A recruit, after having toiled three years on a
plantation, was returned to his own village on Malaita. He was clad
in all kinds of gay and sportive garments. On his head was a top-
hat. He possessed a trade-box full of calico, beads, porpoise-
teeth, and tobacco. Hardly was the anchor down, when the villagers
were on board. The recruit looked anxiously for his own relatives,
but none was to be seen. One of the natives took the pipe out of
his mouth. Another confiscated the strings of beads from around his
neck. A third relieved him of his gaudy loin-cloth, and a fourth
tried on the top-hat and omitted to return it. Finally, one of them
took his trade-box, which represented three years' toil, and dropped
it into a canoe alongside. "That fella belong you?" the captain
asked the recruit, referring to the thief. "No belong me," was the
answer. "Then why in Jericho do you let him take the box?" the
captain demanded indignantly. Quoth the recruit, "Me speak along
him, say bokkis he stop, that fella he cross along me" - which was
the recruit's way of saying that the other man would murder him.
God's wrath, when He sent the Flood, was merely a case of being
cross along mankind.
What name? is the great interrogation of beche de mer. It all
depends on how it is uttered. It may mean: What is your business?
What do you mean by this outrageous conduct? What do you want?
What is the thing you are after? You had best watch out; I demand
an explanation; and a few hundred other things. Call a native out
of his house in the middle of the night, and he is likely to demand,
"What name you sing out along me?"
Imagine the predicament of the Germans on the plantations of
Bougainville Island, who are compelled to learn beche de mer English
in order to handle the native labourers. It is to them an
unscientific polyglot, and there are no text-books by which to study
it. It is a source of unholy delight to the other white planters
and traders to hear the German wrestling stolidly with the
circumlocutions and short-cuts of a language that has no grammar and
no dictionary.
Some years ago large numbers of Solomon islanders were recruited to
labour on the sugar plantations of Queensland. A missionary urged
one of the labourers, who was a convert, to get up and preach a
sermon to a shipload of Solomon islanders who had just arrived. He
chose for his subject the Fall of Man, and the address he gave
became a classic in all Australasia. It proceeded somewhat in the
following manner:
"Altogether you boy belong Solomons you no savvee white man.
