On foggy nights, when the guard boats rowed around the island to prevent escapes by water, the children would go down to the rocks to listen. Once, on a winter dawn, Louis heard a shot from a sentry’s rifle, followed by the clamor of the escape bell and the gasps of a fleeing creature, exhausted by his swim through the icy water, clinging with bleeding hands to the slimy shore, too weak to drag himself further. Becke’s disdain for authority in later years might perhaps be traced to his early sympathy with victims of the convict system.
The boy attended the Fort Street School on Observatory Hill in Sydney, and there obtained the brief but sound education that was to last him for the rest of his life and to get him clerical posts on many a South Sea schooner. Years later, when critics charged him with ungrammatical writing, the successful author replied: “ ‘I never was taught no grammar.’ … And had I let this lack of knowledge worry me I would never have earned a stiver at literary work.”
When dealing with Becke’s life after the age of twelve, his autobiography absolutely falls apart, for if one lists the adventures he claimed for himself one soon discovers that there could not have been enough years in Becke’s teens to accommodate all that his imagination invented.
Here are some of the things he claimed, in various interviews or reminiscences, as his adventures before the age of nineteen. When he was only twelve he and his brother Vernon embarked on the great Pacific to seek their fortunes. They left Newcastle, N. S. W., on the bark Lizzie and Rosa, commanded by a little red-headed Irishman, a savage bully who boasted of being a Fenian and who was hated by the thirty passengers. From the day they sailed, the crew had to man the pumps, but the captain refused to turn back. The leaky old ship met such a series of adverse gales that it was forty-one days before they sighted the island of Rurutu in the Tubuai group, where young Becke got his first glimpse of a South Sea island.
Here the ship’s company, in a starving condition, demanded that the captain supply them with some of the fresh provisions offered by the natives, but the captain was so stingy he would purchase only one small pig, and that for his table alone. The crew, weary of decayed pork and weevily biscuit, came aft and requested better food. When the fiery little captain refused, the mate, a hot-tempered Yorkshireman, exploded and knocked him down.
The monkeylike captain rushed below and reappeared with a brace of old-fashioned Colt revolvers, one of which he pointed at the mate. Calling upon him to surrender and be put in irons, he fired toward the mate’s head. The bullet missed. The crew rushed the skipper, seized him, and held him under the force pump until he was nearly drowned. Only their respect for the captain’s wife, a lovable woman who was sharing the trip, kept the crew from killing the man.
Louis and Vernon had been eager spectators of the mutiny, but thereafter became so bored that they decided to desert the ship, and had to be locked in their cabins in the port. With the captain confined in a stateroom, the crew worked the ship to Honolulu in twenty days, under the guidance of the mate from Yorkshire. There the mate and all the crew stood trial for mutiny, but were acquitted by the court, mainly through the testimony of the passengers.
Finally the old crate reached California, after a passage of 140 days. Here in San Francisco, in a Front Street saloon, the great adventure of Becke’s life began, for he met the famous buccaneer, Bully Hayes. It was an exciting moment, but Hayes did not hire the boy at that meeting, and they were to part for a few years, until a much wilder adventure occurred in the far Pacific.
Adrift in San Francisco, Vernon Becke found a job on a sheep ranch and Louis became captain’s clerk on a steamer running to Lower California. Using his savings to buy a share in a trading ship, he then cruised the Marshall Islands for several years. “My partner was a grand old seaman,” he said later, “but no navigator, and I was only a youngster and no navigator. It was not long before the skipper burst out drinking, and went mad from delirium tremens. Although I was but a lad, the native crew (three Hawaiians and one Manihiki sailor) begged me to take charge and tie up the old man, who had jumped overboard three times. We made a strait-jacket and put him in it; and a day later sighted an uninhabited atoll.” After treatment ashore, the captain kept sober, cutting down his ration to only half a bottle of gin a day.
On the way to the Palau Islands they rescued a canoe load of Marshallese who had been blown hundreds of miles off their course. Of seventy who had set out, only forty remained alive. Becke provisioned them so that they could sail homeward, and exchanged names with their chief, as a gesture of friendship. Many years later, when Becke was about to die on the island of Majuro, he was nursed back to health by this same chief.
At the end of his first trading cruise, Becke returned to Australia and joined the Charters Towers gold rush in northern Queensland. For two years he drifted about, learning, among other things, locomotive driving, amalgamating metals and practical blacksmithing. But he felt the lure of the sea and returned to Sydney, where he bought a trading cutter and, making his base at Samoa, operated as a smuggler of arms and ammunition during the Samoan civil war. It was here that he re-established acquaintance with Bully Hayes, who was then in the blackbirding trade in the brig Leonora.
Unfortunately, most of this lurid autobiography is impure invention. Young Becke could not have done all these things before he was nineteen, for it would have taken him at least seven years to accomplish so much. Dates and ship registries prove that only four years and five months elapsed between the time he left home on the Lizzie and Rosa and his departure from Samoa to join Bully Hayes on an atoll in the Marshalls.
The Lizzie and Rosa left Newcastle on July 23, 1869, when Louis was actually fourteen. Again, a careful search of the Archives of Hawaii and newspapers of the period give no evidence that his ship put into Honolulu in the summer of 1869 or that a trial of the entire crew for mutiny was held. It seems unlikely that so stirring an event would have passed unnoted.
However, the San Francisco Bulletin for October 20, 1869, does record the arrival of the Lizzie and Rosa from New South Wales. But she arrived via Tahiti and required only eighty-four days for the uneventful trip. Only six names are recorded on the passenger list, and “Becke” is not among them; however, since he traveled by steerage, it is possible that only first-class passengers were named. He certainly reached San Francisco, for the 1871 street directory lists “George Becke, messenger.” And he soon returned to his home, for records in Sydney show that “G. L. Becke, clerk, of San Francisco,” arrived as a second-class passenger on the City of Melbourne on July 24, 1871, from San Francisco via Fiji. He thus reached home at the age of sixteen.
It is probably true, as Becke said later, that he had got acquainted with a Rarotongan native who was an A.B. on the bark Rotumah and who on March 21, 1872, helped him stow away on that ship, bound for Samoa. There he worked for about two years as a clerk in the store of Macfarland and Williams, and perhaps did some smuggling on the side. At Apia he met Hayes, but we shall postpone briefly our account of Becke’s adventures in company with the notorious buccaneer.
Rivaling his experiences with Hayes was a sojourn in 1880 on Nanumanga in the Ellice group, where he worked as trader for the Liverpool firm of John S. De Wolf and Co. The chief of that island had ruled that only one white man could live there among the two hundred natives, and Becke was the man. But after a year, because of a quarrel, he closed his store, dismissed all his workers, and lived alone except for a little native girl, Pautoe, whom he had adopted and who kept house for him. In a letter of July 8, 1880, he wrote to his mother: “I rise every day at 4 A.M. and bathe and then Pautoe gets my breakfast—generally flying fish or lobsters—and fills my pipe (I smoke a pipe now) and cleans the house while I smoke and instruct her how to use a broom and wash plates, etc., without breaking more than two at one wash-up.”
In another letter he described the beachcombing type of trader: “I forgot to say that I had a visitor here in the Vaitupulemele, a trader from an adjacent island, Niutao—George Winchcombe.
Four years on Niutao and cannot yet talk the language; in fact, I had to interpret for him. Such a man to talk, my ears are tingling now. I don’t know how much more I would have suffered if it had not been for a case of gin I produced and by liquoring him up freely I got a little respite. He is a fair sample of too many island traders, fond of liquor and never happy without some grievance to relate against the natives. These are the men that give the missionaries such a pull over all traders.”
At the end of his year on Nanumanga, the trading station was destroyed in a hurricane, so Becke moved to neighboring Nukufetau and set up a store there on his own account. Leaving there in August, 1881, he was shipwrecked on Beru Island in the Gilberts and lost most of his possessions, including a cherished box he had made from pieces of the wreck of Hayes’s Leonora.
Returning from Beru on the George Noble with a poisoned foot whose pain the ship’s doctor could not alleviate, Becke met, during a stop at the island of Abemama, the famous King Tembinok, whom Robert Louis Stevenson was to describe in a notable essay.
After a brief stay in Sydney, Becke was induced to try his luck in the cannibal isles of New Britain. He arrived there in time to witness the collapse of the last expedition sent to that place by the notorious Marquis de Rays. Becke’s account of the death of Captain Gustave Rabardy differs from the usually accepted version. He states that Rabardy, game to the last, died of fever in the stifling cabin of his ship, the Génil; “his dying words to the writer of this sketch, as he grasped his hand for the last time, were, ‘I have tried—and failed. I had not one competent officer with me to help me to maintain my authority or shoot some of the ruffians who have ruined the expedition.’ ” No other source supports Becke’s contention that he was present at Rabardy’s death, but the young man was an unknown at the time, and his appearance might have gone unremarked.
Becke was assigned the most distant trading station at New Britain, and during his stay some horrible massacres were perpetrated by the cannibal natives. He also suffered sickness, for he wrote his mother in November, 1882, from Majuro in the Marshalls, that he was nearly clear of the malarial fever he had picked up in New Britain.
Now began the years of vacillation. He would sicken of island life with its cannibals and malaria and would wander disconsolately back to Australia for some ill-paid land job. Once he tried to raise chickens on a snake-infested tract. Once he decided to be a bank teller in North Queensland, but of this attempt the manager reported to headquarters that Becke was frequently absent from his cage and fought with the accountant; that he showed utter lack of business capacity and a distinct disinclination for work; that he once left £900 in the hands of a barkeeper so that he could go off and watch a fight; and finally, that he dressed unconventionally and kept kangaroo dogs on the bank premises. The young man cheerfully admitted each count of the indictment and begged to resign so that he could return to his beloved islands.
The decade beginning in 1882 saw him wandering among the “Gilbert and Sullivan Islands,” as they have been mal-appropriately called. He met a diversity of creatures, both white and brown, and was a fellow to romantic rascals and ruffians like Paunchy Bill, Joachim Ganga, Paddy Coney and Joe Bird. He also knew Cappy O’Keefe, who had carved out a little kingdom for himself in the Carolines and who was finally to disappear in his tiny schooner Santa Cruz.
Becke never lost his boyish urge for action and craving for new scenes; his curiosity never flagged. Furthermore, he was honestly fond of the brown men and women of the islands and had a happy knack of getting into their confidence. Thus he acquired his deep knowledge of their languages, customs and beliefs.
The reason why such men as he could not return permanently to civilization is perhaps explained by a passage in a novel he later wrote about Bully Hayes: “Return? not they! Why should they go back? Here they had all things which are wont to satisfy man here below. A paradise of Eden-like beauty, amid which they wandered day by day all unheeding of the morrow; food, houses, honors, wives, friends, kinsfolk, all provided for them in unstinted abundance, and certain continuity, by the guileless denizens of these fairy isles amid this charmed main. Why—why, indeed, should they leave the land of magical delights for the cold climate and still more glacial moral atmosphere of their native land, miscalled home?”
Nevertheless, Becke remained torn between civilized Australia and the primitive tropics, and in the final outcome the former won, for on February 10, 1886, at the age of thirty, he sedately married Bessie Mary, daughter of Colonel Maunsell of Port Macquarie, the town he hated. Becke promptly took his wife to the islands, but like most white women, she suffered a decline there, and by 1892 the couple were back in Sydney. Louis, himself stricken by recurrences of fever, was unable to get a job, except the painful, ill-paid work of grubbing out stumps.
Quickly his ambivalence drove him the other way and he was contemplating a return to the trader’s life, even if it killed him; so on October 1, 1892, he wrote to a firm at Efate in the New Hebrides asking for a station, stating that “I am thirty-five years of age [he was thirty-seven], am married (with two children), am well up in all branches of the island trade, a good rough carpenter and used to sail small craft, but cannot navigate.” Had the answer been favorable, Becke and his family would have returned to one of the most lethal groups of islands, “the white man’s grave,” and he would probably never have written a line of the rambling volumes that are treasured today.
Disconsolate and without a job, he met one morning an Australian explorer and author, Ernest Favenc, famed for his daring expedition in 1878 into the center of that continent, between Blackall and Darwin. Favenc had set out with two other white men and a black aborigine and had explored north as far as Creswell Creek, only ninety miles from the telegraph line. But the weather was unbearably hot and his three horses perished from lack of water. When the men’s rations ran out, they lived for weeks on wild ducks, blue bush and pigweed, until thunderstorms brought relief and they won through to the coast at Darwin.
Favenc, writer of novels, short stories and history books like The Explorers of Australia, listened to Becke’s yarns and said, “You ought to be a writer.” He took Becke down to the offices of the Sydney Bulletin and introduced him to the celebrated editor, J. F. Archibald.
Born in Australia, John Feltham Archibald was the son of an Irish sergeant of police, but feeling imbued with the Gallic spirit he changed his first names to Jules François, and as such combined with his friend John Hayes in publishing a new magazine, the Bulletin, which is still an influential weekly in Australia. The two were constantly in trouble and once were in jail together, unable to meet the costs of a libel action. But they were popular figures and were released when their fines were paid by public subscription. Archibald, a man of medium height, frail, mercurial, bearded, sardonic in expression, was a brilliant journalist with a wicked gift of satire and a forbidding manner, but his innate personal charm and loyalty drew many talented associates to him, Later, Becke always paid high tribute to his first editor, who, he said, “taught me the secrets of condensation and simplicity of language.”
This famous editor, after listening to Becke relate a few experiences, asked him to write something for the columns of the Bulletin. But Becke had never written a story. “How does a bloke go about it?” he asked.
“Write just as you are telling me now; they will make dashed good yarns!” advised Archibald. Taking him at his word, Becke went to his scantily furnished room on William Street and, on a table made of gin cases, scrawled out half a dozen stories.
They were accepted by the Bulletin, and Becke wrote half a dozen more. These tales, under the title By Reef and Palm, were published in London in 1894, the year of Stevenson’s death.
For the London appearance of his book, Becke felt that he required some celebrated writer to prepare an introduction. He wrote therefore to the Earl of Pembroke, who had sailed through the South Seas in 1870 in his yacht, Albatross, and had ended up wrecked on one of the islands
. The earl and his friend Dr. G. H. Kingsley had published a volume about their cruise called South Sea Bubbles, which was widely read and still, twenty years later, was remembered, particularly because it had given some offense to the missionaries and their supporters. When Pembroke agreed, Becke sent him some highly colored and imaginative autobiographical material, which Pembroke inserted bodily in the introduction, thus misleading most later seekers after the facts of Becke’s career.
By Reef and Palm, which the author sold outright for £65, went through many editions and is still being reprinted. It was the first of some thirty volumes written by Becke, who in addition turned out six historical novels in collaboration with a Sydney journalist, Walter J. Jeffery.
Although he was destined to be a wanderer all his days, Becke’s path now lay in more civilized lands as he pursued his career of writer; but for his material he generally depended upon his recollections of years of Pacific roving. In 1896 he borrowed £200 from Archibald and lit out for London, where he was something of a sensation.
British interviewers of the “Rudyard Kipling of the Pacific,” as Becke was called, found him a man of the world with few frills and a graceful habit of “shouting” for drinks all round. He was pictured as slight and sinewy, about five feet nine inches tall. He lived surrounded by blue clouds from the plug tobacco in his pipe, and told his yarns with an expressive drawl and the remains of his boyish stammer: “I knew a m-m-missionary once …” He struck a person as somber and melancholy, and looked as if, when roused, he could well take care of himself. “His face is tanned a dark brown by years of brazen suns” ran one interview; “he has a restless, roving eye; his hair is black streaked with gray; his mustache is heavy; his nose has just an aquiline curve to it; his neck is bit deep with fiery wrinkles; his hands—ah! his hands are enormous for such a slim-built fellow. They look strong enough to crush a coconut, or a skull.”