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The men looked at each other, and then, lifting up the body of the poor Kanaka, threw it, without form or ceremony, into the water. We looked astern. There it floated, with the arms spread out, and the face turned towards us, for the handkerchief had fallen off the head. Its lips seemed to move. I thought it was uttering a well-merited curse on the hateful craft we were on board.
It was the big hurricane of 1892. He did forty miles in forty-five hours, and only he and one other landed on the land. And they were all kanakas. He was the only white man; yet he out-endured and drowned the last kanaka of them " "I thought you said there was one other?" Paula interrupted. "She was a woman," Dick answered. "He drowned the last kanaka." "And the woman was then a white woman?"
"The boatswain is badly hurt, Mr. Barry," he said suavely, "and as you are such a good surgeon, perhaps you will leave this damned kanaka and attend to him." Barry turned on him with a subdued fierceness. "I'll attend to the scoundrel presently, Captain Rawlings, though he doesn't deserve it. He is a downright sweep like all his ear-ringed kidney.
He has "bitted the bull-mouthed breaker" and ridden it in, and the pride in the feat shows in the carriage of his magnificent body as he glances for a moment carelessly at you who sit in the shade of the shore. He is a Kanaka and more, he is a man, a member of the kingly species that has mastered matter and the brutes and lorded it over creation.
Veronica belonged to the ship, but had never been cooked, being thin and stringy; and Kamelillo was a silent, sulky Kanaka that had lived up and down the Pacific, and harpooned whales, and been shipwrecked now and then, and was sometimes drunk and sometimes starved, and had no opinion on these things, except that he'd rather be drunk than starved.
Kahekili died, too, at the time, at Waikiki. "And long afterward were brought to the Royal Mausoleum here in Honolulu," Pool supplemented. "Also, Kanaka Oolea, there are some who believe to this day that Queen Alice has them stored with the rest of her ancestral bones in the big jars in her taboo room. All are wrong. I know. The sacred bones of Kahekili are gone and for ever gone.
Kanaka is to me decidedly objectionable, as conveying the idea of canaille. I had written thus far when Mr. Severance came in to say that a grand display of the national sport of surf-bathing was going on, and a large party of us went down to the beach for two hours to enjoy it. It is really a most exciting pastime, and in a rough sea requires immense nerve.
Unable to remain flung up on the beach, pounded ever back toward the beach by the perpetual shoreward rush of the kanaka surf, the up-piled water escaped to the sea by way of the channel and in the form of under-tow along the bottom under the breakers. Even in the channel the waves broke big, but not with the magnificent bigness of terror as to right and left.
"Monsieur," the Frenchman answered, trying to cover his rags with his native cape, "that explains itself easily. I was a medical student in Paris in the days of the Commune. Ah! that beloved Paris how far away it seems now from Boupari! Like all other students I was advanced Republican, Socialist what you will a political enthusiast. When the events took place the events of '70 I espoused with all my heart the cause of the people. You know the rest. The bourgeoisie conquered. I was taken red-handed, as the Versaillais said my pistol in my grasp an open revolutionist. They tried me by court-martial br'r'r no delay guilty, M. le President hard labor to perpetuity. They sent me with that brave Louise Michel and so many other good comrades of the cause to New Caledonia. There, nine years of convict life was more than enough for me. One day I found a canoe on the shore a little Kanaka canoe you know the type a mere shapeless dug-out. Hastily I loaded it with food yam, taro, bread-fruit I pushed it off into the sea I embarked alone I intrusted myself and all my fortunes to the Bon Dieu and the wide Pacific. The Bon Dieu did not wholly justify my confidence. It is a way he has that inscrutable one. Six weeks I floated hither and thither before varying winds. At last one evening I reached this island. I floated ashore. And, enfin, me voil
One was a Kanaka the cook, I was informed; one carried a cage with a canary, which occasionally trilled into thin song; one had his left arm in a sling, and looked gentlemanlike and somewhat sickly, as though the injury had been severe and he was scarce recovered; and the captain himself a red-faced, blue-eyed, thick-set man of five-and-forty wore a bandage on his right hand.
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