The Heathen Of Bora Bora

By Charles Brown Jr.

r was by chance that Jack London learned from a young woman at Apia, Samoa, that Tehei, the ihitian sailor on the Snark, had en a cook on the Eimeo, a trad l schooner owned by a Mr. *xter, which was literally blown pieces in the Tuamotus during e terrible hurricane of 1906 that r ept this dangerous archipelago d Tahiti.

Fehei and another Tahitian alone rvived to tell of the loss of the meo. rhey had managed to catch hold a hatch-cover which, torn from e Eimeo by the wind, was blown fir way. For three days the two re in the water, one in and one t alternately, there being room • only one man on the cover, rheir ordeal ended when they v the coconut-fringed atoll of hanea above the sea and, by ving the ragged shirt that was t between them, attracted the iention of natives, who sent a ice out to them.

V week later, they were carried Tahiti by the French rescue liser.

Jot one word of this experience d Tehei breathed to London — hei never talked about himself. it Penduffryn Plantation, on adalcanal Island, in the “terrible” iomons, where, surrounded by lourers and servants from the inibal and head-hunter tribes of ilaita Island, London lived and Dte for a time, he made the neo adventure the starting point his novel called The Heathen.

Jut he did not call his hero Tehei. named him Otoo, and said he s the “one heathen of Bora Bora.” r did he take Tehei’s fellow bitian as the companion of the tch-cover; instead, he created arley, a white adventurer, the >t-person narrator of the story. )too and Charley, according to idon’s story, met in the maw of turricane. They knitted the bonds their comradeship and ranged i wide Pacific together, survived ee shipwrecks, and prospered m their business enterprises.

Lfter 17 years of companionship, iy parted in Savo Lagoon, in the omons—Otoo in the jaws of the irk that dragged him under the ter, after he prevented the 16-ft ler from getting Charley. /harley memorialised his brown •ther in these words: “If Jehovah from His high place watching iry sparrow fall, not least in His igdom shall be Otoo, the one ithen of Bora Bora.” * * * LONDON met Tehei first in Uturoa Lagoon. The yacht Snark was anchored just off • village of Uturoa, between the

twin islands of Raiatea and Tahaa The tall youthful native, wearing a white-flowered crimson pareu and the brim of a pandanus-leaf hat shading his dark brown eyes, had beat up from leeward to the Snark in a reddish-brown coffin-shaped outrigger canoe that rocked appal lingly beneath an impossible huge spritsail.

The dugout was no more than 14 ft long, 2 ft deep, and scarcely a foot wide.

But it was the spritsail which captured the attention of the young American standing in the Snark’s cockpit. As if the hoist of the sail and the length of its boom were not sufficient, its builder had put an extraordinary large head on it, with a spar lashed to the canoe and pro jecting aft over the water. To this was made fast a sprit guy, the sail being held by the mainsheet and the peak by the guy to the sprit.

The cheerful-faced, wide awake islander lost no time in ingratiating himself with the white man. He presented him with a fish, a bundle of greens, and a basket of sweet potatoes. His honest, uncom mercialised eyes beaming good-will for him, he would accept no price for what he gave.

London acknowledged the good will offerings and again his eyes ran over the outlandish craft.

“Well, I know one thing,” he said to himself, “I don’t leave Raiatea till I have a ride in that canoe.”

He made signs that he wanted to do just that and Tehei’s face lighted with pleasure.

“Come for a sail,” London called down the companionway to his wife, Charmian. “But put on your swim ming suit. It’s going to be wet.”

In brief time they were off, headed toward the coral rim of the vast, shining basin. It was full and away on a long tack, the “sailing machine” skimming over the brittle crests, like a flying-fish before a bonita. The wind increasing, they ran off before it with slacked sheets, the blue, foam-laced wavelets con tinually lapping over the canoe’s freeboard which was but two and a half inches high, as Charmian London bailed furiously with a primitive wooden bailer.

Perched midway out on the out rigger, Jack supplied the weight to keep the canoe bottom-side down.

In the puffs, the native climbed part way out on the outrigger, a large steering paddle clasped in both hands, the mainsheet held with his toss, and supplied the nerve. It seemed the canoe must capsize; but the steersman smiled assurance that they were in no danger. This was sailing, Jack told Charmian; the first real small-craft sailing they

Few; present generation Islanders read what were once the acknowledged classics of the Pacific—books by Steven son, Melville, Becke, London and others. There probably is no good reason why they should: Fashions in literature change like fashions in every thing else and what is good writing to one generation is tedious and boring to the next.

There are still some older residents of the Pacific who can remember Jack London and the cruise he made in the Snark —and the author of this story is one. He tells how London came to write his pre- World War I novel, “The Heathen”

had had since coming to the South Seas.

“Ready about!” commanded Tehei Cautiously, crablike, Jack shifted his weight inboard, maintaining the precarious balance as the sail spilled wind.

“Hard a-lee!” shouted the native, and shot the canoe into the wind.

Jack sidled out to the opposite side of the water on a spar athwart the canoe, and they were full and away on the new tack, “All right,’’ cried the canoeman He had used up his English vocabulary.

Returned to the Snark from the short trial ride, Tehei pointed north east to the lofty emerald island over whose minarets and escarp ments the trade-wind clouds were racing, two miles across the lagoon and, uttering one word, “Tahaa,” renewed an invitation for the Londons to accompany him there.

Though the exhilaration of their ride was still upon them they hesitated. They had the letters given them on Tahiti to deliver and Uturoa residents to make acquaint ance with. Still —the prospect drew the Londons like a magnet. “We’ll go,” they said, as their gaze com pleted the half-circle of seascape before them, and hastily shoving shoes, shirts, a pair of trousers, cigarettes, matches, and a book into a biscuit tin, they were in the canoe, and away.

The thrilling traverse ended at Tehei’s white beach. Jack and Charmian, two youngsters on a lark, were received by Bihaura, Tehei’s smiling wife, a “dark, wiry little vahine ... in a limp black calico.” She took them to a little bird-cage house of plaited bamboo and pandanus-leaf thatch.

Tehei and Bihaura proceeded to overwhelm them with hospitality.

No limits were there to the hos pitality. Nor was there any escap ing it. It extended into the next day. At sunrise, Jack and Charmian went fishing with Tehei, baiting their hooks with the portions of live

tentacles that he bit off the squirm ing squid on his long spear.

When they returned to Uturoa that evening in a cutter, it was to take the Snark to Tahaa the next morning and take aboard Tehei and Bihaura, who accompanied them to Bora Bora, 28 miles to the northwest. Bihaura owned a large two-story frame house there.

It was stone-fishing that attracted the Londons to Bora Bora. Come down from the ancient times, it was, generally, a successful way of fishing. It took place as an outing and to honour visitors to the island; and all the pleasure-loving Bora Borans joined in the hilarity.

The fish are driven through the lagoon by the fishermen standing in the bows of canoes repeatedly smiting the water with stones several pounds in weight and at tached to short ropes. The canoes eventually form a circle, with an inner reef of coral as the far edge.

Here stand women in a long row that extends far out into the lagoon, forming a barrier of legs to break any headlong flight of the fish.

When the canoe circle is small enough,, a canoe shoots out from the reef and pays out a long screen of coconut leaves for reinforcing the fence of legs. After which, the guest of honour leaps into the shallow water and impales the first fish on a spear. He is then fol lowed by the rest of the party and usually there are thousands of fish •caught, the trapped fish boiling up and over onto the reef.

This particular fish-drive was a failure, however. When the chief fisherman entered the crystalline water of the coral trap, there was not a fish to be seen. One in five of these drives fail; it was the luck of the Londons to draw the one chance in five. „ When the Londons left Bora Bora they did so with new names— Tehei and Bihaura —exchanged for their own in the beautiful native ceremony of name-exchange.

The initiative had been Charmian Tendon’s; and Tehei and Bihaura, whom the two white sea wanderers would thenceforth call Jack and Charmian, were happy when she suggested it . ..

As the freshening wind filled the JSnark’s sails and the water widened between her and the little white cutter heading home to Tahaa, Jack, formerly Tehei, was kneeling by the Snark’s taffrail, breathing a silent prayer His cheeks were wet with the tears he was shedding for ■Charmian, his little brown vahine, who was waving adieu to him from the stern of the cutter that was growing smaller as he watched.

Signed on before the mast, after the fifth refusal by his white brother Tehei was beginning his log of many thousands of miles of sea faring in the uncharted coral seas of the South.

OF course, Tehei was never a heathen, except as Otoo in The Heathen. As London de scribed him in the story, he “was all sweetness and gentleness, a love-creature, though he stood nearly six feet tall and was muscled like a gladiator.”

While the Snark lay at Ontong Java Atoll (Lord Howe), the brown inhabitants of which were of Poly nesian origin, Tehei, a bit shaky and frightened with fever, went in shore for a change. He spent two days on the ring of sand and coco nuts, visiting and praying with the two native Wesleyan missionaries.

He returned to the Snark with a stiffened soul; he seemed himself again.

But shortly after, black-water fever heavy upon him, he gave up and stumbled to his bunk, to face he knew not what. His temperature repeatedly mounted to 104 and his pulse 115. His heart was chugging close to his mouth; his life, it seemed, must slip away like a puff of smoke.

London, studying everything in the medical library pertaining to black-water, pulled him through the fever. Tehei’s chance had been the one in a hundred.

Then he went out of his mind.

One early morning, in his dementia, as the Snark was fetching Manning Straits, he carried his best suit of clothes on deck, threw into the unfamiliar sea, and made to follow them, as if on the way to the blest kingdom, when he was restrained.

Whether conscious or raving and babbling in his native tongue, all his “childish-lisping talk” was in the nomenclature of the mission aries. So wore the days away, until Tehei gathered new strength.

The cruise of the Snark, begun as a world good-time cruise, had to be abandoned at Sydney. London was miserably sick in a hospital there for five weeks, while the Aus tralian skin specialists could not find in the literature of medicine anything that told the nature of the loathsome, painful malady which afflicted his hands. They were literally going to pieces, on occasion swelling to twice their normal size, when 11 dead and dying skins were peeling off simultaneously.

And, at times, in the space of 24 hours, his toenails grew as thick as they were long, and when filed down, immediately thickened again.

Not until London returned to his native California did he learn that he had a strong predisposition toward the tissue-destructiveness of tropical light and that the ultra violet rays were destroying him. In temperate California, he completely recovered. , . .

Tehei, too, regained his lost senses. He was sent home by steamer to the Society Islands, tak ing with him not only numerous Snark souvenirs and the prodigious wishes of Jack and Charmian

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London for him and Bihaura, but also a gilt-edged letter. Signed in London’s bold hand, it recom mended Tehei and his seamanship to any yachtsman who might sail short-handed into the reef harbour of Uturoa, Raiatea.

But more precious than the letter were the imperishable memories of the beloved white brother and sister of the Snark which Tehei carried to Bihaura on the white beach of Tahaa. t Captain Richard Beim, well known in the New Hebrides and elsewhere in the Pacific, was visiting New Zealand from Sydney in July.

t A new short-wave broadcasting station recently commenced operat- Soron g- Dutch New Guinea with a power of 500 watts the station operates on 3395 kc/s (88 37 metres), Monday and Thursday 1000-1230 GMT, Tuesday and Fri day 4930-1230 GMT, and Sunday 0130-0400 GMT and 1000-1230 GMT The other Dutch-New Guinea Station at Biak Island operates on 5045 kc/s (59.46 metres). t To enable radio listening “fans” m Australia and New Zealand to log a rare station, the United States Armed Forces Radio Sevice broad casting station KMTH (900 kc/s) on Midway Island made a special broadcast at 1500 GMT on July 21.

At this hour stations at Lismore, NSW, and Dunedin, NZ, on the same frequency, had closed down.