Becke - Pacific Tales

Editor: Kaori OConnor

OTHER BOOKS IN THIS SERIES

James S. de Benneville Tales of the Samurai
Isabella Bird Korea and her Neighbours
Isabella Bird Six Months in Hawaii
Katharine Augusta Carl With the Empress Dowager of China
Miguel Covarrubias Island of Bali
Miguel Covarrubias Mexico South
Paul Gauguin Intimate Journals
Jukichi Inouye Home Life in Tokyo
Washington Irving Astoria
John La Farge An American Artist in the South Seas
Jack London Cruise of the Snark
Pierre Loti Japan: Madame Chrysanthemum
Pierre Loti Tahiti: The Marriage of Loti
Herman Melville Omoo
Herman Melville Typee
Charles Nordhoff Nordhoffs West Coast
Robert Louis Stevenson In the South Seas

PACIFIC TALES

BY LOUIS BECKE

Introduction by Kaori OConnor

Trader, pirate, smuggler, beachcomber, castaway the Australian adventurer Louis Becke had been all of these before he sat down at a table made of gin cases turned his hand to writing stories. Becke was then thirty-eight, slim and deeply tanned, with a restless gaze and hands that looked, as one observer remarked, stong enough to crush a coconut or a skull. in its wild and raffish heyday.

Born on June 18, 1855 in Port Macquarie, New South Wales, where his English-born father Frederick was clerk of petty sessions, Becke was given the names George Lewis, but preferred from boyhood to be known as Louis. Becke ran away from home twice before he was ten, and his formal education was limited to two years at the Fort Street Model School in Sydney, where his family moved in 1867. At fourteen he embarked on his Pacific travels, sailing steerage with his brother Vernon to San Francisco where he worked as a clerk and messenger before returning home by way of Fiji some nineteen months later. Soon he was off again, stowing away on the bark Rotumah bound for Samoa which is those days, as he later recalled, was the land of Primeval Wickedness and Original and imported Sin, Strong Drink, and Loose Fish generally. Becke spent two years working as a clerk in Macfarlane and Williams store in Apia where he observed the fighting between followers of Talavou and Malietoa Laupepa in the Samoan civil war, mixed with many of the colourful characters who later appeared in his stories, and acquired his abiding dislike of German colonials.

At eighteen Becke became a supercargo a seagoing business agent, bookeeper and merchant who handled the commercial aspects of a trading voyage, leaving the captain to attend to maritime matters. Aboard ship the supercargo was in charge of the trade room a floating general store stocked with Holland gin, fancy hats, fishing hooks, concertinas, soap, Queensland rum, tinned meats, tobacco, cloth, dynamite and many other goods irresistable to the islanders. In practice, the job of a supercargo was a thankless one, for the hapless occupant of the position usually found himself trapped between the conflicting interests of the ships owners and the captain, the captain and the crew, and the crew and the islanders, but for a poor young man like Becke it offered unrivalled opportunities for adventure at sea. Beckes first voyage as supercargo took him to Mili atoll in the Marshall islands on the rotting ketch E.A. Williams, with instructions to deliver the ship to a man who intended to sell her to the natives. Conditions on board were so bad that, on arriving at Mili, Becke left the ship and refused to return, and indeed the ketch was so unseaworthy that she proved unsaleable at any price.

The man to whom Becke had delivered the ketch now abandoned her and signed Becke on as his supercargo, beginning one of the most exciting adventures of the young mans life, for the ship he joined was the sleek brig Leonora and his benefactor was none other than the notorious Captain Bully Hayes. By 1874 when he took Becke on at Mili, the American-born Hayes had been twenty years in the Pacific, during which time he had obtained countless ships through fraud, stolen tons of cargo belonging to other traders, held whole villages to ransom, raped scores of native girls and kidnapped thousands of unwilling islanders to work as forced labour on distant plantations, a horrifying practice known as blackbirding. Ten weeks off from Mili the Leonora was wrecked on the reefs of Kusaie in a gale, and after the survivors swam ashore through shark-infested waters they fell to quarrelling among themselves and terrorizing the natives. Appalled by the behaviour of his shipmates, Becke took his leave of Hayes and withdrew to the village of Leass where he lived with a native family for what he remembered as the seven happiest months of his life. The idyll came to an end with the arrival of the British warship Rosario, which was in search of Hayes with orders to arrest him on ninety-seven charges every count, I believe, except leprosy as Becke later remarked. But Hayes was an American citizen over whom a British warship had no jurisdiction, and in the end it was Becke who was arrested, put in the brig and taken to Brisbane to stand trial for having stolen the E. A. Williams.

On his day in court Becke was acquitted of piracy, having retained through all his adventures the note that instructed him to deliver the ketch to Hayes. Now nineteen, he made the first of several attempts to reconcile himself to life ashore, joining the Palmer River gold rush and working at the Ravenwood station and as a bank clerk in Townville until he was dismissed for utter lack of business capacity and distinct disinclination for work but lost most of his possessions when he was shipwrecked on Beru in the Gilbert islands in August 1881. Becke then traded in New Britain, where he witnessed many bloody massacres among the still-cannibal natives and contracted the malaria that would plague him for the rest of his life, finally moving on to Majuro in the Marshall islands. By now he was expert in many island languages, well-versed in island lore and culture, and had developed a deep distaste for many of his fellow traders. As he put it in a letter to his mother written from Nanumanga;