The Fijians: A Study of the Decay of Custom
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Title: The Fijians: A Study of the Decay of Custom
Author: Basil Thomson
Contributor: Bolton Glanvill Corney
James Stewart
Release date: December 28, 2011 [eBook #38432]
Language: English
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THE FIJIANS
A STUDY OF THE DECAY OF CUSTOM
[Illustration: BREADFRUIT.]
THE FIJIANS
A STUDY OF THE DECAY OF CUSTOM
BY
BASIL THOMSON
AUTHOR OF "THE STORY OF DARTMOOR PRISON," ETC.
ILLUSTRATED
LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
1908
_OTHER WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
_South Sea Yarns_
_The Diversions of a Prime Minister_
_A Court Intrigue_
_The Indiscretions of Lady Asenath_
_Savage Island_
_The Story of Dartmoor Prison_
(_In collaboration with_ Lord Amherst of Hackney)
_The Discovery of the Solomon Islands_
_Copyright, London 1908, by William Heinemann._
PREFACE
This volume does not pretend to be an exhaustive monograph on the
Fijians. Their physical characteristics and their language, which have
no bearing upon the state of transition from customary law to modern
competition, are omitted, since they may be studied in the pages of
Williams, Waterhouse and Hazlewood, which the author has freely
consulted. All that is aimed at is a study of the decay of custom in a
race that is peculiarly tenacious of its institutions--the decay that
has now set in among the natural races in every part of the globe.
The author lived among the Fijians with short intervals for ten years,
first as Stipendiary Magistrate in various parts of the group, then as
Commissioner of the Native Lands Court, and finally as Acting Head of
the Native Department. Much of the anthropological information was
collected for the Commission appointed in 1903 to investigate the causes
of the decrease of the natives, of which the author was a member, and of
that portion of the book his fellow-Commissioner, Dr. Bolton Glanvill
Corney, C.M.G., and the late Mr. James Stewart, C.M.G., should be
considered joint authors, though they are not responsible for the
conclusions drawn from the evidence.
To Dr. Corney, whose services to medical science in the investigation of
leprosy and tropical diseases in the Pacific are so widely known, his
special thanks are due. He also received valuable assistance from Dr.
Lynch, the late Mr. Walter Carew and a number of native assistants,
notably Ilai Motonithothoka, Ratu Deve, the late Ratu Nemani Ndreu, and
others. The late Mr. Lorimer Fison also helped him with many
suggestions.
The ideas expressed in the introduction were formulated in the author's
presidential address to the Devonshire Association in 1905: the marriage
system and the mythology were described in papers read before the
Anthropological Institute: some account of the "Path of the Shades" and
the fishing of the Mbalolo are to be found in others of the author's
books.
The spelling adopted for native words may be displeasing to Fijian
scholars, particularly the rendering of _q_ by _nk_, but although
_wanka_ may not represent the Fijian pronunciation as accurately as
_wangga_, it is certainly less uncouth. Hazelwood's spelling, excellent
as it is for the purpose of teaching Fijians to read and write their own
language, is misleading to English readers, and the abandonment of his
consonants _c_ for _th_, _b_ for _mb_, _d_ for _nd_ and _g_ for _ng_,
needs no apology.
_London, 1908._
INTRODUCTION
The present population of the globe is believed to be about fifteen
hundred millions, of which seven hundred millions are nominally
progressive and eight hundred millions are stagnant under the law of
custom. It is difficult to choose terms that even approach scientific
accuracy in these generalizations, for, as Mr. H.G. Wells has remarked,
if we use the word "civilized" the London "Hooligan" and the "Bowery
tough" immediately occur to us; if the terms "stagnant" or
"progressive," how are the Parsee gentleman and the Sussex farm labourer
to be classed? Nor can the terms "white" and "coloured" be used, for
there are Chinese many shades whiter than the Portuguese. But as long as
the meaning is clear the scientific accuracy of terms is unimportant,
and so for convenience we will call all races of European descent
"civilized," and races living under the law of custom "uncivilized." The
problem that will be solved within the next few centuries is--What part
is to be taken in the world's affairs by the eight hundred millions of
uncivilized men who happen for the moment to be politically inferior to
the other seven hundred millions?
For centuries they have been sleeping. Under the law of custom, which no
man dares to disobey, progress was impossible. The law of custom was the
law of our own forefathers until the infusion of new blood and new
customs shook them out of the groove and set them to choosing between
the old and the new, and then to making new laws to meet new needs. This
happened so long ago that if it were not for a few ceremonial survivals
we might well doubt whether our forefathers were ever so held in
bondage. With the precept--to do as your father did before you--an
isolated race will remain stationary for centuries. There is, I
believe, in all the history of travel, only one instance in which the
absolute stagnation of a race has been proved, and that is the case of
the Solomon Islands, the first of the Pacific groups to be discovered,
and the last to be influenced by Europeans. In 1568 a Spanish expedition
under Alvaro de Mendana set sail from Peru in quest of the Southern
continent. Missing all the great island groups Mendana discovered the
islands named by him Islas de Saloman, not because he found any gold
there, but because he hoped thereby to inflame the cupidity of the
Council of the Indies into fitting out a fresh expedition. Gomez
Catoira, his treasurer, has left us a detailed account of the customs of
the natives and about forty words of their language. And now comes the
strange part of the story. Expedition after expedition set sail for the
Isles of Solomon; group after group was discovered; but the Isles of
Solomon were lost, and at last geographers, having shifted them to every
space left vacant in the chart, treated them as fabulous and expunged
them altogether. They were rediscovered by Bougainville exactly two
centuries later, but it was not until late in the nineteenth century
that any attempt was made to study the language and customs of the
natives. It was then found that in every particular, down to the
pettiest detail in their dress, their daily life and their language,
they were the same as when Catoira saw them two centuries earlier, and
so no doubt they would have remained until the last trump had not
Europeans come among them.
If, as there is good reason for believing, the modern Eskimo are the
lineal descendants of the cave men of Derbyshire, who hunted the
reindeer and the urus in Pleistocene times, the changelessness of their
habits is to be ascribed to the same cause--the absence of a stimulus
from without to break down the law of custom.
In the sense that no race now exists which is not in some degree touched
by the influence of Western civilization, the present decade may be said
to be a fresh starting-point in the history of mankind. Whithersoever we
turn, the laws of custom, which have governed the uncivilized races for
countless generations, are breaking down; the old isolation which kept
their blood pure is vanishing before railway and steamship communication
which imports alien labourers to work for European settlers; and
ethnologists of the future, having no pure race left to examine, will
have to fall back upon hearsay evidence in studying the history of human
institutions.
All this has happened before in the world's history, but in a more
limited area. To the Roman armies, the Roman system of slave-owning, and
still more to the Roman roads, we owe the fact that there is not in
Western Europe a single race of unmixed blood, for even the Basques, if
they are indeed the last survivors of the old Iberian stock, have
intermarried with the French and Spanish people about them. An
ethnologist of the eighth century, meditating on the wave upon wave of
destructive immigration that submerged England, might well have doubted
whether so extraordinary a mixture of races could ever develop
patriotism and pride of race, and yet it did not take many centuries to
evolve in the English a sense of nationality with insular prejudice
superadded. Nationality and patriotism are in fact purely artificial and
geographical sentiments. We feel none of the bitter hate of our Saxon
forefathers for their Norman conquerors; the path of our advance through
the centuries is strewn with the corpses of patriotisms and race
hatreds.
Nor was the mixture of races in Europe the mere mingling of peoples
descended from a common Aryan stock, for if that were so, what has
become of the Persians and Egyptians, worshippers of AEon and Serapis and
Mithras, who garrisoned the Northumberland wall; of the host of Asiatic
and African soldiers and slaves scattered through Europe during the
Roman Empire; of the Negroes introduced into southern Portugal by Prince
Henry the Navigator; of the Jews that swarmed in every medieval city; of
the Moors in southern Spain? Did none of these intermarry with Aryans,
and leave a half-caste Semitic or Negro or Tartar progeny behind them?
How otherwise can one account for the extraordinary diversity in skull
measurement, in proportion and in colour which is found in the
population of every European country?
If we except the inhabitants of remote islands probably there has never
been an unmixed race since the Palaeolithic Age. Long before the dawn of
history kingdoms rose and fell. Broken tribes, fleeing from invaders,
put to sea and founded colonies in distant lands. Troy was no exception
to the rule of the old world that at the sack of every city the men were
slain and the women reserved to be the wives of their conquerors.
Doubtless it was to keep the Hebrew blood pure that Saul was commanded
to slay "both man and woman, infant and suckling" of the Amalekites, the
ancestors of the Bedawin of the Sinai peninsula.
It may be argued that the laws of custom have been swept away by
conquering races many times in the world's history without any
far-reaching consequences--those of the Neolithic people of the long
barrows by the warriors of the Bronze Age; those of the British by the
Romans; those of the Romano-British by the Saxons; those of the Saxons
by the Normans. But there was this difference: in all these cases the
new customs were forced upon the weaker race by the strong hand of its
conquerors, and as it had obeyed its own laws through fear of the
Unseen, so it adopted the new laws through fear of its new masters. It
was a rough, but in the end a wholesome schooling. We go another way to
work: we do not as a rule come to native races with the authority of
conquerors; we saunter into their country and annex it; we break down
their customs, but do not force them to adopt ours; we teach them the
precepts of Christianity, and in the same breath assure them that
instead of physical punishment by disease which they used to fear, their
disobedience will be visited by eternal punishment after death--a
contingency too remote to have any terrors for them; and then we leave
them like a ship with a broken tiller free to go whithersoever the wind
of fancy drives them, and it is not surprising that they prefer the easy
vices of civilization to its more difficult virtues. In civilizing a
native race the _suaviter in modo_ is a more dangerous process than the
_fortiter in re_.
The law of custom is always interwoven with religion, and is enforced by
fear of earthly punishment for disobedience. This fear is strongest
among patriarchal races whose religion is founded upon the worship of
ancestors. To depart from the customs of the ancestors is to insult the
tribal god, and it is therefore the business of each member of the tribe
to see to it that the impiety of his fellow-tribesmen brings no judgment
down upon his head. In such a community a man is only free from the
tyranny of custom when he dies. As in the German's ideal of a
well-governed city, everything is forbidden. Hedged about by the tabu he
can scarce move hand or foot without circumspection. If he errs, even
unwittingly, the spirits of disease pounce upon him. In Tonga almost
every day he performed the _Moe-moe_, an act of penance to atone for
unconscious breaches of the tabu, and in the civil war of 1810 it was
the practice to open the bodies of the slain to discover from the state
of the liver whether the dead warrior had led a good or an evil life.
Among the races held in bondage by custom there were, of course, rare
souls born before their time in whom the eternal "Thou shalt not" of the
law of custom provoked the question "Why?" But they met the fate
ordained for men born before their time; in civilized states the
hemlock, the cross and the stake; in uncivilized, the club or the spear.
Perhaps the real complaint of the Athenians against Socrates was that an
unceasing flow of wisdom and reproof is more than erring man can endure,
but the published grounds for his condemnation were that he denied the
gods recognized by the State, and that he corrupted the young. This, as
William Mariner tells us, is what men whispered under their breath when
Finau, the king of Vavau in the Friendly Islands, dared to scoff at the
law of tabu in 1810, and he was struck down by sickness while ordering a
rope to be brought for the strangling of his priest. In fact the
reformers of primitive races never lived long: if they were low-born
they were clubbed and that was the end of them and their reforms; if
they were chiefs, and something happened to them, either by disease or
accident, men saw therein the finger of an offended deity, and obedience
to the existing order of things became stronger than before.
The decay of custom, which may be fraught with momentous consequences
for the civilized races, is proceeding more rapidly every year. It can
best be studied by examining the process in a single race in detail, and
for this purpose the Fijians, who are the subject of this volume, are
peculiarly suited, because by their isolation through many centuries no
foreign ideas, filtering through neighbouring tribes, had corrupted
their customary law before Europeans came among them, and so decay set
in with startling suddenness despite their innate conservatism. What is
true of the Fijians is true, with slight modifications, of every
primitive society in Asia, Africa and America which is being dragged
into the vortex of what we call progress. The fabric of every complete
social system has been built up gradually. You may raze it to the
foundations and erect another in its place, but if you pull out a stone
here and there the whole edifice comes tumbling about your ears before
you can make your alterations. It is the fashion to assert that native
races begin to decline as soon as Europeans come into contact with them.
This arises from our evil modern habit of making false generalizations.
The fact that some isolated races suddenly torn from the roots of their
ancient customs begin by decreasing rapidly is so dramatic that we
eagerly fasten on the generalization that weaker races are doomed to
wither away at the coming of the all-conquering European, forgetting the
steady increase of the Bantu races in Africa, and of the Indians and
Chinese up to and even beyond the limit of population which their
country can support.
The main cause of the sudden decrease of a race is the introduction of
new diseases which assume a more virulent aspect when they strike root
in a virgin soil, but we are now beginning to learn that this cause is
only temporary. For a time a race seems to sicken and pine like an
individual, but like an individual it may recover. In the decrease from
disease there seems to be a stopping-place. It may come when the race
has been reduced to one-fifth of its number, like the Maoris, or to a
mere handful like the blacks of New South Wales, but there comes a time
when decay is arrested, and then perhaps fusion with another race has
set in. The type may be lost, but the blood remains.
It is against the attacks of new diseases that the law of custom is most
helpless. The primitive theory of disease and death is so widespread
that we may accept it as the belief of mankind before custom gave place
to scientific inquiry. The primitive argument was this: the natural
state of man is to be healthy, and everything contrary to Nature must be
the doing of some hostile agency. When a man feels ill he knows that an
evil spirit has entered into him, and since evil spirits do not move
unless some person conjures them, his first thought on waking with a
headache is "An enemy hath done this." Out of this springs all the
complicated ritual of witchcraft, fetish and juju, which by frightening
natives into destroying or burying all offal and refuse that might be
used against them by a wizard, achieves the right thing for the wrong
reason. The "Evil spirit" theory of disease is thus not so very far
removed from the bacillus theory: in both the body has been attacked by
a malignant visitor which must be expelled before the patient can
recover. It is in the methods adopted for making the body an
uncomfortable lodging for it that the systems diverge. In all ages the
essential part of therapeutics has been faith in the remedy, whether in
the verse of the Koran swallowed by the Moslem, in the charm prescribed
by the medieval quack, in the "demonstration" of the Christian
Scientist, in the prescription of the medical practitioner. Mankind
survives its remedies as well as its epidemics. England has a population
of nearly forty millions, even though, less than a century ago, as we
learn from Creevy's memoirs, blood-letting was regarded as the proper
treatment for advanced stages of consumption.
It is, I think, safe to assume that in the centuries to come there will
be representatives even of the smallest races now living on the earth,
and that the proportions between civilized and what are now uncivilized
peoples will not have greatly altered, though the political and social
ideas which underlie Western civilization will have permeated the whole
of mankind. It is therefore important to inquire whether the
uncivilized races are really inferior in capacity to Europeans.
Professor Flinders Petrie has expressed the view that the average man
cannot receive much more knowledge than his immediate ancestors, and
that "the growth of the mind can in the average man be but by fractional
increments in each generation." In support of this view he declares that
the Egyptian peasant who has been taught to read and write is in every
case which he has met with "half-witted, silly and incapable of taking
care of himself," while the Copt, whose ancestors have been scribes for
generations, can be educated without sustaining any mental injury. I
venture to think that there are more exceptions than will prove any such
rule. In New Zealand it has been found that Maori children, when they
can be induced to work, are quite equal to their white school-fellows.
Fijian boys educated in Sydney have been proved to be equal to the
average; Tongan boys who have never left their island write shorthand
and solve problems in higher mathematics; Booker Washington and Dubois
are only two out of a host of negroes of the highest attainments.
Australian aborigines, and even Andaman Islanders, have shown some
aptitude when they have overcome the difficulty of a common language
with their teacher; New Guinea children do very well in the mission
schools. The Masai are the most backward of all the East African tribes,
yet Mr. Hollis, the Government Secretary of Uganda, employs two Masai
boys to develop his photographs. It is, in fact, doubtful whether there
is any race of marked mental inferiority, though, as among ourselves,
there are thick-witted individuals, and these may be more common in one
race than in another. Certainly there is no race that suffers mental
injury from teaching. In all uncivilized people there is a lack of
application, and any injury they sustain arises from the confinement
necessary for study. It is character rather than intellect that achieves
things in this world, and character is affected by education, by
climate, and by pressure of circumstances. There are now in almost every
uncivilized race individuals who are defying the law of custom to their
material profit, though not to their entire peace of mind, for they have
begun to understand that the riches of the European may be dearly
purchased, and that in anxiety about many things happiness and
contentment are not often found.
But though all peoples are teachable there are racial idiosyncrasies
which we are only beginning to discover. Why, for instance, should the
Hausa and the Sudanese have a natural aptitude for European military
discipline while the Waganda find it irksome? Why do the Masai, whose
social development is Palaeolithic in its simplicity, make trustworthy
policemen and prison warders, while the Somalis have been found utterly
worthless in both capacities? Why are the Maoris and Solomon Islanders
natural artists in wood-carving while the tribes most nearly allied to
them are almost destitute of artistic skill? These natural aptitudes
suggest what these races may become when we have struck off their
fetters of custom and have forced them to compete with us.
Cheap and rapid means of transit are sweeping away the distinctions of
dress, of custom, and, to some extent, of language, which underlie the
feeling of nationality, and the races now uncivilized will soon settle
for themselves the vital question whether they are to remain hewers of
wood and drawers of water for the white man, or whether they are to take
their place in free competition with him. The "Yellow Peril," which
implies national cohesion among the Mongolians, may be a chimera, but it
is impossible to believe that a white skin is to be for ever a sort of
patent of nobility in the world state of the future.
History teaches us that there can be no middle course. Either race
antipathy and race contempt must disappear, or one breed of men must
dominate the others. The psychology of race contempt has never been
dispassionately studied. It is felt most strongly in the United States
and the West Indies; a little less strongly in the other British
tropical colonies. In England it is sporadic, and is generally confined
to the educated classes. It is scarcely to be noticed in France, Spain,
Portugal or Italy. From this it might be argued that it is peculiar to
races of Teutonic descent were it not for the fact that Germans in
tropical countries do not seem to feel it. It is, moreover, a sentiment
of modern growth. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Englishmen
did not regard coloured people as their inferiors by reason of the
colour of their skin. It appears, in fact, to date only from the time of
slavery in the West Indian colonies, and yet the Romans, the Spaniards,
and the Portuguese, who were the greatest slave-owners in history, never
held marriage with coloured people in contempt. The only race hatred in
the Middle Ages was anti-Semitic, and this was due to the Crusader
spirit. The colour line, as it is called, is drawn more firmly by men
than by women, and deep-seated as it is in the Southern States just now
it may be nothing more than a passing phase of sentiment, a subconscious
instinct of self-preservation in a race which feels that its old
predominance is threatened by equality with its former servants. If you
analyze the sentiment it comes to this. You may tolerate the coloured
man in every relation but one: you may converse with him, eat with him,
live with him on terms of equality, but your gorge rises at the idea of
admitting him to become a member of your family by marriage. In the
ordinary social relations you do not take him quite seriously; if he is
a commoner you treat him as your potential servant; if a dusky potentate
you yield him a sort of jesting deference; but in that one matter of
blood alliance with him you will always keep him at arm's length. That
is the view even of the Englishman who has not lived in a black man's
country, and upon that is built the extraordinary race hatred of the
Southern States, where a white man will not consent to sit in a tramcar
with a negro, though the white man be a cotton operative and the negro a
University professor.
If this race contempt were a primitive instinct with the white race the
future of mankind would be lurid indeed, for it is impossible to believe
that one half of humanity can be kept for ever inferior to the other
without deluging the world with blood. But it is not a primitive
instinct. Shakespeare saw nothing repulsive in the marriage of Desdemona
with a man of colour. Early in the sixteenth century Sieur Paulmier de
Gonneville of Normandy gave his heiress in marriage to Essomeric, the
son of a Brazilian chief, and no one thought that she was hardly
treated. It may not be a pleasant subject to dwell upon, but it is a
fact that women of Anglo-Saxon blood do, even in these days, mate with
Chinese, Arabs, Kaffirs, and even Negroes despite the active opposition
of the whole of their relations. History is filled with romantic
examples of the marriage of European men with native women, to cite no
more than de Bethencourt with the Guanche princess; Cortes with his
Mexican interpreter; John Rolfe with Pocahontas.
It is the fashion to describe the half-caste offspring of such mixed
marriages as having all the vices of both races, and none of the
virtues. In so far as this accusation is true it is accounted for by the
social ostracism in which these people are condemned to live. Disowned
by their fathers, freed by their parentage from the restraints under
which their mothers' people are held in check, it could scarcely be
otherwise, but those who have lived with half-castes of many races will
agree that in intellectual aptitude and in physical endowment they are
generally equal to the average of Europeans when they have the same
education and opportunities, and that there is no physical deterioration
in the offspring of the marriages of half-castes _inter se_.
At the dawn of this twentieth century we see the future of mankind
through a glass darkly, but if we study the state of the coloured people
who are shaking themselves free from the law of custom, we may see it
almost face to face. Race prejudice does not die as hard as one would
think. The Portuguese of the sixteenth century were ready enough to
court as "Emperor of Monomotapa" a petty Bantu chieftain into whose
power they had fallen; and the English beachcomber of the forties who,
when he landed, called all natives "niggers" with an expletive prefix,
might very soon be found playing body-servant to a Fijian chief, who
spoke of him contemptuously as "My white man." In tropical countries the
line of caste will soon cease to be the colour line. There, as in
temperate zones, wealth will create a new aristocracy recruited from men
of every shade of colour. Even in the great cities of Europe and
America we may find men of Hindu and Chinese and Arab origin controlling
industries with their wealth, as Europeans now control the commerce of
India and China, but with this difference--that they will wear the dress
and speak the language which will have become common to the whole
commercial world, and as the aristocracy of every land will be composed
of every shade of colour, so will be the masses of men who work with
their hands. In one country the majority of the labourers will be black
or brown; in another white; but white men will work cheek by jowl with
black and feel no degradation. There will be the same feverish pursuit
of wealth, but all races will participate in it instead of a favoured
few. The world will then be neither so pleasant nor so picturesque a
place to live in, and by the man of that age the twentieth century will
be cherished tenderly as an age of romance, of awakening, and of high
adventure. The historians of that day will speak of the Victorian age as
we speak of the Elizabethan, and will date the new starting-point in the
history of mankind from the decay of the law of custom.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
INTRODUCTION vii
I. THE TRANSITION 1
II. THE AGE OF MYTH 4
III. THE AGE OF HISTORY 21
IV. CONSTITUTION OF SOCIETY 56
V. WARFARE 85
VI. CANNIBALISM 102
VII. RELIGION 111
VIII. POLYGAMY 172
IX. FAMILY LIFE 175
X. THE MARRIAGE SYSTEM 182
XI. CUSTOMS AT BIRTH 206
XII. CIRCUMCISION AND TATTOOING 216
XIII. THE PRACTICE OF PROCURING ABORTION. 221
XIV. THE INSOUCIANCE OF NATIVE RACES 228
XV. SEXUAL MORALITY 233
XVI. EPIDEMIC DISEASES 243
XVII. LEPROSY (_VUKAVUKA_ OR _SAKUKA_) 255
XVIII. YAWS (_THOKO_) 270
XIX. TUBERCULOSIS 277
XX. TRADE 280
XXI. NAVIGATION AND SEAMANSHIP 290
XXII. PHYSICAL POWERS 297
XXIII. ATTITUDES AND MOVEMENTS 299
XXIV. TRAITS OF CHARACTER 304
XXV. SWIMMING 316
XXVI. FISHING 320
XXVII. GAMES 328
XXVIII. FOOD 334
XXIX. YANKONA (_KAVA_) 341
XXX. TOBACCO 352
XXXI. THE TENURE OF LAND 354
XXXII. CONCLUSION 387
INDEX 391
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
BREADFRUIT _Frontispiece_
DESCENDANTS OF TONGAN IMMIGRANTS PERFORMING THE TONGAN DANCE _LAKALAKA_
_To face page_ 22
BRINGING FIRST FRUITS TO MBAU " 60
BUILDING A CHIEF'S HOUSE " 70
SPOIL FROM THE PLANTATIONS--(TARO, COCOANUTS AND YANGKONA) " 78
PAINTING A _TAPA_ SHROUD " 130
SERUA, AN ISLAND CHIEF VILLAGE IN THE _MBAKI_ COUNTRY " 154
THE MBURE-NI-SA (CLUB HOUSE) " 176
WOMEN FISHING WITH THE SEINE " 212
A WAR DANCE " 286
THE _THAMAKAU_ " 290
THE HAIR PLASTERED WITH BLEACHING LIME " 302
THE CHIEF'S TURTLE FISHERS " 320
SLAUGHTERING THE TURTLE " 326
BREWING YANGKONA " 344
PICKING COCOANUTS " 364
_Photographs by_ Waters, _Suva, Fiji_.
THE FIJIANS
CHAPTER I
THE TRANSITION
The Fijian of to-day is neither savage nor civilized. Security from
violence has fostered his natural improvidence. The missionaries, who
have effected so marvellous a change in his moral and religious
sentiments, who have induced him to join in the suppression of such
customs as polygamy, cannibalism, strangling of widows, amputating the
finger as a mark of mourning, dressing the hair in heathen fashion,
wearing the loin bandage, tattooing and many others, have neglected to
teach him to care for his health and his physical well-being. They have
taught him to cultivate his mind rather than his food plantation, and
they have given him no immediate punishment for thriftlessness and
disobedience to take the place of the old club law. He was accustomed to
be ruled by a strong hand because no other rule was possible, and he is
suffering from the fact that civilization was not forced upon him. If,
instead of being ceded, the country had been conquered and each man
relegated to his place with a strong hand, the dawn of settled
government would have been less bleak.
Having never known the struggle for existence that prevails in the
crowded communities of the old world, he was spurred into activity by
the fear of annihilation, for upon his alertness his existence depended.
Intertribal wars conquered the natural indolence and apathy of the
people, but, with the bestowal of the _pax Britannica_ this impulse
failed. The earth yielded all they required for their simple wants, and
they were free to indulge their natural indolence. They lack the
alertness of races who have to contend against savage animals, from
which the Fiji islands are free, and they have none of the steady
application of those who must compete with others for their daily bread.
Yet, in being thriftless and apathetic, they are but obeying a natural
law which the modern state socialist is too apt to minimize if not to
ignore. Without the necessity for a struggle between man and man or man
and Nature there has never been any progress. Society must stagnate or
slip backwards without the spur of ambition or of fear; the natural bent
of all men is to be idle. The old world Paradise was a garden that
yielded its fruit without cultivation; the old world punishment for
disobedience was the decree that man should earn his bread by the sweat
of his brow. Industry and thrift are hardly to be looked for in a
luxurious climate among a sparse population, but rather among those
races whose climate and soil yield food only at stated seasons of the
year, and then grudgingly in return for unremitting labour, or in those
crowded communities whose local supply of food is insufficient. When we
blame the Fijians for their thriftlessness we are prone to judge them by
too high a standard, and to forget that they are land-owning peasants, a
class which even among ourselves is exempt from the grinding necessity
of perpetual toil--a state that has come to be regarded as the natural
lot of the poor. The primitive organization of village communities among
whom the tie of individual property is loose and ill-defined enough to
please the most advanced socialist, causes thrift to be regarded as a
vice, and wasteful prodigality the highest virtue.
[Pageheader: LACK OF IMAGINATION]
The Fijians have already adopted some of the tools of civilization; the
native canoe has given place to vessels of European model, and so far as
clothing is necessary, European fabrics have taken the place of the old
_Liku_ and _Malo_. "Mbau," say the natives, "is adopting European
fashions"--the superficial fashions that take the fancy--"and where Mbau
leads others will follow in time." In spite of the whirlwind of war and
rapine that devastated the country fifty years ago, it would now be
difficult to find a more honest and law-abiding community than the
Fijian, so far as intercourse among themselves is concerned. It is true
that their sympathies are not yet wide enough to allow them to think of
others. Many an otherwise excellent Fijian will, with a clear
conscience, deceive and cheat a foreigner; if his pig strays, he will
pierce its eyes with thorns, or throw quicklime into them to blind the
animal and prevent it from straying again; a poor half-witted woman who
annoys her neighbours by wandering into their houses has the soles of
her feet scored with sharp knives to keep her at home. Sympathy has had
no time to develop, and consequently his sentiments are confined within
the limits of his own joint family, and do not reach up to the foreigner
or down to the lower animals.
In most respects the Fijian is some centuries behind us and it is
unreasonable to expect him to leap the gap at a single bound; yet it is
nevertheless unnecessary that he should follow the tortuous road by
which we arrived unguided at our present state of development.
CHAPTER II
THE AGE OF MYTH
Of all inhabited countries in the world Fiji is probably the poorest in
history. No European, who left a record behind him, had intercourse with
the natives until 1810, and the historical traditions of the natives
themselves scarcely carry back their history beyond the middle of the
eighteenth century. While the chiefs of the Marquesas and Hawaii are
said to recall the names of their ancestors for seventy-three
generations,[1] the chiefs of Mbau cannot give the name of any of their
predecessors before Nailatikau, who reigned during the last quarter of
the eighteenth century, and the earliest name recalled by other tribes
of longer memory is only the sixth generation from the reigning chief.
It is not that the Fijians were less prone than other islanders to
embody their tribal history in traditional poetry, but that the
political _morcellement_ of the tribal units left the poets nothing to
record. A century ago Mbau was nothing but a petty fortified village in
the interior, governed by chiefs whose names were unknown three miles
from its public square. The chiefs of Rewa were equally obscure, and the
songs which celebrated their petty achievements died with the generation
that sang them. When the great wave of unrest in the interior of
Vitilevu sent them forth to fight their way to a new home on the coast,
and to found confederations of the tribes they had subdued, their
history was born; and at its birth died the old traditions of the tribes
they conquered, for vassals in Fiji have nothing to do with memories of
departed greatness.
[Pageheader: THE BOND OF _TAUVU_]
Besides the historical _meke_ there remain a few mythological sagas
which refer to a far older period. With ancestor-worshippers like the
Fijians the founders of their race attain immortality denied to their
descendants, who at the most become demi-gods enjoying a place in
mythology only as long as their deeds on earth are remembered. The
founders of the Fijian race are known as _Kalou-Vu_--Gods of Origin--and
the sagas that relate their exploits, overlaid as they are with glosses
by the poets, undoubtedly contain the germ of traditional history of a
very ancient date. The historical outline of the Nakauvandra sagas is
supported by another class of evidence, namely the _tauvu_.
The word _tauvu_ means literally "Sprung from the same root," or "of
common origin." It is applied to two or more tribes who may live in
different islands, speak different dialects, and have, in short, nothing
in common but their god. They do not necessarily intermarry; they may
have held no intercourse for generations; yet, though each may have
forgotten the names of its chiefs three generations back, the site of
its ancient home, and the traditions of its migrations, it never forgets
the tribe with which it is _tauvu_. Members of that tribe may run riot
in its village, slaughter its animals, and ravage its plantations, while
it sits smiling by; for the spoilers are its brothers, worshippers of
its common ancestor, and are entitled in the fullest sense to the
"freedom of the city." In several instances I have traced back the bond
of tauvu to its origin, the marriage of the sister of some high chief
with the head of a distant clan. Her rank was so transcendent that she
brought into her husband's family a measure of the godhead of her
ancestors, and her descendants have thenceforth reverenced her
forefathers in preference to those of her husband. But in the majority
of cases--and it is the exception to find a clan which is not tauvu to
some other--the bond is too remote for tradition to have preserved its
origin, and in these the two clans were probably offshoots from the same
stock. Perhaps there was a quarrel between brothers, and one of them was
driven out with his family to find another home; or a young swarm from
an overcrowded hive may have crossed the water to seek wider planting
lands for their support, as the first Aryan emigrants burst through the
barriers of their cradle-land and overran Europe. Had the Aryans been
ancestor-worshippers Rome would have been _tauvu_ with Athens, and the
descendants of the youths driven forth in the Ver Sacrum _tauvu_ with
Rome.
The general tendency of the bonds of _tauvu_ in the western portion of
the group is to confirm the sagas of Nakauvandra in suggesting that the
cradle-land of the Fijians was the north-western corner of Vitilevu,
whence the tide of emigration set northward to Mbua, eastward along the
Tailevu coast, and south-eastward down the Wainimbuka branch of the Rewa
river. Besides the saga of Turukawa, printed in another chapter, there
are fragments of a still earlier poem relating the first arrival of the
_Kalou-Vu_ in a great canoe, the _Kaunitoni_, tempest-driven from a land
in the far West. The fragmentary saga of the _Kaunitoni_ must be
accepted with caution, since it was committed to writing so late as
1891, when educated Fijians were already aware that Europeans were
seeking evidence of their arrival in the group.
But there is proof enough of the western origin of the Fijians in the
fact that they are the eastern outpost of the Melanesian race and
language, that their blest abode of spirits lies beyond the setting sun,
and that the Thombo-thombo, or Jumping-off-places of the Fijian shades,
all point westward; there is proof enough of the Nakauvandra range being
their cradle-land in the belief that the shades of the people of the
Rewa delta must repair to Nakauvandra as the first stage in their last
sad journey.
[Pageheader: FIJI PEOPLED FROM THE WEST]
The following is a translation of an ingenious commentary upon these
fragments, written by Ilai Moto-ni-thothoka (Eli Stabbing-spear)---
"Long ago in a land in the far West there were three great chiefs,
Lutu-na-sombasomba, Ndengei, and Wai-thala-na-vanua; of these
Lutu-na-sombasomba was the greatest. And they took counsel together
to build a vessel in which they might set sail with their wives,
their children, their servants, and their dependants, to seek some
distant land where haply they might find a good country where they
might abide. So they sent a messenger to a chief named Rokola
bidding him build them a vessel. And Rokola told his clan, who were
the carpenter clan, the orders of the chiefs, and the carpenters
built a vessel and called it the _Kaunitoni_. And when the vessel
was made ready, they prepared their provisions and their freight,
and went on board. Now there were many other families that made
ready their vessels to accompany them. In the _Kaunitoni_ went
Lutu-na-sombasomba and his wife and five children, together with
his chest of stone in which were stored many things--his patterns
of work (_Vola-sui-ni-thakathaka_) and his inscribed words, and
many other inscriptions.[2] And with them went Ndengei and
Wai-thala-na-vanua and other families, a great company of men and
women. And the chief Rokola went also with his family. After
sailing many days they came to a land which seemed pleasant to many
of them, and these beached their vessels, and abode there. But the
remainder kept on their course. Perhaps this land at which the
others stayed was New Guinea. And as they sailed on, lo! another
land was sighted, and some of them, being eager to land there,
beached their vessels and occupied it. Perhaps this land was New
Britain. And they came upon other lands at which some tarried until
there was left only the _Kaunitoni_ and a few other vessels. And
these launched forth into the boundless ocean where they found no
land. And the sky grew dark, so that the vessels parted company,
for tempestuous weather was upon them. It was no common storm, but
a great cyclone that struck them, for it was the wind called
_Vuaroro_ or _Ravu-i-ra_ (west-north west). And the blast struck
the _Kaunitoni_, so that they were sick with terror, and could
think of nothing but that they must die.
"In the blackness of the storm the vessels were scattered, and the
_Kaunitoni_ drifted ever eastward down the path of the storm. And
as the hurricane continued for thirty days, and the vessel ran
before the wind without finding any land, Lutu-na-sombasomba's
chest of inscriptions fell overboard into the sea. But on the
thirtieth night the keel of the vessel struck upon a rock, and she
lay fast, and immediately the storm abated. Then they saw land
before them, and knew that they were saved. And in the morning they
went ashore and built shelters there: therefore the place was
called _Vunda_ (_Vu-nda_--lit. 'Our Origin'), because it was the
first village that they built, and they rejoiced that they were
saved from the hurricane that had beset them.
"This is the _meke_ of the cyclone that struck them--
"'Rai thake ko Ndaunivosavosa,
Na vua ni thagi lamba sa toka,
Na kena ua ma mbutu kosakosa
Na _Kaunitoni_ ka sa vondoka,
Na kena ua ma rombalaka toka,
Tangi mate ko Lutunasombasomba,
Nonku kawa era na vakaloloma,
Nonku kato vatu ka mai tasova,
Mai lutu kina na nonkui vola,
Da la' ki moce ki ndaveta ni kamboa.'
"'Lutunasombasomba gazed afar,
Behind him gathered the scud of the hurricane
The mighty rollers battered him,
And beat upon the _Kaunitoni_,
The mighty rollers burst over him,
Lutunasombasomba cried a bitter cry,
Alas! Alas! for my descendants,
My chest of stone is overset,
My inscriptions (_vola_) have fallen out of it,
Let us go and sleep in the harbour of the Kamboa (a fish).'
"And all the time they tarried at Vunda, the chief
Lutu-na-sombasomba could not rest for thinking of his inscriptions
that had been lost in the sea. And he sent some of his young men to
go and seek them,[3] for he reflected that his descendants would
grow up ignorant if these inscriptions were indeed lost to them. So
the young men set out with their sail close hauled, and as they
voyaged they were astonished at the sight of islands right in their
course to the westward, and disputed among themselves, some
affirming these to be the islands at which some of their company
had landed before the hurricane struck them, while others cried,
'Impossible; they were far away.' So they called the islands Yasa
yawa[4] (Yasawa). Long did they scull the vessel up and down the
sea seeking the lost inscriptions, but finding them not. And then
he who commanded the _Kaunitoni_, and was named Wankambalambala
(Tree-fern-canoe), spoke, and said that they should return to Vunda
and tell their Lord, Lutu-na-sombasomba, that his inscriptions
could not be found. For they were wearied with rowing up and down,
and the wind had failed them. Then one of them called
Mbekanitanganga climbed the mast to look for the ripple of the
wind, and saw a puff of wind coming up from the west, and when this
reached them Wankambalambala, the sailor, ordered the great sail to
be hoisted and they set their course for Vunda. But they knew not
where Vunda lay, and they beached the vessel at an island, and
landed upon it, wondering at the fertility of the place, and they
said 'Let us stay here awhile (tiko manda la eke) and presently we
will seek the land where Lutu-na-sombasomba is, to tell him that we
cannot find the inscriptions we were sent to seek.' But
Wankambalambala said that they should go first, and afterwards
return to live on the island 'Manda-la-eke.' So they composed a
song telling how they found Manda-la-eke, and since the name was
too long for the rhythm of a song they shortened it to Malake to
suit the rhythm, as they also shortened the name Yasa yawa to
Yasawa. This is the song they made--
"'Rai vosa ko Lutunasobasoba,
I Ragone, dou vakarau toka,
Na _Kaunitoni_ mo dou tavotha,
Mo nou yara manda nai vola,
Nodratou latha ratou thokota,
Ra tathiri ni lutu ni iloa,
Sokosokoni mbongi ma siga vaka,
Sa siri ko Natu Yasawa,
E ruru na thangi ka thiri na wanka
Mai kamba ko Mbeka ni tayanga
Me sa la' ki lewa thangi toka manda,
Yau koto na nde ni thangi thawa,
Mbula koto mai na thangi raya,
Ninkai vosa ko Wankambalambala,
Mai mua ki vanua nonda wanka,
Latha levu era vakarewataka,
Rai ki liu na nkoluvaka,
Ka kuvu tiko na muai manda,
Ucui Malake ka kombuata,
Uru ki vanua me ra thambe sara,
Yanuyanu ka ra volita manda,
Sa nkai ndua na koro vinaka,
Era siro sombu ki matasawa,
Na tokalau ka yau talatala,
Sa thangi tamba na soko ki raya,
Ka ndromu na singa e vakana nawa.'
"'Then Lutunasombasomba spoke,
Make ready boys,
Haul down the _Kaunitoni_,
And go and seek the inscriptions,
Bend our sails to the yards,
They drifted hither and thither till all landmarks were lost,
The Yasawa group is seen on the horizon
The breeze dies away; the vessel is becalmed,
Bekanitanganga climbs aloft,
To sit and look for signs of wind.
The flying wrack of the hurricane is at hand,
A breeze from the west is freshening
Then speaks Wankambalambala
Set our course towards the land,
They hoist the great sail,
We shout as we look ahead,
The spray shoots up from our prow,
We make the cape of Malake
And lower the sail to go ashore,
They make the circuit of the island,
This is indeed a pleasant land,
They go down to the landing-place,
This wind is in exchange for the south-east wind,
A wind permitting no westward voyage,
The sun sets in the ocean gulf.
And they set out from Malake and sculled[5] their vessel to the
mainland; and there they met Ndengei standing on the shore, having
come to explore the country. Him they told of their discovery of a
very fair island. And they asked him of Vunda, and were directed
towards the west. So Ndengei came on board and they coasted
westwards to Vunda. And when they told Lutu-na-sombasomba how his
inscriptions were lost for ever, he was sore grieved, and from this
time his body began to be infirm because his heart was grieved for
his lost inscriptions.
[Pageheader: THE FIRST SETTLEMENT]
"And when Ndengei saw that Lutu-na-sombasomba grew infirm he
commanded that they should abandon Vunda, and remove to a fair land
that he had seen, lest the old chief should die and never see it.
So he bade the chief Rokola to build other canoes to be tenders to
the _Kaunitoni_ in the eastward voyage. And as soon as all these
canoes were built they poled them along the coast, and beached them
opposite the land they wished for, and their stuff they carried up
into the hills, and the first house they built was for
Lutu-na-sombasomba. The posts and the beams of this house were all
of pandanus trunks. In this house, therefore, abode their chief,
and he called the whole land Nakauvandra (Pandanus Tree) to be a
memorial of the first house built there which was built of pandanus
trunks. And therefore, the country is called Nakauvandra even to
this day."
Although, as I have said, this commentary is to be received with
caution, there can be no doubt that a few years ago there were still to
be found on the north-east coast of Vitilevu fragmentary traditions of a
voyage to Fiji undertaken by the personages mentioned in the poem, and
the name, Vunda, which is still attached to the north-western corner of
Vitilevu certainly indicates that it was the earliest settlement of some
party of immigrants. It would, indeed, be strange if the westerly winds,
that sometimes blow steadily for days together during the summer months,
had not brought castaway canoes to a group of islands which cover five
degrees of longitude. Instead of one arrival there must have been
several, and whether Ndengei came in the first or a later company is not
important. The subsequent superiority of Ndengei as a _Kalou-Vu_ over
his chief Lutu-na-sombasomba may be accounted for by his heroic exploits
in the great civil war that divided Nakauvandra as related in the epic
of Nakavandra which is given in another chapter.
* * * * *
[Pageheader: ANTIQUITY OF THE FIJIANS]
In attempting to fix a date for the first Melanesian settlement in Fiji
the widest field lies open to the lover of speculation, for it is
unlikely that when a few years have passed, and the last guardians of
tradition have made way for young Fiji, any fresh evidence will come to
light. The only monuments of a past age are rude earthworks in the form
of moats and house foundations, a few stone enclosures known as _nanga_,
no older than the period covered by tradition, and a stone cairn or two
erected by the worshippers of the _luve-ni-wai_. The Melanesians buried
their dead in their own houses if they were chiefs, leaving the house to
fall to ruin over them; in the open if they were commoners, or in
limestone caves wherever there were to be found, and there is no trace
of tombs or hewn stone such as are found in Tonga and other islands
colonized by Polynesians. Until the stalagmitic floors of the limestone
caves have been examined systematically it is not safe to say that
Paleolithic Man never inhabited the islands, but it is at least very
unlikely. The earliest trace of human occupation yet discovered is a
polished hatchet found in alluvial deposit on the bank of the River Mba
about twelve feet below the surface, during excavations carried out in
the erection of a sugar mill; but in a river subject to heavy annual
floods, during which great quantities of soil are brought down from the
hills, the depth is no proof of age. In the island of Waya (Yasawa) a
_cache_ of polished hatchets was discovered in 1891. Three of these were
gouge-shaped for cutting away the wood on the inside of canoes or drums,
and of elaborate finish, but there was nothing to show that they were of
ancient date.
On the other hand, if the islands were peopled from a single immigration
as native traditions seem to show, or even by successive arrivals of
castaway canoes, many centuries would be required to raise the
population to a total of 200,000. The widespread bond of _tauvu_ between
tribes speaking different dialects, and already showing divergence of
type as in the cases of Nayau and Notho, and Mbau and Malake, sets back
the original immigration many generations. There is nothing in Fijian
tradition corresponding to Mr. Fornander's discovery in Hawaiian myth of
a culture among the early immigrants superior to their condition when
Europeans first came among them. Mr. Fornander believes that the
Polynesians were acquainted with metals in their old home and navigated
in large vessels built of planks. Their degeneracy was the natural
result of their new surroundings, for if we were to take a number of
European craftsmen, carpenters, smiths and fitters, and transport them
with their families to an island destitute of metals, where they would
be cut off from renewing their tools when worn out, we should find them
in the second generation with nothing left of their former culture but
the tradition, and perhaps the name of the metals their fathers used.
This was the case with the Hawaiians. The tradition survived, and they
had a name for the iron tools which they saw in the hands of their
Europeans visitors. But the Fijians had no name for metal. Their first
iron tools were brought to them by the Tongans, and they adopted the
Tongan name, with the prefix of _Ka_, "thing--"_Ka-ukamea_ (Kaukamea),
"iron thing," just as their name for Europeans--_Vavalangi_--was taken
from the Tongans from whom they first learned of the existence of the
white race.
[Pageheader: FORNANDER'S THEORY]
It is impossible to discuss the age of the Melanesian settlement in Fiji
without considering the traditional history of the Polynesians, and it
is with real regret that I am driven to disagree with the bold
conclusions of the principal authority on Polynesian history--Mr.
Abraham Fornander.[6] The true value of his book lies in the
preservation of the ancient genealogies and songs of the Hawaiians,
which would otherwise have died with the generation of bards who chanted
them, and in its ingenious reconstruction of the native history of
Hawaii. The industry and research which he has brought to bear upon the
kinship of the Polynesians with the Cushite races of the old world have
resulted in little more than the collection of a mass of undigested
evidence. There is no close chain of deduction to bind the whole, and
nothing stands out from the confusion except the undoubted fact that the
Polynesians are an offshoot from one of the ancient Asiatic races, and
that they reached their present widely scattered abodes by way of the
Malay Archipelago. If Mr. Fornander had not insisted upon a prolonged
sojourn (_sejour_ he prefers to call it) in Fiji before they colonized
the eastern groups, as the principal link in his chain of argument, it
would not be necessary to review his opinions here; and, so high a
respect is due to his knowledge of the Hawaiian myths and so wasteful of
energy is controversy between two workers in the same field, that I
should allow his assertions to pass unnoticed but for the fact that they
undermine the very foundations of Fijian history and ethnology. As it is
I shall confine my criticism to the portion of his argument based upon
Fiji, and leave the rest of his work to be reviewed by Polynesian
ethnologists. Fornander's temptation lay in knowing Hawaii thoroughly,
the other Polynesian groups imperfectly, and Fiji not at all. Making his
deduction from Hawaii, he sought his proofs from the others by
guesswork. The true history of a native race can never be written by one
who is not thoroughly soaked in the traditions and language of the
people, and since no one man can be an authority upon more than one
branch of a people so widely scattered as the Polynesians, a perfect
treatise will not be written until Fornanders shall be found
contemporary in Tonga, Samoa, New Zealand, Tahiti, the Marquesas,
Rarotonga, Futuna, Wallis, and Hawaii, and collaboration arranged
between them. To such a task the Polynesian Society in Wellington might
well devote its energies.
Fornander's conclusions may be summarized as follows--
(1) That the Polynesians are of pre-Vedic Aryan descent.
(2) That at from a.d. 150-250 they "left the Asiatic Archipelago
and entered the Pacific, _establishing themselves in the Fiji
Group_, and thence spreading to the Samoan, Tonga, and other groups
eastward and northward."
(3) That about the fifth century a.d. Hawaii was settled by
Polynesians who reached the group by a chain of islands that have
since disappeared, and were isolated there for some six centuries.
(4) That in the eleventh century began a period of unrest, during
which there was frequent intercourse between the Marquesas,
Society, Samoan and Hawaiian peoples for five or six generations.
I quote the fourth conclusion because I believe that it has a bearing
upon the Polynesian strain of blood which we find in the eastern portion
of the Fiji islands.
Now, Fornander's route for the Polynesians rests upon the assumption
that they sojourned for more than three centuries in Fiji after the
country had been settled by Melanesians, and that they were driven out
bag and baggage by the Melanesians with whom they left behind nothing
but their mythology and customs. If this is true the first arrival of
the Melanesians in Fiji is set back beyond our era; if it is false,
Fornander's theory falls to the ground. He bases his belief not upon any
indisputable references to Fiji in Polynesian traditions, but upon "the
number of Polynesian names by which these islands and places in them are
called, even now, by their Papuan inhabitants,"[7] and upon the
Polynesian words and folklore to be found incorporated in the language
and Mythology of Fiji.[8] Upon this he estimates the Polynesian sojourn
in Fiji to be thirteen generations, and says that these alleged facts
"argue a permanence of residence that cannot well be disputed."[9] And
so they would if they were true, but, unhappily for his argument, they
are not. He conjectures the Polynesian's landing-place to have been in
the western portion of Vitilevu, where, with one exception, the local
and tribal names are pure Melanesian, and this exception--the tribe of
_Noikoro_ in the centre of the inland district--has a well-preserved
tradition of emigration from the south-eastern coast of the island.
Moreover, the dialects of Western Vitilevu are Melanesian, with less
infusion of Polynesian words than any of the languages lying eastward of
them. And lastly, it is impossible to believe that so momentous an event
as the struggle between the two races, and the final expulsion of one of
them, would have left no trace behind it in the traditions of the
victors, when so insignificant an event as the arrival of two castaways,
the missionaries of the Polynesian cult of the _Malae_ is recorded in
detail. Had Fornander had the talent for sifting evidence he held the
clue in his hand when he wrote, "The large infusion of vocables in the
Fijian language, and the mixture of the two races, _especially in the
south-eastern part of the group_, indicate a protracted _sejour_, and an
intercourse of peace as well as of war," for it is in this very fact
that the Polynesian infusion is strongest on the eastern margin of the
group, and wanes with every mile we travel westward, until it is lost
altogether, that the real truth lies. It is this. The Melanesians landed
on the north-western shore of Vitilevu, and thence spread eastward
throughout their own group. At the islands of the Lau group they met a
check in the 400 miles of open ocean that lay beyond, swept by the
contrary wind of the south-east trades. Meanwhile the Polynesians,
having long colonized the eastern groups, perhaps by way of Micronesia
or Futuna or even by the north-eastern islands of the Fiji group, but
certainly not by Great Fiji, entered on their period of navigation which
Fornander assigns, I believe erroneously, to the eleventh century, were
carried westward by the south-east trades, by single canoes whose male
castaways were generally killed and eaten, but whose females were taken
to wife by the chiefs. The superior attractions of their lighter
coloured progeny led to the women of the mixed race being in request as
wives among the darker Melanesians to the west. Many such castaway
colonies are referred to in Tongan tradition. Early in the sixteenth
century King Kauulu-fonua pursued the murderers of his father through
the islands of the Samoan group to Futuna in vessels more seaworthy than
the Tongiaki of Cook's day.[10] Kau Moala, the navigator, voyaged to
Fiji at the close of the eighteenth century,[11] when we learn that the
_grand tour_ for a Tongan gentleman included a campaign in Fiji.
[Pageheader: POLYNESIAN CASTAWAYS]
The people of Ongtong Java ascribe their origin to a Tongan castaway
canoe; the names of the Tongan ancestors of the Pylstaart Islanders
(since removed to Eua in Tonga) are recorded, though their shipwreck is
two centuries old. The people of the reef islands of the Swallow group,
though purely Melanesian in everything but their tongue, have traditions
of castaways who were influential enough to impress their language, but
not their blood upon their entertainers, just as the Aryan immigrants
impressed their customs, folklore and language upon the Neolithic
peoples they found in Europe.[12] The natives of Rennell I. and Bellona
I. in the Solomons have preserved the physical characteristics of
Polynesians. It is far more probable that Nea and Lifu in the Loyalty
Islands, and Numea (Noumea) in New Caledonia received their Polynesian
names from such chance settlement, than that they are, as Fornander
would have it, echoes of permanent colonies which passed away more than
fifteen centuries ago. Turning to Fiji itself we find innumerable
traditions of such Polynesian visitors, though never a trace of the far
more important event of a Polynesian occupation. The chief family of
Nandronga traces its descent from a single Polynesian castaway who was
washed up by the sea about 1750. The chief of Viwa three generations ago
took to wife a Tongan girl, the only survivor of a murdered crew. The
chiefs of Thakaundrove claim relationship with the kings of Tonga
through an ancestress of that family who was cast away early in the
eighteenth century and saved by clinging to the deck-house when all her
companions perished.[13]
These are only a few out of a series of Polynesian immigrations that may
be numbered by hundreds, of which a tithe would suffice to account for
the Polynesian language and blood to be found in Fiji. A stepping-stone
in Fiji was necessary to Fornander's theory of Polynesian migrations,
and if he had not been blinded by his desire to find it, he would have
seen the obvious import of his declaration that in the eleventh century
the Polynesians had a _renaissance_ of navigation. Such a period of
unrest, of distant voyages undertaken with no compass but the stars, in
clumsy craft, on seas swept continually by a south-east wind, must have
resulted in numerous shipwrecks on the eastern shores of islands lying
to the westward.
His work contains but three appeals to Fijian folklore, which are,
besides, the only evidence he stops to specify. "In the Fijian group,
where much of ancient Polynesian lore, now forgotten elsewhere, is still
retained, the god 'Ndengei,' according to some traditions, is
represented with the head and part of the body of a serpent, the rest of
his form being of stone." This he regards as a trace of serpent-worship,
a "peculiarly Cushite out-growth of religious ideas." If this be
evidence of Polynesian kinship, then were the ancient
serpent-worshippers of Kentucky also Polynesian, together with a host
of other races, who, being human, evolved the religious ideas common to
humanity. Moreover, the serpent nature of Ndengei is a modern gloss
added by the poets of Raki-raki after the Ancestor-god had been
consigned to the gloomy cavern of Nakauvandra, for to the Fijian of the
west every cave has a monstrous eel or serpent lurking in its recesses,
and issuing to glut its maw upon unwary mortals who venture too near.
[Pageheader: TRADITION OF A DELUGE]
Fornander's second quotation from folklore is designed to prove no less
than a Polynesian reminiscence of the Hebrew legend of the building of
Babel, forgotten by the Polynesians, but "stowed away" by them in the
memory of their former hosts, the Fijians. Thomas Williams is
responsible for this tradition of a vast tower erected on a great mound
in Nasavusavu Bay, Vanualevu, which collapsed, scattering the builders
to the four winds. No trace of this tradition is now to be found, and
one cannot but remember that Williams drew his information from his
converts, to whom he was teaching that the Mosaic books related the
genesis of their own race, and who knew that a confirmation drawn from
their own traditions would be highly comforting to their missionary. But
though there was no great mound to point to, and the existence of any
such tradition may be doubted, to what, even if true, does it amount? To
a coincidence such as is to be found in many primitive religions, or, if
you will, to a suggestion that the Fijians are an offshoot of the
Semitic stock, but scarcely to evidence that the Polynesians, who have
no tradition of the kind, bequeathed it to the Fijians.
Fornander's third link is the tradition of the Deluge which is found in
the folklore of both races. This, as might be expected, is quite
sufficient evidence for him, not only of a Polynesian sojourn in Fiji,
but of Polynesian descent from the "Cushite-pre-Joklanite Arabs," who,
it is true, have no such traditions themselves, as far as we know, but
certainly ought to have been at least as well favoured in this respect
as the Semites and Aryans.[14] This is not the place to discuss the
Deluge traditions. It is enough to say here that every island in the
cyclone-belt is subject to destructive floods, that every district in
Fiji has its own distinct tradition, and that in the provinces of Rewa
and Mbua floods that are known to have occurred within the last 125
years have already been canonized in the realm of myth. If the Fijian
and Polynesian heroes had sent forth a dove, which was the distinctive
feature in both the Babylonian and Hebrew accounts, owing to the custom
of the Semitic navigators carrying doves as part of their necessary
equipment to ascertain the proximity of land, then something might be
said for the traditions as evidence. But to quote so universal a human
tradition as the Deluge-myths as evidence of intercourse or common
origin is as rational as to draw such deductions from the belief in
malevolent deities.
[Pageheader: DATES CALCULATED FROM GENEALOGIES]
Now, although Fornander's chronology has no direct bearing upon the date
of the Melanesian arrival if, as I have shown, the Polynesians had no
settlement in the group, the method of calculating dates should be the
same for both races. Our only guide for events that happened in
Polynesia before Tasman's voyage, 1642, is in the natives' genealogies,
calculating by generations. They contain two obvious tendencies to
error. It was very rare for a man of consequence to carry the same name
throughout his career. Adoption, any notable exploit, or succession to a
title were constant excuses for such changes, and it is quite possible
that in the older genealogies the same hero is recorded twice under
different names. Moreover, it is by no means certain that the names were
not those of the reigning chiefs, and seeing that the succession often
went to the next brother when the son was not of an age to wield the
power, it is highly doubtful whether every name represented a
generation. I know one genealogy where, in the portion relating to
historical times, one of the recorded names was younger brother to the
chief who precedes him.[15] This may account for the great diversity of
readings found in the same genealogy, one version being shorter than
another. On the other hand, there is the tendency to omit the names of
remote personages whose short reign or insignificant character have
failed to stamp themselves on the memory of posterity. There is thus a
double tendency to error--on the one side to multiplication of
generations, and on the other to curtailment by omissions. But even
supposing that Fornander's genealogies are correct, it is difficult to
see how he could arrive at an approximate date without showing more
discrimination in fixing the length of a generation. All his dates are
calculated upon a generation of _thirty years_, because that is the
average length generally assigned in Europe. But Polynesia is not
Europe, and generations in Polynesia, where men marry much earlier, are
less than thirty years, as he might have discovered by taking the
average in historical times. This I have done both in Tonga and Fiji,
with the result that the generations in both races average from
twenty-five to twenty-seven years. The Tui Tonga family is a very fair
guide, because the office went invariably from father to son, and the
holder was so sacred that he was never cut off by a violent death. The
generations of this family since 1643 average twenty-seven years, while
those of the temporal sovereign, the Tui Kanakubola who were often the
victims of rebellion, average only twenty years apiece. The history of
Hawaii was so bloodstained, that it is unlikely that Hawaiian
generations averaged more than twenty-five. Five years in a generation
makes a vast difference, for the date given by Fornander for the
Polynesians' arrival in the Pacific is set forward from the fifth to the
seventh century, and for their arrival in Hawaii from the eleventh to
the thirteenth.
Abraham Fornander has done inestimable service to future students of
Oceanic ethnology by preserving for their use songs and traditions that
would otherwise have passed into oblivion, but he will be used as a
storehouse of data rather than as an exponent of history, and I feel
that I am best serving his reputation by cutting away the false
deductions that would have tainted the sound and wholesome facts which
form the larger portion of his work. I cannot leave him without wishing
that he had made better use of Bancroft's saying, which he printed as
his text on the title-page, "It is now a recognized principle in
philosophy that no religious belief, however crude, nor any historical
traditions, however absurd, can be held by the majority of a people for
any considerable time as true, without having in the beginning some
foundation in fact."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: _The Polynesian Race_, by A. Fornander, Vol. i, p. 193.]
[Footnote 2: We detect here a flavour of the commentator's superior
education.]
[Footnote 3: A somewhat futile proceeding unless they were of wood.]
[Footnote 4: Distant land]
[Footnote 5: Fijian canoes are sculled with long oars worked
perpendicularly in a rowlock formed by the cross-ties of the outrigger,
or of the two hulls in a twin canoe. With powerful scullers a speed of
three miles an hour is attained in a dead calm.]
[Footnote 6: _The Polynesian Race, Its Origin and Migrations._ London,
1880.]
[Footnote 7: _The Polynesian Race, Its Origin and Migrations_, Vol. i,
p. 33.]
[Footnote 8: _Ibid._, Vol. i, p. 167.]
[Footnote 9: _Ibid._, Vol. i, p. 33.]
[Footnote 10: See my _Diversions of a Prime Minister_, p. 308.]
[Footnote 11: Mariner's _Tonga_.]
[Footnote 12: _The Melanesians_, Codrington.]
[Footnote 13: Tukuaho, Premier of Tonga, and descendant of the Tui Tonga
and Tui Haatakalaua families, was staying with me at Auckland, N.Z.,
when Ratu Lala, Tui Thakau, of Fiji, arrived in the town. Both chiefs
asked me to bring about a meeting on the ground of their relationship.
Though each could speak the language of the other their shyness led them
to insist that I should interpret the conversation, which was carried on
in Fijian and Tongan. After the usual formalities the two chiefs spoke
of the adventures of their Tongan princess through whom they were
related, and the Tongan and Fijian versions of the tradition were
substantially identical.]
[Footnote 14: "Unfortunately we have no well-preserved account of the
Flood from the Cushite-Arabian quarter; but I am inclined to consider
the Polynesian version as originally representing the early traditions
on this subject among the Cushite-pre-Joklanite Arabs."--_The Polynesian
Race, Its Origin and Migrations._ London, 1880, p. 90.]
[Footnote 15: The Vunivalu geneology of Mbau.]
CHAPTER III
THE AGE OF HISTORY
Of the centuries that lie between the age of myth and the age of history
there are but the feeblest echoes. From the ethnology of the people of
to-day we may infer that the stream of immigration swept down the
northern coast of Vitilevu, and, radiating from Rakiraki, crossed the
mountain range, and wandered down the two rivers, Rewa and Singatoka,
until it reached the southern coast and peopled Serua and Namosi.
Another stream must have crossed the strait to Mbua on Vanualevu, and
spread eastward. Melanesian blood can be traced even in the Lau
sub-group, but before any permanent settlement was made there Polynesian
castaways, driven westward by the prevailing wind, must have begun to
arrive. At the dawn of history, about 1750, Vitilevu was almost purely
Melanesian, but the Lau and Lomaiviti islands, Taveuni, Vanualevu, and
Kandavu were peopled by half-breeds between Melanesian and Polynesian,
the Polynesian strain waxing stronger with every mile from west to east.
The peopling of the waste lands was accelerated by war. There is
scarcely a tribe that does not claim to have migrated from another
place, sometimes from parts relatively remote from its present locality,
and if it were worth the labour, the history of the migrations of each
of them might even now be compiled, partly from its own traditions,
partly from the tie of _tauvu_ (common Ancestor-gods) with other tribes
distantly related to it. But, as it would be merely the history of a few
fugitives from the sack of a village, driven out to find asylum in a
waste valley, and founding in it a joint family which lived to grow
into a tribe, such an inquiry would be barren and profitless.
The traditions of Tongan immigration are too numerous to be set down
here. From 1790, if not earlier, an expedition to Fiji was an annual
occurrence. The most important was the arrival of the Tui Tonga's canoe
in Taveuni, from which sprang the chief family of the Tui Thakau, and
the stranding of the two little old men who instituted the _Nanga_ Cult,
which recalls the rites of the Polynesian _Malae_. The chiefs of the
Nandronga and Viwa (Yasawa) also trace their descent from Tongan
castaways, and are very proud of the connection.
The fact that traditionary history is so meagre is in itself an
indication that there were no powerful confederations before the
nineteenth century. The related tribes of Verata and Rewa in the south
and Thakaundrove in the north-east seem to have been the only powers
that wielded influence beyond their borders, but their intercourse with
other tribes must have been very restricted. In islands where male
castaways, having "salt water in their eyes," were killed and eaten,
there was little spirit for discovery and adventure.
The imprint of the Tongan immigration is to be seen, not only in the
blood of the tribes with whom the immigrants mingled, but in their
mythology, for whereas the religion of the inland tribes is pure
ancestor-worship, that of the coast tribes is overlaid with a mythology
that is evidently derived from Polynesian sources.
[Illustration: DESCENDANTS OF TONGAN IMMIGRANTS PERFORMING THE TONGAN
DANCE _LAKALAKA_.]
Early in the eighteenth century there seems to have been an upheaval
among the inland tribes of Vitilevu which sent forth a stream of
emigrants to the coast, whether as fugitives, or as voluntary exiles in
search of new lands, there is no tradition to show. This event was
destined to have a tremendous influence upon the political destiny of
the islands, for among the emigrants was the tribe of Mbau, sturdy
mountain warriors, still bearing in their physiognomy and dark
complexion the proof of their Melanesian blood and their late arrival in
the sphere of Polynesian influence. This tribe, humble as it was in its
origin, was destined, partly through chance, partly by its genius for
intrigue, to win its way within a century to the foremost position in
the group.
[Pageheader: THE RISE OF MBAU]
Rewa, descended from the earliest settlers on the delta of the great
river, could alone boast an ancient aristocracy and a complex social
organization which entitled it to be called a confederation. The rest of
the group was split up into tribes, little larger than joint families,
which treated all strangers as enemies, and held their lands at the
point of the spear.
The Mbau people settled upon the coast about a mile from the islet now
called by their name, but then known as Mbutoni, which is connected with
the mainland by a coral reef fordable at high water. Upon the islet
lived two tribes of fishermen, named Levuka and Mbutoni, who were
supplied with vegetable food by the inland chiefs in return for fish.
Being subject to the Mbauans, they supplied them with a navy, for a
tribe lately descended from the mountains was distrustful of the sea.
Wedged in between Verata on the north and Rewa on the south, Mbau was
continually at war with one or the other. Her pressing need was men,
"the men of Verata and Rewa" (to quote from the _meke_ that records her
history), and as she held her own, those who had grievances against her
powerful neighbours, broken tribes fleeing from their conquerors in the
hills, flocked to her for protection, and her needs were satisfied. But
her territory did not exceed ten square miles.
About 1760, Nailatikau being Vunivalu, or secular king, the chiefs moved
from the mainland to the islet, which was known thenceforward as Mbau.
The fishermen had for some time been waxing insubordinate, and their
offences culminated in the eating of an enormous fish which ought, by
custom, to have been presented to their chiefs. They were expelled from
the island. The Levuka tribe fled to Lakemba, still retaining their
hereditary right to instal each successive Vunivalu in his office. The
Mbau chiefs scarped away the face of the island so as to form the
embankment upon which the present town is built. Nailatikau died about
1770, and was succeeded by his second son Mbanuve. During his reign the
fishermen of Lasakau from the island of Mbenka, and of Soso, from the
island of Kandavu, were employed in reclaiming more land from the sea,
and were allowed to settle on the island. The first intermarriage with
the Rewa chiefs dates from this period. The story goes that a Rewa
canoe, being hailed as she passed Mbau, replied that she was bound for
Verata for a princess to mate with the king of Rewa; that the crew was
induced to take a Mbau lady in her stead, and that a Rewa princess was
sent to Mbau in exchange. Thus the Mbau chiefs passed from being
_parvenus_ to a place in the aristocracy of their adopted country.
As the date of the first arrival of Europeans, which was to have so
profound an influence upon the natives, is in dispute, it may be well to
mention the recorded voyages chronologically.
Tasman, who sighted Vanua-mbalavu in 1643, did not communicate with the
natives. Cook, who had had information about the group from Fijians
settled in the Friendly Islands, discovered the outlying island of
Vatoa, the southeasterly limit of the group, and called it Turtle
Island, but bore away to the north-east.
In April 1791, a few days after the famous Mutiny of the _Bounty_, Bligh
passed through the centre of the group in an open boat. His urgent need
of provisions would doubtless have impelled him to communicate with the
shore had he possessed firearms, and had he not just lost his
quartermaster in a treacherous attack made upon him by the natives of
Tofua. As it was he was chased along the northern coast of Vitilevu by
two sailing canoes, which only left him when he cleared the group by
Round Island, the most northerly of the Yasawa sub-group.
[Pageheader: THE FIRST EUROPEAN VISITORS]
The first Europeans who had intercourse with the natives, so far as we
know, were the prize crew of the little schooner built of native timber
in Tahiti by the _Bounty_ mutineers in 1791. Having shut up the
mutineers in "Pandora's Box" (as the little roundhouse on the
quarter-deck of H.M.S. _Pandora_ was called) Captain Edwards victualled
and manned the mutineer's schooner as his tender, but he parted company
with her in a storm off Samoa an hour before a fresh supply of stores
and water was to be put on board of her. The island of Tofua had been
the appointed rendezvous in such a contingency, and the schooner duly
made the island, but, having waited in vain for the _Pandora_, her
commander, now desperate for want of provisions, made sail to the
northwest, and cast anchor at an island which was almost certainly
Matuku in the Lau sub-group of Fiji. Here she lay for six weeks with
boarding nettings up, but the natives appear to have treated their
strange visitors with friendliness and hospitality. After terrible
sufferings, from which the midshipman lost his reason, and numerous
encounters with the natives of the Solomons or the New Hebrides, this
handful of brave seamen made the Great Barrier Reef opposite Torres
Straits, which, for want of time to search for a passage, they boldly
rode at in a spring tide, and jumped, escaping without injury to their
little vessel. Mistaken for pirates by the Dutch authorities, they were
clapped into prison, where Captain Edwards found them after himself
suffering shipwreck on the Barrier Reef.
Unfortunately neither Oliver, the gunner in command of the schooner, nor
any of his shipmates published the story of these adventures, and the
Record Office has been searched in vain for the log which they must have
handed over to Edwards; otherwise we might have had a very valuable
description of the Fijians a century ago. One or other of the native
poems describing the first arrival of European ships may refer to this
voyage.
This visit, or perhaps an unrecorded one about the same year, 1791, had
a sinister influence upon Fijian history, for the evidence which will be
set forth in a later chapter points to it as the cause of the terrible
epidemic of _Lila_ (wasting sickness) which decimated the group.
In the following year, 1792, Captain Bligh ran along the coast of
Taveuni in H.M.S. _Providence_, and was followed by canoes.
On April 26, 1794, the "snow" _Arthur_ touched at the Yasawa Islands,
and was attacked by the natives.
In 1802, or 1803, a vessel was wrecked on the Mbukatatanoa Reef,
subsequently named Argo, from a vessel of that name which was cast away
upon it. A number of Europeans wearing red caps over their ears and
smoking pipes were rescued by the natives of Oneata, and gunpowder seems
to have come into the hands of the natives, who used the powder for
blackening their faces and hair, and the ramrods of the muskets as
_monke_ (hair ornaments).[16] The tradition says that some of the white
men were killed and some taken to Lakemba by the Levuka tribe, the same
that had been expelled from Mbau, who happened to be at Oneata at the
time. We do not know what became of these survivors. Perhaps they were
slain as a propitiatory sacrifice to the god of pestilence, for from the
traditions of Mbau we learn that Mbanuve, the son of Nduru-thoko
(Nailatikau), the Vunivalu of the Mbau, died of a new disease introduced
by a foreign vessel, and was surnamed Mbale-i-vavalangi (He who died of
a foreign disease) in accordance with the custom of calling dead chiefs
after the place where they were slain, as Mbale-i-kasavu (He who fell at
Kasavu, etc.). On his death the Levuka people came from Lakemba to
instal his successor, Na-uli-you (New steer-oar), and they brought with
them a canvas tent, which was the first article of European manufacture
which the Mbau people had seen. We may fix this date with some
confidence. On the day of the installation there was a total eclipse of
the sun, the heavens were like blood, the stars came out, and the birds
went to roost at mid-day. While the dysentery was sweeping through the
islands the people were startled by the appearance of a great hairy star
with three tails. Now, the only total eclipse of the sun visible in Fiji
about this period was that which occurred at 9.20 a.m. on February 21,
1803. The total phase lasted 4.2 minutes, or within one minute of the
longest possible total phase. The comet is not so easy to identify. It
may have been Encke's comet of November 21, 1805, or the famous comet of
1807.[17]
[Pageheader: THE FIRST BEACHCOMBERS]
Shortly after Naulivou's accession, that is to say some time between
1803 and 1808, the first of the sandal-wood traders touched at Koro,
where some Mbau chiefs happened to be.[18] Joseph Waterhouse, the
missionary, was told that a white man, called "The Carpenter," and a
Tahitian deserted from this ship, and came to Mbau; that the white man
became inspired by Mbanuve, the late Vunivalu, and shivered and foamed
at the mouth like an inspired Fijian, and was, much to his own profit,
accepted by the Na-uli-you as a genuine priest. He dwelt in the house
erected over Mbanuve's grave, where he took to drinking kava to his own
undoing, but that before his death he told the natives that there was a
God superior to Mbanuve or any Fijian deity. I have never been able to
obtain any confirmation of this story: on the contrary I have been
assured that Charles Savage was the first European to land at Mbau, but
as the arrival of ships must have been not infrequent as soon as the
presence of sandal-wood had become known, and whalers were ranging the
Pacific, it is not improbable.[19]
[Pageheader: MISCONDUCT OF THE WHITES]
In 1808 there happened an event which left an enduring mark upon Fijian
history. The American brig _Eliza_, with 40,000 dollars from the River
Plate on board, was wrecked on the reef off Nairai. The majority of the
crew escaped in the ship's boats, and boarded another American vessel
which was lying off Mbua for sandal-wood; the rest took passage in
native canoes that happened to be at the island, one to Mbau and the
others to Verata, while the natives looted the wreck. The man who went
to Mbau was the Swede, Charles Savage, a man of much character and
resource. Having been refused leave to return to Nairai to search for a
musket, he pointed to a _nkata_ club, which bears a distant resemblance
to a gun, and bade them bring him from the wreck a thing of that shape,
and a cask of black powder like their own hair-pigment. The native
messengers were successful; the musket was found built into a yam-hut as
one of the rafters. Having demonstrated the uses of a musket before the
assembled chiefs, Savage took part in a reconnaissance towards Verata,
the state with which Mbau was then at war. He took with him a gourd
containing a letter addressed to the white men at Verata, bidding them
flee to him at Mbau, as it was the stronger state. The gourd was tied to
a stick just out of arrowshot, and as the canoe retired the Verata
people carried it into their fort, and in a few days later the other
whites joined him at Mbau. Savage with his musket now began to carry all
before him. He had a sort of arrow-proof sedan chair made of plaited
sinnet, in which he was carried into musket-shot of the enemy's
entrenchments, and from which he picked off the sentinels until the
garrison fled. Thus Mbau subdued all the coast villages as far as the
frontiers of Rewa. Savage cleverly kept his fellow-Europeans in the
background without arousing their enmity. He alone carried the musket;
he alone could speak the language fluently, and to him the other whites
thought that they owed the good-will of the natives. Two great ladies
were given him to wife, and the order of _Koroi_ was bestowed upon him
with the title of Koroi-na-vunivalu. Yet he stoutly refused to conform
to native customs, and so he kept the respect of the chiefs. Shortly
after the shipwreck the visits of ships became frequent, from India,
America, and Australia. They lay for many weeks off the Mbua coast,
while the crew cut and shipped sandal-wood; and the sailors, allured by
the story of the dollars lost in the _Eliza_, deserted, or were
discharged in considerable numbers. The dollars, though one or two were
found as lately as 1880, were scattered beyond recovery, and the sailors
drifted away, some to Mbau, and others to the villages on the
sandal-wood coast, where they took native wives, and adopted every
native custom except cannibalism.[20] The natives could give them
everything they wanted except tobacco and spirits, and to acquire these,
and to keep their position among their hosts, they would hire themselves
out to the masters of sandal-wood ships at a monthly wage of L4, paid
partly in knives, tools, beads, and firearms. William Mariner, who
visited Mbau in 1810 on board the _Favourite_, the vessel in which he
escaped from Tonga, found a number of whites there whose reputation both
for crimes, vices, and for quarrelling among themselves was so bad that
his informant, William Lee, was glad to make his escape from them.
During Savage's absence with the army they nearly brought annihilation
upon themselves. At a great presentation of food, the king's _mata_
omitted to set aside a portion for the white men, and they, incensed at
what they took for an intentional insult, ran to the stack of food, and
slashed the yams with their knives. Now, this is an insult which no
Fijian will brook, and they were promptly attacked. They killed a number
of their assailants with their muskets, but when the hut in which they
had taken refuge was fired, they had to make for the sea. Three were
clubbed as they ran, but two, Graham and Buschart, swam out to sea, and
returned only when they were assured of the chief's protection. Thus did
they save their lives, the first to perish more miserably at Wailea, the
second to be the means of discovering the fate of de la Perouse.
Savage could not afford to jeopardize his influence with the chiefs by
mixing in the quarrels of the other Europeans. With his two wives, who
were women of the highest rank, he lived apart from the others, in the
enjoyment of all the privileges of a native chief who was Koroi. But
when not engaged in fighting, he also spent the winter months on the
sandal-wood coast, working for the trading ships. Among the regular
arrivals was the East Indiaman _Hunter_ (Captain Robson), which, on her
third voyage to Fiji in 1813, carried Peter Dillon as mate. Dillon had
spent four months in the group in 1809, and had acquired a slight
knowledge of the language, besides winning the respect of the people for
his magnificent physique, and his Irish good humour. He had, as he tells
us, prepared a history of the islands from the date of their discovery
to 1825, but the manuscript has disappeared, and is not likely now to
come to light. Interesting as it may have been, its value as a history
would have suffered from the lively imagination of the writer.
Captain Robson's methods of obtaining a cargo would not have commended
itself to the Aborigines' Protection Society. On anchoring at Wailea, he
was wont to enter into a contract with Vonasa, the chief, to aid him in
his wars in return for a full cargo. The enemy's forts were carried with
a two-pounder, and the bodies of the slain were then dismembered,
cooked, and eaten in Robson's presence. On this occasion the same policy
was pursued, but whether owing to the exhaustion of the forest or to the
indolence of the natives, a full cargo was not forthcoming. At the end
of four months, two hundred Mbauans, led by two of the king's brothers,
arrived in their canoes to take their white men back to Mbau, and with
their help Robson resolved to punish the faithlessness of the Wailea
people. The landing party fell into the ambush known in Fijian tactics
as _A Lawa_ (The Net), that is to say, they were drawn on by the feigned
flight of a party of the enemy until they were surrounded. Dillon, with
Savage and three others, gained the summit of a low hill, where they
kept their assailants at bay, while the bodies of their comrades were
cooked and eaten in their sight. Despairing of help from the ship,
Savage went down to try his powers of persuasion on the chiefs, but he
too was treacherously killed and laid in the oven before Dillon's eyes.
Their ammunition exhausted, the prospect of torture before them, the
three Europeans had resolved upon suicide, when by a fortunate accident
they were able to seize a heathen priest who had ventured too near, and
by holding him as hostage for their lives, they made their escape. In
the following year Mbau took ample vengeance for the massacre of their
chiefs.[21]
[Pageheader: THE MASSACRE OF WAILEA]
There is a story that Maraia, Savage's half-caste daughter, then a child
of four,[22] remembered her father's last night at Mbau. Lying awake she
saw him open his sea-chest which he always kept locked, and take from it
a string of glittering objects. Startled by her childish exclamation,
for he thought himself alone, he kissed her and said that he was going
away for a long time, and must hide his property in a place of safety.
That night he poled himself over to the mainland, and when she awoke
next morning the canoes had sailed for Mbua, from whence her father
never returned. Probably the string was made of Chilian dollars from the
wreck, which now lie buried somewhere on the mainland opposite Mbau.
After Savage's death Mbau continued to consolidate her power. News of
her success tempted the broken tribes to flee to her for protection, and
settle on the conquered lands. Thus did Namara become borderers
(_mbati_) to Mbau. The story is a curious illustration of Fijian
contempt for human life. Two brothers of Namara had stolen down to the
sea shore for salt, and were seen by the king, Naulivou, then cruising
along the shore in his great canoe. He presented them in sport with a
shark and a sting-ray. Overwhelmed by his condescension, the brothers
began to contend for the honour of giving his dead body in return for
the fish. Their cousin standing by exclaimed, "Is a man's life more
precious than a banana? Let the elder be clubbed." So the elder bowed
his head to the club of the younger brother, who presented the body to
the chief. Grieved at what they had done, Naulivou ordered the body to
be buried, and said, "I wanted no return for the fish. Go, fetch your
wives and children, and settle on this land, and be my _mbati_
(borderers), for I have need of true men."
The navigable canal called Nakelimusu, which shortens the voyage between
Mbau and Rewa by connecting two of the river mouths, and is almost the
only example of native engineering, was constructed in this reign
shortly after the sack of Nakelo in 1810. The Queen of Rewa at that time
was a Mbau princess, and when Nakelo sent her submission to Mbau,
craving leave to rebuild the fortress, one of the conditions imposed was
that the isthmus between the two rivers should be cut at its narrowest
point, where it is about 400 yards wide. The Nakelo men dug a ditch into
which the water could wash at high tide, and the rapid current did the
rest.
Though Mbau did not long enjoy a monopoly of muskets she was able to
purchase more ammunition than her rivals. European sailors still
continued to pour into the islands, for after the exhaustion of the
sandal-wood forests, whalers began to frequent the group, and there
sprang up a desultory, but profitable trade in _beche-de-mer_, the
sea-slug so highly prized by Chinese epicures, and in cocoanut oil. None
of these attained the same influence as Savage. They were rather the
chief's sycophants and handy men, who mended muskets, and beguiled his
leisure by telling stories of far-off lands. A chief likes to have in
his retinue some alien, unfettered by the _tabu_, whom he can make his
confidant, and a chief who could not boast of having a tame white man
was not much esteemed. A tame negro was a curiosity even more highly
prized. The natives as a body appear to have treated the white men with
tolerant contempt, as beings destitute of good manners and the
deportment proper to those who consort with chiefs.
In 1828 Mbau was at the zenith of her power. She had absorbed the
Lomaiviti islands, and was disputing the Lau group with the Tongan
immigrants. On the northern coast of Vitilevu her influence was felt as
far west as Mba, and she exercised a nominal suzerainty over Somosomo,
the state then paramount over the eastern half of Vanualevu. The inland
and western tribes of Vitilevu alone were entirely independent of her
influence.
[Pageheader: INSURRECTION AGAINST TANOA]
That her empire was the influence of a person rather than of a state was
shown in 1829, when her leader, Naulivou, better known by his posthumous
title of Ra Matenikutu (Lord Lice-Slayer) died. His younger brother,
Tanoa, who succeeded him, had neither his ability nor his physique.
Among the Europeans he was known contemptuously as "Old Snuff," from his
habit of daubing himself with black pigment, and he was unpopular among
his own people. From the day of his accession there were rumours of
conspiracy, and during his absence at Ovalau in 1832 the rebellion broke
out. Tanoa fled to Koro, and would there have been put to death, had not
Namosimalua of Viwa, who had been sent to arrest him, secretly connived
at his flight to Somosomo, where he was safe. The rebels installed as
Vunivalu one of his brothers named Tuiveikoso, chosen because he could
be trusted to act as their tool, and refrained from the usual custom of
putting Tanoa's adherents to death, though Namosimalua of Viwa, whose
motives are not easy to understand, urged that the king's son, Seru,
should be killed. But the boy was allowed to live on at Mbau, where he
grew to manhood, without exciting any suspicion of the mark which he was
to make upon Fijian history.
At first the Europeans took no part in these political disturbances. The
more respectable of them had removed to the adjacent island of Ovalau,
where they formed a settlement under the protection of Tui Levuka,
plying the trades of boatbuilding and sail-making, and selling native
produce to passing vessels. Those who chose to remain at Mbau were
Fijianized whites who lived upon the natives.
Tanoa was not idle. Being _vasu_ to Rewa he had no difficulty in
inducing the king of that state to ally himself with Somosomo and to
declare war with Mbau. By the promise of a cargo he even hired an
American vessel to bombard Mbau. Having taken up a position at the
anchorage she fired a broadside, but the Europeans on the islet, having
trained a gun upon her, carried away her jib-boom at the second shot,
and she slipped her cable and returned to Somosomo.
The leader of the rebellion was Ratu Mara, a man born before his time.
Professing to be in favour of peace, of free intercourse, and of a new
era of bloodless government, he was immensely popular with the whites.
He is still remembered as the only Fijian warrior who took fortified
villages by direct assault, and who was absolutely fearless in battle.
It is even said that, on hearing of the missionaries in Tonga, he
declared his intention of inviting them to Fiji to displace the religion
in which he no longer believed. In person he was tall and very powerful,
and his acts show him to have been of great intelligence and
perseverance. Friendly as they were to Mara, the Europeans so much
disliked the other chiefs of the usurping government, who had advocated
a massacre of all foreigners, that they resolved to support Tanoa, and
secretly sent him a contribution of arms and ammunition.
Tanoa had meanwhile been undermining the power of the usurpers by the
old expedient of bribing the borderers. In obedience to an oracle at
Somosomo he had removed to Rewa, and was intriguing with a party at
Lasakau, the eastern end of Mbau, inhabited by fishermen. A number of
villages on the mainland had also been won over. Seru meanwhile, though
grown to manhood, was believed to be above suspicion. His only objects
in life seemed to be its amusements. He was the leader and the idol of a
band of youths of his own age, who passed the days and nights in sports
and wantonness. Suddenly, by a preconcerted arrangement a number of
villages declared for Tanoa, and when the news reached Mbau one morning,
it was found that the Lasakauans had built a war fence during the night,
dividing their quarter of the town from that of the chiefs. Aghast at
this turn of events the chiefs summoned a council of war. Namosimalua
urged the immediate arrest of Seru, and his own nephew, Verani, whom he
suspected of treachery, but it was then too late. The two youths had
taken refuge in Lasakau. Namosimalua's musket, fired at his nephew, was
the signal for civil war. But the _coup d'etat_ was complete. The
Lasakauans had prepared a number of flaming darts which they threw into
the thatch of the nearest houses. A strong wind swept the conflagration
through the town. In half-an-hour every house was in ashes, and the
inhabitants were fleeing to the mainland.
[Pageheader: THAKOMBAU'S _COUP D'ETAT_]
As soon as the news reached Rewa, the army was put in motion. Village
after village was destroyed, though, contrary to the wish of Seru, its
inhabitants were spared by the king of Rewa. Tanoa himself re-entered
Mbau at the close of 1837, after an exile of five years. Seru received
three names. His own party called him Thikinovu (the centipede), which
bites without warning; the usurpers called him Na Mbi (the turtle pond),
in allusion to the number of people who were killed and eaten by him,
but the name by which he was generally known was Tha-ko-mbau
("destruction to Mbau," or "Mbau is undone "),[23] signifying the
success of his _coup d'etat_.
The day of reckoning had come. A price was set upon the head of all the
usurping chiefs, and no one dared to give them asylum. Thakombau slew
many of them with his own hand, and they were cooked and eaten by the
Lasakauans, whose hereditary duty it was to provide material for the
cannibal ovens. Grisly stories are told of this orgy of revenge. It is
said that a rebel whom Thakombau hated was brought before him, he
ordered his men to cut out the man's tongue, and that he ate it raw,
joking with the wretched man about the change in his fortunes. When
tired of the sport he sent him out to be further tortured, and when
death released him from his sufferings he was cooked and eaten.
The arch-rebels, Mara and Namosimalua, were the last to be taken.
Thakombau pursued Mara from village to village until he came to Namata,
where he suffered a repulse. He then set himself to buy over the Namata
chief. Early one morning Mara's faithless hosts surrounded him. His
magnificent courage did not desert him. For some time he fought
single-handed for his life, but numbers prevailed. Gashed by hatchets
and knives, he fell at last, and his body was presented to Thakombau.
Namosimalua was allowed to return to Mbau, and Tuiveikoso, the
figure-head of the rebellion, and Tanoa's elder brother, were not
molested.
In 1837 the first missionaries, Mr. Cross and Mr. Cargill, of the
Wesleyan Missionary Society, arrived in the group. The Lau islands,
already colonized by Tongans, were the natural starting-point for their
labours; but Mr. Cross visited Mbau, and had an interview with
Thakombau, from whom he sought permission to settle on the islet. The
moment was unfortunate, and the young chiefs answer very natural under
the circumstances. "Your words are good to me, but I will not hide from
you that I am now at war, and cannot myself hear your instruction nor
even assure you of safety." Mr. Cross misunderstood the answer. If he
had seized upon the bare permission to reside at Mbau, itself a great
concession, his labours would have been greatly lightened. As it was,
his departure gave great offence to Thakombau, who opposed all further
overtures from the missionaries, and the offer was not renewed for
fifteen years.
In September, 1837, a great meeting was held at Mbau. Having made
submission to his brother, Tuiveikoso, an aged, corpulent and lame man,
was pardoned by Tanoa, who described him as "a great hog, grown too fat
to walk about, and able to do nothing but sleep, and wake to pick his
food." The sole guilt of the rebellion was fixed upon Namosimalua. On
the following day he was brought to trial, when he frankly admitted
having accepted six whales' teeth to kill Tanoa. To the astonishment of
everybody Tanoa gave him his life. The secret of the confession and
Tanoa's clemency was that, to use a Fijian metaphor, Namosimalua had
been "eating with both sides." It says much for his diplomacy that he
preserved his life against the hatred of Thakombau, who had not
forgotten his endeavours to persuade the rebels to kill him.
[Pageheader: PUNISHMENTS FOR PIRACY]
The rebels had made one serious mistake. During Tanoa's exile in 1833
they had urged Namosimalua to seize the French brig, _L'Aimable
Josephine_ (Captain Bureau), lying at Viwa. The Viwa chief, scenting
danger, declined at first to have anything to do with the project, but
his scruples were overborne, and the crew was massacred by Namosi's
nephew, who was thereafter called Verani (Frenchman). The captured
vessel did not prove to be of much value. Her native crew did not dare
to sail her within sight of other vessels, and eventually she was cast
away. In October, 1838, M. Dumont d'Urville, who touched at the group on
his return voyage from the Antarctic sea, exacted reparation for this
act of piracy by burning Viwa, the inhabitants being in hiding in the
neighbourhood. He did not then know that Captain Bureau had to some
extent provoked his fate by taking part in native wars.
In 1840 Captain Wilkes, of the United States Exploring Expedition,
visited the group, and deported Veindovi, the king of Rewa's son, for
having instigated the massacre of part of the crew of an American
vessel. He also severely punished the people of Malolo, an islet at the
western extremity of Vitilevu, for the murder of two of his officers.
These proceedings undoubtedly had a great effect in protecting the lives
and property of Europeans from chiefs whom they had offended.
In the same year war broke out between Somosomo and Vuna, two districts
in the island of Taveuni. Mbau pursued her usual policy of weakening her
rivals by supporting the weaker side, and, regardless of the debt owed
to Somosomo by Tanoa during his exile, espoused the cause of Vuna.
Thakombau's elder brother, Wainiu, who was vasu to Somosomo, and had
designs upon the succession to Tanoa, took the opportunity of betraying
his intentions. He fled to Somosomo, whence he proceeded to buy over the
borderers of Mbau on the mainland, within a few miles of the town. The
most formidable of the tribes that joined him was Namena, which
Thakombau was powerless to reduce by open attack. The stratagem which
reduced Namena from a powerful tribe to its present condition of serfdom
is worth narrating for the light it throws upon Fijian methods of
diplomacy. Namena sent messengers to Viwa to win over Namosimalua to the
cause of Wainiu. The chief received them apparently with open arms, but
secretly informed Thakombau that he had a plan for effecting the
massacre of all Namena's fighting men without a campaign. The plan was
simple. Mbau was to lay siege to Viwa, and the Viwans were to invite
Namena to garrison the town. But only blank cartridge was to be used,
and the rest was to be left to him. The Viwans, many of whom were
nominally Christians, for the missionaries had settled in the island,
were kept in the dark till the last moment. Mbau played their part in
the comedy admirably. When the blank cartridge was fired many of the
warriors feigned death, but when they reached the moat, the gates were
thrown open, and the Viwans joined their mock assailants in massacring
the unfortunate Namenans. One hundred and forty warriors were slain, and
forty widows were strangled to their manes, a blow from which the tribe
has never recovered.
Thakombau had now virtually become regent. He had not only to direct the
foreign policy of the confederation, but to keep a watchful eye upon
conspirators at home. One of his brothers, Raivalita, sailed from Vuna
with the intention of assassinating him. But the plot was betrayed, and
as Raivalita left the house after reporting his arrival to his father,
he was waylaid and clubbed. In 1845 war broke out between Mbau and Rewa,
owing chiefly to a personal feud between Thakombau and Nkara, son of the
king of Rewa, who had had an intrigue with one of Thakombau's wives. It
was an illustration of the old Fijian proverb that a quarrel between
brothers is the most difficult to patch. There had been almost annual
skirmishes between the border villages, in which the chiefs took
desultory interest, but in this war the issue lay between the chiefs
themselves. Hostilities were precipitated by an act of treachery. Rewa
had burned the town of Suva[24] during the absence of the fighting men,
and had sent a message to Mbau saying that, as honour was satisfied, the
people would be spared. But on the following day the fugitives were
ambushed on the Tamanoa heights.[25] The war dragged on for six months,
being for the most part little more than the burning of outlying
villages, and the cutting off of stragglers, all of whom were killed and
eaten. The ties of vasu between members of the royal families had much
confused the issue. One of the sons of the king of Rewa, Thoka-na-uto
(or Mr. Phillips, as he preferred to call himself) had joined Mbau from
the first, and a number of the border villages had followed his example,
and were in the field against their feudal lord. White men were fighting
on both sides, in one or two cases naked and blackened like the natives.
[Pageheader: DESTRUCTION OF REWA]
The end came in June, 1845. Defections from Rewa had been frequent;
indeed, in this war desertion was scarcely regarded. Early in June the
Rewans had sent a chief to Mbau to treat for peace, a fatal step, for
Thakombau bought over the envoy to betray his countrymen. The Mbau army
was to invest the town, and while it was attacking, traitors within the
walls were to set it on fire, and begin slaying their fellow-citizens.
The plot was entirely successful. As the enemy reached the bank of the
river opposite Rewa, the town burst into flames. The traitors within its
walls had already begun slaughtering. Meanwhile, a Mbau chief shouted to
the queen to cross the river in a canoe to her own people, the Mbauans,
and to bring her children and Mbau retainers with her. As they were
embarking the king himself came down to the canoe. The Mbauans shouted
to him to go back, but he would not. As he was crossing the river he was
fired upon; he was wounded by a spear as he was disembarking. Then
Thakombau ordered one of his brothers to club him, but he was afraid to
strike so great a chief. The wretched king pleaded hard for life, and
his wife joined her entreaties; but Thakombau reminded him of the
calumnies he and his sons had spoken, and told him sternly that he must
die. Snatching from an attendant a club with an axe head lashed to it,
he clave his skull to the jaw, and his wife and children were splashed
with his blood.
Indirectly the Rewa war had a sinister bearing upon the fortunes of the
whites. In May, 1844, a European, who had fought on the Rewa side
against Mbau, sailed for Lakemba with one of Tanoa's wives, who had run
away from Mbau, and was now deputed by the Rewans to induce Lakemba to
revolt from Thakombau's government. He was wrecked on the island of
Thithia, and the Europeans of Levuka, hoping to recover some of the
vessel's gear, of which they stood in need, sailed to that island.
Failing in this, they went on to Lakemba, whither the shipwrecked man
had escaped. For a time they hesitated to give him a passage to Rewa,
for he was as much disliked by them as he was by the natives, and they
knew the danger of displeasing Thakombau. But he offered a sum of
passage-money which overcame their scruples, and they carried him off
just in time to escape the war canoe which Thakombau had sent in pursuit
of him.
Thakombau not unnaturally regarded this as an act of hostility, and Tui
Levuka, who was becoming alarmed at the power of the whites in his town,
and at the extent of land which he had alienated to them, seized the
opportunity for beseeching his suzerain to deport them from the island.
The peremptory order for their removal was a severe blow to the
prosperous little settlement, which had to abandon the fruits of so many
years of labour, and begin life afresh. A fine schooner, half built, had
to be abandoned on the slips, and the houses left to be gutted by the
natives. It speaks well for their peaceable disposition that they did
not remove to Rewa, where they might have restored its waning fortunes
in the struggle with Mbau, and that they chose Solevu Bay in Mbua, which
was at peace with Thakombau. The new settlement was unhealthy and
inconvenient for communication with ships, and long before the five
years of exile was completed Tui Levuka and the Mbau chiefs had repented
of their precipitancy, which had cut them off from the services of the
white artisans which were so necessary to them. The request for
permission to return, made early in 1849, was readily granted.
[Pageheader: THE SECOND REWA WAR]
In 1846 Thakombau led an army of 3000 men, nominally to help Somosomo
against Natewa, but in reality to increase his own influence at the
expense of his ally. This he did by commanding the attack in person,
and contriving to spare the lives of the defenders, while receiving
their submission himself. The result of this campaign, for which
Somosomo paid an enormous subsidy, was to make Natewa a tributary of
Mbau, and diminish the influence of Somosomo.
On September 1, 1847, Rewa was again destroyed by Thakombau. The sister
whom he had promised to Tui Nakelo as a bribe for his treachery to Rewa
had been given instead to Ngavindi, chief of Lasakau, and Tui Nakelo in
revenge offered to join Ratu Nkara, the son of the king of Rewa, whose
feud with Thakombau had provoked the last war. Between them they rebuilt
Rewa, and repulsed the Mbauans sent to prevent them. But Tui Nakelo was
assassinated by means of a plot devised by Thakombau, who advanced to
Tokatoka, and sent thence a message to Ratu Nkara that he wished him no
ill, and that if he would remove with his people to the islet of
Nukulau, and allow him to burn Rewa _pro forma_, he would molest him no
further. Ratu Nkara accordingly withdrew all his men, not to the islet
mentioned in the message, but to a hill top whence he could watch the
Mbau canoes surrounding Nukulau to capture him, "Pig's dung!" he
exclaimed; "does Thakombau take me for a fool!"
In 1849 Captain Erskine visited the group in H.M.S. _Havannah_, and gave
Thakombau an exhibition of the precision of marine artillery, which had
an important bearing on the history of the next few years. It inflamed
the king with a desire to possess a gunboat of his own, and two were
ordered, one from America and one from Sydney. The almost annual visit
of ships of war about this time had impressed Thakombau with the
importance of doing nothing that would give any excuse for foreign
intervention. But neither Captain Fanshaw, Captain Erskine, nor Sir
Everard Home, who urged Thakombau in turn to abandon cannibalism and the
strangling of widows, the last named so vehemently that they parted on
bad terms, had much effect upon him. The fact was that, as after events
proved, Thakombau did not feel himself strong enough to do so. In the
fifteen years between 1835 and 1850 he had fought his way into the
foremost place in Fiji, and his influence in the latter year was such
that the American Consul, Mr. Miller, in a letter of remonstrance
actually addressed him officially as Tui Viti (King of Fiji). But the
Europeans could not see beneath the surface, and none knew, as he
himself did, upon what a quicksand his power was built. His maintenance
of the ancient customs, his opposition to Christianity, denounced so
bitterly by the missionaries, was part of a set policy. Had he embraced
Christianity when it was first pressed upon him, he would have remained
the petty chief of a few square miles, a mere vassal of the mission, all
his days, for the missionaries discountenanced war, and it was only by
war that he could hope to extend his influence. He alone of all his
people foresaw that the mission would destroy, first the ancient polity,
and ultimately the independence of the Fijians. His dialogues with the
missionaries,[26] who for fifteen years were importuning him to let them
live at Mbau, bantering as they were in tone, show how consistent was
his policy, and they do not justify all the abuse that was heaped upon
him by the mission historians. He respected the men; he objected to
their doctrine, which, he said, might be suitable enough for Europeans,
but was not adapted to the Fijians. His forbearance to the missionaries
who so often thwarted him was remarkable: he allowed them to live at
Viwa, within sight of Mbau, and to proselytize his subjects: he was
personally kind and courteous to them, though he received nothing at
their hands in return, as by Fijian usage he had a right to expect. The
missionaries, so far from allowing him any personal credit for his
kindliness, crowed over his courtesies as surrenders to their diplomacy.
As an absolute sovereign he had cause enough to quarrel with them.
Without preaching actual treason, they were always denouncing the
customs which he practised, and denying the pretensions to divinity
which were accorded to every ruling chief; the mission stations were
cities of refuge to which every disaffected native fled when his treason
was discovered. They themselves admit that the converted natives openly
boasted that they were exempt from service in the army, and that
murderers, "who were punishable even by Fijian law, fled to mission
stations, and hypocritically professed an anxiety for Christian
instruction."[27] The Christian natives refused to fight for their
country. There was in fact a party in the state which denied their
ruler's authority, and were not only apostates from the national
religion, but disaffected towards the government. It was therefore
remarkable, not that he made an attempt to persecute, but that he made
only one.
[Pageheader: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIAN CONVERTS]
In December, 1850, Thakombau declared war on all Christians. The heathen
villages on the Tailevu coast for a distance of fifty miles rose, and
laid siege to Dama and to the island of Viwa, where the missionaries
lived, but Thakombau had issued orders that no injury should be done to
the lives and property of the Europeans, lest there should be a pretext
for foreign intervention. The missionaries appealed to a Tongan chief,
who, with 300 men, was on a visit to Mbau. This chief dispatched a canoe
to act as a guard for the missionaries, and some of its crew were killed
by the besieging force. The Tongans were now involved in the war, and as
the whites were also supporting the Mission with supplies, Thakombau
very wisely called off his troops and there was peace.
In 1850 Thakombau had touched the pinnacle of his fortunes, and we are
now to see upon what his authority rested. So long as he ran in the
grooves of custom his power was absolute, but no sooner did he introduce
innovations than it began to crumble beneath him. Late in 1851 the two
gunboats of sixty tons, ordered by him abroad, were delivered, and the
agents began to press for payment. He ordered a levy of _beche-de-mer_
throughout his dominions. The labour entailed by this new tax was far
less than that of house-building or providing food, but the one was new,
and the others sanctified by custom. Moreover, his subjects knew that
the _beche-de-mer_ they were called upon to fish would find a ready sale
with the Europeans. Many of the villages flatly declined to obey; some
took the sacks, and let them rot in their houses; others burned the
sacks before the eyes of the king's messengers. In January, 1852,
Thakombau, who seldom abandoned any project in the face of opposition,
took 1000 fishers with him to Mathuata, and set them an example by
fishing with his own hands, but his men worked grudgingly, and the
proceeds of the expedition were small. He then sent a party in the ship
to New Caledonia, where sufficient _beche-de-mer_ was collected to pay
for one of the vessels, and she was handed over to him. This purchase
was the most unpopular act of his reign.
The long-expected death of old Tanoa occurred in 1852, and, despite the
protests of the missionaries and captains of ships-of-war, Thakombau
took part in the immemorial ceremony of strangling his father's widows,
who, in accordance with custom, themselves contended for the honour of
being strangled to prove their loyalty to the dead. The missionaries
affect to trace his troubles to this act of barbarity, but they had
probably the effect of delaying them, by proving to his chiefs that
their king was before all things a Fijian still.
[Pageheader: REVOLT AGAINST THAKOMBAU]
On the death of Thoka-na-uto (Mr. Phillips), who as Thakombau's ally was
nominally king of Rewa, Ratu Nkara came from his hiding-place in the
mountains and succeeded to the chieftainship. He is the most romantic
figure in Fijian history. Years of guerrilla warfare, when he was a
fugitive with a price upon his head, had not broken his indomitable
spirit, nor weakened his lifelong defiance of his victorious enemy,
Thakombau. He had never stooped to the acts of treachery that had
stained the career of his rival, and had he lived longer his courage and
skill in warfare would have raised the city of his fathers from its
ashes to be the capital of the first state in Fiji. Rewa was rebuilt,
and Nkara set about corrupting the border villages of Mbau. He was
successful beyond his hopes. In a few weeks Mbau was enclosed in a ring
of revolted towns, for not only was the mainland aflame from Kamba to
Namena, but Ovalau, under Tui Levuka, had declared its independence.
There can be no doubt that for this the Europeans at Levuka were partly
responsible. They had never forgiven their summary expulsion from
Levuka in 1844, nor Thakombau's request to Captain Macgruder to deport
them all from the group. They were at this time the most orderly and
law-abiding community of Europeans in the Pacific, having by hard work
and trading accumulated a good deal of property. They were not in a
position to take up arms openly against Thakombau, and their only overt
act was to punish the natives of Malaki, an island subject to Mbau, for
the destruction of an English cutter called the _Wave_. In December,
1853, Levuka was destroyed by an incendiary who was believed to be
acting under the orders of Verani, Thakombau's lieutenant. The whites
lost all they possessed, and on the following day Thakombau visited the
town in order to express his sympathy, and avert any suspicion of
connivance. During his progress through the ruined town the Europeans,
many of whom knew him well, let him pass without a sign of recognition,
and he left the place anxious and dispirited.
At this juncture he had sore need of friends. The unexpected revolt of
his personal serfs at Kamba was a veritable disaster, for they had
charge of his largest canoe, the sails and stores of his gunboat, and
his principal magazine. A few days after his formal installation as
Vunivalu on July 26, 1853, his army was beaten off by the Kambans, his
faithful lieutenant Verani was assassinated in Ovalau, and the rebellion
spread. He knew that he had now to reckon with traitors among his own
kin. Ratu Mara,[28] who had for many months been a voluntary exile from
Mbau, had returned to the delta to be the figure-head of the rebellion,
and Tui Levuka, whose authority was not sufficient to control the rebels
of Ovalau, persuaded the Europeans to send for him. At this moment a
schooner arrived from Sydney with a consignment of arms for Thakombau,
and the European consignee, Pickering, declined to deliver them.
On October 30, 1853, Thakombau yielded to the importunities of the
missionaries so far as to allow the Rev. Joseph Waterhouse[29] to take
up his residence at Mbau, probably in the hope that he would be a
useful advocate in the event of misunderstanding with European
governments. In November he received an unexpected visit from King
George Tubou of Tonga, then on his way to Sydney. He turned this visit
to good account by promising the king a large canoe (the celebrated Ra
Marama) if he would revisit him on his return home. There now seemed to
be a prospect of a favourable turn to his fortunes. Tui Levuka, doubtful
of the success of his rebellion, made a secret compact with him to play
the traitor to his own side, and Thakombau now prepared to crush Kamba.
His plans were impeded by the secession of his kinsman Koroi-ravulo, who
secretly bribed five hundred of his army to absent themselves from the
rendezvous, and in March, 1854, he set forth with barely 1500 men. He
had foolishly neglected to seize the opportunity of a hurricane, which
had levelled the defences of Kamba, and when the assault was made the
Kamba garrison had been stiffened with a number of whites and
half-castes from Levuka, who foresaw that the fall of Kamba would place
Levuka in the power of the victorious army. Thakombau commanded the
assault in person. Having cleared broad roads for retreat in case of a
sortie 500 men advanced to the attack, but they were seized with a
sudden panic, and the whole army fled in confusion to their canoes. A
further defeat at Sawakasa, the stronghold of Koroi-ravulo, completed
Thakombau's discomfiture.
Ratu Nkara and his friend Mr. Williams, the United States Consul, Ratu
Mara, Tui Levuka, and the Europeans of Ovalau, who had combined to bring
him to this pass, styled themselves the "League." Their agreement, as
set forth in a letter from Pickering to Williams, afterwards made
public, was "to stop all ships of going to Mbau," and to invoke the aid
of the first ship-of-war that might arrive. Consul Williams's
ill-directed activity in the cause proved the undoing of all the
schemes, for he wrote a violent letter to the newspapers in Sydney,
urging the destruction of Mbau as the first duty of civilized nations,
which, when translated to Thakombau, convinced him that his only chance
of salvation lay in conciliating the missionaries. A letter which he
received at the same time from King George of Tonga persuaded him that
it was high time to embrace Christianity. His defeat at Kamba after so
many favourable omens had rudely shaken whatever belief he may have had
in the gods of his fathers, and if he now rejected the support of King
George and the missionaries he would have had no friends left. He had
been profoundly moved by the news of the assassination of Tui Kilakila,
the chief of Somosomo, which, the missionaries assured him, was a
judgment on him for his opposition to Christianity, and he was moreover
suffering from a painful disease of the leg. Cut off as he was from
communication with the Europeans who opposed the conversion of Mbau,
there was no hostile counsel to neutralize the persuasions of the
missionaries.
[Pageheader: THAKOMBAU CONVERTED]
On April 28, 1854, the momentous decision was made. Assembling his
chiefs he read the two letters to them, and announced his decision,
reminding them of the prosperity of Tonga since the adoption of
Christianity. On the following Sunday he attended service with about
three hundred of his chiefs and retainers, all clad in waistcloths, for
the missionaries had ordained that the outward sign of conversion should
be clothes. As soon as the people had recovered from their astonishment
there was a convulsion that nearly cost Thakombau his life. Rewa was
still stoutly heathen, and all the malcontents in Mbau flocked to the
enemy. The island of Koro also rose. Mbau was now hemmed in, and for the
first time since 1835 it was put into a state of defence. But there were
traitors within. Yangondamu, Thakombau's cousin, won over by two of the
king's brothers who had joined the enemy, had engaged to assassinate
him. His house was crowded with young chiefs anxious to pay court to the
rising power, while Thakombau sat alone, deserted by all but the
missionary and a faithful Tongan. This immediate peril was averted by
the dispatch of Yangondamu in command of a force to reduce the Koro
rebels, and while he was away a Captain Dunn arrived from America with a
cargo of arms, which he insisted upon selling to the Mbauans despite the
entreaties of the Europeans.
The missionaries had already made a clean sweep of cannibalism, the
slaughter of prisoners, and the strangling of widows, but when they
tried to force a constitution on European lines upon the king they found
him obstinate. "I was born a chief, and a chief I will die," he said,
and his firmness, distasteful as it was to the missionaries, saved, not
only himself, but also the cause of the mission; for, as Waterhouse
himself records, "the populace, long favourably inclined towards the new
religion, now hated Christianity because it was the religion of
Thakombau," and if Thakombau had added to the other sins the abdication
of his authority, nothing could have saved him or the cause of his
foreign advisers.
On November 8, 1854, Thakombau was induced by Captain Dunn to hold a
conference with his brother, Ratu Mara, on his ship, the _Dragon_. This
meeting, effected with so much difficulty, resulted in nothing but a
profession of reconciliation. Thakombau had so far humbled himself as to
sue his enemy, the king of Rewa, for peace, but his overtures were
haughtily rejected. In the same month he attended an inquiry held by
Captain Denham on H.M.S. _Herald_, at which he formally withdrew all the
charges he had made against the Europeans, much to the chagrin of the
missionaries, who had forwarded them to the commander. The Europeans had
sent three representatives, who roundly charged the king with the
burning of Levuka, but of this charge he seems to have cleared himself.
This was the first occasion on which he officially stated the limits of
his dominions. He had explained the suzerainty which he claimed over
Somosomo, Lakemba and other states, but when asked point-blank to
declare the limits of the territory in which he would undertake to
protect the Europeans, he indicated a territory no larger than an
English country parish, and his reply was disconcerting to those who had
been styling him Tui Viti, King of Fiji.
[Pageheader: A DEATH PORTENT]
His conciliatory spirit, being set down to fear, had availed him
nothing, and in the last months of 1854, the fate of Mbau still hung in
the balance. Ratu Nkara had offered to end the contest by a duel between
the two kings. "It is shameful," he said, "that so many warriors should
perish; let you or me die": but Thakombau replied, "Are we dogs that we
should bite one another? Are we not chiefs? Let us fight with our
warriors like chiefs."
But in January, 1855, the low tide of Thakombau's fortunes began to
turn. Rewa was stricken with alarm at the news of a portent. Andi Thivo,
one of the Rewa queens, noticed that tears were exuding from one of the
roots of taro set before her. She addressed it, asking why it wept. Was
Rewa to be destroyed? Was her father about to die? Was Thakombau? Were
any of the chiefs whom she named? But the taro made no sign. Was her
lord, the king of Rewa, near his death? A voice from the taro said
"Yes," and the weeping ceased. The report spread through the length and
breadth of the land, and the people waited in hushed expectancy. To them
their king was already dead. Suddenly the war-drums themselves were
hushed. The omen was fulfilled; Ratu Nkara, "the Hungry Woman," "the
Long Fellow," was no more. A mighty man, Thakombau's only dangerous
enemy, had fallen. He died of dysentery on January 26, 1855, having in
his last moments promised to turn Christian if he recovered, swearing
nevertheless to have the blood of Thakombau. But he was speechless
during his last moments, and could not bequeath a continuance of the war
to his chiefs.
Though he had shown the missionaries many kindnesses and allowed them to
live with him, though he had had more intercourse with white men than
any other chief, he died in the faith of his fathers. In the last months
of his life he was with difficulty restrained from wading into the
river, where sharks were seen, in order to prove to the missionary,
Moore, that his person was sacred to them. A fortnight before his death
he completed the building of two heathen temples to ensure his victory
over Mbau, and sent a polite message to the missionary asking him to
hold his services in another part of the town, "lest the gods should be
angry at the noise." He said that he did not intend any disrespect to
Jehovah, but was putting his own gods on their last trial, and desired
to give them every chance of success. Though his chiefs were still
heathen, out of respect for the missionary only one of his wives was
strangled, and she, as they explained, was old and already half dead.
On the death of Thakombau's personal enemy Rewa was glad enough to make
peace with Mbau, but the Mbau rebels, who had to fear reprisals,
continued the struggle. But in March King George of Tonga arrived at
Mbau with forty large canoes to take away the war-canoe presented to him
by Thakombau. After trying in vain to bring about a reconciliation, and
suffering the loss of one of his own chiefs through the treachery of the
rebels, King George agreed to lend his troops to Thakombau. The prospect
of this foreign interference so incensed the people that tribes which
had hitherto taken no part in the struggle threw in their lot with the
rebels, and every one who opposed Christianity, or had anything to fear
from Mbau, joined the enemy. The priests were inspired; the oracles
spoke. The Tongan fleet would be derelict at Kamba for want of hands to
work the sails after the battle. It was to be a death-struggle between
the old gods and the new.
The promontory of Kamba was to be the battlefield, and the fortress at
its extremity swarmed with warriors. For three days the allied fleets
waited near the fort in the hope that it would capitulate without a
siege, but on April 7 they bore down upon the promontory--a formidable
spectacle. They were received with a volley of musketry. By all the
rules of Fijian warfare this should have checked the landing for that
day, but to the astonishment of the Kambans it did nothing of the sort.
The sails were lowered, and, leaving their dead and wounded to the care
of their women, the Tongans rushed to the attack. There were more
surprises in store for the garrison; instead of hiding behind trees, and
trying to scare the defenders into flight, the Tongans advanced to the
assault in the open, and recked nothing of the men who fell. King
George, who commanded in person, had decided to invest the town by
throwing up fortifications fronting the defences, and to starve it into
submission, but the Vavau warriors pressed on, and took the place by
assault. They afterwards defended themselves for this act of
insubordination by saying that they were looking for the defences, and,
taking the rampart for mere outworks, had found themselves in possession
of the town before they were aware of their mistake--a familiar form of
Tongan boasting. The Tongans lost fourteen killed and thirty wounded;
the Mbauans, who had been mere spectators, escaped almost scatheless.
More than two hundred of the enemy were killed, the greater part by the
heathen Fijians on the Mbau side, and two hundred prisoners were taken.
Thakombau was willing to spare all but Koroi-ravula, but King George
interfered to save his life, which was justly forfeited by European as
well as Fijian law. The submission of the rebels was complete. No less
than twenty thousand natives proved their allegiance to Thakombau by
accepting Christianity and adapting their customs to the wishes of the
missionaries.
[Pageheader: THE TONGANS TAKE KAMBA BY ASSAULT]
It is not to be understood that the conversion of Thakombau was the
first success of the missionaries. A printing press had been at work for
many years, and, even in the Mbau territory, many hundreds of the
natives had been taught to read and write. There were mission stations
in Lakemba, Somosomo, Rewa, Levuka and Mbua, and in many of the coast
villages there were native teachers, the Christian and heathen natives
living amicably side by side. The Christians claimed immunity from war
service, and it was therefore not to be wondered at that Thakombau
showed indecent glee when appealed to by the missionaries for help
against persecution at Mbau. "You have often refused to fight for me,
and now you have a war of your own on your hands, and I am glad of it."
But the Lau group professed Christianity to a man; in the Lomaiviti
islands the heathen were in a minority, and now, by Thakombau's
conversion, the north-east coast of Vitilevu adopted the new faith. Only
the inland and western tribes of the two large islands continued in the
faith of their fathers, and these were soon obliged to fight for their
religion.
In 1858 Thakombau's peace of mind was again rudely disturbed. Williams,
the United States Consul, whose enmity against Thakombau was personal,
had never relaxed his efforts to bring about foreign intervention.
During the Fourth of July festivities in 1849 Williams's house on the
island of Nukulau had been burned to the ground, and though report
attributed the fire to pure accident during a display of fireworks by
its convivial master, Williams laid his loss at the door of Thakombau.
There were other claims by American citizens, and Williams's persistency
at length induced the American Government to send a frigate to make
inquiries. Commodore Boutwell had visited Mbau in 1855. His high-handed
treatment of Thakombau, and his ready acceptance of the _ex parte_
statement of the claimants, passed almost unnoticed in that eventful
year, but in 1858 the king was made to realize that the American award
of L9000 as compensation to American residents was no empty threat, but
was a claim that must be met. He had had a sinister experience of the
danger of levying from his subjects contributions not sanctioned by
custom, and he knew that the task was hopeless.
But this was not all. A new star had risen on the eastern horizon, and
Mbau was now threatened by the Tongans. Occasional intercourse between
Tonga and Fiji had taken place for perhaps three or four centuries,
through canoes plying between the different Tongan islands having been
driven westward by the trade wind, but it was not until later in the
eighteenth century that it became regular. At the time of Cook's visit
in 1772 it had become as much a part of every young chief's education to
take part in a warlike expedition to Fiji as it was in England a little
later to make the grand tour. The Tongans steered for Lakemba, where
they took part with one or other of the factions that happened to be at
war, and, having taken the lion's share of the loot, and built
themselves new war-canoes in Kambara of _vesi_, a timber very scarce in
Tonga, they set sail for their own country. But not a few stayed behind,
and gradually a little colony of Tongan-speaking half-castes established
itself in all the principal windward islands.
[Pageheader: THE TONGAN CONQUESTS]
In 1837 the influence of the Tongans in Fiji received an unexpected
impetus from the arrival of the first Wesleyan missionaries, who sailed
from Tonga to Lakemba with a retinue of Tongan teachers. They were at
once joined by all the resident Tongans, who were now as zealous in
converting the Fijians to Christianity as they had formerly been in
converting their property to their own use. The countenance and
encouragement of the white missionaries fostered their natural
arrogance, and, when persuasion failed to effect conversion, stronger
methods were sometimes resorted to. By the year 1848 the Tongans had got
thoroughly out of hand, and King George, who was not yet secure against
conspiracy, foresaw that any rival who might choose to recruit partisans
in Fiji could return to Tonga with a formidable army. In order to
provide a legitimate outlet for the ambition of his cousin Maafu, he
dispatched that redoubtable warrior to Fiji ostensibly as governor of
the Tongan colony, in reality as conqueror of as much of the group as he
could take. Maafu's strong personality, aided by the lash, soon reduced
the turbulent Tongans to order, and island after island of the eastern
group went down before him. The Tongan teachers, now established in most
of the western islands, acted as his political agents, and the
missionaries were powerless to discountenance aggressions that were
avowedly made with the object of spreading the Christian faith. So
horrible were the excesses of his warriors in these raids that the
Wesleyan authorities were occasionally obliged to wash their hands of
him, but their somewhat half-hearted protests did not prevent Taveuni
and the greater part of Vanualevu from falling under his control.
The Tongans had carried all before them by their superior courage and
dash in frontal attack, and by their intelligent use of European
weapons.[30] In 1858 Maafu's cruisers were ravaging territory claimed by
Mbau, and the two powers stood face to face. Thakombau was wise enough
to see that, in the event of an open rupture, even if he should gain an
initial advantage over Maafu's warriors, he could not hope to stand
against a power that had all Tonga to draw upon for recruits, and that
with America pressing for its debt, and Maafu bent upon conquest, he had
every prospect of finding himself in vassalage to one or the other. In
his extremity he turned to Mr. Pritchard, the English Consul, who,
having a firm belief in the future of the islands as a cotton-growing
country, was anxious to attract immigrants with capital. On Mr.
Pritchard's advice, Thakombau executed a deed of cession, offering the
sovereignty of the group to England on condition that he should retain
the rank and title of Tui Viti (King of Fiji) accorded to him by the
American Government,[31] and that, in return for 200,000 acres of land,
the British Government should satisfy the American claims.
Some pressure was put upon the Home Government from the Australian
colonies to induce it to accept the offer upon the ground of the high
price to which cotton had risen in consequence of the disturbances in
the Southern States of the Union. Colonel Smythe, R.A., was sent out to
report upon the proposal, but, in the face of his assurance that
Thakombau's authority controlled less than half the group, the
Government, already embarrassed by the expenses of a Maori war, could
not entertain the offer.
The prospect of annexation had attracted from New Zealand a large number
of Englishmen, some of whom settled in the island. In 1861 the European
colony numbered 166 adults, of whom the majority were respectable
people. They bought large tracts of land from the native chiefs, who
sold recklessly whether the land belonged to them or not.
[Pageheader: ANNEXATION]
From 1861 to 1869 the Europeans increased to 1800, and the control of
political affairs passed from the native chiefs to Europeans, who served
as a check upon Maafu's ambition. The mission spread rapidly, until by
1870 all but a few of the inland tribes were nominally Christian.
Various unsuccessful attempts were made to establish a settled
government, but in 1871 Thakombau was declared constitutional sovereign
of the entire group, with a ministry and two houses of parliament, a
form of government ridiculously unsuited to the needs of the country,
seeing that the natives, who numbered nearly one hundred to one, were to
have no votes. Thakombau had an army officered by white men, and made
abortive attempts to conquer the interior, but the new government did
little beyond plunging into debt, and splitting the country into
factions. In 1873 the political state of the group had become
intolerable, and on British Commissioners being sent to inquire into the
matter on the spot, the chiefs were induced, after some hesitation, to
cede the sovereignty to England unconditionally. The Deed of Cession was
signed in September, 1874. No doubt the chiefs acted to some extent
under pressure from the Europeans, who had purchased land which they
could not enjoy while it was in occupation by natives, and for which
they desired to have titles. The Lands Commission had a task of
extraordinary difficulty. Tracts had been sold by chiefs who had no
title to them, and sometimes the same land had been sold to two or more
purchasers. Many of the deeds produced could never have been understood
by the natives who signed them, and often the boundaries were
imperfectly described. Sir Arthur Gordon,[32] the first Governor, wisely
decided to govern the natives as far as possible through the machinery
that he found in operation, and it encountered no open opposition with
the exception of an insignificant rising in the western interior of
Vitilevu, where the tribes, provoked by the encroachments of their
neighbours on the coast, and alarmed at the ravages of the measles,
reverted to their heathen gods for a few months. This outbreak was put
down by native levies.
Thakombau, who received a pension of L1500 a year, was loyal to the
British Government, and, both in the administration of his own province
and in his intercourse with other chiefs, used his immense influence to
promote the contentment of his people under their new rulers. At his
death in 1882 the last of the great chiefs passed away, for Maafu had
died in the preceding year.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 16: One of them, having thus smeared his head, stooped to the
fire to dry it; the powder flared up, and he leapt forth into the _rara_
singed bare to the scalp.]
[Footnote 17: The native poems of the time refer also to a hailstorm,
which destroyed the plantations, a hurricane which caused a tidal wave
and a great flood, and raised the alluvial flats of the Rewa delta
several feet, a tradition which has support in the fact that a network
of mangrove roots underlies the soil at a depth of four or five feet.
The hurricane is said to have carried the pestilence away with it.]
[Footnote 18: They boarded her and directed her to the sandal-wood
district in Mbau, returning to the shore with a pig, a monkey, two geese
and a cat, besides knives and axes and mirrors. The native historians
name her captain "Red-face."]
[Footnote 19: It is well here to correct an error for which Thomas
Williams was originally responsible, and which has been copied by almost
every writer on Fiji since his day, namely, that "about the year 1804 a
number of convicts escaped from New South Wales, and settled among the
islands." The only foundation for this story is that "Paddy" Connor, who
was actually a deserter from a passing ship, was popularly supposed to
have "done time," and that the morals of the early settlers were such
that if they were not convicts they ought to have been. Putting aside
the extreme improbability that escaped convicts should beat 1200 miles
in the teeth of the prevailing wind, while so many eligible
hiding-places lay near at hand, it is certain that the first white
settlers were all shipwrecked sailors, deserters, or men paid off at
their own request.
According to M. Dumont d'Urville, two escaped convicts named "Sina" and
"Gemy" (? Jimmy) were concerned in the seizure of the _Aimable
Josephine_ in 1833.]
[Footnote 20: Among the settlers in 1812 was one who was believed to be
secretly addicted to cannibalism, and was ostracized by his own
countrymen.]
[Footnote 21: The story of this adventure, as narrated by Dillon, in his
_Voyage in the South Seas_, is the most dramatic passage in Polynesian
literature.]
[Footnote 22: The same Maraia who was afterwards forcibly married to the
captain of a Manila ship.]
[Footnote 23: Cakobau, according to Fijian spelling.]
[Footnote 24: Now included in the grounds of Government House.]
[Footnote 25: The massacre took place on the site of the present
residence of the manager of the Bank of New Zealand, and four hundred
persons were massacred without distinction of sex or age.]
[Footnote 26: See _The King and People of Fiji_, by Joseph Waterhouse.]
[Footnote 27: Waterhouse, p. 188.]
[Footnote 28: The second rebel chief of that name.]
[Footnote 29: Author of _The King and People of Fiji_.]
[Footnote 30: Maafu was the first to employ cannon in native craft in
Fiji. He had two small pieces mounted on the decks of canoes, which, if
they did but little execution in a bombardment, often ended a siege by
striking terror into the hearts of the garrison.]
[Footnote 31: Mr. Miller, the British Consul in Hawaii, first addressed
Thakombau as "Tui Viti" (King of Fiji) in a letter written in 1849 on
the subject of the American claims, it being the policy of the claimants
to make one chief responsible for damages sustained in every part of the
group, however remote from the frontiers of Thakombau's territory.]
[Footnote 32: Now Lord Stanmore.]
CHAPTER IV
CONSTITUTION OF SOCIETY
Chiefs--The Growth of the Confederation--The Confederation in
Decay--Lala, Communal and Personal--Community of Property through
Kerekere.
The principal authority upon the state of society among the Fijians when
Europeans first came into contact with them, is the Rev. Thomas
Williams, a man possessing intelligence and observation and the instinct
of anthropological research without the training necessary for
systematic inquiries. Belonging to the pre-speculation period, he
described what he found and not what he wished to find, and in this
respect he is a valuable witness, but, like other missionaries, he used
a loose terminology in describing Fijian society, making the word
"tribe" serve any group of men from a family to a state. His manuscript
fell upon evil days. His scientific instinct of accuracy and detail was
ludicrously out of keeping with the spirit of the missionary
publications of those days, in which any customs that did not suit the
English middle-class notions of propriety were either passed over as
heathen wickedness too deplorable for description, or set forth (with a
rich commentary of invective) in an obvious spirit of exaggeration to
show the subscribers at home how perilous were the lives of
missionaries, and how worthy the labourer of his hire. In his simple
love of truth, Mr. Williams had forgotten to point the usual moral, and
when Mr. Calvert brought home his manuscript in 1856, the Missionary
Society decided that it must be edited with vigilance. A Bowdler was
found in the person of a Mr. George Stringer Rowe, otherwise unknown to
fame, who re-wrote most of what was supplied to him, he apparently
having no special knowledge of the subject. "But here," says this
maiden-modest editor, whenever the outspoken Williams dares to touch
upon the marriage laws, "even at the risk of making the picture
incomplete, there may not be given a faithful representation."
[Pageheader: SINISTER FATE OF WILLIAMS' MS.]
The manuscript has long disappeared, and now we can never know exactly
what was Williams and what was Rowe. In respect of its scientific
accuracy, it may be questioned whether it did not find in Rowe a worse
fate than the "Scented Garden" met at the hands of Lady Burton.
Fortunately for science the loss of Williams's manuscript is not as
irreparable as a distinguished anthropologist would have us believe. Mr.
McLennan, in rating Mr. George Stringer Rowe for his meddlesome editing,
remarks, "The natives were speedily converted first, and slowly
extinguished afterwards. Comparatively few of the natives remain, and
our chance of knowing well what were their laws and customs is perhaps
gone for ever."[33] Upon this curious assumption, he treats "Fiji and
the Fijians" as modern Biblical critics treat the Pentateuch--namely, as
an obscure treatise whose loose terminology can only be read by the
light of internal evidence. Had he taken the trouble to ascertain that
the Fijians, so far from being extinguished, still number more than
two-thirds of their strength when Williams wrote, and maintain their old
tribal divisions and some of their social organization intact; had he
cared to look through the mass of evidence collected since the cession
of the islands in 1874, he would have spared his readers a lengthy
commentary, and himself a number of errors which go far to explain his
unscientific attitude in his great controversy with Morgan on the
classificatory system of relationship.
The key to the Melanesian system of government is Ancestor-worship. Just
as every act in a Fijian's life was controlled by his fear of Unseen
Powers, so was his conception of human authority based upon religion.
Patriarchy, if not the oldest, is certainly the most natural shape into
which the religious instinct of primitive man would crystallize. First
there was the family--and the islands of the Pacific were probably
peopled by single families--ruled absolutely by the father with his
store of traditions brought from the land whence he came. His sons,
knowing no laws but those which he had taught them; planting their
crops, building their huts and their canoes under his direction,
bringing their disputes to him for decision, have come to trust to him
for guidance in every detail of their lives. Suddenly he leaves them.
How are they to believe that he whose approval they courted, and whose
anger they feared but yesterday, has vanished like the flame of
yesterday's fire? His spirit has left his body; yet, somewhere it must
be watching over them still. In life he was wont to threaten them with
punishment for disobedience, and even now, when they do the things of
which he disapproved, or withhold their daily offerings of food at his
tomb, punishment is sure to follow--the crops fail; a hurricane unroofs
the hut; floods sweep away the canoe. Thus they come to propitiate the
spirit armed with such powers to harm, and, in response to their
prayers, victory is given them over their enemies. When they are beaten
back, he is frowning upon them: when the yams ripen to abundant harvest
he is rewarding their piety.
In this most natural creed was the germ of government. Each son of the
dead father founded his own family, but still owed allegiance to the
earthly representative of their deified father--the eldest son--on whom
a portion of the father's godhead had descended. Generations came and
went; the tribe had increased from tens to hundreds, but still the
eldest son of the eldest, who carried in his veins the blood of the
common ancestor in its purest form, was venerated as the head of the
tribe. The ancestor was not forgotten, but he was now translated into
Kalou-vu (lit. Root-God) and had his temple and his priests, who had
themselves become a hereditary caste, with the strong motive of
self-interest for keeping his memory green. His descendant, the tribal
chief, is set within the pale of the tabu: his will may not be
disobeyed, nor his body touched without incurring the wrath of the
Unseen. The priests and the chief give one another mutual support, the
one by threatening divine punishment for disobedience; the other by
insisting upon regularity in bringing offerings to the temple.
[Pageheader: RISE OF THE CHIEF'S POWER]
Had there been no war in Fiji the power of the aristocracy would have
been limited. Among the mountain tribes of Vitilevu, who seldom extended
their borders by conquest, the chief, while enjoying some measure of
religious veneration, can issue no important order without the consent
of the council of elders. He can exact no truckling homage where every
member of the tribe is a blood relation. But for conquest, Fiji would
have been a country of tiny independent states, no larger than a single
village could contain. From conquests sprang the great confederations.
The chief of a conquering tribe rose to be head of a complicated social
body; the members of his tribe an aristocracy supported by the industry
of an alien plebs composed of tribes they had conquered and fugitives
from other conquerors. These too had had their tribal gods and tribal
chiefs, but what have men, reduced to open slavery, to do with such
dignities? A generation of ill-usage sufficed to wipe out the very
memory of independence. For god and chief alike they had their suzerain,
upon whose indulgence their lives depended.
Besides the fortune of war, the chiefs owed much of the enormous
increase in their power to their system of land tenure. The land
boundaries of the tribe were telescopic. Every tribe owned as much land
as it could defend against the encroachments of its neighbours. There
was, as will presently be explained, individual ownership of land
actually under cultivation, but all waste land was held, theoretically,
in common. And, since the mouthpiece of the tribal will was the chief,
the waste lands were at his disposal. So long as he gave it to his own
people to use he gained no power, but as soon as fugitives, driven out
by other conquerors, began to run to him for protection, and were
granted land on which to settle, he found a body of tenants springing up
who regarded him as their personal overlord. It was to him that they
paid their rent in kind and in labour; it was to him, and not to the
tribe, that they gave feudal service in war. The chief of a great
federation had thus two distinct classes of vassals--serfs conquered in
war, and feudal tenants.
Before the advent of Europeans and the introduction of firearms, the
confederations were never very large. Tribe fought with tribe on equal
terms; the besieged had an advantage over the besiegers. Every tribe had
a natural stronghold, stored with food and water for many weeks, into
which it would retire in times of danger. If they did not carry it at
the first assault, by surprise, or by treachery from within, the
besiegers went home to await a better opportunity, for the slow
starvation of a garrison by organized siege had never occurred to any
native leader. The largest confederations known to us by
tradition--Verata and Thakaundrove--controlled less than ten miles of
coast line. With the introduction of gunpowder in 1808 native wars
became far more destructive. The powerful chiefs immediately doubled
their power, and yet Thakombau, the head of the most powerful
confederation of all, even in the zenith of his power, never ruled
directly over more than fifteen thousand people, though, undoubtedly, he
could bring influence to bear upon half the group.
[Illustration: Bringing first fruits to Mbau.]
The development of autocracy followed certain well-defined lines. At
first the chief was priest and king after the order of Melchisedec of
the Ammonite city, Jebus--that is to say, he received divine honours
while wielding the temporal authority. But as the tribe grew the
temporal power became irksome to him. The tradition of the founding of
the temporal line in Tonga about the beginning of the seventeenth
century throws the clearest light upon the origin of the spiritual and
temporal lines. A king of Tonga had goaded his people into assassinating
him; and his son, after avenging his murder, sought to put a buffer
between himself and his rebellious subjects by delegating his executive
power to his younger brother, reserving to himself all the solid
advantages of his high station without any responsibilities. Safe from
popular outbreak, he began to enjoy increased veneration owing to the
more rigid tabu that hedged him in. In another case preserved by
tradition the temporal power was founded by the indolence of the
supreme chief. In order to rid himself of the cares of government, he
constituted his brother his hereditary minister, and bequeathed to his
descendants an ornamental and dignified retirement. The Mikado and the
Shogun are analogues of the Roko Tui and the Vunivalu.[34]
[Pageheader: ORIGIN OF SPIRITUAL CHIEFS]
In Fiji, the process of scission was found in every stage of evolution.
Among the Melanesian tribes of the interior it had not begun; in Rewa
the spiritual Roko Tui still wielded the temporal power; in Mbau and
Thakaundrove he was beginning to lose even the veneration due to his
rank. Just as the coast tribes had begun to adopt the Polynesian gods in
addition to their own ancestral mythology, so they were more ready to
follow the Polynesian example of separating the temporal from the
spiritual chiefs.
The constitution of Mbau may be taken as a type of the Fijian
constitution. First in rank was the Roko Tui Mbau (Sacred Lord of Mbau).
His person was sacred. He never engaged personally in war. He was the
special patron of the priests, who, in return, were unstinting in their
insistence upon his divinity. He alone might wear his turban during the
kava-drinking. It was tabu to strangle his widow, though the widows of
no other chief were exempt from paying that last honour to the dead. At
his death no cry of lamentation might be uttered, but a solemn blast was
sounded on the conch-shell, as at the passing of a god.
Next in rank came the temporal chief, the Vu-ni-valu (Root of War, or
Skilled in War), who was at once Commander-in-Chief and executive
Sovereign. He never consulted the Roko Tui Mbau in temporal affairs, and
he enjoyed tabu privileges little inferior to those paid to his
spiritual suzerain. The Vunivalu always belonged to the Tui Kamba (Lords
of Kamba) sept, and the Roko Tui Mbau to the Vusaratu ("Chief sept").
The Tunitonga, the hereditary adviser and spokesman of the chiefs,
ranked next. He was the state matchmaker, and disposed absolutely of the
young chief girls, whose natural guardian he was.
The Mbete (priests) and Mata-ni-vanua (Royal messengers, _lit._
Messengers of the land) were next in consequence, though the chiefs of
the Fisher septs wielded influence in proportion to their force of
character.
Each sept had its own quarter of the town, the heralds at its eastern
extremity, next the Vusarandave (hereditary soldiers), and the fishermen
nearest to the mainland. Across the narrow straits were the planting
lands of the subject tribes, who might be seen at every low tide, wading
across the ford with contributions of food.
The Confederation in Decay.
The first effects of foreign interference was to strengthen the power of
the chiefs; the second, to destroy it. For more than two years Mbau
enjoyed a monopoly of muskets, which enabled her almost to double the
extent of her territory. To the eastward the kingdom of Somosomo
swallowed up the whole of Taveuni and the eastern portion of Vanua Levu,
while the Tongan immigrants under Maafu first conquered the Lau group,
and then threatened the independence of Mbau itself. The immediate
effect of subjugation was to blight the traditions and religion of the
conquered tribe, for independence is as necessary to their life as light
and air to the life of a plant. It is astonishing how quickly the status
of a Fijian is reflected in his bearing. In an assemblage of Fijians an
unskilled eye can pick out the members even of tribes who were subdued
within the memory of men still living, by their slinking gait, their
shifty eye, and the humble curve of their spine. A few years have
changed them from warriors into beaten curs. Their chief, a hewer of
wood like themselves, ceases at once to inspire respect; they approach
him now without crying the _tama_, the prerogative he used to share with
the gods themselves; they keep the _tama_ for their alien conqueror and
his gods; of their own they pretend to have forgotten the very name, nor
dare they any more to claim _tauvu_ relationship with any cousin-tribe
that has preserved its freedom. They have dropped out of the social
fabric, and chief and subject alike spend their lives in weaving ignoble
plots to alleviate the squalor of their servitude.
[Pageheader: INFLUENCE OF CONQUEST]
Far otherwise the conqueror. He who, but a generation back, would have
sweated in the yam-field with his men, now grew fat upon the
contributions of his tenants and the toil of his kitchen-men. His harem
was crowded with the daughters of allied chiefs, and the fairest girls
from every conquered village. Panders and sycophants flocked to him;
dwarfs and negroes and renegade Europeans were in his train; buffoons
told dirty stories over his evening kava bowl; poets forged heroic
genealogies for him, and when he went abroad men squatted on the ground
with averted faces and _tama_'ed. Every vessel that he used was sacred,
and brought death to any lowborn man that touched it. Every member of
his tribe swam upon the tide of his prosperity. His village became a
village of chiefs, with serfs of their own to plant food for them, where
the youths were trained to the chief-like exercises of war and
seamanship and dancing, and the old men spent their nights in feasting
and concocting plots for extending their dominion. As for the Roko Tui,
the Sacred Chief among the conquered tribes--there being no place for
such rank among serfs--he was fain to surrender his sanctity; among the
conquerors he degenerated into an ornamental symbol of the powers
divine.
The chief was seen at his best among those tribes that had preserved
their independence without seeking to extend their borders. Among the
Melanesian tribes in the western half of Vitilevu, in a number of
isolated islands, such as Vatulele and the Yasawa islands, the chief was
veritably the father of his people. Neither his dignity, nor the
sanctity of his person depended, as with us, upon any adventitious
barriers between himself and his subjects. Familiarity bred no contempt.
Like them, he wore nothing but the _malo_; with them he plied the
digging-stick at planting time. And yet, though any might approach him,
none forgot the honours due to him. When Roko Tui Nandronga worked
himself into a drunken fury over the accidental burning of his kitchen,
his whole people, chiefs and all, besmeared themselves with ashes, and
crawled to his feet to sue forgiveness; and when the Colonial Government
threatened to deport him for unjust exactions levied on his people, the
very people who had suffered from his extortions implored the Governor
to reinstate him, saying that they loved him as a father. "Can we
picture," asks Teufelsdroeckh, "a naked Duke of Wellington addressing a
naked House of Lords?" Had the sage seen a Fijian chief among his people
he would have marked how the naked brown skin may be clothed in a
divinity that needs no visible garment to lend it dignity.
The first blow at the power of the chiefs was struck unconsciously by
the missionaries. Neither they nor the chiefs themselves realized how
closely the government of the Fijians was bound up with their religion.
No sooner had a missionary gained a foothold in a chief village than the
tabu was doomed, and on the tabu depended half the people's reverence
for rank. The tabu died hard, as such institutions should die. The
first-fruits were still presented to the chief, but they were no longer
carried from him to the temple, since their excuse--as an offering to
persuade the ancestors to grant abundant increase--had passed away. No
longer supported by the priests, the Sacred Chief fell upon evil days.
Disestablished and disendowed, he was left to subsist upon the bounty of
the temporal chief, whose power and dignity had, as yet, suffered no
eclipse, for it was not the interest of the Europeans who were now
crowding into the group to attack it. The chiefs guaranteed their lives
and property, the chiefs sold them land, and protected them in their
occupation of it; the chiefs levied contributions to pay for the
contracts they had made with them; and, in return, the white men were
always ready with muskets and ammunition to help them to keep rebellious
vassals in check.
[Pageheader: SIR A. GORDON'S NATIVE POLICY]
The temporal chiefs sounded the death-knell of their privileges when
they were persuaded to cede their country to the British Government.
Had they realized the consequences they would have preferred the danger
of conquest by Maafu and his Tongans, or bullying by American
commanders, as more than one has since confessed to me. But Thakombau
was weary of bearing the brunt of European aggression, and when
Thakombau persuaded, who was strong enough to hold aloof? The British
Government began wisely enough considering the information at its
disposal. Sir Arthur Gordon (now Lord Stanmore), the first governor, was
gifted with a rare sympathy with native modes of thought. With the
experience of the disastrous native wars in New Zealand before his eyes,
he realized the importance of governing the country through its own
strong native government. To deprive the chiefs of any of their
privileges, to deny them all share in the government of their people,
would have been to convert, not only them, but their people into
enemies. To accept and improve the native system was at once the most
just, the most safe and the most economical policy. His expert advisers
were Sir John Thurston and Mr. David Wilkinson, the former deeply versed
in native politics, and the latter in native customs, if not in
customary law. With their help he set about enclosing the natives as it
were within a ring fence. The islands were divided into provinces
coinciding roughly with the boundaries of the existing confederations as
he found them. The ruling chiefs were made lieutenant-governors under
the title of _Roko Tui_, borrowed from the Sacred Chiefs who had no
longer any use for it; the province was sub-divided into districts under
chiefs with the title of _Mbuli_ ("Crowned"); the system of village
councils was extended to the province, and to the high chiefs
themselves, who met once a year to make recommendations to the Governor.
War and cannibalism were of course put down, and polygamy, which had
long been forbidden by the missionaries, was discountenanced, but
otherwise the existing native customary law was embodied in a code of
regulations passed expressly for the natives to be administered by
native magistrates under European supervision.
Lala
It was here that the first mistake was made. The chiefs' privileges were
well understood; their limitations had never been studied. It was known
that the chief could command the gratuitous service of his subjects,
provided that he fed them while they were working for him. It was not
understood that each confederation had its own system of privileges. Mr.
David Wilkinson, the Native Commissioner, had a most complete knowledge
of the Confederation of Mbua, and he seems somewhat hastily to have
assumed that the Mbua system prevailed _mutatis mutandis_ throughout the
group. Nor does he appear to have clearly understood the difference
between the chiefs' personal privileges and his right to impose taxation
for the good of the commune.
In the native mind the distinction is very clearly marked. There are, in
fact, two distinct kinds of _lala_. The first, which I will call
"personal _lala_" was the payment of rent in the form of tribute or
service to certain powerful chiefs by the tenants settled upon their
land. The second, which is best described as "communal _lala_" was
taxation in the form of tribute or service on behalf of the commune.
[Pageheader: LEVY BY _LALA_]
It is necessary to draw a clear line of distinction between communal and
personal _lala_, because while the former was universal throughout Fiji,
the latter was limited to those confederations in which the chief had
private rights in the land, and also because the two forms of _lala_
originated in totally different institutions, which are by no means
confounded in the native mind. By Europeans, both official and
"anti-official," they seem always to have been confounded. To the
critics of the Colonial Government the word _lala_ is synonymous with
"authorized oppression," or, as a recent writer chooses to call it,
"legalized robbery"; to the framers of the Native Regulation No. 4. of
1877, the two were so confused that they are enumerated haphazard
without any attempt at classification. In that regulation _lala_ is
limited to house-building, planting gardens, road-making, feeding
strangers, cutting and building canoes, and turtle fishing. By
Regulation No. 7 of 1892, the communal aspect of _lala_ was extended by
giving any resolution of the Provincial or District Council that had
received the written assent of the Governor the force of law. The
exercise of _lala_ was limited to the Roko Tui of the province, or the
_Mbuli_ of a district, and the penalty for disobedience to their lawful
commands was a fine not exceeding 2s., or fourteen days' imprisonment in
default, with a slightly increased penalty for a subsequent offence.
Now, of the limitation set forth in the Native Regulations,
house-building, canoe-building, planting gardens and fishing turtle
belong to personal _lala_, though they may occasionally be applied for
communal purposes; while road-making, feeding strangers and complying
with resolutions of the Native Council are certainly exercised for the
good of the commune. And yet the Regulation, put into the hands of a
number of official chiefs, by no means entitled them to personal
privileges that were only due from tenants to their landlord.
Communal Lala
In its communal aspect _lala_ is the axis of the primitive commonwealth.
A native cannot by himself build his house, or dig his plantation, and
he has no money with which to pay others for doing so. Accordingly, he
applies to the chief, who, acting as the mouthpiece of the commune,
summons all the able-bodied men to come to his assistance. In return he
must provide food for them, and he must take his turn in helping each of
them whenever his services are required. Both in the larger
confederations and the miniature republics of the inland tribes, this
kind of _lala_ is applied by the chief of sept or chief of village with
the consent of the council of elders.
Communal _lala_ is also indispensable for the performance of all public
works, such as road-making, bridge-building; the erection of public
meeting-houses, such as the church or _Mbure-ni-sa_, and it was also
legitimately applied to such quasi-communal services as the repair of
the chief's canoe or house, the planting of food and catching fish, for
the entertainment of strangers coming to trade with the tribe. In this
respect the _lala_ corresponds closely with our system of local rates.
When exercised by the supreme chief to levy contributions for the
equipment of an army or an embassy, it may fitly be compared with public
taxation. Without it, the condition of the natives' houses, already bad,
would become worse; their crops, already diminished, would become
insufficient for their support; their villages, often now neglected,
would become unfit for habitation, and the purchase and maintenance of
boats and vessels become impossible. Where it has been abolished, as in
Tonga and the Tongan community settled in Fiji, the necessity for
combination is so keenly felt that the people have evolved a substitute
of their own. Men and women voluntarily form themselves into clubs
called _Kabani_ (company) under various fanciful names, which are called
together under the direction of an elected president to build houses,
plant gardens, and do other combined work for one another. Disobedience
to the order of the president is visited by a money fine, or by
expulsion. A person who belongs to no club can obtain no assistance from
his fellows.
I am not sufficiently acquainted with the history of the _corvee_ in
Egypt or the _rajakarya_ of Ceylon to say whether they, like the _lala_,
were instituted to meet the necessity of combination among a primitive
people. The _rajakarya_, we know, was abolished because the high chiefs
much abused it, but they did not begin to do so until the law of custom
had begun to decay, owing to intercourse with Europeans. We had the
_lala_ ourselves up to the thirteenth century, or the magnificent
churches of the Norman and Gothic periods would never have been built by
people who were content to live in thatched hovels: in Scotland it
survived until much later.
[Pageheader: LIMITATIONS OF THE _LALA_]
The communal _lala_ has suffered far less decay than the personal. The
chief had no selfish interest to tempt him to push it to excess; the
people felt it no injustice, though they were compelled to supply
extravagant contributions of food and property for the frequent
_solevu_. Nor do they grumble at being compelled to contribute a sum of
some L5000 annually for the purchase and repair of vessels owned in
common, for these exactions, burdensome as they are, minister to their
natural vanity. It was when the government applied the principle of
communal _lala_ to sanitation that they began to cry out, for this was a
clear infraction of the law of custom. Their fathers did well enough
with a road twelve inches wide, with bridges formed of a single slippery
log, with village squares unweeded save on the occasion of some great
public function. When the chief orders the widening of roads and
bridges, he is not voicing the want of the commune but the will of the
foreigners.
It is worth noting as an illustration of communal _lala_ that for the
first few years after annexation the communal vessels usually belonged
to the province. The people who contributed the purchase money did not
grumble, because they regarded the collection as a personal levy by
their chief. The vessel was at the disposal of the _Roko Tui_, who
regarded it as his private yacht. But as soon as the people grasped the
idea of owning a vessel in common, they began to subscribe for district
and village boats, in which they enjoyed an ample return for their
money. The government exercises a wise control over such collections. No
money may be levied until the resolution of the Native Council has
received the sanction of the government, and sanction is never accorded
when the levy is likely to put an undue burden upon the people. And here
again is an instance of how one cannot tamper with native customs
without letting loose a pack of unforeseen evils. The collection of
money for the purchase of vessels is a useful spur to activity; it
maintains a profitable colonial industry without putting any strain upon
the natives. But with increased facilities for travelling there is
growing up a practice on the part of both men and women of wandering
from island to island on the village boat, billeting themselves upon the
people they visit, and leaving their families to take care of
themselves.
Personal Lala
If there had been but one system of land tenure throughout the group,
the loose limitation of the personal _lala_ enacted by the government
would have worked well enough, so long as the hereditary chief had been
the holder of the government office. But among no primitive people in
the world, perhaps, is found so great a diversity of institutions
relating to land as among the Fijians. The group being the meeting
ground of the Polynesians, whose ruling aristocracy claimed special
rights in the soil, and the Melanesians, whose institutions are
republican and who hold their waste lands in common, there is every
grade of land tenure ranging from absolute feudalism or serfdom to
peasant proprietorship. And the systems are further complicated by the
natural peculiarities of the soil; in river deltas where cultivable land
is continually shifting and but little labour is required to reclaim
fields from the mud flats, ownership becomes necessarily individual, and
a regular system of transfer springs up.
For several years it did not occur to any one that the right to personal
_lala_ was merely a property in land. For the first few years after
annexation the government had enough to do in settling the land claims
of Europeans without touching the thorny question of native titles. The
Lands Commission established the fact that the chiefs had no right to
sell land without consulting the wishes of their people, but it was
outside the scope of the inquiry to define what their interest in the
land really was. That the government had a suspicion of the truth is
shown by Section 4 of Regulation No. 5 of 1881, in which it is provided
that 40 per cent, of the rent of lands leased to Europeans is to be
given to the Turanga i taukei--a status that exists in all the large
confederations, but which is unknown among the tribes of Melanesian
origin in western Vitilevu.
[Illustration: Building a Chief's House.]
[Pageheader: PERSONAL _LALA_ IS RENT]
It was not until 1890 that the government found leisure to attack the
native boundaries, and then the truth came out. By that time the natives
had come to regard land from a new point of view. The principal
commodity of old Fiji was food. Land had no value except in so far as
it produced food, and, therefore, the mere possession of it was not
coveted unless there were inferiors living on it as cultivators. But as
soon as it was realized that land, when leased to Europeans, produced
money, the earth-hunger of the chiefs increased a thousandfold. They now
laid claims to lands which, twenty years before, they would not have
accepted as a gift, and tried to prove their case by quoting instances
in which the resident cultivators had done them _lala_ service. The
rival claimants would as eagerly assert that the services in question
were given in token of gratitude for protection, or out of mere
neighbourly feeling in times of scarcity--for anything, in short, but
rent, and would allege delicate shades of distinction in the ritual
employed. But all alike admitted that a chief's interest in land would
be established if he could prove an ancient right to order gardens to be
planted by subject tribes, or to demand services from them in
house-building, fishing or contributions for the entertainment of
visitors. In few cases did the chiefs claim an absolute proprietorship
in the soil; they admitted that the land was vested in the people living
upon it, subject to the usual tribute.
Personal _lala_, then, was a landed interest. The chiefs of the large
confederations had acquired it partly by appropriating the common lands
of the tribe, and partly by the conquest or protection of the weaker
tribes that made up their confederations. And if this seems to be but a
slender title to so enormous a privilege, let it be remembered that the
large landed proprietors in Europe have come by their property in no
more regular or legitimate a fashion. Until the establishment of the
Copyhold Commission some of the landed interests in England were quite
as divergent from modern ideas as _lala_. Yet, among those who advocate
that property in land should be transferred from the landlord to the
State, there are few who propose to make the change except upon the
basis of fair compensation to the landlords. It is a recognized
principle of modern legislation that whenever a class has acquired
certain rights by prescription, no measure injuriously affecting such
rights shall be enacted without fair compensation. Policy as well as
justice made it incumbent upon the British Government to confirm in
their ancient rights the chiefs who had voluntarily ceded their country.
But the attempt to reduce these rights to written law was most
unfortunate. Chiefs who were landlords were, at a stroke of the pen,
given the right to exact personal _lala_ from tribes who were not their
tenants; and throughout quite half the group, the right to personal
_lala_ was conferred upon chiefs who were not landlords at all, and had
no claim to it whatever. Confusion became worse confounded when the
hereditary chiefs were expelled from office for misconduct, and persons
of inferior rank were appointed to succeed not only to their official
duties, but to their private rights to personal _lala_. Had the question
been understood it would have been easy to frame a regulation of
limiting the exercise of personal _lala_ to those chiefs entitled to it
by ancient usage, allowing each disputed case to be decided on its
merits, and to limit the holders of government offices of _Roko Tui_ and
_Mbuli_ to _lala_ for communal purposes. It says much for the tenacity
of customary law that the chiefs took so little advantage of the
ignorance of the government--an ignorance that may be compared with the
mistakes made by the Indian government in the matter of the Ryots. The
chiefs of the miniature republics of western Fiji have never attempted
to claim personal _lala_, and even chiefs, such as _Roko Tui Ra_, who
were brought from other provinces by the government to be _Roko Tui_
over people who had never been federated under a paramount chief, have
used their powers very sparingly, although they were placed in the false
position of having to maintain large establishments on very insufficient
salaries.
[Pageheader: _LALA_ RECEIVES LEGAL SANCTION]
The Colonial government has been bitterly attacked by certain European
critics for permitting _lala_ to exist at all. Insufficient knowledge of
the subject has betrayed them into expressions as inaccurate as they are
intemperate. "Slavery," and "Legalized Robbery," are not the strongest
terms that have been applied to _lala_, and the people have been
described as sunk in apathy and despair under the exactions of their
chiefs. Let us see how far these charges are borne out by facts. The
native regulations that defined the _lala_ also provided that--"If any
town shall desire to commute its _lala_ work due to any chief for a
fixed annual payment in money or in kind, and such chief shall have
accepted such commutation with the Governor's sanction, the right of
_lala_ cannot again be resumed by him. A record of all such commutations
shall be kept in the Native Affairs Office." Although many native
communities now receive large incomes from rents and surplus taxes, from
which commutation could be paid, there has been no single instance of an
application to commute the _lala_ during the thirty-one years in which
the Regulation has been in force. If the people felt the _lala_ to be
oppressive they would not have hesitated to tender the trifling annual
payment that would free them from it. There is no doubt that the _lala_
has been pushed beyond its legitimate uses, but always by the chiefs of
the confederations. Personal _lala_ cannot be legitimately applied
without the reciprocal obligation of providing the workers with food
(_vakaotho_), and when the chief neglects this obligation, or uses the
_lala_ in the execution of work for Europeans, the _lala_ at once
becomes, not legalized robbery, for it is illegal, but oppression. An
instance of this occurred before annexation, when, as already related,
the American Government had fined king Thakombau L9000 for the
destruction of Vice-Consul Williams's house in a fire that was probably
accidental. The people of the Tailevu coast were ordered to fish
_beche-de-mer_ for sale to Europeans in order to meet the American
claim, but they refused, though they knew that refusal might cost them
their lives. For Thakombau they would cheerfully have stripped
themselves of all they had, but to collect produce destined for a
foreigner was an infringement of the law of custom.
The instances of oppressive _lala_ nearly all came from one
province--that of Thakaundrove--governed by a young chief who, having
been educated in Sydney, wished to live in European style beyond his
means. For abuse of the _lala_, especially in levying goods for sale to
Europeans, he was punished more than once by the government. The people
who complained against him were those over whom the hereditary right to
_lala_ did not exist, and not those who were the natural tenants of his
estates. It is a significant fact that although the people have largely
lost their fear of lodging complaints against their chiefs, most of the
complaints that are made allege wrongful division of money or land,
while very few indeed are based upon abuse of the _lala_. The commission
appointed in 1893 to inquire into the causes of the decrease of the
natives went very fully into these charges, and reported that throughout
the largest portion of the group, no real discontent existed, and that
in those provinces where the chief had influence enough to abuse the
_lala_, the reported discontent was rather in the nature of grumbling at
the inexorable regularity of the call for tax and communal work than at
the chief's _lala_, for punctual recurrence is peculiarly abhorrent to
the desultory mind of the Fijian. These murmurs, which are not thought
worthy of being formulated in complaints, naturally reach the ears of
the resident Europeans, to whom they are given as excuses for broken
promises, and for disinclination to work. The fact is that _lala_ by a
hereditary chief, unless pushed to great excess, is not considered a
hardship by a Fijian. And seeing how lately the chiefs enjoyed absolute
power, and how the temptations laid in their way by the introduction of
money have increased, it is surprising how little they have abused their
power. It is unreasonable to expect from them an entire freedom from
errors which are not unknown in our own civilized society, where the
rich take advantage of the poor, the strong of the weak, the shrewd of
the simple.
[Pageheader: SPOLIATION SANCTIONED BY CUSTOM]
Defects are common to all social systems, and at the most the legal
recognition of the so-called communal system and the government of the
chiefs was a temporary compromise intended to last only until the people
could walk alone. The hostile critics of the system have viewed the
question solely by the light of modern civilization, holding the belief
that whatever fails to coincide with that system must be forcibly
dragged into line with it. They have forgotten that no social system is
perfect, that in civilized society there are many who own more property
than they can profitably use, while others have scarcely enough to
maintain existence. Our own system is in a process of transition. Our
upper classes, formerly basing their claim of rank upon the purity of
their descent, now rely upon the possession of wealth. The relations of
master and servant having passed from slavery to wage-earning, are now
in the first stage of evolution from wage-earning to profit-sharing. The
system may some day reach perfection, perhaps in the direction of state
socialism, but it is not in its present state a model upon which the
Fijian should be made to mould itself.
Two examples of spoliation recognized by customary law should here be
cited, because though they are "robbery" legalized by the law of custom
(albeit unlawful in the eye of the government), it has never occurred to
any one of the victims to seek redress. The first was exercised by what
is known as the right of the _vasu_ which has its origin in the peculiar
marriage laws of the Fijians. Every Fijian was said to be _vasu_ to the
clan of his mother, and in theory had a lien over all the property of
her family, but of course only the sons of women of high rank would dare
to claim such a right, though low-born _vasus_ could always count upon a
welcome at the hands of their cousins. To the rights of the _vasu levu_
(great _vasu_), _e.g._ the son of the reigning chief's daughter or
sister who was royal on both sides, there was practically no limit. He
might ransack the houses, sweep the plantations bare, kill the pigs and
violate the women without a murmur from the unfortunate dependants of
his kinsmen. In this way villages are occasionally swept of everything
of value. I do not think that in former days the people felt anything
but honour in being so singled out for plunder, and even now, when they
are fully aware of their legal right to refuse, the ties of custom are
stronger than their new-born love of independence. They give their
property with an outward show of good-humour, and vent their
mortification in grumbling among themselves, and to the neighbouring
Europeans. I remember Mbuli Malolo, who, as chiefs went, had a high
reputation for care of the welfare of his people, taking his
ten-year-old daughter, just recovered from sickness, for a tour round
the poverty-stricken islands of the Mamanutha group. The little girl was
led from house to house to point out every article of clothing and
furniture that happened to take her childish fancy; and, everything she
chose being swept up and carried instantly to her canoe, she left a
trail of destitution behind her. Though the poor people knew that I had
power to redress their grievance, they made no complaint; they only
mentioned the matter to account for their abject poverty. In 1887 I
offered to interfere on behalf of certain natives of Koro, thus
despoiled by one of the Mbau chiefs, but the natives themselves begged
me to take no action, saying that it was their custom to give whatever
their chiefs asked, and that their grumbling to Europeans who had given
me the information was not to be taken seriously. In this they could not
have been actuated by fear of the chief's resentment, for he belonged to
another province, and had no official relations with them.
[Pageheader: NATIVES MAY COMMUTE _LALA_]
The other example is the curious custom arising out of the tie of
_vei-tauvu_, which, though not due to the influence or authority of
chiefs, has also sometimes the effect of stripping a village of all
movable property. As already explained, the people of two villages, who,
though now widely separated, worship the same god--that is, trace their
origin to a common source--are said to be _vei-tauvu_, and have the
privilege, when visiting one another, of killing the domestic animals,
stripping the food plantations and appropriating all chattel property
belonging to their hosts. A remarkable instance of this occurred in
1892. The formerly influential, but now quite insignificant, island of
Nayau, on the eastern confines of the group, contrived, with the utmost
difficulty, to raise a hundred pounds for the purchase of a cutter. In
due course the people came to Suva to take over their little vessel. On
the first night out, whether by accident or design, they dropped anchor
at the chief village of the tribe of Notho. Under ordinary circumstances
they would have behaved themselves as befitted persons of their
insignificance, but, no sooner had they anchored than a depu
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