the emily arrived that evening, and we fed royally on good fresh australian beef, fried fish, and potatoes, and comp?te of fruit, followed by fresh cream cheese, with bread and tinned butter—as usual, from australia. in fact, if it wasn’t for australia i believe that new caledonia would either live on tinned everything or starve, which is of course a good thing for sydney and newcastle.
the doctor produced a couple of bottles of excellent burgundy from his private cellar, and altogether we did ourselves exceeding well. the next morning the emily sailed, of course, at five o’clock; but i turned out of bed in the moonlight well contented, for my last journey but one was over. the commandant invited me on to his verandah for a farewell consommation. after which i went with the doctor and the dynamiter for another[263] one or two at the canteen. then we parted in as friendly a fashion as english and french ever did.
i was glad to get away, yet i left some regrets behind me. though i had come under unpromising circumstances, every one had made me welcome, and although my stay had lengthened into something like a little exile, my visit to the land of wood and iron had been both pleasant and profitable.
the doctor i parted from with real regret. he was one of the best types of the travelled french officer and gentleman that i have ever met. at first his ideas about the boers were hopelessly wrong, and that was all there was the matter with him; but i was the first man he had ever met who had actually lived among them, and when i left his views were considerably altered.
just before i left, the director of posts and telegraphs—every official seems to be a director of something in caledonia—brought me the first letters that i had received in prisonland. they had been carried by a kanaka over the mountains from noumea, through fifty miles of jungle-paths.[264] these bush-postmen have never yet been known to lose a letter. when i asked how much extra they were paid for work like this i was told that they were made to do it as a punishment—which struck me as being entirely french.
the emily—may her name be blessed!—was only a steam launch multiplied by two, but she was clean and sweet, and her nose was pointed towards home. she towed two lighters loaded with dressed timber, and she took something like fifteen hours to do forty-five miles. but that mattered little. it was a delicious day, and the scenery along the coast was lovely. moreover, you could lie down on her decks without having to change afterwards and throw your clothes overboard, and so the long hours passed pleasantly under the awning.
when at length she had puffed and panted her way into noumea, i looked about the harbour and saw that yellow jack was flying more numerously than ever. the first news i learnt when i landed was that the plague was a great deal worse than the papers were allowed to say. it had begun to jump about all over the town, just as it did later on in sydney. the chief[265] of the sanitary commission had just been struck down by it.
the first thing i noticed as i drove from the wharf to my old quarters was the number of people in mourning. my landlady, who—i dare say under compulsion—had had her premises cleaned and disinfected, greeted me with even more than french effusion. i owed her a long bill, and she thought i was dead of the plague in some out-of-the-way spot. she nearly cried for joy when she saw me. poor old lady, she was to be one of the next of the microbe’s victims!
at dinner that night i learnt, to my intense disgust, that the messagerie company and the government had established a twelve-days’ quarantine on a mosquito-haunted islet in the bay for any one who wanted to travel by the monthly mail to sydney. the principal reason for this was that the governor was going home and wanted to be quite certain that no microbes got on board concealed about the persons of his fellow-passengers.
from my point of view it amounted to this: twelve days on ile freycinet, four days’ passage, and from eight to ten days’ quarantine in sydney—total[266] at least twenty-six days for a trip of a little over a thousand miles.
it had to be avoided somehow, and at the same time noumea was getting every day a better place to get out of. even lord dunmore, who had stuck to his offices down near the wharves while his neighbours were running away, and while the rats, driven out of destroyed buildings, were coming under his floors to die, at last admitted that things were serious, and advised me to “get” as soon as i could.
fortunately one of the larger coast-boats had been disinfected and was put on the line again, and in her i took passage to pam, at the north-eastern extremity of the island.
pam is the port and headquarters of an immensely rich mining district, the property of the international copper company, of which his lordship is administrator. it has been said that when nature made new caledonia she set herself to dump down as many ores and minerals in as small a space as possible.
she has certainly succeeded, for there is scarcely a mineral known to science that is not represented in greater or less quantities in this wonderful island.
the mines of the international copper co., pilou, new caledonia. there is a greater variety of metallic ores within the area shown here than in any other region in the world.
[267]
a very clever and experienced mining expert once went over from australia to make a survey for the international, and after an exhaustive examination he was shipped to london to make a personal report to the board. he knew as much about mining as any one in the southern hemisphere, but his language and deportment were those of the bush and the mining camp. a noble lord asked him if he could give any estimate of the amount of copper, nickel, cobalt, iron, silver, gold, etc., that might be found in the central chain, and this was his answer:
“my lord, if you were to take all the —— minerals there are out of those —— mountains the —— island would —— well fall to pieces.”
the report was taken as satisfactory.
i brought some specimens away with me which certainly seem to bear out his estimate. they were the wonder and envy of several mining experts in australia. one of the specimens weighs about three pounds, and i am told that it contains about a dozen distinct kinds of minerals. it didn’t come out of the mine. it was just chopped off the surface for me with a pickaxe.
the mines are not at pam. they are at pilou,[268] about seven miles up the river. here, connecting the principal mining station with the wharf, is the only other railway in caledonia, which is run by steam. it is a narrow gauge and about five miles long.
that five miles is a journey through purgatory. the attendant demons are little black and devilishly businesslike mosquitos. now, i thought i knew something about mosquitos. they had lived off me in many parts of the world from delagoa bay to panama, and honolulu to guayaquil, but when i got to pilou i found i hadn’t begun to learn about them.
the air above the swamp over which the railway ran was black with them, and their song made the whole atmosphere vocal. they were all over us in a moment. they even settled on the boiler of the engine, and bit it until it whistled in its agony. we were black with them from head to foot. clothing was no protection; and, of course, ours was pretty thin. they just stood on their heads and rammed their probosces down into our flesh, usually along the line of a vein, and sucked in our life-blood until they were too gorged to get their blood-pumps out again.
[269]
by constant sweeping with green branches we managed to keep our faces fairly clear, and do our breathing without swallowing more than a dozen at a time. even the kanakas, who are not as a rule a favourite article of food with mosquitos, had to go on swishing themselves with boughs to keep the little black demons out of their eyes and nose and mouth and ears.
as for me, i visited the camps and the mines, and then i fled. i was a sight which my worst enemy, if i have one, might well have looked upon with eyes of pity. i had got a touch of fever, too, in the swamp, and an illness in pilou was too terrible for contemplation. i would not live in the place, rent free and with nothing to do but fight mosquitos, for a hundred pounds a week.
the unhappy convicts who work the mines were the most miserable lot i had seen in all caledonia. neither by day nor night have they any protection from the swarming pests, which, as one or two of them told me, made their lives one long misery. they sleep in open barracks without mosquito curtains over their hammocks, and by day their tormentors pursue them even down the shafts of the mine.
[270]
it was the same with the officials and their wives and children. they all looked an?mic, as though most of the blood had been sucked out of them. they were worried and nervous. their hands had got into a way of moving mechanically towards their cheeks and necks and foreheads, the result of long and mostly vain efforts to squash mosquitos.
when we were going to have a meal a couple of fire-pots, covered with green boughs, had to be put into the room until it was full of smoke and comparatively empty of mosquitos. then we went into the smoke, and the fire-pots were put in the doorway. i wasn’t at pilou long enough to get used to being half-cooked myself while i was eating my dinner, but even the smoke in your eyes and lungs was a more bearable affliction than the winged tormentors who seemed to be a sort of punitive discount on the vast mineral wealth of pilou.
no one but very wicked people ought to live there, and when they die their accounts ought to be considered squared.
the saloon of the ballande liner st. louis.
with eyes puffed up and almost closed; with nose and ears and lips about twice their normal[271] size; with knuckles and wrists swollen and stiff—to say nothing of a skinful of itching bumps—i got back to pam, and on board the cargo boat on which i had booked a passage in noumea.
we called her afterwards the ballande liner st. louis. she was an exaggeration of la france, and belonged to the same distinguished firm. she was bigger and, if possible, dirtier. she also smelt more, because there was a larger area for the smells to spread themselves over.
no provision had been made for the eight passengers who were doomed to travel by her. the captain had no money or credit to buy stores, and when i offered to lend him some, he declined, in case his owners should hold him responsible. the result was that the food we ate on that miserable voyage made me look back longingly to the days when i had eaten salt horse and pickled pork in the forecastle of a black-birder.
the decks were not washed down till the fifth morning, when we reached sydney heads. then there was a general clean-up before the medical superintendent came on board, in case a worse fate than quarantine might await us. up went[272] yellow jack again, and that afternoon saw us anchored off the quarantine station at north head.
i have been in prisons of many sorts, but that quarantine taught me for the first time what imprisonment really means. the penalty for leaving the st. louis without authority was ￡300 fine and six months’ hard labour—so there we were for eight days and nights of about one hundred and fifty hours each.
on one side there was the quarantine station—about as beautiful a land and seascape as those about to die ever took a last look from at earth and sea and sky.
on the other hand, the varied beauties of “our harbour,” with manly beach to the northward, north shore with its red-roofed villas sprinkled among the trees; and, away in the dim distance, the spires and chimneys of sydney. a couple of hours would have taken us to it, but as we looked at it with longing eyes, thinking of what a cocktail at the bar of the australia hotel would taste like, it might just as well have been twenty thousand miles away.
it was during those eight days of mingled dirt and discomfort, cursing, and cribbage that i[273] saw as curious a contrast between life and death as you might search the wide world over for.
on the starboard side, which is the right-hand side looking forward, lay the route of the excursion steamers running between sydney and manly beach.
they came past at all hours of the day, and they came near enough for us to hear strains of stringed and wind instruments, which brought back memories of the dear old thames with painful distinctness.
on the port side, with almost equal frequency, there came a green-painted, white-awninged launch, flying the yellow flag and carrying corpses, “cases,” and “contacts” from the dep?t at wooloomooloo. as she rounded into the jetty she whistled. day and night for eight days and nights we heard that whistle—and the meaning of it was usually death. but you get hardened to all things in time, and before our durance vile ended we had got to call her the cold meat boat.
one day the medical superintendent of the station acceded to an urgent request made by myself and a fellow-passenger. neither of us had washed properly for six days, and so, after[274] a little discussion and many promises, he let us go ashore that we might enjoy ourselves under a hose. we douched each other for more than half an hour, and then we went to stretch ourselves on the beach—a silver-sanded rock-walled curve, trodden by many feet which will never tread earth again.
as we were coming back to the quay to go on board we heard that never-to-be-forgotten whistle again, and the green death boat swung round the corner. one of the sanitary police on the wharf put his hand up and waved us back.
in the stern there were about a dozen people sitting. forward there was a long shapeless bundle lying on a stretcher. it was a case. the others were “contacts,” friends, lodgers, and relations who had lived in the same house with the case. they had come to be isolated for ten days, so that the microbe of the black death might show whether or not it was in their blood.
they were taken out of the boat first. their own feelings didn’t matter, for the black spectre takes no account of human affections, and permits no other to do so. they were marched away to the quarters set apart for contacts. no farewells[275] were permitted, just a look that might be the last, and that was all.
then the stretcher with the long bundle on it was lifted and carried on to the wharf. meanwhile the ambulance backed down to the shore-end, the stretcher was put into it, and it drove away up through the trees to the hospital. the next journey of that particular “case” was to the cemetery four days afterwards.
when we got back to our floating prison i told the chief engineer what we had seen on shore, and he said in very epigrammatic french:
“quite so! what would you? you are a human being till you take the plague; after that you are an outcast, a thing separate. you live and get better; you die and are buried that’s all.”
and, as it happened, the very next day brought an all-too vivid illustration of the truth of this saying. about ten in the morning we heard the “woo-hoo” of the death boat’s whistle.
there was only one passenger this time, and he travelled in a coffin. a common two-wheeled cart backed down to where the ambulance had been the day before. the coffin was carried to it and put in just like any other sort of packing-case[276] might have been. the driver whipped up his horse, and we watched the cart with its load of coffin, corpse, and quicklime, trotting up the winding road which leads to the burying-ground of north head.
i have seen many funerals in a good many places from westminster abbey to wooloomooloo, but this one was the simplest and the saddest of them all.
away on the other side of the bay, wife and children, brothers and sisters and friends were mourning—and there was the indescribable thing, which two or three days ago had been a man, being carted away to be dropped into a twelve-foot hole in the ground—buried like a dead dog, because it had died of the black death instead of something else. from which you will see that the black death has terrors for the living even after it has claimed its dead.
