Rascals in Paradise

  The only bright spot in the Manila incident is the fact that even under those conditions Bully was able to convince American consuls that his heart was pure. As if in payment for our officials’ sublime faith in Hayes, he now turned his attention to American shipping, and what he accomplished there is well documented.

  Penniless, he landed in San Francisco in the spring of 1876 and immediately became fascinated by the water front Striking up an acquaintance with a married couple named Moody, he proposed a partnership which would purchase the thirteen-ton schooner Lotus and make a triple fortune in the South Seas. He painted a vivid picture of himself as captain, the Moodys as passengers, and a fine Scandinavian cook to dish up the victuals. The gullible pair envisioned enjoyment and riches, tropical isles, and practically endless wealth now being held by stupid native chiefs who just loved to be defrauded.

  On the midnight of October 7, when the tiny vessel was ready to sail, Hayes remembered that the Lotus’ chronometer was still ashore, being repaired at the watchmaker’s. Moody was sent ashore to pick it up, and when he returned to report that somebody from the ship had collected the chronometer that very afternoon, he saw that the Lotus was gone, and his wife, Jenny Ford Moody, as well.

  On the run south, Hayes did not get along well with the man who had signed on as cook. He was a young Scandinavian named Peter Radeck, known along the water front as Dutch Pete. Hayes kept the cook standing sea watch as well as running the galley, and often beat him.

  Arriving in golden Apia, his best-loved port in the Pacific, Hayes was welcomed like a king, and with some reluctance he left Samoa on January 2, 1877, headed for Kusaie, to pick up the coconuts he had accumulated there. Louis Becke claims that he was also going to dig up a sum of money that he had buried on Kusaie after the wreck.

  The best account of what happened on this voyage was given by the mate of the Lotus, Charles Elson of Honolulu, who aside from Dutch Pete and Jenny Moody was the only other person aboard. The cook was still being tyrannized by the captain, and had been flogged for trying to desert at Jaluit.

  The Lotus left that island on March 31, 1877, and encountered a bad storm. Elson, wearied by his trick at the wheel in the little cockpit astern, was sleeping below. He was wakened by the sound of revolver shots. He rushed up, and in the dark made out the figures of Hayes and Dutch Pete fighting on deck above the cockpit. The cook held an object shaped like a cross—either an iron tiller or a wooden boom crutch—and swung it full on the captain’s skull.

  Bully’s clenched hands dropped to his sides, his head fell on his breast, his knees sagged, and as the Lotus swept into a trough of the sea, his massive body lurched backward into the ocean. He may still have been alive, but nobody turned the ship around to go and look. Appropriately, Bully Hayes had found an unmarked grave among the sharks of the Pacific. The keels of his stolen ships would cross those waves no more.

  With Bully Hayes definitely gone, Dutch Pete collapsed in terror, then tried to tell Mate Elson what had happened. The final version was not clear, but it seemed that Hayes felt that his cook had not obeyed an order smartly enough and had cried, “I’ll kill you and throw you overboard!”

  The burly captain leaped forward to carry out his threat, but Dutch Pete slipped out a revolver and fired several rapid shots. Some must have hit Hayes, or Pete would never have had time to snatch up the heavy cross and crush the buccaneer’s skull. It is only fair to state, however, that Louis Becke always contended that “the woman and the mate deliberately planned his murder.… Hayes tumbled back into the cabin, then, still breathing, he was dragged up on deck and dropped overboard.”

  Mate Elson took the Lotus back to Jaluit, where it slowly rotted on the reef. Instead of being charged with murder, Dutch Pete was hailed as a public hero. In fact, the authorities made no inquiry into Hayes’s death, so content was everyone with his passing. Dutch Pete drifted off with the flotsam of the South Seas, but Mrs. Moody made her way to Honolulu, where she died in poverty and blindness.

  Often throughout the Pacific, Bully Hayes, in order to forestall pursuit or arrest, had announced his own death. Now, when he was really dead, it was years before old hands in the islands would believe it. Confidently they expected the fiery fraud to turn up on their shores seeking coconuts or pretty girls, and as they waited, they began to embroider the legend of Bully Hayes. It is now possible to winnow out most of the substantial facts, but quite impossible to kill the legend.

  Two almost opposing views of William Henry Hayes can be found. Louis Becke, who knew Hayes better than any other writer, summarized his character as “an extraordinary combination of bravery, vice, kindheartedness, and savagery.” Elsewhere he said: “I have spoken of Hayes as I found him—a big, brave man; passionate and moody at times, but more often merry and talkative (he was an excellent raconteur); goodhearted and generous in one hour, hard and grasping in the next. He was as suave, as courteous and as clever as the trained diplomatist when occasion demanded the arts of civilization. He would ‘haze’ a malingerer unmercifully; but he never omitted a nod of approval or a word of praise to the sailor who did his work well. With women his manner was captivating; and no one entered more heartily into a romp with little native children, whom he allowed to do anything they liked with him.… Nine tenths of the tales that have been told of and written about him are purely fictitious. He has been held up to the public as a bloodthirsty pirate of the worst type and accused of crimes he never dreamt of.… He was a much maligned man, and scores of writers who never saw him in their lives have made a good deal of money by their monstrous tales of his alleged murders, abductions, poisonings, and piracies.”

  An opposing view was registered some years later by A. T. Saunders, an Australian journalist who studied all the facts he could find and concluded: “That Hayes was a cowardly ‘bully’ I am satisfied. He was ignominiously captured by a Samoan chieftain in 1869, was arrested, and the Black Diamond taken from him, by Akerstein at New Zealand in 1864, and in 1865 Britt and others took the cutter Wave from him, also in New Zealand.… Hayes was a sneak-thief when he could not cajole or bully. I know of no instance when he did not deceive and rob those who trusted him. He bolted from Adelaide in 1858, Frisco in 1859, from Auckland in 1864, Hokitika in 1867, and Samoa in 1870, having deluded and defrauded people who had trusted him.” It has even been whispered to Bully’s discredit that he never was much of a hand for guzzling liquor, and that he preferred to leave such befuddlement to his chosen victims.

  At any rate, these are our conclusions: There is no evidence that Bully Hayes ever murdered any white person, “except,” as one apologist argued, “his wife Roma, and that ought not to count against him.” The likelihood that he caused her death by drowning is remote. It has never been proved that he killed personally any of the blackbirds that he captured in the South Seas, but it is likely that he did. Certainly, many must have died on his slave ships.

  There is no evidence that Hayes ever captured a ship on the high seas in an authentic act of piracy, and when one considers how easily he came by ships through guile, one concludes that he would have been crazy to take one by force. Still, the disappearance of Ben Pease, and Bully’s grin of satisfaction when he turned up in command of that cruel man’s ship, tempts the mind. But we know nothing specific.

  Bully was frequently charged with having made victims walk the plank in the style of eighteenth-century pirates. He never did. He may have told young girls whom he kidnaped from remote islands that they had to sleep below with him or he would send them to the plank, but hundreds of sea captains of the time seemed to have followed that practice and, so far as we know, none of the girls drowned.

  All other charges, as Louis Becke might have said, were proved “except leprosy.” The number of ships he stole cannot be accurately computed. The slaves he impressed must have run into the thousands. The money he got by fraud probably totaled well over a million dollars, all of which he wasted. That he invaded peaceful ports and stole all the coconuts he cou
ld find, we know for sure. That he subdued and debaunched whole islands we find reported by trustworthy witnesses. That he kidnaped and raped children is on record. He was a known bigamist three times over, and if one counted his island marriages, he was probably guilty one hundred times more.

  But the fact that will probably live longest about the buccaneering Cleveland citizen was this—he had one ear and kept the stump of the other covered by long curls, which he tended with a lady’s curling iron.

  8

  Louis Becke, Adventurer and Writer

  There are several ways to test a stranger’s contention that he knows the Pacific, but there is only one sure way.

  You might ask him to identify the four famous ships of this ocean—(Vittoria, Endeavour, Bounty, Leonora)—but some people don’t like ships and pay small attention to them.

  Or you might require the variant names of certain well-known islands—Penrhyn (Tongareva), Easter (Rapa Nui), the Marianas (Ladrones), Pleasant (Nauru), Stewart (Sikaiana)—but many travelers do not easily associate names in this way.

  One of the best tests of Pacific knowledge is to ask which groups contain the following famous individual islands. Where was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Abemama? (Gilberts.) Where is Rapa Iti, the island which is rumored to have ten lovely girls for every eligible male? (Australs.) To which group does Bikini belong? (Marshalls.) Where lies the forbidding cannibal island of Malekula? (New Hebrides.) The weakness of this test is that men who navigate vessels will always be able to answer better than others, who may in different respects be better informed.

  The best quiz for starting an argument is to ask which islands are associated with certain outstanding missionaries who made history in the Pacific. Where did the saintly John Williams meet his death? (Erromanga of the Martyrs.) What group did the extraordinarily able Shirley Baker dominate for a generation? (Tonga.) Where did the fiery priest Father Laval rule for thirty-seven years? (Mangareva.) Where did sagacious Hiram Bingham operate? (Hawaii.) But, of course, this test fails completely when the traveler growls, “I never discuss missionaries.”

  There is only one test that never fails. Simply ask the stranger, “Who do you think is the best writer about the Pacific?” From his answer you can tell every time if he knows what he’s talking about.

  If he says, “James Norman Hall,” you know he loves the high romance of the ocean, but you cannot be sure he knows the ocean itself.

  If he replies, “Robert Louis Stevenson,” you probably have hold of a man who has read nothing since childhood, but who loved what he read then. Many travelers tour the Pacific spurred mainly by such youthful reading, but they rarely see much and their knowledge remains partial.

  If your traveler replies, “Herman Melville,” you are in trouble, for while Melville is unquestionably the greatest writer to have dealt with the Pacific, it is shocking how many people discuss Moby Dick and Typee and Omoo without ever having read them. In the Pacific you quickly find that you can’t trust people who claim Melville as their favorite author. Their answer, as police sometimes report of witnesses, is too good.

  Nor should the answer, “Robert Dean Frisbie,” be accepted. There is a growing cult, in which one of the authors confesses membership, which holds that Frisbie was the most graceful, poetic and sensitive writer ever to have reported on the islands, but other critics hold that his charm was too tenuous. Certainly his later books deteriorated pathetically.

  There is only one correct answer. Almost without fail, people who know the Pacific will choose as their favorite author Louis Becke. And equally without fail, those who do not know the great ocean will not have heard of Becke.

  The present authors state without equivocation that if one wants an honest, evocative, unpretentious and at times fearfully moving account of the Pacific in its heyday, he must read Louis Becke. They do not claim that Becke was a great writer, for he was markedly limited in both scope and skill. They do not claim that he ever wrote one completely satisfying book, for all his works are chaotic. Nor do they even claim that he could invent colorful characters, for his are monotonous. But they do insist that in some strange way this unlettered Australian absorbed the essence of an ocean and preserved it in his books. Around the world, men who have wandered the Pacific go back again and again to the works of Louis Becke, and as they leaf through the graceless stories of this awkward man, suddenly they are gripped in a veritable typhoon of nostalgia.

  For Becke could describe the grubby foreshore of an atoll, or the waters rushing into a lagoon through a break in the reef, or a trader’s lonely shack, in such salt-stained and wind-ripped words as to make anyone who knows these things cry out in almost anguished recollection of his youth, “Ah, that’s the way it was!” Louis Becke is the laureate of the prosaic, the curator of things as they actually were.

  Consider the typical Becke yarn, “A Basket of Breadfruit.” It takes fewer than two thousand words to tell and has neither a beginning nor an end, but it immediately drags the reader into island life and for the moment he is a South Sea trader, hurrying his small schooner inside the perilous reef.

  It happened in Samoa, at the time when Malietoa was trying to gain control. The trader had taken his vessel into Apia and was about to return to his post on another island when he idly stopped to watch a group of native girls chewing kava root and spitting the narcotic juice into the bowl from which toasts would later be drunk.

  When he was teased about not having a wife he said that he was ready to take one if a girl could be found who was untouched by scandal; whereupon an old woman presented her beautiful granddaughter. The crowd agreed that she was a girl above reproach, but the maiden was so humiliated by the laughter that she fled, followed by her grandmother.

  Some hours later, as he was about to sail off, he was met on the beach by the old woman and the girl, who was solemnly offered to him as a wife, either to marry or to take Samoan style. All the old woman wanted was passage in the boat for herself and her basket of two large, ripe breadfruit.

  The trader thought, “This is well for me, for if I get the girl away thus quietly from all her relations I will save much in marriage presents,” but during the dark trip he found that he would have escaped giving presents anyway. All the girl’s relatives, except her grandmother, had been killed in recent fighting. A day and a half ago her one brother and a cousin were killed, and their heads had been shown at Matautu. Since then she had grieved and wept and eaten nothing.

  This news touched the trader and he produced a tin of sardines for a midnight snack, but he could find no biscuit, so instead of ransacking the stores below deck, he decided to cut open one of the old woman’s breadfruit. But when he slipped his hand into the basket, under the wrappings his fingers touched a human eye.

  Striking a match hurriedly, he peered into the basket and found not breadfruit, but two heads with closed eyes, and white teeth showing through lips blue with death. The old woman had begged the heads from the enemy and was taking them back through the lines for ceremonial burial in their ancient village.

  The trader was angry at this deception, but the girl explained that Malietoa’s troops would shoot them if they tried to run the blockade. So some trick was necessary. That was all. Then the girl ate the sardines and, leaning her head against the trader’s bosom, fell asleep.

  The incident probably happened, and Becke narrated it with precision, for to anyone who knows Samoa there is an inescapable ring of truth about the setting, the style of expression and the mood. But if Becke had a passion for reporting island life honestly, that passion diminished markedly when he wrote about himself, for practically every statement he offers as autobiography has to be questioned. He cites four different birth dates, according to the age he wanted to be when retelling a particularly good yarn.

  The prosaic records of the Registrar-General of New South Wales prove that he was born on June 18, 1855, and that his name was properly George Lewis Becke. His parents were named Frederick and Caroline Matilda Becke. H
is father was clerk of petty sessions in the old town of Port Macquarie, about two hundred miles north of Sydney. Louis, as he preferred to spell his name, was the youngest of six children. He was disposed to go off and camp in the bush, or watch his aboriginal black friends spear five-foot fish in the coastal lagoons. Before he was ten he had twice run away from home and had to be brought back by the mounted police. Fear of brutal teachers in school and Sunday school left him with a stammer that he was never able to overcome.

  His father, black-bearded and stern, believed that the boys of the family should master the practical arts of boat and camp, although the kindly mother and sisters spoiled them in between times. The family was none too prosperous, and life in provincial Port Macquarie was boring. “I have often thought,” Louis wrote later, “that that town only wanted a small cathedral to make it, facile princeps, the dullest and most God-forsaken hole on the whole Australian continent. It was built by convict hands in the days of the cruel System, and nothing but an earthquake or a big fire will ever improve it.”

  The family moved to Sydney about 1865 and got a house in Hunter’s Hill on a point jutting into the Parramatta River directly opposite Cockatoo Island, then a prison. Ten-year-old Louis often gazed across at the gloomy buildings perched high on the treeless island, guarded by pacing red-coated sentries. The sound of the prison bell was in his ears, and he not only watched the long lines of wretched men marching to and from their toil in the dry dock or among the sandstone quarries, but twice was taken with his brothers to visit the men inhabiting the cells hewn from solid rock.