Silver Tongue loved Rosalie, and Rosalie loved Silver Tongue, and ever since they had first met at the Taufusi Club dance their friends had seen the inevitable finish of their acquaintance. They were invited everywhere together, and the affair had progressed from the first or furtive stage to the secondary or solemn Sunday drive about […]

“What am I to enter in the log, sir?” asked Mr. Francis, the first lieutenant. “There’s an old-fashioned word for it,” said Captain Hadow grimly. “Had it been my brother it couldn’t have hurt me more,” said Mr. Francis. “Everybody loved that boy.” “It will break his father’s heart, sir.” “A deserter, by God!” “He […]

Things had been dull in Apia before the arrival of Captain Satterlee in the Southern Belle. Not business alone–which was, of course, only to be expected, what with the civil war being just over and the Kanakas driven to eat their cocoanuts instead of selling them to traders in the form of copra–but, socially speaking, […]

I It was two o’clock in the afternoon, and from her uneasy anchorage in the pass the German man-of-war struck the time, four bells. Overhead the sun shone fiercely through a mist of fire; below, the bay gave back a dancing glare; on the outer reef the long breakers foamed and tumbled, white as far […]

It was a wild March day, and the rising wind sang in the rigging of the ships. The weather horizon, dark and brilliant, in ominous alternations showed a sky of piled-up cloud interspersed with inky patches where squalls were bursting. To leeward, the broad lagoon, stretching for a dozen miles to the tree-topped rim of […]

His beginnings was a mystery, where he come from a conjecture, and his business in Manihiki Island one of them things that bothered a fellow in his sleep and yapped at his heels when he was awake. Captain Corker had picked him up at Penrhyn, and the trader there said he had been landed from […]

Far away in the western Pacific, in that labyrinth of coral reefs and low, palm-rimmed isles floating between the blue of heaven and the deeper blue of sea, known to the pajama-clad, ear-ringed traders as “the Group,” and to the outer world as Micronesia–here, one burning morning there arrived a visitor from “Home,” who descended, […]

Puna Punou lies in 14th South exactly, though the writer keeps back the longitood for reasons that will soon be understood by the gentle reader–if the gentle reader is patient and won’t skip. Not that there is any buried treasure there, or any foolishness of that kind; it’s girls mostly, and pearl shell and cocoanuts, […]

It was years ago that he came to Uvea (said little Nofo, as we sat side by side on a derelict spar and watched the sun go down into the lagoon)–years and years and years ago, when I was an unthinking child and knew naught of men nor their crooked hearts. He was a chief, […]

I was in the bark Ransom, with twenty tons of trade aboard, and looking for a station up in the Westward, when I fixed it up with Tom Feltenshaw at Arorai Island to buy him out. It was a good little station, and far better than I could have hoped for at the money I […]

Behind Apia, on the edge of the Taufusi swamp, was a small collection of huts, jumbled together in squalor and dirt, with pigs dozing in the ooze and slatternly women beating out siapo in the shade. It was a dunghill of out-islanders, Nieues, Uveans, Tongans, Tapatueans, banded together in a common poverty; landless people of […]

Raka-hanga is a dot of an island in the mid-Pacific, and so far from anywhere that it doesn’t belong to a group–as most islands do–but is all by its lonesome in the heave and roll of the emptiest ocean in the world. In my time it was just big enough to support two traders, not […]