Freya of the Seven Isles

CHAPTER I

One day--and that day was many years ago now--I received a long,
chatty letter from one of my old chums and fellow-wanderers in
Eastern waters. He was still out there, but settled down, and
middle-aged; I imagined him--grown portly in figure and domestic in
his habits; in short, overtaken by the fate common to all except to
those who, being specially beloved by the gods, get knocked on the
head early. The letter was of the reminiscent "do you remember"
kind--a wistful letter of backward glances. And, amongst other
things, "surely you remember old Nelson," he wrote.

Remember old Nelson! Certainly. And to begin with, his name was
not Nelson. The Englishmen in the Archipelago called him Nelson
because it was more convenient, I suppose, and he never protested.
It would have been mere pedantry. The true form of his name was
Nielsen. He had come out East long before the advent of telegraph
cables, had served English firms, had married an English girl, had
been one of us for years, trading and sailing in all directions
through the Eastern Archipelago, across and around, transversely,
diagonally, perpendicularly, in semi-circles, and zigzags, and
figures of eights, for years and years.

There was no nook or cranny of these tropical waters that the
enterprise of old Nelson (or Nielsen) had not penetrated in an
eminently pacific way. His tracks, if plotted out, would have
covered the map of the Archipelago like a cobweb--all of it, with
the sole exception of the Philippines. He would never approach
that part, from a strange dread of Spaniards, or, to be exact, of
the Spanish authorities. What he imagined they could do to him it
is impossible to say. Perhaps at some time in his life he had read
some stories of the Inquisition.

But he was in general afraid of what he called "authorities"; not
the English authorities, which he trusted and respected, but the
other two of that part of the world. He was not so horrified at
the Dutch as he was at the Spaniards, but he was even more
mistrustful of them. Very mistrustful indeed. The Dutch, in his
view, were capable of "playing any ugly trick on a man" who had the
misfortune to displease them. There were their laws and
regulations, but they had no notion of fair play in applying them.
It was really pitiable to see the anxious circumspection of his
dealings with some official or other, and remember that this man
had been known to stroll up to a village of cannibals in New Guinea
in a quiet, fearless manner (and note that he was always fleshy all
his life, and, if I may say so, an appetising morsel) on some
matter of barter that did not amount perhaps to fifty pounds in the
end.