Black Pawl

SPIESS, a born lubber who would never learn the way of the sea, bungled his simple share of the task of getting the mate’s boat away. Black Pawl, master of the schooner, was near by; and he cuffed the man. The buffet was good-natured enough, and Black Pawl laughed as he administered it. Nevertheless it knocked Spiess end over end. The man got up, grumbling; and Red Pawl, the captain’s son and mate, said sharply to his father:

“I’ll handle my boat and my men, sir. Let them be.”

Black Pawl laughed again. “Fiddle, boy,” he retorted. “If you knew your job, you’d have Spiess trained before this. He’s been thirty months on your hands.”

“Keep your fists off my men,” Red Pawl repeated sullenly; and Black Pawl frowned.

“Get your boat away,” he ordered. “And stop your mouth.”

They had worked into the bay that morning, threading the intricate passages between the islands and the reefs with a familiarity that showed Black Pawl knew his way about. Not that the passage was difficult. There was always room, and to spare; but an ignorant man might well have taken a short way through blue water and piled up on a slumbering reef. Black Pawl was not ignorant, not ignorant where these waters were concerned. He had made this anchorage a full score of times, in his years upon the sea.

Where the schooner now lay, there was a beauty all about them, the unmeasured and profligate beauty of the tropics that appealed to every sense a man possessed. The eye was drunk with it; the air was richly heavy with a fragrance that caressed the nostrils; the stirring currents of this air brought faint, far bird-songs, and the musical tones of the natives, and blended them in a symphony to which the murmuring sea lent undertone. The touch of the sun and of the sun-warmed wind was as caressing as the touch of a woman’s hand. And to the fifth sense of men hardened to salt-horse and the rough fare of the sea, the fruit the natives brought was delight unutterable. Beauty made for the eye, the ear, the nose, the hand, the tongue—this lay all about them.

The islands were picturesque, densely wooded, and pleasantly broken by steep cliffs and reaches of bare rock. They had an appearance of permanence and strength that was welcome to eyes which had looked too long on coral atolls that barely topped the sea. The bay where the schooner lay was perfectly sheltered. A mile away, the beach lay white as silver snow. To right and left, protecting horns of land came down steeply to the water, and were wooded to the rippling edge. Along the beach were ranged a few native houses, all but hidden among the orange trees and the palms. Those who had seen it will know the spot—the Vau Vau group, ten miles or so from what passed for the “town.”

The native canoes were swarming out toward the schooner, the islanders laughing and calling like children—like amiable children, anxious to make friends. Their narrow dugouts with the balancing outrigger were deeply loaded with enough fruit and provender for a fleet. There was no need to barter for food. Once the islanders saw that the schooner was friendly, the stuff was heaped aboard. Huge oranges, great bunches of gold and green bananas, cocoanuts by the cluster, a fowl or two. One man laughingly slung aboard a pig, its feet trigged fast with strands of fiber; and it lay in the waist and squealed and squealed, kicking helplessly where it lay.

These were unspoiled folk; they lived in a land of plenty, flowing with what passed for milk and honey. But there were no pearls, no treasures to bring the traders flocking here—nothing but the abundant food. They told Black Pawl, in their broken tongue, that no vessel had anchored in this bay for three years past. They were unqualifiedly delighted to make the schooner welcome and help her take aboard the wood and water which she needed for the homeward voyage, just beginning. They wore loose folds of a cloth made of bark, this scant garb supplemented here and there by shirts or trousers of obviously Occidental origin. The women and the children stayed in the canoes; and no man came aboard the schooner without first donning some such garment of civilization. Many of the men knew Black Pawl; and they stood before him—he had taken his post at the break of the quarterdeck, and looked kindly down upon them—and told him many things, many bits of news of themselves and of the islands. Red Pawl and the second mate, each with his boat, had gone ashore for water and for wood.