In the Strange South Seas by Beatrice Grimshaw

Author:Beatrice Grimshaw [Grimshaw, Beatrice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Nonfiction
ISBN: 4064066167943
Publisher: Good Press
Published: 2021-05-20T04:00:00+00:00

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CHAPTER X

How not to see the Islands—Lonely Niué—A Heathen Quarantine Board—The King and the Parliament—The Great Question of Gifts—Is it Chief-like?—The New Woman in Niué—Devil-fish and Water-Snakes—An Island of Ghosts—How the Witch-Doctor died—The Life of a Trader.

LANDINGS on Pacific islands are not usually easy, but there are few approaches as bad as that of Niué, the solitary outlier of Polynesia. It is a difficult task to get within reasonable distance of the land in the first place, and when the ship has succeeded in manoeuvring safely up to the neighbourhood of the cruel cliffs, the trouble is only beginning. There are no harbours worth the name on the island, although the cliffs show an occasional crack through which a boat may be brought down to the sea, and the circling reef is broken here and there. The best that a ship can do is to lie off at a safe distance, put out a boat, and trust to the skill of the crew to effect a landing on the wharf. In anything but really calm weather, communication is impossible. However, there are very many calm days in this part of the Pacific, so chances are fairly frequent.

It was not at all as calm as one could have wished when the Duchess put out her whaleboat to bring me ashore. But the pirate trusted to his luck, and was, as usual, justified. The boat passage proved to be a mere crack in the reef, through which the sea rushed with extreme violence, dancing us up and down like a cork. It was not difficult for our smart Maori crew to fend us off the knife-edged coral walls with their oars, as we manoeuvred down towards the spider-legged little iron ladder standing up in the surf, and pretending to be a wharf. But when we got within an oar’s length of the ladder, and the boat was leaping wildly on every swell, things got more exciting. The only way of landing on Niué is to watch your time at the foot of the ladder, while the men fend the boat off the coral, and jump on to the rungs at the right moment. A native standing on the platform at the top takes you by the arms as you rise, and snatches you into the air as the eagle snatched Endymion. Only, instead of going all the way to heaven, you land on the pier—or what passes for it—and find yourselves upon the soil of Niué.

Behind the pier rises a little pathway cut in the face of the rock, and leading up to the main street of the capital. Once up the path, we are fairly arrived in Savage Island.

It is not a place known to the globe-trotting tourist, as yet. Much of the Pacific has been “discovered” by the tripper element of recent years, but Niué is still almost inviolate. Once here, if one seeks the true spirit of the South Seas, one still may find it.

Travellers go in

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