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GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ON
WEALTH AND DISTRIBUTION

The Coronavirus
Pandemic and
Inequality
A Global Perspective

Edited by
Shirley Johnson-Lans
Global Perspectives on Wealth and Distribution

Series Editors
Shirley Johnson-Lans, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, USA
Feridoon Koohi-Kamali, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
This is a broad-ranging and interdisciplinary series dedicated to studying
the fundamental economic issue of inequality, including wealth inequality,
wage and earnings differentials, and inequality in alternative measures
of well-being. The series focuses on studies of developed nations as
well as volumes focusing on recent research on inequality in the devel-
oping world. Gender- and racial-based inequality and the intra-household
division of resources are addressed as well as inequality associated with
technological change and globalization and the persistent problem of
poverty. The economics of human rights addresses the problems of the
most vulnerable members of society and considers policies to alleviate
human rights violations.
 Shirley Johnson-Lans
Editor

The Coronavirus
Pandemic
and Inequality
A Global Perspective
Editor
Shirley Johnson-Lans
Vassar College
Poughkeepsie, NY, USA

ISSN 2662-382X ISSN 2662-3838 (electronic)

Global Perspectives on Wealth and Distribution
ISBN 978-3-031-22218-4 ISBN 978-3-031-22219-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22219-1

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Adam Oliver of the London School of Economics for

gathering together our Anglo-American and European Health Policy
Network in the Spring of 2020 to write periodic commentaries on how
our various countries were dealing with the Coronavirus pandemic.
Being involved with this project caused me to begin keeping detailed
records of the daily COVID-19 reports which I still continue, provided
me with a wonderful network of friends and colleagues, and inspired me
to organize this book.
Thank you to all of the authors of chapters in the book, including
Amelie Quesnel-Vallee, and Jaunathan Bilodeau, Elize Massard de
Fonseca, Catarina Segatto, and Francisco Inacio Bastos, Margherita Gian-
noni and her Italian team, Gisella Kagy and Denat Negatu, Olive
Umuhire Nsababera, Vibhuti Mendiratta, and Hanna Sam, May Tseng-
Mei Cheng, and Vera Brusentsev. I thank my research assistant Ethan
Roth for his invaluable help, and thank Vassar Economics Department
colleague, Vera Brusentsev, for her help in organizing and editing as well
as her contribution of the excellent chapter on Australia.
And last but not least, I thank the editors at Palgrave Macmillan,
initially Elizabeth Graber and now Meera Seth, Ananda Kumar Mari-
appan, and Redhu Ruthroyonhu, who have been so helpful and
supportive throughout the process of creating this book.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
Shirley Johnson-Lans
2 The Response of the United States to the Coronavirus
Pandemic 7
Shirley Johnson-Lans
3 Inequalities Associated with the COVID-19 Pandemic
in Canada: The Legacy of Socio-Demographic Fault
Lines and Inter-Provincial Differences 39
Jaunathan Bilodeau and Amélie Quesnel-Vallée
4 COVID-19 Inequalities in Brazil: Health, Education,
and Social Assistance Policies 69
Elize Massard da Fonseca, Catarina Ianni Segatto,
and Francisco Inacio Bastos
5 The Coronavirus Pandemic and Inequality in Italy 85
Margherita Giannoni, Milena Vainieri, Iris M. Bosa,
Adriana Castelli, Michele Castelli, Oriana Ciani,
Simone Ghislandi, Giorgia Marini, and Sabina Nuti
6 The Coronavirus Pandemic: Ethiopia 131
Gisella Kagy and Denat Negatu

vii
viii CONTENTS

7 The Impact of COVID-19 on Household Welfare

in the Comoros: The Experience of a Small Island
Developing State 141
Olive Umuhire Nsababera, Vibhuti Mendiratta,
and Hannah Sam
8 Taiwan’s Response to the COVID-19 Crisis:
Experience and Lessons 197
Tsung-Mei Cheng
9 The Coronavirus Pandemic and Inequality: Australia 231
Vera Brusentsev
10 Conclusion 261
Shirley Johnson-Lans

Index 271
 Notes on Contributors

Francisco Inacio Bastos M.D., Ph.D., is a Senior Researcher, Physician,

and former Chair of Graduate Studies in the Department of Epidemiology
and Biostatistics at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ). He has
substantial experience in the research of substance misuse, particularly
its association with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), viral hepatitis,
and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and blood-borne diseases.
He has been the principal investigator on a number of large, multi-city
studies on HIV, and other blood-borne Infections and STIs.
Jaunathan Bilodeau is a Sociologist and Research Associate in the
Department of Sociology at McGill University. He completed his Ph.D.
in sociology at the Université de Montréal and did a postdoctoral fellow-
ship at McGill University. His work focuses on the relationship between
work-family articulation and health as well as on psychosocial, organiza-
tional, and structural determinants of health inequalities such as gender
and social policies. He has recently published in Preventive Medicine
Report, Social Science and Medicine—Population Health, and in the
Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Medical Sociology.
Dr. Iris M. Bosa is a Lecturer in Accounting at the University of Edin-
burgh Business School. Her particular research interest is on professional
accountability and the healthcare and social care sector. More specifically,
her attention is to the changing role of health professionals and health and
social care innovation in light of new accountability requirements. Before

ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

joining the University of Edinburgh she was a Lecturer in Public Health

at the European Training Centre for Social Affairs and Public Health
in Milan, antenna of the European Institute of Public Administration
(Maastricht).
Vera Brusentsev completed her undergraduate studies at Macquarie
University in Sydney, Australia. After being awarded a Commonwealth
Scholarship, she completed her Ph.D. program in economics at Dalhousie
University in Halifax, Canada. Her academic experience is broad in
terms of range and international scope, teaching in Argentina, Australia,
Canada, Nepal, and Latvia. She has conducted research and published on
labor force participation, unemployment protection programs, and the
effects of disasters caused by various hazards.
Adriana Castelli is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Health
Economics (CHE), University of York, which she joined in 2004.
She leads the Efficiency & Productivity policy research area in CHE and
has an extensive experience in the measurement of healthcare system
productivity, in which she has gained both national and international
recognition as a leading expert. She has collaborated with both UK and
international partners. She has published widely in health economics,
health policy, and social science journals. Her research interests include
health policy reforms evaluation, and health system performance measure-
ment, in both high and low/middle-income countries.
Dr. Michele Castelli is Senior Lecturer in Health Policy and Systems
at Newcastle University. His areas of expertise include healthcare systems
analysis and comparison, policy reform analysis and evaluation, and global
health, with a specific focus on the impact of socio-political and health
systems factors on the health and well-being of people and on their access
to health services and public services in developed and developing coun-
tries. He is the Degree Programme Director of the Public Health, Health
Services Research, and Global Public Health Postgraduate Programmes
of the Faculty of Medical Sciences at Newcastle University. He has partic-
ipated in several international collaborative and multidisciplinary research
projects, and he has published in high-impact academic journals in the
health policy field.
Mai Tsung-Mei Cheng L.L.B., M.A., is Health Policy Research Analyst,
School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. She is an
authority on the healthcare system of Taiwan, and with the late Princeton
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 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi

Health Economics Professor Uwe Reinhardt was the founder of the

Princeton Conference, an annual conference on healthcare policy.
Oriana Ciani is Associate Professor of Practice at the Government,
Health, and Not-for-Profit Division at SDA Bocconi School of Manage-
ment in Milan, Italy. Her main research interests are centered on (i) the
use of evidence synthesis techniques to inform policy decisions, (ii) Health
Technology Assessment and economic evaluation in health care, and (iii)
pharmaceutical policies evaluation. Over the years, she has collaborated in
many international research projects, and she is now principal investigator
in a EU Horizon Research and Innovation initiative investigating inno-
vative pricing schemes for healthcare innovation. She has been awarded
the 2020 Fulbright Visiting Scholarship at Yale School of Medicine and
School of Public Health in the United States.
Elize Massard da Fonseca Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Public Admin-
istration at the São Paulo School of Business Administration, Getulio
Vargas Foundation, Brazil. She is also a visiting scholar at the Latin
America and Caribbean Center at the London School of Economics
(LACC/LSE). She specializes in pharmaceutical regulation in Latin
America, health industry policy, and the politics of infectious diseases
(HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C). Her research on COVID-19 is funded by the
São Paulo Research Foundation (grant #2021/06202-0).
Simone Ghislandi is Associate Professor of Health and Public Economics
in the Department of Social and Political Sciences of Bocconi University.
He holds an M.Phil. and a D.Phil. in Economics from the University
of Oxford. He is the director of the Master in Economics and Manage-
ment of Government and International Organizations (GIO) in Bocconi
and the coordinator of the “welfare and taxation” unit of DONDENA,
the Centre for the study of Social Dynamics, and Public Policy in
Bocconi. He is also a member of the POPJUS Programme in IIASA
(Vienna). He focuses his research activity on issues related to demography,
epidemiology, and health policy, writing on a variety of topics including
well-being, health behaviors, universal health coverage, and healthcare
management.
Margherita Giannoni Ph.D., M.Sc. is an Associate Professor in the
Department of Economics of the University of Perugia (Italy). Her
research interests include the analysis of health policies for the manage-
ment of COVID-19 pandemic in Italy, measuring equity in health, health
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

financing, and healthcare access and use, and the socio-economic and
health inequalities of fragile groups such as migrants.
Shirley Johnson-Lans Professor of Economics, Emerita, at Vassar
College is an economist specializing in labor economics, health
economics, comparative economic systems, and income inequality. She
holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and was a Marshall Scholar
at Edinburgh University where she received a first-class honors M.A. in
Political Economy after receiving her B.A. in philosophy from Harvard.
She has served on a number of public service boards including Vice-
chair of the State of New York Mortgage Agency and Economist Member
of the New York State Energy Research Development Authority and as
President of Omicron Delta Epsilon (ODE), the international economics
honor society. She is the recipient of four Ford Foundation summer
fellowships, the author of many articles in scholarly journals, and the
books, A Health Economics Primer and Wage Inequality in Africa. She is
co-editor of the Palgrave Macmillan book series, Global Perspectives on
Wealth and Distribution.
Gisella Kagy is an Assistant Professor at Vassar College in New York.
She is a development economist with a focus on gender, employment
in low-income countries, and the impact of early childhood and in-utero
health shocks on later life health and human capital accumulation. She has
projects in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Ghana that use a variety of experi-
mental and applied methods with a particular focus on designing surveys
and collecting new data. Her work has been publisher in top general
interest and development economics field journals. She received her Ph.D.
in economics from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2015.
Giorgia Marini is an Assistant Professor of Public Economics at the
Department of Juridical and Economic Studies, Sapienza University of
Rome which she joined in 2012. She has an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in
Economics both awarded by Tor Vergata University of Rome and a
B.A. in Economics awarded by Sapienza University of Rome. Before
joining the Department of Juridical and Economic Studies, she was a
Research Fellow at the Department of Economics, Tor Vergata University
of Rome (2009–2012) and at the Centre for Health Economics, Univer-
sity of York (2005–2008). Her research interests include health policy
evaluation, health policy reforms, performance measurement, inequality
measurement, and technical efficiency.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

Vibhuti Mendiratta is a Senior Economist in the Research and Impact

Assessment Division of IFAD, where she is in charge of leading impact
assessments of some IFAD projects. Her key area of interest is to
understand policies that can best reach and help poor households and
promote gender equality.Prior to joining IFAD, Vibhuti worked as a
Senior Economist in the Poverty and Equity unit of The World Bank
where she engaged in research on issues related to poverty, inequality and
gender as well as in policy dialogue with Statistical offices and Ministries
of Finance of countries in Middle East, North Africa and East Africa. She
has worked on topics related to survey design and data collection; poverty
and inequality measurement as well as prepared country reports such
as poverty assessments; Poverty and Social Impact Analyses and country
diagnostics. Vibhuti holds a Master’s degree in Public Policy and a PhD
in Economics from the Paris School of Economics.
Denat Ephrem Negatu is currently a Research Program Associate at
Vassar College. She recently graduated from New York University Abu
Dhabi with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and a minor in Busi-
ness Studies and Natural Sciences. Before moving to Vassar College, she
also worked for the Ethiopian Economics Association as an RA among
seasoned researchers for more than six months. She has more than 2 years
of research assistantship experience during her undergraduate program
where she worked along with Dr. Wifag Adnan on labor economics before
graduating. In the near future, she plans to attend a graduate program
that combines data analytics and economics.
Olive Umuhire Nsababera is an economist with the Poverty and Equity
Global Practice of the World Bank where she works at the intersec-
tion of poverty, inequality and the distributional impacts of shocks and
policy reforms. She has worked extensively on fragile, and conflict affected
settings with a focus on understanding the impact of migration and
displacement on individual welfare and economic development. In her
work, she combines alternative data sources such as big data on remote
sensing with microdata to analyze spatial dimensions of welfare. She has
conducted research in East and Southern Africa, the Middle East, and
Latin America. She holds a B.A. in Economics from Yale University, an
M.P.A. from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Economics from the
University of Sussex.
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Sabina Nuti is Rector of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (Sant’Anna School

of Advanced Studies) for the mandate 2019–2025. She is Full Professor
of Health Management at the Institute of Management and founder eval-
uation systems, efficiency, and governance mechanism in health care. She
is responsible for the Interregional performance evaluation systems for
more than half of Italian Regions (http://performance.sssup.it/netval),
and she is a member of the Board of Directors of the Istituto Supe-
riore di Sanità (Italian National Institute of Health). She has been a
member of the Expert Panel on Effective Ways of Investing in Health
of the European Commission since 2016. She is responsible for Euro-
pean and National research projects regarding healthcare management,
performance evaluation and policies, and author of various national and
international publications. She is a member of the Editorial Board of
Health, Economics, Policy, and Law (Cambridge University Press) and
a member of the Bureau of Health Information Scientific Advisory
Committee(Australian government body for measuring health perfor-
mance in New South Wales). Since 2013, she oversees the Me.Mo (Merit
and Social Mobility) project at Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies,
a guidance and coaching course to mentor high merit students living in
fragile socio-economic contexts, selected throughout Italy.
Amélie Quesnel-Vallée is a Professor at McGill University, where she
holds the Canada Research Chair in Policies and Health Inequalities and
is jointly appointed across the faculties of Arts (Sociology) and Medicine
(Epidemiology). She leads CAnD3 (https://mcgill.ca/cand3/), an inter-
national consortium of 36 academic, government, private, and nonprofit
organizations delivering training in support of data-driven decision-
making in aging societies. Her research examines the contribution of
policies to social inequalities in health over the life course and has been
recognized through awards from the Fulbright Foundation, the American
Sociological Association, the Population Association of America, and the
American Public Health Association.
Dr. Hannah Sam is a lecturer in Sustainability Risk Management where
she teaches courses spanning Economics, Finance, and management at
the Claude Littner Business School, University of West London. She is
a Development Economist with interest in applied policy research on
conflict, poverty, and inequality. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from
the University of Sussex.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

Catarina Segatto Ph.D., is Information Analyst at the Regional

Center for Studies on the Development of the Information Society
(Cetic.br/NIC.br), and Professor at the Graduate Program in Public
Policy at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC). She holds a Ph.D. in
Public Administration and Government at Fundação Getulio Vargas’s Sao
Paulo School of Business Administration (FGV EAESP) and was a fellow
at the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy (University of
Regina) and at the Center for Metropolitan Studies (CEM).
Milena Vainieri Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in management at
Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa where she has been leading
the Management and Health Laboratory. She has collaborated with the
European DG Reform, DG Regio, and DG Employment on the topic
of performance evaluation of healthcare services and health infrastruc-
tures. She covers relevant roles as an expert: the Italian National Project
Manager for the PaRIS initiative of the OECD; a member of the board of
directors at the Italian National Agency for healthcare services (Agenas);
expert in monitoring the Italian Panflu, and expert for the WHO Patient
and Family Engagement. She is the principal investigator for the Perfor-
mance Evaluation System of the Italian Regional Network and several
international projects related to this topic for the Management and
Health lab. Her interest in research lies in governance mechanisms for
the healthcare system.
 List of Figures

Chapter 2
Fig. 1 Seven Day Average of New Reported U.S. COVID-19
Cases (Source New York Times, April 13, 2022. Charts
based on CDC figures) 8
Fig. 2 New Daily U.S. COVID-19 Cases during the Omicron
Surge (Source Coronavirus Tracker, CDC figures, published
online daily by the New York Times ) 12
Fig. 3 7-day Average US COVID-19 Cases per 100,000
during the Omicron Surge (Source Coronavirus Tracker,
CDC figures, published online daily by the New York Times ) 13
Fig. 4 US COVID-19 Daily Deaths during the Omicron Surge
(Source Coronavirus Tracker, CDC figures, published
online daily by the New York Times ) 14
Fig. 5 Associations between state politics and vaccination rates 27

Chapter 3
Fig. 1 Daily number of hospital beds and ICU beds occupied
by COVID-19 patients as of June 13, 2022 (Source
https://health-infobase.canada.ca/COVID-19/) 41

xvii
xviii LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 2 Count of total death related to COVID-19 in Canada

up to June 11, 2022 (Source https://health-infobase.can
ada.ca/COVID-19/) 42
Fig. 3 Average rate of new deaths reported in the last 7 days
by province (per 1,000,000) (Source Institut National de
Sante publique du Quebec [INSPQ] https://www.inspq.
qc.ca/covid-19/donnees/comparaisons) 45

Chapter 5
Fig. 1 Income inequality in Italian regions before the pandemic
(2018–2019) (Source ISTAT [2021a], Table A2) 90
Fig. 2 Life expectancy free from disability at 65 years for male
and female vs. a economic inequality 2019–2020 and vs b
Gini index in Italian regions (the lines in the figure are
the fitted values from a linear regression of life expectancy
at 65 years free from disability for male and female
in the 21 Italian regions vs. a measure of income inequality.
The latter is the product between per capita post-tax
income and the Gini coefficient in the 21 Italian regions.
Data are reported in Table A1 in the Appendix) (Data
Source ISTAT [2021a] [2021b] [2021d]) 102
Fig. 3 Frequency of problems (any level) by age
class and EQ-5D-5L dimensions (Comparison
between frequencies of any problem according to five
dimensions of health-related quality of life as measured
by the EQ-5D-5L in 2020 [Meregaglia et al., 2022]
and in 2014 [Scalone et al., 2015]. The survey
in 2020 was administered online to a representative
sample of the national Italian population, the one
in 2014 was performed through phone interviews
with a representative sample of the population living
in the Lombardy Region) 103
Fig. 4 Regional hospitalizations variations during the pandemic
and income inequality Urgent hospitalizations
during 2020–2019 vs. a per capita income and b income
inequality; Hospitalizations for mental health conditions
during 2020–2019 vs. c per capita income and d income
inequality; Regional variations in surgical volumes for breast
cancer during 2020–2019 vs. e per capita income and f
income inequality (Data Source Agenas [2021] ISTAT
[2021a], [2021b], [2021d], [see Table A2]) 107
 LIST OF FIGURES xix

Fig. 5 2019–2020 Variations in elective hospitalizations

and surgery in Italian Regions: a elective hospitalizations;
b elective surgery hospitalizations (Data Source Agenas
[2021] [see Table A2]) 109

Chapter 6
Fig. 1 Daily new confirmed COVID-19 cases: 7-day rolling
average (Source Johns Hopkins University CSSE
COVID-19 Data) 134

Chapter 7
Fig. 1 Timeline of the EHCVM survey and COVID-19 response 150
Fig. 2 Distribution of household welfare indicators and labor
market outcomes across the month of interview (Note The
zero (0) reference line denotes the Covid-19 lockdown
month (March 2020) in Comoros. We positioned
the x-axis to reflect the time trend of the interviews
before and after the treatment variable (Covid-19 lockdown
month). Hence, the scale reads from left of the reference
line as January 2020 (−2), February (−1) and to the right
as April (+1) to August/September (+5). The observations
for August and September 2020 interviews were pooled
together given their small sample sizes, hence the absence
of (+6) that would have corresponded to September 2020) 155
Fig. 3 Post-match distribution of propensity scores
across treatment and control 183

Chapter 8
Fig. 1 Total number of COVID-19 cases and deaths per 100,000
population in select OECD countries and Taiwan, January
2020–July 31, 2022 (Source CNN tracking Covid-19’s
global spread. https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/
health/coronavirus-maps-and-cases/) 198
Fig. 2 Trend in the number of confirmed cases from domestic
transmission in Taiwan, May 1, 2021–July 15, 2021 (Source
COVID-19 Central Epidemic Command Center, Ministry
of Health and Welfare, Republic of China, Taiwan, 15 July
2021) 201
xx LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 3 COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 population in select

countries and Taiwan as of 14 July 2021 (Source Data
based on “Mortality Analyses”. Johns Hopkins University
Covid Resource Center. Accessed July 16, 2021) 202
Fig. 4 COVID-19 cases and deaths per 100,000 population
in Taiwan and comparable OECD countries as of October
22, 2021 (Source CNN health: Tracking Covid-19’s global
spread. Data based on Johns Hopkins University Center
for Systems Science and Engineering. https://www.cnn.
com/interactive/2020/health/coronavirus-maps-and-
cases/) 203
Fig. 5 Taiwan’s COVID-19 Omicron surge: Daily cases April 10,
2022–May 15, 2022 (Source Taiwan CDC 16 May 2022.
https://topic.udn.com/event/COVID19_Taiwan) 204
Fig. 6 COVID-19 cases and deaths per 100,000 population
in Taiwan and comparable OCED Countries. January
2020–July 17, 2022 (Source CNN Global Cases ad Deaths,
Tracking Covid-19’s global spread. https://www.cnn.com/
interactive/2020/health/coronavirus-maps-and-cases/) 204
Fig. 7 Total number of cases in Taiwan January 3, 2022–August
1, 2022 (Source Newest Covid-19 state United Daily
News. Taiwan data from Taiwan CDC. https://topic.udn.
com/event/COVID19_Taiwan) 205
Fig. 8 Trend in deaths (persons) during Taiwan’s COVID-19
Omicron surge April 1, 2022–July 29, 2022 (Source
Taiwan CDC data as of July 30, 2022) 206
Fig. 9 COV10-19 case fatality rate in Taiwan and select OECD
countries as of July 14, 2021 (Source CNN tracking
Covid-19’s global spread. https://www.cnn.com/intera
ctive/2020/health/coronavirus-maps-and-cases/) 211
Fig. 10 COVID-19 vaccination rates in Taiwan, by age, as of May
16, 2022 (Source Data from Taiwan Center for Disease
Control, Ministry of Health and Welfare, May 16, 2022.
https://topic.udn.com/event/COVID19_Taiwan) 212
Fig. 11 Trend lines for COVID-19 cases and deaths in Taiwan
in the period December 23, 2021–August 3, 2022 (Source
Data based on published daily news briefings in this period
by the Central Epidemic Control Center (CECC) Ministry
of Health and Welfare, Taiwan) 213
 LIST OF FIGURES xxi

Fig. 12 Economic growth (in % GDP) in Taiwan 2011–2021

and Forecast for 2022 (Source Statista. Annual growth
of the gross domestic product (GDP) in Taiwan from 2000
to 2021 with a forecast until 2022. https://www.statista.
com/statistics/328535/gross-domestlc-product-gdp-ann
ual-growth-rate-in-taiwan/. Accessed August 11, 2022) 216
Fig. 13 Economic impact (in % GDP) of COVID-19 in the world,
G20, Eurozone, select OECD countries, and Taiwan,
2020 (Source OECD Economic Outlook, Interim report
March 2021. https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/
oecd-economic-outlook/volume-2020/issue-2_34bfd999-
en#page6. Data for Taiwan from the Directorate-General
of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, Executive Yuan,
R.O.C. (Taiwan), updated 20 FEB and SEP 2021. In
Chinese. https://www.dgbas.gov.tw/ct.asp?xItem=46902&
ctNode=5624&mp=1) 217
Fig. 14 Changes in growth of industrial output (%) in Taiwan, June
2021–May 2022 (Source Directorate-General of Budget,
Accounting and Statistics, Taiwan. Rate of Industrial
Output (%), June 2021–May 2022. In Chinese. https://
www.dgbas.gov.tw/mp,asp?mp=1) 218

Chapter 9
Fig. 1 Total employment, Australia, December 2014–2019
(Source Australian Bureau of Statistics, Labour Force,
Australia December 2019) 234
Fig. 2 Organization of the Healthìuta System in Australia (Source
L. Glover, 2020) 236
Fig. 3 COVID-19 Registered deaths by age and sex (Source
Australian Bureau of Statistics, COVID-19 mortality
22/12/2021) 242
Fig. 4 Distribution of weekly earnings (Note In August
2020, there was a larger number of people than usual
earning around $750 per week, which was the amount
of the JobKeeper wage subsidy. Source Australian Bureau
of Statistics, more than 40% of Australian worked
from home 14/12/2021) 246
Fig. 5 Gross Domestic Production (GDP) Chai. Volume
measures, seasonally adjusted (Source Australian Bureau
of Statistics, economic activity increased 3.4% in December
quarter 2/03/2022) 249
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Right across the lagoon from where they sat they could see their
camping place and the tent, the wreck, and the opening in the reef
all in the blue weather, and beyond the opening in the reef a glimpse
of the great Pacific and the fringe of pearl-white clouds on the
horizon.
"Well," said Schumer, as they finished their meal, "the stuff is there
right enough, and it only comes now to the question of lifting it. We
have no labor, or none to speak of. Of course, we'll dredge and dive
so as to get as much samples as we can, but we want twenty men
on the work, and I don't see how we're to do it without letting
others into the secret. It's this way: Some time or another a vessel is
sure to happen along here and take us off; well, if it does we must
keep mum. Our object will be to get to Frisco or Sydney, and there
get hold of some chap with money and form a little syndicate. That'll
water the profits considerable; he'll want half at least. But there you
are—what's to be done?"
"Nothing," said Floyd; "we can't move without labor, and even that's
no use without a ship. To rig an expedition up at Frisco or Sydney
will cost a lot, and you may be sure any speculator who puts his
money into the thing will want to gobble most of the profits."
"Before we'd let him into the know we'd make him sign a paper,"
said Schumer, "stating his acceptance of our terms, and then we'd
make him keep his bond with a pistol to his head. I don't trust the
law alone, but the law backed by a derringer makes a pretty good
security."
As Schumer spoke, Floyd, who was watching his profile cut hard
against the sky, noticed for the first time the flatness of the cheek
bones and the relationship between the nose and chin.
Schumer was a very quiet man in his speech and manner, yet there
was about him an assured confidence speaking of great reserves of
energy; and now for the first time, as though the thought of being
robbed of his treasure had revealed it, there peeped out a new man;
something of the bird of prey showed in that profile, something of
the desperado found echo in his voice.
"Well," said Floyd, "there's no use in making plans till we have
something to go on. Let's settle on our immediate business; we'll
have to get oysters up and rot them in the sun to see if there's any
show of pearls, and it seems to me that we are very well placed for
that. Suppose a ship comes into the lagoon; well, she can't come
within a mile of this beach on account of the shoal water, and she
won't be able to see our work. I propose we stick to our old camp by
the wreck, and come here every day to work. We can leave Isbel on
guard at the camp, and if she sights a ship she can light a fire to
give us warning."
"That's sense," replied Schumer, who had become himself again.
"We can rot the oysters on the weather side of the reef, and we'll set
to work on the business to-morrow morning. Let's get back now to
the camp. I'm going to fix up a dredge. Did I tell you I was a bit of
an engineer? I've had to be a bit of everything this time or that. I
once edited a paper and wrote it mostly, from the poetry column to
the produce. I guess I'd have written books if my lines had been
cast in quiet waters. Trade has always kept me going, and here
where there's palm trees and blue water enough trade turns up in
oysters."
His eyes were fixed across the lagoon on the palms near the wreck;
the hawk-like look had vanished, and he murmured half to himself
the verse of Scheffel:
"Zwölf Palmen ragten am Meeresstrand
Um eine alte Cisterne."
It was "Dun Tode Nah" he was repeating, and Floyd, who did not
know the verse, knew the language.
"You speak German?" said he.
"My father was a German," replied Schumer. "I speak four languages
and half a dozen Polynesian dialects. One has to. Well, shall we get
back? There is nothing more to be done here for the present."
 CHAPTER IV
SCHUMER'S STORY

T heyrowed back across the lagoon to the camp, and there

Schumer set to on the construction of his dredge.
Floyd had suddenly found an object of interest on the island almost
as absorbing as the oyster bed, and that object was Schumer.
Schumer had seemed to him at first a simple trader bound up in
trade, one of a class that swarms in the Pacific. Bound up in trade he
undoubtedly was, but there was all the difference in the world
between him and the others of his class that Floyd had come across
in his wanderings.
Perhaps the hardest thing in the world to put one's finger on is
personality, or the power that tells in a man's appearance, actions,
and speech. Its essence lies in complexity, and is born of all the
multitudinous attributes that form spirit.
Floyd watched Schumer working on the dredge, and wondered at his
ingenuity and power over metal and wood. He had but little material
to his hand—cask hoops and old ironwork from the wreck, and so on
—yet he made the most of it, and did not grumble. He explained the
mechanism of the thing when he had finished. He had set Isbel to
work stitching the canvas bag which was part of the dredge, and she
sat mysterious as a sphinx, working and listening to him as he
talked.
Then, later on, as they smoked after supper and watched the stars
break out over the lagoon, Schumer went on talking, now of trade
and the wild work he had seen here and there in the Pacific.
He was vague, rarely giving the names of islands or places,
contenting himself with such wide terms as "It was an island south
of the Marshalls," or "It was down in the Solomons." It was down in
the Solomons that he had got the scar on his arm which he showed
to Floyd.
"That's fifteen years old," said he; "it missed the artery or I wouldn't
be here now. I was only twenty then and new to the islands, new to
the sea also. I'd taken passage in a big schooner; two hundred and
fifty tons she was, captained by a Yankee skipper, and manned by
the biggest crowd of rascals that ever sailed out of Frisco to meet
perdition.
"We put in at a big island southeast of Manahiki. I went ashore with
the old man, the first mate, and two of the hands that could be
trusted. We were all well armed, and lucky for us we were.
"It was the bos'n who started the trouble—a big, black-bearded
chap, half Irish, quarter Scotch, with a tar brush somewhere in his
family. Not a good mixture by any means.
"We hadn't been ashore ten minutes when this chap took the
schooner. There were no preliminaries. She had a big brass swivel
gun, and he turned it on the beach and let fly. He'd loaded her with
a bag of bullets, and the first shot smashed the boat we'd landed in,
smashed the only canoes in the place, and tore up the sand as if it
had been plowed. Fortunately we had seen his game and scattered,
but two natives were killed, and the rest took to the bush.
"So did we, and under cover of the leaves we watched what was
going on in the schooner.
"They seemed pretty satisfied with themselves. They were sure
against attack; they had smashed our boat and the canoes, and they
were pretty certain we wouldn't try to board them by swimming, for
the lagoon was full of sharks. They brought up grog and took to
dancing on deck. Their object, of course, was to get away with the
schooner and all the trade on board, change her name, and make
for some port on the South American coast, and sell schooner and
cargo and all. There was money aboard, too—the ship's money and
some coin of the old man's, and fifty British sovereigns of my own
hid in my bunk, though the beggars did not guess that.
"Yes, they should have knocked the shackle off the anchor chain and
got to sea at once; they chose instead to drink and dance,
celebrating their victory. You see they did not know whom they were
dealing with.
"From where we lay we could have picked them off like crows with
our rifles. Of course, that would have meant they would have gone
below and hid, and then at dark they'd have gone away. It would
have sobered them, too, and I did not want that.
"So we let them be, putting our trust in the bottle, and we set to
and made a raft with the help of some of the natives who were
hiding in the bush with us.
"There was a little creek hidden from the schooner by a cape of
coconut and pandanus trees, and we made the raft there, and a
rotten raft it was; but it served our purpose, and when dark came
down we shoved off, us four and two natives.
"The tide was with us; it was running out of the lagoon. The natives
had canoe paddles, but they scarcely used them. Not a soul was on
deck; they were all in the saloon drinking, and the noise was worse
than a tavern on the Barbary Coast of a Saturday night. They
wouldn't have heard us coming alongside if we had come blowing
trumpets—which we didn't."
Schumer paused to refill and light his pipe. The lagoon was now a
sheet of stars, and not a sound came but the murmur of the reef
and the splash of a fish jumping in the lagoon.
"We came alongside, and in a minute we were over the rail—she had
a low freeboard—every man of us. We didn't trouble about the raft,
and she went out to sea on the tide.
"The saloon hatch was off, and there they were all crowded like bees
in a bottle fighting and playing cards and drinking and smoking, and
there as they sat we began to plug them with our Winchesters. We
got six before the smoke of the firing hid them, and then we fired
into the smoke and stood by to down them as they came up the
companionway. They were plucky, but mad with drink, and they had
no arms to speak of. One of them had a bottle in his hand, the only
thing he could find to fight with; when he tumbled over into the lee
scuppers he still held it unbroken, and I guess he went before his
Maker with it like that.
"We settled them all with the exception of the bos'n. He skulked
below, and I went down to find him. The saloon was clear of smoke
and the swinging lamp was burning; dead men were lying
everywhere, but no bos'n. He'd taken refuge in the old man's cabin
and had barricaded the door, so that I couldn't kick it in—only
managed to crack the paneling; so I began firing through it with my
revolver, and then out he came with two bullets in him and a sheath
knife in his hand.
"He gave me this cut before we had done with one another.
"The upshot was that every man of them was given his dose, and
we took the schooner out of the lagoon, us four, with four Kanakas
who joined the ship, and we had good luck all the rest of the
voyage, though my arm inflamed so that I nearly lost it.
"So you see a trader's life out here is not all trading; one has to fight
sometimes for what one gets, and to keep what one gets."
Floyd could not help thinking that Schumer's part in the recapture of
the schooner had been more than he had stated.
"What's made you take to trading out here?" he asked. "You're a
sailor, aren't you? At least I made the guess yesterday that you were
a sailor first and a trader after."
"Yes, I began as a sailor. I served my two years before these new
topsail yards made reefing child's work. I served in a Hamburg ship.
What made me a trader? Well, I suppose it was the common sense
that made me give up sailoring. I do not like hard manual labor. As I
told you before, it was on the cards that I might have cast my lines
in the newspaper world. Books interest me, written books; the world
interested me, and I might have been the correspondent of
newspapers. I am a fair linguist, and I can write simple English and
picture fairly well what I see in words; yet I am a trader. I do not
know why I am a trader in the least. It is the way of life that has
come to me."
He ceased, and they sat in silence for a moment.
Floyd, looking round, saw that Isbel had vanished; she had slipped
off to bed somewhere in the bush—slipped off like an animal. It was
her characteristic that she was one of the shipwrecked party, yet
remained apart. She helped in cooking and boat sailing and in other
ways; but she lived her own life as an animal lives it, thinking her
own thoughts, keeping her own counsel, speaking little. There was
nothing about her of the childish and the light-hearted that stamps
so many Polynesians, which is not to say that she was gloomy or too
old for her years. She was just a creature apart, and had always the
air of a looker-on at a game in which she helped, but which did not
particularly interest her.
"The girl's gone," said Floyd.
Schumer looked round.
"Crept off to sleep; she'll sleep anywhere—in a tree or in the bush. I
can't make out Kanakas. I've read a lot of stuff written about them,
but there's always something behind that no one can get at. They
are right down good in a lot of ways, and right down bad in others.
Missionaries civilize them and varnish them over, but there's always
the Kanaka underneath; they make Christians of them, but it's only
on the outside. Look at that girl—she's only a child, of course, but a
missionary has had the handling of her, and in the time we've been
here she has turned right in on herself and gone back to her people,
so to speak. She's not bad, but she's a savage, and nothing will
make a savage anything else than a savage, except, maybe, on the
outside."
"She seems pretty faithful and helps us all she can," said Floyd.
"Oh, she's not bad," yawned Schumer; "and she's a good deal of use
in her way, and she's company of a sort, same as a dog or a cat.
Well, I'm going to turn in."
He rose up and stretched himself, and looked at the starlit lagoon.
"It's funny to think there's maybe a fortune in pearls under all that,"
said he, "no knowing—but it will take some getting."
"We'll get it if it's there," said Floyd.
 CHAPTER V
DREDGING

T hey were up at dawn, and the fire was crackling and the coffee
heating before the sun had fully shown itself over the eastern
reef line.
Schumer had been able to salve cooking utensils and some
unbroken crockery ware from the Tonga, to say nothing of knives
and forks and spoons.
It seems a small matter, but a knife and a fork make all the
difference when one comes to food, even on an island of the Pacific
—a plate, too.
Condemned to eat with one's fingers and to share a knife in
common, one feeds, but one does not eat.
There was condensed milk for the coffee, ship's bread and salt pork
fried over the fire. Isbel had collected some plantains; they went into
the frying pan to help the pork. She had also gathered some drupes
from a pandanus tree growing near the wreck, and served them on
a big leaf.
"There's a whole lot of seeds aboard somewhere," said Schumer, as
they breakfasted; "onions and carrots and so on; I must hunt for
them, and when we have time I'll see how they grow here. You can
grow anything on these islands. The soil's the best in the world;
maybe because of the gull guano. We'll want all the native-grown
food we can get here, if things turn out as I expect, for we'll have to
feed the labor we bring, and natives aren't happy without the stuff
they are used to. Corned beef and spuds are all very well in their
way, but it's breadfruit and taro and plantains that are the stand-by.
Fortunately there seems lots. You see all that dark-green stuff
growing over there straight across the lagoon—that's breadfruit; big
trees, too, and the coconuts aren't bad.
"When we get the labor we'll have a main camp over by the fishing
ground. I've been thinking it all out. There's no natural water there,
but I noticed yesterday a big rain pond in the coral; it must have
been cut out by natives some time or another. The funny thing about
these ponds is that the water is saltish at high tides, but gets fresh
with the ebb. In some of the islands the natives stock them with
fish, salt-water fish swimming in fresh.
"Then we have the fishing to fall back on, and the lagoon is full. Yes,
we are not badly placed as things go."
They placed the dredge on board the boat and some food for the
midday meal, and pushed off, leaving Isbel behind to look after the
camp and keep an eye out for ships. At the sight of a sail anywhere
on the sea she was to light the fire and make a smoke with green
wood, and she had a splendid lookout post, for the deck of the
Tonga, onto which she could easily climb, gave a complete view of
the horizon from all directions.
Then they rowed off, leaving her watching them, a solitary figure on
the beach.
"Seems she'll be a bit lonely," said Floyd.
"Not she," replied Schumer; "she'll be happy enough alone, and she
has lots to do between washing up and keeping a lookout. Kanakas
are never lonely; it's a disease of civilization."
"You look upon these people as if they were animals," said Floyd.
"Which they are," replied Schumer—"animals dressed in human
skin."
Floyd said nothing. He was not a psychologist or a philosopher, but a
man of action; yet he gauged something of the strange make-up of
Schumer's mind. Here was a man of keen intelligence, a quoter of
Scheffel, an appreciator of beauty, apparently a kindly individual, but
in some respects apparently hard beyond belief, and in others
apparently blind.
Floyd had some knowledge of the Polynesian natives, he was gaining
some knowledge of Schumer, and he was to gain more knowledge of
both—of the civilized man and the savage and their respective
worth.
They got to work in two-fathom water on the northern edge of the
great bed. They stripped for the business. Both men were good
swimmers and expert divers, and the dredge did its work fairly well.
They agreed to take the diving business in half-hour tricks, one
remaining in the boat with a view to possible sharks, though sharks
were scarcely to be feared in that part of the lagoon, and to keep
the boat moving when the dredge was in operation.
Floyd was the first to go down. At a depth of twelve feet it was as
bright almost as at the surface. The water seemed to hold light in
solution; glancing up, the white-painted boat floating like a balloon
above him showed a tinge of rose; passing scraps of focus were all
spangled and sparkled over as though powdered with jewel dust; his
arm, newly immersed, was diamonded by tiny beads of air. In this
silent, brilliant world of crystal and color one only wanted gills to find
life in perfection and fairyland in material form.
There were few fish here, but occasionally a colored phantom would
slow up, pause, and whisk off, fry would pass like a flight of silver
needles, and great jellyfish quartered like melons and absolutely
invisible till glimpsed by reflected light.
All these things he noticed in his first submersion; after that the
labor of the business prevented him from noticing anything much
except the work on hand, cruel and murderously hard work to the
man unused to it. The dredge was almost useless at first; it had to
be taken up and altered, then, as it was dragged along, he followed
it, helping it, picking up loose oysters and putting them in the bag.
He could only work for less than half a minute at a time, coming up
for a two minutes' breathing spell, and as he worked he could feel
now and then what seemed a warm wind trying to blow him aside as
the wind blows thistledown. It was the swell of the incoming tide.
They had arranged to work in half-hour tricks, but they found this
absolutely impossible; before the end of the first twenty minutes
Floyd confessed himself beaten and Schumer took his place.
An hour before noon they knocked off. They had taken a large
quantity of oysters, despite the limited means at their disposal,
enough to sink the boat a strake or two and give them an hour's
work in unloading and spreading their catch on the coral on the
windward side of the reef.
Then they took three hours' rest under the shade of the trees. At
sundown they had completed their day's work, and they felt as
though they had been laboring for fifty years.
They had overdone it.
Though they had dived as little as possible during the second half of
the day's work, using the dredge as much as they could, the work
had nearly broken them, owing to the sudden and tremendous strain
put on their lungs.
Schumer recognized the reason of their exhaustion.
"We should have broken ourselves to it by degrees," said he—"done
a couple of hours' work instead of a whole day's. We are fools. We
didn't want to strip the lagoon; we were only after a sample, and
could have taken a week over it. Well, we can take things easy to-
morrow."
They rowed back to the camp and found Isbel waiting for them, and
supper.
They had come back in low spirits, but after supper and a cup of
coffee the surprising thing happened—their spirits jumped up as
though under the influence of alcohol. Prolonged strain in diving
produces these results—the tissues that have been starved or partly
starved of oxygen reabsorb it with renewed vigor.
They lay on the sand and smoked and talked, and Floyd built castles
and furnished them with his prospective fortune.
"Suppose," said he, "we strike it rich—very rich—what may we net
out of this?"
"It all depends," said Schumer, "if this is a real pearl lagoon;
anything up to a hundred thousand, and maybe more. Pearls are a
disease, and the disease is more prevalent in some waters than
others. I don't know why, no one does. It may be the temperature or
the stuff the water holds in solution, it may be the breed of the
oyster; but there you have it. Every oyster under the sun is a pearl
oyster, at least may be capable of growing pearls. I found a pearl
once in an oyster which I was eating in a restaurant in Hamburg. It
wasn't a big pearl, but it was a pearl. I sold it for thirty marks. But
one thing is sure, it's only in tropical and subtropical waters that you
find pearls of any account or to any account. It's only in the tropics
and subtropics you find color and stuff that's rich and worth having.
The north—pah! What does it give us? Iron and tin, wood, copper.
It's the south where the gold is, where the pearls are. Why, the very
earth in the south hides color and riches! Where are the diamond
mines? In Africa and Brazil. The ruby and emerald mines? In Burma
and Brazil and India. The gold? California and Africa. The silver?
Peru. Look at the birds; there's not a colored bird in the north that
hasn't come from the south; look at the shells and the corals, and
the flowers and the people; look at the sun. No, the south holds
everything worth having or seeing. You ask me what I would do if I
were rich? Well, I would not go north, or only for a while. I'd stay in
the south, fix my home somewhere not too close to the equator,
take an island in these seas, and have it for my own."
"Can you buy islands?"
"You can buy land; one might buy a small island from some of the
governments, or rent it; but I'd sooner have the most land in a big
island than the whole of a little one. Once you have got your grip on
land you have power. Nothing else gives you so much power; funny,
that, isn't it? Money, you would say, gives power. It only gives the
power to buy or to meddle in other people's affairs through paid
agents. If you have got your grip on the earth, and the things that
come out of it, and the people who live on it, you have power; and
power is the only thing worth having in the world."
"Good Lord!" said Floyd. "There's a lot of things I'd sooner have."
"And what things may those be?"
"Well, I want to have a good time and see other people having a
good time. I want to travel, not as the mate of an old hooker like the
Cormorant, but as a man with money in his pocket and time to look
around him. I want to be able to buy things. I want to dress
decently and to marry some time or another and settle down. I'm
fond of horses, though I've never had the chance to own one; and
I'm fond of cricket, though I've never touched a bat for years. I'm
fond of a jolly good dinner, and I'm fond of a good cigar. To get all
those things one wants money."
"And all those things come to you if you have power," said Schumer.
"It implies everything material, and much more. It's the sense of it,
the feeling 'I am the stronger man,' that gives the mind freedom and
ease to enjoy what money can bring. You are entirely English; you
want enjoyment and luxury without foundation of strength."
"Oh, good heavens!" said Floyd, "I think we have a pretty solid
foundation of strength; we own half the earth, and we hold it—why?
Simply because we live and let live. We don't try to grind people
down with what you call power. We give them power, liberty,
whatever you like to call it. Now you are a man who has traveled,
and so am I. Can you tell me any spot on earth that a man may be
really free in that's not under the Union Jack or the Stars and
Stripes? Take the German colonies, the Dutch; haven't you always
some pesky official shoving his nose into your affairs? Take the very
port officers and customs, and it's the same all through the country
as well as on the coast. You can't breathe in these places the same
as you can where there's a decent English or American
administration. I've heard foreigners wondering how it is we hold
India—all those hundreds of millions of natives under the rule of a
few thousand white men. As a matter of fact, we don't hold it at all;
it holds itself. A native in Bombay is as free as a duke in Piccadilly;
that's our secret."
Schumer laughed.
"And at any moment," said he, "those very free natives are ready to
rise in their hundreds of millions and cut your throats."
"I don't think so," said Floyd. "Men don't cut the throats of their best
friends."
Schumer yawned.
To argue with Schumer was like pressing against India rubber—the
pressure left no impression.
They talked for a while longer on indifferent subjects, and then
turned in under the shelter of the tent.
The night was almost windless, and the great southern stars stood
out like jewels crusting the whole dome of the sky from sea edge to
sea edge. The Milky Way, like a vast band of white smoke cut by the
terrific pit of a coal sack, Canopus, and the Cross, filled the world
with the mystery of starlight.
Away out on the weather side of the reef near the wreck, and clear
in the starlight against the coral, was seated a figure. It was Isbel.
She had not yet turned into whatever haunt she had in the bush,
and with her knees drawn up and clasped by her hands she was
watching the regular fall of the breakers.
The child seemed under the spell of the vast sea, an atom in face of
the infinite.
 CHAPTER VI
RISK OF WAR

"Y ou can't get pearls from oysters till the oysters are rotten," said
Schumer next morning, as they sat after breakfast consulting
on the day's work. "Of course, you could take every individual fresh
oyster and hunt under its beard; but you know how an oyster sticks
to its shell even after it is opened, and you can fancy the work it
would be. Once they are decayed they are mushy, and the work is
easy though it's not pleasant. But it's surprising how quick you get
used to it. We worked pretty hard yesterday, and I propose to take it
easy this morning, and then a bit later on I want to have a regular
overhaul of the saloon and trade room of the old Tonga. We have
cleared the way pretty well, but I've been so busy catching stores in
the bush that I've never had time for an overhaul. You see there was
only Isbel and me to do the job. I expect the oysters we laid out
yesterday will be fit to work on to-morrow."
"You've done this pearl business before," said Floyd.
Schumer laughed.
"I have helped in pearling, if that's what you mean, but I have never
had any luck. I once had my hand on a fortune in pearls, but it did
not come off.
"There was a French island in these seas, no matter where—it
wasn't a thousand miles from the Marquesas. It was a double lagoon
island, shaped like an hourglass; no use to look at, not enough trees
to give any amount of copra. It had done a little business in
sandalwood in the old days, but that was all gone. But the place
wasn't deserted. There was an old Frenchman in charge; he had
rented it under the French government, and he lived there with his
two sons, and seemed happy enough, though doing next to no
trade.
"I was in the outer lagoon twice as supercargo of a trading
schooner; once we put in for water, and the second time we called
on the chance of picking up a little copra. Lefarge was the old man's
name, and he was a great fisherman; said he lived there mostly for
the fishing and to have an easy life.
"Yet somehow he struck me as a man who would not be content to
spend his time fishing and sitting in the sun, and his two boys struck
me the same.
"When I wanted to explore the island and get round by the reef to
the main lagoon he said that was forbidden, the natives held it taboo
to white men, and so on.
"Then I began to suspect, and the only one thing I could suspect
was shell, and maybe pearls.
"The more I thought of it the more sure I was; but, of course, I
could do nothing; the place was his, and whatever it held, and we
were peaceful traders, not pirates. So, when we had loaded with all
the copra he could give us, out we put, wishing him good health and
good luck in his fishing.
"Two days from the island we met a mail brigantine, and she
signaled us that war had been declared between France and
Germany, and our captain—Max Schuster was his name—began to
swear, for we were bound for the Marquesas, which are French, and
we'd have to alter our course and lose consignments and trade, and
he sat down on a mooring bit, and cursed war and the French till I
took him by the arm and led him down the saloon and explained
what was in my mind.
"I told him of my suspicions about the island, and he pricked up his
ears. Then, when I had been talking to him about ten minutes and
explaining and arguing, he suddenly took fire.
"It's surprising how a dull man will refuse to be convinced—won't
see, till all at once, when he does see, he'll rush at what you show
him harder than the best.
"Schuster, when he saw fully the advantage of his position, little risk,
and everything to gain, rushed up on deck. In less than five minutes
the schooner was showing her tail to the Marquesas and making a
long board for the island.
"Our crew were mostly Swedes, Kanakas, and an Irishman, and
when they heard the news that Schuster had to tell them they were
his to a man. The French were not much in favor just then; they had
Noumea tacked on to their name, and the ordinary sailor loves a bit
of a fight or any break in the monotony of sea life. We had plenty of
trade rifles, Albinis—not the best sort of rifle, but good enough for
us—and plenty of ammunition.
"We lifted the island at dawn on the second day, and were anchored
in the lagoon a few hours later.
"Old Lefarge was on the beach tinkering a canoe. He didn't seem
surprised to see us come in with the German flag flying at the peak,
nor did his sons, who came out of the frame house set back among
the bushes. They thought we had sickness or something on board,
for they made no offer to put out to us. We lowered a boat on the
port side, which was the side away from the beach, and got our men
in and the rifles, and then rowed ashore.
"When they saw us landing they took fright, but our men covered
them with their rifles, and Schuster and I came up to the old man
and his sons and told them that war was declared, and that they
were prisoners.
"They could do nothing, and they just gave in. We had them taken
on board the schooner, and then we went to the frame house, and
there, sure enough, in a big safe, were the pearls. We had searched
the prisoners and taken their keys from them. The key of the safe
was among them, and we opened it easily. There were twenty
thousand pounds' worth of pearls, so we judged.
"Schuster was a man who always held tight by the law. I pointed out
to him that since we were at war with France all French property
belonged to us by rights, and that the best thing we could do was to
land the prisoners and take the pearls. We did not want prisoners. I
pointed out to him, also, that we were acting in the nature of
privateers, but without a letter of marque, and that consequently our
prize would go to the government, and we would get nothing.
"I pointed out that since this was French property it would be much
better just to take it and be thankful, and say nothing. He said that
would be piracy."
"So it would," said Floyd.
"Well, maybe it would; but what is war if not piracy legalized? You
have a letter of marque and you are a privateer, you have none and
you are a pirate."
"But even privateering has ceased," objected Floyd.
"Well," said Schumer, "if it has it ought to be renewed in war time; it
breeds fine men, as you English ought to know, and it's every bit as
legitimate as fighting behind naval guns. However, Schuster thought
different about our case. He said he would take the whole lot,
prisoners and pearls, to the nearest German island, and claim a
share of the proceeds, and be within the law.
"So off we set, and it took us nearly three weeks to reach the island
we were in search of, between head winds and calms. When we got
there it was getting on for night, so we held off and on till morning,
and when the pilot came aboard we gave him news of the war, and
several canoes that had put out shot back to land with it; so that
when we entered the harbor the place was decked with flags, and
we were cheered right from the harbor mouth to the quay."
Schumer paused for a light, and went on:
"We landed our prisoners and the pearls, and the governor had laid
a big spread for us, baked pig and lager beer, and so on, and
Schuster was in the middle of a speech when the sound of a gun
brought us all out on the beach, and there, entering the harbor, was
the German cruiser of the station.
"The captain landed and asked us what we were doing with the
flags, and when we explained he told us that there was no war, only
a lying rumor. He had the latest European news from San Francisco,
and he gave it to us.
"It was worth going through the whole of that business to see
Schuster's face. He said nothing, and the governor said nothing, and
it was fortunate they held their tongues, for the cruiser only waited
four hours to water and put off again.
"When she had gone the governor bundled old Lefarge and his sons
on board our schooner and the pearls, and he gave us orders to take
them back to their island and dump them there, and he sent an
armed guard to see that it was done. He judged, and judged rightly,
that Lefarge would make no trouble afterward, simply because he
would not want to advertise the existence of his island. He made
them a present of a few cases of California champagne and some
cigars, and old Lefarge was so glad to be out of the business and
get back his pearls that he insisted on opening the champagne, and
Schuster brought out some trade gin, and they all got drunk.
"There was a big moon that night, and they enjoyed themselves,
Lefarge singing 'Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,' and the
governor the 'Marseillaise.'
"Then they started fighting, and then they got sick.
"Men are strange things, once they let themselves go, and they are
all pretty much alike when they are drunk."
"You took them back to their island?" said Floyd.
"Yes, and then we had to return and bring back the armed guard.
Schuster lost nearly two months over the business, to say nothing of
the provisions and loss of trade. He said he wanted to sink the mail
brigantine that had given us the lie; but you can't sink a ship by
wanting to. Well, let's get to work."
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