Pages From The Past

By Julian Hillas

The Tragic Story of Rosa

Cruickshanks

“jVTINETY years ago the island of Mani- J-l hiki was unknown save for a few uncorroborated rumours. Even to-day, after nearly a century of resident traders and visiting missionaries, much that belongs to the past still clings to its surf ringed shores.

Civilisation may have taken the venom out of paganism but it has never quite succeeded in removing the sting, and life, stripped of its cruder aspects, is lived much as it was prior to the arrival of the lirst white man. Beneath a polished veneer of Christianity superstition is rife and there yet lingers on a belief, if not in the actual existence, then certainly in the power of the old heathen gods.

To Manihiki, in the early 70’s, came Kosa Cruickshanks and her tubercular husband. Why they chose this lonely atoll so far removed from the beaten track will never be known, nor the manner by which they induced some schooner captain to carry them thither. But come they did and Kosa, young, full-blooded and of good family, was unquestionably the first white woman to land there. That they were people of some station and refinement — with no intention of deliberately dropping their former standards—seems fairly cer tain from the cutlery, the silver fish forks and pearl-handled fruit knives that they brought with them to a community which used its fingers exclusively.

To the islanders they were a constant source of wonder and interest. It is diffi cult to imagine their first impressions.

Food must have caused Rosa many wor ries during those early days, for the island could only provide fish, coconuts and fowls, with an occasional piece of fresh pork.

How many years passed before her invalid husband passed away are un recorded, as is the precise way in which

husband and wife lived, beyond that they kept a native male servant. But from suosequent events one is led to think that at the time of his death their money was either expended or ceased automatically.

Be that as it may, Rosa did not leave Manihiki immediately; and for what hap pened next there were probably reasons and excuses of which we are ignorant.

Picture her, still young, alone on that flat coral riband with no other companionship than the company of six or seven hundred natives whose contact with Europeans dated back a matter of five and twenty years.

Day after day, the trade-wind played its melancholy music among the palm fronds and streamer-like leaves of the pandanus.

Every morning the sun climbed slowly above the vivid blue water of the lagoon and every night'it sank down below the horizon in a crimson welter of colour.

Rosa Cruickshanks must have lain awake in her empty house with its lattice-work walls and high thatched roof, staring at the moving mosaic of moonbeams on the floor and listening to the ceaseless diapason of the surf running its magic fingers over the mighty keyboard of the reef.

In the village of Tukao there was often dancing and then the rhythmic stamp of feet and the rumble of shark-skin drums would rise above the hoarse guttural chorus of the himene singers in an adjoin ing house. Strange scents would fill the air, the aromatic odour of coconut-shell fires and the cloying honey-sweet perfume of the flowering ara.

Day and night the island breathed its silent invitation to Rosa Cruickshanks.

In the end, her erstwhile house-boy became her lover. Perhaps there slumbered in the refined and cultured Rosa a sub conscious urge to the primitive; perhaps it was simply loneliness and a sense of social values, deadened by long separation from her own world, that caused this strange liaison.

Such an ill-balanced association could not and did not last. But Rosa, once

launched on the dangerous decline, was unable to stop.

A white woman was a novelty, a rarity, and the young men competed for the dis tinction of possession. Again and again she postponed the letter to her relations

which would bring release from Manihiki.

One visualises her, confronted by the in creasing difficulty of keeping up her old standards, gradually letting slip first one and then another of these. Dependent now upon her neighbours for the daily supplies of fish and coconuts which com prised her principal diet, Rosa Cruick shanks must have been unable to preserve that invisible line which formerly divided her from the islanders.

At length, forced either by circumstances or the weight of local missionary opinion, she married a native from the Austral island of Rurutu. Her husband, Faareva, had come north on one of the trading vessels which were then numerous, and after a time he not unnaturally wished to return home.

At this juncture, Rosa might yet have

extricated herself from the net which Destiny was slowly drawing about her.

The captain of the schooner on which they were to take passage was a man of wide and generous understanding. None knew better than he that the white woman who has married a native is socially dead —a pariah among her own people and an object of contemptuous pity among those she has adopted. With every argument at his command, he urged her to leave the Islands, even offering to provide the means from his own pocket.

But Rosa had a queer pride which for bade acceptance and also prevented her communicating with her own folk. Per haps she thought that, in Rurutu, things would be different, and perhaps she be lieved the specious promises of her new husband, the sailor Faareva.

In Rurutu, she was again the focus of an interested curiosity, and for a time Faareva basked in the publicity which surrounded his strange marriage.

But as the novelty of the situation wore off, its disadvantages became evident. The fine dinner service and the pearl-handled knives were no more—gone long since in exchange for everyday necessities. Noth ing remained to boast about except a past, which threw no shadows on the present.

Rosa also began to worry him and their inability to converse freely only widened the rift between them.

Friends, and particularly girls who had grown up in the expectation that he would choose one of their number, now twitted him on his wife’s lack of accomplishments, her ignorance of hat or mat-making, and of preparing native food. He began to neglect Rosa: and soon there were nights when he did not come back to the ram shackle hut which was their home.

As time passed, Rosa’s good looks faded, exposure to the sun darkened her face and arms, and the rough salty winds coarsened her skin. A stranger in an alien land, she must often have thought of that world she had renounced and to which her pride always closed the door of return.

Occasionally, there visited her the same schooner captain who had brought them to Rurutu, Always he urged her to leave and always Rosa refused. Then came the day when Faareva told her. with brutal candour, she was a useless encumbrance and that he would live with her no longer.

In future, she could fend for herself.

Cold, indeed, are those who sit alone beside the ashes of romance: and when the friendly captain next visited Rurutu he found a changed and submissive Rosa, who listened willingly enough to his ad vice.

But where to go, and what to do? Back to her own people was now out of the question.

Diffidently, the kind-hearted captain suggested marriage—divorce from Faareva would be easy—but again Rosa refused.

Go with him she gladly and gratefully would, but not as his wife. That, she argued, would be taxing friendship too heavily.

So to Penrhyn, his next port of call, the captain carried her; and, after seeing her comfortably settled there, continued on his way.

Penrhyn, in the late 70’s, was the gather ing-place of as hard-drinking and hard living a set of pearl-buyers as could have been found anywhere. Two stores served their needs, and trading schooners from Rarotonga and Tahiti made frequent visits. The arrival of such vessels pro vided a ready excuse for a wild carouse, and the little settlement of Omoka would then echo with the rum-crazed shouts of the revellers, and bottles and glasses were broken underfoot as the evening which had begun in conviviality ended in a drunken brawl.

In this company Rosa was almost as great a curiosity as she had been on Ru

rutu or Manihiki. Never before had a white woman lived among them; and, at first, there were some who openly re sented her presence.

But Rosa troubled nobody. She sought only peace and forgetfulness. The grey burden of the past rested on her like a pall. The future, blank and interminable, hung before her as a trembling opaque curtain. Spiritually weary and prema turely aged, she soon sank into a listless decline, from which death came as a wel come release barely eighteen months later.

Nearly sixty years have elapsed since then, and time has almost obliterated the memory of her rake-helly contemporaries.

Rosa Cruickshanks sleeps under the sparse sandy soil of Penrhyn. Over her grave is a rough-hewn headstone of coral rock, on which the faded initials R.F. are faintly legible. A few more years, and the wind and rain and the sea-spume will wipe away even this last record of a lonely woman — “Whose perplexed heart did evil, foolishly, A long while since and by some other sea.”