South Sea Foam
The Romantic Adventures of a Modern Don Quixote in the Southern Seas
9781465632647
330 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
EVEN the wind, my boon companion—for are we not both born roamers?—seems to blow chunks of old memories through the moonlit, tossing pines that are sighing to-night outside this wayside inn. It’s here that we rest awhile, my fiddle and I, as I take up my pen to record some of the incidents from my early travels. Time, in its everlasting hurry, gives me the briefest space to say all I wish to say; and ere the month ends I shall be, once more, outbound on the western ocean. Personally, I think that to have inherited a pair of rose-coloured spectacles from one’s ancestors is to have been endowed at birth with inexhaustible wealth, as well as being born a king in one’s own right. Such an inheritance enables one to conjure up the finest illusions, helps one to surmount apparently impossible heights, and also cheers one in each inevitable precipitous fall. I’ve often blessed the fates in the thought that they so kindly enabled me to warm my hands and heart by an imaginary fire when the winds were blowing cold. So much would I say, in complete humbleness, about my special gift. Possibly the aforesaid gift is the only inherited privilege that entitles me to write this book dealing with my life and travels in the South Seas. So far as the world’s and my own opinion goes, I’ve no violent claim to write more than three books. For, true enough, it does not make for notoriety and a keen interest in one’s self from a wide public to have done the things that I’ve done. I seriously doubt if my effigy will be seen in Madame Tussaud’s waxwork show when I come to die. The plain fact is, that it is not considered highly respectable to have slept in a wharf-dustbin in a strange land, unashamed, and with the lid on! And to have knelt in the complete obeisance of idolatry before a wooden idol with a tattooed heathen poet, and deliberately worshipped at the old shrine of the stars, is, to say the least, not quite the thing. Neither does a wandering vagabond life, and a deep feeling of kinship with strange old shellbacks, ragged derelicts, and tattooed chiefs, lay a suitable foundation for recording one’s omissions and sins in polite form. However that may be, I believe that to have dined deeply on salt-horse and weevily hard-tack, and to have played the fiddle on the “Wallaby track” from Maoriland to the Solomon Isles, is to have gathered an outfit of dire accomplishments that I hope may have inspired me with something to say. First of all, I will say that, though I had been smashing about the seaports from Shanghai to Callao, and had trekked across the Never-Never land, generally bound for Nowhere, I still had strange hopes that wild pioneer life and romance, as I had read about it ere I ran away to sea, existed somewhere in the world. I was down in the dumps, stranded in Sydney, when the great opportunity presented itself. By the wharf, in the harbour, lay a three-masted ship. When I went aboard I heard that she was bound for the South Sea Islands—the Isles of the Blest!
