Captain Jansen's
warning that any canoe sighted that night would be pumped full of
lead, Ugi turned into a bellicose declaration of war, which wound up
with a peroration somewhat to the following effect: "You kill my
captain, I drink his blood and die with him!"
The bushmen contented themselves with burning an unoccupied mission
house, and sneaked back to the bush. The next day the Eugenie
sailed in and dropped anchor. Three days and two nights the Minota
pounded on the reef; but she held together, and the shell of her was
pulled off at last and anchored in smooth water. There we said
good-bye to her and all on board, and sailed away on the Eugenie,
bound for Florida Island. {1}
CHAPTER XVI - BECHE DE MER ENGLISH
Given a number of white traders, a wide area of land, and scores of
savage languages and dialects, the result will be that the traders
will manufacture a totally new, unscientific, but perfectly
adequate, language. This the traders did when they invented the
Chinook lingo for use over British Columbia, Alaska, and the
Northwest Territory. So with the lingo of the Kroo-boys of Africa,
the pigeon English of the Far East, and the beche de mer of the
westerly portion of the South Seas. This latter is often called
pigeon English, but pigeon English it certainly is not. To show how
totally different it is, mention need be made only of the fact that
the classic piecee of China has no place in it.
There was once a sea captain who needed a dusky potentate down in
his cabin. The potentate was on deck. The captain's command to the
Chinese steward was "Hey, boy, you go top-side catchee one piecee
king." Had the steward been a New Hibridean or a Solomon islander,
the command would have been: "Hey, you fella boy, go look 'm eye
belong you along deck, bring 'm me fella one big fella marster
belong black man."
It was the first white men who ventured through Melanesia after the
early explorers, who developed beche de mer English - men such as the
beche de mer fishermen, the sandalwood traders, the pearl hunters,
and the labour recruiters. In the Solomons, for instance, scores of
languages and dialects are spoken. Unhappy the trader who tried to
learn them all; for in the next group to which he might wander he
would find scores of additional tongues. A common language was
necessary - a language so simple that a child could learn it, with a
vocabulary as limited as the intelligence of the savages upon whom
it was to be used. The traders did not reason this out. Beche do
mer English was the product of conditions and circumstances.
Function precedes organ; and the need for a universal Melanesian
lingo preceded beche de mer English. Beche de mer was purely
fortuitous, but it was fortuitous in the deterministic way.
