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Chapter XIV. Native Women Burst Their Bonds, and Alarm of the Enemy's Approach.

Perhaps, for the matter of lucidness, it may he as well to explain that, in addition to all the work that these whalers had on hand in connection with the defence, they had, at the same time, a great deal to attend to in connection with the special calling which they were following. Moreover, they were enforced to remove, for better security, from the quarters which they hitherto had occupied. A rough log hut, of portly dimensions, so as to accommodate the lot of them, was fitted up on the beach, southward of Paratutu, convenient to where they had already re-docked their boats. This new station, it is true, was farther away from the seat of their militant operations. However, the war-pah of Ngamotu could be reached with more safety than from where they were housed formerly, as there was a covered-way from the new site to what may be termed the citadel, almost right along. Out of the thirty whalers, as many as eleven of that number were the acknowledged husbands of Native women. These women, as already has been notified, were compelled to live in undesired singleness away from their spouses, uncomfortably cooped up on the island of Moturoa: thereon, by this time, these wives were in a state bordering on open rebellion, estranged from everything they held dear, transported on this bleak sea-girt tor. Not only, poor disconsolates, were they separated from their connubial complements, but also separated from their customary pastimes and pursuits: from the erstwhile much enjoyed wanderings in gossiping groups at low tides among the boulders on the beach, hunting shellfish, or from their excursions through the old forest glades gathering wild fruit. The exasperation which they were in at their protracted restraint can be fully understood when it is hereby made known that nearly everyone of the wives belonging to whalers, together with several others, and also two or three young unmarried girls, actually went as far as to have ventured one calm, moonlight night, to swim the distance of over thirty chain to the shore! invading the whalers' quarters just while they, the whalers, were about to turn-in for the night. What was now to be done? The tars, of course, could page 85 not find it in their hearts to turn them back again. No; they could not think of doing such a thing as that: whatever might be the consequence, such would be out of all reason. They would shelter them now until the return of morning, then they would, without ever allowing it to be known, quietly take them back in their boat to where they came from. Erangi, the chief in whose charge they were temporary in, was not likely ever to hear so much as even a word about this wild escapade: meanwhile, certainly the most advisable thing to do was to heap more logs on the fire, which had been permitted to go low down, so as these amphibia could squat around it as near as they could get, to dry their still dripping locks, and their sadly soaked scanty garments: also internally animate their partially chilled hearts, by a judicious allowance off what here was termed the pure Jamaica stingo. Dickey Barrett was away at the big pah, sleeping for the night; but Bill the Preacher nevertheless held Gideon Polton, the Dep., responsible for the preservation of seemly decorum under the rather odd circumstances in which they were, for the time being, placed. Groggy Dyson's fingers tingled, as it were, and would have fain made this remarkable sirenic raid, an excuse for an all-round drinking carousal; but the Dep. would not have it, and sat upon him for his ever daring to hint at such an unseemly impropriety, saying that, as long as he—Polton—remained in temporary charge, he should do his duty, that he would, by seeing that no such ribald license was taken. “No! Dyson, I again tell you—listen! there'll be none of your hankered-after revelry here!”

“I wish to gad,” irreverently broke in Jerry Towser, sitting with one of his arms around the neck of his good-natured spouse Toitu, she streaming wet whilst squatting contentedly between his knees, “that the Powers-that-be, had av chosen some other place for a whaling station than this wretchedly heaven-desharted hole, whir niver a wan, the niver a blissed minunt at all at all, gits ever any pace o' mind!”

“The place is as right as ninepence, Towser,” rebuked Jack Love, the carpenter, alias Chips: continuing, “Well, well boys! aint it comical, too, to see some people so glaringly stoopid, so absurdly dense, that they even pay ugly compliment without noticing it, to those they have, whilst doing so, squatting comfortably between their very knees! I don't see, myself,” Jack proceeded deliberating, “how that any place should be run down like to stinking fish, just because a pack of darned rapacious burglars have set their greedy eyes upon it. Taking a proper view of these things, don't now it behove the neighbours round to render whatever assistance lies in their power to those so beset by such ugly, covetous customers? Well, that is nothing more than what I consider we are now doing. An ounce of hot lead in the gizzards of each of the heads of these Waikato pests, who wont allow people to live quietly in their own homes, would just be their proper deserts.”

“Well spoken, Jack: bully, Jack,” as soon as he had wound up came from a choir of voices.

“Ay! and so think all of us; and so think all of us,” was drawlingly page 86 reiterated by old rheumy Joe Grundy, planted in a corner by himself, alternately quipping, twisting and grimacing with poignant muscular twinges.

One of the Maori wives, designated Tirri, it may be supposed, guided by old Joe's supplementary remark, gave what she must have considered in her ruminations to be the due compliment to Joe's “All of us,” by her starting up, vociferously, “O ees, a olly kute wello: o ees, a olly kute wello.” Tirri had, some years' back, been as far as Hobart, and therein, most likely, acquired that popular refrain. However, Tirri's acquirements were not going to be permitted by her sisterhood to “waste their sweetness in the desert air,” as' the entire company of them loudly took it up, and again and again gave out discordantly, “O ces a olly kute wello: O ees a olly kute wello; and so say all of us,” and went on until that once they saw Bill the Preacher shaping so as to fulminate.

“Men!” interluded Bill, “you've all heard Jack Love's sentiments, haven't ye? Them er sentiments likewise be mine. Them are the sentiments of all that be endowed with proper grace. Them are the sentiments, I say, that be worthy of an abiding place in every man and mother's son who has aught of regard for his condition when the, hull of the stately craft is buried in the sands of a lee shore. Them be the sentiments which every man-jack of us here around should zealously maintain towards our Maori brethren, who are now in sore travail — sore travail, I say! under woeful affliction, not knowing the day nor the hour e'en when there may enter into their inheritance, famished scorpions and ravenous wolves, and, without a grain of ceremony, cut them off from all earthly things: yea, consume them like that unto which fire consumeth dry flax; and them who have known them once shall rever, henceforth nevermore know them again. ‘Awake, awake Deborah; let all thine enemies perish.’ ‘Tell it not in Gath: publish it not in Askelon.’ That we shall stand with our loins ungird and be living witnesses of such cruelty and utterly base abominations—tell it, I say, never, that the place that we are now in, is a ‘heaven-forsaken hole.’ We be living, men, why, in nothing o the sort, as there ben't a single spot in the habitable universe forsaken by He beyond the clouds, above the firmament. So you all, my fellow brethren, swarths and whites conjointly, now in sore tribulation, let us prepare to fight in a good cause—the cause of humanity—the cause of justice! and, last of all—the weightiest cause of all—that be self -preservation! ‘Who will go with me this day to fight the battles of the Lord?”

Here, Bill the Preacher concluded, wiped the reeking perspiration off his face with his shirt-cuffs, and sunk his head for support on the palms of his capacious hands, suggestive of wrestling severely with inwardly conflicting emotions.

The pause following the discourse was broken by the dark, though comely daughters of the Maori again striking up, “O ees a olly kute wello! O ees a olly kute wello!” But, instantly, all was quashed, excepting page 87 Hena, by the great officiô, the Dep. Hena would persist in giving, as a supplement to “ees a olly kute wello!” one of Jack Wright's, her teacher's, latest lessons, in these words:

Happy I't pe, as Pos'ns Pal on pay-tay,
Wir I te Kween! wir I King Shorges' Layty!

“Why why-cat-toes!” as Hena finished, “don't you come at once, and have done with it” Groggy Dyson punningly exclaimed, “and settle the job either the one way or the other? I am sick, even almost to death, with this confounded shilly-shallying. Surely they're not begrudging to leave the seagulls a little of the putrid carrion to pick at! I'm thinking that we'll not fare much better ourselves if they don't soon make haste. Goodness gracious! there mayn't be a craft here this next six weeks!”

“It's the bit drain, Groggy, ai' mon, and nae the food that's jist noo your hale conseederation,” remarked Jimmie Ling; “but noo, seriously speaking, if so be that we're jammed up this way tae a the supplies become absorbed, it'll nae doot be raither a rackin kind of poseession. Lod! I jist noo mind a seemlar coinseedence hap'nin when I was in my 'prenticeship in the bark ‘Billy-go-along,’ when we were lying one time in Madras roadstead—–”

“Bah! Billy-go-along wid yer old grandmother's spinning-wheel, Jimmie,” unpolitely interrupted Jerry Towser. “Sowl! wan wid be apt to suppose that you could spin out coincidences as readily as that owld lady, I've jist spoke aff, could spin hanks of yarn! Go to! Jimmie, I've never the least of patience wid ye: that, indade, is what I hiv'nt!”

As the Dep. was about to speak, David Evans [alias Taffy] got his word out first, despite, ere doing so, having had to shake off his knees his dusky rib. “I woot suggest,” began Taffy, “that any man making himsel so riticulas wit old yarns shoot pe punished first and then foint after. Efrey one must haf heart Jimmie Ling's coinsitences as many often as pe days in te year, so help me pop! Folk might think on something else than stupit coinsitences when they tont know the precise moment that might sen them to somewhere that's nefer seen, to my knowledge, on any ship's chart.”

“Tawy, Tawy, me say me like a one more tot o krok!” This modest solicitation was ingenuously communicated by Mrs. Taffy, as Mr. Taffy resumed his former supine position on his lair. “Me, Tawy, me tell oo what it is, me tampt try! My mout, tes minout, all te same as te stones of Maori ov'n.”

“We hal, we ewery one tampt try,” shouted, in concert, half-dozen other wahines. “Tawy, oo, kute man; kute man, oo, Tawy.”

Then, here again, cutely, these sharp, tawny wenches discovered a connecting link with the words “good man,” and “good fellow,” in their former refrain, inasmuch as they lustily rang out this time, in splendid conformity, “Oh! ees, a olly kute wello.” But, most discouragingly, the Dep. was relentless to the plead page 88 ings of the bewitching sirens as far as moistening their chaps went, serving them after the manner that, on one memorable occasion, has been cited as was served once in a warmer place, to an erstwhile very rich man. Nay, the apparently stony-hearled Dep. went further even in the way of opposition to the wishes of these sorry parched-mouth damsels, by telling them straight that, if their conduct henceforth was not more submissible, he should certainly, without any further nonsense about it, launch one of the boats in the dark and take them back, tied together as prisoners, on the rock; ay! whatever the upshot should be! What would be the result, Mr. Polton put to them, should at any moment now, all the whalers be suddenly called away to man the guns! and the chief, Erangi, come to know that we left you behind in the whalers' caboose instead of being on Moturoa? The best thing, till we pack you off quietly in a boat in the morning, for you all to do—do you hear me?—is to go to sleep, and let the whalers take to their hammocks and go to sleep also. “I know my duty, and my duty I do, without either fear or favor! You all hear that!”

There were, to their credit be it said, no recalcitrant airs whatever with these thirsty Nymphs: no standing on their dignity at all, with these children of the wild-wastes. Prone they all went, higgledepiggledy on the ground convenient to the blazing logs, with the whalers' hammocks right over their heads.

Swinging away, the seamen were in the sort of couch they had been for a long time accustomed to: accustomed to on the tranquil and on the tumultuous main: the couch, in sooth, which they had been educated to have a liking for. Now, in these hammocks, some, peradventure, may be dreaming of the far-away ever-cherished isle in another hemisphere; dreaming of the many incidents there connected with their giddy youthful career. Some may be revisiting, at this moment, the haunts of their boyhood days and vividly see, once more, the old nooks and crannies where they risked life and limb to get at, in pursuit of birds' nests. Again, they may animatedly enter in the games which they were wont to contest on their native village green. Possibly they review the past actions which met with an approving conscience: possibly, also, review those which met with self-condemnation, which may cause them, even now, in their oscillating couches, to evoke an inaudible murmur. Moreover, they may, too, in their reverie, have a clear outline before them of the ship lying down the stream which they first left their home in: yes; a clear panoramic scroll of such may come into their vision! Consecutively they behold again their relations and old associates coming upon deck a little while before the anchor was weighed, their fond mother bringing with her a couple of pair of warm stockings—her own knitting! the father, a full box of tobacco, and a small pocket Bible with selected, marked paragraphs: the sweetheart, a neat, cambric handkerchief, with the letters nicely embroidered on it with her own deft hands—“Forget me not.” … Sleep, sleep on you worthy tars, you shall have, as you all have had, many is hte time before, a rude awakening. page 89 Aye! but this time though, it will not be by the sudden burst of a monsoon or tornado, to go and strengthen the watch; but worse than that—ever so much worse than that! It will be to meet hordes of barbarous savages flushed with recent victory, eager to shed your blood, as well as the blood of those whom you, in a manner, have become endeared to: whose cause you have generously espoused through having with them, for a series of years, lived in friendship.

A short time before day-dawn, one of the occupants of the hammocks awakes to see through the chinks of the roughly-jointed logs, a red, lurid light: undressed, jumps down on the floor, and passes his head through the half-open door.

“Show leg all! Show leg all!” he immediately cries. “Oliver's got a bonfire ablaze on Paratutu!”

In an instant afterwards the gongs and conches were heard in the pah. The drowsy-eyed sleepers were at once upon their feet, groping hastily in the dark for their clothes.

“Fall-in, quickly, men: do now, ‘look slippy’!” excitedly ordered the Dep. “Now you, you women,” he next proceeded, “this is just the very thing which has bothered my head this whole blessed night—blessed if it isn't!”

“Ah, you don't bother your head then any more with us,” spoke the round moon-faced Mrs. Towser, who was most up in English, “for we hal makey te swim here, and why not for hal of us makey the swim back again? Come, all of you wahines, efery one of you, before te men leafs—you follow me!”

Then, then! “Bravo, bravo! plucky wahines!” in a trice, every one of these hardy, fearless women breasted the bellowing surf on their way back to their undesirable quarters! and upon the whalers' beholding their matchless daringness, whilst they were mustering, with irrepressible admiration, they gave them a suppressed cheer, which, being heard, several of the swimmers swayed around their heads on the water, shouting lustily out, “Kif it: kif it: kif it, pakeha; make it like te kute rum grog, hot and strong, mo te pluty Waikato! Ka nui pai, Ehak te wailler!”

The voice of Hena, while she rested for a spell on an intervening rock, was after heard on the shore, trilling out,—

Happy I't pe, as Pos'ns Pal on pay-tay,
Wir I te Kween! wir I King Shorge's Layty!