Referring to my diary and the scraps which I wrote down in those old days, I find the notes considerably mixed up, parts quite obliterated through my sea-chest getting washed about on sailing-ships. Many of the pages are missing. But my memory is good, and I can easily fill in the interminable gaps. Indeed, the best part of this book is being written within the sounds of the winds in the palms. The dark, sombre green of the tropic landscape stretches for miles and miles. There lies the expanse of the sapphire-hued ocean, ending far away in the pale saffron fires of the skyline’s sunset, as, in my imagination, I softly dip my pen into the magic foams that sparkle on the coral-dust sands at my feet and sigh with the coco-palms overhead.
I see by my notes that I have already recorded in my previous books[4] many of the incidents connected with my visit to Samoa at this period. And, having also previously related much that befell me on my first voyage to Nuka Hiva and Hiva oa, I have no alternative but to revert to the incidents of a very interesting experience which came to me after I had “jumped ship” in Fiji. And this I will do in the next chapter.
_A Vagabond’s Odyssey_; _Wine-Dark Seas and Tropic Skies_; _Sailor and Beachcomber_.
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A Heathen Monastery—A scene of Primitive Heathenism—My unsolicited Professional Engagement—I imbibe Kava—I am made “Taboo”—Things that I may not Confess—My escape—Fanga Loma—A Native Village—The Enchantress of the Forest—Temptation—In Suva again.
I RECALL that, though my profession has never burdened me with wealth till it seemed an encumbrance, my violin has enabled me to delve without harm into the most secretive, dangerous heathen societies and sacred festivals. Where a white man would have been, in the ordinary way, clubbed, or doped with a mixture of kava and South Sea strychnine for intruding at a secret sacred festival, I have been received with open arms. It seems incredible, when I think of the magnificent receptions I have had through being able to play my old Sunday-school hymns on a fiddle before ex-cannibal chiefs.
I was in Suva, Fiji, when I managed to wheedle my way into a heathen monastery that was the one surviving temple of another age. This sacred hell was situated in a picturesque spot up in the Kai Tholos mountains. These Kai Tholos tribes were a fierce mountain people who, up till that date, had successfully resisted the advances of the British missionaries. Few of them were still living, but those few most certainly did their best to make up for the iniquities of the missing when they met in their temple cavern four miles west of Mandaua, not far from the Rewa River. The aforesaid river ran through an isolated district in those days. Where now the new sugar and coffee plantations are, there was nothing more than a few taro and pineapple patches that supplied the scattered villages with work and food.