Each time we swung up to the crest of a swell I got a look at the surf, and the prospect was not reassuring. Once or twice, as the backwash poured off in a frothy cascade, I caught a glimpse of the coral — reddish-black, jagged and forbidding. Little by little we drew near the land until the boat lay just where the waves began to tower for the final rush; the oarsmen backed water gently — the boat steerer turned his head nervously this way and that, glancing at the reef ahead and at the rearing water behind. I thought of a day, many years before, when my father had taken me for a first experience of the "chutes," and our little boat seemed to pause for an instant at the summit of the tower before it tilted forward and flew down the steep slope to the water — infinitely far off and below. The feeling was the same — fear mingling with delight, an almost painful exhilaration.
All of us, saving the watchful figure in the stem, were waiting for a signal which would make the oarsmen leap into activity, the passengers clench their teeth and grip the rail. Suddenly it came — a harsh shout. Six oars struck the water at once; the whaleboat gathered way; a big sea rose behind us, lifted us gently on its back, and swept us toward the reef. Next moment I saw that we had started a breath too late. We were going like the wind, it was true, but not tilted forward on the crest as we should have been; the wave was gradually passing beneath us. Riley glanced at me and shook his head with a humorous turndown of the mouth. It was too late to stop — the men were pulling desperately, their long oars bending at every stroke. When the sea broke we were slipping down into the trough behind; as we passed over the edge of the reef the wave was beginning its backward wash. There were shouts; I found myself up to my waist in a foaming rush of water, struggling with might and main to keep my footing and to hold the boat from slipping off into the sea. We stopped her just on the brink; her keel grated on the coral ; another sea was coming at us, towering high above our heads. Riley, the supercargo, and I leaped aboard in response to a sharp command. The boys held her stern-on to the last; as they scrambled over the sides the sea caught us, half swamping the boat and lifting her stern high in the air. She tilted wildly as her bow crashed on the coral, but a rare piece of luck saved her from turning broadside on. Next moment we were over the reef and gliding smoothly into the shallow water beyond. As I drew a long, satisfying breath I heard Riley chuckle. "I think I'll get a job diving for shell," he remarked. "I'll swear I haven't breathed for a good three minutes!"
When we stood on the beach a dozen men came forward, smiling, to greet their friend Rairi. With a decently pronounceable name — from the native standpoint — Riley has got off easily; I never tire of wondering what these people will call a white man. They seem to prefer the surname if it can be pronounced; if not, they try the given name, and Charley becomes Teari, or Johnny, Tioni. If this fails, or if they take a dislike to one, the fun begins. I have a friend who, unless he leaves the islands, will be called Salt Pork all his life; and I know another man — a second-rate colonial of the intolerant kind — who goes blissfully about his business all unaware that hundreds of people know him by no other name than Pig Dung. No doubt you have noticed another thing down here — the deceptive simplicity of address. In these eastern islands the humblest speaks to the most powerful without any title of respect, with nothing corresponding to our "mister" or ''sir." At first one is inclined to believe that here is the beautiful and ideal democracy — the realization of the communist's dream — and there are other things which lead to the same conclusion. Servants, for one example, are treated with extraordinary consideration and kindliness; when the feast is over the mistress of the household is apt as not to dance with the man who feeds her pigs, or the head of the family to take the arm of the girl who has been waiting on his guests. The truth is that this impression of equality is false; there are not many places in the world where a more rigid social order exists — not of caste, but of classes. In the thousand or fifteen hundred years that they have inhabited the islands the Polynesians have worked out a system of human relationship nearer the ultimate, perhaps, than our own idealists would have us believe. Wealth counts for little, birth for everything; it is useless for an islander to think of raising himself in a social way — where he is born he dies, and his children after him. On the other hand, except for the abstract pleasure of position, there is little to make the small man envious of the great; he eats the same food, his dress is the same, he works as little or as much, and the relations between the two are of the pleasantest. There is a really charming lack of ostentation in these islands, where everything is known about everyone, and it is useless to pretend to be what one is not. That is at the root of it all — here is one place in the world, at least, where every man is sure of himself.
We were strolling up the path between the canoe houses when Riley stopped me. "Come and have a look," he said; "this is the only island I know of where you can see an old-fashioned double canoe."
There were two of them in the shed we entered, under a roof of battered galvanized iron — long, graceful hulls fashioned from the trunks of trees, joined in pairs by timbers of ironwood laid across the gunwales and lashed down with sinnet. They were beautifully finished — scraped smooth and decorated with carving. In these craft, my companion told me, the men of Mauke still voyage to Atiu and Mitiaro, as they had done for generations before Cook sailed through the group. There is an ancient feud between Mauke and Atiu; it is curious how hard such grudges die. The men of Atiu were the most warlike of all the Cook Islanders ; even in these times of traders and schools and missionaries no fire-arms are allowed on the island. Time after time, in the old days, they raided Mauke, stealing by night upon the sleeping villages, entering each house to feel the heads of the sleepers. When they felt the large head of a warrior they seized his throat and killed him without noise; the children and women — the small heads and the heads with long hair — were taken back alive to Atiu. Terrible scenes have been enacted under the old ironwoods of Mauke, when the raiders, maddened with the heat of killing, danced in the firelight about the opened ovens and gorged on the bodies of the slain ; for the Cook-Islanders, excepting perhaps the people of Aitutaki, were cannibals as fierce as the Maoris of New Zealand or the tawny savages of the Marquesas. Why should Aitutaki have bred a gentler and finer people? The group is not widely scattered as islands go; there must have been fighting and intermarriage for ages past. Yet any man who has been here long can tell you at a glance from which island a native hails; even after my few weeks I am beginning to have an eye for the differences. The Mangaian is certainly the most distinct, recognizable at once by his dark skin, his wide, ugly mouth, his uncouth and savage manner. The full-blooded Rarotongan, who will soon be a rarity, is another type — handsome in a square-cut leonine way, with less energy and far more dignity of presence. The people of Aitutaki are different still — fair as the average Tahitian, and pleasing in features and manner; I have seen girls from that island who would be called beautiful in any country. These ifferences are not easy to account for, it seems to me, when one considers that the islanders are all of one race, tracing their ancestry back to common sources and speaking a common tongue.
The trader, a friend of Riley's, took us to his house for lunch. The day was Sunday and a feast was already preparing, so we were spared the vocal agonies of the pig. Times must be changing — I have seen very few traders of the gin-drinking type one expects to find in the South Seas; nowadays they seem to be rather quiet, reflective men, who like to read and play their phonographs in the evening, and drink excellent whisky with soda from a sparklet bottle. This one was no exception; I found him full of intelligence and a dreamy philosophy which kept him content in this forgotten corner of the world. He was young and English; there were cricket bats and blazers in his living room, and shelves filled with the kind of books one can read over and over again. He was pessimistic over Riley's chances of getting men — the people of Mauke were growing lazier each year, he said, and seemed to get along with less and less of the European things for which, at one time, they had worked. As for copra, they no longer bothered much with it; the nuts were left to sprout under the palms. The taro patches were running down; the coffee and breadfruit dropped off the trees unpicked; the oranges, which brought a good price when a vessel came to take them off, were allowed to drop and rot.