No Man's Island/Chapter 2

AM MANNING, master diver, had cozy quarters in a narrow, short and twisty lane that runs between Beretania and King Streets. Three of his assistants were quartered elsewhere between contracts. The fourth, Fong, a Chinaman of placid countenance and uncertain age, acted as Manning’s cook and house-boy.

Fong was a man of parts. He had been with Manning for eight years after the diver had rescued him from a nasty bit of trouble at Singapore. For which he believed Fong, with reason, grateful. In many ways he was invaluable. He could repair a diving-suit as deftly as he could scramble eggs or make a bed. Manning trusted him at the air-pump. Fong had even gone down successfully with the suit that had the oxygen gas-tank attachment.

After supper, while Manning and Hooper smoked, Fong clattered with the dishes, then poked his head in at the door.

“Me go along Chinatown now,” he said. “You wan’ something mo’?”

“You’ll bunk here tonight, Hooper? Fong, fix up a bed. Got plenty of hot water?”

“That all fix,” said Fong with a grin. He had an uncanny way of forestalling things but Manning wondered a little. “I sabe him stop,” Fong went on. “I fix um bed, put out pajamas, fix um wateh fo’ bath. All time I sabe Cap’n Hoopeh. Plenty too much he skinny now, but I sabe him along that time Tahiti. Sabe him ship. T’lee masts. Schooneh.”

His grin widened at the look of astonishment on both their faces. Manning knew the capacity of Fong’s memory. Hooper narrowed his eyes and then his face cleared.

“You knew my cook, Qui Ling?”

“Sure. Qui Ling sabe me. Plenty. Where Qui Ling now?”

A shadow darkened Hooper’s face.

“I don’t know, Fong. I wish I did. I hope he’s safe.”

“Huh! Qui Ling he plenty sabe to take care of Qui Ling. He win fo’ty dollar from me that time along Tahiti. Goo’ night.”

“There’s an endorsement,” said Manning as the door closed.

“Out of the sky.”

“Good enough for me,” rejoined Manning. “I’m glad it happened, Hooper. Not that I doubted you but for your own sake.”

“I’m glad myself. I’ve got a queer yarn to spin. Where are those charts?”

Manning produced the roll and Hooper selected one of them. He flattened it on the table Fong had cleared, weighting it down with books, and picked up a pencil, poising it for a minute and then bringing it down with a light swoop that left a dot on the map in a wide space of ocean.

“There it is,” he^, said. “Due north of faster Island, close to the line. One hundred and nine-twenty, east longitude, three-seventeen south. I won’t swear to the exact reckoning, but it’s close enough, and it’s the only landfall within thirteen hundred miles, north, south, east or west. I got at the figures with some difficulty. But they’ll serve.”

“All right,” said Manning, his eye's on the tiny speck. “Go ahead, Hooper.”

“I am going to cut it as short as possible,” said Hooper. “It’s all past history. If you are interested when I get through I’ll enlarge on details.

“Here is Huapai.” He used the pencil again to indicate the position. “Lies between the Paumotus and the Tubuai Archipelago. Belongs to neither. The chief I bought it from owed no sovereignty to France. It was my headquarters. I went in for pearls, hunting virgin lagoons, looking up half-born atolls, where there is no soil on the reef as yet with the coral awash. They are the richest. I was a pearl prospector and I made a study of the game. Both of finding and selling.

“I had been holding ever since the war started, waiting for it to end and prices to go up. But I forgot about the pearls after I read about Belgium. All my news came by way of Tahiti and I got it in chunks. I thought America would have to get into the scrap. I knew I would, sooner or later. The Lusitania settled it. I started for San Francisco in the Moanamanu on a four-thousand-mile trip, as a steamer would make it. I took my pearls along. I didn’t know just what I was going to do except to offer my services as sailing-master.

“I had a vague idea of buying or building a fast chaser for submarines with my pearl sales. I thought they would have their U-boats in the Pacific before long. I took along my supercargo, Thompson, who was as eager to get into it as I was, Neilssen, first mate of the schooner, Scandinavian and neutral, ’Pulu, the second mate, Tahitian, and my full crew of Tahiti boys. I figured to send them all back under ’Pulu from San Francisco, either in the schooner or by steamer.

“We barely got half-way. The wind failed between the trades, as usual, but we had worked up to about two hundred miles south and west of Clipperton Island when the German raider came tearing out of the eye of the sun and chucked a shell across our bows. It was heave to or sink. We flew the American flag and you’d have thought us small game for them but we suited their purpose; all was fair to them in war, and they took us.

“I wasn’t overpolite to them. They couldn’t understand why I had nothing in the hull and only a little trade stuff aboard and I told them plainly that I was on my way up to the U. S. A. to join in the scrap. I wasn’t even politic. I was boiling over at the time. The raider sent an oberleutnant aboard by the name of Steiner and I insisted on pretending his name was Schweiner. Which didn’t help matters?

“He told me America would never get into the war, unless it was on the side of Germany. He told me the vessels in the Pacific trade were getting a bit shy of raiders and that they were going to use the Moanamanu for a decoy. They shipped off ’Pulu, all the native boys and Qui Ling, my cook, in two of my boats to get to land as best they could. Let them take grub and water and let me give them their reckoning and a compass. ’Pulu is a good man and I hope they made it. They were right in the equatorial counter-current and that helped them. Neilssen they took aboard the raider.

“Thompson wasn’t backward about say ing how he felt about things and Steiner, after he had signaled the raider, told us we two were too eager to get into the fighting to be given a seat in the boats. We might get through. So we were to be kept on the schooner because they were a bit crowded on the raider. That was a fast steamer taken from some South American line, German owned. I wouldn’t wonder if it had been built with the purpose in mind. Steiner brought a few men aboard and they tried to make me and Thompson help navigate. When we wouldn’t they stowed us in the trade-room.

“They fitted up a wireless on the schooner. The raider would stay below the horizon and the schooner would sail along, sending out S. O. S. signals and flying a flag of distress. When a ship would answer, giving position and coming up, the raider would get ready. And Thompson and I would see the whole thing through the ports.

“It worked well. They didn’t get my pearls. I stowed them in a belt the minute they fired the shell at me and, when I knew we weje to be kept aboard and how they were going to use the schooner, I hid them in a safe place before they thought to search me. If I couldn’t have them myself I wasn’t going to make them a present of a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of pearls.

EVER mind the details of what they did. The war’s over. They played their game too long. It couldn’t last forever. Landed or picked-up boats’ crews gave the details and an Australian battle-cruiser came scooting up over the horizon one afternoon under forced draft, flinging steel. There was a nasty sea running; it was working up to a gale, but it would have done your heart good to see that shooting. The raider was making a running fight of it and both of them came up fast toward us in the schooner where Thompson and I had our eyes glued to the glass of the ports, yelling at every hit. I imagine the raider made all of twenty-two knots but the cruiser was on top of her with thirty, with bigger guns and longer range.

“It was like boys throwing rocks at a can in a mill-pond, with the raider the can, and mighty accurate throwing. Lead-colored sea, leaden clouds over the lowering sun, the lead-colored cruiser coming up hand over hand, spewing fire and steel, and the raider limping along over the angry sea, going down a mass of smoke and flame, stern first.

“Then they turned their attention to us. I don’t suppose they knew we were aboard. That was part of the fortune of war. I’ll say this for Steiner. He knew how to handle my schooner. It was getting dark; wind and sea were heavy; we were a hard mark to hit and, though we could only guess at what they were doing on deck, I know he shortened canvas and reduced the target while keeping all sail she could stand in that gale.

“Squalls were breaking and Steiner sailed right into the heart of one, clawing into it, curtained off from the cruiser. It must have blotted us right out, but the cruiser kept after us and one shell got our main mast, grooving half its thickness away.

“We fled through that night like a booby with a broken wing before a hurricane. The mainmast went by the board and we could hear them trampling the deck and cutting the mast away where it banged against the side. A gale is always worst to those below. It seemed to me the hardest I have ever known. Every hour that wind strengthened. We couldn’t keep our feet, and Sid about the floor in the lurch and lunge of the schooner. They had taken all the furnishings out of the traderoom but the shelves, a small table and a couple of chairs, but we had a rare time dodging those in the dark, with a flash of phosphorus whenever a wave surged along over the ports. The Moanamanu was flung from surge to surge like a chip in a millrace. Helm and sail useless. I’ve an idea we were under bare poles, with maybe a rag of headsail.

“We lost the cruiser, inevitably. I reckon it was about two in the morning when we struck. I’m combining what I learned later with what I knew at the time, Manning. Somewhere about two in the morning we hit the outer reef of the island Steiner named Sckwarzklippen—Black Cliffs. It was a thousand to one shot that we ever struck it though currents may have helped swing us to it. It has a double reef. There are two entrances, not opposite each other, and we didn’t find either of them in that welter of storm.

“We hurdled that first barrier without striking and we crashed across the inner reef with the coral ripping out the lower strakes and leaving us hung up by one jag of rock in her stern, bows down and in the lagoon, wind and wave still battering at us.

“Even that gale could not do much to that twice-belted lagoon. The spume was flying like wet snow in a blizzard and the wind lashed at the sheltered water but, compared to the turmoil outside, it was a millpond. Steiner got off two boats. One splintered into toothpicks when it was launched.

“They may have forgotten us. But they left us in the traderoom, locked up. We tore the shelves down and used the table and chairs for clubs and rams with the water rising fast to our waists on the slanting floor. Once the schooner lurched and we went down, striking out in that trap, believing it was all over.

“But we smashed the door down and scraped through the panels, scrambling on deck and going overside just as a big wave, all streaky with green fire, came thundering over the outer reef, shattered, gathered itself, came on and spent its strength on the stern of the old Moanamanu, sending it to the bottom in ten fathoms, well inside the lagoon, my pearls inside of her.

“Thompson and I made a little beach in a bit of a cove that bottomed a wrinkle in an obsidian cliff. Black sand, we found it, when the dawn came. Thompson had his scalp torn somehow and I was badly bruised. But we were safe for the time and we found some mussels to chew. No water, no fire. We were glad to lie in the sun and nurse ourselves for a bit.

“We didn’t know then if the Germans had got ashore or not. But, while we were talking things over, a whale-boat passed us with Steiner in the stern sheets and the men rowing the German man-of-war stroke, choppy and hard. They saw us but paid no attention. They were out looking for stuff from the wreck. Presently they came back, loaded up, and went by us as if we had been a couple of penguins. In an hour or so they returned and picked us up.

“Schwarzklippen is made up of a hollow crater with a narrow promontory leading to a cone. That cone is covered with bush and palms. The inner walls of the crater, sloping to the lagoon, the same, with two or three streams cascading down all the time. On the slope facing the sea the wall is terraced, partly by nature, partly by man, and paved with great blocks a fathom long.

“On the lower terrace there are great images of gray lava with crowns of red tufa on their heads, all the way from four feet to forty on their pedestals, staring out to sea. The same sort of images they have on Easter Island. Put there by the same prehistoric race, I imagine. The natives on the island are a tribe of Melanesians under a chief named Tiburi. They have only been there for about five generations and they know nothing about the origin of the statues. They only worship them.

“Behind the statues there are caves running away back and communicating with caves on the beach below them that are filled with water, even at ebb tide. Steiner made his camp on the terrace. Thompson and I were allowed to build a grass house on the beach. They kept the whale-boat in one of the lower caves, with the oars and mast taken up to the camp when they were not used.

“Thompson and I were allowed to do all the work we could stagger under. We fished for them and gathered fruit and did kitchen chores. We were prisoners to them, who were also prisoners of the sea. I don’t know that they treated us overbadly though they weren’t overconsiderate.

“The natives came around in canoes that first afternoon and some of them clambered down trails on the crater slopes. They tried to make a demonstration and got the worst of it. Steiner had managed to get arms ashore and some ammunition. Later he made friends with them, in a way. They thought he and his men were gods. They had a different idea about us until we convinced ’em to the contrary.

“Steiner showed Tiburi a few tricks and fixed up some sort of a pact that lasted until they began to get familiar with the women and carried off some of the younger ones. Then Tiburi sulked and went off to the cone. He was still afraid of the guns. Some of the natives stuck with Steiner, those who didn’t get along with Tiburi, for one reason and another.

“They showed Steiner and his crowd how to make kawa and white alcohol from the root of the ti plant. They began to spend most of their time drinking and singing and Steiner’s authority weakened. Discipline got slack and Tiburi attacked. But they beat him off. The promontory is a regular knife-edge and Steiner didn’t dare tackle it to clean them up.

“They made us rig a flagstaff for them on top of the cliff and the women made a flag of bark paper and colored it red, white and black. It was flying day by day for a possible ship. We hauled up wood for a signal-fire but there was small chance of using it. Steiner had his sextant and saved a chronometer and worked out the position, as I gave it to you. I fancy he was accurate. I got it out of one of the men when he was drunk. It looked hopeless enough. The island is uncharted and likely to be.”

“But they had their boat,” said Manning. “Why didn’t they provision up and get away?”

“The boat wouldn’t hold more than six teen and there were twenty-three of them,” said Hooper. “They talked about it but none of them would consent to stay and let the rest go. Afraid what Tiburi would do to them. They’d have gone into the ovens, and they knew it. Steiner suggested drawing lots but they wouldn’t hear to it. And there was no hardwood on the island to build a ship with. Nothing but brush and palms and pithwood trees.

HEY fished up a spar or so from the schooner, with odds and ends of line and tarpaulin and canvas, but they couldn’t lift the hull. I used to look at it when we were fishing in the lagoon or out on the inner reef. The knowledge my pearls were there, safe, kept me going, kept up my resolution to get away. Two of the men watched down on the beach each night, armed, both to prevent our stealing the boat or letting the natives get it.

“Our clothes wore out and our shoes. We went native fashion and Thompson and I got covered with yaws and coral scratches. They kept us working as long as we could stand and any of them thought of some thing for us to do. We had twenty-three masters to serve.

“I meant to steal the whale-boat and make for the Marquesas and Thompson was game. The Galapagos were out of the question with the prevailing winds and the south equatorial current against us. It seemed a crazy scheme for two fhalf-starved men to tackle with scant chance of provisioning—seventeen hundred miles in an open boat. But we were half-crazy, I reckon.

“We made a couple of paddles and a mast and hid them. We braided a big mat sail from pandanus, working in the dark when they thought we were asleep. I stole bits of rope for rigging and spliced them. We dried fish and Thompson stole two calabashes from the natives for water. At the last we gathered a lot of young coconuts to supplement them.

“The night we got away it was moonless and still. The crowd was howling out songs on the terrace until midnight, when it died down. We sneaked up on our guards. They were careless by this time and figured we hadn’t any spirit left. Never dreamed of us tackling the open boat, I reckon. We strong-armed them, tied them up and gagged them, and we got clear.

“There was a wind outside the reef and by morning we were well away. Maybe they sent canoes after us but we never saw them. I won’t tell you what we went through. Don’t recollect a quarter of it. We didn’t make the Marquesas. A Peruvian bark picked us up on the Callao-Honolulu run, half-mummies, half-maniacs. They brought us to Hilo, half-dead when we got there. Later they shipped us to Honolulu to the Sailors’ Home after the bark had left.

“All the data they had was we had been picked up at sea in a whale-boat, which they hadn’t brought along. Thompson is still in bad shape. He didn’t have as much surplus to lose as I did. I saw him this morning. He’s coming round. I told you they dismissed me the day before yesterday.

“Of course I found out the war had ended while we were on Schwarzklippen but I didn’t realize just what that meant. I had dreamed of getting a cruiser to go down there, or a destroyer, and seeing Steiner and his crowd rounded up. But—the war is over.

“I saw the shipping commissioner here yesterday. A man with the blood and eyes of a fish. He didn’t believe me.

“‘It’s a good yarn, my man,’ he says. ‘Pity you haven’t any proof of it.’

“‘We haven’t signed peace with Germany,’ I told him. ‘There are twenty-three Germans waiting to be interned and punished for raiding.’

“‘They may be there and they may be not,’ he said. ‘You say the island is uncharted. It’s a good place for them. They’re interned all right. Good morning. If you want to ship I can put you in the way of a berth.’

“I went to see the commandant of the Naval yard and I didn’t get past the sentry at the gate.”

“Sending down after them wouldn’t get you back your pearls,” said Manning. “Even if they took you with them you couldn’t expect them to provide a diver.”

“I realize that. But what about ’Polu and my Kanakas? What about the rest of the crews they sent off in boats? The war is over but they kept me out of it, them! And they still stand between me and the pearls.”

“Not to mention Tiburi,” put in Manning.

“Those are the risks I told you of. I made one more trial. This morning. There is a man here named Butler. He is a factor. Supplies the plantations with everything they need. And he has other big interests. I met him in Tahiti. Put him up at the club and entertained him. If I ever came to Honolulu he was going to reciprocate. You know the usual thing.

“When I got in to him by sending in my name I saw he put me down for a fake. Twenty-five pounds lost and these, clothes robbed me of any resemblance to Hooper of Huapai. He told me frankly he didn’t believe I was the same man. To him I was just a beach-comber. I didn’t give anything away beyond the fact that I could make it worth his while to outfit me to an island that wasn’t charted. I didn’t even mention the German end of it.

“He cut me short.

“‘If it’s a mysterious island with buried treasure, or a stranded galleon, or a wonderful pearl lagoon,’ he said, ‘I’m not biting.’

“And then he mentioned the Cocos Island fake. He started to put his hand in his pocket but he didn’t take it out. When I began to eye him I fancy he thought for the first time I might be Hooper of Huapai after all, but I was down and out and he was not dealing with derelicts.”

“You didn’t mention the position of the island to any one?”

“I didn’t get a chance. You are the only one who knows the whole yarn, Manning. It’s up to you. It’s wild enough but it’s true, every word of it.”

Manning stretched out his hand to the other above the map.

“I believe it,” he said. “What do you want to do?”