Rascals in Paradise Page 5

  Now began the strangest part of the Globe mutiny. Cowering in a Mili hut, Will Lay understandably considered himself the only survivor of the massacre. But there was one more—the cooper, Cyrus Hussey, a lad of eighteen who had likewise been rescued by an islander with whom he had once made friends. The two youths were soon brought together and exchanged gloomy forebodings. In a sense their fears were justified, for they were doomed to spend almost two years on Mili laboring for their native captors. Ironically, they had come to the island in the entourage of a man who would be king. They alone survived—as slaves.

  On the morning after the slaughter, Lay and Hussey were taken under guard to the scene of the massacre. Here they found the pulped bodies of their seven comrades, horribly mutilated and unrecognizable, so furious had been the rain of heavy stones upon their heads. The camp lay in ruins, and all morning the two boys dug graves for the dead mutineers. When the job was done they were permitted to load canoes with flour, hardtack and pork. They also recovered blankets and a few books, including a Bible for each. Most important, they got shoes to protect themselves from the piercing coral edges.

  Several days later the boys were hauled to a flat place near the village, where the adults of Mili stood greased with coconut oil and adorned with shells. It was obvious that a feast was about to be held and the boys assumed that they were to be the cannibalized victims, but instead they witnessed a wild ceremony of triumph in which brown women banged on drums in celebration of the victory over the white invaders.

  It was then that the boys found they were to be separated and assigned to masters who would keep them as slaves. Yellow-haired Cyrus Hussey was given to a man of thirty—tough, square-built, fiery-natured Lugoma, who carried him off to a distant reef islet. There the boy’s shoes were confiscated and his clothing torn up, so that naked he started upon his days of misery.

  Promptly his feet were slashed to strips by the relentless coral, while his entire body blistered and caked under the equatorial sun. This his native captor could not understand, since the brown bodies of Mili men warded off both sun and salt water. In time, of course, Hussey’s feet and body became toughened, and he served as a fisherman, a farmer, a field hand and a laborer. He seemed clearly destined to a life of perpetual slavery on a desolate and lonely isle.

  Will Lay was luckier. His master, Ludjuan, not only lived in a larger village, where there was excitement, but was kinder than Hussey’s owner. Ludjuan did, however, insist on two things. Will must destroy his Bible and never read anything again, lest he conjure up evil spirits; and the boy must don native dress, which consisted of a belt of braided pandanus and two horsetails of coarser fiber hanging fore and aft. Will’s long black hair was pinned in a bow knot on top of his head, and his skin soon became as dark as that of a Mili man. But Ludjuan supported him when he firmly resisted that final treatment which would have made him a true island beau: he refused to have holes bored in his earlobes and stuffed with rolls of pandanus leaves.

  But when Lay acquired some knowledge of Mili speech he got some disturbing news, for while picking breadfruit he heard a small boy shout: “Uroit aro rayta mony la Wirram.” That meant: “The chiefs are going to kill William.”

  A previously unknown disease was afflicting the islanders, producing swelled hands, feet and faces. Sometimes cheeks would become so puffed that the victim would go blind for several days. Obviously Lay and Hussey were the cause. Obviously they should be killed.

  A council was held at which all chiefs but one voted for death. The negative came from Lugoma, Hussey’s owner, who argued that Mili’s supreme master, the god Anit, had sent the scourge to punish the islanders for their massacre of the white men. If this were true, would not additional killings infuriate the god further? As a final dramatic gesture, Lugoma swore that if the chiefs insisted upon killing the boy with the golden hair, they would have to kill Lugoma first.

  The boys were saved, and the slow abating of the disease was taken as proof that Anit was appeased and that the crime of massacre had been expiated.

  Shortly thereafter, at the height of the harvest season, Lay was dragged by a throng of natives to a spit of land, and there, far out to sea, he saw a strange ship standing in for Mili. He was deluged with questions. What was the ship? Where did she come from? How many men would be in such a ship? Lay pretended to be fearful lest the ship take him away from his friends, but all night he tossed and dreamed of rescue. In the morning the ship was gone, and it never returned.

  Then, as happened regularly each year, starvation time came, when breadfruit and pandanus bore no food. The day’s ration for each person dwindled to one half a coconut. The resulting pangs of hunger were so tormenting that Lay used to sneak out at night, force himself up the steep trunk of a coconut tree, and slide down with a nut in each hand and one held by the stem between his teeth. In the darkness of the night he would wolf the oily meat to stay alive.

  But his master found him out, and Lay then resorted to graverobbing, for it was the Mili custom to place a coconut at the head and feet of a newly buried person. Lay stole one of these sacrificial nuts and when the theft was discovered was put on trial for his life. The sacrilege was excused only because of his ignorance.

  Suffering constant pangs of hunger, the two boys lived through the starvation time, and like the natives they now resembled, stuffed themselves when the new crops came in. Then, however, an unforeseen problem confronted them, for their island had declared war against a gang of marauders who lived across the lagoon. The boys were summoned and told they must terrify the enemy with white man’s guns, but the lads explained that they had no powder.

  “I have some,” a chief replied, producing a small box of wet gunpowder mixed with mustard seed. Even had the powder been serviceable, it would have sufficed for only five or six shots, but the boys could not refuse. Drying the powder in the sun, they made their cartridges and hoped.

  Fortunately, they were not called upon to fire, for when the enemy saw a fleet of fifteen canoes approaching, the front two armed with guns, they capitulated and the boys were returned to Mili Town with full battle honors.

  But scarcely had the lads survived the year’s expected starvation period than they were faced with an unexpected drought of such severity that even trees perished. Thus they lived in their kingdom—starving, burned by the sun, tormented by rats and persecuted by ignorant natives.

  In the twenty-second month of his slavery, Will Lay was awakened by a loud hooting of natives, for a two-masted schooner had anchored at the head of the atoll. Spies, who had been sent out to barter, reported that it carried a hundred men and a row of big guns on each side.

  The chiefs immediately guessed that this was a warship sent to capture Lay and Hussey from them, and they concluded that the safest thing would be to kill the boys at once and hide their bodies. But Hussey argued that the ship’s crew obviously knew the boys were alive and that if anything happened to them, the ship’s guns would begin to fire and blow the atoll right out of the water.

  So the chiefs adopted an alternative plan. Two hundred warriors would be sent aboard the schooner to make friends with the strangers. At a signal they would seize the crew and pitch them into the sea. This idea was submitted to the god Anit, who showed his pleasure.

  Will Lay, on the other hand, tried to calm the natives’ fears, claiming that the ship could not have come from America, because unlike the Globe it had only two masts. But as he spoke, a boat was lowered and headed for the beach a hundred yards away. He was promptly whisked out of sight and into the garret of a hut, where forty women crowded around to hide and watch him. The boat’s crew actually came to this hut and wandered about beneath the boy, but he was unable to attract their attention—fortunately for him, he learned later, for the women had been ordered to kill him instantly if he moved.

  At nightfall Lay was spirited across the lagoon to a distant islet and he assumed that this was the end of his chances with this ship. But on the sixth day, to his surpr
ise, a launch approached his very island.

  Lay conceived a bold plan that would either return him to freedom or cost him his life. He said to the chiefs, “Let me lure this boat ashore, and the crew will be so surprised to see me that they will drop their guard, whereupon you can fall to and slaughter them all.” The chiefs approved. Will Lay waded a few feet into the water and started calling aloud in English.

  What boat was he hailing? Let us double back to Nantucket, where Gorham Coffin, one of the owners of the Globe and the uncle of Rowland Coffin, youngest member of the crew, had been outraged by Thomas’ trial and had written to top officials in Washington to demand that the mutineers be apprehended and their innocent victims rescued. Orders were sent to Commodore Isaac Hull in South America, and as a result, Hull detached one of his ships to pursue the mutineers and bring them back to justice.

  Thus, on August 18, 1825, the U. S. Schooner Dolphin, under the command of an officer whose name is still famous in Pacific annals—Mad Jack Percival—set out from Peru with orders to track down the mutineers wherever they might be and to bring them back in chains. The little topsail schooner was fast, well armed, well manned and admirably suited for such a task.

  The Dolphin stopped at the Galapagos Islands and then beat westward. In the fabled Marquesas Islands, where another American whaleman, Herman Melville, was to jump ship seventeen years later and spend a month in captivity among the cannibals of Typee, the Dolphin was greeted hospitably and its men roamed that romantic valley. Marquesan girls in large numbers swam out to welcome the schooner, and officers “had to use some violence to get clear of them.”

  At one island near Mili, savage natives narrowly missed cutting off several boat crews and the Dolphin only just managed to recover them and escape. But four months after leaving Peru, the schooner hove to off the atoll where the last survivors still lived as slaves.

  Their first searches on Mili, on November 21, 1825, proved fruitless, but the next day some sailors filling their water casks ashore discovered on the ground a whaler’s lance and several faded pieces of canvas. When the seamen got back to the schooner, a number of native canoes were clustered around its side. Some of them were mended with spars of good New England ash. Most mcriminating of all, some of the canoe seats were obviously made of the lids of sea chests.

  The natives refused to talk, but a few days later Mad Jack ordered a determined search on shore, and during the party’s march an officer found a solitary mitten marked with the name of Rowland Coffin, youngest member of the Globe’s crew. Farther on they came upon a skeleton protruding from shallow sand and a box containing a few Spanish dollars.

  That night Mad Jack appointed an unusually brave young officer, Lieutenant Hiram Paulding, to go ashore and find the mutineers. Paulding was warned that they had probably organized the natives and had decided upon war to the finish.

  It was a careful Paulding, therefore, who gingerly dropped anchor next morning only a few yards from where Will Lay, playing his own desperate game, waited to be rescued. On the beach beyond sat several hundred impassive Marshallese men. No women or children were in sight—a dangerous sign.

  The first suspicious gesture Paulding caught came when a lithe figure, burned brown, with a crown of hair knotted on top of his head, and naked except for a woven mat about his loins, moved out from the assembled warriors and started to shout—in English!

  “The Indians are going to kill you. Don’t come on shore unless you are prepared to fight!”

  This man, Paulding reasoned, must be one of the mutineers. And this was all a trick, else why had the man not disclosed himself before? Even now, why did he not make a break for the boat?

  “Who are you?” Paulding shouted back over the open water.

  The brown man ignored the question and kept shouting that the natives planned to lure the boat’s crew ashore, and when the white men were seated they would be killed by big rocks of jagged coral.

  “Who are you?” Paulding repeated.

  “William Lay, of the Globe!”

  Now the natives clustered on the beach behind Lay demanded to know what words he was calling, but he put them off with promises that the trap would soon be sprung and all the white men killed. The natives thereupon edged forward, each spotting a handy rock with which to bash out the brains of the men about to land.

  At this point young Lieutenant Paulding made his decision. “Load pistols, and we will march up the beach!” He leaped ashore from the launch and led the way, well in advance. His junior officer, Midshipman Davis, later testified that this was the boldest act he had ever witnessed.

  Now Lay was faced with a terrifying decision. If he moved too soon, the natives behind him would transfix him with spears. If he waited too long, the Americans might fire and kill him. Keeping silent, he watched the approaching men, and at the precise moment when his plan had a chance of working, he sped forward and threw himself before the leader.

  Coldly Paulding offered Lay his left hand, at the same time thrusting a cocked pistol at the boy’s breast “Now, who are you?” he repeated.

  The brown sailor burst into tears. In a babble of English and Mili talk he sobbed, “I am your man. Pardon me, sir, they are going to kill me.”

  Sternly Paulding turned him around and said, “Notify them that if one rises, or if one throws a stone, all will be shot.”

  Two or three natives rose and made to advance, but Lay’s words drove them back to their places—all except one old man, Will Lay’s master Ludjuan, who had many times saved the boy’s life. Resolutely the old native came forward; Lay embraced him and told him that they must part. Lieutenant Paulding cut short the farewell and, studying the touchy situation, concluded that he must hurry his men back to their boat.

  Among the crew of the launch, Lay, who had talked little English in two years, exploded with words. “Is there anybody here from East Saybrook?” he asked again and again. “That’s where I’m from—East Saybrook, Connecticut.”

  “Where’s the rest of your crew?” Paulding interrupted.

  “All dead,” he replied. Then he remembered Cyrus Hussey and cried, “There’s one more alive. Can we go save him right away, before they kill him?”

  Will’s joy on hearing that his friend might be rescued was as great as his joy at his own salvation. So impatient was he that he begrudged the launch crew the time to eat and rest before undertaking the trip to the island where Hussey lived under the yoke of his master Lugoma.

  When the launch grounded on the islet, Lugoma was walking on the beach. Paulding jumped out, pointed a pistol at him. “Where is Hussey?”

  The lad happened to be strolling in a grove of coconut trees not far away. Hearing his name shouted, he ran to the landing place. He stood there in amazement, his yellow hair hanging in ringlets to his bronzed shoulders.

  “Well, young man,” said Paulding, “Do you wish to return to your country?”

  Cyrus’s eyes filled. “Yes, sir. I know of nothing that I have done for which I should be afraid to go home.”

  Everybody was happy except Lugoma. He declared to Paulding that he, Lugoma, might as well cut his own throat as to lose this blond boy, his son Cyrus. Nobody else on the atoll was so good at helping catch canoe loads of fish. Now Cyrus was going away with his musket, and Lugoma’s enemies would surely come and kill him.

  Paulding patiently explained that he would let Cyrus return—provided the boy’s mother, back in New England, approved. Then Hussey loaded into the launch his two remaining possessions—his musket and his Bible, which he had saved from destruction by threatening the natives with the vengeance of the Great Spirit. The women of Lugoma’s household gave the boy some small mats and shell ornaments, and in return Paulding gave them some cheap rings and glass beads. Paulding presented Lugoma with a treasure such as no other Mili chief owned—a jackknife.

  Then Hussey led Captain Percival to the grave of Samuel Comstock, and the chief mutineer’s skull and cutlass were exhumed, to be taken back to Ameri
ca.

  As the Dolphin sailed from this island of terror and vengeance it moved in the direction of an inconspicuous atoll that was then little noted, but which in a later day was to become world-famed for a terror of its own—Bikini.

  The celebrated castaways Lay and Hussey were never brought to trial for their part in the drama. First they were taken to South America in the far-wandering Dolphin, whose triumphant return proved, in Paulding’s words, “that crime cannot go unpunished in the remotest part of the earth, and that no situation is so perilous as to justify despair.” Then the lads were turned over to Commodore Isaac Hull and in his frigate, the U.S.S. United States, at last returned to their homeland, landing at New York in April, 1827, four years and four months after their departure from Edgartown in the ill-fated Globe. They proceeded to publish a little book giving their version of the gory mutiny and a description of their subsequent slavery on Mili Atoll.

  Yet in a way it was Sam Comstock, the demon harpooner of Nantucket, who had the last laugh in this grisly affair. New England newspapers always referred to this arch-monster as a man from New York.

  * Also spelled Milli, Mille, Milly, Milei and, under the Japanese, Miri. Mili lies at the southern tip of the eastern Radak (Sunrise) chain of the Marshall Islands.

  2

  Charles I, Emperor of Oceania

  Of all the criminals who have pillaged the South Pacific, the most brutal and callous was a gentleman who never reached that region. Cynically, he defrauded thousands of their money, sent hundreds to certain death, and lived in luxury on the proceeds of his villainy.

  He was a handsome man, a nobleman of the most ancient French stock. Charles-Marie-Bonaventure du Breil, Marquis de Rays, waited until he was forty-five years old before launching his audacious scheme, and photographs of that year, 1877, show him as he must have appeared to the middle-class people of Europe, whom he bilked so mercilessly.

  He was a true Breton, with pale skin, a high and distinguished forehead, a powerful nose set between bleached blue eyes, a wealth of blond hair and a full, strong mouth. He wore a heavy mustache and the trace of a goatee. He had, everyone agrees, a most engaging and forthright manner. He was also a notably pious man.