My Crowded Solitude

Jack McLaren

My Crowded Solitude

Published by Good Press, 2022

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EAN 4066338092144

Table of Contents

Chapter One

THE SEARCH

Chapter Two

THE NATIVES ARRIVE

Chapter Three

THE PEOPLE WHO STOOD STILL

Chapter Four

MARY BROWN

Chapter Five

THE JUNGLE'S REVENGE

Chapter Six

IN THE ABSENCE OF HUMANS

Chapter Seven

A FATHER BY PURCHASE

Chapter Eight

BILLY NUMBER FIVE

Chapter Nine

SOME VISITORS

Chapter Ten

THE WILDING THAT WAS ME

THE END

Chapter One

Table of Contents

THE SEARCH

Table of Contents

On a mighty blaze on a mighty tree are cut two initials and a date. The initials are mine, the date is when I began an eight years' lonely residence among the most backward race of people in the whole of the tropical South Pacific, which is a place where backward peoples abound.

This experience was mine primarily because in the midst of an adventurous South Seas wandering the urge came upon me to settle awhile. It was not that I was weary of the South Seas, for I loved them. Nor was it that I was weary of adventuring, for youth was mine, and to my particular kind of youth adventuring was Life. It was merely that I was weary of adventuring in many places and desired greatly to adventure in one place for a change.

But for long I saw no means of satisfying this urge. There was always something--usually financial--to hinder me. Indeed, the number and force of circumstances apparently especially designed to prevent a wandering young man giving up his wandering was astonishing. Then one day I came again to Thursday Island, the place of pearls and pearl-shell which sits astride the strait that makes of New Guinea and Australia two separate lands, and encountered a man with a proposal which suited me exactly.

It was that we should establish a coconut plantation at Cape York--that is to say, at Australia's uttermost north, the apex of that tremendous and almost completely unknown peninsula which, after half a thousand miles of paralleling the mighty Barrier Reef, thrusts up amid the islands of Torres Strait and towards New Guinea like a pointing finger.

This great land, it appeared, had a peculiarity all its own. It was a South Sea land without coconut palms--insignia of a South Sea land. You could sail its shore for days, said my friend, for weeks if you liked, and never once see a palm.

In one place only were there a few, planted by a man named Jardine. The beaches were edged instead by jungle and open forest and tall indigenous grasses. He'd seen them often enough--he'd been much up and down that coast--and every time it had somehow seemed strange. As you went along you kept looking ahead for the green of clustered palms, for sight of tall boles all bent with the wind. It didn't seem right that there shouldn't be any, for you were sailing all the while a land washed by the waters of the Coral Sea and fanned by trade-winds and inhabited by natives--a land with all the features of a true part of the tropical Pacific, except the most outstanding.

But, said my friend, there was no reason why the palms should not be made abundantly to grow there. No reason at all. He'd given a deal of thought to the matter, considered all the details, garnered information wherever he could. He was sure that with discretion and judgement it could be done. The great land lay squarely within the latitudes coconuts favoured. It was affluent in the matter of rainfall and, so far as was known, fertility of soil. It was not within any area of cyclonic or other palm-destroying winds. Indeed, had it been tenanted by agriculturists like the Solomon Islanders or Papuans, instead of by Australian aborigines--Palaeolithic nomads who grew nothing whatever, but lived by the chase--its beaches would have had their miles upon miles of palm groves. A fine plantation indeed could be made there! enthused my friend. There would be all manner of advantages. The most suitable site could be had for the choosing. In a land so great suitable sites would be innumerable. The labour of the natives would cost little. They would be eager to work and thus obtain European foods and goods. A man would labour a whole month for a few shillings' worth of 'trade' goods. They were a poverty-stricken lot, who seldom saw strangers, and would jump at a chance like this. What did I think of the idea? I had had experience of coconut planting in New Guinea and elsewhere, and if I would become the working partner, he would provide certain necessary moneys.

But it would be no easy task, he warned when I promptly agreed. I should consider the disadvantages involved. He didn't want me to begin the task only to abandon it unfinished. That would be no good to either of us. I would have to live there eight years. It would be like going into a kind of exile, cutting myself off from the rest of the world, and all that. There would be hardships of various kinds, and perhaps danger from natives. From all accounts, the natives were a pretty wild and savage crowd. And it would be difficult to teach them plantation work. Then there was the loneliness. I would see white men only at long intervals. Loneliness would be hard to stick in such a place...

But this was just the kind of life I craved. Also it came to me that there would be something romantic in being the first systematically to plant coconuts in so great a land and thereby bring it into its own. I felt I could not begin quickly enough. A day or two later all arrangements were made, and I boarded a small sailing-craft and set forth to spy out the land in general and a spot suitable for the venture in particular.

It was not an imposing craft for a voyage of discovery, being a craft dirty, ill-found and worse-kept, even to the matter of sun-cracked decks and straggling rope-ends and blistered paint-work. Also it had been used in the fishing of trepang. Trepang is a sea-slug of repulsive appearance when alive and of great malodorousness when smoke-dried for export as a Chinese edible; and the malodorousness had impregnated itself into the very timbers, so that never for a moment was I free from it.

Further, the captain was a thin-faced yellow-eyed Cingalese who spent much of his time in the cabin dallying in turn with an opium-pipe and a newly acquired native wife with a tendency to obesity; and the smell of the opium mingled with the smell of the trepang and produced a third smell unlike but viler than either of its components.

Again, the crew, of various crossed breedings, with black predominant, had before leaving drunk much of Thursday Island's strange liquors and now drank more on board, to the displaying of the several savage characteristics of their black heredity incongruously mingled with the vices of their white heredity.

But these things mattered little to me. Too often before had I seen their like. As trader, gold-seeker, pearler, recruiter of plantation labourers, as a general South Seas Odysseus, the crudities of life had been commoner to me than the refinements, and I had become accustomed to them. Besides, the real significance of the venture burned within me. I was setting out to discover a new possibility in a new land. It was like setting out to discover a new land itself. I was a pioneer, an explorer, a Columbus--a Columbus in a trepang-craft.

It was the height of the trade-wind season, and all through that first day we lay up to the blustering seas, sailing tack for tack across the breeze, taking four miles sidewise to gain one of forward progress; and at sundown we anchored behind a tall and rocky island which kept from us both wind and sea; and here the drinking of the crewboys was ended, for soon after dark they went into an alcoholic sleep and the thin-faced captain quietly confiscated their store of liquor--to their tremendous discontent when they awoke, and to their accusing one another of having stolen it.

With the first of the sunrise the anchor came clanking up--a sunrise which filled me with the joy of life, so clear and fresh and warm was it--and on rounding the sheltering isand's shoulder we fell in with a score or more luggers working a bed of pearl-shell, all of them bright, brisk craft, tall of mast and wide of sail. Everywhere was colour--small flecks of it, great splashes of it, colours that ranged from the scarlet of a loin-cloth to the broad gold-and-blueness of the sea. In the low rays of the sun the luggers' sails were white as paper, the green of their rails the green of jade, the gleaming of their protecting copper, just above the water or awash, the gleaming of wet gold. On each vessel's either bow, so placed that it was an eye, was a distinguishing disc of blue, or white, or crimson. The red wheel-handles of the divers' air-pumps were as flashes of reflected flame, and the nude backs of the men who turned them bits of bronze. All about the smoothness of the sea were bursting bubbles of silver--betrayers of the divers' positions on the bottom--and from each vessel's rail an air-pipe and life-line overside and down like a thick grey snake and a thin one incredibly long.

I remarked to the captain's wife to the effect that this was a sight worth while; and she agreed with me, and with her fat hand pointed to various small colours I had missed, and showed me a cloud which she said was shaped like a stout woman's breast. But her husband shook his fist at the vessels and spat voluminously.

'Japanee!' he said. 'All bloody Japanee!'

He didn't like Japanese, he told me later. They'd got hold of all the pearling. One time there was hardly any of them in the Strait; but now they were all over the place. They'd got hold of all the luggers, and an outsider hadn't a chance of getting one. He'd tried and tried. He was a good diver; he'd dived for various lugger-owning firms years ago, and done well at it, too, what with the pearls he found and forgot to hand over, and all that. There was a lot of money in pearling, if you had a bit of luck. But he couldn't get a lugger. The Japanese blocked him every time he tried. So he had to take on trepanging. It wasn't much of a game, trepanging. There were too many boats at it. The trepang was getting too hard to find.

'It's harder work than pearlin',' he said. 'Not only is there a lot of divin' to get the trepang, but afterwards their guts have to be taken out, and the trepang boiled and smoked; and we've got to go ashore every now and then and cut heaps of wood for the smoking and boiling; and the fire's got to be looked after; and what with the smokehouse and the boiler there ain't any room on deck, and everything's stinking like hell and--and--oh! b--them Japanese!'

At noon we sighted low down against the sky a long grey smear which the captain said was the Peninsula's western shore; and that afternoon we lay along it but did not stop, for the land, so far as could be seen from the sea, was mainly steep-sided hills covered with tall, coarse grasses which I knew from experience to betoken agriculturally unfit soil. So on we went, that day and the next, winding between sandbanks and reefs and islands, on past a hill where stood a telegraph station which by linking a submarine cable to a land-line of exceeding length joined Thursday Island and its pearlers to the rest of the world--a single, lonely-looking building it was, on tall piles, with a wide verandah which had at its corners loop-holed shooting-shelters of spear-proof galvanized iron. Then we came to the Peninsula's utmost extremity, and after a stout battle with an adverse tide rounded it and made through an island-bordered pass where jungle-dad cliffs stood steeply to the water's edge and made of the sea a place of purple shadows with light in them.

It was the pass through which Captain Cook sailed his tiny inadequate Endeavour and thereby established definitely that Australia was not joined to New Guinea; and I thrilled absurdly to the knowledge that a century and a half later I, also on a voyage of discovery, should be sailing in a tiny inadequate craft through this self-same pass, should be looking at scenes unaltered as when that prince of navigators looked at them.

I remarked on this to the captain. But he wasn't at all impressed. He didn't think Captain Cook had any particular virtues as a navigator. There were many better, he thought, and to prove it gave me the names of some of them; whereupon I discovered he thought I had referred to a remarkably dissolute trepanger of his acquaintance, he never having heard of the Endeavour and having no conception whatever of what the term a century and a half conveyed.

Nor when I explained was he very greatly impressed. In coming safely through this maze of then uncharted shoals, he said in effect, the >Endeavour no doubt performed a worthy feat, but only a week or two ago these same waters had seen one absolutely remarkable. Whereupon he related the adventure of a pearling-cutter--an adventure which recalled, even in the matter of nomenclature, the adventure of the Marie Celeste, the sailing-ship which was found adrift in the Atlantic, abandoned intact and with all sail set and nothing to indicate what had happened.

The cutter was called the Marie Esebia, and one day in a calm at the farther limit of the strait her native crew of three went overside for a swim. Suddenly a breeze sprang up and and filled the sails, and the vessel was off towards the skyline before the men in the water realized what had happened. The men were picked up later none the worse, but by then the cutter was well over the curve and out of sight, and it was only after an extended search that the runaway was found on the eastern side of Cape York. She was quite unharmed, for manless and all as she was, she had travelled more than a hundred miles to windward, through a most tremendous tangle of reefs and sandbanks and islands, where there were scarcely two consecutive half-miles of open water--and missed them all!

This region had a very definite interest for my captain. As we sat on the rail, with the vessel swimming so smoothly to the last of the day-wind as to make scarcely a ripple, he told me of it. It concerned the wreck of the Quetta, a British-India passenger-steamer of a full ten thousand tons which hereabouts one calm and moonlight night so ripped out her bottom on an uncharted rock that within five minutes she plunged completely under, to the losing of some hundreds of lives. My captain was then a pearl-diver, and soon after the disaster went down to the vessel in the dress.

He told me he would not care to see again what he saw down there. He didn't think he could stand it, what with the opium and all. The passengers had just started a dance, and there was an awning along the deck, all hung with red electric globes and blue ones and flags and things, and the ship was sitting straight up on the bottom, like she was sailing along. Some of the people was caught up under the awning. The tide was making them bump it. You'd have thought they was alive, the way they moved. There was a lot of women. Beautiful, some of them, and young, too. There was a man with a cigar in his hand. He had a round face and his eyes was open, staring-like, and the cigar was all in loose bits, like bits of paper. All sorts of people, and they was all bumping the awning as if they was trying to get up; and some of their faces was like they was asleep and happy, and some was frowning, and some looked frightened. There was a girl with her dress washed up over her