confidently out at the horizon. The Japanese watched in puzzlement as the Americans quietly went about their last mortal task. When the grave was dug, the Japanese were still suspicious. They bound the Americans hand and foot and then backed cautiously away from them. The Americans gazed impassively at the Japanese, uncomprehending. Then they looked again at the blue encircling Pacific, scanned it as they had scanned it for years. They smiled at one another with confidence, sharing some secret which was denied their captors. They had passed some psychological point of no return and now were ready for whatever consequences followed.
At a command from a Japanese officer, machine guns began to chatter and rifles to crack. The forty-eight were smashed back into the grave by a solid hail of bullets. A few moments later not one of them was alive. The Japanese covered them over with sand and coral.
In 1946, Admiral Sakaibara and Lieutenant Commander Tachibana and fourteen others were sentenced to hang by the military commission which was convened on Kwajalein to investigate the circumstances of the deaths of the ninety-eight.
This was done.
Clifford Gessler
Phantoms and
Physicians on Tepuka
Born in Milton Junction, Wisconsin, in 1893, Clifford Gessler, journalist and poet, served from 1924 to 1934 as telegraph and literary editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Seeking a change, he joined the Mangarevan Expedition of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum and in 1934 sailed to the Tuamotu group on the ninety-foot sampan Islander. He and Kenneth P. Emory (“Keneti”) were the only outsiders on the atoll of Tepuka Maruia (the place of the puka tree) from May 15 to July 29, 1934, and closely shared the lives of the Polynesian inhabitants. Two uncanny selections are taken from his 1937 volume, Road My Body Goes.
Gessler then went on the cutter Tiare Tahiti, by way of Vahitahi and several other islands, to Papeete, where he spent some time as a penniless beachcomber. His later adventures, wandering among the Tuamotu, Austral, and Society groups, are told in The Leaning Wind (1943).
GHOSTS
SOME time in the night of our first day on the island, I was awakened by a sound as of pebbles thrown against the side of the house. It was not a loud sound, but a definite one, and the pauses between were as of someone listening.
My first thought was that an early-rising pig or chicken had wandered against the house, but the beam of an electric torch, flashed into the darkness, revealed no living thing.
“Somebody is playing tricks,” I concluded, though in view of the absence of cover for such a trickster to hide near the house, and the known reluctance of Tuamotuans to venture out at night without a light, this explanation was slightly lame.
“It was without doubt a spirit,” said our neighbors next morning.
Such stone-throwing ghosts are common in the Tuamotu, the more so in the “civilized” iron-roofed islands where they can make more noise. All the islands are haunted; the imagination of the Polynesian has peopled his darkness, often with shapes of fear. The spirits of the newly dead wander abroad, seeking literally whom they may devour. This latter propensity of the nocturnal apparitions was less emphasized at Tepuka, and there may have been some connection of this omission with the contention, plausible enough, of the people of that island that they had never been cannibals. On the former man-eating islands, such as Vahitahi and Hao, it is a natural transition, as Stevenson pointed out long ago, from the eating of the dead by the living to the eating of the living by the dead, and a certain kind of spirit is therefore as greatly feared as the werewolves and vampires of medieval Europe. Nevertheless, the haunted darkness of the coconut groves was regarded with extreme caution by our friends and neighbors; nor would they sleep at night without a light in the house: a dim and smoky lantern, turned low, or if, as often happened, oil failed,
At a command from a Japanese officer, machine guns began to chatter and rifles to crack. The forty-eight were smashed back into the grave by a solid hail of bullets. A few moments later not one of them was alive. The Japanese covered them over with sand and coral.
In 1946, Admiral Sakaibara and Lieutenant Commander Tachibana and fourteen others were sentenced to hang by the military commission which was convened on Kwajalein to investigate the circumstances of the deaths of the ninety-eight.
This was done.
Clifford Gessler
Phantoms and
Physicians on Tepuka
Born in Milton Junction, Wisconsin, in 1893, Clifford Gessler, journalist and poet, served from 1924 to 1934 as telegraph and literary editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Seeking a change, he joined the Mangarevan Expedition of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum and in 1934 sailed to the Tuamotu group on the ninety-foot sampan Islander. He and Kenneth P. Emory (“Keneti”) were the only outsiders on the atoll of Tepuka Maruia (the place of the puka tree) from May 15 to July 29, 1934, and closely shared the lives of the Polynesian inhabitants. Two uncanny selections are taken from his 1937 volume, Road My Body Goes.
Gessler then went on the cutter Tiare Tahiti, by way of Vahitahi and several other islands, to Papeete, where he spent some time as a penniless beachcomber. His later adventures, wandering among the Tuamotu, Austral, and Society groups, are told in The Leaning Wind (1943).
GHOSTS
SOME time in the night of our first day on the island, I was awakened by a sound as of pebbles thrown against the side of the house. It was not a loud sound, but a definite one, and the pauses between were as of someone listening.
My first thought was that an early-rising pig or chicken had wandered against the house, but the beam of an electric torch, flashed into the darkness, revealed no living thing.
“Somebody is playing tricks,” I concluded, though in view of the absence of cover for such a trickster to hide near the house, and the known reluctance of Tuamotuans to venture out at night without a light, this explanation was slightly lame.
“It was without doubt a spirit,” said our neighbors next morning.
Such stone-throwing ghosts are common in the Tuamotu, the more so in the “civilized” iron-roofed islands where they can make more noise. All the islands are haunted; the imagination of the Polynesian has peopled his darkness, often with shapes of fear. The spirits of the newly dead wander abroad, seeking literally whom they may devour. This latter propensity of the nocturnal apparitions was less emphasized at Tepuka, and there may have been some connection of this omission with the contention, plausible enough, of the people of that island that they had never been cannibals. On the former man-eating islands, such as Vahitahi and Hao, it is a natural transition, as Stevenson pointed out long ago, from the eating of the dead by the living to the eating of the living by the dead, and a certain kind of spirit is therefore as greatly feared as the werewolves and vampires of medieval Europe. Nevertheless, the haunted darkness of the coconut groves was regarded with extreme caution by our friends and neighbors; nor would they sleep at night without a light in the house: a dim and smoky lantern, turned low, or if, as often happened, oil failed,
Similar Books
