第23章 "YAH! YAH! YAH!"(4)

"That afternoon they landed from the schooner in three small boats filled with white men.They went right through the village, shooting every man they saw.Also they shot the fowls and pigs.We who were not killed got away in canoes and paddled out into the lagoon.Looking back, we could see all the houses on fire.Late in the afternoon we saw many canoes coming from Nihi, which is the village near the Nihi Passage in the northeast.They were all that were left, and like us their village had beenburned by a second schooner that had come through Nihi Passage.

"We stood on in the darkness to the westward for Pauloo, but in the middle of the night we heard women wailing and then we ran into a big fleet of canoes.They were all that were left of Pauloo, which likewise was in ashes, for a third schooner had come in through the Pauloo Passage.You see, that mate, with his black boys, had not been drowned.He had made the Solomon Islands, and there told his brothers of what we had done in Oolong.And all his brothers had said they would come and punish us, and there they were in the three schooners, and our three villages were wiped out.

"And what was there for us to do? In the morning the two schooners from windward sailed down upon us in the middle of the lagoon.The trade wind was blowing fresh, and by scores of canoes they ran us down.And the rifles never ceased talking.We scattered like flying fish before the bonita, and there were so many of us that we escaped by thousands, this way and that, to the islands on the rim of the atoll.

"And thereafter the schooners hunted us up and down the lagoon.In the nighttime we slipped past them.But the next day, or in two days or three days, the schooners would be coming back, hunting us toward the other end of the lagoon.And so it went.We no longer counted nor remembered our dead.True, we were many and they were few.But what could we do? I was in one of the twenty canoes filled with men who were not afraid to die.We attacked the smallest schooner.They shot us down in heaps.They threw dynamite into the canoes, and when the dynamite gave out, they threw hot water down upon us.And the rifles never ceased talking.And those whose canoes were smashed were shot as they swam away.And the mate danced up and down upon the cabin top and yelled, "Yah! Yah! Yah!'

"Every house on every smallest island was burned.Not a pig nor a fowl was left alive.Our wells were defiled with the bodies of the slain, or else heaped high with coral rock.We were twenty-five thousand on Oolong before the three schooners came.Today we are five thousand.After the schooners left, we were but three thousand, as you shall see.

"At last the three schooners grew tired of chasing us back and forth.Sothey went, the three of them, to Nihi, in the northeast.And then they drove us steadily to the west.Their nine boats were in the water as well.They beat up every island as they moved along.They drove us, drove us, drove us day by day.And every night the three schooners and the nine boats made a chain of watchfulness that stretched across the lagoon from rim to rim, so that we could not escape back.