new caledonia is essentially a land of contrasts, both in scenery and climate, and when i had left the sunny hills and plains and the silver-sanded, palm-fringed bays of the isle of pines some fifty miles behind me, i found myself in a region of enormous forests, clothing the slopes of rugged mountains running sheer down to the sea from the clouds which rarely broke above them.
there were no white beaches here, only boulder-strewn shores, which were literally, as well as in the metaphorical sense, iron-bound. not only the rocks and the boulders, but the very sands of the shore themselves were of iron, sometimes pure, but, as a rule, containing from eighty-five to ninety per cent. of the metal.
this was prony, the chief of a cluster of convict camps scattered about what is literally a land of[237] wood and iron. the wood is used, the iron is not. millions of tons of it are lying round the shores of one of the finest and safest natural harbours in the world. a thousand miles away are the coal-fields of new south wales. since it pays to ship copper and iron from spain and even south america to swansea, one would think it would pay to ship this to newcastle. however, there it lies, waiting, i suppose for some one to make fortunes out of it, and the energies of the eight hundred or one thousand relégués are devoted to hewing timber in the forests, bringing it down to the shore, and floating it in big barges to prony, where there is a finely equipped saw and planing mill.
the dressed timber is, of course, the property of the administration, and is used for building wharves and jetties. a good deal of it is sold to the public for building purposes. some day, too, there is going to be a real railway in caledonia, and then the forest camps of the baie du sud will furnish the sleepers, signal-posts, and platforms.
meanwhile prony has a railway all to itself, of which i shall here give some account.
i was fortunate in making two very pleasant[238] acquaintances in this out-of-the-way corner of the world. one was the commandant, who was quite the most intelligent and broad-minded man of his class that i met in caledonia, and the other was the doctor of the port. he was, of course, a military doctor, and held the rank of lieutenant in the army. his official title was “le médecin major!” he had seen a good deal of the world, and had visited the united states on a french warship, and from him i heard the first words of english that i had heard for nearly three weeks. the dear little doctor was proud of his english, and he had a right to be. although it was not very extensive, it was distinctly select. one day the commandant referred somewhat slightingly to it as “son peu d’anglais”; but perhaps that was because he couldn’t speak a single word himself. at any rate, he never tried to.
at prony, too, i renewed my acquaintance with the microbe. in fact, the doctor was there because of him. one day a coast steamer had brought some tons of flour for the station, which depended entirely for its food on noumea and australia. the sacks were stacked under cover in the commissariat department. the little[239] daughter of the chief surveillant got playing about among these sacks. some infected rats had been doing the same a short time before, and so she got the plague.
the doctor was telegraphed for to noumea, and he came and saved her, and, thanks to his skill and precautions, that was the only case in prony, although we actually had the infection in the midst of us, and for the fifteen days that i was tied up there we ate bread made from that flour!
i often had to pass the sacks, but i did so at a respectful distance. one morning, however, i had a bit of a fright. there had been a deluge of rain all night, and, when i woke, i found a dead and very wet mouse on my bedroom floor.
what if it had come from those sacks?
i drenched it with corrosive sublimate, and pitched it carefully out of doors with a stick. then i poured petroleum over it and burnt it and the stick, and there the incident closed.
it always struck me as somewhat of a miracle that rats did not find those sacks out and spread the plague broadcast among us. it would have been a terrible thing in that isolated camp, cut[240] off from all communication with the world except the telegraph. perhaps there were no rats. at any rate, i never saw any, and felt duly thankful.
there are no roads about prony, only footpaths, and not many of these, so we paid our visits to the camps in steam launches. when it was fine it was very pleasant work cruising about the picturesque bays, discoursing the while on crime, criminals, and colonisation with the intelligent commandant, or swopping anglo-french jokes and stories with the doctor, who had a very pretty wit of his own.
the commandant was a firm believer in relegation and transportation generally, but like every one else, he looked down upon the liberé and the relégué. according to him a for?at was worth two liberés, and a liberé was worth a relégué and a half, if not more. nevertheless, during my stay at prony i saw a squad of relégués working about as hard as i have ever seen men work. this was on the railway aforesaid.
the convict railway at prony.
drawn by harold piffard from a photograph.
we started one morning, as usual, about five o’clock, and steamed across two or three bays to the camp du nord. in all the other camps the timber is got down from the hills to the[241] sea by means of wood-paved slides, which are quite as much a feature of this part of caledonia as the ice-slides are in norway, but the camp du nord rises to the dignity of a railway on which that morning i did the most curious bit of railroading i have ever done.
when we had inspected the camp at the terminus and, for the commandant’s sake, i had duly admired the landing-stage, the trim buildings, and the gardens in which the flowers and vegetables were struggling for existence in the burning iron soil, the state car was brought out for us.
it was a platform on wheels, with four sloping seats facing backwards. i could see the line twining away up through the forest, but there was no engine.
presently it, or, rather, they, materialised at the summons of the chief surveillant. fifteen blue-clad figures, each with a halter and hook-rope over his shoulder, came out of one of the dormitories. there was a long chain shackled to the front of the car. at an order the human beasts of draught passed the halters over their heads and hooked on to the chain, seven on each side and one ahead.
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then the commandant invited the company to mount. there were seven of us. the commandant had brought his two little girls, and there were four besides: the chief surveillant, who weighed fifteen stone if he weighed a pound, the chief forester, who weighed a good twelve stone, and the doctor and myself, who were comparatively light weights.
i had often seen convicts harnessed to carts in england, and, of course, i had ridden many miles in rickshaws in the east, but this was the first time i had ever travelled in a car drawn by human beings who did it because they had to, and who would have had their food docked if they had refused to do it, and i confess that i didn’t exactly like it. still, i took my place, and the strange journey began.
at first it didn’t seem very bad, for the line was almost level, but when we got into the hills the collar-work began, and our human cattle had to bend their necks and their backs to it.
the line wound up through cuttings and over bridges at what seemed to me an ever-increasing gradient. it was a damp, muggy, tropical morning. it was not exactly raining, but the moisture soaked[243] you to the bones for all that, and the leaves and branches of the vast virgin forest on either hand shone and dripped as the moisture condensed on them.
we perspired sitting still and making no more exertion than was necessary for breathing, so you can imagine how those poor wretches tugging at the chains sweated—and, great heavens, how they stank!—though the most fastidious, under the circumstances, could hardly blame them for this.
for very shame’s sake i got off and walked whenever there was an excuse. it made breathing pleasanter. so did the doctor, who was a botanist and found us venus’ fly-traps and other weird vegetable monsters. the forester also got off now and then, not from motives of mercy, but to point out varieties of timber to the commandant. the chief surveillant sat tight, probably on account of his weight, until i wanted to put him into one of the halters.
but what, though i hardly like to say so, disgusted me most was the absolute callousness, as it seemed to me, of the two little girls. perhaps the worst of it was that it was absolutely innocent. they had been born and bred in prisonland, and[244] i don’t suppose they really saw any difference between that sweating, straining, panting team of human cattle and a team of mules or donkeys.
at last, to my own infinite relief, the journey was over. what it must have been like to our team i can only guess from the fact that in a distance of a little over four miles they had dragged us up one thousand five hundred feet! it took an hour and three-quarters to do it. they were dismissed when we got to the top and allowed to have a drink—of water.
the doctor took us back. he understood the brake, and in consideration for the young ladies he kept the speed moderate. we got back in twelve minutes and a half. he said he had done it in six; but i wasn’t with him then, and didn’t want to be.
although forestry is, of course, the same all the world over, and, therefore, not the sort of thing to describe here in detail, there were two other camps that i visited which had interesting peculiarities of their own. one of these was the camp of bonne anse, a pretty little spot whence a very steep and stony path led over a little range to a promontory called cap ndoua, which is the[245] telegraph station for the isle of pines. i don’t know whether there are any other telegraphic stations which have neither cables nor wires and make no use of electricity, but this and the one on the isle of pines were the only ones i have ever seen.
when i was taken into the operating-room at cap ndoua i saw an apparatus which looked to me like a gigantic magic-lantern with a telescope fixed to its side. in the front of the big iron box there was a huge lens about eighteen inches across, behind this was another smaller one, and behind this again a powerful oil lamp, with a movable screen in front of it, worked with a sort of trigger; on a table in the corner of the room were the usual telegraphic transmitters and receivers in connection with the general telegraphic system to noumea and the cable to sydney.
every evening at seven, when it is of course quite dark, the operators go on duty until nine. if ndoua has a message to send to the island the lamp is lit, and the man at the telescope in the observatory above the hospital on the island sees a gleam of white light across the forty-six miles of sea. he lights his lamp, and the preliminary[246] signal twinkles through the darkness. then the shutter begins to work. short and long flashes gleam out in quick succession, the dots and dashes of the morse system in fact; and so the words which have come over the wire from noumea, or, perhaps, from the uttermost ends of the earth, are translated into light, and sent through the darkness with even more than electrical speed.
saving only fogs, which are not very frequent in those latitudes, the optic telegraph is just as reliable as the cable and the wire, and they are good for any distance up to the range of the telescope. the apparatus cost about ￡50 apiece, while a cable would cost several thousands; and it struck me that for quick communication between the mainland and islands or distant light-houses, the optic telegraph is worthy of a wider use than it seems to have.
the other visit was to port boisé, near to cape queen charlotte, which is the extreme north-western point of caledonia. port boisé is, like so many other of the caledonian convict camps, a most beautiful spot. it is fertile, too, thanks to the existence of ancient bog lands, which make it possible to temper the heat of the[247] ferruginous soil, and so skill and patience have made it a delightful oasis in the midst of the vast forest and jungle which surround it on all sides save the one opening to the sea.
these forests and jungles, by the way, are of somewhat peculiar growth; the timber is mostly what is called chêne-gomme, and is an apparent combination of oak- and gum-tree. it is almost as hard as the iron which is the chief ingredient in the soil from which it derives its sap, and it is practically indestructible. as for the jungle, it is composed of brush and creepers which have the consistency of wire ropes—a sort of vegetable steel cable, in fact.
but for me, as an englishman, the chief interest in port boisé was connected with cape queen charlotte, and a little island lying about five miles out to sea, which is called le mouillage de cook—the anchorage of captain cook. it was here that the great navigator made perhaps the greatest mistake of his life. as every one knows, he discovered and named new caledonia. he sailed along its shores, and contented himself with describing it as an island of lofty mountains surrounded by reefs which made it inaccessible.
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he anchored at a little island, and named the bold promontory in front of him cape queen charlotte. he landed here, and, as he says, found the natives very civil and obliging. it is a million pities that he did not cultivate their friendship further, and learn something about their country. he would not then have described it as “inaccessible” and “unapproachable.”
beyond the bay in which his boats landed he would have found a stretch of open country under the hills across which his men could have marched till they discovered what is now the baie du sud—another sydney cove in miniature. if he had only done this, caledonia, with its enormous mineral wealth and its magnificent harbours, would have been british instead of french, a worthy appanage to that other empire of the future, the new-born commonwealth of australia.
i discussed this with the commandant as we walked back to bonne anse, and he told me the story of how on a much later occasion we also lost caledonia.
once upon a time, a little more than fifty years ago, there were two frigates lying in sydney harbour—one british and one french. we will[249] call the british ship h.m.s. dodderer. she was commanded by an old woman in naval uniform who ought to have been superannuated years before. the frenchman, as events proved, was a man of a very different sort.
new caledonia in those days was a sort of no-man’s land, but there were both catholic and protestant european missionaries working among the natives. the two warships received almost simultaneous orders to go and annex the island. they started the same day. the british frigate out-sailed the frenchman, but her captain had got those fatal words of captain cook’s deep-rooted in his mind, and when he got near the dreaded reefs he began to take soundings. the frenchman went ahead, neck or nothing. he gambled his ship to win a colony, and, taking only the most ordinary precautions, he kept on his course.
by great good luck he struck the broad passage through the reef which leads to the harbour of noumea, and when h.m.s. dodderer eventually groped her way in she found the french frigate at anchor, and the tricolour flying from a flagstaff on one of the hills, after which the french[250] captain politely invited him and his officers to lunch and to an excursion on french soil; and here ends a short but exasperating chapter in our colonial history.
i had been ten days in prony when we visited port boisé, and each day we had been looking anxiously for the coming of the steamer which was to bring us food and me release. morning after morning we looked out across the bay to the two islands which guarded the channel through which she had to come, but for six more days never a whiff of smoke drifted across the clear-cut horizon. meanwhile, food was running very low, and we were getting decidedly ennuyés. so one day, by way of a diversion, the doctor proposed that we should break the law and go dynamite-fishing and shark-slaying.
the fresh meat had given out. vegetables—far more important to a frenchman than to an englishman—were nearly a memory. the fruit supply of the camp was represented by a lime-tree in the doctor’s garden, and that grew in imported soil. no fruit would grow in the iron soil of prony. the preserved australian meat was getting very low. in short, in a few more days we should[251] have got within measurable distance of starvation, and then mutiny; and it was with an idea of deferring such unpleasant contingencies that the doctor suggested we should go fishing.
any change from the monotony of wandering about the little area walled in by jungle and forest, impassable by any save those who knew the kanaka paths, was welcome, and i began to talk gladly about rods and line and bait, to which the doctor replied:
“oh no, we must work quicker than that. we shall fish with dynamite! you will see them come to the bait, and then—pouf!—there breaks out the waterquake, not earthquake, as you say, and they are all dead—hundreds! you shall see sharks, too. dynamite is good medicine for them.”
this sounded interesting, and i got up the next morning about half-past four, more cheerfully than usual, because, of course, we were going to start at five o’clock. it was a dull, cloudy, steamy morning when i went down to the jetty, and found the big whale-boat manned by six stalwart kanakas armed with their throwing-spears, and the doctor with a little saloon rifle, and the[252] director of works—the biggest and most english-looking frenchman that i met in the colony—with his pockets full of dynamite.
we first paid a visit to a camp about eight miles away, taking a contribution of meat and bread, and the news that the long-expected supplies had not yet come. then we shaped our course for sharks’ bay, which proved to be a most characteristically tropical piece of water. the dense vegetation not only came down to the water’s edge, but threw out long, snaky-looking roots a couple of yards from the shore. it was among these that the first sport began, because it was in these oily-looking shallows that the flat fish were wont to take refuge from the wolves of the sea.
this was the kanakas’ part of the sport. we ran the boat in quietly and four of them went ashore with their spears. the director of works did the same, and when he had landed i felt that the doctor and i were a little farther off from the razor-edged brink of eternity than when he was sitting beside us with enough dynamite in his pockets to blow the boat to matchwood and ourselves beyond the confines of time.
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we amused ourselves by taking potshots at the black triangles which keenly cut the unrippled surface of the brown water. as far as my own experience goes, i don’t think there’s another piece of water in the world that possesses as many sharks to the acre as that well-named bay. wherever you looked you could see a black fin cutting the water, and every minute or so you would see a swirling eddy which meant that one of the sea-wolves had made a dash at something, and had either got an instalment of his breakfast or missed it.
when i was talking this over afterwards with the doctor, who was a bit of a naturalist, i learnt a little more about the doctrine of evolution and the survival of the fittest than i knew before. sharks swarm in the new caledonian waters, and the only chance for their victims is flight; wherefore about the shores of new caledonia you find the fastest swimming fish in the world.
after we had had a few ineffective shots at dorsal fins, one of our crew said “ough!” and pointed to the shore. we pulled in, it being evident that there was sport afoot. the kanakas[254] ashore had been climbing with marvellous agility over the snaky water-roots of the trees until they had come to a tiny little cove.
they were leaning over the roots peering down into the water, motionless as bronze images. then one swiftly and silently shinned up a tree with his spear in his mouth. he got a foot- and hand-hold. then with his right hand he took the spear out of his teeth, balanced it for a moment, and then down it went like a flash of lightning.
the next instant there was a terrific commotion in the water below. three other spears went down, and our men laid to their oars and rushed the boat in. two of the others jumped into the water, and the crowd began struggling with a huge flat-fish, something like an exaggerated flounder, which was nailed to the bottom by a couple of spears. when we got him into the boat, i thought he would have knocked the side out of it. subsequently he made good eating for many hungry convicts.
meanwhile, the director had been wandering about with a cigarette in his mouth and a dynamite cartridge in his hand, looking for his prey,[255] which, unobligingly, kept too far out. his turn was to come later on, when we had pulled across past the sulphur stream to the mouth of the river which flows into sharks’ bay.
it is a rather curious fact that the waters of this bay are strongly impregnated with sulphur, and yet, as i have said, they are literally swarming with fish. they evidently seemed to like it, for both the sharks and their victims were thicker in the neighbourhood of the submarine springs than they were anywhere else. wherefore it was here that we made the best bags.
our kanakas seemed to have a faculty of seeing through the brown water which none of us possessed. again and again they located swarms of fish that we had no notion of. one of them lay in the bows with his big black eyes seeing things where we could see nothing, and directing our course by moving his right or left hand.
meanwhile the dynamiter stood on the seat with one foot on the gunwale, puffing at his cigarette, keeping it in a glow so that he might light the fuse of his cartridge at it. presently there came from the bows a low intense whisper, “stop!” the kanakas use a good deal more[256] english than french when they’re out sporting. he got up and pointed to the water about ten yards ahead, and hissed:
“there, là! plenty! beaucoup!”
the dynamiter took his cigarette from his lips, blew the ash away, and touched the end of the fuse with it. then he pitched his cartridge into the water about ten yards from the boat. ten seconds later a volcano seemed to burst up from the bottom of the bay, and the boat jumped as if a whale’s flipper had struck her. the water ahead boiled up into a little hillock of foam and dropped again.
then all about us i saw the water sprinkled with the white bellies of fish, some quite dead, and others swimming in a feeble, purposeless sort of way with their tails. the next moment there were six big splashes, and i saw six pairs of brown legs disappearing into the water, after which heads and arms bobbed up, and it began to rain fish into the boat.
they ran from eight to eighteen inches in length, and from two to six pounds in weight, and so i took some pains to dodge them as they came flying up out of the water. they[257] were something like bass, but they had the heads and tails of mackerel, and they swam like lightning—of course, before they struck the dynamite.
i have often watched, in clearer waters, the sharks hunting shoals of them. the caledonian shark can get a tremendous speed on him. i have seen a twelve-footer carried clean out of the water by the impetus of his rush. but the way these things dodged them just at the moment that they turned over to make their grab was simply marvellous. you would see a shark plunge into the midst of a swarm of them. the long, blue-grey body would turn over, the mouth—the ugliest mouth in all creation—would open, and the tripled-armed jaws would clash together on a mouthful of empty water. every fish had vanished, and brother shark would give a disgusted wriggle, and go on the prowl again.
escapes of this kind were, of course, due to inherited wisdom, but dynamite was a recent experience, and the fish fell victims to it through sheer curiosity. when the cartridge dropped into the middle of the shoal they naturally scattered in all directions. then they came back to see what had fallen into the water, and after that[258] came the catastrophe. those who died were victims to curiosity. those who escaped would probably be about the most scared fish that ever wagged a fin.
the effect of the dynamite on those who did not escape was most extraordinary. in every case the vertebral column was broken just behind the head, and the heart was as cleanly divided as if it had been cut with a razor.
when we had our boat about half full we started in pursuit of bigger game. the shock of the explosion had startled the sharks, who, like all bullies, are mostly cowards, and the kanakas had kept them away by beating the water every now and then with their hands in their usual fashion. so our dripping, laughing crew, sure now of a splendid feed, pulled merrily down the bay to a point on which we landed two of them and the dynamiter. they crept stealthily along the tangled shore till one of the kanakas stopped and pointed to three little black spots on the surface of a tiny jungle-fringed bay.
the dynamiter took out a cigarette and lit it, watching the three points the while as they moved along the oily surface through little eddies made[259] by the great bodies underneath. presently they formed a triangle not many feet apart. two or three vigorous whiffs of his cigarette, a touch to the fuse, and a motion of the hand, a scurry in the water—and then a muffled bang and an uprising of muddy water.
we waited a moment or two, and then we could see something white—three streaks of it—gleaming through the water, and three livid shapes rose slowly to the surface, wagging the great tails which would never send them through the water again. their horrible mouths were a little open, but they would never close fish or man again.
i took the doctor’s word for it that their necks, so to speak, were broken, and their hearts split as those of the smaller fry were; but i didn’t make any personal investigations, for soon after the troubling of the waters had subsided there came swift, swirling rushes from all sides; black fins cut the water, white bellies gleamed under it, and then came a clashing of cannibal jaws, a tugging and a tearing, a silent, horrible contest, and presently all that was left of those three sharks was a blood-reddened scum on the surface of the little leaf-fringed bay.
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our morning’s fishing closed with the slaying of a shark who fell a victim to his insatiable appetite just as the smaller fry had done to their curiosity. when the tragedy was over we pulled out into the middle of the outer bay and waited until quiet and confidence was restored among our friends below. meanwhile, one of the kanakas had cut one of our biggest fish open. the director put a dynamite cartridge into it, and then it was tied up, after which the end of a line was passed through its gills. when one of the black triangles came within a few yards of us the director touched the end of about six inches of fuse with his cigarette and dropped it quietly overboard.
brother shark didn’t seem to notice the little fizzy splutter which made this fish different from all others that he had eaten, or, if he did, he took no notice of it. he turned over on his side, the jaws opened, and the fish vanished.
in a few moments and for just an immeasurable fraction of a second he was the most astounded shark in the pacific ocean. after which came chaos for him, and a breakfast for his brethren. the pieces weren’t very big, with the exception of the head, which, after a bit of a scrimmage,[261] was carried off by a monster who might have been his mother-in-law. the rest of the fragments disappeared in a swirl of bloody froth, and we went home to breakfast to learn the glad news that the long-awaited emily had really left noumea at last.
