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He possessed pearling concessions in the Paumotus. Though his name did not appear, he was in truth the German company that traded in the French Marquesas. His trading stations were in strings in all the groups, and his vessels that operated them were many. He owned atolls so remote and tiny that his smallest schooners and ketches visited the solitary agents but once a year.
Mr Becke went back in the cruiser to the Colonies, and then again sailed for Eastern Polynesia, trading in the Gambiers, Paumotus, and Easter and Pitcairn Islands. In this part of the ocean he picked up an abandoned French barque on a reef, floated her, and loaded her with coconuts, intending to sail her to New Zealand with a native crew, but they went ashore in a hurricane and lost everything.
Ormsby, an Englishman in his early twenties, good-looking and courteous, with an air of accustomedness to luxury, but of being roughened by his environment, was sitting on a bench one morning with a girl. He called me over to meet her. "You are an old-timer here now," he began, "and I've got to go away on the schooner to the Paumotus to-morrow.
He had learned the nickname given me, and was in such a happy frame of mind that he ordered drinks for the club. "I'm lucky to be here at all," he said seriously. "I have a seven-ton cutter, and left the Paumotus four days ago for Papeete. We had eight tons of copra in the hold, filling it up within a foot of the hatch.
South of the shoal an easterly current had set them down upon it; north of the shoal an equally swift westerly current had clutched the ship and was sweeping her away. "I've heard of these Paumotus before," the captain groaned, lifting his blanched face from his hands. "Captain Moyendale told me about them after losing his ship on them. And I laughed at him behind his back.
Comparisons of sanitation, order, neatness, and businesslike management of these islands, with the happy-go-lucky administration of the Society, Paumotus, Marquesas, and Austral archipelagoes, owned by the French, were frequent by the English. The French shrugged their shoulders. "The Tahitians are happy, and we send millions of francs to aid France," they said.
When I was building my house in the Paumotus I had slept out for weeks on a harder bed than that, with nothing to shelter me but wild shrubs; and as for vermin, my tough skin should be proof against their malice. "We went down to the stream to bathe while Ata was preparing the dinner, and after we had eaten it we sat on the verandah. We smoked and chatted.
It beats insurance and you know the underwriters won't stand for insurance in the Paumotus." Grief pointed to a small cutter beating up astern of them on the same course. "I'll wager a five-franc piece the little Nuhiva beats us in." "Sure," Captain Warfield agreed. "She's overpowered. We're like a liner alongside of her, and we've only got forty horsepower.
And then had I now my son Tagipo with me, he who went into the bellies of the sharks at Tia Kau." A Memory Of The Paumotus I stayed once at Rotoava in the Low Archipelago, Eastern Polynesia while suffering from injuries received in a boat accident one wild night. My host, the Rotoava trader, was a sociable old pirate, whose convivial soul would never let him drink alone.
What exotic life there was beyond the clubs, the waterfront, and the Asiatic quarter revolved around the Tiare, and entirely so because of its proprietress, Lovaina. She was the best-known and best-liked woman in all these South Seas, remembered from Australia to the Paumotus, from London to China, wherever were people who had visited Tahiti, as "dear old Lovaina." She was very large.
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