TREASURE ISLANDS

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21970, 19 December 1936, Page 17

TREASURE ISLANDS

Suwarrow Gold and Other Stories of the Great Sou+h Sea. By James Cowan. Jonathan Cape. 253 pp. (7/6 net.) Auckland pays its price for being the terminus of Canadian and American shipping lines and for its nearness to the tropics. Its shopwindows, speech, dress, and manners have traces of American influence, it is the least typically New Zealand city, and queer fellows of various shades who have been carried in on Island ships give a shady romance to the back streets and sometimes give trouble to the police. But the waterfront is the richer for these wandering ships and men, and he who knows where to look may see strange people and hear strange tales in the year of civilisation, 1936. Thirty or 40 years ago the tales and the people were stranger still. Seacaptains had, bore about the bag or plate in church ’legedly, killed their man and gained their pile otherwise than by conventional selling and buying'; unobtrusive schooners found a quiet bertn away from the publicity of Queen street; wildlooking men, British and foreign, turned their steps to the hospitality of Alexandra street, and happy Kanakas beamed their bewildered way along the waterfront. From these men and at these times Mr Cowan collected his stories of the South Seas, and, put together, they make an astonishingly exciting book. The material is good, and, set down as hurriedly as they are, the tales are exciting. Mr Cowan has not the skill of arrangement or expression to do the subject full justice, and he is irritatingly unchronological; but his very baldness and awkwardness are not handicaps in telling stories so crude and fierce. The title story tells of an atoll where treasure has twice been found and where it may yet again be uncovered; there are accounts of blackbirders and sandalwood traders, stories of volcanic islands that rise and fall and of others still more elusive, there are tales of bad men and good, even of the missionary who cast off tall hat and frockcoat and horrified his colleagues. One of these wrote in his journal, “He has gone to the daughters of Belial; and he says he is Happie.’’ One adventure deserves its revival, the wreck of the Garston. After his vessel was cast away, the captain sailed his open boat on a voyage of 1700 miles in 23 days. The mutiny of the Caswell is another subject of horrible excitement that fiction can scarcely equal. One very interesting phase of South Sea history is the early Spanish exploration, so many traces of which are left in names, though many of these have been superseded. Thus Ducie Island was once Encarnacion: the New Hebrides have their Espiritu Santu; and Fernando Ouiros called atoll Gente Hermosa. When Mr Cowan amolifies his volume, he will be thanked if he adds a chapter or two about Quiros and de Mendena.