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. Me
fella me savvee him. Me fella me savvee talk along white man.
"Before long time altogether no place he stop. God big fella
marster belong white man, him fella He make 'm altogether.
