"Why not come along now?" said Captain Jansen to us, at Penduffryn, on the island of Guadalcanar.
Charmian and I looked at each other and debated silently for half a minute.Then we nodded our heads simultaneously.It is a way we have of making up our minds to do things; and a very good way it is when one has no temperamental tears to shed over the last tin-of condensed milk when it has capsized.(We are living on tinned goods these days, and since mind is rumoured to be an emanation of matter, our similes are naturally of the packing-house variety.)"You'd better bring your revolvers along, and a couple of rifles,"said Captain Jansen."I've got five rifles aboard, though the one Mauser is without ammunition.Have you a few rounds to spare?"We brought our rifles on board, several handfuls of Mauser cartridges, and Wada and Nakata, the Snark's cook and cabin-boy respectively.Wada and Nakata were in a bit of a funk.To say the least, they were not enthusiastic, though never did Nakata show the white feather in the face of danger.The Solomon Islands had not dealt kindly with them.In the first place, both had suffered from Solomon sores.So had the rest of us (at the time, I was nursing two fresh ones on a diet of corrosive sublimate); but the two Japanese had had more than their share.And the sores are not nice.
They may be described as excessively active ulcers.A mosquito bite, a cut, or the slightest abrasion, serves for lodgment of the poison with which the air seems to be filled.Immediately the ulcer commences to eat.It eats in every direction, consuming skin and muscle with astounding rapidity.The pin-point ulcer of the first day is the size of a dime by the second day, and by the end of the week a silver dollar will not cover it.
Worse than the sores, the two Japanese had been afflicted with Solomon Island fever.Each had been down repeatedly with it, and in their weak, convalescent moments they were wont to huddle together on the portion of the Snark that happened to be nearest to faraway Japan, and to gaze yearningly in that direction.
But worst of all, they were now brought on board the Minota for a recruiting cruise along the savage coast of Malaita.Wada, who had the worse funk, was sure that he would never see Japan again, and with bleak, lack-lustre eyes he watched our rifles and ammunition going on board the Minota.He knew about the Minota and her Malaita cruises.He knew that she had been captured six months before on the Malaita coast, that her captain had been chopped to pieces with tomahawks, and that, according to the barbarian sense of equity on that sweet isle, she owed two more heads.Also, a labourer on Penduffryn Plantation, a Malaita boy, had just died of dysentery, and Wada knew that Penduffryn had been put in the debt of Malaita by one more head.Furthermore, in stowing our luggage away in the skipper's tiny cabin, he saw the axe gashes on the door where the triumphant bushmen had cut their way in.And, finally, the galley stove was without a pipe--said pipe having been part of the loot.
The Minota was a teak-built, Australian yacht, ketch-rigged, long and lean, with a deep fin-keel, and designed for harbour racing rather than for recruiting blacks.When Charmian and I came on board, we found her crowded.Her double boat's crew, including substitutes, was fifteen, and she had a score and more of "return"boys, whose time on the plantations was served and who were bound back to their bush villages.To look at, they were certainly true head-hunting cannibals.Their perforated nostrils were thrust through with bone and wooden bodkins the size of lead-pencils.
Numbers of them had punctured the extreme meaty point of the nose, from which protruded, straight out, spikes of turtle-shell or of beads strung on stiff wire.A few had further punctured their noses with rows of holes following the curves of the nostrils from lip to point.Each ear of every man had from two to a dozen holes in it--holes large enough to carry wooden plugs three inches in diameter down to tiny holes in which were carried clay-pipes and similar trifles.In fact, so many holes did they possess that they lacked ornaments to fill them; and when, the following day, as we neared Malaita, we tried out our rifles to see that they were in working order, there was a general scramble for the empty cartridges, which were thrust forthwith into the many aching voids in our passengers'
ears.
At the time we tried out our rifles we put up our barbed wire railings.The Minota, crown-decked, without any house, and with a rail six inches high, was too accessible to boarders.So brass stanchions were screwed into the rail and a double row of barbed wire stretched around her from stem to stern and back again.Which was all very well as a protection from savages, but it was mighty uncomfortable to those on board when the Minota took to jumping and plunging in a sea-way.When one dislikes sliding down upon the lee-rail barbed wire, and when he dares not catch hold of the weather-rail barbed wire to save himself from sliding, and when, with these various disinclinations, he finds himself on a smooth flush-deck that is heeled over at an angle of forty-five degrees, some of the delights of Solomon Islands cruising may be comprehended.Also, it must be remembered, the penalty of a fall into the barbed wire is more than the mere scratches, for each scratch is practically certain to become a venomous ulcer.That caution will not save one from the wire was evidenced one fine morning when we were running along the Malaita coast with the breeze on our quarter.The wind was fresh, and a tidy sea was making.A black boy was at the wheel.
