BIGGLES IN THE SOUTH SEAS

by Captain W. E. Johns

First published September 1940

CONTENTS

List of illustrations - Page 7 (Frontispiece by Norman Howard and six illustrations by Norman Howard on pages 45, 79, 105, 165, 207 and 233)

Page 9 – A WORD TO THE READER – (Signed W. E. J.)

Johns explains why Biggles play a smaller role in this book. “Being a wise leader he was prepared to take the advice and accept the service of those better acquainted with dangers of which he had had little experience”.

Page 10 – THE ISLANDS

Johns talks about the Society Islands and the Marquesas.

I. BIGGLES MEETS AN OLD FRIEND (Pages 11 – 34)

“It was a perfect morning in early spring, when Major James Bigglesworth, better known to his friends as Biggles, with his two comrades, the Honourable Algernon Lacey, M.C., and ‘Ginger’ Hebblethwaite, turned into Piccadilly on their way to the Royal Aero Club”. Outside they meet Biggles old friend Sandy Macaster. Sandy was a former Captain in Biggles and Algy’s old Squadron, Biggles tells Ginger “until he hit a telegraph pole on the wrong side of the lines”. (Sandy doesn’t actually appear in any of the old 266 Squadron stories that Johns had previously written). They haven’t met since then, so Biggles invites Sandy to join them for lunch. Sandy tells them he is in England looking for money – five thousand pounds. Biggles says he is having nothing to do with any “wild-cat scheme”. “Would ye call a hatful o’pearls a wild-cat scheme?” Sandy tells Biggles he has seen them with his own eyes. “I’ll tell ye just the plain sober honest truth – every word of it”. Sandy says he sold everything he had and bought a third-class passage to Papeete, in Tahiti, one of the Society Islands. “They belong to France now and being French, nobody bothers much about anything”. Sandy says he spotted an old diving-suit in a trader’s store and arranged to borrow it on the understanding that if he found pearls the trader would have a third. Sandy then made the same deal with the owner of an old lugger. So he could keep a third of any pearls he found. “I worked like a n****r (This is the seventh Biggles book to feature the use of the very offensive “N” word by W. E. Johns. The word appears twice in this book, once in this chapter and once in Chapter II, “An Encounter with Castanelli”. Of course, in its day, the word was in regular use and not considered offensive at all, otherwise it would not have appeared in a children’s book, where even mild expletives are watered down. The word remained in all Oxford editions of this book and also in the 1965 and 1969 Armada paperback versions. This book was not chosen by Red Fox to be reprinted) for nearly a year”, doing most of the diving himself and had a nice little bag of pearls, enough to keep him comfortable for the rest of his days, even with a third share. Making for Papeete, a cyclone hit and the pearls went back to the bottom of the sea with the lugger. Sandy got back to Mareita on a bit of driftwood. Sandy tells another story about finding a large pearl that would have been worth about £5000 if sold in Paris, but a gust of wind hit his schooner and the pearl rolled over the side before he could grab it. Sandy then says that eighteen months ago, he was flat broke and so he took a job as supercargo with a Corsican called Louis Castanelli. He had a bad reputation. “He’s a crooked, foul-mouthed little swine, and his crew of eight native boys, whom he’d picked up some time in the Solomons, were not much better”. They had done time in Australia for cannibalism. Castanelli was selling spirits to the natives which was against the law and Sandy threatened to report him to the first French governor they saw. At a location east of the Marquesas, Castanelli, who was drunk, and Sandy, clashed. Sandy has just taken a reading of their location but had not yet entered it in the log. There was a forty or fifty foot swell on the sea and the bottom came within five or six feet of the keel of their boat, the Avarata, as the islands were effectively the tops of mountains there and it may have been a submerged peak. Fearing the boat would be crushed in the shallow water, Sandy shouted “Man the boat!”. “Castanelli wanted to know what the blankety-blank for”. Sandy told him to come and look and then they saw thousands of oysters, the size of dinner-plates, lying in pairs. They were open and there was the gleam of mother-of-pearl inside. That alone was worth a fortune. Castanelli looked at Sandy and said “I reckon there ain’t enough here for the two of us” and pulled a gun and fired. Sandy was in a hopeless situation. Castanelli’s “eight boys were with him, their knives out”. Knowing that Castanelli didn’t know their location, Sandy snatched up the sextant and threw it over the side and then followed it as Castanelli fired at him again and again. Sandy swam away from the schooner and Castanelli tried to sail after Sandy and shoot him, but the wind started blowing a gale and Castanelli had to give up and sail away. Sandy says he thought “I’ll just drown comfortably by myself” although he managed to hang on, floating, though the night. “It’s funny how you hang on to life, even when everything seems hopeless. I couldn’t hope to be picked up. In those waters there is, maybe, one ship for every hundred thousand square miles of sea. However, the current took Sandy past an island and he was able to reach shore. The island had fresh water and coconuts and Sandy was able to survive for three months. “I was taken off by a couple of Marquesans from Rutuona in a canoe; a boy and a girl named Breaker of Shells and Full Moon – at least, those are the English equivalents. They are easier to remember than the native names”. It then took Sandy two months, hopping from island to island to get to Nuku-hiva, the biggest island of the group, and then three months to get a schooner to Tahiti. Castanelli had returned and reported Sandy as lost overboard in a gale and then sailed off again. Sandy tried to get other island skippers interested in his find on a fifty-fifty basis but no one was interested. “You see, the trouble is that every loafer and beach-comber in the South Seas has a tale to tell about a wonderful pearl-bed. You are always hearing such stories, but nobody believes them. They just laugh at you”. Sandy managed to pick up a pearl or two in Rutuona and went to Australia and tried to raise money there for an expedition, but people would not put down the money without him revealing the location of the pearl bed and that was something he was not prepared to do. He used the rest of his money to travel to England thinking that people might not be so sceptical, but hasn’t succeeded. Biggles asks some questions. Sandy says the island he was on has no name. Biggles calls it “Sandy’s island” for the sake of argument. It is around eight hundred miles from Tahiti. Biggles asks if you could land a flying-boat in the anchorage and is told that you could. Biggles offers to provide the flying-boat and pay all expenses if Sandy is willing to split the profits. Sandy agrees to split the profits four ways. Biggles says he will give Sandy a cheque to go and get the diving-gear and anything else they might need. Biggles says he will attend to the machine. “Don’t forget to bring your bowler hat to measure them in,” smiled Biggles. “We shall be satisfied with nothing less than the hatful you spoke about at the beginning”.