And--still concerning this matter--“one word more, and I have done.” Some weeks after my arrival, I was going round the group in company with the Resident Commissioner and a few more officials, who were holding courts and administering justice in the various islands. The Commissioner was late getting back to the ship one afternoon, and the captain asked him if he had been detained.
“Only a little while,” replied the guardian angel of the group, cheerfully rattling his pockets, which gave forth a pleasant chinking sound. “Another dozen of divorces. We’ll have a new road round the island next year.” And he went to dinner.
Divorce in the Cook Islands is not an expensive luxury. If memory serves me right, it costs under thirty shillings, and there is a sixpence somewhere in the price--I am unable to say why. But I remember very well indeed, after the officials had gone home, when I was travelling round about other islands with a captain, who had just taken over the ship and did not know the Cook group, that dignitary came to me one day and said:
“I can’t make out these hands of mine. They’re a very decent lot for niggers, and don’t give no trouble, but one and another, now that we’re going round the islands, keeps coming to me and asking me for an advance on their wages, because, says they, they’ve been a long time from home, and they wants it--and every blessed one of them he wants the same advance!”
“Was it so-and-so?” I asked, mentioning a certain small sum with a sixpence in it.
“How on earth did you know?” was the reply.
“Price of a divorce from the Commissioner,” I explained.
“Well!” said the captain, who was a hard-shelled old whaler, with a strong religious cast. And again--“Well!”
“That’s what I think myself,” I explained. “But it certainly fills the exchequer. I hear the score runs up to ten or twelve apiece, often enough.”
“Disgustin’,” said the captain, spitting over the rail.
But the incident has its own significance, so I have recorded it.
I linger long over the life and ways of Raratonga, for I spent many very happy weeks there--studying native customs, and taking notes? Well, perhaps--a little, at all events. Raratonga is not quite so lazy a place as Tahiti, and the climate is less trying. Still--still------