The Call of the South 1908

oval-shaped seed of the mango family, it has a round, root-like and spiky core. The fruit, however, is of a delicious flavour, and when fully ripe melts in one's mouth. Whilst o...

The Man Who Knew Everything came to Samoa in November, when dark days were on the land, and the nearing Christmas time seemed likely to be as that of the preceding one, when bur...

A native girl, about thirteen years of age, was standing in the trader's doorway, clad only in a girdle of many-hued dracaena leaves. Her long, glossy black hair fell about her...

Early one morning some native hunters came on board our vessel and asked me to come with them to the mountain forest of the island of Ponapé in quest of wild boar. Glad to escap...

Once, after many years' wanderings in the North and South Pacific as shore trader, supercargo and “recruiter” in the Kanaka labour trade, I became home-sick and returned to my n...

We were bound from Tahiti to the Gilbert Islands, seeking a cargo of native labourers for Stewart's great plantation at Tahiti, and had worked our way from island to island up n...

Although I had often heard of the “corncrake” or landrail of the British Isles, I did not see one until a few years ago, on my first visit to Ireland, when a field labourer in C...

“Guess I'm getting round,” and the big, bronzed-faced man raised his eyes to mine as he lay under the awning on the after deck of his pearling lugger. I sat down beside him and...

On the afternoon of the 4th of June, 1885, the Hawaiian labour schooner _Mana_, of which I was “recruiter” was beating through Apolima Straits, which divide the islands of Upolu...

The Island of Upolu, in the Samoan group, averages less than fifteen miles in width, and it is a delightful experience to cross from Apia, or any other town on the north, to the...

We had had a stroke--or rather a series of strokes--of very bad luck. Our vessel, the _Metaris_, had been for two months cruising among the islands of what is now known as the B...

When I was supercargo of the brig _Palestine_, we were one day beating along the eastern shore of the great island of Tombara (New Ireland) or, as it is now called by its German...

Mr. Rudyard Kipling has spoken of what he terms “the Great American Pie Belt,” which runs through certain parts of the United States, the people of which live largely on pumpkin...

Piracy, as most people are aware, is not yet quite extinct in Chinese and East Indian waters, despite the efforts that have been made to utterly stamp it out. But it is not gene...

The _fiat_ has gone forth from the Australian Commonwealth, and the Kanaka labour trade, as far as the Australian Colonies are concerned, has ceased to exist. For, during the mo...

Between the southern end of the great island of New Guinea and the Solomon Group there is a cluster of islands marked on the chart as “Woodlark Islands,” but the native name is...

One Sunday morning--when I was about to leave the dear old city of Sydney for an unpremeditated and long, long absence in cold northern climes, I went for a farewell stroll arou...

A few years ago I was written to by an English lady, living in the Midlands, asking me if I could assist her nephew--a young man of three and twenty years of age--towards obtain...

Mutinies, even at the present day, are common enough. The facts concerning many of them never come to light, it is so often to the advantage of the after-guard of a ship to hush...

The bank of the tidal river was very, very quiet as I walked down to it through the tall spear grass and sat down upon the smooth, weather-worn bole of a great blackbutt tree, c...

For the Samoans I have always had a great admiration and affection. Practically I began my island career in Samoa. More than a score of years before Robert Louis Stevenson went...

Old Kala-hoi, the net-maker, had ceased work for the day, and was seated on a mat outside his little house, smoking his pipe, looking dreamily out upon the blue waters of Leone...

A short time ago I came across in a daily newspaper the narrative of a traveller in the South Seas full of illuminating remarks on the ease with which any one can now acquire a...

Nine years had come and gone since I had last seen Nukutavake and its amiable brown-skinned people, and now as I again stepped on shore and scanned the faces of those assembled...

The day's work was finished. Outside a cluster of rudely built palm-thatched huts, just above the curving white beach, and under the lengthening shadows of the silent cocos, two...

A white rain squall came crashing through the mountain forest, and then went humming northward across the quiet lake, down over the wooded littoral and far out to sea. Silence o...

It is a night of myriad stars, shining from a dome of deepest blue. The lofty, white-barked swamp gums stand silent and ghost-like on the river's bank, and the river itself is a...

Mâni's husband was a Frenchman named François Renault, who, when he was sober, worked as a boat-builder and carpenter, for the German “factory” at Mataféle. And when he was away...

We anchored under Cape Bedford (North Queensland) one day, and the skipper and I went on shore to bathe in one of the native-made rocky water-holes near the Cape. We found a nat...

When I was first learning the ropes as a “recruiter” in the Kanaka labour trade, recruiting natives to work on the plantations of Samoa and Fiji, we called at a group of islands...