John Frewen, South Sea Whaler by George Lewis Becke (great books of all time .txt) 📖

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"My dear Frewen (let us now drop the 'Sir' and 'Captain,' for I am sure we each regard the other as a friend), I am now starting on a very long letter, and have but little time in which to finish it, for the _Dancing Wave_, by which I am sending it, leaves Apia to-morrow at daylight, and it will take a native runner all his time to cross over the mountains with it to Apia."

Then he went on to say that, about six months previously, Malie had been approached by a German gentleman (who had just arrived from Hamburg) and asked if he would sell a large tract of land near Samatau. The chief at once consulted Raymond, who could not help feeling some natural curiosity as to the object of the German gentleman making such a large purchase of land so far away from the principal port of the group (Apia). Malie could give him no information on the subject--all he knew was that he (Malie) had been offered a very fair price for a tract of country that he was willing to lease, but not to sell, for on it were several villages, and the soil was of such fertility that the people would deeply resent their chief parting with it and making them remove to less productive lands.

On the spur of the moment--and feeling that there was some very good reason for the German making the chief such a substantial offer--Raymond said to Malie--

"The German has offered you ten thousand dollars for the land, but will not lease it from you. Now I am not a rich man, and even if you were willing to sell it to me for five thousand dollars, I could not buy it. But I will lease it from you for one year. I will not disturb any of your people, but at the end of the year I will make you another offer. There is some mischief on foot, Malie. Let you and I go to Apia and find out who this man is, and why he is so eager to buy your land."

They set out together, and at Apia gained all the information they desired. The German gentleman was the agent of a rich corporation of Hamburg merchants who wished to purchase all the available land in Samoa for the purpose of founding a colony, the principal industry of which would be cotton-growing. Cotton was bringing fabulous prices in Europe, and the corporation had already made purchases of land both in Fiji and Tahiti, and were using every effort to obtain more.

Raymond quickly made up his mind as to his course of action. He had a hurried interview with two other English planters, and a partnership of three was formed in half an hour. They had then made an agreement with Malie and another chief to lease all the unoccupied country for many miles on each side of Samatau Bay.

"Now," the letter went on, "here is what we purpose to do. We are going to found the biggest cotton and coffee plantation in all the South Seas, and will make a pile of money. But the one all-important thing is to have plenty of labour, and that we can only obtain from other islands--New Britain, the Solomon Group, and thereabouts, and also from the Equatorial Islands. But it is risky work recruiting labour with small, weakly-manned schooners. What is required is a big lump of a vessel, well armed, and with two crews--a white crew to work the ship and a native crew to work the boats. The _Esmeralda_ is just the ship. She can carry six hundred native passengers, and in two trips we shall have all the labourers we want, instead of getting them in drafts of fifty or sixty at a time by small schooners--which would always be liable to be cut off and all hands killed--especially in the Solomon Islands.

"I laid our scheme before Mrs. Marston, and, to be as brief as possible, she is not only willing to let us charter her ship, but also wishes to take a share in the venture. But she wants you to keep command of the _Esmeralda_, as I trust you will."

Then followed a long list of stores, trade goods, arms, ammunition, &c, &c, which Raymond wished Frewen to purchase in Sydney, and the letter concluded with a request for him to leave for Samatau as quickly as possible.

On a separate sheet he made mention of Villari, saying that he had thoroughly recovered from his wound and was living at Apia.

"To tell you the truth, we are all glad he has gone away from us, for he fell madly in love with Mrs. Marston, and proposed to her, and took her kindly rejection of him very badly. He then left the house, but has twice since come to see her. At last she began to get alarmed at his conduct, and finally I had to frankly tell him that he was an undesirable visitor. It stung him deeply, but he persists in writing her the most passionate letters, asking her to reconsider her decision. I am sorry for the fellow, as we all liked him. Frohmann, the new German doctor at Apia, told me that he believes the poor fellow is not 'all there' mentally."


CHAPTER XIV


Frewen showed his letters to the agent Beilby, who corroborated Raymond's statement in every particular regarding the money that could be made by growing cotton on an organised system with native labour, and with proper machinery to clean and pack it; and he also bore out the planter's remarks about the danger that attended small vessels employed in the black labour trade.

"You have seen a good deal of the natives of the South Sea Islands, Captain Frewen, and know what desperate cut-throats are those of the Western Pacific Groups. Two small trading vessels of my own have been cut off within the last five years, and every soul massacred, and the vessels looted and then burnt. It is a most difficult matter to keep a swarm of natives off the decks of a vessel with a low freeboard, all they have to do is to step out of their canoes over the rail, and if they are bent on mischief they can simply overpower a small vessel's company by mere weight of numbers. You will be surprised to hear that, even now, some of the Sydney trading craft use the old-fashioned boarding nettings, and their skippers only allow a certain number of natives on board at a time. But with a large vessel like the _Esmeralda_, this very great source of danger--the low freeboard--is absent; and besides that, you can carry a crew large enough to squelch any attempt at a rising, if, after you get them on board, your gentle passengers took it into their heads to attempt to possess themselves of the ship."

"Just so. And I have heard of several instances where Honolulu and Tahiti labour vessels have been captured, even though they carried large crews and were well armed."

"Exactly! Just carelessness. You never know, when you have a hundred or so of these savages on board, what they may do. They all know that they are going to a foreign country to work on sugar or cotton plantations for three years, at the end of which they will be paid for their labour in guns, powder, beads, calicoes, &c, &c. Well, they come on board perfectly content, and all goes well for a week or two, until some of them begin to notice that the crew are not keeping such a good watch over them as they did when they first came on board. These fellows begin the mischief. 'Why should we not kill the white men on board?' (they will argue) 'and help ourselves to _everything_--guns, pistols, powder, and bullets, cutlasses, grog and tobacco, and all the other riches in the ship? It is much better than working for three years for one gun and one keg of powder and bag of bullets, a knife or two, and a few other things, and then bringing them back to our own country to be despoiled of them by our relations.' Do you understand, Captain Frewen?"

"Quite."

"Well, they lie low and wait, and when the opportunity comes the beggars set to work with a vengeance-Only three years ago one of the Hawaiian Islands labour vessels recruited ninety Gilbert Islands natives to work on the new sugar plantations near Honolulu. They behaved themselves splendidly--for they were well treated--for about a fortnight, and the skipper of the vessel (an old hand in the island trade) allowed them to lie on deck at night, feeling sure that they would give no trouble. More than this, he even told his officers and crew to discontinue carrying their Colts' pistols. The result was that one night, when the watch were taking in sail during a squall, the natives took possession of the brig, killed the mate and all the men of the watch who were on deck, and would certainly have slaughtered every one of the ship's company had it not been for the captain himself; who, hearing the noise, rushed up from below armed with a whale-ship bomb gun, loaded with slugs. He fired right into the mob of natives on the main deck, killed three or four, and wounded twice as many. Then the second mate and the rest of the watch below came tumbling up, headed by a big Nova Scotian A.B. He was a tremendously powerful fellow, and had armed himself with the carpenter's broad axe, and in a few minutes he cut down five of the natives, one of whom was the ringleader. Then the steward and supercargo turned up with nine-bore double-barrelled shot-guns, loaded with No. 1 shot, and they and the bluenose{*} practically saved the ship, or with their four shots they laid out nearly a dozen more natives, and the others bolted down to the hold and asked for quarter. Ah, Captain Frewen, there is nothing like buckshot or slogs to squash a mutiny. You most get some nine-bore guns made here to take away with you."

* A "bluenose" is a sailor's term for a Canadian or Nova
Scotian.

"Thank you for the suggestion, Mr. Beilby. But whalers' bomb guns--which can be easily procured in Sydney--are better still. You can load them with a small charge of powder and crushed rock salt, which won't kill a man, but which will prevent him from doing any mischief for a long time. When I was a boatsteerer some years ago on a New Bedford whaler--the _Aaron Burr_--we had serious trouble with about thirty Portuguese negroes we picked up off the coast of Brazil. They were in two boats, and were deserters from a Brazilian man-of-war, which had gone ashore off Santos. Many of our men were down with fever of some sort, and these black gentry (who were all armed with knives), thinking that the after-guard was not able to cope with them, came aft and told our skipper that if he did not give them all the liquor they wanted they would throw him overboard, set fire to the ship, and go ashore again. He seemed to be very much frightened--he was an undersized, quiet man--and begged them to go on deck and remain there whilst he and the steward and such of the officers who were not ill with fever would get up a keg of rum from the lazzarette. Then--he spoke Spanish pretty well--he asked them not to be too hard on him. He would treat them as gentlemen, &c., and, with apparently trembling hands, he gave them boxes of cigars,