempter came, in the shape of an old sailor who had been wrecked in a large ship, well laden, on an island in Torres Straits, and he gave Thompson such brilliant ideas of the profit to be obtained by any one who should take the trouble to visit the wreck and walk off with “jetsam and flotsam” that the latter resolved to go in his cutter and either return to Moreton Bay or go on to Port Essington (at which place he seems to have had some idea of settling). About this time Dr. Leichhardt was starting on his overland expedition and it appears that he wished Thompson to join him, but the latter, the worse for him, preferred his own exploration, only promising on his arrival at Port Essington to inform the people of the coming expedition and induce them to send a party to meet it.

After living, then, about eighteen months at Brisbane, Thompson with his wife and three men started in the cutter on their ill-omened journey. They had nearly reached the desired island when a heavy squall came on, and their little vessel was utterly wrecked upon a reef running out from the island.

Two native canoes which were out turtle fishing were similarly distressed by the squall but the natives easily reached the shore. Not so with the unfortunate tenants of the cutter: the three men were drowned, and Mrs. Thompson was drowning when one of the blackfellows (Aliki who came on board with her) swam out, and seizing her arm brought her safely to land.

They treated her very kindly, fed her and protected her from insult. One of the old chiefs, who had lately lost a daughter, persisted, according to their common belief that white people are the ghosts of black, that she was this very daughter “jump alive again” and she seems to have been regularly adopted among them, so that she talks of her brothers, nephews, etc. Years rolled on, and by degrees she approximated towards her friends, adopting their language so that she speaks it fluently and at present (evidently thinks in it, having in talking to you to translate her native thoughts into plain English, sometimes a matter of considerable difficulty, and at the same time adopting their ways so that her manners present a most ludicrous graft of the gin upon the white woman.

For the first twelvemonth she kept some account of time but afterwards lost it, so that she has no idea of dates at present, and indeed, as she says herself, she would have forgotten her own language had she not been accustomed to sing to herself at night all the old fragments of songs and ballads she could remember.

The natives appear to have treated her quite as a pet; she never shared in the labors of the women but stayed in the camp to look after the children while they went out on “hospitable cares intent.” Of the kindness and good disposition of the men she speaks in the highest terms, and of the women too she speaks well but says that some of them were not so kind.

Year after year she saw the English ships sail by on their way to China but never had any opportunity of communicating with them, and sometimes she says she was very sorrowful and despairing.

Last year she knew of our being here but the natives would not let her come, and when the canoes were setting out from the islands to visit us for the purpose of getting tobacco, etc., the women were very unwilling to let her come, and it was only partly by promises to return, partly by the influence of “Toma-gogi,” one of her brothers, a gentleman about six feet two and doubtless proportionately respected, that she got away.