A serious white man, particularly when he is able to recruit and handle native labor, is always in demand in the islands; it was not long before Riley's talents were recognized; now he is manager and part owner of an entire atoll. I have listened with a great deal of interest to his accounts of the life there. Every year, at about Christmas time, a schooner comes to load his copra and take his boys back to their respective islands. Not a soul is left on the atoll; Riley boards the schooner with his wife and takes passage to Papeete for a couple of months of civilization. When the time is up he makes a tour of the Cook group to recruit twenty or thirty boys for the new season, and is landed on his island with a nine months' supply of medicine, provisions, and reading matter. He is the only white man on the atoll; one would suppose such a life deadly monotonous and lonely, but just now he is pining to get back. It is really the pleasantest of lives, he says; enough routine in keeping the men properly at work, superb fishing when one desires a touch of sport, plenty of time to read and think, the healthiest climate in the world, and a bit of trouble now and then to give the spice a true Irishman needs.
Riley is a man of medium size, with thick brown hair and eyes of Celtic dark blue, perpetually sparkling with humor. I have never seen a stronger or more active man of his weight; on his atoll he spends an hour every day in exercise, running, jumping, working with dumbbells and Indian clubs. From head to foot he is burnt a deep, ruddy brown — a full shade darker than the tint of his native wife. Sometimes, he says, he works himself into such a pink of condition that he aches to pick a fight with the first comer, but I fancy he finds trouble enough to satisfy another man. Once a huge, sullen fellow from the Gambier group attempted to spear him, and Riley called all of his men in from their work, appointed the foreman referee, and beat the two-hundred-and-twenty-pound native — fierce and lithe and strong as a tiger — slowly and scientifically, to a pulp. On another occasion, a half -savage boy, from a far-off island of the southern Paumotus, took a grudge against the manager and bided his time with the cunning of a wild animal. The chance came one afternoon when Riley was asleep in the shade behind his house. The Paumotan stole up with a club and put him still sounder asleep with a blow on the head that laid his scalp open and nearly fractured his skull. Half a dozen kicks from the ball of a toughened foot stove in the ribs on one side of his chest ; with that, the native left his victim, very likely thinking him dead. Riley's wife, from whom I got the story, was asleep in the house at the time; toward evening she went to look for her husband, and found him stretched out, bloody and unconscious, on the sand. In spite of her agitation — her kind are not much use in a crisis — she managed to get him to the house and revive him. Riley's first act was to drink half a tumbler of whisky; his second, to send for the foreman. The Paumotan boy had disappeared; overcome by forebodings of evil, he had taken a canoe and paddled off to hide himself on an uncleared islet across the lagoon. Riley gave the foreman careful instructions; early in the morning he was to take all the boys and spend the day, if necessary, in running down the fugitive, who under no circumstances was to be injured or roughly handled.
They brought the boy in at noon — deadly afraid at first, sullen and relieved when he learned his punishment was no worse than to stand up to the manager before the assembled plantation hands. It must have been a grievous affair; Tetua could scarcely describe it without tears. Riley was still sick and dizzy; his ribs were taped so tightly that he could breathe with only half his lungs, and a two-inch strip of plaster covered the wound on his head. The Paumotan was fresh and unhurt; he outweighed his antagonist by twenty pounds, and fought with confidence and bitterness. The Kanaka is certainly among the strongest men of the world, a formidable adversary in a rough-and-tumble fight. It went badly with Riley for a time; the boy nearly threw him, and a blow on his broken ribs almost made him faint, but in the end — maddened by pain and the thought of the treacherous attack — he got his man down and might have killed him if the foreman and half a dozen others had not intervened.
Riley's island is a true atoll — a broad lagoon inclosed by an oval sweep of reef along which are scattered islets of varying size. Many people must have lived on it in the past; everywhere there are traces of man's occupation. A dozen inhabitants were there within the memory of living men, but the dead outnumbered the living too heavily — the place became unbearable to them, and in the end a schooner took them away.
Our landing on Mauke was a ticklish business. Like Mangaia, Mitiaro, and Atiu, this island is of mixed volcanic and raised-coral origin — the pinnacle of a submerged peak, ringed with millions of tons of coral, and without any lagoon worthy of the name. The polyps have built a sort of platform around the land, low inshore and highest — as seem, usually the case — just before it drops off into the sea. Breaching across the outer ridge, the surf fills a narrow belt of shallows between it and the shore; the result is a miniature edition of a lagoon — a place of rocky pools where children wade knee-deep, on the lookout for crayfish and baby octopus. On the outer edge the reef is steep, too, dropping off almost at the perpendicular. It is difficult to realize, when one has been brought up on the friendly coasts of America, that if a boat capsizes off these reefs one must swim offshore and wait to be picked up — that it is wiser to chance the sharks than to attempt a landing in the surf, for the sea is breaking along the summit of a sunken cliff — jagged and sharp as broken glass, poisonous as the venom of a snake.
They came out to us in a whaleboat; Riley, the supercargo, and I were the first to go ashore. As we pulled away from the schooner a high-pitched argument began. One of the principal men of the island had come out as a passenger and was sitting beside me. He insisted that as they had got off safely from the boat passage it was best to return the same way. The boat steerer disagreed; it was all very well to put out from the passage, with a score of men to hold the boat until the moment came, and launch her out head-on to the breakers, but now the situation was different; the passage was narrow; it must be entered just so, and a mishap might have unpleasant consequences in such a surf. The steersman had the best of it; he took us a quarter of a mile beyond the passage, and let his men rest on their oars off a place where the reef seemed a little lower than elsewhere.