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Updated: June 7, 2025
Twice every year the place was visited by a small German trading schooner from Blanche Bay, in New Britain, and possibly, he thought, they might either find her there loading a cargo of copra; or, if not, they could wait for her.
Gibney grunted his approval and Mr. McGuffey, bringing out a pocket knife, fell to manicuring his terrible finger nails and paring the callous patches off his palms. Mr. Gibney lighted a Sailor's Delight cigar and puffed meditatively, the while he watched a gasoline tug kicking the little schooner Tropic Bird into an adjacent berth. From the Tropic Bird came an odour of copra and pineapple and Mr.
Now he was old and had retired up the valley to the home he had long established there beside his copra furnace and his shrine of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. He led me to the abandoned shack, a long room, tumbledown, moist, festooned with cobwebs, the counters and benches black with reminiscences of twenty thousand tradings and Chinese meals.
Hallman, with whom I journeyed on the Noa-Noa, dropped into the Cercle Bougainville occasionally, but he was ordinarily too much occupied with his schemes of trade. Besides, he had only one absorbing vice other than business, and with merely wine and song to be found at the club, Hallman went there but seldom, and only to talk about pearl-shell, copra, and the profits of schooner voyages.
Case had as good as said he would pot me if ever I got any copra; he would come home to find the best business in the village had changed hands; and the best thing I thought I could do was to get in first with the potting. "See here, Uma," says I, "tell him I'm sorry I made him wait, but I was up looking at Case's Tiapolo store in the bush." "He want savvy if you no 'fraid?" translated Uma.
“Well, do you think it would better me to shoot you here, on this open beach?” said he. “Because I don’t. Folks come fishing every day. There may be a score of them up the valley now, making copra; there might be half a dozen on the hill behind you, after pigeons; they might be watching us this minute, and I shouldn’t wonder. I give you my word I don’t want to shoot you.
He was a good axe-man, and later he was put in the bridge-building gang. Once, he was punished by being put in the road-building gang. At times he served as boat's crew in the whale boats, when they brought in copra from distant beaches or when the white men went out to dynamite fish.
And we told them that we were sorry, that never again would we harm a white man, and in token of our submission we poured sand upon our heads. And all the women and children set up a great wailing for water, so that for some time no man could make himself heard. Then we were told our punishment. We must fill the three schooners with copra and beche-de-mer.
It was just her way to tease me and make me cross, for then she would snuggle up and ripple over with laughter and hold me tight in her soft, round girlish arms, and say that I was her copra a whole ship of it, and how she 'ud hang herself from a coconut tree if I were to die and by God, she would have done it, too, them Gilbert women being great on love, and the thing happening often enough.
That was one employment we had, and it made me feel less lonesome; but there was no profit in the thing, for though the priest came and sat and yarned, none of his folks could be enticed into my store; and if it hadn't been for the other occupation I struck out there wouldn't have been a pound of copra in the house.
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