FullReads

Then Tom and me started in our digging operations on a checkerboard plan, very systematic, with stakes where we left off, working by night so as not to rouse the natives’ ill will. Or, I ought to have said, two nights, for I guess we didn’t cover up our tracks sufficient, and they got on to it. We discovered this in the form of a depitation of chiefs and elders, who give us warning it had to stop ker-plunk! They said they wouldn’t allow their graveyard torn up, and altogether acted very ugly and insulting. Tom and I had to sing small and put in a holiday neither of us wanted, for the Kanakas had the whip hand of us, and I never saw them so roused. Tom at first tried to carry it off with a high hand, informing them that he was a British subjeck, by God! and was they meaning to interfere with a British subjeck? But I couldn’t see how that gave him any right to dig up Kanaka graveyards for money that didn’t belong to him, and so I smoothed them down and out-talked Tom, saying it shouldn’t happen again, and I was glad they had mentioned it!

We waited a few weeks for the storm to blow over, and then begun again, this time more cautious than before by a darned sight. We thought we were managing beautifully, till the next day, when we went out fishing in Tom’s boat and come back to find both our stations burned to the ground, and all our stuff stacked outside the smoking ruins, higgledy-piggledy!

This was getting it in the neck, and we saw we were beat. We ran up a couple of little shacks and settled down to ordinary trading again, with what good spirits you can imagine. We didn’t even dare walk on the weather side of the island, lest they’d carry out their next threat, which was to shoot us; and the only revenge we had was raising prices on them and monkeying with the scales, winning out in both ways. But it was a poor set off to a quarter of a million of cold coin where almost we could lay our hands on it, and if there was in the whole world a human being more blue and miserable than me, it was Tom Riley. Then, to make matters worse, the whole thing was common property now, the Kanakas knowing as much as we did, and more, and the news was passed along to every ship that came–all about Old Dibs and the money in the graveyard. You might be surprised the natives didn’t take a leaf out of our book and dig it up for themselves; but you’ll never really civilize a Kanaka if you try a thousand years, and they wouldn’t have turned up their dead grandmothers and fathers and aunts for all the gold in the Bank of England–being sunk in superstition and slavishly afraid of spirits and the like.

We had to sit with folded hands and pretend to be pleased, while every ship that called had to take its whack at the graveyard. First it was the Lorelei, getting off scot-free with only a taboo; then it was the Tasmanian, with a bullet through the captain’s leg; then the cutter Sprite, with concussion of the brain. I never saw the Kanakas drove so wild, till at last, when there was a ship off the settlement, they’d set an anchor watch on the graveyard and do sentry go with loaded guns.

Then one fine day a French schooner from Tahiti ran in, unloaded sixteen men armed with rifles and carrying pickaxes and spades, who marched across the island singing the “Marseillaise,” and proceeded to take up the whole place. The natives rallied with everything they could lay their hands on, from Winchesters to fish spears, and my, if they didn’t chase out them Frenchmen at the double! They got away, leaving one dead and carrying three, making a bee line for the beach, the schooner covering their retreat with a blazing Nordenfeldt. They were in such a hurry to be gone that they cut away their moorings with an ax, and I had the privilege, later on, of buying their anchor, second hand, for ten dollars in trade.