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Not that they did so with unnecessary cruelty, but ex-Lieutenant Schwartzkoff, the foreman, was looking on, and then, besides that, this big-boned, light-skinned man was a foreigner, and a Samoan hates a foreigner of his own colour if he is poor and friendless. And then he was an aitu a devil, and could speak neither Samoan, nor Fijian, nor Tokelau, nor yet any English or German.
Here, now, was an opportunity of getting a supply of fresh meat which would last us for a couple of months or more; as we could easily stow eighty or a hundred turtle on board, and kill one or two every day as required. We always carried with us a heavy turtle-net, made of coir fibre, which I had bought two years before in the Tokelau Group.
"That is what the people of the Tokelau Islands call O le fati le galu the last great wave, that gathering itself together far out on the ocean, rushes to the reef, and curling high up as the mast of a ship, falls and shakes the land from one side to the other."
The quiet, dignified courtesy with which the chief addressed him recalled the white man to himself, and a pleasant smile lit up the native's features when the stranger answered him in Tokelau the lingua franca of the equatorial isles of the Pacific north and south.
And then, in the Tokelau language, which the wild-eyed people around him fairly understood, "I have come here to live with you and trade for oil" and he pointed to the tierce of tobacco. "Where are you from?" "From the land called Nukunono, in the Tokelau." "Why come here?" "Because I killed an enemy there."
Did not the foreman say that he was possessed of many devils, and for two years had lived alone on the plantation, working in the field with the gangs of Tokelau and Solomon Island men, but speaking to no one, only muttering in a strange tongue to himself and giving sullen obedience to his taskmasters?
More than twenty years ago a fine young Polynesian half-caste, named Alan, and the writer, were running a small trading cutter out of Samoa, among the low-lying atolls of the Ellice and Tokelau groups, in the South Pacific.
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