Presently the land took vague form through the mist of squalls ; we were skirting the reef obliquely, drawing nearer the breakers as the settlement came in view. A narrow boat passage, into which an ugly surf was breaching, had been blasted through the hard coral of the reef ; a path led up the sloping land beyond, between a double row of canoe houses to the bush. A few people were gathering by the canoe houses; it was evident that we had just been sighted, and that it would be some time before a boat could put out, if, indeed, the boatmen were willing to risk the surf. Meanwhile we could only stand off and on until they came out to us, for the skipper had no intention of risking his ship's boat and the lives of his men on such a forbidding shore, "Arari.'" he sang out, dwelling long on the last syllable of this Cook Island version of "hard alee." The schooner rounded into the wind with a ponderous deliberation calculated to make the nerves of a fair-weather sailor twitch; she seemed to hesitate, like a fat and fluttering grandmother; at last, after an age of bobbing and ducking into the head sea, while boom tackles were made fast and headsails backed, she made up her mind, and filled away on the port tack.
Riley, the American coconut planter, who was recruiting labor for the season on his island, turned to me with a wink. "If this old hooker was mine," he remarked in a voice meant to reach the skipper's ears, "I'd start the engine every time I came about; she can't sail fast enough to keep steerageway!"
The skipper sniffed a British sniff; they are old friends. "If this damn fine schooner was yours," he observed, without turning his head, "she'd have been piled up long ago — like as not in broad daylight, on an island a thousand feet high."
Riley chuckled. "Too early for an argument," he said. "Let's go below and have a drink."
I have not often run across a more interesting man than Riley. Thrown together, as he and I have been, in circumstances which make for an unusual exchange of confidence, I have learned more of him in two months than one knows of many an old acquaintance at home. At thirty-five years of age he is a living object lesson for those who bewail the old days of adventure and romance, and wish that their lives had been cast in other times. His blood is undiluted Irish; he has the humor, the imagination, the quick sympathy of the race, without the Irish heritage of instability. Born in South Boston and reared with only the sketchiest of educations, he set out to make his way in the world at an age when most boys are playing marbles and looking forward with dread to the study of algebra. For fifteen years he wandered, gathering a varied background of experience. He worked in mills; he drifted west and shipped as cabin boy on vessels plying Great Lakes; he drifted farther west to become a rider of the range. Finally he reached San Francisco and took to the sea. He has been a sealer, an Alaska fisherman, an able-bodied seaman on square-riggers sailing strange seas. He has seen Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope; he speaks of the ports of India, China, Africa, the Java Sea, as you would speak of Boston or New York.
In the days when a line of schooners ran from San Francisco to Tahiti, touching at the Marquesas on the way, he felt a call to the South Seas, and shipped for a round trip before the mast. When he returned to San Francisco a change seemed to have come over him; the old, wandering life had lost its charm — had gone flat and stale. Like many another, he had eaten of the wild plantain unaware. The evenings of carousal ashore no longer tempted him; even the long afternoons of reading (for reading has always been this curious fellow's chief delight), stretched on his bed in a sailor's boarding house, had lost their flavor — the print blurred before his eyes, and in its place he saw lands of savage loveliness rising from a warm blue sea; shadowy and mysterious valleys, strewn with the relics of a forgotten race; the dark eyes of a girl in Tai-o-Hae.
Remember that Riley was both a sailor and an Irishman — a rough idealist, keenly susceptible to beauty and the sense of romance. It is stated that the men who live romance are seldom aware of it; this may be true, though I doubt it — certainly in Riley's case the theory does not work out. He is the most modest of men, untainted by a trace of egoism; in his stories, superbly told with the Irish gift for circumstantial detail and dramatic effect, the teller's part is always small. And yet as one listens, thrilled by the color and artistry of the tale, one is all the while aware that this man appraises his memories at their full value — reviews them with a ripened gusto, an ever-fresh appreciation. In short, he is one of those fortunate, or unfortunate, men for whom realities, as most of us know them, do not exist; men whose eyes are incapable of seeing drab or gray, who find mystery and fresh beauty in what we call the commonplace.
It is scarcely necessary to say that Riley was aboard the next schooner bound south for the islands. Nukuhiva knew him for a time, but the gloom and tragedy of that land — together with an episode of domestic infelicity — were overpowering to a man of his temperament. From the Marquesas he went to Tahiti, and his wanderings ended in the Cook group, six hundred miles to the west. Perhaps the finding of his journey's end wrought the change, perhaps it was due to his rather practical Tahitian wife — in any case, the wanderer ceased to rove, the spendthrift began to save and plan. In the groups to the easward he had picked up a smattering of coconut lore; it was not long before he got a berth as superintendent of a small plantation. With a native wife and the Irishman's knack for languages, he soon mastered the dialect of his group; he is one of a very few men who speak it with all the finer shadings. This accounts in part for his success with labor — the chief difficulty of the planter throughout Polynesia. To one interested as I am in the variations of this oceanic tongue, it is a genuine pleasure to talk with Riley. In school he learned to read and write; beyond that he is entirely self-educated. A good half of his earnings, I should say, in the days when he followed the sea, were spent on books; a native intelligence enabled him to criticize and select; he has read enormously, and what he has read he has remembered. Each time a new subject attracted him he hastened to the book shops of San Francisco, or Liverpool, or Singapore, and gathered a little forecastle library of reference. Like most intelligent men in this part of the world, he has grown interested in the subject of Polynesian research; it is odd to hear him discuss — with a strong accent of South Boston and the manner of a professor of ethnology — some question of Maori chronology, or the variations in a causative prefix. Once he made clear to me a matter often referred to in print, but which I had never properly understood. He was speaking of the language of Tahiti.
"When you hear a Tahitian talk," he said, "it sounds different, but really it's the same as Hawaiian, or Marquesan, or Rarotongan, or New Zealand Maori. Tahiti is the oldest settled place, and the language has kind of rotted away there. Nowadays the Tahitian has lost the strong, harsh sounds of the old ingo, the k and ng; in place of them there is simply a catch between two vowels. If you know Rarotongan and understand the system of change, you can get on all right in Tahiti. Take our word akatangi — to play a musical instrument. Tangi means 'wail' or 'weep' ; aka is the old causative prefix; the combination means 'cause to weep.' Now let's figure that word out in Tahitian. First we've got to take out the k and ng; that leaves a bad start — it doesn't sound good, so the Tahitians stick on an f at the beginning. That's all there is to it; fa'ata'i is the word. It makes me laugh to think of when I first came down here. I was working in Tahiti, and when I came home in the evening my girl would look up from her sewing and sing out, 'O Riley!' 'For the love of Mike,' I'd tell her, 'don't you know my name yet? It's Riley, not O'Riley!' Finally I caught on; I'd been fooled on the same proposition as Cook and all the rest of them. You remember they called the island Otahiti. That is simply a special form of the verb used before personal pronouns and proper nouns. The old navigators, when the canoes came out to meet them, pointed to the land and asked its name. 'O Tahiti' said the natives ('It is Tahiti'). My girl didn't mean to call me O'Riley at all; she was simply saying, 'It's Riley.' "