taking notes down, asking questions, the names of trees, flowers, and Isle afar and near, busily engaged in compiling his memoirs, to be published when he returned to his native land in a grand volume chock-full of extreme virtue and self-sacrifice, and the sad ways of the children of the South Seas, and the little bit of good white men had circulated in the children who would grow up pious. I have read a good many books written by men who have presumably travelled and lived in the parts they have written about, but I can most earnestly assure my readers of this autobiography that black men of India and on the Gold Coast of West Africa and in the South Seas do not speak as I have read that they do speak.
The copper-coloured man of Ceylon and Bombay, as soon as you step ashore, speeds towards you and says, “Me show you where live, me good man, carry parcel and nebber steal,” points viciously to his rival—who is clamouring in pigeon English for your patronage—and swears that “He’s bad man, steal all, and been pison” (meaning prison), as the aristocratic dark-turbaned gentleman, with long black naked legs, white shoes and no socks, grins, shows his white teeth, pulls his black hand from under his shirt tail, and tries to entice you to scan his splendid selection of photographs—photographs that, not to put too fine a point upon it, even a Turk, on looking at them, would blow his nose and blush! The South Sea Islanders accost you in a more innocent way; naturally a virtuous race, and living in isolation from civilised Europe, they have watched the White askance, and gradually discovered that the godliness he clothes himself with sometimes covers a deal of vice! So they strive to sell you corals and fruit, as they patter over the ship’s deck with naked feet, and when they see the white man’s eyes wandering over their lithe figures, the women, who have been schooled in Western ways, glide up to you with speaking eyes, stroke your hand with their soft brown fingers, stand with their curved nude brown bodies, clothed only in a string of beads, and like a big greedy child say, “You like me? give me money, eh?”
This, of course, sounds very different to the books I have read, but whoever you are, go to the South Seas, and keep your weather-eye open and you will not contradict me when I say that the money spent by Christian Societies in England and America to polish up the South Sea Island daughters and men, who were far more innocent than Europe ever remembers being, could be spent in our own countries with far greater advantage. The South Sea Islanders would be happier and the English poor and starving children better looked after.
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