Джек Лондон
Jerry Of The Islands
“Washee-washee!” he urged peremptorily, while those in the invisible canoe still hesitated.
Came the sound of paddles, and, next, emerging into the lantern’s area of light, the high, black bow of a war canoe, curved like a gondola, inlaid with silvery-glistening mother-of-pearl; the long lean length of the canoe which was without outrigger; the shining eyes and the black-shining bodies of the stark blacks who knelt in the bottom and paddled; Ishikola, the old chief, squatting amidships and not paddling, an unlighted, empty-bowled, short-stemmed clay pipe upside-down between his toothless gums; and, in the stern, as coxswain, the dandy, all nakedness of blackness, all whiteness of decoration, save for the pig’s tail in one ear and the scarlet hibiscus that still flamed over the other ear.
Less than ten blacks had been known to rush a blackbirder officered by no more than two white men, and Van Horn’s hand closed on the butt of his automatic, although he did not pull it clear of the holster, and although, with his left hand, he directed the cigar to his mouth and puffed it lively alight.
“Hello, Ishikola, you blooming old blighter,” was Van Horn’s greeting to the old chief, as the dandy, with a pry of his steering-paddle against the side of the canoe and part under its bottom, brought the dug-out broadside-on to the Arangi so that the sides of both crafts touched.
Ishikola smiled upward in the lantern light. He smiled with his right eye, which was all he had, the left having been destroyed by an arrow in a youthful jungle-skirmish.
“My word!” he greeted back. “Long time you no stop eye belong me.”
Van Horn joked him in understandable terms about the latest wives he had added to his harem and what price he had paid for them in pigs.
“My word,” he concluded, “you rich fella too much together.”
“Me like ’m come on board gammon along you,” Ishikola meekly suggested.
“My word, night he stop,” the captain objected, then added, as a concession against the known rule that visitors were not permitted aboard after nightfall: “You come on board, boy stop ’m along boat.”
Van Horn gallantly helped the old man to clamber to the rail, straddle the barbed wire, and gain the deck. Ishikola was a dirty old savage. One of his tambos (tambo being b #234;che-de-mer and Melanesian for “taboo”) was that water unavoidable must never touch his skin. He who lived by the salt sea, in a land of tropic downpour, religiously shunned contact with water. He never went swimming or wading, and always fled to shelter from a shower. Not that this was true of the rest of his tribe. It was the peculiar tambo laid upon him by the devil-devil doctors. Other tribesmen the devil-devil doctors tabooed against eating shark, or handling turtle, or contacting with crocodiles or the fossil remains of crocodiles, or from ever being smirched by the profanity of a woman’s touch or of a woman’s shadow cast across the path.
So Ishikola, whose tambo was water, was crusted with the filth of years. He was sealed like a leper, and, weazen-faced and age-shrunken, he hobbled horribly from an ancient spear-thrust to the thigh that twisted his torso droopingly out of the vertical. But his one eye gleamed brightly and wickedly, and Van Horn knew that it observed as much as did both his own eyes.
Van Horn shook hands with him-an honour he accorded only chiefs-and motioned him to squat down on deck on his hams close to the fear-struck girl, who began trembling again at recollection of having once heard Ishikola offer five twenties of drinking coconuts for the meat of her for a dinner.
Jerry needs must sniff, for future identification purposes, this graceless, limping, naked, one-eyed old man. And, when he had sniffed and registered the particular odour, Jerry must growl intimidatingly and win a quick eye-glance of approval from Skipper.
“My word, good fella kai-kai dog,” said Ishikola. “Me give ’m half-fathom shell money that fella dog.”
For a mere puppy this offer was generous, because half a fathom of shell-money, strung on a thread of twisted coconut fibres, was equivalent in cash to half a sovereign in English currency, to two dollars and a half in American, or, in live-pig currency, to half of a fair-sized fat pig.
“One fathom shell-money that fella dog,” Van Horn countered, in his heart knowing that he would not sell Jerry for a hundred fathoms, or for any fabulous price from any black, but in his head offering so small a price over par as not to arouse suspicion among the blacks as to how highly he really valued the golden-coated son of Biddy and Terrence.
Ishikola next averred that the girl had grown much thinner, and that he, as a practical judge of meat, did not feel justified this time in bidding more than three twenty-strings of drinking coconuts.
After these amenities, the white master and the black talked of many things, the one bluffing with the white-man’s superiority of intellect and knowledge, the other feeling and guessing, primitive statesman that he was, in an effort to ascertain the balance of human and political forces that bore upon his Su’u territory, ten miles square, bounded by the sea and by landward lines of an inter-tribal warfare that was older than the oldest Su’u myth. Eternally, heads had been taken and bodies eaten, now on one side, now on the other, by the temporarily victorious tribes. The boundaries had remained the same. Ishikola, in crude b #234;che-de-mer, tried to learn the Solomon Islands general situation in relation to Su’u, and Van Horn was not above playing the unfair diplomatic game as it is unfairly played in all the chancellories of the world powers.
“My word,” Van Horn concluded; “you bad fella too much along this place. Too many heads you fella take; too much kai-kai long pig along you.” (Long pig, meaning barbecued human flesh.)
“What name, long time black fella belong Su’u take ’m heads, kai-kai along long pig?” Ishikola countered.
“My word,” Van Horn came back, “too much along this place. Bime by, close up, big fella warship stop ’m along Su’u, knock seven balls outa Su’u.”
“What name him big fella warship stop ’m along Solomons?” Ishikola demanded.
“Big fella Cambrian, him fella name belong ship,” Van Horn lied, too well aware that no British cruiser had been in the Solomons for the past two years.
The conversation was becoming rather a farcical dissertation upon the relations that should obtain between states, irrespective of size, when it was broken off by a cry from Tambi, who, with another lantern hanging overside at the end of his arm had made a discovery.
“Skipper, gun he stop along canoe!” was his cry.
Van Horn, with a leap, was at the rail and peering down over the barbed wire. Ishikola, despite his twisted body, was only seconds behind him.
“What name that fella gun stop ’m along bottom?” Van Horn indignantly demanded.
The dandy, in the stern, with a careless look upward, tried with his foot to shove over the green leaves so as to cover the out-jutting butts of several rifles, but made the matter worse by exposing them more fully. He bent to rake the leaves over with his hand, but sat swiftly upright when Van Horn roared at him:
“Stand clear! Keep ’m fella hand belong you long way big bit!”
Van Horn turned on Ishikola, and simulated wrath which he did not feel against the ancient and ever-recurrent trick.
“What name you come alongside, gun he stop along canoe belong you?” he demanded.
The old salt-water chief rolled his one eye and blinked a fair simulation of stupidity and innocence.
“My word, me cross along you too much,” Van Horn continued. “Ishikola, you plenty bad fella boy. You get ’m to hell overside.”
The old fellow limped across the deck with more agility than he had displayed coming aboard, straddled the barbed wire without assistance, and without assistance dropped into the canoe, cleverly receiving his weight on his uninjured leg. He blinked up for forgiveness and in reassertion of innocence. Van Horn turned his face aside to hide a grin, and then grinned outright when the old rascal, showing his empty pipe, wheedled up:
“Suppose ’m five stick tobacco you give ’m along me?”
While Borckman went below for the tobacco, Van Horn orated to Ishikola on the sacred solemnity of truth and promises. Next, he leaned across the barbed wire and handed down the five sticks of tobacco.
“My word,” he threatened. “Somo day, Ishikola, I finish along you altogether. You no good friend stop along salt-water. You big fool stop along bush.”
When Ishikola attempted protest, he shut him off with, “My word, you gammon along me too much.”
Still the canoe lingered. The dandy’s toe strayed privily to feel out the butts of the Sniders under the green leaves, and Ishikola was loth to depart.
“Washee-washee!” Van Horn cried with imperative suddenness.
The paddlers, without command from chief or dandy, involuntarily obeyed, and with deep, strong strokes sent the canoe into the encircling darkness. Just as quickly Van Horn changed his position on deck to the tune of a dozen yards, so that no hazarded bullet might reach him. He crouched low and listened to the wash of paddles fade away in the distance.
“All right, you fella Tambi,” he ordered quietly. “Make ’m music he fella walk about.”
And while “Red Wing” screeched its cheap and pretty rhythm, he reclined elbow on deck, smoked his cigar, and gathered Jerry into caressing inclosure.
As he smoked he watched the abrupt misting of the stars by a rain-squall that made to windward or to where windward might vaguely be configured. While he gauged the minutes ere he must order Tambi below with the phonograph and records, he noted the bush-girl gazing at him in dumb fear. He nodded consent with half-closed eyes and up-tilting face, clinching his consent with a wave of hand toward the companionway. She obeyed as a beaten dog, spirit-broken, might have obeyed, dragging herself to her feet, trembling afresh, and with backward glances of her perpetual terror of the big white master that she was convinced would some day eat her. In such fashion, stabbing Van Horn to the heart because of his inability to convey his kindness to her across the abyss of the ages that separated them, she slunk away to the companionway and crawled down it feet-first like some enormous, large-headed worm.
After he had sent Tambi to follow her with the precious phonograph, Van Horn continued to smoke on while the sharp, needle-like spray of the rain impacted soothingly on his heated body.
Only for five minutes did the rain descend. Then, as the stars drifted back in the sky, the smell of steam seemed to stench forth from deck and mangrove swamp, and the suffocating heat wrapped all about.
Van Horn knew better, but ill health, save for fever, had never concerned him; so he did not bother for a blanket to shelter him.
“Yours the first watch,” he told Borckman. “I’ll have her under way in the morning, before I call you.”
He tucked his head on the biceps of his right arm, with the hollow of the left snuggling Jerry in against his chest, and dozed off to sleep.
And thus adventuring, white men and indigenous black men from day to day lived life in the Solomons, bickering and trafficking, the whites striving to maintain their heads on their shoulders, the blacks striving, no less single-heartedly, to remove the whites’ heads from their shoulders and at the same time to keep their own anatomies intact.
And Jerry, who knew only the world of Meringe Lagoon, learning that these new worlds of the ship Arangi and of the island of Malaita were essentially the same, regarded the perpetual game between the white and the black with some slight sort of understanding.
CHAPTER X
Daylight saw the Arangi under way, her sails drooping heavily in the dead air while the boat’s crew toiled at the oars of the whaleboat to tow her out through the narrow entrance. Once, when the ketch, swerved by some vagrant current, came close to the break of the shore-surf, the blacks on board drew toward one another in apprehension akin to that of startled sheep in a fold when a wild woods marauder howls outside. Nor was there any need for Van Horn’s shout to the whaleboat: “Washee-washee! Damn your hides!” The boat’s crew lifted themselves clear of the thwarts as they threw all their weight into each stroke. They knew what dire fate was certain if ever the sea-washed coral rock gripped the Arangi’s keel. And they knew fear precisely of the same sort as that of the fear-struck girl below in the lazarette. In the past more than one Langa-Langa and Somo boy had gone to make a Su’u feast day, just as Su’u boys, on occasion, had similarly served feasts at Langa-Langa and at Somo.
“My word,” Tambi, at the wheel, addressed Van Horn as the period of tension passed and the Arangi went clear. “Brother belong my father, long time before he come boat’s crew along this place. Big fella schooner brother belong my father he come along. All finish this place Su’u. Brother belong my father Su’u boys kai-kai along him altogether.”
Van Horn recollected the Fair Hathaway of fifteen years before, looted and burned by the people of Su’u after all hands had been killed. Truly, the Solomons at this beginning of the twentieth century were savage, and truly, of the Solomons, this great island of Malaita was savagest of all.
He cast his eyes speculatively up the slopes of the island to the seaman’s landmark, Mount Kolorat, green-forested to its cloud-capped summit four thousand feet in the air. Even as he looked, thin smoke-columns were rising along the slopes and lesser peaks, and more were beginning to rise.
“My word,” Tambi grinned. “Plenty boy stop ’m bush lookout along you eye belong him.”
Van Horn smiled understandingly. He knew, by the ancient telegraphy of smoke-signalling, the message was being conveyed from village to village and tribe to tribe that a labour-recruiter was on the leeward coast.
All morning, under a brisk beam wind which had sprung up with the rising of the sun, the Arangi flew north, her course continuously advertised by the increasing smoke-talk that gossiped along the green summits. At high noon, with Van Horn, ever-attended by Jerry, standing for’ard and conning, the Arangi headed into the wind to thread the passage between two palm-tufted islets. There was need for conning. Coral patches uprose everywhere from the turquoise depths, running the gamut of green from deepest jade to palest tourmaline, over which the sea filtered changing shades, creamed lazily, or burst into white fountains of sun-flashed spray.
The smoke columns along the heights became garrulous, and long before the Arangi was through the passage the entire leeward coast, from the salt-water men of the shore to the remotest bush villagers, knew that the labour recruiter was going in to Langa-Langa. As the lagoon, formed by the chain of islets lying off shore, opened out, Jerry began to smell the reef-villages. Canoes, many canoes, urged by paddles or sailed before the wind by the weight of the freshening South East trade on spread fronds of coconut palms, moved across the smooth surface of the lagoon. Jerry barked intimidatingly at those that came closest, bristling his neck and making a ferocious simulation of an efficient protector of the white god who stood beside him. And after each such warning, he would softly dab his cool damp muzzle against the sun-heated skin of Skipper’s leg.
Once inside the lagoon, the Arangi filled away with the wind a-beam. At the end of a swift half-mile she rounded to, with head-sails trimming down and with a great flapping of main and mizzen, and dropped anchor in fifty feet of water so clear that every huge fluted clamshell was visible on the coral floor. The whaleboat was not necessary to put the Langa-Langa return boys ashore. Hundreds of canoes lay twenty deep along both sides of the Arangi, and each boy, with his box and bell, was clamoured for by scores of relatives and friends.
In such height of excitement, Van Horn permitted no one on board. Melanesians, unlike cattle, are as prone to stampede to attack as to retreat. Two of the boat’s crew stood beside the Lee-Enfields on the skylight. Borckman, with half the boat’s crew, went about the ship’s work. Van Horn, Jerry at his heels, careful that no one should get at his back, superintended the departure of the Langa-Langa returns and kept a vigilant eye on the remaining half of the boat’s crew that guarded the barbed-wire rails. And each Somo boy sat on his trade-box to prevent it from being tossed into the waiting canoes by some Langa-Langa boy.
In half an hour the riot departed ashore. Only several canoes lingered, and from one of these Van Horn beckoned aboard Nau-hau, the biggest chief of the stronghold of Langa-Langa. Unlike most of the big chiefs, Nau-hau was young, and, unlike most of the Melanesians, he was handsome, even beautiful.
“Hello, King o’ Babylon,” was Van Horn’s greeting, for so he had named him because of fancied Semitic resemblance blended with the crude power that marked his visage and informed his bearing.
Born and trained to nakedness, Nau-hau trod the deck boldly and unashamed. His sole gear of clothing was a length of trunk strap buckled about his waist. Between this and his bare skin was thrust the naked blade of a ten-inch ripping knife. His sole decoration was a white China soup-plate, perforated and strung on coconut sennit, suspended from about his neck so that it rested flat on his chest and half-concealed the generous swell of muscles. It was the greatest of treasures. No man of Malaita he had ever heard of possessed an unbroken soup-plate.
Nor was he any more ridiculous because of the soup-plate than was he ludicrous because of his nakedness. He was royal. His father had been a king before him, and he had proved himself greater than his father. Life and death he bore in his hands and head. Often he had exercised it, chirping to his subjects in the tongue of Langa-Langa: “Slay here,” and “Slay there”; “Thou shalt die,” and “Thou shalt live.” Because his father, a year abdicated, had chosen foolishly to interfere with his son’s government, he had called two boys and had them twist a cord of coconut around his father’s neck so that thereafter he never breathed again. Because his favourite wife, mother of his eldest born, had dared out of silliness of affection to violate one of his kingly tamboos, he had had her killed and had himself selfishly and religiously eaten the last of her even to the marrow of her cracked joints, sharing no morsel with his boonest of comrades.
Royal he was, by nature, by training, by deed. He carried himself with consciousness of royalty. He looked royal-as a magnificent stallion may look royal, as a lion on a painted tawny desert may look royal. He was as splendid a brute-an adumbration of the splendid human conquerors and rulers, higher on the ladder of evolution, who have appeared in other times and places. His pose of body, of chest, of shoulders, of head, was royal. Royal was the heavy-lidded, lazy, insolent way he looked out of his eyes.
Royal in courage was he, this moment on the Arangi, despite the fact that he knew he walked on dynamite. As he had long since bitterly learned, any white man was as much dynamite as was the mysterious death-dealing missile he sometimes employed. When a stripling, he had made one of the canoe force that attacked the sandalwood-cutter that had been even smaller than the Arangi. He had never forgotten that mystery. Two of the three white men he had seen slain and their heads removed on deck. The third, still fighting, had but the minute before fled below. Then the cutter, along with all her wealth of hoop-iron, tobacco, knives and calico, had gone up into the air and fallen back into the sea in scattered and fragmented nothingness. It had been dynamite-the MYSTERY. And he, who had been hurled uninjured through the air by a miracle of fortune, had divined that white men in themselves were truly dynamite, compounded of the same mystery as the substance with which they shot the swift-darting schools of mullet, or blow up, in extremity, themselves and the ships on which they voyaged the sea from far places. And yet on this unstable and death-terrific substance of which he was well aware Van Horn was composed, he trod heavily with his personality, daring, to the verge of detonation, to impact it with his insolence.
“My word,” he began, “what name you make ’m boy belong me stop along you too much?” Which was a true and correct charge that the boys which Van Horn had just returned had been away three years and a half instead of three years.
“You talk that fella talk I get cross too much along you,” Van Horn bristled back, and then added, diplomatically, dipping into a half-case of tobacco sawed across and proffering a handful of stick tobacco: “Much better you smoke ’m up and talk ’m good fella talk.”
But Nau-hau grandly waved aside the gift for which he hungered.
“Plenty tobacco stop along me,” he lied. “What name one fella boy go way no come back?” he demanded.
Van Horn pulled the long slender account book out of the twist of his loin-cloth, and, while he skimmed its pages, impressed Nau-hau with the dynamite of the white man’s superior powers which enabled him to remember correctly inside the scrawled sheets of a book instead of inside his head.
“Sati,” Van Horn read, his finger marking the place, his eyes alternating watchfully between the writing and the black chief before him, while the black chief himself speculated and studied the chance of getting behind him and, with the single knife-thrust he knew so well, of severing the other’s spinal cord at the base of the neck.
“Sati,” Van Horn read. “Last monsoon begin about this time, him fella Sati get ’m sick belly belong him too much; bime by him fella Sati finish altogether,” he translated into b #234;che-de-mer the written information: Died of dysentery July 4th, 1901.
“Plenty work him fella Sati, long time,” Nau-hau drove to the point. “What come along money belong him?”
Van Horn did mental arithmetic from the account.
“Altogether him make ’m six tens pounds and two fella pounds gold money,” was his translation of sixty-two pounds of wages. “I pay advance father belong him one ten pounds and five fella pounds. Him finish altogether four tens pounds and seven fella pounds.”
“What name stop four tens pounds and seven fella pounds?” Nau-hau demanded, his tongue, but not his brain, encompassing so prodigious a sum.
Van Horn held up his hand.
“Too much hurry you fella Nau-hau. Him fella Sati buy ’m slop chest along plantation two tens pounds and one fella pound. Belong Sati he finish altogether two tens pounds and six fella pounds.”
“What name stop two tens pounds and six fella pounds?” Nau-hau continued inflexibly.
“Stop ’m along me,” the captain answered curtly.
“Give ’m me two tens pounds and six fella pounds.”
“Give ’m you hell,” Van Horn refused, and in the blue of his eyes the black chief sensed the impression of the dynamite out of which white men seemed made, and felt his brain quicken to the vision of the bloody day he first encountered an explosion of dynamite and was hurled through the air.
“What name that old fella boy stop ’m along canoe?” Van Horn asked, pointing to an old man in a canoe alongside. “Him father belong Sati?”
“Him father belong Sati,” Nau-hau affirmed.
Van Horn motioned the old man in and on board, beckoned Borckman to take charge of the deck and of Nau-hau, and went below to get the money from his strong-box. When he returned, cavalierly ignoring the chief, he addressed himself to the old man.
“What name belong you?”
“Me fella Nino,” was the quavering response. “Him fella Sati belong along me.”
Van Horn glanced for verification to Nau-hau, who nodded affirmation in the reverse Solomon way; whereupon Van Horn counted twenty-six gold sovereigns into the hand of Sati’s father.
Immediately thereafter Nau-hau extended his hand and received the sum. Twenty gold pieces the chief retained for himself, returning to the old man the remaining six. It was no quarrel of Van Horn’s. He had fulfilled his duty and paid properly. The tyranny of a chief over a subject was none of his business.
Both masters, white and black, were fairly contented with themselves. Van Horn had paid the money where it was due; Nau-hau, by virtue of kingship, had robbed Sati’s father of Sati’s labour before Van Horn’s eyes. But Nau-hau was not above strutting. He declined a proffered present of tobacco, bought a case of stick tobacco from Van Horn, paying him five pounds for it, and insisted on having it sawed open so that he could fill his pipe.
“Plenty good boy stop along Langa-Langa?” Van Horn, unperturbed, politely queried, in order to make conversation and advertise nonchalance.
The King o’ Babylon grinned, but did not deign to reply.
“Maybe I go ashore and walk about?” Van Horn challenged with tentative emphasis.
“Maybe too much trouble along you,” Nau-hau challenged back. “Maybe plenty bad fella boy kai-kai along you.”
Although Van Horn did not know it, at this challenge he experienced the hair-pricking sensations in his scalp that Jerry experienced when he bristled his back.
“Hey, Borckman,” he called. “Man the whaleboat.”
When the whaleboat was alongside, he descended into it first, superiorly, then invited Nau-hau to accompany him.
“My word, King o’ Babylon,” he muttered in the chief’s ears as the boat’s crew bent to the oars, “one fella boy make ’m trouble, I shoot ’m hell outa you first thing. Next thing I shoot ’m hell outa Langa-Langa. All the time you me fella walk about, you walk about along me. You no like walk about along me, you finish close up altogether.”
And ashore, a white man alone, attended by an Irish terrier puppy with a heart flooded with love and by a black king resentfully respectful of the dynamite of the white man, Van Horn went, swashbuckling barelegged through a stronghold of three thousand souls, while his white mate, addicted to schnapps, held the deck of the tiny craft at anchor off shore, and while his black boat’s crew, oars in hands, held the whaleboat stern-on to the beach to receive the expected flying leap of the man they served but did not love, and whose head they would eagerly take any time were it not for fear of him.
Van Horn had had no intention of going ashore, and that he went ashore at the black chief’s insolent challenge was merely a matter of business. For an hour he strolled about, his right hand never far from the butt of the automatic that lay along his groin, his eyes never too far from the unwilling Nau-hau beside him. For Nau-hau, in sullen volcanic rage, was ripe to erupt at the slightest opportunity. And, so strolling, Van Horn was given to see what few white men have seen, for Langa-Langa and her sister islets, beautiful beads strung along the lee coast of Malaita, were as unique as they were unexplored.
Originally these islets had been mere sand-banks and coral reefs awash in the sea or shallowly covered by the sea. Only a hunted, wretched creature, enduring incredible hardship, could have eked out a miserable existence upon them. But such hunted, wretched creatures, survivors of village massacres, escapes from the wrath of chiefs and from the long-pig fate of the cooking-pot, did come, and did endure. They, who knew only the bush, learned the salt water and developed the salt-water-man breed. They learned the ways of the fish and the shell-fish, and they invented hooks and lines, nets and fish-traps, and all the diverse cunning ways by which swimming meat can be garnered from the shifting, unstable sea.
Such refugees stole women from the mainland, and increased and multiplied. With herculean labour, under the burning sun, they conquered the sea. They walled the confines of their coral reefs and sand-banks with coral-rock stolen from the mainland on dark nights. Fine masonry, without mortar or cutting chisel, they builded to withstand the ocean surge. Likewise stolen from the mainland, as mice steal from human habitations when humans sleep, they stole canoe-loads, and millions of canoe-loads, of fat, rich soil.
Generations and centuries passed, and, behold, in place of naked sandbanks half awash were walled citadels, perforated with launching-ways for the long canoes, protected against the mainland by the lagoons that were to them their narrow seas. Coconut palms, banana trees, and lofty breadfruit trees gave food and sun-shelter. Their gardens prospered. Their long, lean war-canoes ravaged the coasts and visited vengeance for their forefathers upon the descendants of them that had persecuted and desired to eat.
Like the refugees and renegades who slunk away in the salt marshes of the Adriatic and builded the palaces of powerful Venice on her deep-sunk piles, so these wretched hunted blacks builded power until they became masters of the mainland, controlling traffic and trade-routes, compelling the bushmen for ever after to remain in the bush and never to dare attempt the salt-water.
And here, amidst the fat success and insolence of the sea-people, Van Horn swaggered his way, taking his chance, incapable of believing that he might swiftly die, knowing that he was building good future business in the matter of recruiting labour for the plantations of other adventuring white men on far islands who dared only less greatly than he.
And when, at the end of an hour, Van Horn passed Jerry into the sternsheets of the whaleboat and followed, he left on the beach a stunned and wondering royal black, who, more than ever before, was respectful of the dynamite-compounded white men who brought to him stick tobacco, calico, knives and hatchets, and inexorably extracted from such trade a profit.
