We started one morning, as usual, about five o’clock, and steamed across two or three bays to the Camp du Nord. In all the other camps the timber is got down from the hills to the sea by means of wood-paved slides, which are quite as much a feature of this part of Caledonia as the ice-slides are in Norway, but the Camp du Nord rises to the dignity of a railway on which that morning I did the most curious bit of railroading I have ever done.

When we had inspected the camp at the terminus and, for the Commandant’s sake, I had duly admired the landing-stage, the trim buildings, and the gardens in which the flowers and vegetables were struggling for existence in the burning iron soil, the State car was brought out for us.

It was a platform on wheels, with four sloping seats facing backwards. I could see the line twining away up through the forest, but there was no engine.

Presently it, or, rather, they, materialised at the summons of the Chief Surveillant. Fifteen blue-clad figures, each with a halter and hook-rope over his shoulder, came out of one of the dormitories. There was a long chain shackled to the front of the car. At an order the human beasts of draught passed the halters over their heads and hooked on to the chain, seven on each side and one ahead.

Then the Commandant invited the company to mount. There were seven of us. The Commandant had brought his two little girls, and there were four besides: the Chief Surveillant, who weighed fifteen stone if he weighed a pound, the Chief Forester, who weighed a good twelve stone, and the Doctor and myself, who were comparatively light weights.

I had often seen convicts harnessed to carts in England, and, of course, I had ridden many miles in rickshaws in the East, but this was the first time I had ever travelled in a car drawn by human beings who did it because they had to, and who would have had their food docked if they had refused to do it, and I confess that I didn’t exactly like it. Still, I took my place, and the strange journey began.

At first it didn’t seem very bad, for the line was almost level, but when we got into the hills the collar-work began, and our human cattle had to bend their necks and their backs to it.

The line wound up through cuttings and over bridges at what seemed to me an ever-increasing gradient. It was a damp, muggy, tropical morning. It was not exactly raining, but the moisture soaked you to the bones for all that, and the leaves and branches of the vast virgin forest on either hand shone and dripped as the moisture condensed on them.

We perspired sitting still and making no more exertion than was necessary for breathing, so you can imagine how those poor wretches tugging at the chains sweated—and, great heavens, how they stank!—though the most fastidious, under the circumstances, could hardly blame them for this.

For very shame’s sake I got off and walked whenever there was an excuse. It made breathing pleasanter. So did the Doctor, who was a botanist and found us Venus’ Fly-Traps and other weird vegetable monsters. The Forester also got off now and then, not from motives of mercy, but to point out varieties of timber to the Commandant. The Chief Surveillant sat tight, probably on account of his weight, until I wanted to put him into one of the halters.

But what, though I hardly like to say so, disgusted me most was the absolute callousness, as it seemed to me, of the two little girls. Perhaps the worst of it was that it was absolutely innocent. They had been born and bred in Prisonland, and I don’t suppose they really saw any difference between that sweating, straining, panting team of human cattle and a team of mules or donkeys.

At last, to my own infinite relief, the journey was over. What it must have been like to our team I can only guess from the fact that in a distance of a little over four miles they had dragged us up one thousand five hundred feet! It took an hour and three-quarters to do it. They were dismissed when we got to the top and allowed to have a drink—of water.

The Doctor took us back. He understood the brake, and in consideration for the young ladies he kept the speed moderate. We got back in twelve minutes and a half. He said he had done it in six; but I wasn’t with him then, and didn’t want to be.

Although forestry is, of course, the same all the world over, and, therefore, not the sort of thing to describe here in detail, there were two other camps that I visited which had interesting peculiarities of their own. One of these was the Camp of Bonne Anse, a pretty little spot whence a very steep and stony path led over a little range to a promontory called Cap Ndoua, which is the telegraph station for the Isle of Pines. I don’t know whether there are any other telegraphic stations which have neither cables nor wires and make no use of electricity, but this and the one on the Isle of Pines were the only ones I have ever seen.

When I was taken into the operating-room at Cap Ndoua I saw an apparatus which looked to me like a gigantic magic-lantern with a telescope fixed to its side. In the front of the big iron box there was a huge lens about eighteen inches across, behind this was another smaller one, and behind this again a powerful oil lamp, with a movable screen in front of it, worked with a sort of trigger; on a table in the corner of the room were the usual telegraphic transmitters and receivers in connection with the general telegraphic system to Noumea and the cable to Sydney.

Every evening at seven, when it is of course quite dark, the operators go on duty until nine. If Ndoua has a message to send to the island the lamp is lit, and the man at the telescope in the observatory above the hospital on the island sees a gleam of white light across the forty-six miles of sea. He lights his lamp, and the preliminary signal twinkles through the darkness. Then the shutter begins to work. Short and long flashes gleam out in quick succession, the dots and dashes of the Morse system in fact; and so the words which have come over the wire from Noumea, or, perhaps, from the uttermost ends of the earth, are translated into light, and sent through the darkness with even more than electrical speed.

Saving only fogs, which are not very frequent in those latitudes, the optic telegraph is just as reliable as the cable and the wire, and they are good for any distance up to the range of the telescope. The apparatus cost about £50 apiece, while a cable would cost several thousands; and it struck me that for quick communication between the mainland and islands or distant light-houses, the optic telegraph is worthy of a wider use than it seems to have.

The other visit was to Port Boisé, near to Cape Queen Charlotte, which is the extreme north-western point of Caledonia. Port Boisé is, like so many other of the Caledonian convict camps, a most beautiful spot. It is fertile, too, thanks to the existence of ancient bog lands, which make it possible to temper the heat of the ferruginous soil, and so skill and patience have made it a delightful oasis in the midst of the vast forest and jungle which surround it on all sides save the one opening to the sea.

These forests and jungles, by the way, are of somewhat peculiar growth; the timber is mostly what is called chêne-gomme, and is an apparent combination of oak- and gum-tree. It is almost as hard as the iron which is the chief ingredient in the soil from which it derives its sap, and it is practically indestructible. As for the jungle, it is composed of brush and creepers which have the consistency of wire ropes—a sort of vegetable steel cable, in fact.

But for me, as an Englishman, the chief interest in Port Boisé was connected with Cape Queen Charlotte, and a little island lying about five miles out to sea, which is called Le Mouillage de Cook—the Anchorage of Captain Cook. It was here that the great navigator made perhaps the greatest mistake of his life. As every one knows, he discovered and named New Caledonia. He sailed along its shores, and contented himself with describing it as an island of lofty mountains surrounded by reefs which made it inaccessible.

He anchored at a little island, and named the bold promontory in front of him Cape Queen Charlotte. He landed here, and, as he says, found the natives very civil and obliging. It is a million pities that he did not cultivate their friendship further, and learn something about their country. He would not then have described it as “inaccessible” and “unapproachable.”

Beyond the bay in which his boats landed he would have found a stretch of open country under the hills across which his men could have marched till they discovered what is now the Baie du Sud—another Sydney Cove in miniature. If he had only done this, Caledonia, with its enormous mineral wealth and its magnificent harbours, would have been British instead of French, a worthy appanage to that other Empire of the future, the new-born Commonwealth of Australia.

I discussed this with the Commandant as we walked back to Bonne Anse, and he told me the story of how on a much later occasion we also lost Caledonia.

Once upon a time, a little more than fifty years ago, there were two frigates lying in Sydney Harbour—one British and one French. We will call the British ship H.M.S. Dodderer. She was commanded by an old woman in naval uniform who ought to have been superannuated years before. The Frenchman, as events proved, was a man of a very different sort.

New Caledonia in those days was a sort of No-Man’s Land, but there were both Catholic and Protestant European missionaries working among the natives. The two warships received almost simultaneous orders to go and annex the island. They started the same day. The British frigate out-sailed the Frenchman, but her captain had got those fatal words of Captain Cook’s deep-rooted in his mind, and when he got near the dreaded reefs he began to take soundings. The Frenchman went ahead, neck or nothing. He gambled his ship to win a colony, and, taking only the most ordinary precautions, he kept on his course.

By great good luck he struck the broad passage through the reef which leads to the harbour of Noumea, and when H.M.S. Dodderer eventually groped her way in she found the French frigate at anchor, and the Tricolour flying from a flagstaff on one of the hills, after which the French captain politely invited him and his officers to lunch and to an excursion on French soil; and here ends a short but exasperating chapter in our colonial history.

I had been ten days in Prony when we visited Port Boisé, and each day we had been looking anxiously for the coming of the steamer which was to bring us food and me release. Morning after morning we looked out across the bay to the two islands which guarded the channel through which she had to come, but for six more days never a whiff of smoke drifted across the clear-cut horizon. Meanwhile, food was running very low, and we were getting decidedly ennuyés. So one day, by way of a diversion, the Doctor proposed that we should break the law and go dynamite-fishing and shark-slaying.

The fresh meat had given out. Vegetables—far more important to a Frenchman than to an Englishman—were nearly a memory. The fruit supply of the camp was represented by a lime-tree in the Doctor’s garden, and that grew in imported soil. No fruit would grow in the iron soil of Prony. The preserved Australian meat was getting very low. In short, in a few more days we should have got within measurable distance of starvation, and then mutiny; and it was with an idea of deferring such unpleasant contingencies that the doctor suggested we should go fishing.

Any change from the monotony of wandering about the little area walled in by jungle and forest, impassable by any save those who knew the Kanaka paths, was welcome, and I began to talk gladly about rods and line and bait, to which the doctor replied:

“Oh no, we must work quicker than that. We shall fish with dynamite! You will see them come to the bait, and then—pouf!—there breaks out the waterquake, not earthquake, as you say, and they are all dead—hundreds! You shall see sharks, too. Dynamite is good medicine for them.”

This sounded interesting, and I got up the next morning about half-past four, more cheerfully than usual, because, of course, we were going to start at five o’clock. It was a dull, cloudy, steamy morning when I went down to the jetty, and found the big whale-boat manned by six stalwart Kanakas armed with their throwing-spears, and the Doctor with a little saloon rifle, and the Director of Works—the biggest and most English-looking Frenchman that I met in the colony—with his pockets full of dynamite.

We first paid a visit to a camp about eight miles away, taking a contribution of meat and bread, and the news that the long-expected supplies had not yet come. Then we shaped our course for Sharks’ Bay, which proved to be a most characteristically tropical piece of water. The dense vegetation not only came down to the water’s edge, but threw out long, snaky-looking roots a couple of yards from the shore. It was among these that the first sport began, because it was in these oily-looking shallows that the flat fish were wont to take refuge from the wolves of the sea.

This was the Kanakas’ part of the sport. We ran the boat in quietly and four of them went ashore with their spears. The Director of Works did the same, and when he had landed I felt that the Doctor and I were a little farther off from the razor-edged brink of eternity than when he was sitting beside us with enough dynamite in his pockets to blow the boat to matchwood and ourselves beyond the confines of time.

We amused ourselves by taking potshots at the black triangles which keenly cut the unrippled surface of the brown water. As far as my own experience goes, I don’t think there’s another piece of water in the world that possesses as many sharks to the acre as that well-named bay. Wherever you looked you could see a black fin cutting the water, and every minute or so you would see a swirling eddy which meant that one of the sea-wolves had made a dash at something, and had either got an instalment of his breakfast or missed it.

When I was talking this over afterwards with the Doctor, who was a bit of a naturalist, I learnt a little more about the doctrine of evolution and the survival of the fittest than I knew before. Sharks swarm in the New Caledonian waters, and the only chance for their victims is flight; wherefore about the shores of New Caledonia you find the fastest swimming fish in the world.

After we had had a few ineffective shots at dorsal fins, one of our crew said “Ough!” and pointed to the shore. We pulled in, it being evident that there was sport afoot. The Kanakas ashore had been climbing with marvellous agility over the snaky water-roots of the trees until they had come to a tiny little cove.

They were leaning over the roots peering down into the water, motionless as bronze images. Then one swiftly and silently shinned up a tree with his spear in his mouth. He got a foot- and hand-hold. Then with his right hand he took the spear out of his teeth, balanced it for a moment, and then down it went like a flash of lightning.

The next instant there was a terrific commotion in the water below. Three other spears went down, and our men laid to their oars and rushed the boat in. Two of the others jumped into the water, and the crowd began struggling with a huge flat-fish, something like an exaggerated flounder, which was nailed to the bottom by a couple of spears. When we got him into the boat, I thought he would have knocked the side out of it. Subsequently he made good eating for many hungry convicts.

Meanwhile, the Director had been wandering about with a cigarette in his mouth and a dynamite cartridge in his hand, looking for his prey, which, unobligingly, kept too far out. His turn was to come later on, when we had pulled across past the sulphur stream to the mouth of the river which flows into Sharks’ Bay.

It is a rather curious fact that the waters of this bay are strongly impregnated with sulphur, and yet, as I have said, they are literally swarming with fish. They evidently seemed to like it, for both the sharks and their victims were thicker in the neighbourhood of the submarine springs than they were anywhere else. Wherefore it was here that we made the best bags.

Our Kanakas seemed to have a faculty of seeing through the brown water which none of us possessed. Again and again they located swarms of fish that we had no notion of. One of them lay in the bows with his big black eyes seeing things where we could see nothing, and directing our course by moving his right or left hand.

Meanwhile the dynamiter stood on the seat with one foot on the gunwale, puffing at his cigarette, keeping it in a glow so that he might light the fuse of his cartridge at it. Presently there came from the bows a low intense whisper, “Stop!” The Kanakas use a good deal more English than French when they’re out sporting. He got up and pointed to the water about ten yards ahead, and hissed:

“There, là! plenty! beaucoup!”

The dynamiter took his cigarette from his lips, blew the ash away, and touched the end of the fuse with it. Then he pitched his cartridge into the water about ten yards from the boat. Ten seconds later a volcano seemed to burst up from the bottom of the bay, and the boat jumped as if a whale’s flipper had struck her. The water ahead boiled up into a little hillock of foam and dropped again.

Then all about us I saw the water sprinkled with the white bellies of fish, some quite dead, and others swimming in a feeble, purposeless sort of way with their tails. The next moment there were six big splashes, and I saw six pairs of brown legs disappearing into the water, after which heads and arms bobbed up, and it began to rain fish into the boat.

They ran from eight to eighteen inches in length, and from two to six pounds in weight, and so I took some pains to dodge them as they came flying up out of the water. They were something like bass, but they had the heads and tails of mackerel, and they swam like lightning—of course, before they struck the dynamite.

I have often watched, in clearer waters, the sharks hunting shoals of them. The Caledonian shark can get a tremendous speed on him. I have seen a twelve-footer carried clean out of the water by the impetus of his rush. But the way these things dodged them just at the moment that they turned over to make their grab was simply marvellous. You would see a shark plunge into the midst of a swarm of them. The long, blue-grey body would turn over, the mouth—the ugliest mouth in all creation—would open, and the tripled-armed jaws would clash together on a mouthful of empty water. Every fish had vanished, and brother shark would give a disgusted wriggle, and go on the prowl again.

Escapes of this kind were, of course, due to inherited wisdom, but dynamite was a recent experience, and the fish fell victims to it through sheer curiosity. When the cartridge dropped into the middle of the shoal they naturally scattered in all directions. Then they came back to see what had fallen into the water, and after that came the catastrophe. Those who died were victims to curiosity. Those who escaped would probably be about the most scared fish that ever wagged a fin.

The effect of the dynamite on those who did not escape was most extraordinary. In every case the vertebral column was broken just behind the head, and the heart was as cleanly divided as if it had been cut with a razor.

When we had our boat about half full we started in pursuit of bigger game. The shock of the explosion had startled the sharks, who, like all bullies, are mostly cowards, and the Kanakas had kept them away by beating the water every now and then with their hands in their usual fashion. So our dripping, laughing crew, sure now of a splendid feed, pulled merrily down the bay to a point on which we landed two of them and the dynamiter. They crept stealthily along the tangled shore till one of the Kanakas stopped and pointed to three little black spots on the surface of a tiny jungle-fringed bay.

The dynamiter took out a cigarette and lit it, watching the three points the while as they moved along the oily surface through little eddies made by the great bodies underneath. Presently they formed a triangle not many feet apart. Two or three vigorous whiffs of his cigarette, a touch to the fuse, and a motion of the hand, a scurry in the water—and then a muffled bang and an uprising of muddy water.

We waited a moment or two, and then we could see something white—three streaks of it—gleaming through the water, and three livid shapes rose slowly to the surface, wagging the great tails which would never send them through the water again. Their horrible mouths were a little open, but they would never close fish or man again.

I took the Doctor’s word for it that their necks, so to speak, were broken, and their hearts split as those of the smaller fry were; but I didn’t make any personal investigations, for soon after the troubling of the waters had subsided there came swift, swirling rushes from all sides; black fins cut the water, white bellies gleamed under it, and then came a clashing of cannibal jaws, a tugging and a tearing, a silent, horrible contest, and presently all that was left of those three sharks was a blood-reddened scum on the surface of the little leaf-fringed bay.

Our morning’s fishing closed with the slaying of a shark who fell a victim to his insatiable appetite just as the smaller fry had done to their curiosity. When the tragedy was over we pulled out into the middle of the outer bay and waited until quiet and confidence was restored among our friends below. Meanwhile, one of the Kanakas had cut one of our biggest fish open. The Director put a dynamite cartridge into it, and then it was tied up, after which the end of a line was passed through its gills. When one of the black triangles came within a few yards of us the Director touched the end of about six inches of fuse with his cigarette and dropped it quietly overboard.

Brother Shark didn’t seem to notice the little fizzy splutter which made this fish different from all others that he had eaten, or, if he did, he took no notice of it. He turned over on his side, the jaws opened, and the fish vanished.

In a few moments and for just an immeasurable fraction of a second he was the most astounded shark in the Pacific Ocean. After which came chaos for him, and a breakfast for his brethren. The pieces weren’t very big, with the exception of the head, which, after a bit of a scrimmage, was carried off by a monster who might have been his mother-in-law. The rest of the fragments disappeared in a swirl of bloody froth, and we went home to breakfast to learn the glad news that the long-awaited Emily had really left Noumea at last.

XI
MOSTLY MOSQUITOS AND MICROBES

The Emily arrived that evening, and we fed royally on good fresh Australian beef, fried fish, and potatoes, and compôte of fruit, followed by fresh cream cheese, with bread and tinned butter—as usual, from Australia. In fact, if it wasn’t for Australia I believe that New Caledonia would either live on tinned everything or starve, which is of course a good thing for Sydney and Newcastle.

The Doctor produced a couple of bottles of excellent Burgundy from his private cellar, and altogether we did ourselves exceeding well. The next morning the Emily sailed, of course, at five o’clock; but I turned out of bed in the moonlight well contented, for my last journey but one was over. The Commandant invited me on to his verandah for a farewell consommation. After which I went with the Doctor and the Dynamiter for another one or two at the canteen. Then we parted in as friendly a fashion as English and French ever did.

I was glad to get away, yet I left some regrets behind me. Though I had come under unpromising circumstances, every one had made me welcome, and although my stay had lengthened into something like a little exile, my visit to the Land of Wood and Iron had been both pleasant and profitable.

The Doctor I parted from with real regret. He was one of the best types of the travelled French officer and gentleman that I have ever met. At first his ideas about the Boers were hopelessly wrong, and that was all there was the matter with him; but I was the first man he had ever met who had actually lived among them, and when I left his views were considerably altered.

Just before I left, the Director of Posts and Telegraphs—every official seems to be a director of something in Caledonia—brought me the first letters that I had received in Prisonland. They had been carried by a Kanaka over the mountains from Noumea, through fifty miles of jungle-paths. These bush-postmen have never yet been known to lose a letter. When I asked how much extra they were paid for work like this I was told that they were made to do it as a punishment—which struck me as being entirely French.

The Emily—may her name be blessed!—was only a steam launch multiplied by two, but she was clean and sweet, and her nose was pointed towards home. She towed two lighters loaded with dressed timber, and she took something like fifteen hours to do forty-five miles. But that mattered little. It was a delicious day, and the scenery along the coast was lovely. Moreover, you could lie down on her decks without having to change afterwards and throw your clothes overboard, and so the long hours passed pleasantly under the awning.

When at length she had puffed and panted her way into Noumea, I looked about the harbour and saw that Yellow Jack was flying more numerously than ever. The first news I learnt when I landed was that the plague was a great deal worse than the papers were allowed to say. It had begun to jump about all over the town, just as it did later on in Sydney. The Chief of the Sanitary Commission had just been struck down by it.

The first thing I noticed as I drove from the wharf to my old quarters was the number of people in mourning. My landlady, who—I dare say under compulsion—had had her premises cleaned and disinfected, greeted me with even more than French effusion. I owed her a long bill, and she thought I was dead of the plague in some out-of-the-way spot. She nearly cried for joy when she saw me. Poor old lady, she was to be one of the next of the microbe’s victims!

At dinner that night I learnt, to my intense disgust, that the Messagerie Company and the Government had established a twelve-days’ quarantine on a mosquito-haunted islet in the bay for any one who wanted to travel by the monthly mail to Sydney. The principal reason for this was that the Governor was going home and wanted to be quite certain that no microbes got on board concealed about the persons of his fellow-passengers.

From my point of view it amounted to this: Twelve days on Ile Freycinet, four days’ passage, and from eight to ten days’ quarantine in Sydney—total at least twenty-six days for a trip of a little over a thousand miles.

It had to be avoided somehow, and at the same time Noumea was getting every day a better place to get out of. Even Lord Dunmore, who had stuck to his offices down near the wharves while his neighbours were running away, and while the rats, driven out of destroyed buildings, were coming under his floors to die, at last admitted that things were serious, and advised me to “get” as soon as I could.

Fortunately one of the larger coast-boats had been disinfected and was put on the line again, and in her I took passage to Pam, at the north-eastern extremity of the island.

Pam is the port and headquarters of an immensely rich mining district, the property of the International Copper Company, of which his lordship is Administrator. It has been said that when Nature made New Caledonia she set herself to dump down as many ores and minerals in as small a space as possible.

She has certainly succeeded, for there is scarcely a mineral known to science that is not represented in greater or less quantities in this wonderful island.

A very clever and experienced mining expert once went over from Australia to make a survey for the International, and after an exhaustive examination he was shipped to London to make a personal report to the Board. He knew as much about mining as any one in the Southern Hemisphere, but his language and deportment were those of the bush and the mining camp. A noble lord asked him if he could give any estimate of the amount of copper, nickel, cobalt, iron, silver, gold, etc., that might be found in the Central Chain, and this was his answer:

“My lord, if you were to take all the —— minerals there are out of those —— mountains the —— island would —— well fall to pieces.”

The report was taken as satisfactory.

I brought some specimens away with me which certainly seem to bear out his estimate. They were the wonder and envy of several mining experts in Australia. One of the specimens weighs about three pounds, and I am told that it contains about a dozen distinct kinds of minerals. It didn’t come out of the mine. It was just chopped off the surface for me with a pickaxe.

The mines are not at Pam. They are at Pilou, about seven miles up the river. Here, connecting the principal mining station with the wharf, is the only other railway in Caledonia, which is run by steam. It is a narrow gauge and about five miles long.

That five miles is a journey through purgatory. The attendant demons are little black and devilishly businesslike mosquitos. Now, I thought I knew something about mosquitos. They had lived off me in many parts of the world from Delagoa Bay to Panama, and Honolulu to Guayaquil, but when I got to Pilou I found I hadn’t begun to learn about them.

The air above the swamp over which the railway ran was black with them, and their song made the whole atmosphere vocal. They were all over us in a moment. They even settled on the boiler of the engine, and bit it until it whistled in its agony. We were black with them from head to foot. Clothing was no protection; and, of course, ours was pretty thin. They just stood on their heads and rammed their probosces down into our flesh, usually along the line of a vein, and sucked in our life-blood until they were too gorged to get their blood-pumps out again.

By constant sweeping with green branches we managed to keep our faces fairly clear, and do our breathing without swallowing more than a dozen at a time. Even the Kanakas, who are not as a rule a favourite article of food with mosquitos, had to go on swishing themselves with boughs to keep the little black demons out of their eyes and nose and mouth and ears.

As for me, I visited the camps and the mines, and then I fled. I was a sight which my worst enemy, if I have one, might well have looked upon with eyes of pity. I had got a touch of fever, too, in the swamp, and an illness in Pilou was too terrible for contemplation. I would not live in the place, rent free and with nothing to do but fight mosquitos, for a hundred pounds a week.

The unhappy convicts who work the mines were the most miserable lot I had seen in all Caledonia. Neither by day nor night have they any protection from the swarming pests, which, as one or two of them told me, made their lives one long misery. They sleep in open barracks without mosquito curtains over their hammocks, and by day their tormentors pursue them even down the shafts of the mine.

It was the same with the officials and their wives and children. They all looked anæmic, as though most of the blood had been sucked out of them. They were worried and nervous. Their hands had got into a way of moving mechanically towards their cheeks and necks and foreheads, the result of long and mostly vain efforts to squash mosquitos.

When we were going to have a meal a couple of fire-pots, covered with green boughs, had to be put into the room until it was full of smoke and comparatively empty of mosquitos. Then we went into the smoke, and the fire-pots were put in the doorway. I wasn’t at Pilou long enough to get used to being half-cooked myself while I was eating my dinner, but even the smoke in your eyes and lungs was a more bearable affliction than the winged tormentors who seemed to be a sort of punitive discount on the vast mineral wealth of Pilou.

No one but very wicked people ought to live there, and when they die their accounts ought to be considered squared.

With eyes puffed up and almost closed; with nose and ears and lips about twice their normal size; with knuckles and wrists swollen and stiff—to say nothing of a skinful of itching bumps—I got back to Pam, and on board the cargo boat on which I had booked a passage in Noumea.

We called her afterwards the Ballande liner St. Louis. She was an exaggeration of La France, and belonged to the same distinguished firm. She was bigger and, if possible, dirtier. She also smelt more, because there was a larger area for the smells to spread themselves over.

No provision had been made for the eight passengers who were doomed to travel by her. The captain had no money or credit to buy stores, and when I offered to lend him some, he declined, in case his owners should hold him responsible. The result was that the food we ate on that miserable voyage made me look back longingly to the days when I had eaten salt horse and pickled pork in the forecastle of a black-birder.

The decks were not washed down till the fifth morning, when we reached Sydney Heads. Then there was a general clean-up before the Medical Superintendent came on board, in case a worse fate than quarantine might await us. Up went Yellow Jack again, and that afternoon saw us anchored off the quarantine station at North Head.

I have been in prisons of many sorts, but that quarantine taught me for the first time what imprisonment really means. The penalty for leaving the St. Louis without authority was £300 fine and six months’ hard labour—so there we were for eight days and nights of about one hundred and fifty hours each.

On one side there was the quarantine station—about as beautiful a land and seascape as those about to die ever took a last look from at earth and sea and sky.

On the other hand, the varied beauties of “Our Harbour,” with Manly Beach to the northward, North Shore with its red-roofed villas sprinkled among the trees; and, away in the dim distance, the spires and chimneys of Sydney. A couple of hours would have taken us to it, but as we looked at it with longing eyes, thinking of what a cocktail at the bar of the Australia Hotel would taste like, it might just as well have been twenty thousand miles away.

It was during those eight days of mingled dirt and discomfort, cursing, and cribbage that I saw as curious a contrast between life and death as you might search the wide world over for.

On the starboard side, which is the right-hand side looking forward, lay the route of the excursion steamers running between Sydney and Manly Beach.

They came past at all hours of the day, and they came near enough for us to hear strains of stringed and wind instruments, which brought back memories of the dear old Thames with painful distinctness.

On the port side, with almost equal frequency, there came a green-painted, white-awninged launch, flying the Yellow Flag and carrying corpses, “cases,” and “contacts” from the depôt at Wooloomooloo. As she rounded into the jetty she whistled. Day and night for eight days and nights we heard that whistle—and the meaning of it was usually death. But you get hardened to all things in time, and before our durance vile ended we had got to call her the Cold Meat Boat.

One day the Medical Superintendent of the station acceded to an urgent request made by myself and a fellow-passenger. Neither of us had washed properly for six days, and so, after a little discussion and many promises, he let us go ashore that we might enjoy ourselves under a hose. We douched each other for more than half an hour, and then we went to stretch ourselves on the beach—a silver-sanded rock-walled curve, trodden by many feet which will never tread earth again.

As we were coming back to the quay to go on board we heard that never-to-be-forgotten whistle again, and the green Death Boat swung round the corner. One of the sanitary police on the wharf put his hand up and waved us back.

In the stern there were about a dozen people sitting. Forward there was a long shapeless bundle lying on a stretcher. It was a case. The others were “contacts,” friends, lodgers, and relations who had lived in the same house with the case. They had come to be isolated for ten days, so that the microbe of the Black Death might show whether or not it was in their blood.

They were taken out of the boat first. Their own feelings didn’t matter, for the Black Spectre takes no account of human affections, and permits no other to do so. They were marched away to the quarters set apart for contacts. No farewells were permitted, just a look that might be the last, and that was all.

Then the stretcher with the long bundle on it was lifted and carried on to the wharf. Meanwhile the ambulance backed down to the shore-end, the stretcher was put into it, and it drove away up through the trees to the hospital. The next journey of that particular “case” was to the cemetery four days afterwards.

When we got back to our floating prison I told the chief engineer what we had seen on shore, and he said in very epigrammatic French:

“Quite so! What would you? You are a human being till you take the plague; after that you are an outcast, a thing separate. You live and get better; you die and are buried that’s all.”

And, as it happened, the very next day brought an all-too vivid illustration of the truth of this saying. About ten in the morning we heard the “woo-hoo” of the Death Boat’s whistle.

There was only one passenger this time, and he travelled in a coffin. A common two-wheeled cart backed down to where the ambulance had been the day before. The coffin was carried to it and put in just like any other sort of packing-case might have been. The driver whipped up his horse, and we watched the cart with its load of coffin, corpse, and quicklime, trotting up the winding road which leads to the burying-ground of North Head.

I have seen many funerals in a good many places from Westminster Abbey to Wooloomooloo, but this one was the simplest and the saddest of them all.

Away on the other side of the bay, wife and children, brothers and sisters and friends were mourning—and there was the indescribable Thing, which two or three days ago had been a man, being carted away to be dropped into a twelve-foot hole in the ground—buried like a dead dog, because it had died of the Black Death instead of something else. From which you will see that the Black Death has terrors for the living even after it has claimed its dead.

Part III
HOMEWARD BOUND

I
“TWENTY YEARS AFTER”

Everything, even quarantine, comes to an end in time; and so on the morning of the eighth day at anchor, and the thirteenth out from Pam, the sanitary policeman who formed our sole connection with the outside world brought with our morning letters and newspapers the joyful news that our imprisonment was to end at noon that day. Never did convicts hail the hour of their release more gladly than the passengers on board the Ballande liner St. Louis.

We had managed to make our durance vile tolerable by means of yarning by day, and cribbage by night. In the after saloon, an apartment measuring about sixteen feet by eight, there were four of us—three men and the wife of a mining superintendent in Pam. The miner was one of the good old colonial hard-shell type, a man of vast and varied experience, and the possessor of one of the most luxuriant vocabularies I have ever had reason to admire in the course of many wanderings. One night, I remember, we all woke up wondering whether the ship had broken from her moorings and gone ashore or whether the Kanaka crew had mutinied. It turned out that our shipmate had discovered a rat in his bunk, and was giving his opinion as to the chances of our all dying of plague before the quarantine was over. He knew that there had been fourteen deaths from plague only a month before on the miserable old hooker, and he was considerably scared. When he told us that the rat was alive I began to laugh, whereupon he turned the stream of his eloquence upon me. He literally coruscated with profanity, and the more his adjectives multiplied the louder I laughed, and only the influence of my stable companion, a pearl-sheller and diver from Thursday Island, who had been exploring the ocean floor round New Caledonia, prevented a breach of our harmonious relations.

When I got my breath and the miner lost his, I explained that the fact of the rat being alive proved it to be absolutely harmless. It was indeed a guarantee that there was no plague on the ship. If it had been dead and the sanitary authorities had got to know of it, it might have got us another twenty days’ quarantine. Finally, it came out that the rat had bitten the miner’s toe, and, as he believed, inoculated him with the plague. I suggested that whiskey was the best antidote for anything of that sort and so the proceedings terminated amicably.

My friend the diver was also a man who could tell you tales of land and sea and under-sea in language which was unhappily sometimes too picturesque to be printable. We had travelled together all the way from Noumea, and made friends before the St. Antoine had left the wharf. We had both been rope-haulers and climbers before the mast, and the freemasonry of the sea made us chums at once. I never travelled with a better shipmate, and if this book ever reaches him across the world I hope that it will remind him of many hours that he made pleasant during that evil time.

I have brought two somewhat curious memories out of our brief friendship.

I had not been talking to him for an hour before twenty years of hard-won education and culture of a sort disappeared, and I found myself thinking the thoughts and speaking the speech of the forecastle and the sailors’ boarding-house: thoughts direct and absolutely honest; and speech terse, blunt, and equally honest, for among the toilers of the sea it is not permitted to use language to conceal one’s thoughts. The man who is found out doing that hears himself dissected and discussed with blistering irony garnished with epithets which stick like barbed arrows, and of such was our conversation on the St. Antoine and the St. Louis; not exactly drawing-room-talk, but of marvellous adaptability to the true description of men and things.

On the morning of our release as we were taking our after-breakfast walk and looking for the last time on that hatefully beautiful little cove at North Head, I said to him:

“Well, I’ll have to stop being a shell-back to-night, and get into civilisation again.”

“I suppose you will,” he said; and then he proceeded to describe civilisation generally in a way that would have healthily shocked many most excellent persons. I thoroughly agreed with him, and, curiously enough, although our experiences had been none of the most pleasant, and I had had anything but a succession of picnics during my stay in New Caledonia, I was already beginning to feel sorry that I had to go back to civilisation and dine in dress-clothes and a hard-boiled shirt—which brings me to my second memory.