The morning news. [volume] (Savannah, Ga.) 1887-1900, 1898-06-02
THE HEART OF SAVAGERY.
A TRAGEDY OF BEACHCOMBERs IN
THE FAR AWAY SOUTH SEA.

Lonely Islet of the Pacihc-Murder
Bone without Excitement by
ChiIdIiIke Natives-Artistic Lying
by "a Woman TO Conceal the Crime.
From the New York Sun
The South Sea is full Of obscure TRACE
dies. Tragedy was often the end of adj
venture. and then. too. none but the most
venturesome or the most abandoned of
white men sought to live among ths Wild
islanders in the days, not so far remote,
when the missionary had not yet intro
duced his stucco churches and taught the
natives the price of an ak or handful of
ship biscuit This tale of one of the for
gotten tragedies is drawn from an official
document on which forty years of slumber-
ing in a forgotten pigeonhole has served
to dim the writing and to dull the imprint
of the lion and the unicorn with which a
British consul made the paper official TO
write an account of a murder on sixteen
sheets of government blue stationary, 20
attach a seal with the royal arms that
may pass sometimes as just the same as
avenging il.
Suvarrow is as lonely a group of desc
scantily Travelled region of the S~-'+h Seas
which lies to The eastward of Samoa ana
before reaching such populous centers as
Tahiti and Rarotonga. Other islands have
the picturesque features or towering noun
tains Verdure clad to their summit crags,
the grace of waving cocoanut palms firing
ing every beach with giant leaves. Suvar-
row is but a ring of sand banks skirting
a lagoon filed with coral groves the only
trees the stunted pandanus SET on group
of prop-like roots. Other islands have
their peopling of brOwn-skinned folk. pos
sibly treacherous, and always to be tceat-
ed as interiors by that lovely creature, the
beachcomber of these seas, yet human in
their desire for gaudy toys and the timed
goods on which the white man feeds. SUI
NARROW is marked on the charts as unin-
habited, and, therefore, is not a port of
call for the vagrant whaler in his search
for sperm, the trader or the blackbrder.
Yet now and again little island colonies
may be found on the bare sands OF the
atoll, for in the lagoon grow the peaIl
oyster and the beche-de-mer, which China
men eat, and on the sands great turtles
come to lay their eggs by night. Hence
beachcombers mysteriously wandering be-
yond the confines of civilization at odd
times camp on the bare islets in search
of the wealth of tortoise shell, pearl shell,
and trepang the sea affords. This is the
story of one such colony on the desolate
atoll of Suvarrow, a tale whose events
were complete in 1858, but have never yet
been made known beyond the comDers of
South Sea beaches
In the early months of 1857 Thomas
Charlton of Martha's Vineyard a runaway
hand from a Nantucket whaler was living
on the island of Manahiki When he was
fishing one day In a canoe outside the CO.
raj reef a sudden squa1 carried him and
his party of islanders out of sight of land
and left them adrift and undirecteu upon
the ocean. South Sea tradition is a mass
of tales of such involuntary voyaglng.
With such help as a sailor could get from
dead reckoning and a knowledge of the
set of the trade winds, Charlton managed
to bring his canoe TO Suvarrow and there
esta blisned his colony of gentle Manahik-
ians In addition to his wife Sumaria,
Charlton, or Tamu, as he was called i'm
the liquid speech of the islands. numbered
in the census of his settlement on the
sands eight souls. Here and his wife Ko
korariki Ga PaumOtu woman from the far
eastern island away to windward of Ia
hti, and, as the event proved, a shrewd
and constituencies woman,) Kaita1 and his
wife, and the single men Ngere, Taarau,
Volta, Otea, and Vaimau. With true Poly
nesian apathy, these people made the best
they could of a bad affair, built them hous-
es near a source of water, and took up the
thread of life where II had been broken by
the squat at NldudnlIl, scores OF leagues
away. There was food on the island and
water-that is enough for q colony of folk
whose needs are simple
They were destined to live not long alone.
Capt. Sam Sustenance was sailing those
seas in his topsail schooner Dart. Capt
Sustenance might not be classed among
the elect. He was not good man, even
according to the standard OF those wa
tiers, where the only good thing afloat was
- he
London Missionary Society. which has pio-
neered the South Pacific since Cooks voy-
ages of discovery. But Sustenance was
such a man as best suited the early
times of sea trading, enough of a mere
merchantmen to satisfy the curiosity of
the infrequent naval vessels cruising
among the islands for the sake Of the
moral effect, enough of a buccaneer to
have dollars to jingle on the Circular Quay
in Sydney before a grand carouse in the
Currency Lass public house. From end to
end of the Pacific Sam Sustenance was
known by the name of Uru-Uru, which the
islanders had given him. At Penrhyn
Island on Aug. !, 1857, he engaged an
English beachcomber, Joe Bird to super
intend the party of native pearl divers
whom he shipped at the same time There
were eighteen men and several women in
the party The Penrhyn folk are widely
different from the gentle and timorous
Manahikians. Dour and gloomy at all
times, they are capable of nourishing a
grievance and of biding their time in a
plot to wipe it out. Two days later TJru-
Uru stopped at Manahiki long enough to
take on baord 1000 cOcoanuts for the food
of his divers, and on Aug. 10 he anchored
at Suvarrow.
According to beachcomber's law of might
is right Sustenance and Joe Bird with a
fighting crew at their back, with a score
of fierce Penrhyn Islanders were able 10
decree that Tamu and his handful Of mild
Manahikians should confine themselves to
one islet and leave the rest of the atolI to
the pearl divers. Still more company was
coming. Within a month or six weeks the
schooner Ticker, Thomas f. Martin mas
ter, visited Suvarrow and landed Jules
Tirel a Frenchman, who was known TO
the islanders as Jules Farani or French
Jules. In October Of the same year Sus-
tenance revisited his pearling station and
found little shell as yet collected. II Is
likely that he gave forcible expression to
his disappointment, but be that is st may.
the main feature is that the three beach
combers were then there with the two IA
tive settlements of Nanahikans and Pen
rhVn roODla and that all vaa xvaH Il,