Sulphur, oil, and copra make the kind of tinder any firebug dreams of.
I suppose a Lascar sailor had sneaked a cigarette in the hold and touched off the blaze.
Now, roaring up in great oily clouds of smoke and flames, the fierce heat quickly drove us to the stern where we huddled like suffocating sheep, not knowing what to do.

The lifeboats were stuck fast.
We couldn't budge them.
I heard a cry from a stoker as a pillar of flame leaped from a hatch and tongued the man's bare back.
He sprinted to the rail and leaped overboard into the shark-infested waters.

One especially bad detonation shook Lifeboat No. 3 which trembled violently in the davits.
Brassnose yelled: "Come on, Sommers, Max step on it, we got a chance now.
Heave on those ropes;
the boat's come unstuck".

We pulled and swore and yanked and wept, scraping our hands until they bled profusely.
The Bonaventure was quivering and lurching like an old spavined mare.
Her stern was down and a sharp list helped us to cut loose the lifeboat which dropped heavily into the water.

Brassnose, Max and I leaped into the sea and swam to the boat.
"Let's get away fast", said Brassnose, shaking water from his mop of bleached hair.
"That tub is going to explode all at once".

Then the Bonaventure seemed to disintegrate with a roar of live steam, geysers of sparks and flames, and a dense cloud of black-and-orange smoke.
Dimly, we heard the voices of men in mortal agony but we couldn't go back into that inferno.

Already our leaky lifeboat was filled with five inches of water.
"Sommers, you bale while we row", Brassnose commanded.

As best as I could determine, we were some 700 miles west of New Guinea, in the Bismark Archipelago.
Three days previously, we had steamed past barren Rennell Island in the distance.
Now we peered anxiously for any speck of land in the Pacific, for this interminable bailing would have to stop soon.
There were gigantic blisters and rope burns on our hands;
our muscles were hot wires of pain.

Brassnose was strangely silent.
The big man with the whitened hair murmured something: his words sounded as if they were in the Manu tongue, which I recognized, having studied the dialect in my Anthropology 6, class at the University of Chicago.

He then said something which struck a chord in my memory.

"God help us if we're near the island of Eromonga.
We'd be in real trouble then.
I'd rather keep bailing -- or sink".

I was puzzled by the remark, then I recalled the voice of mild Professor Howard Griggs three years ago in a university lecture on primitive societies.
He had been speaking of this archipelago:

"Even when the islands were under German mandate before World War 1,, Europeans gave Eromonga a wide berth.
The place is inhabited by several hundred warlike women who are anachronisms of the Twentieth Century -- stone age amazons who live in an all-female, matriarchal society which is self-sufficient".

I remembered, too, the jesting voice of a classmate, Bobby Pauson: "But how do they reproduce, Dr. Griggs?
I'm sure that males have something to do with that process"!

There had been classroom guffaws which quickly subsided as Professor Griggs said dryly: "I see your point, Pauson.
Of course, males play a role there, but believe me when I say you wouldn't enjoy yourself one bit on Eromonga.
Indeed, you wouldn't live long, for the females either drive the men they've seized from neighboring islands back to their boats after exploiting them for amatory purposes, or they destroy them by revolting but ingenious methods.
In fact, one important aspect of their very religion is the annihilation of men".

"I think I know what you mean, Brassnose", I said.
"I know something about Eromonga.
Let's hope we come to a safer place".

But we didn't.
Three hours later, while we were bailing desperately, a dot of land came into view.
Foster Lukuklu Frayne made a sign over his heart with his two linked thumbs: I recognized it as an ancient Manu gesture intended to propitiate the Devil.

A half-hour passed;
we had drifted closer.
In a voice so frightened as to seem not his own, the big bo'sun's mate quavered:

"Tchalo!
It is Eromonga -- look hard, you can see with your naked eye the wooden scaffolding on the cliff".

I squinted at the looming shoreline.
There was a wooden tower or derrick there, something like a ski jump;
it was perhaps 80 feet high and had been artfully constructed of logs.
A fine example of engineering in a primitive society.

"What is the scaffolding for, Brassnose"?

He made a sound of despair deep in his throat.
It was embarrassing to see strapping, blonde Brassnose comport himself like a child who talks about bogeymen.

"Aaa-ee!
It is their tultul, the 'jumping platform' of death.
It is the last of the three tests of manhood which the women impose, to discover if a male is worthy of survival there.
Often, I heard my uncles and cousins speak of it when I was a small boy growing up in Rabaul.
They had never seen a tultul but they had heard about it from their fathers".

Our lifeboat was filling rapidly and despite what I had heard of the inhabitants of Eromonga, I was glad to see a long and graceful outrigger manned by three bronzed girls glide out of a lagoon into the open sea and toward our craft.

I expected Brassnose -- as a man with a strain of Melanesian in his blood -- to speak to them.
But he had turned a sickly green and appeared tongue-tied or panicked.

So, I mustered my few words of the Manu dialect and said, "We greet you in peace.
In ngandlu.
My friends and I come from a ship which was destroyed by fire.
We are thirsty and hungry;
our sore and burned hands and arms need attention".

The girl in the prow of the outrigger turned a smile like a beacon on me.
I noted that her full breasts were bare and that she wore a garland of red pandanus fruit in her blue-black hair.

She said, "My name is Songau and these girls are Ponkob and Piwen.
You are welcome to Eromonga.
My people await you on the shore.
You shall have food, water and rest".

Thirty minutes later, the outrigger grated on sand and other girls, waiting on shore, rushed forward to pull it up on the beach and make it fast with vine ropes to a large boulder.
I saw a dozen or so other outriggers moored there.

I looked.
All my rosy visions of rest and even pleasure on this island vanished at the sight.
There was a mound of bleached human bones and skulls at the base of the big wooden derrick.
Some had been there for years;
others still had whitened shreds of decayed flesh sticking to them.

There was one object which sickened yet fascinated me.
This was also a corpse -- a male, judging from the coral arm bands, the tribal scars still discernible on the maggoty face, the painted bone of the warrior caste which still pierced the septum of the rotting nose.

The body may have been two or three weeks' dead.
I looked with revulsion at the legs.
They were shattered.
Many small bones protruded crazily from the shreds of flesh.
The man must have leaped to his death from the topmost rung of the tultul.

As if divining my thoughts, the girl Songau smiled warmly and said in the casual tone an American woman might use in describing her rose garden:

"This is our tultul, a jumping platform, aku.
Later, you shall know it better.
Is it not well-made?
Our old one blew down in a storm at the time of the pokeneu festival fifteen moons ago.
It took thirty of our women almost six moons to build this one, which is higher and stronger than the old one.
We are very proud of it".

"You have every right to be", I replied gravely in the Manu dialect, but my attention was fixed on Brassnose, the biggest and strongest of us.
He looked as if he was going to keel over.
I felt a queasiness in my own stomach but it wouldn't do to show these girls that we were afraid.
Not so soon, anyway.

I clapped the big man with the bleached hair on his shoulder and said heartily, hoping it would make an impression on the women: "This one is the maku Frayne.
He speaks your language too, for he is the grandson of a chieftain on Taui who made much magic and was strong and cunning.
The maku Frayne has inherited this strength from his grandfather".

This was the worst thing I could have said.
Brassnose turned a stricken face toward me and said brokenly, "Sommers, you meddling Yank, you're a fool!
They despise males who brag of their strength;
they destroy such men with their damned tests.
You've ruined me, blast you"!

At first, I thought he was out of his head, talking wildly like this.
But a glance at Songau and the other women confirmed what Brassnose had blurted out.

The women's faces had hardened after my statement.
At a nod from Songau, four lithe and muscular girls darted to Frayne's side and seized him by the arms.
The man was an ox and he put up a creditable struggle;
but four Eromonga women are more than a match for the strongest male that ever lived.

Besides, terror had sapped some of Frayne's vitality and will.
My last impression as they led him off to a stockade was of his pale face

.
In the Manu tongue, "eromonga" means manhood -- a quality which the women derisively toasted in weekly feasts at which great quantities of a brew like kava were imbibed.
In the hut to which I was assigned -- Max had his own quarters -- my food was brought to me by a wrinkled crone with bare drooping breasts who seemed to enjoy conversing with me in rudimentary phrases.

Her name was L'Turu and she told me many things.
For an anthropologist, loquacious old L'Turu was a mine of information.
Though I had a great dread of the island and felt I would never leave it alive, I eagerly wrote down everything she told me about its women.
(Her account was later confirmed by the Scobee-Frazier Expedition from the University of Manitoba in 1951.
)

From L'Turu, I heard that until about 1850 the people of this island -- which was about the size of Guam or smaller -- had been of both sexes, and that the normal family life of Melanesian tribes was observed here with minor variations.

But in the middle of the last century an island woman named "Karipo" seized a spear in the heat of an inter-tribal battle and rallied the women after their men had fled.
Miraculously, Karipo and her women had succeeded in driving a hundred invaders from the isle of Pamasu back to their war canoes, after considerable loss of life on both sides.

Karipo was something of a politician as well as a militarist.
She quickly exploited the exalted position she now occupied, by harassing the disorganized males and even putting many of them to death.
Within a decade or less, few men were left and a feminist society had sprung up.

"Karipo was great goddess, told our mothers that men were not necessary except to father children", the crone told me.
"All men went away from here.
Those who stayed had to pass tests.
Few passed".
She cackled with mirth, showing the stumps of betel-stained teeth.
"Karipo's women then named this place 'Eromonga' -- manhood -- for just the strongest men could stay here.
Come, I show you".

The old woman arose stiffly and led me to a clearing where a small hut stood.
In the shade of a palm tree in front of the squalid dwelling I saw four figures in a semi-circle on the ground.