Presently he said: “I’ve spent many a day on many an island dreaming out for myself the history, in its barest outlines, of the Polynesians of centuries ago. “Where did the Polynesians come from in the first place?” I asked. It may have been heard all of a thousand years ago when they were making their great voyages eastward, pushing farther and farther into the Pacific in search for new lands.” “One still hears it in some of the songs handed down from the times of their remote ancestors. I shouldn’t wonder if it’s as old as the Polynesian race,” he continued. For giving me a whiff of the emotion I used to feel upon hearing it years ago. “For having been stirred by the call we heard just now. Winnie sat up in his chair, turned to peer briefly at me, and leaned back once more without replying. It sent little shivers running up and down my spine. But no it seemed rather to be that of some wandering spirit of the sea itself, giving a listener, if there should be one, a means to measure infinite silence by. The peace and beauty of mid-ocean had been given a human voice. Presently the stillness of the night was broken by a clear lonely call that seemed to come from horizons beyond horizons. Barefoot, he moved as silently as a shadow about the decks of his little ship often the slight creaking of his chair gave me the first intimation of his presence. A moment later the deck chair alongside my own creaked faintly as Captain Winnie lowered himself into it with a sigh of content. The anchor -at the end of a rope, not a chain - splashed into the lagoon and the ripples moved outward in circles of white fire. The thunder of the surf along the outer reefs seemed only to deepen the silence which the land enclosed it could not disturb the peace within them, as flawless as the surface of the lagoon, bright with the reflections of the stars. No hail was given either from the schooner or the men on shore as we entered the passage, and as soon as we were safely through, the torches were extinguished and the men holding them vanished, as though they had been given reality for the moment only, and for that particular service.Ĭopyright 1950, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. The ruddy light was reflected with spectacular effect from the surf piling over the reefs, the quiet water of the passage, and from their brown bodies which stood out in clear relief against the dark background of the land. A moment later came bursts of flame from either side, revealing men, naked save for their loincloths, holding flares of dry palm fronds above their heads. The breeze died away after sunset when we were still some distance out, and as we closed with the land, the passage could be clearly seen a wide strip of starlit water. “The chief will have men alongshore to light us in.” “But they will have seen us coming,”he added. The island we were approaching had such a pass, but Winnie told me that because of several coral shoals above the surface of the water it was a difficult one to enter at night. The schooner was equipped with an ancient Fairbanks-Morse engine, but Captain Winnie was compelled to be frugal with gasoline and the engine was used only for entering or leaving the lagoons of those islands that had a passage to the sea, or for standing off and on beyond the reefs of those which had not. On this particular afternoon we were beating up against a fresh southeast wind toward a lagoon island, the tops of its coconut palms barely visible above the horizon. The remnants of the Brander fortune had long since vanished and he earned a modest living as an independent trader whose home was the broad-beamed, weatherbeaten little vessel in which I was traveling. He must have received a greater share of his mother’s island blood: that of the old ariki, the class of chiefs and kings. “Captain Winnie,”as everyone called him, was a true Polynesian in character, although in appearance he looked more like a European than an islander. On the occasion mentioned it was my good fortune to be traveling with Captain Winnie Brander, whose father’s establishment, the House of Brander, had once been the only important commercial and trading company in the eastern Pacific, with interests extending as far as Rapa-Nui, the Easter Island of the mysterious stone images. I was then a newcomer in the Pacific and fell under an island enchantment thatremains to this day. IN the austral summer of the year 1921, I was voyaging in a sixty-ton trading schooner amongst “The Cloud of Islands,” more commonly known as the Tuamotu Archipelago: seventy-four lagoon islands scattered over a thousand miles of the eastern Pacific below the equator the most distant from any continent of all the islands on the globe.
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