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Updated: June 18, 2025
Would it not be presumptuous for a mere idler, an individual whose enterprise and industry have been sapped by the insidious nonchalance of the Beachcomber, to tell of practical details of cultural pursuits the enthusiasm, the disappointments, the glowing anticipations, the realisation of inflexible facts, the plain emphatic truths which others have reason to know ever so much more keenly?
So much of the time of the Beachcomber is spent sweeping with hopeful eyes the breadths of the empty sea, policing the uproarious beaches, overhauling the hordes of roguish reefs, and the medley concealed in cosy caves by waves that storm at the bare mention of the rights of private property, that he cannot avoid casual acquaintance with the scores of animated things which ceaselessly woo him from the pursuit of his calling.
As Carey landed he glanced at the now enormous stack of pearl shells and at the tubs once more well filled with oysters, for the beachcomber had not let his men be idle. But the sight of the treasures of which they had been robbed only irritated the boy, and he turned away to forget it in encountering the grinning face of Black Jack close by.
"No; I aren't going to send him down; but I tell you what I will do if you don't hand up that revolver I'll pitch a lanthorn down alight so as to get a good aim at you, and then I'll give you two barrels o' this." There was a few minutes' silence, and then the beachcomber began again. "Send that Black Jackum down to me. Where's he been all this time?"
"Mumkull killa fellar," said the black, grinning as if it were a fine joke. "Mumkull now?" he continued, with his eyes beginning to look wild, as he turned them questioningly on one after the other. "Not yet. Get out." The black darted away again as quickly as he had come. "That chap's a child o' nature, young fellow," said the beachcomber, scowling; "so I say to you, don't you try to gammon me.
If the hour across the island seems a minute, the time I groped along the beach seems nights on end. And then one of the shades turned solid, and I was in such a case I had almost bolted before it spoke and I knew it for Rolldown Nickerson, the beachcomber. He was a good man in ways. But you must remember his business was a vulture's business, and something of it was in his soul.
She thought a moment, and then briefly, but clearly, sketched the life of those islands, showing how, in spite of missionary labour selfish and unselfish, the native became the victim of civilisation, the prey of the white trader and beachcomber, who were protected by men-of-war with convincing Nordenfeldt and Hotchkiss guns; how the stalwart force of barbaric existence declined, and with it the crude sense of justice, the practice of communism at its simplest and purest, the valour of nationality.
By this time the others were finishing, and for another quarter of an hour the boy was kept busy at work, to find in the very thick of it that he had an addition to his audience in the shape of the coarse-faced beachcomber, who looked less ferocious now, with his countenance softened by a good-humoured grin. "Feeding 'em up then," he said. "Mind they don't finish up by eating you."
The beachcomber himself, a wild-looking, dark-skinned ruffian, who had clothed himself in a shirt and trousers, now came aft and again assured the captain that he need feel no alarm at the great number of naked savages who now thronged the deck, from the windlass right aft to the wheel.
Captain Mitchell's heart was so heavy that he would have preferred for the time being a complete solitude to the best of company. But any company would have been preferable to the doctor's, at whom he had always looked askance as a sort of beachcomber of superior intelligence partly reclaimed from his abased state. That feeling led him to ask "What has that ruffian done with the other two?"
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