The Pacific Triangle
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Title: The Pacific Triangle
Author: Sydney Greenbie
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PACIFIC TRIANGLE ***
THE PACIFIC TRIANGLE
[Illustration: ERUPTION OF VOLCANO ON THE ISLAND OF KYUSHU, JAPAN
To the world a symbol: to Japan a fact]
THE
PACIFIC TRIANGLE
BY
SYDNEY GREENBIE
AUTHOR OF "JAPAN: REAL AND IMAGINARY"
ILLUSTRATED
WITH PHOTOGRAPHS
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1921
Copyright, 1921, by
THE CENTURY CO.
Printed in U. S. A.
TO BARRIE
WHO DID HIS BEST TO
PREVENT THE WRITING OF THIS
BOOK, IN THE HOPE THAT HE MAY
SOME DAY READ IT AND REPENT OF HIS SINS.
PREFACE
This book is an attempt to bring within focus the most outstanding
factors in the Pacific. With the exception of Chapter II, which deals
with the origin of the Polynesian people, there is hardly an incident in
the whole book that has not come within the scope of my own personal
experience. Hence this is essentially a travel narrative. I have
confined myself to the task of interpreting the problems of the Pacific
in the light of the episodes of everyday life. Wherever possible, I have
tried to let the incident speak for itself, and to include in the
picture the average ideals of the various races, together with my own
impressions of them and my own reflections. The field is a tremendous
one. It encompasses the most important regions that lie along the great
avenues of commerce and general intercourse. The Pacific is a great
combination of geographical, ethnological, and political factors that is
extremely diverse in its sources. I have tried to discern within them a
unit of human commonality, as the seeker after truth is bound to do if
his discoveries are to be of any value.
But the result has been an unconventional book. For I have sometimes
been compelled to make unity of time and place subservient to that of
subject matter. Hence the reader may on occasion feel that the book
returns to the same field more than once. That has been unavoidable. The
problems that are found in Hawaii are essentially the same as those in
Samoa, though differing in degree. It has therefore been necessary,
after surveying the whole field in one continuous narrative of my own
journey, to assemble stories, types, and descriptions which illustrate
certain problems, in separate chapters, regardless of their
geographical settings. If the reader bears this in mind he will not be
surprised in Book Two to find himself in Fiji, Samoa, Hawaii, or New
Zealand all at once--for issues are always more important than
boundaries.
The plan of the book has been to give the historical approach to the
Pacific and its native races; then to take the reader upon a journey of
over twenty thousand miles around the Pacific. I hope that he will come
away with a clear impression of the immensity of the Ocean, of the
diversity of its natural and human elements, and the splendor and
picturesqueness of its make-up. Out of this review certain problems
emerge, the problems of the relations of native and alien races, of
marriages and divorces, of markets and ideals--problems that affect the
primitive races in their own new place in the world. But over and above
and about these come the issues that involve the more advanced races of
Asia, Australasia, and America--where they impinge upon each other and
where their interests in these minor races center. This is the logic of
the Pacific.
Though the importance of these problems is now obvious to the world, I
feel grateful to those who encouraged me while I still felt myself
almost like a voice crying in the wilderness, on the subject. I
therefore feel specially indebted to the editors of _North American
Review_, _World's Work_ and the _Outlook_, who first published some of
the material here incorporated. But so rapid has been the movement of
events that in no case has it been possible for me to use more than the
essence of the ideas there published. In order to bring them up to date,
they have been completely re-written and made an integral part of this
book. Two or three of the descriptive chapters have also appeared in
_Century Magazine_ and _Harper's Monthly_, for permission to reprint
which I am indebted to them.
There is a further indebtedness which is much more difficult of
acknowledgment. To my wife, Marjorie Barstow, I am under obligation
not only for her steadfast encouragement, but for her judgment,
understanding, and untiring patience, without which my career of
authorship would have been trying indeed.
SYDNEY GREENBIE.
Greensboro, Vermont,
August 4, 1921.
CONTENTS
BOOK ONE
HISTORICAL AND TRAVEL MATERIAL
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE HEART OF THE PACIFIC 3
II THE MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES 15
III OUR FRONTIER IN THE PACIFIC 30
IV THE SUBLIMATED, SAVAGE FIJIANS 52
V THE SENTIMENTAL SAMOANS 79
VI THE APHELION OF BRITAIN 108
VII ASTRIDE THE EQUATOR 128
VIII THE AUSTRALIAN OUTLANDS 143
IX OUR PEG IN ASIA 158
X BRITAIN'S ROCK IN ASIA 168
XI CHINA'S EUROPEAN CAPITAL 179
XII WORLD CONSCIOUSNESS 192
BOOK TWO
DISCUSSION OF NATIVE PROBLEMS--PERSONAL AND SOCIAL
XIII EXIT THE NOBLE SAVAGE 205
XIV GIVE US OUR VU GODS AGAIN! 222
XV HIS TATTOOED WIFE 237
XVI GIVING HEARTS A NEW CHANCE 254
XVII "THIS LITTLE PIG WENT TO MARKET" 265
BOOK THREE
DISCUSSION OF THE POLITICAL PROBLEMS INVOLVING AUSTRALASIA,
ASIA AND AMERICA
XVIII AUSTRALASIA 281
XIX JAPAN AND ASIA 297
XX AMERICA 312
XXI WHERE THE PROBLEM DOVETAILS 330
XXII AUSTRALIA AND THE ANGLO-JAPANESE ALLIANCE 347
XXIII POLITICAL ALLIES AND FINANCIAL CONSORTS 364
XXIV UNCHARTED SEAS 384
APPENDIX 395
INDEX 397
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Eruption of volcano on the island of Kyushu, Japan _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Map of the Pacific 16
Diamond head near Honolulu 20
The hulk of the German man-of-war, the _Adler_ 20
After seven days of sea--this emerged 21
Hilo, Hawaii 21
Even Fijians are loath to forget the arts of their forefathers 28
In giant canoes Heliolithic immigrants roamed the South Seas 29
There are only a few Chinese women in Hawaii 36
A sage in a china shop at Honolulu 36
Feminine propriety 37
Whoa! Let's have our picture taken 37
Miles away rose the fumes of Kilauea 44
The largest cauldron of molten rock on earth 44
A river of rock pouring out into the sea 45
Whirling eddies of lava undermining frozen lava projections 45
Where the tides turn to stone 48
A blizzard of fuming heat 48
The lake of spouting molten lava 49
A corner of Suva, Fiji 64
Food for a day's gossip 64
The long and the short of it 65
A Hindu patriarch 65
The scowl indicates a complex 68
Instructor of the Fijian constabulary 68
A Fijian Main Street 69
Little Fijians 69
One of the most gifted of Fijian chiefs 76
Cacarini (Katherine), the chief's daughter 76
Fijians dance from the hip up 77
A Fijian wedding 77
The street along the waterfront of Apia, Samoa 96
I thought the village back of Apia, Samoa, was deserted, but
it was only the noon hour 96
Tattooing of the legs is an essential in Samoa 97
Contact with California created this combination of scowl,
bracelets and boy's boots--but Fulaanu beside her was
incorruptible 97
Dunedin, New Zealand 112
Bridges are still luxuries in many places in New Zealand 112
The fiords and sounds of New Zealand 113
Lake Wanaka, New Zealand 113
The S. S. _Aurora_ 128
Mount Cook of the New Zealand Alps in summer 128
Circular quay, Sydney, Australia 129
Monument to Captain Cook 129
One of the oldest Australian residences is now a public
domain 144
The interior of a wealthy sheep station owner's home in
Melbourne 144
Australian blacks in their native element 145
An Australian black in Melbourne 145
Filipino lighters drowsing in the evening shadows 160
The docile water buffalo is used to walking in mud 160
One can throw a brick and hit seven cathedrals in Manila 161
Cool and silent are the mossy streets of the walled city
of Manila 161
In China drinking-water, soap-suds, soup and sewers all find
their source in the same stream 176
Shanghai youngsters putting their heads together to make
us out 176
This old woman is laying down the law to the wild young
things of China 177
China could turn these mud houses into palaces if she
wished--she is rich enough 177
Fujiyama 192
Sea, earth and sky 193
This Hindu has usurped the job of the chieftains' daughters 224
An Indian coolie village 224
A Maori Haka in New Zealand 225
A Maori canoe hurdling race 225
Three views of a Maori woman 240
A group of whites and half-castes in Samoa 241
A ship-load of "picture-brides" arriving at Seattle 241
A Maori woman with her children 241
Beauty is more than skin-deep 256
A half-caste Fijian maiden 257
A full-blooded Fijian maiden 257
Fijian village 272
Little fish went to this market 272
Good luck must attend these traders at the doors of the
cathedrals in Manila 273
A Fijian bazar is a red letter day 273
The mountains are called the Remarkables 284
The Blue Mountains of Australia 284
Australia denuding herself 285
Australia is not all desert and plain 288
People are small amidst Australia's giant tree ferns 289
Japan's first reaction to foreign influence 304
Second stage in Westernization 304
Third stage in Westernization 305
Fourth stage in Westernization 305
Lord Lansdowne and Baron Tadasu Hayashi 352
Prince Ito 352
Dr. Sun Yat-Sen 352
Thomas W. Lamont 353
Wellington Koo 353
Yukio Osaki, M.P. and Ex-Minister of Justice 353
BOOK ONE
HISTORICAL AND TRAVEL MATERIAL
CHAPTER I
THE HEART OF THE PACIFIC
_The First Side of The Triangle_
1
... stared at the Pacific--and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Exactly four centuries after the event immortalized by Keats, I
outstripped Balboa's most fantastic dreams by setting out upon the
Pacific and traversing the length and breadth of it. "It is a sight," we
are told, "in beholding which for the first time any man would wish to
be alone." I was. But whereas Balboa's desires were accomplished in
having obtained sight of the Pacific, that achievement only whetted
mine. He said:
You see here, gentlemen and children mine, how our desires are
being accomplished, and the end of our labors. Of that we ought to
be certain, for, as it has turned out true what King Comogre's son
told of this sea to us, who never thought to see it, so I hold for
certain that what he told us of there being incomparable treasures
in it will be fulfilled. God and His blessed Mother who have
assisted us, so that we should arrive here and behold this sea,
will favor us that we may enjoy all that there is in it.
The story of how far he was so assisted is part of the tale of this
book, for in all the wanderings which are the substance of my
accomplishment I can recall having met with but a half-dozen of Balboa's
kinsmen. Instead there are streaming backward and forward across the
Pacific descendants of men Balboa hated and of others of whom he knew
nothing.
Balboa was the first to see the ocean. He had left his men behind just
as they were about to reach the peak from which he viewed it. But he was
not the first to step upon its shores. He sent some of his men down, and
of them one, Alonso Martin, was the first to have that pleasure. Martin
dipped his sword dramatically into the brine and took possession of it
all as far as his mind's eye could reach. Yet to none of the men was
this vast hidden world more than a vision and a hope, and the accidental
name with which Magellan later christened it seems, by virtue of the
motives of gain which dominated these adventurers, anything but
descriptive. To be pacific was not the way of the kings of Castile; nor,
sad to say, is it the way of most of their followers.
What was it that Balboa took possession of in the name of his Castilian
kings? Rather a courageous gamble, to say the least. The dramatic and
fictional possibilities of such wholesale acquisition are illimitable.
In the mid-Pacific were a million or more savage cannibals; in the
far-Pacific, races with civilizations superior to his own. At that very
time China was extending the Great Wall and keeping in repair the Grand
Canal which had been built before Balboa's kings were chiefs. Japan was
already a nation with arts and crafts, and a social state sufficiently
developed to be an aggressive influence in the Oriental world, making
inroads on Korea through piracy. Korea was powerful enough to force
Japan to make amends. Four years after Balboa's discovery the Portuguese
arrived in Canton and opened China for the first time to the European
world. The Dutch were beginning to think of Java. It was hardly Balboa's
plan to make of all these a little gift for his king: his act was but
the customary flourish of discoverers in those days. Men who loved
romance more than they loved reality were ready to wander over the
unknown seas and rake in their discoveries for hire. Balboa, Magellan,
Drake, roamed the seas out of sheer love of wind and sail. Many a man
set forth in search of treasure never to be heard from again; some only
to have their passage guessed by virtue of the signs of white blood in
the faces of some of the natives. For two hundred years haphazard
discoveries and national jealousies confused rather than enlightened the
European world. But late in the eighteenth century, after a considerable
lessening of interest in exploration, Captain James Cook began that
memorable series of voyages which added more definite knowledge to the
geographical and racial make-up of the South Seas than nearly all the
other explorers put together. The growth of the scientific spirit and
the improvement in navigation gave him the necessary impetus. Imbued
with scientific interest, he went to observe the transit of Venus and to
make close researches in the geography of the Pacific. But to George
Vancouver falls the praise due to a constructive interest in the people
whose lands he uncovered. Wherever he went he left fruits and domestic
animals which contributed much to the happiness of the primitives, and
probably laid the foundation for the future colonization of these
scattered islands by Europeans.
Backward and forward across the Pacific through four centuries have
moved the makers of this new Atlantis. First from round Cape Horn,
steering for the setting sun, then from the Australian continent to the
regions of Alaska, these shuttles of the ages have woven their fabric of
the nations. Now the problem is, what is going to be done with it?
I suppose I was really no worse than most people in the matter of
geography when I set forth on my venture. Though the Pacific had lain at
my feet for two years, I seem to have had no definite notions of the
"incomparable treasures" that lay therein. Japan was stored away in my
mind as something to play with. Typee, the cannibal Marquesas--ah! there
was something real and vigorous! Then the South Sea maidens! Ideal
labor conditions in New Zealand! Australia was Botany Bay; the
Philippines, the water cure. Confucius was confusion to me, but
Lao-tsze, the great sage of China--in his philosophy I had found a
meeting-ground for East and West.
But I was sizzling with curiosity. I wanted to bring within my own range
of experience that "unplumbed, salt estranging sea" with its area of
seventy million square miles, equivalent to "three Atlantics, seventy
Mediterraneans," and--aside from the hundreds of millions of people
round its shore--the seventy-odd millions within its bosom. Yet of the
myths, the beliefs, the aspirations of these peoples, even the most
knowing gave contradictory accounts, and curiosity was perforce my
compass.
2
Something in a voyage westward across the Pacific gives one the sense of
a great reunion; it is not a personal experience, but an historic
sensation. One may have few incidents to relate, there may be only an
occasional squall. But in place of events is an abstraction from world
strife, a heading for the beginning of a cycle of existence--for Asia,
the birthplace of the human race. The feeling is that of one making a
tour of the universe which has lasted ten thousand centuries and is but
at the moment nearing completion. For eons the movement has been a
westward one. Races have succumbed to races in this westward reach for
room. Pursuing the retreating glaciers, mankind snatched up each inch of
land released, rushing wildly outward. After the birth of man there was
a split, in which some men went westward and became Europeans, some
eastward and became Asiatics. The Amerindians were the kick of that
human explosion eastward which occurred some time during the Wurm ice
age.
One cannot grasp the significance of the Pacific who crosses it too
swiftly. Every mapped-out route, every guide-book must be laid aside,
and schedules must cease to count. With half a world of water to
traverse, its immensity becomes a reality only when one permits oneself
to be wayward, with every whim a goal.
A fellow-passenger said to me, "My boss has given me two weeks'
vacation."
"Mine has given me a lifetime," I answered.
In that mood I watched the _Lurline_ push its way into the San Francisco
fogs and out through the fog-choked Golden Gate. The fogs stayed with us
a space beyond and were gone, and the wide ocean lay in every direction
roundabout us.
I was bound for Japan by relays. Unable to secure through passage to the
Land of the Rising Sun, I did the next best thing and booked for
Honolulu. There I planned to wait for some steamer with an unused berth
that would take me to Kyoto, Japan, in time to attend the coronation of
the Tenno, the crownless Emperor. After all, Honolulu was not such an
unfavorable spot in which to prepare my soul for the august sight of
emperor-worship on a grand scale, I thought.
And at last I was out upon the bosom of the Pacific, sailing without
time limit or fixed plan, sailing where did Cook and Drake and
Vancouver, and knowing virtually as little of what was about me as did
they. Our ship became the axis round which wheeled the universe, and
progress "a succession of days which is like one day." We went on and
on, and still the circle was true. We moved, yet altered nothing. When
the sky was overcast, the ocean paled in sympathy; when it was bright,
the whitecapped, cool blue surface of the sea abandoned itself to the
light. At night the cleavage between sea and sky was lost. Then we lost
distance, altitude, depth, and even speed. All became illusive--a time
for strong reason.
Then came a storm. The vast disk, the never-shifting circle shrank in
the gathering mist. From the prow of the ship, where I loved most to be,
the world became more lonely. The iron nose of the vessel burrowed into
the blue-green water, thrusting it back out of the way, curling it over
upon a volume of wind which struggled noisily for release. The blue
became deeper, the strangled air assumed a thick gray color and emerged
in a fit of sputtering querulousness. But the ship lunged on, as
unperturbed as the Bhodistava before Mara, the Evil One, sure that he
was becoming Buddha.
We were dipping southward and soon tasted the full flavor of the
luscious tropical air. The ship never more than swayed with the swells.
During the days that followed there was never more than the most
elemental squall. The nights were as clear and balmy as the days. For
seven days we danced and made merry to Hawaiian melodies thrummed by an
Hawaiian orchestra, or screeched by an American talking-machine, or
hammered by a piano-player. The warm air began to play the devil with
our feelings.
Thus seven days passed. I had taken to sleeping out on deck, under the
open sky. The moon was brilliant, the sea as smooth as a pond. I was
awakened by whispered conversation at five o'clock of that last day and
found a group of women huddling close on the forward deck. Their hair
was streaming down their backs, their feet were bare, and their bodies
wrapped in loose kimonos. Some of the officers were pointing to the
southwestern horizon, where a barely perceptible streak of smoke was
rising over the rim of the sea. It was from Kilauea, the volcano on the
island of Hawaii, two hundred miles away.
The air was fresh and balmy as on the day the earth was born. Rolling
cumulous clouds sought to postpone the day by retarding the rising sun.
Lighthouse lights blinked their warnings. Molokai, the leper island,
emerged from the darkness. A blaze of sunlight broke through the clouds
and day was in full swing. And as we neared the island of Oahu, a
full-masted wind-jammer, every strip of sail spread to the breeze, came
gliding toward us from Honolulu.
By noon we were in the open harbor,--a fan-spread of still water. The
_Lurline_ glided on and turned to the right and we were before the
little city of Honolulu. I can still see the young captain on the
bridge, pacing from left to right, watching the water, issuing quiet
directions to the sailor who transmitted them, by indicator, to the
engine-room. We edged up to the piers amid a profusion of greetings from
shore and appeals for coins from brown-skinned youngsters who could a
moment later be seen chasing them in the water far below the surface.
This, then, is progress. In 1778, Captain Cook was murdered by these
islanders. To-day they "grovel" in the seas for petty cash. One hundred
and forty years! Seven days!
3
But Hawaii was only my half-way house. I was still reaching out for
Japan. According to the advice of steamship agencies I might have waited
seven years before any opportunity for getting there would come my way.
At twelve o'clock one day I learned that the _Niagara_ was in port. She
was to sail for the Antipodes at two. By two I was one of her
passengers. Hadn't "my boss" given me a lifetime's vacation?
The world before me was an unknown quantity, as it doubtless is to at
least all but one in a million of the inhabitants of our globe. My
ticket said Sydney, Australia. How long would it take us? Two weeks?
What should we see en route? Two worlds? Here, in one single journey I
should cut a straight line across the routes of Magellan, Drake, Cook,
and into those of Tasman,--all the great navigators of the last four
hundred years. Here, then, I was to trace the steps of Melville, of
Stevenson, of Jack London,--largely with the personal recommendations of
Jack,--and of one then still unfamed, Frederick O'Brien. All the courage
in the face of the unknown, all the conflicts between the world
civilizations in their various stages of development, all the dreams of
romance, of future welfare and achievement, would unfold in my progress
southward and fall into two much-talked-of and little-understood
divisions--East and West. I was to discover for myself what it was that
Balboa and his like had taken possession of in their grandiloquent
fashion and were ready to defend against all comers. Yet the flag at the
mast was not Balboa's flag, nor Tasman's, and the passengers among whom
fate had wheeled me were, with one exception, neither Spanish nor Dutch,
but British. As long as I moved from San Francisco westward and as long
as I remained in Honolulu, I was, as far as customs and people were
concerned, in America. But from the moment I considered striking off
diagonally across the South Seas in the direction of the Antarctic I was
thrown among Britons. The clerk in the steamship office was Canadian,
the steamer was British, the passengers were British, and the cool,
casual way in which the _Niagara_ kicked herself off from the pier and
slipped out into the harbor was confirmation of a certain cleavage. For
there was none of the gaiety which accompanies the arrival and departure
of American vessels,--no music, no serpentines, no cheering. We just
took to our screws and the open sea as though glad to get away from an
uncordial "week-end." This was a British liner that was to cut across
the equator, to climb over the vast ridge of earth and dip down into the
Antipodes. We were to leave America far behind. Henceforward, with but
the single exception of tiny Pago Pago, Samoa, we could not enter an
American owned port,--and on this route would miss even that one. And
now that mandates have become the vogue, there is in all that world of
water hardly an important spot that does not fly the Union Jack. The
sense of private ownership in all that could be surveyed gave to the
bearing of the passengers an air of dignity which was not always latent
in the individual.
Meanwhile the ship pressed steadily on, coldly indifferent, fearless and
emotionless. We were nearing the equator, and the days in its
neighborhood steeped us all in drooping feebleness. Climate gets us all,
ultimately. We forgot one another beneath the heavy weight of
nothingness which hangs over that equatorial world. Sleep within my
cabin was impossible, so I had the steward bring me a mattress out on
deck. At midnight a heavy wind turned the air suddenly so cold that I
had to secure a blanket. The wind howling round the mast and the
flapping of the canvas sounded like a tragedy without human agency. The
night was pitch-black and the blackness was intensified by intermittent
streaks of lightning. But there was no rain.
It was Tuesday, yet the next day was Thursday. Where Wednesday went I
have never been able to find out. We had arrived at the point in the
Pacific where one day swallows up another and leaves none. The European
world, measuring the earth from its own vantage-point, had allotted no
day for the mid-Pacific, so that instead of arriving at Suva, Fiji, in
proper sequence of time, we were both a day late and a day ahead. We had
cut across the 180th meridian, where time is dovetailed.
That afternoon we sighted land for the first time in seven days. Alofa
Islands, pale blue, smooth-edged, were a living lie to reality. A
peculiar feeling came over me in passing without touching terra firma.
It was like the longing for the sun after days and days of gray, the
longing for rain in the desert. It was the longing for the return to the
actualities of life after days on the unvariable sea. And presently I
was in Fiji, and the _Niagara_ sailed on without me. Once again I
changed my course to wander among the South Seas and leave Sydney for
the future.
Yet even on land he who has been brought up on a continent cannot escape
a feeling of isolation, the consciousness of being completely surrounded
by water. After you have had the deep beneath you for seven days, and
again seven days, you begin to feel that even the islands are but
floating in the same fluid. The fact that you cannot go anywhere without
riding the waves, and that it takes two whole days by steamer to get
from Fiji to Samoa, and four from Fiji to New Zealand, and then four
again between New Zealand and Australia, a water-consciousness takes
possession of you, and the islands become mere ledges upon which you
rest occasionally. Something of the joy of being a bird on the wing is
the experience of the traveler in the Pacific seas.
Imagine, then, my delight and surprise, early one morning on my return
trip from Samoa to Fiji, to find the _Talune_ sidling up to an unknown
isle considerably off our course. It was, we were told, the island of
Niuafoou, and was visited every month or so to deliver and take off the
mails. It was a chill morning. Everything was blue with morning cold.
The waves dashed in desperation against the cliffs. Glad was I that we
were not run ashore, for I have never yet been able to see the virtue in
ice-cold sea-water. Fancy our consternation when down slid a native,
head first, from the bluff half a mile away into the water, as we slide
into a swimming-pool. For a moment he was lost behind the tossing
crests. Then we saw him coming slowly toward us, resting on a plank and
paddling with his free hand, seeming like a tremendous water-spider.
Tied to a stick like to a mast was a tightly wrapped bundle of mail. The
_Talune_ kept swerving like an impatient horse, waiting for the arrival
of that amphibian. When he came alongside he dropped the little bundle
into a bucket let down to him at the end of a rope, and kicked himself
away. A second man arrived with a packet,--the parcels-post man of
Niuafoou. A third came merely as an inspector. Meanwhile, on the bluff
the whole community had gathered for the irregular lunar event.
Or, days later, after my second call at Fiji as the ship pressed
steadily on toward Auckland, New Zealand, we passed the island of Mbenga
where dwell the mystic fire-walkers so vividly portrayed by Basil
Thomson in his "South Sea Yarns." I wished that I had had a "callous" on
my habits in cleanliness to protect me from the unpleasantnesses of the
vessel, as have those Fijian fire-walkers on their soles, then I should
have been happier. Their soles are half an inch thick. I should have
needed a callous at least two inches thick to endure the _Talune_ more
than the six days it took us to get from Samoa to Auckland.
Early in the morning of the fourth day of our journey from Suva, Fiji,
we passed the Great Barrier Island, which stands fifty miles from
Auckland. We crept down the Hauraki Gulf, passed Little Barrier Island,
and entered Waitemata Harbor, where we dropped anchor, awaiting the
doctor's examination. Just from the tropics, I was taken by surprise to
find the wind biting and chill as we went farther south, and here at the
gates of Auckland the coat I had unnecessarily carried on my arm for
months became most welcome. Before I could adjust myself to the new
landing-place, I had to readjust my mind to another fact which had never
been any vital part of my psychology,--that henceforth the farther south
I should go the colder it would feel, and that though it was the sixth
of November, the longer I remained the warmer it would become. In the
presence of such phenomena, losing a thirteenth day of one's month while
crossing the 180th meridian was a commonplace. The habits of a short
lifetime told me to put on my coat, for winter was coming. But here I
had come amongst queer New Zealanders who told me to unbutton it, even
to shed it, for spring, they assured me, was not far behind.
And then for the first time in months I felt the spirit of the
landlubber work its way into my consciousness again. I had cut a
diagonal line of 6,000 miles across a mysterious, immeasurable sea, and
my reason, my heart and my body longed for respite from its benumbing
influence. I had seen enough to last me a long time. I fairly ached for
retirement inland, for sight of a cool, still lake, for contact with
snow-capped mountain peaks. More than all else, I yearned for the cold,
for the scent of snow, for the snug satisfaction of self-generated
warmth. My soul and my body seemed seared and scorched by the blazing
tropical sun under the wide, unsheltered seas. Later, when I should be
"well" again, I thought, I would risk the climb up over the equator, the
curve of the world that lies so close to the sun.
And now that I was settled I had time to reflect on all I had seen. I
had cut a diagonal line through the heart of the Pacific, and had seen
in succession the various types of native races--the Hawaiians, the
Fijians, the Samoans--while all about me were the Maories. So I reviewed
and classified my memories before I started north on another diagonal
course which led me among the transplanted white peoples of Australia
and Asia. Yet one question preceded all others: whence came these
Pacific peoples and when? The answer to that must be given before
specific descriptions of the South Sea Islanders can be clear.
CHAPTER II
THE MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES
1
Not even the speed of the fastest steamer afloat can transport the white
man from his sky-scraper and subway civilization over the hump of the
earth and down into the South Seas without his undergoing a
psychological metamorphosis that is enchanting. He cannot take his
hard-and-fast materialistic illusions along with him. Were he a
passenger on the magic carpet itself, and both time and space
eliminated, the instant he found himself among the tawny ones he would
forget enough of square streets and square buildings, square meals and
square deals, to become another person. Upon that cool dewdrop of the
universe, the Pacific, the giant steamer chugs one rhythmically to rest
and one dreams as only one in a new life can dream, without being
disturbed by past or future.
One slumbers through this adolescent experience with the smile and the
conceit of youth. At last one arrives. The enormous ship, upon whose
deck have shuffled the games of children too busy to play, slips away
from the pier and is swallowed up in the evening twilight. Left thus
detached from iron and certainty, one wonders what would happen if there
never should be iron and certainty again in life. What if that ship
should never return, nor any other, and the months and years should lose
track of themselves, and memory become feeble as to facts and fumble
about in hyperbolic aspirations? What if the actualities that knotted
and gnarled one's emotions, or flattened them out in precise
conventions, should cease to affect one's daily doings? What if, for
you, never again were there to be factories and dimensions of purse, or
ambitions that ramble about in theories and ethics, but only the need of
filling one's being with food and converting it into energy for the
further procuring of food, and the satisfaction of impulses that lead
only to the further vent of impulse,--and in that way a thousand years
went by? What would the white man be when the lure of adventure and
discovery suddenly revealed him to a world phenomenally different from
the one he left behind in the bourn of his forgotten past?
As I let myself loose from such moorings as still held me in touch with
my world, the wonder grew by inversion. When the _Niagara_, wingless
dinosaur of the deep, slid out into the lagoon beyond, I felt overcome
with a sense of drooping loneliness, like one going off into a trance,
like one for whom amazement is too intoxicating.
It had not been that way in Hawaii, for there already the grip of the
girder has made rigid the life of nature and the people. But down
beneath the line one could still look over the corrugated iron roofs of
sheds and forget. Everywhere in the Fiji or the Samoan islands something
of antiquity cools one's senses with unheard questionings. Instantly one
wants to know how it happens that these people came to be here, what
accident or lure of paleolithic life led them into this isolation. One
cannot get away from the feeling--however far inland one may go--that
the outer casings of this little lump of solid earth beneath us is a
fluent sea, a sea endless to unaided longing. Homesickness never was
like that, for ordinary homesickness is too immediate, too personal. But
this longing for contact which comes over one in the mid-Pacific islands
is universal; it is a sudden consciousness of eternity, and of the atom.
One begins to conceive of days and events and conditions as absolutely
incompatible with former experience. One's mind is set aglow with
inquiry, and over and over again, as one looks into the face of some
shy native or some spoiled flapper, one wonders whence and how. And a
slight fear: what if I, too, were now unable ever to return, should I
soon revert to these customs, to the feeling of distance between men and
women, to the nakedness, not so much of body as of mind?
That was what happened to Tahiti, to Maoriland, to Hawaii, to the
popping peaks of illusive worlds which to ante-medieval isolated Europe
could not exist because it did not know of them. For thousands of years
these innumerable islands in the Pacific had been the habitation of
passionate men, of men who had come out in their vessels from over
_Kim's_ way with decks that carried a hundred or more persons; persons
who doubtless also entertained themselves with games because too busy to
play; persons with hopes and aspirations. A thousand and more years ago
the present inhabitants of Polynesia may have dreamed of rearing a new
India, a wider Caucasia, just as the Pilgrims and the persecuted of
Europe dreamed, or the ambitious Englanders of New Zealand. Welcomed
here and ejected there, they passed on and on and on, as far as Samoa
and Tahiti. And slowly the film of forgetfulness fixed their
experiences. The big ships and the giant canoes rotted in the harbors.
They had come to stay. The sun was burning their bridges behind them.
What need for means of going farther? Eden had been found. And the soft,
sweet flesh of young maidens began, generation after generation, to be
covered with the tattooings of time, the records of the number of times
the race had been reborn. So, while the nakedness of youth was being
clothed, mind after mind stored up unforgettable tales of exploit and of
passion, till fancy sang with triumph over things transitory, and tawny
men felt that never would they have to wander more.
Is not this the history of every race on earth? Has not every nation
gloated over its antiquity and its security? Was not permanence a
surety, and pride the father of ease? And have not song and story been
handed down from generation to generation, or, with the more skilled and
the more proud races, been graved in stone or wax or wood? And have not
the more mighty and the more venturesome come over the pass, or over the
crest and invaded and conquered and changed?
So it was when Polynesia awoke to see that which could only be a god,
because fashioned in the form of its own imaginings, swept by its
gorgeous sails into view,--the ship of Captain Cook. Thus the racial
memories that had lain dormant in the Polynesians for centuries were
revived by Europeans. Narrative renders vividly their surprise and
wonder, especially on seeing the vessel girt in iron such as had drifted
in on fragments from the unknown wrecks and had become to these natives
more precious than gold.
It seems to me that in the hearts and minds of heliolithic man when he
ventured eastward across the chain of islands which links, or rather
separates, Polynesia and Melanesia from its home in Asia, he must have
felt just as Cook and Vancouver and Magellan felt. Bit by bit I picked
up those outer resemblances which give to men the world over their basic
brotherliness. They may hate one another justly, but they cannot get
away from that fraternity. And they generally reveal relationship when
they least expect it.
Thus, as we kicked our way up the smooth waters of the Rewa River, Fiji,
in a launch laden with black faces and proud shocks of curly hair, mixed
with sleek people of slightly lighter-hued India, a suggestion of the
origin of these people came to me. As these alien Indians, so must have
come these native negroids. I should have felt successful in my method
of inquiry, hopeful of feeling my way into a solution of this wondering,
had not an outrigger canoe dragged itself across our course with a
dilapidated sail of bark-cloth.
"Where did they learn to sail?" I asked the white skipper.
"They have always known it," he answered. "But you seldom see these
sails nowadays."
I wanted to take a snap-shot of it, but the lights of evening, as those
of tradition, were against me, and we were clipping along too rapidly.
The last example of an art which brought the whole race eastward was
being carelessly retained.
A few days later I caught another glimpse of a past that was working my
sun-baked brain too much. We were going up the river in a comfortable
launch, some missionaries and I, their unknown guest. We were about
twenty or thirty miles up the Rewa. With us was a young native who spoke
English rather well. I plied him with questions, but his shyness and
reticence, so characteristic of isolated human beings, inhibited him. At
last he spoke, with an eye to my reactions, of the methods of warfare
along the palisades of the river.
"In my boyhood days," he said, "nobody knew anything of his neighbor.
People lived just a mile apart, but you white people were not much
stranger to us than they were to one another. There was constant war. We
children were afraid to venture very far from our village."
"Has that always been the way?"
"I suppose so, but I don't know," and that was all I could get out of
him. Yet it has not always been so, for nothing is always so among
people, and the Melanesian-Fijians in many cases have welcomed and
received among them Samoans and Tongans, races distinctly different from
them. There is a definite separation, however, between ourselves and the
Fijians that is obvious even to the casual tourist, and affords no easy
solution of the whence and why.
Not so among the Polynesians as in Samoa, where one instantly feels at
home. That which attracted me to the Fijian was his incompatibility,
his unconscious aloofness, his detachment.
There is, however, not much greater difference between some of the races
in the Pacific and the white men than there is between any two of the
European peoples themselves. There is less difference between an
Hawaiian and a Maori, though they are separated by nearly four thousand
miles of unbroken sea, than there is between an Englishman and a
Frenchman with only a narrow channel between them. In the Pacific, the
chain of relationship between races from New Zealand to Hawaii is
somewhat similar to that running north and south in Europe. The
variation becomes similarly more pronounced in the latitudinal
direction. In other words, the diversity existing between European and
Turk is something akin to that between Samoan and Fijian,--from the
point of view of appearances.
Something of the kinship of peoples scattered over the millions of
square miles of Pacific seas becomes evident, not so much in their own
features and customs as in the way in which they lend themselves to
fusion with the modern incoming nomads of the West. Something of the
possible migrations said to have taken place in that unromantic age of
man somewhere back in Pleistocene days may be grasped from the streams
that now flow in and become part of the life of the South Pacific.
Scientists detect in the Melanesian-Fijian slight traces of Aryan blood
without being definite as to how it got there. When I ran into a little
fruit shop in Suva, just before sailing, to taste for the last time the
joys of mummy-apple, I glimpsed for a second the how. For the proprietor
was a stout, gray-haired, dark-complexioned individual from the island
of St. Helena. In a vivid way he described to me the tomb of Napoleon,
spicing his account with a few incidents of the emperor's life on the
island. Should no great flood of Europeans come to dilute the present
slight infusions, the centuries that lie in waiting will perhaps
augment this accidental European strain into some romantic story. In a
thousand years it would not at all be impossible for this story of
Napoleon to become part of Fijian legend, and for children to refer to
that unknown god of war as their god and the father of their ideals.
This genial islander from St. Helena will puzzle anthropologists and
afford them opportunities for conjecture, fully as much as the evidence
of Aryan and Iberian races in Asia and the islands east of it does
to-day.
[Illustration: DIAMOND HEAD, NEAR HONOLULU
Once a volcano, now a fortress]
[Illustration: THE HULK OF THE GERMAN MAN-OF-WAR, THE _ADLER_
Wrecked in the hurricane of 1889 at Samoa]
[Illustration: AFTER SEVEN DAYS OF SEA--THIS EMERGED]
[Illustration: HILO, HAWAII
An oasis in the desert of the Pacific]
Or the wail of the Indian, into whose shop I strayed to get out of the
sun, at the downfall of "his" empire, may be the little seed of thought
out of which the aspirations of a Fiji reborn will spring.
2
According to the traditions of almost every race on earth, the place of
its nativity is the cradle of mankind. Nor does mere accident satisfy.
In nearly every instance not only is the belief extant among natives
that their race was born there, but that, be the birthplace island or
continent, it came into existence by some form of special creation as an
abiding-place for a chosen people. The Japanese _kami_, Izanagi and
Izanami, were commissioned by the other gods to "make, consolidate, and
give birth to the drifting land." "According to the Samoan cosmogony,
first there was Leai, nothing; thence sprung Nanamu, fragrance; then
Efuefu, dust; then Iloa, perceivable; then Maua, obtainable; then
Eleele, earth; then Papatu, high rocks; then Maataanoa, small stones;
then Maunga, mountains. Then Maunga married Malaeliua, or changeable
meeting-place, and had a daughter called Fasiefu, piece of dust." The
more primitive Melanesians, the Fijians, and the Australoids are less
definite in their conceptions of whence they came, having in many cases
no traditions or myths to offer.
With all our scientific inquiry, we are to-day still lost in the maze of
probable origins of various races. The birthplace of man is as much of a
mystery as it ever was. Ninety years ago, Darwin said of the South
Pacific: "Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat
near to that great fact--that mystery of mysteries--the first appearance
of new beings on this earth." And in 1921 Roy Chapman Andrews set out
upon a third expedition to Mongolia in search of relics and fossils of
the oldest man. He writes:
With the exception of the Java specimen, all fossil human fragments
have been discovered in Europe or England. Nevertheless, the
leading scientists of the day believe that Asia was the early home
of the human race and that whatever light may be thrown upon the
origin of man will come from the great central Asian plateau north
of the Himalaya Mountains.
Thus his antiquity will doubtless interest man to his dying day. Slogans
epitomizing the spirit of races fan the flames of human conflict.
Conflict wears down the differences between them, or shatters them and
scatters them to the whirling winds. Doubtless the records which seem to
us so lucid and so permanent will vanish from the earth in the next
half-million years, and our descendants will mumble in terms of vague
tradition expressions of their beginning. Or perhaps their linguistics
will make ours vulgar and primitive by comparison. Possibly, if our
progress and development are not impeded, the hundreds of tongues now
spoken on this globe will seem childishly incomplete, and in their stead
will be one extremely simple but flexible language spoken in every islet
in the seas.
What our present world will seem to the man of the future, the world of
the Pacific, wreathed in races of every hue--Asia, Australasia, the
Americas--seems to us now. In the wide spaces of the Pacific we have
several thousands of islands, anchored at various distances from one
another in about seventy million square miles of sea. Grouped with a
healthy regard for the freedom of individual needs there are enough
separate races, speaking separate languages and abiding by separate
customs, to make the many-colored map of Europe seem one primary hue by
comparison. Yet all the romance which brightens the pages of European
history and its intake of Asiatic culture is ordinary beside the
mysterious silence that steeps the origin and age of the cultures of the
Pacific. There, beneath the heavy curtain of unknown antiquity, dwell
innumerable people who, if they are not the Adams and Eves of creation,
have wandered very little from the birthplace of the human race. It
seems as though the overflow of living creatures from the heart of Asia
had found an underground channel back into the Garden of Eden, like some
streamlet lost in the sands of the seashore, but worming its way into
the very depths below. Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia, are the names
by which we know them. The drawer of water, as he lets his bucket down
to the farthest reaches of the wells of antiquity, finds in his vessel
evidence of kinship with races now covering the whole of Europe. Romance
has it that the Amerindians are descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel
and Mormon missionaries are carrying that charm among the Polynesians.
They are very successful in New Zealand among the Maories. Like a great
current of warm water in the sea, the Polynesian races have run from
Hawaii to Samoa, the Marquesas, Tahiti, and Maoriland. How they got
there is still part of conjecture.
To most of us, the South Seas mean simply cannibals and naked girls.
Dark skins and giant bodies are synonymous with Polynesians. The
grouping of these peoples into Poly-Mela-Micronesian has some scientific
meaning which, if not esoteric and awe-inspiring, slips by our
consciousness as altogether too highbrow to deserve consideration. Or we
are satisfied with pictures such as Melville and O'Brien have given us,
pictures that as long as the world is young will thrill us as do those
of Kinglake and Marco Polo. But, those of us who have gone beyond our
boyhood rhymes of "Wild man from Borneo just come to town" and have been
White Shadows ourselves, are keenly interested in the whence and the why
of these people. Can it be that Darwin was right? Have we approached the
spot whereon man made his first appearance on the earth? Or are others
right whose soundings divulge a hidden course that gives these people a
birthplace ten thousand miles away, in central Asia? Is it that all the
people of the world were first made men on land that is now beneath the
waters of the Pacific,--men who, because of geological changes, fell
back across Asia, leaving scattered remnants in the numerous island
peaks now standing alone in that sun-baked world? "There is ground for
the belief," says Griffith Taylor,[1] "that the Pacific Ocean was
smaller in the Pleistocene period, being reduced by a belt of land
varying in width from 100 to 700 miles." Or are the further calculations
more accurate,--that there have been constant migrations of people from
Asia?
[1] Griffith Taylor: _Geographical Review_, January, 1912, p. 61.
Slowly scientists are groping their way through legend. No one who has
been among the South Sea people, and those of the western Pacific
islands, can help being impressed with certain remarkable likenesses
between them and European people. Present-day anthropologists are at
variance with the old evolutionary school which believed in "a general,
uniform evolution of culture in which all parts of mankind
participated." "At present," according to Franz Boas, "at least among
certain groups of investigators in England and also in Germany,
ethnological research is based on the concept of migration and
dissemination rather than upon that of evolution." In connection with
Polynesia and the Pacific peoples, it seems to be fairly well known that
they drifted from island to island in giant canoes. They had no sails
nor compass, but, guided by stars and directed by the will of the winds,
they roved the high seas and landed wherever the shores were hospitable.
During ages when Europe dreaded the sea and hugged the land, when the
European universe consisted of a flat table-like earth and a dome-like
heaven of stars,--even before the vikings ventured on their wild
marauding excursions, the Polynesians made of the length and breadth of
the Pacific a highway for their canoes. "Somewhat before this (450
A. D.) one bold Polynesian had reached polar ice in his huge war
canoe."[1] Our Amerindians dared the swiftest rapids in their frail bark
canoes; but what was that compared with the courage and love of freedom
which sent this lone Polynesian out upon the endless waters of the
Pacific? Some day a poet will give him his deserving place among the
great heroes.
[1] Griffith Taylor: _Geographical Review_, January, 1912, p. 61.
Dr. Macmillan Brown tells us that the Easter Islands were once the
center of a great Pacific empire. Here men came from far and wide to pay
tribute to one ruling monarch. He builded himself a Venice amid the
coral reefs, with canals walled in by thirty feet of stone. Fear of the
control over the winds which this monarch was said to possess, and
superstitious dread of his ire brought the vassal islanders to him with
their choicest possessions, though he had no military means of
compelling respect. This monarch, like the Pharaohs who built the
pyramids, must have had thousands of laborers to have been able to cut,
shape, and build the giant platforms of stone or the great canals which
are referred to as the Venice of the Pacific. It must have taken no
little engineering skill so to adjust them to one another as to require
no mortar to keep them together. In the Caroline Islands, now under
Japanese mandate, there still stand remains of stone buildings of a
forgotten day's requirements.
These relics of unknown days make it reasonably certain that after
having been "shot" out from the mainland, the early people of the
Pacific reached all the way across to the island of Savaii, in the
Samoan group, and later as far as Tahiti. Why they did not go on to the
Americas is hard to say. Perhaps the virginity of the islands and the
congenial climate offered these artless savages all they desired. Beyond
were cold and drudgery. Here, though labor and war were not wanting,
still there was balmy weather. Probably they were the tail-end of the
great migration of the Wurm ice age. More venturesome than most, and
having arrived at lands roomy enough for their small numbers, they must
have called themselves blessed in that much good luck and decided to
take no further chances with the generosity of the gods.
Linguistic and ethnological data link the Polynesians with the
Koreans, Japanese, Formosans, Indonesians, and Javanese. Legends
and genealogies show that about the dawn of our era the early
Polynesians were among the Malay Islands. By 450 A. D. they had
reached Samoa and by 850 A. D., Tahiti.... In 1175 A. D. the
primitive Maoriori were driven out of New Zealand to the Chatham
Isles. No doubt New Zealand was first reached several hundred years
before this. Tahiti seems to have been a center of dispersal, as
Percy Smith has pointed out in his interesting book "Hawaiki." We
must, however, remember that Melanesians preceded the Polynesians
to many of these islands at a much earlier date.[1]
[1] Griffith Taylor: _Geographical Review,_ January, 1921.
However, mutation is the law of life. Even these small groups split into
smaller factions. Some went south to the islands of the Antipodes and
called themselves Maories; others went north of the equator and called
themselves Hawaiians. The physical distribution of all the races in the
Pacific, rooting, as we have seen, in Asia, represents a virile plant
the stem of which runs eastward and is known as Micronesia and
Melanesia, with the flowers, in all their diversified loveliness,
Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti, the Marquesas, and Maoriland.
What made them what they are? How is it that being, as it seems, people
of extraction similar to that of Europeans, they have remained in such a
state of arrested development? How is it that they became cannibals,
eaters of men's flesh? Again the answer is not far to seek. Just like
the Europeans, they followed the line of least resistance, having as yet
developed no artificial or brain-designed weapons against the stress of
nature. Europeans, in time of great famine, have not themselves been
above cannibalism. In our Southern States we have isolated mountaineers
to show us what men can revert to. And in northern China to-day,
essentially Buddhist and non-flesh-eating, cannibalism was reported
during the famine last year.
But Europe had what Polynesia did not have. Driven by the force of
necessity out of continental Asia, Polynesia hid itself away in the
cracks and crannies of the Pacific; Europeans spread over a small
continent and broke up into innumerable warring and learning tribes.
Backward and forward along peninsular Europe, men communicated to one
another their emotional and objective experiences. The result has been a
culture amazing only in its diversity,--amazing because, with contact
and interchange of racial experiences, the coursing and recoursing of
the same blood, stirred and dissolved, it is amazing that such diversity
should persist.
But in Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia,--in all the distant land-specks
of the Pacific,--contact was impossible in the larger sense. Though
canoes did slide into strange harbors or drift or row in and about the
atolls, they afforded at most romantic stimuli to these isolated groups.
Infusion of culture was very difficult. At most, these causal meetings
added to or confused the stories of their origin. And in a little time
the different island groups forgot their beginnings.
Presently, the pressure upon their small areas with the limited food
supply began to make itself felt. Some method had to be devised for the
limitation of population and to keep in food what few numbers there
were. There seem to have been no indigenous animals anywhere in the
islands. Darwin found only a mouse, and of this he was uncertain as to
whether it really was indigenous. Except for a few birds, and the giant
Moa which roamed the islands of New Zealand, animal life was everywhere
insufficient to the needs of so vital a people as were these. But much
less is heard to-day of the cannibalism said to have run rampant among
them. It is even disputed. The fruits of the tropics, doubtless rich in
vitamines, are peculiarly suited to the sustenance of so spirited a
race.
3
The Polynesians found in the various islands they approached, during
that slow, age-long migration eastward, tribes and islanders inferior to
themselves. So did the Europeans in their movement westward. The
primitive Caucasians remained and mixed slightly along the way, leaving
here and there traces of their contact. And their ancestors in Asia
forgot their exiled offspring.
With the landing of Cook at Tahiti, at Poverty Bay, at Hawaii, the
counter invasion of the Pacific began. For over a hundred years now the
European has been injecting his culture, his vices, his iron exactitude
into the so-called primitive races. These hundred years make the second
phase of civilization in the Pacific. It might have been the last. It
might have meant the reunion of Caucasic peoples, their blending and
their amalgamation, and the world would have lived happily ever after.
But the eternal triangle plays its part in politics no less than in
love, and the third period, the period of rivalry and jealousy, of
suspicion and scandal, of still-born accomplishment in many fields has
set in. And tragedy, which men love because it is closest to truth, is
on the stage.
[Illustration: EVEN FIJIANS ARE LOATH TO FORGET THE ARTS OF THEIR
FOREFATHERS
F. W. Caine, Photo]
[Illustration: IN GIANT CANOES HELIOLITHIC IMMIGRANTS ROAMED THE
SOUTH SEAS
Photo, H. Winkelmann]
The third period dates largely from the discovery and the awakening
of Japan. It is the blocking of the European invasion of the Pacific,
and the institution of a counter move,--that of the expansion of Asia
into the Pacific,--which will be treated in the last section of this
book.
To-day, Polynesia is barely holding its own. Its sons have studied
"abroad," they have been in our schools and universities, they have
fought in "our" war. Rapidly they are putting aside the uncultured
simplicity of adolescence. For long they treasured drifts of iron-girded
flotsam which the waves in their impartiality cast upon their shores;
to-day iron is supplanting thatch, and a belated iron age is reviving
their imaginations, just as iron guns and leaden bullets shattered them
a century ago. In the light of their astonishment, _Rip Van Winkle_ is a
crude conception; Wells has had to revise and enlarge "When the Sleeper
Wakes" into "The Outline of History." No man knows what is pregnant in
the Pacific; nor will the next nine eons reveal the possibilities.
Chapter III
OUR FRONTIER IN THE PACIFIC
1
Honolulu marks our frontier in the Pacific. Honolulu has been conquered.
If the conquest is that of love, then the offspring will be lovely; if
of mere force, or intrigue, then Heaven help Honolulu! As far as outward
signs go, we are in a city American in most details. The numerous
trolleys, the modern buildings, the motor-cars, the undaunted Western
efficiency which no people is able to withstand has gripped Hawaii in an
iron grip. True that the foreign (that is, Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese,
Portuguese) districts are steeped in squalor, but this is old Honolulu.
The new is a little Los Angeles with all its soullessness, and it has
taken all the illusions of modern civilization to accomplish it. The
first illusion was that the natives would be better off as Americans
than as Hawaiians; the second, that Hawaiians were lazy and Japanese and
Chinese were necessary; the third, that cleanliness is next to
godliness. How have these things worked out? The Hawaiians are in the
ever-receding minority, the Japanese in the unhappy majority, and
enjoyment of cleanliness has made most men forget that it is only _next_
to something else. If the invited are coming to Honolulu expecting
money-grabbers to turn to poetry and petty politicians to philosophy,
they had better save their fares. If readers of magazines expect to find
a melting-pot in which all the ingredients are dancing about with their
arms round one another's neck, they had better remain at home.
For the first and foremost effect of the tropics is to individualize
things. In colder climes people huddle together to conserve warmth; here
they give one another plenty of space. Virtually one of the first things
the new-comer does is to name and separate things from the mass. Every
little thing has its personality. Plants grow in profusion, but each
opens out to its utmost. One is much more inclined to ask what this
flower is called in Honolulu than in America, for each stands out, and
one stands out to each. Honolulu exudes moisture and fragrance, stirring
the passions as does the scent of a clean woman. It limbers up one's
reasoning faculties and arouses one's curiosity.
On the street every Chinese and every Japanese comes in for his share of
attention. One begins to single out types as it has never occurred to
one to do in New York. In Honolulu all intermingle, flower in a sort of
unity, but in the very mass they retain their natural variations. The
white people are ordinarily good, they have mastered the technique of
life sufficiently and play tolerably well to an uncritical audience.
While the Hawaiian policeman in charge of the traffic stands out in bold
relief because the dignity and importance of his position have stiffened
the easy tendencies of his race,--he is self-conscious. Monarch of
Confusion, arrayed in uniform, tall and with the manner of one always
looking from beneath heavy eyebrows, it is said that he causes as much
trouble as he allays. But that is mere prejudice. Who would dare ignore
his arm and hand as he directs the passing vehicle? He fascinates. He
commands. His austere silence is awe-inspiring. When he permits a driver
to pass, there is a touch of the contemptuous in that relinquishment.
Nor dare the driver turn the corner till, in like manner, this human
indicator points the direction for him. The finger follows now almost
mockingly, until another car demands its attention, and it becomes
threatening again.
One hears of the all-inclusive South Seas as though it were something
totally without variation. The average tourist and scribe soon acquires
the South-Sea style. But the more discriminating know full well that the
expressions which describe one of the South Sea islands fall flat when
applied to another. "Liquid sunshine" is a term peculiarly Hawaiian. It
would never apply to Fiji, for instance, for there the words
"atmospheric secretion" are more accurate. Hence, it is more than mere
political chance that has made Hawaii so utterly different from the
Philippines and the litter of South Seas.
Honolulu is essentially an American city. The hundreds of motor-cars
that dash in and about the streets do so just as they would in "sunny
California." The shops that attract the Americans are just like any in
America,--clean, attractive, with their best foot forward. So
meticulous, so spotless, so untouchable are they that the soul of the
seeker nearly sickens for want of spice and flavor. To have to live on
Honolulu's Main Street would be like drinking boiled water. One imagines
that when the white men came thither, finding disease and uncleanliness
rampant, they determined that if they were to have nothing else they
would have things clean. All newcomers to Oriental and primitive
countries cling to that phase of civilization with something akin to
terror. Generally they get used to the dirt. They have not done so in
Honolulu. It may be that mere distance has something to do with the
different results, but certain it is that Manila, under American control
just as is Honolulu, has none of these prim, not primitive, drawbacks.
Twenty years of American rule have done little really to Americanize
Manila, while they have utterly metamorphosed Honolulu.
The man-made machine has now outlived the vituperation of idealists. The
man-made machine is running, and even the most romantic enjoys life the
better for it. Clean hotels, swimming-pools within-doors, motor-cars
that bring nature to man with the least loss of time and cost of
fatigue,--these are things which only a fool would despise. But one
longs for some show of the human touch, none the less, and cities that
are built by machine processes are, despite all their virtues, not
attractive. At least, they are not different enough from any other city
in the modern world to justify a week's journey for the seeing. One
hears that steamers and trains and airplanes are killing romance. That
is so, but not because they in themselves conduce to satiety, but
because they destroy indigenous creations and substitute importations
and iron exactitude. Within the next few generations there will, indeed,
be a South Seas, indistinguishable and without variety. Honolulu is an
example. But Honolulu is not Hawaii! It is only a bit of decoration. So
we shall leave this phase of Hawaii for consideration at a time when,
having seen the things native to the Pacific, we reflect upon the
meaning and purport of things alien.
In Hawaii, we are told,--and without exaggeration,--one can stand in the
full sunshine and watch the rain across the street. So, too, can one
enjoy some of the material blessings of modern life, yet be within touch
of nature incomparably exquisite.
2
He was only a street-car conductor. Every day he journeyed from the
heart of Honolulu, like a little blood corpuscle, through arteries of
trade hardened by over-feeding, in a jerking, rocking old trolley car,
to the very edge of Manoa Valley. His way lay along the fan-shaped plane
behind the sea, and was lined with semi-palatial residences and Oahu
College. Palms swayed in the breeze, and the night-blooming cereus slept
in the glittering sunlight upon the stone walls. He was only a
street-car conductor, furnished with his three spare meals a day and his
bed, but he fed along the way on sweets that no street-car conductor in
any other place in the world has by way of compensation. He was carved
with wrinkles and his frail frame bent slightly forward, but his heart
was young within him, and he acted like a plutocrat whose hobby was
gardening and whose gardens were rich with the finest flowers on earth.
The delight he took in the open country, barely the edge of which he
reached so many times a day, was pathetic. When I asked him to let me
off where I could wander on the open road, he beamed with pleasure and
delight, and told me where I should have to go really to reach the wild.
There may be other places in the world as beautiful and even more so,
but no place ever had such a street-car conductor to recommend it. And
no recommendation was ever more poetic and inspiring than this,--not
even that of the Promotion Committee of Honolulu.
And, strange to say, I have never been guided more honestly and more
truthfully than when that street-car conductor advised me to go to Manoa
Valley. I lived an eternity of joy in the few hours I spent there. I
knew that not many miles beyond I should again be blocked by the sea. I
could not see it because of the hills which spend three hundred and
sixty-five days of every year dressing themselves in their very best and
posing before the mirror of the sky. Not more than one or two natives
passed me, nor did any other living creature appear. I could only
romance with myself, refusing to be fooled by the talk about fair
maidens with leis round their necks. I was certain that back home there
were maidens whose beauty could not be equaled here; whose soft, white
skins and shapely forms were never excelled by tropical loveliness. But
I was just as certain that there was nothing at home that compared to
nature as it is lavished upon man here in Hawaii, and especially in
Manoa Valley.
We all have our compensations, and I have even shown preference for a
return to the joys of genuine human beauty which the maker of worlds
gave to America, and to leave to the mid-Pacific verdure and altitudes
whose combination stirs my mind with passionate adoration to this very
day. Still, I shall ever be grateful to that wizened street-car
conductor for having suggested that I visit his little valley, which he
himself can enter only after paying a penalty of sixteen journeys
between Heaven and Honolulu every day, carrying the money-makers
backward and forward. Perhaps he does not regard it as a penalty.
Perhaps he feels himself fully compensated if one or two of his human
parcels asks him where may be found the Open Road.
3
Sullen and less concerned with emotional or spiritual values was the
driver of the motor-bus whom we exhumed one day from the heart of
Honolulu's "foreign" section. He evidently regarded nature on his route
as too great a strain on his brakes, though he, too, must have felt that
compensation was meted out to him manifold. For few people come to
Hawaii and leave without contributing some small share to his support,
as he is the shuttle between Honolulu and Kaneohe, and carries the
thread of sheer joy through the eye of that wondrous needle, the Pali.
At the Pali one senses the youth and vigor of our earth. Its peak,
piercing the sky, seems on the point of emerging from the sea. It has
raised its head above the waters and stands with an air of contempt for
loneliness, wrapped in mist, defying the winds. The world seems to fall
away from it. It has triumphed. There is none of that withdrawing
dignity of Fujiyama, the great man who looks on. The Pali imposes itself
upon your consciousness with spectacular gusto, like the villain
stamping his way into the very center of the stage and gazing roundabout
over a protruding chin.
The palm-trees bow solemnly before changeless winds, in the direction of
Honolulu, which lies like an open fan at the foot of the valley near the
sea. Color is in action everywhere,--spots of metallic green, of
volcanic red, filtered through a screen of marine gray. Honolulu lies
below to the rear; Kaneohe, beyond vast fields of pineapple, before us;
the sea, wide, open, limitless except for the reaches of the heavens,
binding all. And then there is an upward, circular motion,--that of the
rising mists drawn by the burning rays of the sun pressing landward and
dashing themselves into the valley and falling in sheets of rain upon
the earth. Wedged into a gully, as though caught and unable to break
away, was a heavy cloud,--but it was being drained of every drop of
moisture as a traveler held up by a gang of highway-men.
This circular motion is found not only in inanimate nature. Once, at
least, it has whirled the Hawaiians into tragedy. Here, history tells
us, Kamehameha I (the fifth from the last of Hawaii's kings) hurled an
army of native Oahu islanders over this bluff, back into the source of
their being. Without quarter he pressed them on, over this pass; while
they, unwilling to yield to capture, chose gladly to dash themselves
into the valley below. One is impressed by the striking interplay of
emotion with sheer nature. The controlling element which directs both
man and mountain seems the same. States and stars alike emerge, crash,
and crumble.
We rolled rapidly down into the valley past miles and miles of pineapple
fields. Then we came, as it were, to the land's end. Nothing sheer now
before us, nothing precipitate. A bit of freshness, of coolness, and an
imperceptible tapering off. The sea.
[Illustration: A SAGE IN A CHINA SHOP AT HONOLULU]
[Illustration: THERE ARE ONLY A FEW CHINESE WOMEN IN HAWAII]
[Illustration: WHOA! LET'S HAVE OUR PICTURE TAKEN
We don't know whether we're Hawaiian, Chinese or American, but who
cares. Giddap!]
[Illustration: FEMININE PROPRIETY
Oriental and Occidental versions]
Here at Kaneohe dwelt Arthur Mackaye, brother of the poet, whose name
was vaguely known to me. He was slender, bearded, loosely clad, with
open collar but not without consciousness and conventionality,--a
conventionality in accordance with prescribed notions of freedom.
Refreshing, cool as the atmosphere roundabout, distinct from the
tropical lusciousness which is the general state of both men and nature
in and about Honolulu, the personality of this lone man--this man who
had flung everything aside--was a fit complement to the experience of
Manoa Valley and the Pali.
He conducted a small sight-seeing expedition on his own. The proprietor
of a number of glass-bottomed launches, he took me over the quiet waters
of the reefs. Throwing a black cloth over my head to shield me from the
brilliant sky, I gazed down into the still world within the coral reefs.
There lay unimaginable peace. What the Pali affords in panorama, the bay
at Kaneohe offers in concentrated form. Pink-and-white forests twenty to
forty feet deep, with immense cavities and ledges of delicate coral,
fringe the shore. Fish of exquisite color move in and out of these giant
chambers, as much at home in one as in another. Droll, sleepy sponges,
like lumps of porous mud, lie flat against the reefs, waiting for
something edible to come their way. Long green sea-worms extend and
contract like the tentacles of an octopus in an insatiable search for
food.
An unusual silence hangs over the memory of that trip. I cannot recall
that the unexpected companion I picked up in Honolulu said anything; the
lonely one who furnished the glass-bottomed boat certainly said nothing;
the fish and sponges emphasized the tone of silence associated with the
experience. But the Pali shrieked; it was the one imposing element that
defied stillness. And below it is Honolulu, where silence is not to be
found.
4
For the Honolulu spirit is averse to silence. Honolulu is the most
talkative city in the world. The people seem to talk with their eyes,
with their gait, with their postures. Night and day there stirs the
confusion of people attending to one another's wants. One is in a
ceaseless whirl of extraverted emotions. One cannot get away from it.
The man who could be lonely in Honolulu would have to have his ears
closed with cement. If New York were as talkative as Honolulu, not all
of America's Main Streets together would drown it out.
For Honolulu teems with good-fellowship. It is the religion of Honolulu
to have a good time, and every one feels impelled before God and Patria
to live up to its precepts. Everybody not only has a good time but talks
having a good time. Not that there are no undercurrents of jealousy and
gossip. By no means. The stranger is let into these with the same gusto
that swirls him into pleasurable activities. It is a busy, whirligig
world. Even the Y.M.C.A. spirit prevails without restraint. I had found
the building of the association very convenient, and stopped there. That
put the stamp of goodness on me, but it did not exclude me from being
drawn into a roisterous crowd that danced and drank and dissipated
dollars, and heaved a sigh of relief that I did not preach to it. Its
members were glad that I was just "stopping" at the Y. They didn't see
how I could do it, but that was my affair. If I still managed to be a
good fellow,--well, I belonged to Honolulu.
Charmian London had given me a note of introduction to a friend, Wright,
of the "Bulletin." Wright was a bachelor and had a little bungalow
across from the Waikiki Hotel on the beach. There we met one evening. It
had every indication of the touch of a woman's hand. It was neatly
furnished, cozy, restful. Two nonchalant young men came in, but after a
delightful meal hurried away to some party. Wright and I were left. What
should we do? Something must be done.
He ordered a touring-car. We whirled along under the open sky with a
most disporting moon, and it seemed a pity we had none with us over whom
to romanticize. Quietly, as though we were on a moving stage, the world
slipped by,--palms, rice-fields ashimmer with silver light. Through
luxuriant avenues, we passed up the road toward the Pali. Somewhere
half-way we stopped. The Country Club. A few introductions, a moment's
stay, and off we went again, this time to avoid the dance that was to
take place there. Slipping along under the moonlight, we made our way
back to Waikiki beach, dismissed the car, and took a table at Heinie's
which is now, I understand, no more.
But we had only jumped from the frying-pan into the fire. Others, bored
with the club dance, had come to Heinie's for more fling than dancing
afforded. The hall was not crowded, so we were soon noticed. Mr. Wright
was known.
"They want us to come over," he said. "Just excuse me a moment."
Presently he returned. I had been specifically invited over with him. I
accepted the invitation. Then, till there were no more minutes left of
that day, we indulged in one continuous passing of wits and wets. Before
half the evening was over, I was one of the crowd in genuine Honolulu
fashion, and nothing was too personal for expression.
But one there was in the group to whom all her indulgences were
obviously strange, though she seemed well practised. She was a romantic
soul, and sought to counteract the teasing of the others. Her
deprecation of whisky and soda was almost like poor Satan's hatred of
hell. She vibrated to romantic memories like a cello G string. When she
learned that I was westward bound, she fairly moaned with regret.
"China!--oh, dear, beloved China! I would give anything in the world to
get back there!" she exclaimed, and whatever notions I had of the Orient
became exalted a thousandfold. But my own conviction is that she missed
the cheap servants which Honolulu lacks. In other words, there were
still not enough leisure and Bubbling Well Roads in Honolulu, nor the
international atmosphere that is Shanghai's. But that is mere
conjecture, and she was a romantic soul, and good to look at.
But there were two others in the crowd who did not, in their hilarious
spirits, whirl into my ken until some time afterward. Their speed was
that of the comet's, and what was a plodding little planet like myself
to do trying to move into their orbit? They were not native daughters of
Honolulu; most of their lives they had spent in California, which in the
light of Hawaii is a raw, chill land. There they carried on the drab
existence of trying to earn a living,--just work and no play. But
evidently they had never given up hope. They were tall, thin, fair, and
jolly. They invested. They won. It was only two thousand dollars. They
earned as much every year, no doubt, but it came to them in instalments.
Now they had a real roll. _Bang_ went the job! American industry, all
that depended on their being stable, honest producers, the smoothness of
organization, was banished from their minds. Let the country go to the
dogs; they were heading for Honolulu for a good time. And when they got
there they did not find the cupboard bare, nor excommunication for being
jobless.
For as long as two thousand dollars will last where money flows freely
(and there are plenty of men ready to help stretch it with generous
entertainment) these two escaped toilers from the American deep ran the
gamut of Honolulu's conviviality. Night after night they whispered
amorous compliments in the ears of the favorite dancers; day after day
they flitted from party to party. I had met them just as their two
thousand dollars were drawing to a close, but the only thing one could
hear was regret that they could not possibly be extended. Honolulu was
richer by two thousand; they were poorer to the extent of perpetual
restlessness and rebellion against the necessity of holding down a job.
Yet the "Primer" published by the Promotion Committee tells us that
Hawaii is "not a paradise for the jobless." These folk had no jobs, yet
they certainly felt and acted and spoke as though they were in Paradise.
Witness the arrivals and departures of steamers. The crowds gather as
for a fête or a carnival. Bands play, serpentines stream over the ship's
side, and turn its dull color into a careless rainbow. Hawaiian women
sell leis, necklaces of the most luscious flowers whose scent is enough
to empassion the most passionless. But as to jobs,--why, even the
longshoremen seem to be celebrating and the steamer moves as by
spirit-power.
Visit Waikiki beach, and every day it is littered with people who enjoy
the afternoon hours on the tireless breakers. Go to the hotels, and
hardly an hour finds them deserted. The motor-cars are constantly
carrying men and women about as though there was nothing in the wide
world to do. Even those who are unlucky enough to have jobs attend to
them in a leisurely sort of way. Yet these jobless people hold up their
hands in warning to possible immigrants that there is no room for them,
that "Hawaii is not a paradise for the jobless."
5
Who, then, does the work of the island? It is obvious that it is being
done. There isn't another island in the whole Pacific so modernized, so
thoroughly equipped, so American in every detail, so progressive and
well-to-do. It is the most sublimated of the sublime South Seas. One
wonders how white men could have remained so energetic in the tropics,
but one is not long left uninformed. Honolulu is an example of a most
ideal combination of peoples, the inventive, progressive, constructive
white man with the energetic, persistent, plodding Oriental. Without the
one or the other, Honolulu would not be what it is; both have
contributed to the welfare of the islands in ways immeasurable.
It is not surprising, therefore, to find the Oriental elements as much
in evidence as the Occidental. One hardly knows where one begins and the
other ends. As spacious and individualized as are the European sections,
so the Asiatic are a perfect jumble of details. The buildings are drab,
the streets are littered, the smells are insinuating, the sounds
excruciating.
A most painful noise upon an upper balcony of an overhanging Chinese
building made me come to with a sudden clapping of my hands against my
ears. As noise goes, it was perfect,--without theme or harmony. It could
not have been more uncontrolled. What consolation was it that in China
there was more of it! Gratitude awakened in me for the limitations a
wise joss had placed upon the capacities of the individual. Yet men are
never satisfied. These Chinese weren't, and combined their energies.
What one man couldn't accomplish, several could at least approach. So we
had a band. I should certainly never have thought it possible, myself.
However, they were trying to achieve something. It was neither gay nor
mournful; nor was it sentimental. What purpose could it possibly have
served? Surely they had no racial regrets or aspirations, they who
played it! The bird sings to his mate, but what mate would listen to
such tin-canning and howling, and not die?
To me there was something charming in this shamelessness of the Chinese,
something childlike and naïve. I had never realized the meaning of that
little rhyme,
I would not give the weakest of my song
For all the boasted strength of all the strong
If but the million weak ones of the world
Would realize their number and their wrong.
The thought is almost terrifying when applied to the teeming hordes of
the world, whether of Asia, Europe, or the South Seas. If sheer numbers
are any justification of supremacy, God had better take His old world
back and reshape it nearer something rational. One becomes conscious of
this welling up of the world in Hawaii. Not that the Chinese and the
Japanese haven't the same right to life and to its fulfilment in
accordance with latent instinct and ability, with all its special racial
traits and customs, but one doesn't just exactly see how numbers have
anything to do with it. Yet here are the Chinese and Japanese slowly,
quietly, persistently out-distancing the white by a process of doubling
in numbers, where mentality and ingenuity would doubtless fail.
One hears much about the progress of the Orient. That is, white folk
talk much about the way in which the East is taking to Western ways, and
call that progress. One would not expect that sort of progress to
proceed with any great velocity in the East itself, but it is only
necessary to observe the ingrowing tendencies of life in Hawaii, however
superficially, to see how foolishly optimistic is the expectation of
such progress. For even in Hawaii, where everything has had to be built
afresh, where everybody is an alien--with very few exceptions--and where
the dominant element is European, the East is still the East, and the
West the West. There is a slight overlapping, but not enough to make one
lose one's way,--to make a white man walk into a Chinese restaurant and
not know it. The fastidious white man whose curiosity gets the better of
him, moves about the Chinese and Japanese districts fully conscious of
his own shortcomings. He is less able to feel at home there than the
Oriental on the main street; but why doesn't the Oriental build for
himself a main street?
I was abroad early one Sunday morning, headed for the Chinese section.
Lost in thought, I went along, gazing on the ground. Had Charlie
Chaplin's feet suddenly come into my range of vision I should not have
been more surprised than I was when two tiny shoes, hardly bigger than
those of a large-sized doll, and with some of that stiff, automatic
movement of the _species mechanicus_, dissipated my reflections. I
raised my eyes slowly, as when waking, up, up, up,--hem of skirt,
knees, waist-line, flat bosom, narrow shoulders, sallow face, and slit
eyes! A Chinese woman! She was as big as a fourteen-year-old girl, but
her feet were a third of their due proportion. How many thousands of
years of natural selection went into the making of those little feet?
Yet she was a rare enough exception to astound my abstracted mind. About
her strolled hundreds of others of her race, who would have given much
of life to possess those two little feet.
Differences abound in Hawaii. The Chinese is no twin brother of the
Japanese. In fact, there is probably as much relationship between the
Hawaiian and the Japanese as there is between these two "Oriental"
races. The major part of the Japanese being Malay and the Polynesian
Hawaiians having at least lived with the Malays some hundreds of years
ago and infused some of their Caucasic ingredients into them, there is
more of "home-coming" when "Jap" meets "Poly," than when he meets
"Chink." But notwithstanding proximity and propinquity, over which
diplomatic letter-writers labor hard, when the Chinese and the Japanese
and the Hawaiian come together, the Hawaiian "vanishes like dewdrops by
the roadside," the Chinese jogs along, and the Japanese runs motor-cars
and raises children. The Japanese obtrudes himself much more upon the
life of the community than the other two races, but with no more
relinquishment of his own ways. He drives the cars and he drives white
men to more activity than they really enjoy. And the Hawaiian sells
necklaces of luscious flowers under the shaded porticoes of the
buildings along the waterfront.
[Illustration: MILES AWAY ROSE THE FUMES OF KILAUEA
During the day they were ashen and at night like rose dawn]
[Illustration: THE LARGEST CAULDRON OF MOLTEN ROCK ON EARTH
Eight hundred feet below it seethed]
[Illustration: A RIVER OF ROCK POURING OUT INTO THE SEA
Photo, Otto C. Gilmore]
[Illustration: WHIRLING EDDIES OF LAVA UNDERMINING FROZEN LAVA
PROJECTIONS
Photo, Otto C. Gilmore]
Aside from the adoption of our trousers and coat and hat, and a few
other unimportant aspects of our civilization, the observer on the
streets of Honolulu sees no mingling of races. The only outward sign of
this mixing is the Salvation Army. There, large as life, with the
usual circular crowd about them, stood these soldiers of misfortune,
praising the Lord in English. A row of unlimited Oriental offspring upon
the curb; a few grown-ups on the walk; a converted Japanese who looked
as though his Shinto father had disowned him; a self-conscious white boy
who confessed to having been converted just recently; two
indifferent-looking soldiers; a distrustful-looking leader and a
hopeless-visaged white woman. Twenty feet away, a saloon. I wonder what
the Salvation Army is going to do now that that object of attraction is
no more.
As far as Honolulu was concerned, it seemed to me that barter and trade
were more intoxicating to the majority than was drink. The world
everywhere about seemed a-litter with boxes and bales and shops and
indulgences. How much of all the things exchanged, how many of the
things for which these people toil endlessly, are worth while or
essential, or even truly satisfying? The dingy stores, their only worth
their damp coolness; the huddling and the innocent dirt; the
inextricable mesh of little things to be done,--only the Chinese sage
who posed for my camera in front of his wee stock of yarns was able to
tell their value to life. His long, thin, pointed beard, his lack of
vanity in accepting my interest in him, his genial smile and fatherly
disinterestedness symbolized more than anything I saw in Honolulu the
virtue and endurance of race. Beside the eager, grasping Japanese and
the rolling, expanding white men, he looked like the overtowering
palm-tree that seems to grow out of the monkey-pod in the park.
6
To a creature from another world, hovering over us in the unseen ether,
watching us move about beneath the sea of air which is life to us,
Honolulu would seem like a little glass aquarium. The human beings move
about as though on the best of terms with one another. Some look more
gorgeous than others, but from outward appearances they are as innocent
of ill intentions against one another as the aquatic creatures for which
Hawaii is famous, out in the cool, moist aquarium at Waikiki.
Kihikihi, the Hawaiians call one of them, and his friends the white folk
have christened him Moorish Idol. I don't know what Kihikihi means, but
as to his being an idol, I can't accept that for a moment, except in so
far as he deserves to be idolized. For about him there is no more of
that static, woodeny thing which idols generally are than there is about
Pavlowa. Yet he is only a fish, and not so very large at that. He is
moon-shaped, but rainbow-hued. He is perhaps three-quarters of an inch
across the shoulders, but six inches up and down, and perhaps eight from
nose to the ends of his two tails. And so he looks like a three-quarter
moon. Soft, vertical bands of black, white, and egg-yellow run into one
another on both sides, and a long white plume trails downward in a
semicircle. He is the last word in form, translucent harmony of color
and of motion. He moves about with rhythmic dignity and grace. At times
his eyes bulge with an eagerness and self-importance as though the world
depended on him for its security. Though he is constantly searching for
food, he does not seem avaricious; and while he admits his importance,
he is not proud.
Kihikihi has a rival in Nainai, who has been given an alias,--Surgeon
Fish, light brown with an orange band on his sides. Nainai is heavier
than Kihikihi, more plump. His color, too, is heavier and therefore
seems more restrained. It is richer and hence stimulates envy and
desire.
Lauwiliwili Unkunukuoeoe has no aliases, thank you, but he has a snout
on which his Hawaiian name could be stamped in fourteen-point type and
still leave room for half a dozen aliases. Only a water-creature could
possess such a title as this and keep from dragging it in the mud.
Knowing that he would be called by that appellation in life, his Creator
must have compensated him with plenty of snout.
But it is better to have one long snout than eight. And though no one
would give preference to any devil-fish, this long-snouted creature is
the rival by an inverse ratio of that eight-snouted glutton. The
octopus, the devil of the deep, is an insult to fishdom. The Moorish
Idol and this Medusa-like monster in the same aquarium make a worse
combination than Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This ugly, flabby, boneless
body, just thick skin and muscle, with a large bag for a head,--eight
sea-worms extending and contracting in an insatiable search for food is
the paramount example of gross materialism. If only the high cost of
living would drive to suicide this beast with hundreds of mouths to
feed, the world might be rid of a perfidious-looking monster. But his
looks do him great injustice, and were the Hawaiian variety--which is,
after all, only squid--to disappear, the natives would be deprived of
one of their chief delicacies. At the markets--that half-way house
between aquaria and museums--numerous dried octopus, like moth-eaten
skins, lie about waiting for the housewife's art to camouflage them. But
I shall have something to say elsewhere about markets and museums, and
now shall turn, for a moment, to more startling wonders still.
7
An artist is delighted if he finds a study with a perfect hand or a
beautiful neck; or, in nature, if a simple charm is left undisturbed by
the confusion of human creation. Yet at night as our ship passed the
island of Maui, it seemed to me that all the sweet simplicities that
make life worth while had been assembled here in the beginning of the
world and left untouched. The moon rose on the peak of the cone-shaped
mountain, and for a time stood set, like a moonstone in a ring. The
pyramid of night-blue earth was necklaced in street lights, which
stretched their frilled reflections across the surface of the sea; and
just back of it all lay the crater of Haleakala, the House of the Sun.
At sunrise next morning we were docked at Hilo on the island of Hawaii,
two hundred miles from Honolulu. There was nothing here impressive to
me, despite the waterfalls. For two and a half hours we drove by motor
over the turtle-back surface of Hawaii toward Kilauea. Tree-ferns,
palms, and plantations stretched in unending recession far and wide. A
sense of mystery and awe crept slowly over me as we neared the region of
the volcano. At eleven we arrived at the Volcano House.
Yet, in a mood of strange indifference I gazed across the five miles of
flat, dark-brown frozen lava which is the roof of the crater.
Ash-colored fumes rose from the field of fissures, like smoke from an
underground village. Sullen, sallow vapors, these. Sulphur banks, tree
molds cast in frozen lava, empty holes! Nothing within left to rot, but
fringed with forests and brush, sulphur-stained or rooted in frozen
lava. Everywhere promise of volcanic fury, prophecy of the end of the
world.
The road lay like a border round the rim of an antique bowl which had
been baked, cracked, chipped, but shaped to a usefulness that is beauty.
All day long we waited, watching the clouds of gray fumes rise steadily,
silently, and with a sad disinterestedness out of the mouth of the
crater.
Frozen, the lava was the great bed of assurance, a rock of fearlessness.
It seemed to say to the volcano: "I can be indifferent. Down there, deep
down, is your limitation. Rise out of the pit and you become, like me,
congealed. There, down in that deep, is your only hope of life. This
great field of lifeless lava is proof of your effort to reach beyond
your sphere. So why fear?" And there was no fear.
[Illustration: A BLIZZARD OF FUMING HEAT
Photo, Otto C. Gilmore]
[Illustration: WHERE THE TIDES TURN TO STONE
Photo, Otto C. Gilmore]
[Illustration: THE LAKE OF SPOUTING MOLTEN LAVA
In the volcano of Kilauea. At night the white here shown is pink
and terrifying
Photo, Otto C. Gilmore]
As night came on the gray fumes began to flush pink with the reflection
of the heart of the crater. We set out in cars for the edge. Extinct
craters yawned on every side, their walls deep and upright. Some were
overgrown with green young trees, but as we came nearer to the living
crater, life ceased. Great rolls of cloud-fumes rose from the gulch to
wander away in silence. What a strange journey to take! From out a
boiling pit where place is paid for by furious fighting, where pressure
is father of fountains of boiling rock, out from struggle and howling
fury, these gases rose into the world of living matter, into the world
of wind and water. Out of the pit of destruction into the air, never
ceasing, always stirring down there, rising to where life to us is death
to it. The lava, seething, red, shoots aimlessly upward, only to quell
its own futile striving in intermittent exhaustion.
We stood within a foot of the edge. Eight hundred feet below us the lava
roared and spit. In the night, the entire volcano turned a pink glow,
and before us lay three-quarters of a mile of Inferno come true. The red
liquid heaves and hisses. Some of it shoots fully fifty feet into the
air; some is still-born and forms a pillar of black stone in the midst
of molten lava. From the other corner a steady stream of lava issues
into the main pool, and the whole thumps and thuds and sputters and
spouts, restless, toiling eternally.
On our way to the crater we were talkative. We joked, burnt paper over
the cracks, discussed volcanic action, and expressed opinions about
death and the probability of animal consciousness after death. But as we
turned away from the pit we fell silent. It was as though we had looked
into the unknown and had seen that which was not meant for man to see.
And the clouds of fumes continued to issue calmly, unperturbed, with a
dreadful persistence.
Just as our car groped its way through the mists to the bend in the
road, a Japanese stepped before us with his hands outstretched. "Help!"
he shouted. "Man killed." We rushed to his assistance and found that a
party of Japanese in a Ford had run off the road and dropped into a
shallow crater. Down on the frozen bed below huddled a group of men,
women, and children, terrified. As we crawled down we found one Japanese
sitting with the body of his dead companion in his arms, pressing his
hot face against the cold cheek of his comrade. A chill drizzle swept
down into the dark pit. It was a scene to horrify a stoic. To the
wretched group our coming was a comfort the richness of which one could
no more describe than one could the torture of lava in that pit over
yonder.
Japanese are said to be fatalists. They hover about Kilauea year in and
year out. One man sat with a baby in his arms, his feet dangling over
the volcano. Playfully he pretended to toss the child in, and it
accepted all as play. The same confidence the dead man had had in the
driver whose carelessness had overturned the car. And now it seemed that
his body belonged in the larger pit at which he had marveled not more
than half an hour earlier.
As I look back into the pit of memory where the molten material,
experience, has its ebb and flow, I can still see the seething of rock
within a cup of stone, the boiling of nature within its own bosom. Where
can one draw the line between experience past and present? Wherever I
am, the shooting of that fountain of lava is as real as it was to me
then; nor can conglomerate noises drown out the sound of lava pouring
back into lava, of undermined rock projections crashing with a hissing
sound back upon themselves. It is to me like the sound of voices when
King Kamehameha I forced the natives of the island of Oahu over the
Pali, and the group of terrified Japanese were like the fish in the
coral caves at Kaneohe when aware of the approach of a fish that feeds
upon them.
Yet there is a sound rising clear in memory, perhaps more wonderful even
than the shrieking of tortured human beings or the hissing of molten
lava. As I stood upon the rim of Halemaumau there arose the vision of
Kapiolani, the Hawaiian girl who, defying superstition, ventured down
into the jaws of the crater and by her courage exorcised Kilauea of its
devils. What in all the world is more wonderful than frailty imbued with
passion mothering achievement? Kapiolani may be called Hawaii's Joan of
Arc. Unable to measure her strength with men, she defied their gods. A
world of prejudice, all the world to her, stood between her and Kilauea.
Courage triumphant had conquered fear. In defiance of her clan and of
her own terror, she was the first native to approach the crater, and in
that she made herself the equal of Kilauea. As she cast away the
Hawaiian idols, herself emerged an idol.
CHAPTER IV
THE SUBLIMATED, SAVAGE FIJIANS
1
Fiji is to the Pacific what the eye is to the needle. Swift as are the
vessels which thread the largest ocean on earth, travelers who do more
than pass through Fiji on their way between America and the Antipodes
are few. Yet the years have woven more than a mere patchwork of romance
round these islands. In climate they are considered the most healthful
of the South Sea groups, though socially and from the point of view of
our civilization they do not occupy the same place in our sentiments as
do Samoa, Tahiti, the Marquesas, and the Sandwich Islands. Largely, I
suppose, because of the ethnological accident that planted there a race
of people that is farther from Europeans than the Polynesians. The
Fijians are Melanesians, a negroid people said by some to be a
"sub-branch" of the Polynesians. They have been slightly mixed through
their contact with the Tongans and the Samoans, but they are not
definitely related to either and full mixture is unlikely.
A century ago a number of Australian convicts escaped to Fiji. They
brought to these savage cannibal islanders all the viciousness and
arrogance of their type, and imposed themselves upon the primitive
natives. The effect was not conducive of the best relations between
white people and natives, nor did it have an elevating influence upon
the latter. However, despite their cannibalism and their unwillingness
to yield to the influence of our benign civilization, the Fijians are a
people in many ways superior to both the Polynesians east of them and
the true Melanesians or Papuans to the west. They are more moral; they
are cleanly; their women occupy a better position in relation to their
men; and in character and skill they are superior to their neighbors. I
was impressed with this dignity of the Fijians, conscious and
unconscious, from the time I first laid eyes on them. I felt that,
notwithstanding all that was said about them, here was a people that
stood aloof from mere imitation.
Yet such is the nature of reputation that when I announced my intention
of breaking my journey from Honolulu to Australia at Fiji, my
fellow-passengers were inclined to commiserate with me. They wondered
how one with no special purposes--that is, without a job--could risk
cutting loose from his iron moorings in these savage isles. Had they not
read in their school geographies of jungles and savages all mixed and
wild, with mocking natives grinning at you from behind bamboo-trees,
living expectations of a juicy dinner? They warned me about dengue
fever; they extolled the virtues of the Fijian maidens, and exaggerated
the vices of the Fijian men. The word "cannibals" howled round my head
as the impersonal wind had howled round the masts of the steamer one
night. But the adventurer soon learns that there is none so unknowing as
the average globe-trotters (the people who have been there); so he
listens politely and goes his own way.
When, therefore, I got the first real whiff of tropical sweetness, mixed
though it was with copra and mold, all other considerations vanished.
From the cool heights the hills looked down in pity upon the little
village of Suva as it lay prostrate beneath the sun. If there was any
movement to be seen, it was upon the lapping waters of the harbor, where
numerous boats swarmed with black-bodied, glossy-skinned natives in that
universal pursuit of life and happiness. As the _Niagara_ sidled up to
the pier and made fast her hawsers, these black fellows rushed upon her
decks and into the holds like so many ants, and what had till then been
inanimate became as though possessed.
2
I had been under the impression that the natives were all lazy, but the
manner of their handling of cargo soon dissipated that notion. Further
to discredit the rumor-mongers, three Fijians staged an attempt to lead
a donkey ashore which would have shamed the most enthusiastic believer
in the practice of counting ten before getting angry and trying three
times before giving up. The Fijian is as indifferent to big as to little
tasks, and seems to be alone, of all the dwellers in the tropics, in
this apathetic attitude toward life. There is none in all the world more
lazy, indolent, and do-nothing than the white man. As soon as he comes
within sight of a native anywhere, that native does his labor for him;
you may count on it.
So it was that with fear and trembling I announced to the stewards that
I had a steamer trunk which I wanted ashore with me. They grunted and
growled as the two of them struggled with it along the gang-plank and
dropped it as Atlas might have been expected to drop the earth, and
stood there with a contemptuous look of expectation. I took out two
half-dollars and handed one to each. The sneer that formed under their
noses was well practised, I could see, and they took great pains to
inform me that they were no niggers, they would not take the trunk
another foot. There it was. I was lost, scorned, and humiliated. Why did
I have so much worldly goods to worry about? Just then a portly Fijian
stepped up. Beside him I felt puny, doubly humble now. Before I had time
to decide whether or not he was going to pick me up by the nape of the
neck and carry me off to a feast, he took my trunk instead. Though it
weighed fully a hundred and sixty-five pounds, it rose to his
shoulders--up there a foot and a half above me--and the giant strode
along the pier with as little concern as though it were empty. The two
stewards stood looking on with an air of superiority typical of the
white men among colored.
I cannot say that mere brawn ever entitles any man to rank, and that the
white generally substitutes brain for brawn is obvious. But I failed to
see wherein they justified their conceit, for to men of their type the
fist is still the symbol of their ideal, as it is to the majority of
white men. And as I came away from the ship again that afternoon I found
a young steward, a mere lad, standing in a corner crying, his cheek
swollen and red. I asked him what happened. "The steward hit me," he
said, trying to restrain himself from crying. "I thought I was through
and went for my supper so as to get ashore a bit. He came up and asked
me what I was doing. I told him, and he struck me with his fist." Yet
the stewards thought themselves too good to do any labor with black men
about. No ship in a tropical port is manned by the sailors; there they
take a vacation, as it were.
From the customs shed to my hotel the selfsame Fijian carried my trunk
majestically. I felt hopeful that for a time at least I should see the
last of stewards and their ilk. But before I was two days in Suva I
learned that shore stewards are often not any better, and was happy to
get farther inland away from the port for the short time I could afford
to spend in the tropics.
Meanwhile, some of the younger of my fellow-passengers came on shore and
began doing the rounds, into which they inveigled me. From one store to
the other we went, examining the moldy, withered, incomplete stocks of
the traders. Magazines stained brown with age, cheap paper-covered
novels, native strings of beads formed part of the stock in trade. We
soon exhausted Suva.
At the corner of the right angle made by Victoria Parade and the pier
stood a Victoria coach. A horse slept on three legs, in front of it,
and a Hindu sat upon the seat like a hump on an elongated camel. We
roused them from their dozing and began to bargain for their hire. Six
of us climbed into the coach and slowly, as though it were fastened to
the ground, the horse began to move, followed by the driver, the
carriage, and the six of us. For an hour we continued in the direction
in which the three had been standing, along the beach, up a little
knoll, past corrugated-iron-roofed shacks, and down into Suva again; the
horse stopped with the carriage behind him in exactly the same position
in which we had found them, and driver and beast went to sleep again.
Much is heard these days about the effects of the railroad and the
steamer and the wireless telegraph on the unity of the world, but to
those travelers and that Hindu and to the Fijians whom we passed en
route, not even the insertion of our six shillings in the driver's
pocket has, I am sure, as much as left the faintest impression on any of
us except myself. And on me it has left the impression of the utter
inconsequence of most traveling.
Thus Suva, the eye of Fiji and of the needle of the Pacific, is
threaded, but there is nothing to sew. The unexpected never happens.
There are no poets or philosophers, no theaters or cabarets in Suva, as
far as mere eye can see,--nothing but smell of mold and copra (cocoanut
oil).
In Suva one cannot long remain alert. The sun is stupefying. The person
just arrived finds himself stifled by the sharp smells all about him as
though the air were poisoned with too much life. The shaggy green hills,
rugged and wild in the extreme, show even at a distance the struggle
between life and death which moment by moment takes place. Luxuriant as
on the morning of creation, the vegetation seems to be rotting as after
a period of death. In Suva everything smells damp and moldy. You cannot
get away from it. The stores you buy in, the bed you sleep in, the room
you eat in,--all have the same odor. The books in the little library
are eaten full of holes through which the flat bookworms wander as by
right of eminent domain. Offensive to the uninitiated is the smell of
copra. The swarms of Fijians who attack the cargo smell of it and
glisten with it. The boats smell of it and the air is heavy with it. If
copra and mold could be banished from the islands, the impression of
loveliness which is the essence of the South Seas would remain
untainted. Yet to-day, let me but get a whiff of cocoanut-oil from a
drug store and I am immediately transported to the South Seas and my
being goes a-wandering.
3
I seldom dream, but at the moment of waking in strange surroundings
after an unusual run of events my mind rehearses as in a dream the
experiences gained during consciousness. When the knuckles of the
Fijian--and he has knuckles--sounded on my door at seven to announce my
morning tea, I woke with a sense of heaviness, as though submerged in a
world from which I could never again escape. At seven-fifteen another
Fijian came for my laundry; at seven-thirty a third came for my shoes.
Seeing that it was useless to remain in bed longer, I got up. I was not
many minutes on the street before I realized the urgency in those
several early visits. Daylight-saving is an absolute necessity in the
tropics, for by eight or nine one has to endure our noonday sun, and
unless something is accomplished before that time one must perforce wait
till late afternoon for another opportunity. To keep an ordinary coat on
an ordinary back in Suva is like trying to live in a fireless cooker
while angry. Even in the shade one is grateful for white duck instead of
woolens, so before long I had acquired an Irish poplin coat. Yet Fiji is
one of the most healthful of the South Sea islands.
Owing to the heat, most likely--to give the white devils their
due--procrastination is the order of life. "Everything here is 'malua,'"
explained the manager of "The Fiji Times" to me. "No matter what you
want or whom you ask for it, 'wait a bit' will be the process." And he
forthwith demonstrated, quite unconsciously, that he knew whereof he
spoke. I wanted to get some information about the interior which he
might just as easily have given me off-hand, but he asked me to wait a
bit. I did. He left his office, walked all the way up the street with me
to show me a photographer's place where I should be able to get what I
was after, and stood about with me waiting for the photographer to make
up his mind whether he had the time to see me or not. There's no use
rushing anybody. The authorities have been several years trying to get
one of the off streets of Suva paved. It has been "worked on," but the
task, turned to every now and then for half an hour, requires numerous
rest periods.
In Fiji, every one moves adagio. The white man looks on and commands;
the Indian coolie slinks about and slaves; the Fijian works on occasion
but generally passes tasks by with sporty indifference. Yet there is no
absence of life. Beginning with the noise and confusion at the pier,
there is a steady stream of individuals on whom shadows are lost, though
they have nothing on them but their skins and their sulus. The Fijian
idles, allows the Indian to work, happy to be left alone, happy if he
can add a shilling to his possessions,--an old vest, a torn pair of
trousers of any shape, an old coat, or a stiff-bosomed shirt sans coat
or vest or trousers. Tall, mighty, and picturesque, his coiffure the
pride of his life, he watches with a confidence well suited to his
origin and his race the changes going on about him.
Thus, while his island's fruits are being crated and carted off by the
ship-load for foreign consumption, he helps in the process for the mere
privilege of subsidized loafing. All the fun he gets out of trade in the
tropics seems to be the opportunity of swearing at his fellows in
fiji-ized versions of curses taught him by the white man. Or he stands
erect on the flat punt as it comes in from regions unknown, bearing
bananas green from the tree, the very picture of ease and contentment.
Yet one little tug with foreign impertinence tows half a dozen punts,
depriving him even of this element of romance in his life.
Still, there is nothing sullen in his make-up. A dozen
mummy-apples--better than bread to him--tied together with a string,
suffice to make his primitive heart glad. Primitive these people are;
their instincts, never led astray very far by such frills and trappings
as keep us jogging along are none the less human. Unfold your camera and
suggest taking a picture of any one of them and forthwith he straightens
up, transforms his features, and adjusts his loin-cloth; nor will he
forget to brush his hair with his hand. What a strange thing is this
instinct in human nature anywhere in the world which substitutes so much
starch for a slouch the moment one sees a one-eyed box pointing in his
direction! None ever hoped to see a print of himself, but all posed as
though the click of that little shutter were the recipe for perpetual
youth.
The motive is not always one of vanity. Generally, at the sound of the
shutter, a hand shoots out in anticipation of reward. In the tropics it
is no little task to bring oneself together so suddenly, and the effort
should be fully compensated. The expenditure of energy involved in
posing is worthy of remuneration. Nevertheless, vanity is inherent in
this response. The Fijian is a handsome creature, and he knows it. He
knows how to make his hair the envy of the world. "Permanent-wave"
establishments would go out of business here in America if some skilled
Fijian could endure our climate. He would give such permanence to
blondes and brunettes as would cost only twenty-five cents and would
really last. He would not plaster the hair down and cover it with a net
against the least ruffle of the wind. When he got through with it it
would stand straight up in the air, four to six inches long, and would
serve as an insulator against the burning rays of the sun unrivaled
anywhere in the world. While I squinted and slunk in the shade, the
native chose the open highway. Give him a cluster of breadfruit to carry
and a bank messenger with a bag of bullion could not seem more
important.
The Fijians, notwithstanding the fact that they take less to the
sentimental in our civilization than the Samoans, are a fine race. Their
softness of nature is a surprising inversion of their former ferocity.
What one sees of them in Suva helps to fortify one in this conclusion; a
visit farther inland leaves not a shadow of doubt. And pretty as the
harbor is, it is as nothing compared with the loveliness of river and
hills in the interior.
I was making my way to the pier in search of the launch that would take
me up the Rewa River, when a giant Fijian approached me. He spoke
English as few foreign to the tongue can speak it. A coat, a watch, and
a cane--a lordly biped--he did not hesitate to refer to his virtues
proudly. He answered my unspoken question as to his inches by assuring
me he was six feet three in his stocking feet (he wore no stockings) and
was forty-five years old. For a few minutes we chatted amicably about
Fiji and its places of interest. There was never a smug reference to
anything even suggestive of the lascivious--as would have been the case
with a guide in Japan, or Europe--yet he cordially offered to conduct
and protect me through Fijiland. Had I had a billion dollars in gold
upon me I felt that I might have put myself in his care anywhere in the
world. But I was already engaged to go up the Rewa River and could not
hire him. Cordially and generously, as an old friend might have done, he
told me what to look for and bid me have a good time.
4
I took the launch which makes daily trips up the Rewa. The little vessel
was black with natives--outside, inside, everywhere, streaming over to
the pier. It was owned and operated by an Englishman named Message. Even
in the traffic on this river combination threatens individual
enterprise. "The company has several launches. It runs them on schedule
time, stopping only at special stations, regardless of the convenience
to the Fijians. It is trying to force me out of business," said Mr.
Message, a look of troubled defiance in his face. "But I am just as
determined to beat it."
So he operates his launch to suit the natives, winning their good-will
and patronage. It was interesting to see how his method worked. No
better lesson in the instinctive tendency toward coöperation and mutual
aid could be found. He had no white assistant, but every Fijian who
could find room on the launch constituted himself a longshoreman. They
enjoyed playing with the launch. They helped in the work of loading and
unloading one another's petty cargo, such as kerosene, corrugated iron
for roofing (which is everywhere replacing thatch), and odd sticks of
wood. And the jollity that electrified them was a delightful commentary
on this one white man's humanity.
Delight rides at a spirited pace on this river Rewa. The banks are
seldom more than a couple of feet above the water. The launch makes
straight for the shore wherever a Fijian recognizes his hut, and he
scrambles off as best he can. Here and there round the bends natives in
_takias_ (somewhat like outrigger canoes with mat sails, now seldom
used), punts, or rowboats slip by in the twilight.
The sun had set by the time all the little stops had been made between
Suva and Davuilevu, the last stopping-place. Each man, as he stepped
from this little float of modernism, clambered up the bank and
disappeared amid the sugar-cane. What a world of romance and change he
took into the dark-brown hut he calls his own! What news of the world
must he not have brought back with him! A commuter, he had probably gone
in by that morning's launch, in which case he spent three full hours in
"toil" or in the purchase of a sheet of corrugated iron or a tin of oil.
He may have helped himself to a shirt from somebody's clothes-line in
the spare time left him. One thing was certain, there were no chocolates
in his pockets, for he had no pockets, and I saw no young woman holding
a baby in her arms for daddy to greet.
Yet even from a distance one recognized something of family affection.
To enter and examine closely would perhaps have made a difference in my
impressions. I was content with these hazy pictures, to see these
dark-skinned people merge with their brown-thatched huts curtained by
shadows within the cane-fields. When night came on all was dissolved in
shadow, and voices in song rose on the cool air.
5
The Rewa River runs between two antagonistic institutions. At Davuilevu
(the Great Conch-Shell) there is a mission station on one side and a
sugar-mill on the other. Both are deeply affecting the character and
environment of the Fijians, yet the contrast in the results is too
obvious to be overlooked by even the most casual observer.
As I stepped off the boat a young New Zealander whose cousin had come
down with us on the _Niagara_ and whom I had met the day of our arrival
in Suva, came out of a building across the road. He was conducting a
class in carpentry composed of young Fijian students of the mission.
They were so absorbed in their work that they barely noticed me, and the
atmosphere of sober earnestness about the place was thrilling. From
time out of mind the Fijians have been good carpenters, the craft being
passed down from generation to generation within a special caste. Their
shipbuilding has always been superior to that of their neighbors, the
Tongans. It was not to be wondered at, therefore, that the main
department here should be that of wood-turning, and some of the work the
students were doing at the time was exceptionally fine.
The buildings of the mission had all been constructed with native labor
under the direction of the missionaries. They were simply but firmly
built, the absence of architectural richness being due fully as much to
the spirit of the missionaries as to the lack of decorativeness in the
character of the natives.
However, there was something to be found at the mission which was
harshly lacking at the sugar-mill. The students moved about in a
leisurely manner, cleanly and thoughtful; whereas across the river not
only were the buildings of the very crudest possible, but the Hindus and
the Fijians roamed around like sullen, hungry curs always expecting a
kick. Those who were not sullen, were obviously tired, spiritless, and
repressed. Their huts were set close to one another in rows, whereas the
mission buildings range over the hills. The crowding at the mill, upon
such vast open spaces, gave the little village all the faults of a
tenement district. Racial clannishness seems to require even closer
touch where space is wide. The very expanse of the world seems to
intensify the fear of loneliness, so men huddle closer to sense somewhat
of the gregarious delights of over-populated India. But there is also
the squeezing of plantation-owners here at fault, and the total
disregard of the needs of individual employees.
The mill is worked day and night, in season, but it is at night that
one's reactions to it are most impressive. The street lamps, assisted by
a dim glow from within the shacks, the monotonous invocation of prayer
by Indians squatting before the wide-open doors, the tiny kava
"saloons," and the great, giant, grinding, grating sugar-mills crushing
the juice out of the cane and precipitating it (after a chain of
processes) in white dust for sweetening the world, are something never
to be forgotten. The deep, pulsating breath of the mill sounded like the
snore of a sleeping monster. Yet that monstrous mill never sleeps.
The sound did not cease, but rather, became more pronounced after I
returned that night. Deeply imprinted on my memory was the figure of a
sullen-looking Indian at his post--small, wiry, persistent--with the
whirring of machinery all about him, the steaming vats, the broken
sticks of cane being crunched in the maw of the machine. The toilers
sometimes dozed at their tasks. I was told that once an Indian fell into
one of the vats in a moment of dizzy slumber. The cynical informer
insisted that the management would not even stop the process of turning
cane into sugar, and that into the tea-cups of the world was mixed the
substance of that man. My reflection was along different lines,--that
into the sweets of the world we were constantly mixing the souls of men.
6
But unfortunately those who look after the souls of these men at the
mission are apt to forget that they have bodies, too, and that body is
the materialization of desire. There is something wonderful, indeed, in
the sight of men known to have been of the most ferocious of human
creatures going about their daily affairs in an attitude of great
reverence to the things of life. And reverence added to the extreme
shyness of the Fijian is writ large in the manner of every native across
the way from the mill. Sometimes I felt that there was altogether too
much restraint, too much checking of wholesome and healthy impulses
among them for it to be true reverence. That was especially marked on
Sunday morning, when from all the corners of the mission fields gathered
the sturdy black men in the center of the grounds where stood the little
church.
[Illustration: A CORNER OF SUVA, FIJI
The unexpected happened--the cab moved]
[Illustration: FOOD FOR A DAY'S GOSSIP]
[Illustration: THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT
My Fijian guides]
[Illustration: A HINDU PATRIARCH
On board the launch going up the Rewa River, with shy Fijians all
about]
They were a sight to behold, altogether too seriously concerned to be
amusing, and to the unbiased the acme of gentleness. There they
were--muscular, huge, erect, and black, their bushy crops of coarse hair
adding six inches to their heads; dressed in sulus neatly tucked away,
and stiff-bosomed white shirts over their bodies. Starched white shirts
in the tropics! And the Bible in Fijian in their hands. In absolute
silence they made their way into the church, the shuffle of their unshod
feet adding intensity to that silence. When they raised their voices in
the hymns it seemed to me that nothing more sincere had ever been sung
in life. But then something occurred which made me wonder.
From the Solomon Islands had come on furlough the Rev. Mr. Ryecroft and
his delicate wife. He was a man of very gentle bearing and great fervor.
He and his plucky wife had suffered much for their convictions. All men
who really believe anything suffer. The missionary is as much anathema
in his field as the anarchist is in America, and is generally as violent
an agent for the disruption of custom. Mr. Ryecroft rose to speak before
the congregation. He spoke in English and was interpreted by the
missionary in charge. He told of his trials in the Solomon Islands, and
appealed for Fijian missionaries to go back with him and save the
blood-thirsty Solomons. I watched the faces of these converted Fijians.
Some of them were intent upon the speaker, repugnance at the cruelties
rehearsed coming over them as at something of which they were more
afraid as a possible revival in themselves than as an objective danger.
Some, however, fell fast asleep, their languid heads drooping to one
side. I am no mind-reader, nor is my observation to be taken for more
than mere guess-work, but I felt that there were two conflicting
thoughts in the minds of the listeners, for while Mr. Ryecroft was
urging them to come arrest brutality in the Solomons there were other
recruiters at work in Fiji for service in Europe. While one told that
the savage Solomon Islanders swooped down upon the missionary compound
and left sixteen dead behind them, in Europe they were leaving a
thousand times as many every day, worse than dead. To whom were they to
listen!
That afternoon Mr. Waterhouse, one of the missionaries, asked me to give
the young men a little talk on my travels, he to interpret for me. I
asked him what he would like to have me tell them and he urged me to
advise them not to give up their lands. I complied, pointing out to them
how quickly they would go under as a race if they did so. The response
was more than compensating.
The outlook is all the more reassuring when you sit of an evening as I
did in the large, carefully woven native house, elliptical in shape,
with thatched roof and soft-matted floors, which serves as a sort of
night school for little tots. The children, who were then rehearsing
some dances for the coming festival, sat on tiers of benches so built
that one child's feet were on a level with the shoulders of the one in
front. Like a palisade of stars their bright eyes glistened with the
reflections of the light from the kerosene lamps hanging on wires from
the rafters. Lolohea Ratu, a girl of twenty, educated in Sydney,
Australia, spoke to them in a plaintive, modulated voice, soft and low.
All Fijian voices are sad, but hers was slightly sadder than most of
them, tinged, it seemed, with knowledge of the world. She had studied
the Montessori method and was trying to train her little brothers and
sisters thereby. But she was not forgetful of what is lovely in her own
race, primitive as it is, and was preparing these children in something
of a compromise between native and foreign dances. Round and round the
room they marched, the overhanging lamps playing pranks with their
shadows. Others sat upon the mats, legs crossed, beating time and
clapping hands in the native fashion. Their glistening bodies and
sparkling, mischievous eyes, their response to the enchanting rhythm and
melody borrowed from a world as strange to them as theirs is to us,
showed their delight. I wondered what strange images--ghostly pale
folk--they were seeing through our songs. Perhaps the music was merely
another kind of "savage" song to them, even a wee bit wilder than their
own. On the following day they were to sing and dance to the amazement
of their skeptical elders.
Thus does Fijian "civilization" steer its uncertain course between the
two contending influences from the West--the planters and the
missionaries--just as the river Rewa runs between them over the jungle
plains, struggling to supplant wild entangling growths with earth
culture.
7
And that "civilization" leans at one time toward the mill and at another
toward the mission. Frankly, Fiji grows more interesting as one gets
away from these two guy-wires and floats on the sluggish river. My
opportunity of seeing that Fiji which is least confused by either
influence came unexpectedly. The missionaries generously invited me to
go with them up the river in their launch early Monday morning.
Everywhere along the banks of the broad, deep stream stood groups of
huts and villages amid the sugar-cane fields. I gazed up the wide way of
the river toward the hazy blue mountains which stood fifty miles away.
They seemed to be a thousand miles and farther still from reality. The
Himalayas which lured the Lama priest and _Kim_ could not have been more
enticing. Because of the cloying atmosphere of the day, this distant
coolness was like an oasis in the desert, and I longed for some phantom
ship to bear me away on the breeze.
For twenty miles we glided on through cane plantations, banana- and
cocoanut-trees, and miniature palisades here and there rising to the
dignity of hills. We landed, toward noon, at a village which stood on a
little plateau,--quiet, self-satisfied, though in no way elaborate. The
best of the huts stood against the hill across the "street" formed by
two rows of thatch-roofed and leaf-walled huts. It belonged to the
native Christian teacher. He turned it over to us, himself and his wife
and baby disappearing while we lunched. Much of our repast remaining,
the missionary offered it to the teacher, but I noticed that he looked
displeased and turned the platter over to the flock of children which
had gathered outside,--a brood of little fellows, their bellies bulging
out before them, not even the shadow of a garment covering their
nakedness.
I returned to the hut a little later for my camera, not knowing that any
one was there. Inside, in one corner, lay the teacher's wife, stretched
face downward, nursing her baby, which lay on its back upon the soft
mats. She smiled, slightly embarrassed, and I withdrew. Here, then, was
the place where civilization and savagery met.
There were few Fijians in the village, mostly children and several old
women. A Solomon Islander, who had got there during the days when
blackbirding or kidnapping was common, moved among them. He had quite
forgotten his own language and could not understand Mr. Ryecroft when
the missionary spoke to him. An elderly man beckoned to me from his hut
and there offered to sell me a heavy, ebony carved club that could kill
an ox, swearing by all the taboos that it was a sacred club and had
killed many a man in his father's time.
[Illustration: INSTRUCTOR OF THE FIJIAN CONSTABULARY
At Suva]
[Illustration: THE SCOWL INDICATES A COMPLEX
For he is not quite certain that the missionaries are right about that
club not being a god]
[Illustration: A FIJIAN MAIN STREET
The corrugated iron-roofed shack is the one we ate our lunch in]
[Illustration: LITTLE FIJIANS
The only things some of these had on were sores on the tops of their
heads]
A narrow path climbing the hill close behind the village led us to a
view over the long sweep of the river and its valley. The utmost of
peace and tranquillity hung, without a tremor, below us. Twenty huts
fringed the plateau, forming a vague ellipse, interwoven with lovely
salvias, coleuses, and begonias. The village seemed to have been caught
in the crook of the river, while a field of sugar-cane filled the plain
across the stream, the shaggy mountains quartering it from the rear.
Distant, reaching toward the sun, ranged the mountains from which the
river is daily born anew.
As our launch chugged steadily, easily down-stream, and the evening
shadows overstepped the sun, Fiji emerged fresh and sweet as I had not
seen it before. The missionaries, till then sober and reserved, relaxed,
the men's heads in the laps of their wives. Sentimental songs of long
ago, like a stream of soft desire through the years, supplanted precept
in their minds, and I realized for the first time why some men chose to
be missionaries. It was to them no hardship. The trials and sufferings
were romance to their natures, and the giving up of everything for
Christ was after all only living out that world-old truism that in order
to have life one must be ready to surrender it.
8
Next day Mr. Waterhouse and I wandered about the village of the sugar
factory. At the bidding of several minor chiefs who had described a
circle on the mats, we entered one of the dark huts by way of a low
door. In a corner a woman tended the open fire, and near an opening a
girl sat munching. The room was thick with smoke, the thin reeds
supporting the roof glistening with soot. Everything was in order and
according to form. They were making _kava_ (or _ava_ or _yangana_), the
native drink. This used to be the work of the chieftain's daughter, who
ground the ava root with her teeth and then mixed it with water. The law
doesn't permit this now; so it is crushed in a mortar (_tonoa_).
Specialization has reached out its tentacles even to this place, so that
now the captain of this industry is an Indian.
The ava mixed, it was passed round in a well-scraped cocoanut-shell cut
in half. As guests we were offered the first drink. Extremely bitter, it
is nevertheless refreshing. After I made a pretense of drinking, the
bowl was passed to the most respected chief. With gracious
self-restraint he declined it. "This is too full. You have given me
altogether too much." A little bit of it was poured back, and he drank
it with one gulp. He would really have liked twice as much, not half,
but there is more modesty and decorum among savages than we imagine. In
fact, our conventions are often only atrophied taboos.
But the women, not so handsome nor so elegantly coifed as the men, were
excluded from a share in the toast. They were not even part of the
entertainment. The sexes seldom meet in any form of social intercourse.
The boys never flirt with the girls, nor do they ever seem to notice
them. In public there is a never-diminishing distance between them. A
world without love-making, primitive life is outwardly not so romantic
as is ours. The "romance" is generally that of the foreigner with the
native women, not among the natives themselves.
The daughter of the biggest living Fijian chief wandered about like an
outcast. She wore a red Mother-Hubbard gown, and nothing else. Her hair
hung down to her shoulders. Having gone through the process of
discoloration by the application of lime, according to the custom among
the natives in the tropics, it was reddish and stiff, but, being long,
had none of the leonine quality of the men's hair. Andi Cacarini (Fijian
for Katherine), daughter of a modern chief, spoke fairly good English.
She wasn't exactly ashamed, but just shy. The better class of Fijians,
they who have come in contact with white people, all manifest a timid
reticence. Andi Cacarini was shy, but hardly what one could call bashful
or fastidious. She posed for me as though an artist's model, not at all
ungraceful in her carriage or her walk.
The male Fijian is extremely timid, but none the less fastidious. The
care with which he trains and curls his hair would serve as an
object-lesson to the impatient husband of the vainest of white women.
This doesn't mean that the Fijian man is effeminate in his ways, but he
is particular about his hair. The process of discoloring it is exact. A
mixture of burnt coral with water makes a fine substitute for soap. When
washed out and dried, the hair is curled and combed and anointed. From
the point of view of sanitation, the treatment is excellent, and from
that of art--just watch the proud male pass down the road!
No matter where one goes in Fiji--or any of the South Sea Islands--the
dance goes with one. Here at Davuilevu one afternoon in the hot,
scorching sun, the natives gathered on the turf for merrymaking. It was
no special holiday, no unusual event. To our way of thinking it is a
tame sort of dance they do. We hear much of the freedom between the
sexes in the tropics, and one gains the impression that there are
absolutely no taboos. But just as there is nothing in all Japan--however
delightful--to compensate the child, or even grown-ups, for the lack of
the kiss, so none of the Fijian dances fill that same emotional
requirement which with us is secured through the embrace of men and
women in the dance. From the Fijian point of view, the whirling of
couples about together must be extremely immodest, if not immoral.
Sitting in a double row, one in front of the other, were oiled and
garlanded Fijians. Behind them and in a circle sat a number of singers
and lali-players. As they began beating time, the oiled natives began to
move from side to side rhythmically. Their arms and bodies jerked in a
most fascinating and interpretative manner. No voices in the wide world
are lovelier than the voices of Fijians in chorus; no other music issues
so purely as the Fijian music from the depths of racial experience.
Sometimes the dancers swung half-way round from side to side, with arms
akimbo, or extended their arms in all directions, clapping their hands
while chanting in soothing, melodious deep tones.
Judging from what I heard of the music of the Tongans, the Samoans, and
the Fijians, I give the prize to the Fijians for richness of tone. More
primitive than the plaintive Tongans, the Fijian music is a weird
combination of the intellectual, the martial, and the industrial,--more
fascinating than the passionate, voluptuous tunes and dances of the
Samoans and the Hawaiians. The Polynesians, probably because of their
close kinship with the Europeans, are much more sentimental in their
music. The Fijian is more vigorous and to me more truly artistic.
No study, it seems to me, would throw more light on the history and
unity of the human race than that of the dance and music. Why two races
so far apart as the Japanese and the Maories of New Zealand should be so
strikingly alike in their cruder dances, is hard to say. And the Fijians
seem in some way the link between these two. The Fijian doubtless
inherits some of his musical qualities from his negroid mixture, but he
has certainly improved upon it if that is so. He has no regrets, no
sentimental longings, and in consequence his songs are free from racial
affectation.
The Fijians always sing. The instant the day's work is done and groups
form they begin to sing. Half a dozen of them sit down and cross their
legs before them, each places a stick so that one end rests lightly on
one toe, the other on the ground; and while they tap upon these sticks,
others sing and clap hands, swaying in an enchantment of loveliness. One
carries the melody in a strained tenor, the others support him with a
bass drawl. Once in a while an instrument is secured, as a flute, and
the ensemble is complete. Even the tapping on the stick becomes
instrumental in its quality.
As the day draws to a close, from the cane-fields smoke rises in all
directions. The plantation workers have gathered piles of cane refuse
for destruction. Like miniature volcanoes, these, with the coming of
darkness, shine in the lightless night. It makes one slightly sad, this
clearing away of the remnants of daily toil, this purification by fire.
Then the sound of that other lali (the hollow tree-trunk), once the
war-alarum or call to a cannibal feast, now at Davuilevu the invitation
to prayer, the dampness, and the sense of crowding things in
growth,--this is what will ever remain vivid to me.
9
Poor untroubled Fijians! This simple love of harmony, a majestic sense
of force and brutality,--yet, withal, so naïve, withal so easily
satisfied, so easily led. Once a foreigner met a native who seemed in
great haste and trembling. The native inquired the time, in dread lest
he miss the launch for Suva. In his hand he carried a warrant for his
own arrest, with instructions to present himself at jail. When the
foreigner told him that it was up to the jailer to worry about it, he
seemed greatly shocked. One of the missionaries had been asked to keep
his eye on a friend's house. In the absence of the owner, the missionary
found a Fijian in the act of burglarizing. When questioned it was found
that the native wanted to get into jail, where he was sure of three
meals and shade, without worry. This is almost worthy of civilized man,
by whom it is perhaps more commonly practised.
But the kind of jail in which men were at that time incarcerated was not
enough to frighten the most liberty-loving individual. Because of the
humidity and dampness, the structure was left open on one side, only
three substantial walls and a roof being practical. Before the white man
got full control and the native had some iron injected into his nature,
it was not an arduous life the prisoners led. The missionary told me
that once the head jailer was found sitting out of sight, with the
officer in charge of the prisoners, tilting his chair against the wall
of the jail. The prisoners had been ordered to labor. The officer in
charge was to execute the command. Between puffs of tobacco, he would
shout: "Up shot!" and rest a while; then "Down shot!"--more rest. Not a
prisoner moved a muscle, the weights never rose from the ground. The men
were deep within the shadows. The period of punishment over, they were
ordered into their heaven of still more rest and more shade.
From our way of thinking, these are flagrant deceptions. But to the
Fijian (and to most South Sea races) the inducements for greater
exertion are simply non-existent. His revelries have been tabooed, his
wars have been stopped, his native arts are in constant competition with
cheap importations from our commercialized, industrialized world. What
is there, then, for him to do? Little wonder that his native
indifference to life is growing upon him. His conception of life after
death never held many horrors. Even in the fierce old days it was easy
for a Fijian to announce most casually that he would die at eight
o'clock the following day. He would be oiled and made ready, and at the
stated time he died. Most likely a state of catalepsy, but he was buried
and none thought a second time about it. One boy was recently roused
from such a condition and still lives.
The only means of counteracting this apathy are education and the
awakening of ambition through manual training and the teaching of
trades. This, the head of the mission told me, was his main object.
Missionary efforts, according to one man, were directed more to this
purpose than to the inculcation of any special religious precepts. And
there is no question that that will work. The will to live may yet
spring afresh in the Fijian.
From the nucleus formed by the mission is growing a more elaborate
educational system. Recently the several existing schools have been
amalgamated under a new ordinance. A proposal in reference to a more
efficient system of vernacular or sub-primary schools was embodied in a
bill put before the legislative council. A more satisfactory method of
training teachers was deliberated upon. The Fijians are, it is seen,
outgrowing the kindergarten stage, but the grown-ups are largely
children still.
10
A fortnight after I landed in Suva I was steaming for Levuka, the former
capital of the islands, situated on a much smaller land-drop not many
hours' journey away. These are the only two important ports in the
group, and inter-island vessels seldom go to one without visiting the
other. Levuka is a much prettier place than Suva. Its little clusters of
homes and buildings seem to have dug their heels into the hillside to
keep from sliding into the sea.
Along the shore to the left stood a group of Fijian huts,--a suburb of
Levuka, no doubt. Only a few old women were at home, and one old man.
Nothing in the wide world is more restful to one's spirit than to arrive
at a village which is deserted of toilers. Nothing is more symbolic of
the true nature of home, the village being more than an isolated home,
but a composite of the home spirit which is not tainted by any evidence
of barter and trade.
On the other side of Levuka, however, was an altogether different kind
of village, that of the shipwrights. Upon dry-docks stood the skeletons
of ships, fashioned with hands of love and ambition. In such vessels
these ancient rovers of the sea wandered from island to island,
learning, teaching, mixing, and disturbing the sweetness of nature, with
which no race on earth was more blessed.
The _Atua_, on which I had sailed from Suva, was a fairly large
inter-island steamer that made the rounds of all the important groups.
She was bound for Samoa, whither I had determined to go. There is no
better opportunity of getting a glimpse of the contrast between the
natives of the various South Sea islands than on board one of these
inter-island vessels. They are generally manned by the natives of one of
the groups,--in this case, the Fijians. These men handle the cargo at
all ports, and remain on board until the vessel returns to Fiji en route
to the Antipodes. They feed and sleep on the open deck and make
themselves as happy and as noisy as they can. A gasoline tin of tea,
baked potatoes, hard biscuit, and a chunk of fat meat, which is all
placed before them on the dirty deck (they are given no napkins),--that
is Fijian joy.
After their work, which in port sometimes keeps them up till the morning
hours, these strange creatures, untroubled by thought, stretch
themselves on the wooden hatchway and sleep. There I found them at
half-past five in the morning, all covered with the one large sheet of
canvas and never a nose poking out. Air! Perhaps they got some through a
little hole in the great sheet. Some stood and slept like tired,
overworked horses.
One queer Fijian with turbaned head grinned in imitation of none other
than himself, a vague, undefined curiosity rolling about in his skull.
He followed me everywhere, his white eyes staring and his mouth wide
open. Here was a future Fijian statesman in the process of formation.
His nebular, chaotic mentality was taking note of a creature as far
removed from his understanding as a star from his reach.
[Illustration: ONE OF THE MOST GIFTED OF FIJIAN CHIEFS
But who said that the wearing of hats causes baldness (?)]
[Illustration: CACARINI (KATHERINE), THE CHIEF'S DAUGHTER
In her filet gown of Parisian simplicity]
[Illustration: FIJIANS DANCE FROM THE HIP UP]
[Illustration: A FIJIAN WEDDING
Puzzle: find the bride. No, not the one with the hoop-skirt; that's
the groom]
One white soldier, an elderly man, wished to protect himself from the
wind, and asked a Fijian to haul over a piece of canvas. The black
man did so, but when the boatswain saw it, he was enraged. The Fijian
took all the scolding, said never a word, and quickly replaced the
sheet. As the boatswain moved away, the soldier handed the native a
cigarette, saying: "Have one of these, old sport. One must expect
reverses in war." The native grinned and felt the row was worth while.
There were Tongans, Indians, Samoans, and whites on board, and though
these are nearer kin to us, I liked the Fijians most. Yet the Tongans
are an attractive lot, refined in feature, in manner, and in person.
Perhaps that is why they have the distinction of being the only South
Sea people with their own kingdom, a cabinet, and a parliament.
The noise the Fijians make while in port is excruciating. It is
something unclassifiable. They roll their r's, shout as though mad with
anger, and then burst out in childish laughter at nothing. These boyish
barbarians enjoy themselves much more in yelling than they would in
chorus with a Caruso. How torrential is the stream of invective which
issues against some fellow-laborer! With what a terrific crash it falls
upon its victim! But how utter the disappointment when, after one has
expectantly waited for a scrap, a gurgle of hilarity breaks from the
throats which the moment before seemed such sirens of hate and malice!
And so they toil, happy to appear important, busy, honestly busy,
loading the thousands of crates of green bananas, the cargo which passes
to and fro. Happier than the happiest, sharing the scraps of a meal
without the growl so common among our sailors, each always seems to get
just what he wants and helps in the distribution of the portions to the
others. The missus never bothers him, no matter how long he is away, and
instantly labor ceases the group is "spiritualized" into a singing
society and the racial opera is in full swing.
I had anticipated relief at their absence when the steamer set off for
the colder regions south. Yet something pleasant was gone out of life
the moment the ship steamed out. The sailors moved about like pale
ghosts who had mechanically wandered back to a joyless life. The white
man's virtues are his burdens. His tasks are done so that he may
purchase pleasure. The ship was orderly, everything took its place, even
the cursing and yelling came within control. We were heading again for
civilization.
I felt somewhat like the old folks after their wish had rid the town of
all mischievous little boys, and my heart strained back for an inward
glimpse of the life behind. The smell of mold and copra returned; the
damp beds; the cool, clear night air; the moonlight upon the shallow
reefs; dappled gray breakers, playing upon the shore as upon a child's
ocean; in the dark, along Victoria Parade, the shuffle of bare feet in
the dust, the dim figures of tall, bushy-haired men and slim, wiry
Hindus; the thud of heeled boots on the dry earth. And far off there,
the sound of the lali, the singing of deep voices, the vision of an
earthly paradise,--shattered by the sighting of land ahead.
CHAPTER V
THE SENTIMENTAL SAMOANS
1
On the _Niagara_ was a troupe of Samoan men and women who had been to
San Francisco demonstrating their arts at the Panama-Pacific Exhibition.
This, our meeting on the wide, syrup-like tropical sea seemed to me
almost a welcome, a coming out to greet me and to lead me to the portals
of their home. They were en route to Suva, Fiji, where they were to
await an inter-island vessel to take them to Samoa. They were traveling
third class, and the way I discovered them is not to their discredit. We
were becoming more or less bored with life on deck, the games of ship
tennis and quoits being too obviously make-believe to be entertaining.
At times I would get as far away from the gregarious passengers as
possible, and again a number of us would gather upon the hatchway and
read or chatter. It was a thick latticed covering, and the warm air from
below none too agreeable. But with it rose strains of strange melodies,
as from Neptune's regions of the deep. Peering down, we espied a number
of Samoan men and women, lounging upon the floor of the hold. We took
our reputations in our hands and made the descent.
There were big, burly men and broad, sprawling women, half-naked and
asleep. One could see at a glance that they had been spoiled by the
attention they had received while on exhibition at the fair, but the
freedom of life among third-class passengers somewhat softened the
acquired stiffness, and they relaxed again into native ways. Hour by
hour, as the vessel moved southward, they seemed to come back to life,
to thaw out as it were, while we were wilting by degrees.
The scene was one which could have been found only in tropical waters
under the burning sun. Smoke, bare feet, nakedness, people fat with the
sprawly fatness which is the style of the South Seas, unwashed
sailors,--a medley of people and cargo and steamer stench. But also of
the sweetly monotonous song of the Samoan girl, the swishing of the
water against the nose of the ship in the twilight without, and the
steady push of the vessel toward the equator.
I whiled away many a pleasant hour, learning a few of the native words
in song and gossip. It is hard to distinguish one native from the other
at first, but Fulaanu stood out above the rest like a creature
over-imbued with good-nature. She was flat, flabby, with a drawl in
speech that had the effect not only in her voice but her entire bearing
of a leaning Tower of Pisa. Her body bent backward, her head was tilted
up, and her long, prominent nose also slanted almost with pride. She was
an enormous girl, plain, soft, with absolutely no fighting-spirit in
her, but she stood her ground against all masculine advances with a
charm that was in itself teasingly alluring. She was always flanked on
each side by a sailor. They pretended to teach her the ukulele, they
proffered English lessons, they found one excuse after another for being
near her, and she never shooed them away; but I'd swear by all the gods
that not one of them ever more than held her hand or leaned lovingly
against her.
Yet Fulaanu was as sentimental a maiden as I have ever laid eyes on. She
was constantly drawling some sentimental song she had learned in
California, the ukulele was seldom out of her hands, she never joined in
any of the card games going on constantly roundabout her, and she was
always ready to swap songs with any one willing to teach her.
"I teach you my language," she said to me, and slowly, with twinkling
eyes, she pronounced certain words which I repeated. We had often taught
French to our boys at our little school in California in that way,--the
Marseillaise, for instance,--and the method was not strange to me. She
used the song method, too, an old English song that was just then the
rage in Samoa. The English words run somewhat like this:
And you will take my hand
As you did when you took my name;
But it's only a beautiful picture,
In a beautiful golden frame.
I'm sure I have them all muddled, but let me hum this tune to myself and
immediately Fulaanu, the hold, Fiji, Samoa, and all the scents and
sounds of savagedom come instantly to my mind. For everywhere I went
they were singing this song, through their noses but with all the
sentimental ardor of the young flapper; as at a summer resort in America
when a new song hit has been made, the sound of it is heard from
delivery boy to housemaid and as many different renderings of it as
individual temperament demands.
There was Setu, too,--tall, straight, with that easy grace known only
among people free of clothes. Setu spoke English very well, and was as
companionable a chap as one could pick up in many a mile. But Setu's
heart was not his own; he stood guardian over a treasure he had found in
San Francisco. Not an American girl, no, sir! These savage boys did not
play the devil in our land as our savages do in theirs. But Setu was the
personification of chivalry, and, what was more, he was in love. To look
at him and then at her was to despair of human instinct of natural
selection. How an Apollo of his excellence should have been unable to
find a more handsome objet d'amour, I cannot imagine. She was short,
well rounded, with a head as square as Fulaanu's was oblong, and a nose
as snubby as Fulaanu's was romanesque. She was evidently committed, body
and soul, to Setu for she was as devoid of charm for the others as
Fulaanu was full of it. And so all day long, Setu and his sweetheart
hugged each other in a corner, as oblivious of the presence of a
ship-load of people as though they had been ensconced in a hut of their
own. They were evidently taking advantage of proximity to civilization,
for such immodest behavior is not frequent in the tropics. Civilization
had taught the savages some things at least. Whenever Setu was free from
love-making, he would spare a moment to me, and on those rare occasions
he stirred my spirit with promises of guidance in his native island that
threatened to exhaust my funds.
The romantic associations we have with the South Seas were in this group
reversed, for to these primitive people the greatest romance imaginable
came with their journey to America. There young people from different
islands met and fell in love with one another; there, under the benign
influence of American spooning, one couple was married, and there their
first baby was born,--an American subject, brought back to Pago Pago
(American Samoa) to resume his citizenship. There they learned true
modesty, which comprised stockings and heavy boys' shoes; the art of
playing solitaire, in which one fat, matronly-looking woman indulged all
day as though she had been brought along as chaperon and felt herself
considerably out of it; and even en route for home they were learning
the art of striking by calculation and without passion or frenzy.
I was sitting on the hatch with Fulaanu, who was strumming away on her
ukulele, when a ring was formed in the middle of the hold and a young
white man began boxing with a Samoan. The white boxer was obviously an
amateur, bearing himself with all the unpleasant mannerisms of his
profession,--a haughty, pugnacious, overbearing self-conceit. He had
every advantage in training over his antagonist, whom he peppered
vigorously. He kept it up when it was evident that the young Samoan was
going under. One last blow and the fellow doubled over, bleeding from
nose and mouth. It took ten minutes to bring him round. In the
meanwhile, the victor of the unfair bout strutted around as though he
had accomplished something remarkable.
It was interesting to see the effect this had on the "primitive"
Samoans. There was consternation among them; a hush came over the hold.
The vibration of the steamer and the splashing of the water against its
iron side alone broke the stillness. The Samoan girls, though they did
not grow hysterical, were most decidedly displeased, turning in disgust
from the sight of blood. Yet according to our notions they are
primitive, and the fact is that a few generations ago they were savages.
But they were not long in distress. The spell of the equatorial sun was
upon them, and they soon relaxed. There upon mats, as in their own huts,
lay rows of fat, large, voluptuous men and women; nor was there even a
rope to separate the sexes as in an up-to-date Japanese bath. They
seemed to sleep all day, in shifts governed by impulse only. A woman
would rise and move about a while, then go back to lounge again.
Enormous, broad-shouldered and black mustached men would snore gently,
rise and inspect life, and decide that slumber was better for one's
soul. But Fulaanu lounged with her ukulele, surrounded by amorous
sailors who gazed longingly into her eyes.
One night we arranged for a meeting of the "classes." We promised the
Samoans a good collection if they would come and dance for us on deck.
We invited the first-class folk to come, too. They stood as far to one
side of us as was consonant with first-class dignity represented by an
extra few pounds sterling in the price of the ticket. But for a moment
we forgot that there were class and race in the world.
It was not one of those interminable revelries one reads about, that
begin with twilight and end with twilight. On the contrary, it was a
little squall of entertainment, one that breaks out of a clear sky and
leaves the sky just as clear in a trice. There was no occasion for
self-expression here. They had been asked to dance for our
entertainment, not for theirs. There we stood, ready to applaud; there
they were, ready to be applauded, to receive the collection promised. It
was another little thing they had picked up in our world, from our
civilization,--the commercialization of art. Our artists, scribes, and
entertainers have been considerably raised above prostitution of their
talents by a certain commercialization, by the translation of their
worth in dollars and cents; and we need a little more of it to free art
from bondage to patronage. But in the tropics, where the dance and
jollity are no private matters, there is something sterile in
commercialization. No doubt to the natives there is little difference
between a woman giving herself for gain and a man dancing for the money
there is in it without the whole group becoming part of the performance:
the dancer feels that his purchaser, his public, is cold and
unresponsive. And so it seemed to me at this dance. They finished, they
expected their money, they got it and departed, and there seemed
something immoral to me in the exploitation of their emotions.
What a different lot they were one night when I visited the little house
they rented in Suva while waiting for the _Atua_ to arrive from New
Zealand and take them on to Samoa. There it was song and dance out of
sheer ecstasy: life was so full. They were again in their home
atmosphere, and their voices only helped swell the volume of song which
issued forth everywhere about,--an electrification of humanity all along
the line, in village after village.
They hung about the pier before sailing for Samoa till after midnight,
singing sentimental songs and hobnobbing with the Fijians. The Fijian
constable joined them with a flute, and the lot of them tried to drown
out the voices of the natives loading and unloading cargo. Not until
notice was given that the ship was about to get under steam did they
think of going aboard. They looked as though ready for rest, but by no
means dissipated, by no means weary. The spell of song was still upon
them.
When we woke next morning, we were tied up to a pier at the foot of the
hills of Levuka. But I have already dwelt upon the features of this
former capital, and am only concerned with it here as it was reflected
in the eyes of the Samoans. Levuka to me was one thing; to them it was
quite another. The moldy little stores afforded them more interest than
the village to the left, or the shipyards to the right which were to my
Western notions commendable.
I followed in the wake of these gliding natives as we left the steamer.
They looked neither to the right nor to the left, but wended their ways,
like cattle in the pasture, straight toward the shops. Into one and out
the other they went, bargaining, pricing, buying little trinkets and
simple cloths, chatting with the Fijians as though friends of old.
Setu's sweetheart and the pretty mother of the young American citizen,
who was left in the care of the fat "chaperon," set off by themselves
through the one and only street of Levuka. It was obvious that they were
quite aware of whither they were going,--so direct was their journey. My
curiosity was roused and I wandered along with them. They said never a
word to me, nor objected to my presence. We turned to the left, off into
a side street that began to insinuate its way along the bed of a stream
lined with wooden huts and shacks. Some of these were fairly well
constructed, with verandas, like the houses of a miniature American
town, garlanded in flowers. Just above the village, where the stream
began to emerge from behind a rocky little gorge, the two women turned
in at a gate to a private cottage. A bridge led across the stream to
the little house, the veranda of which extended slightly over the
stream. Beneath, in a corner formed by a projecting boulder, lay a quiet
little pool of water--clear, cool, fresh and deep.
Without asking permission from the owners, the women began slowly,
cautiously to wade into the pool. Seeing that I had no thought of going,
they put modesty aside, slipped the loose garments down to their waists
and immersed themselves up to their necks. One of them was tattooed from
below her breasts to her hips; the other's breasts alone bore these
designs. They dipped and rose, splashed and spluttered, but there was
none of that intimacy with their own flesh which is the essence of
cleanliness and passion in our world. There was no soap, no scrubbing.
It was something objective, almost, a contact with nature like looking
at a landscape or listening to a storm.
Presently some of the inmates of the cottage, evidently well-to-do
Fijians, came out to greet them. I could not tell whether they were
friends or not, but the women were invited in,--and I turned into town
through back roads and alleys that were just like the back roads and
alleys anywhere in the world.
That afternoon we steamed out again for Apia, Samoa. The sea was
disturbed somewhat and gave us various sensations; but the vile odors
that threatened my nautical pride never changed.
Most of the Samoans were under the weather. They did not look cheerful,
and all song was gone out of them. Setu and his sweetheart were here
even more inseparable than on the _Niagara_. She was not very well and
stretched out on the bench on the edge of which he took his seat. In her
squeamish condition she could hardly be expected to pay much attention
to proprieties she had acquired in less than a year's residence in
America. Her sprawly bare feet on several occasions made too bold an
exit from beneath the loose Mother-Hubbard gown she wore, and each time
Setu would draw the skirt farther over them, affectionately pressing
them with his hand. This one instance, exceptional as it was, made me
notice more consciously the absence of that public intimacy which is the
bane of the prude with us. Not all the charm of the tropics which is so
real to me can take the place of the cleanliness of the West, the
tenderness of clean men and women in public, to be observed even on our
crowded subways, the loveliness of white skin tinged with pink and
scented with the essence of flowers.
I did not see them again before we arrived at Samoa the next day; the
sea was too choppy. But in the afternoon Setu came out with a pillow
held aloft over his head, and declared he would take a nap. There was
childish glee in his face at the prospect, and he stretched out on the
hard deck in perfect ease. And long after I ceased to figure in his
fancies, the beaming, sparkling eyes and merry grin seemed to light up
the soul within him.
Toward sundown we passed the first island of the group,--Savaii, the
largest. It lay at our left, Mua Peak emitting a sluggish smoke from
reaches beyond the depth of the waters which had nearly submerged it,
and as the sea made furious charges into blow-holes or half-submerged
caverns, the earth spit back the invading waters with an easy contempt.
At our right lay the island of Manono, much smaller, and nearer our
course. Shy Samoan villages hid in little ravines, almost afraid to show
their faces.
Shortly after eight o'clock we neared the island of Upolu. The troupe of
Samoans came out on deck with the eagerness in their eyes that marks
such arrivals at every port of the world. The lights of the village of
Apia pricked the delicate evening haze. One strong, steady lamp, like a
planet, shone from above the others. Setu called to me eagerly, his
right hand pointing toward it.
"That is from Vailima, Stevenson's home," he said, with some pride.
When at last we anchored just outside the reefs before Apia, these
natives, who had grown close to one another during the year of their
pilgrimage, began bidding one another farewell before slipping back to
the little separate grooves they called home. The women kissed one
another, cheek touching cheek at an angle, a practice common both at
meeting (_talofa_) and at parting (_tofa_). But with the men they only
shook hands. Then, clambering over into canoes, they were borne across
the reefs to their homes. And as long as Polynesia is Polynesia there
will echo the stories of this journey to the land of the white man and
all children will know that what the white man said about his lands is
true.
2
The reader who has never entered a strange port nor come home from
foreign lands will not be able to imagine the psychological effect of my
entry of Samoa. Not only did the thousands of eyes of the natives seem
to turn their gaze upon me, but it seemed, and I was quite sure, that at
least two thousand pale faces with as many bayonets were fixed upon me.
Samoa was under occupation. I asked the captain of the forces what I
could do to avoid trouble.
"See that you don't get shot," he said. I assured him there was nothing
nearer my heart's desire, and, seeing that I looked harmless, he
ventured to reassure me: "Oh, just keep away from the wireless. That's
all." I had come to see the natives, not electric gymnastics, so I found
it very easy to keep away from the wireless.
What there was of Apia was essentially European and lay along the
waterfront. Here stood the three-story hotel, built and until then
managed by Germans. Diagonally across from it and nearer the water's
edge, was a two-story ramshackle building even then run by Germans. The
little barber to whom I had been directed spoke with a most decided
German accent. He cut and shampooed my hair, but let me walk out with as
much of a souse on top of my head as I ever had in a shower-bath.
Wherever I went were Germans,--and yet they said the islands were under
occupation. Turn to the right and there, back off the street within a
small compound that seemed to lie flat and low, was a German school
still being conducted by black-bearded German priests. But to the left,
within the dark-red fence, stood the dark-red buildings of the German
Plantation Company, closed, and the little building that once was the
German Club had become the British Club; while at the other end of the
street were the office buildings of the military staff, where once ruled
the German militarists. In between, in a little building a block or two
behind the waterfront, was the printing-office,--where, strange to say,
the daily paper was still being printed in both German and English. With
the few structures that filled in the gaps between these outposts we had
small concern. They were the nests of traders, the haven of so-called
beach-combers and the barracks and missionary compounds. And alien Samoa
is at an end.
Mindful of the mild instructions not to get myself shot, I took as
little interest in the details of occupation as was compatible with my
sense of freedom; but this course was precarious, for at the time any
one who was not with us was against us. However, details of such
differences must be reserved for a later chapter. Here we are interested
in Samoa itself. But in my very interest in the place I struck a snag,
for every other day Germans were being deported or coraled for
attempting to stir up a native uprising. Still, inasmuch as I could not
acquire the language in so short a time, I felt secure, and took to the
paths that led to the Stone Age as a Dante without a love-affair to
guide him.
The island is hemmed in by coral reefs on the edge of which the waves
break, spreading in foam and gliding quietly toward shore. As they sport
in the brilliant sunlight, it seems as though the sea were calling back
the life lost to it through evolution. The tall, gaunt palms which lean
toward the sea, bow in a humble helplessness. There, a quarter of a mile
out, upon the unseen reefs, lies the iron skeleton of the _Adler_, the
German man-of-war which was wrecked on the memorable day in 1889. Such
seems to be the fate of the Germans: even their skeletons outlive
disaster. But the sea has been the protector of the natives. It would be
interesting to speculate as to what course events about the South Seas
would have taken had not that hurricane intervened. The natives are
indifferent to such speculations; for, as far as they were concerned,
one turn was as good as another. Borne over the swelling waves from
island drift to island drift, the ups and downs of eternity seem to
leave no great changes in their lives.
Roaming along the waterfront to the left of Apia with the sun near high
noon, all by myself, I met with nothing to disturb the utter sweetness
and glory of life about. I wavered between moods of exquisite
exhilaration and deep depression. Bound by the encircling consciousness
of the occupation, the sense of wrong done these natives who had neither
asked for our civilization nor invited us to squabble over their
"bones," I felt that but for the presence of the white man this would
have been the loveliest land in the world. For here one becomes aware of
nature as something altogether different from nature anywhere else. That
distant pleading of the sea; the gentle yielding of the palms to the
landborn breezes,--there was much more than peace and ease; there was
absolute harmony. But where was man?
I became restless. Nature was not sufficient. I went to seek out man,
for at that hour there was none of him anywhere about. I was, for all
intents and purposes, absolutely the only human being on that island.
Every one else had taken to cool retreats. But where should I go? I
wondered. I knew no one, and the sense of loneliness I had for a while
forgotten came back to me with a rush. For a moment I was again in
civilization, again in a world of fences and locked doors. "I will go
and look up Setu," I thought. "He promised to guide me about Samoa. I
have his address. I'll look up Setu." So I turned back toward the hills
and in among the palm groves, where I could see the huts of the village
of Mulinuu, where Setu lived.
When I arrived I realized why I had suddenly become conscious of my
loneliness. Throughout the village there wasn't a soul abroad. The domes
of thatch resting on circles of smooth pillars were deserted, it seemed,
and the fresh coolness that coursed freely within their shade was
untasted. Nowhere upon the broad, grassy fields beneath the palms was
there a walking thing; and I was a total stranger. It was slightly
bewildering, as though I were in a graveyard, or a village from which
the inhabitants had all gone. I approached one of the huts and found, to
my satisfaction, that there was a human being there. It was a woman,
attending to her household duties. She was just under the eaves on the
outside, beside the floor of the hut, which was like a circular stage
raised a foot or two above the ground, and paved with loose shingles
from the shore. I hardly knew how to approach her, not thinking she
might know my language.
"Good afternoon," she said in perfect English. "Sit down." The shock was
pleasant. So there were no fences or doors to social intercourse in
Samoa, after all. Still, I must find Setu. I asked her where I could
locate his home. Before directing me, she chatted a while and assured me
that I could go to any one of the huts about and make myself
comfortable. I was not to hesitate, as it was the custom of the country
and in no way unusual. She was a fine-looking woman, robust and tall,
genial and attentive, as housewifely a person as could be found
anywhere. I have since had occasion to talk with many a housewife in New
Zealand and Australia when searching for private quarters and cannot say
that their manners, their dress, their regard for a stranger's welfare
in any way exceeded those of this woman who had nothing to offer me but
rest and no wish for reward but my content.
Taking her directions, I turned across the village to where she said
Setu could be found. Beneath the shade of a palm squatted a group of men
who when they spied me called for me to come over to them. Had I not
been on curiosity bent, I should have regarded their request as sheer
impudence, for when I arrived they wanted me to employ them as guides.
It was amusing. Instead of running after hire, they commanded the
stranger to come to them. It was too comfortable under the spreading
palm branches. I told them that I had arranged with Setu to guide me and
was in search of him. They began running Setu down. He was
untrustworthy, they assured me, and would charge me too high a price.
Then they asked me what my business was, what Setu had said, when he was
going,--everything imaginable. But never an inch would they move to show
me the way to Setu's house. I wandered about for a while, inquiring of
one stray individual and another, but no one had seen Setu, and at last
I learned that he had left the village early that morning for his
father's place, far inland, and would not return. Setu had gone back on
me. He had promised to call for me with his horse and buggy and convey
me over the island. But Setu had forsaken me, and there was nothing to
do but to make the best of the day right there.
Taking the word of the well-spoken woman, I approached the most
attractive-looking hut, where sat a number of people roundabout the
pillars. It was a mansion-like establishment even to my inexperienced
judgment of huts. It was roofed with corrugated iron instead of thatch,
and the pillars were unusually straight and smooth. The raised floor was
very neatly spread with selected, smooth, flat stones four to five
inches in diameter, and framed with a rim of concrete. Fine straw mats
lay like rugs over a polished parquet floor at all angles to one
another, and straw drop curtains hung rolled up under the eaves, to be
lowered in case of rain or hurricane. The floor space must have been at
least thirty-five feet in diameter, and it was plain that each
inhabitant occupied his own section of the hut round the outer circle.
I was cordially greeted and invited to rest, which I did by sitting on
the ground with my legs out, and my back to a pillar for support. From
the quiet and decorum it was evident that the householders were
entertaining guests. Each couple or family sat upon its own mats. There
were twelve adults and three children. It happened that the man who
greeted me and bade me be seated was the guest of honor, a gentleman
from Rarotanga, passing through Samoa on his way to Fiji. He was a very
refined-looking individual, and made me feel that the Rarotangans were a
superior race, but the contrary is true. However, his regular features
and courtly manners were a distinction which might well have led to such
a supposition. His handsome wife, who sat with him, was as retiring as a
Japanese woman, and as considerate of his comfort.
The others were set in pairs all round the hut. At the extreme left were
two women, sewing; opposite us, a man and woman apportioning the
victuals; to my right, a man and a woman grinding the ava root
preparatory to the making of the drink. Farther way squatted a very fat
woman, with barely a covering over her breasts, which were full as
though she were in the nursing-stage. The children moved about freely
neither disturbing nor being curbed. In the center of the company sat
two men, one evidently the head of the family, with his back up against
a pillar, the other his equal in some relationship.
The dinner was being served by a portly individual, a man who could not
have been exactly a servant, yet who did not act as though he were a
member of the family. He passed round the ample supply of fish, meats,
and vegetables on enamel plates, his services always being acknowledged
graciously. No one looked at or noticed his neighbor, but indulged with
the aid of spoon or finger as he saw fit, and had any made a _faux pas_
there would have been none the wiser. That, I thought, was true
politeness.
Dinner over, the remains were removed and each person leaned back
against the nearest pillar. After a slight pause, the eldest man, he in
the center of the hut, clapped his hands, and uttered a gentle sound, as
one satisfied would say: "Well! Let's get down to business." But it was
nothing so serious or so material as that. It was ava-drinking time. The
polished cocoanut bowl was passed round, by the same old waiter, to the
man whose name was called aloud by the head of the household, and each
time all the rest clapped hands two or three times to cheer his cup. It
was like the Japanese method of "ringing" for a servant, not like our
applause. Then fruits were passed around. Cocoanuts, soft and ripe, the
outer shell like the skin of an alligator pear and easily cut with an
ordinary knife, were first in order, after which the companion of the
man in the middle of the hut, like a magician on the stage, drew out of
mysterious regions an enormous pineapple which may have been thirty
inches in circumference. It might have had elephantiasis, for all I
knew, but it was the cause of the only bit of disharmony I had noticed
during the entire time I rested with them. The man to whom it fell to
dispense its juicy contents--he who had sat unobtrusively beside the
head of the house now found it necessary to stretch his legs in order
the better to carve the fruity porcupine. The shock to my sense of form
the moment I caught sight of those legs was enough to dissipate my
greediest interest in the pineapple. They were twice the size of the
fruit, and as knotty. He was suffering from elephantiasis of the legs,
poor man,--a disease, according to the encyclopædia, "dependent on
chronic lymphatic obstruction, and characterized by hypertrophy of the
skin and subcutaneous tissue." Morbid persons seem to enjoy taking away
with them photographs of people affected by this hideous disease in
various parts of the body, but it was enough for me that I saw this one
case; and sorry enough was I that I saw it at that quiet, peaceful hut,
from which I should otherwise have carried away the loveliest of
memories.
For as soon as the meal was over, and the ava-drinking at an end,
pleasures more intellectual were in order. Neighbors began to arrive,
including the fine woman who had urged me to rest wherever I wished. As
each new guest appeared, he passed round on the outside and shook hands
with those to whom he was introduced, finally finding a quiet corner.
When the interruptions ceased, the head of the house began to speak in a
low, reflective tone of voice. All the others relaxed, as do men and
women over their cigarettes. My Tongan neighbor acted as interpreter for
me, being the only person present who could speak English. The head of
the house was telling some family legend, the point of which was the
friendship between his forefathers and the fathers of this Tongan guest.
Then one at a time, quietly, in a subdued tone, each one present
expressed his gratitude for the hospitality extended, or recited some
family reminiscence. There wasn't the slightest affectation, nor the
semblance of an argument. Here, then, was Thoreau's principle of
hospitality actually being practised. As each one spoke he gazed out
upon the open sky decorated with the broad green leaves of the palm.
Sometimes the listeners smiled at some witticism, but most of the time
they were interested in a sober way. Last of all arose the companion of
the head of the house, upon his heavy, elephantine legs, and in a
dramatic manner--probably made to seem more so by the tragic distortion
of his limbs--related a story, several times emphasizing a
generalization by a sweep of the hands toward the open world about.
A gentle breeze crept down from the hills and swept its way among the
pillars of this peaceful hut and skipped on through the palms out to
sea. As far as the eye could reach through the village there was no sign
of uncleanliness, no stifling enclosures, no frills to catch the unwary.
The afternoon was well-nigh gone when I moved reluctantly away from this
charmed spot. Slowly life was becoming more discontented with ease and
bestirred itself to the satisfaction of wants. A few hours of toil, in
the gathering of fruits, and one phase of tropical life was rounded out.
It might be more pleasant to believe that that is the only side, but
such faith is treacherous. The life of the average South Sea islander is
as arduous as any. Fruits there are usually a-plenty, but they must be
gathered and stored against famine and storm. Be that as it may, the
open life, the things one has which require only wishing to make them
one's own, the uncramped open world,--by that much every man is
millionaire in the tropics, and it is pleasant to forget if one can that
there is exploitation, despoliation, and oppression as well, both of
native and of alien origin. But for the time at least we may as well
enjoy that which is lovely.
3
That night I witnessed the usual events at the British Club. The
substance of the evening's conversation, every word of which was in my
own language, was quite foreign to me. It comprised "Dr. Funk" and
his special services in counteracting dengue fever. The aim and object
of every man there seemed to be to make me drink, quite against my will.
A visiting doctor added the weight of his learning to induce me to turn
from heedlessly falling a victim to fever by engaging "Dr. Funk." I was
inclined to dub him "Dr. Bunk," but why arouse animosity in the tropics?
there is enough of it.
[Illustration: THE STREET ALONG THE WATERFRONT OF APIA, SAMOA]
[Illustration: I THOUGHT THE VILLAGE BACK OF APIA, SAMOA, WAS
DESERTED, BUT IT WAS ONLY THE NOON HOUR]
[Illustration: CONTACT WITH CALIFORNIA CREATED THIS COMBINATION OF
SCOWL, BRACELETS AND BOY'S BOOTS--BUT FULAANU BESIDE HER WAS
UNCORRUPTIBLE]
[Illustration: TATTOOING OF THE LEGS IS AN ESSENTIAL IN SAMOA]
But I couldn't help contrasting in my own mind the little gathering on
the shingle-paved floor of that corrugated iron hut with the more
elaborate club that changed its name from German to British with no
little hauteur. More than once I wished that I had had command of the
language of those people in the hut where allegory, mixed with
superstition but seasoned with gentle hospitality--and not rum--was the
order of the day.
Weary of refusing booze and more booze, I set off for the shore. Though
military order forbade either natives or Germans or any one else without
a permit to be out after ten o'clock, I had had no difficulty in
securing a permit to roam about at will, day or night. The new military
Inspector of Police strolled out with me and we took to the road that
led out of Apia to the left, past the barracks, past the school, and the
church, past all the crude replicas of our civilization.
"Oh, how I loathe it all!" said Heasley to me. "God, what wouldn't I
give to be back with my wife and kiddies! This everlasting boozing, this
mingling with people whom I wouldn't recognize in Wellington, being
herded with the riffraff of the world. They talk of the lovely maidens.
Tell me, Greenbie, have you seen any here you'd care to mess about with?
The tropics!--rot!"
I saw that I had to deal with a frightfully homesick man, and there was
no point in running counter to him. The fact that to me the tropics were
lovely only when seen as an objective thing, not as something to feel a
part of, would have made little impression on his mind. He was
condemned to an indefinite sojourn, whereas I was foot-loose, had come
of my own free will, and was going as soon as I had had enough of it. To
him the daily round of drink and cheap disputes, the longing for his
wife and kiddies, the heat, the mosquitos, the mold, the cheap beds and
unvaried fare, the weeks during which the British troops had virtually
camped on the beach in the steady downpouring tropical rains; the
inability to dream his way into appreciation of South Sea life; the
necessity of looking upon the natives as possible rebels; suspicions of
the few Germans there, suspicions of every new-comer, suspicions of even
the death-dealing sun,--no wonder there was nothing romantic about it to
him!
But as we wandered along, chatting in an intimate way, as only men gone
astray from home will chat when they meet on the highways of the world,
he seemed to grow more cheerful. Time and again he told me what a relief
I was to him, how being able really to talk freely with me was balm to
his troubled spirit. I knew that an hour after my departure he would
forget all about me, that there was nothing permanent in his regard,
that I really meant nothing to him beyond an immediate release for his
pent-up mind,--but I felt that he was sincere.
As we kicked our way along the dusty road we came to a stretch where the
palm-trees stood wide apart. The smooth waters covered the reefs, and a
million moonbeams danced over them. Within the palm groves camp-fires
blazed beneath domes of moon-splattered thatch, and from all directions
deep, clear voices quickened the night air. We of the Northern lands do
not know what communal life is. We move in throngs, we crowd the
theaters, we crowd the summer resorts,--but still we do not know what
communal life is. We are separate icicles compared with the people of
the tropics. Only to one adrift at night within a little South Sea
village is the meaning of human commonalty revealed. It seemed to touch
Heasley as nothing had done before. After our little conversation he
appeared relieved and receptive. We wandered about till long after
midnight, long after the village had sung itself to sleep, even then
reluctant to take to our musty beds.
Thus did one day pass in Samoa, and every day is like the other, and my
tale is told.
4
I tapped one man after another in Samoa for some personal recollections
of Stevenson, but without success. At last I heard of an American trader
who had been an intimate friend of R. L. S. and knew more about him than
any other. So to him I went. He was a round-headed, red-faced, bald
individual in the late fifties, deeply engrossed in the sumptuous
accumulations he had made during more than a quarter-century of
residence in Samoa. His reactions to my declaration of interest in
Stevenson made me think he was turning to lock his safe and order his
guard, but instead he really opened the safe and dismissed all pretense.
In other words, he realized, it seemed to me, that he had another chance
of adding luster not to Stevenson, but to himself. Stevenson he
dismissed with, "Well, you know, after all he was just like other men.
Often he was disagreeable, ill-tempered," etc. The thing worth while was
the fact that _he_ had written a book about Stevenson, in which _he_ had
exhausted all he knew of the man, so why did I not read that and not
bother him about it! I felt apologetic, almost inclined to bow myself
out, backward, when he announced that he too had written stories of the
South Seas. My interest was whetted. I asked to be shown. He drew from
among his bills and invoices a packet of manuscripts, and handed one to
me to read. I thought of Setu and his enthusiasm at the recognition at
sea of the light from Vailima, and felt that, as far as Stevenson's own
life went, Setu was, to me at least, more important.
Notwithstanding all the cynics who laugh at those who come to Samoa to
climb to Stevenson's grave, I was determined to make the ascent. I could
get no one to make it with me. At five o'clock in the morning I mustered
what energy I had left from the North, ready to spend it all for the
sake of seeing Stevenson's grave. By six, the wind was already warm and
dragged behind it heavy rain-clouds. Hot and brain-fagged, I pressed on,
my body pushing listlessly forward while my mind battled with the
temptation to turn back. Near the end of European Apia I turned toward
the hills, into a wide avenue cut through the growths of shaggy palms.
Suddenly opening out from the main street, it as suddenly closes up, an
oblong that dissipates in a narrow, irregular roadway farther on. It was
to
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