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| By Reef and Palm |
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By Louis Becke  Â
CONTENTSChallis The Doubter ABOUT THE AUTHORGeorge Lewis (Louis) Becke was born in 1855 in New South Wales, Australia. He received little formal education before the family moved to Sydney, but there he was able to attend school. At 16, however, he stowed away on a ship bound for Apia in Samoa where he took a job as a store bookkeeper. When delivering a ketch for his employers, Becke, just 18, met notorious slaver, buccaneer, and swindler "Bully" Hayes. He sailed with Hayes for three months as "supercargo" until Hayes ship, the Leonora, sank during a typhoon. Becke survived the shipwreck, and left Hayes, but a British warship pursuing the pirate arrested Becke and others for trial in Brisbane. Fortunately he had salvaged a copy of the power-of-attorney from his employers and was acquitted of the charges of piracy. While in Queensland he took part in the gold rush, but by age 25 he had the urge to wander again and became an employed trader on Kiribati, then opened his own store in February 1881 on Nukufetau, and married a native girl. After losing all his belongings in 1881 in a shipwreck near Beru Island, he left both islands and wife to seek a job with his first employer, but instead landed in Sydney. By 1886 he was married again to a native Australian, Bessie Maunsell, and was working as a draftsman until moving to Townsville in 1888. Once again the urge for the islands came over him, and he took a post as a trader from 1890 until 1892 when he returned to Sydney. Unable to find another post as a trader, Becke turned to writing. Tradition has it that publication of his first story, "'Tis in the Blood" was the result of acquaintances he made in a pub who put him in touch with an editor of a weekly paper. Shortly thereafter he was asked to write autobiographical material for T.A. Browne (writing under the pseudonym Rolf Boldrewood) which Browne would use as background material for a novel. However, Brown apparently used too much of the material verbatim, and Becke brought suit against Browne in a case that was argued successfully by Becke's lawyer, another famous Australian literary figure, Banjo Patterson. In 1894 Becke's first collection of short stories was published by Unwin in London under the title By Reef and Palm. Other collections soon followed, but Becke's habit of selling his copyright, and Unwin's notoriously poor payment practices, combined to leave Becke relatively poor despite his success. Forced to declare bankruptcy in 1894, he separated from his wife in 1896 and left for England. There he became a celebrity on the British literary scene, renowned for his conversational ability as a story teller. He became friends with many colonial adventurers, including Rudyard Kipling. Still poor and always restless, Becke moved around Great Britain, lived in Ireland for a year, and in France from 1903-1906. He also took trips to the U.S. and Jamaica during those years, and then returned to the South Pacific in 1908 after remarrying. By 1909 he was back in Sydney, but he still impoverished and constantly hounded by creditors. His fame diminishing as well, Becke began to drink heavily and spent the final two years of his life mostly alone and battling cancer. He died in 1913. In some ways it is difficult to assess the literary contribution of Louis Becke. His prose style is not up to the polished standards of giants such as Conrad or Melville, but his knowledge of the world in the South Seas produced a vivid record of cultures clashing and the inevitable results. According to Becke expert Professor Dirk Spennemann of Charles Sturt University, "In 1957 James Michener and A. Grove Day devised a series of questions to identify those who really knew the Pacific. The only useful question to ask, so they felt, was to name 'best writer about the Pacific,' as there was only one 'correct' answer: Louis Becke."
Title: By Reef and Palm  |
