第8章 THE MAROON(2)

The natives were drawing palm-tree wine,a thing forbidden by law;and when the wind thus suddenly revealed them,they were doubtless more troubled than ourselves.

At the top of the den there dwelt an old,melancholy,grizzled man of the name of Tari (Charlie)Coffin.He was a native of Oahu,in the Sandwich Islands;and had gone to sea in his youth in the American whalers;a circumstance to which he owed his name,his English,his down-east twang,and the misfortune of his innocent life.For one captain,sailing out of New Bedford,carried him to Nuka-hiva and marooned him there among the cannibals.The motive for this act was inconceivably small;poor Tari's wages,which were thus economised,would scarce have shook the credit of the New Bedford owners.And the act itself was simply murder.Tari's life must have hung in the beginning by a hair.In the grief and terror of that time,it is not unlikely he went mad,an infirmity to which he was still liable;or perhaps a child may have taken a fancy to him and ordained him to be spared.He escaped at least alive,married in the island,and when I knew him was a widower with a married son and a granddaughter.But the thought of Oahu haunted him;its praise was for ever on his lips;he beheld it,looking back,as a place of ceaseless feasting,song,and dance;and in his dreams I daresay he revisits it with joy.I wonder what he would think if he could be carried there indeed,and see the modern town of Honolulu brisk with traffic,and the palace with its guards,and the great hotel,and Mr.Berger's band with their uniforms and outlandish instruments;or what he would think to see the brown faces grown so few and the white so many;and his father's land sold,for planting sugar,and his father's house quite perished,or perhaps the last of them struck leprous and immured between the surf and the cliffs on Molokai?So simply,even in South Sea Islands,and so sadly,the changes come.

Tari was poor,and poorly lodged.His house was a wooden frame,run up by Europeans;it was indeed his official residence,for Tari was the shepherd of the promontory sheep.I can give a perfect inventory of its contents:three kegs,a tin biscuit-box,an iron saucepan,several cocoa-shell cups,a lantern,and three bottles,probably containing oil;while the clothes of the family and a few mats were thrown across the open rafters.Upon my first meeting with this exile he had conceived for me one of the baseless island friendships,had given me nuts to drink,and carried me up the den 'to see my house'-the only entertainment that he had to offer.