PART II THE SOLOMON ISLANDS
CHAPTER VII
South Sea traders good and bad; their ups and downs—Nicolas the Greek—The Mambare river massacre—Some queer creatures with queerer ways—A fitting end to a wasted life.
There is a grim uncertainty about the life of a South Sea trader. To-day he is alive and the centre of a crowd of cringing natives who bow down before him, offering their goods in exchange for others, obeying his every word, for he is their lord and they are his slaves. But to-morrow may alter everything, and find that all that is left of the once boastful trader is a mangled corpse.
He may curse the Papuan, he may cheat him and rob him of his wives up to a certain point, then the worm turns, and one dark night, when the trader is lying unsuspectingly in his lonely hut, murder steals through the jungle in the shape of a naked savage whose eyes gleam with revenge. Yes, there are no half-measures with these savages, {72} no gentle stabbing, no single shot, but absolute mangling in a ghastly form.
Sooner or later death has come to nine-tenths of the traders; sometimes it has been unjust, but more often richly deserved. The remaining one in ten lives free from all trouble and in harmony with his men, and he prospers and enjoys his life.
The majority of the men who trade out there are rough, uncouth beggars, but they have a jovial, devil-may-care way with them, taking both life and death as they come; they rise in the morning, not knowing if they will ever see their beds again in this world, but they don’t mind that. Some of them are as plucky as they are coarse, and as jolly as they are muscular; but it is deplorable to think that they are the men who are civilising and forming the future of the natives, and with such guides it is not surprising that they steal and murder, and that in some parts no trader dare leave his store for a night lest it be sacked by daybreak. A trader’s existence is no life for a peaceful white man; it means, as Louis Beck so aptly puts it, “a pistol in one hand and your life in the other.” Yet there is room for the honest man and plenty of money to be made, for these islands abound in untouched wealth, as the success of Messrs. Burns Philp {73} shows. They have made money, and their advancement shows that with honesty and enterprise there is plenty of room for good men. A few more such firms and the place would soon change and become a prosperous colony, where decent folks could live with some certainty of dying a natural death.