In the South Seas
by Robert Louis Stevenson · English · Gutenberg #464 · 595,228 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: In the South Seas
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Release date: March 1, 1996 [eBook #464]
Most recently updated: November 16, 2012
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/464
Credits: Transcribed from the 1908 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE SOUTH SEAS ***
Transcribed from the 1908 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
IN THE SOUTH SEAS
BEING AN ACCOUNT OF EXPERIENCES AND
OBSERVATIONS IN THE MARQUESAS, PAUMOTUS
AND GILBERT ISLANDS IN THE COURSE OF
TWO CRUSES, ON THE YACHT ‘CASCO’ (1888)
AND THE SCHOONER ‘EQUATOR’ (1889)
BY
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
FINE-PAPER EDITION
* * * * *
LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1908
* * * * *
_All rights resverved_
CONTENTS
PART 1: THE MARQUESAS
CHAPTER
I. AN ISLAND LANDFALL
II. MAKING FRIENDS
III. THE MAROON
IV. DEATH
V. DEPOPULATION
VI. CHIEFS AND TAPUS
VII. HATIHEU
VIII. THE PORT OF ENTRY
IX. THE HOUSE OF TEMOANA
X. A PORTRAIT AND A STORY
XI. LONG-PIG—A CANNIBAL HIGH PLACE
XII. THE STORY OF A PLANTATION
XIII. CHARACTERS
XIV. IN A CANNIBAL VALLEY
XV. THE TWO CHIEFS OF ATUONA
PART II: THE PAUMOTUS
I. THE DANGEROUS ARCHIPELAGO—ATOLLS AT A DISTANCE
II. FAKARAVA: AN ATOLL AT HAND
III. A HOUSE TO LET IN A LOW ISLAND
IV. TRAITS AND SECTS IN THE PAUMOTUS
V. A PAUMOTUAN FUNERAL
VI. GRAVEYARD STORIES
PART III: THE GILBERTS
I. BUTARITARI
II. THE FOUR BROTHERS
III. AROUND OUR HOUSE
IV. A TALE OF A TAPU
V. A TALE OF A TAPU—_continued_
VI. THE FIVE DAYS’ FESTIVAL
VII. HUSBAND AND WIFE
PART IV: THE GILBERTS—APEMAMA
I. THE KING OF APEMAMA: THE ROYAL TRADER
II. THE KING OF APEMAMA: FOUNDATION OF EQUATOR TOWN
III. THE KING OF APEMAMA: THE PALACE OF MANY WOMEN
IV. THE KING OF APEMAMA: EQUATOR TOWN AND THE PALACE
V. KING AND COMMONS
VI. THE KING OF APEMAMA: DEVIL-WORK
VII. THE KING OF APEMAMA
PART 1: THE MARQUESAS
CHAPTER I—AN ISLAND LANDFALL
For nearly ten years my health had been declining; and for some while
before I set forth upon my voyage, I believed I was come to the
afterpiece of life, and had only the nurse and undertaker to expect. It
was suggested that I should try the South Seas; and I was not unwilling
to visit like a ghost, and be carried like a bale, among scenes that had
attracted me in youth and health. I chartered accordingly Dr. Merrit’s
schooner yacht, the _Casco_, seventy-four tons register; sailed from San
Francisco towards the end of June 1888, visited the eastern islands, and
was left early the next year at Honolulu. Hence, lacking courage to
return to my old life of the house and sick-room, I set forth to leeward
in a trading schooner, the _Equator_, of a little over seventy tons,
spent four months among the atolls (low coral islands) of the Gilbert
group, and reached Samoa towards the close of ’89. By that time
gratitude and habit were beginning to attach me to the islands; I had
gained a competency of strength; I had made friends; I had learned new
interests; the time of my voyages had passed like days in fairyland; and
I decided to remain. I began to prepare these pages at sea, on a third
cruise, in the trading steamer _Janet Nicoll_. If more days are granted
me, they shall be passed where I have found life most pleasant and man
most interesting; the axes of my black boys are already clearing the
foundations of my future house; and I must learn to address readers from
the uttermost parts of the sea.
That I should thus have reversed the verdict of Lord Tennyson’s hero is
less eccentric than appears. Few men who come to the islands leave them;
they grow grey where they alighted; the palm shades and the trade-wind
fans them till they die, perhaps cherishing to the last the fancy of a
visit home, which is rarely made, more rarely enjoyed, and yet more
rarely repeated. No part of the world exerts the same attractive power
upon the visitor, and the task before me is to communicate to fireside
travellers some sense of its seduction, and to describe the life, at sea
and ashore, of many hundred thousand persons, some of our own blood and
language, all our contemporaries, and yet as remote in thought and habit
as Rob Roy or Barbarossa, the Apostles or the Cæsars.
The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first
sunrise, the first South Sea island, are memories apart and touched a
virginity of sense. On the 28th of July 1888 the moon was an hour down
by four in the morning. In the east a radiating centre of brightness
told of the day; and beneath, on the skyline, the morning bank was
already building, black as ink. We have all read of the swiftness of the
day’s coming and departure in low latitudes; it is a point on which the
scientific and sentimental tourist are at one, and has inspired some
tasteful poetry. The period certainly varies with the season; but here
is one case exactly noted. Although the dawn was thus preparing by four,
the sun was not up till six; and it was half-past five before we could
distinguish our expected islands from the clouds on the horizon. Eight
degrees south, and the day two hours a-coming. The interval was passed
on deck in the silence of expectation, the customary thrill of landfall
heightened by the strangeness of the shores that we were then
approaching. Slowly they took shape in the attenuating darkness.
Ua-huna, piling up to a truncated summit, appeared the first upon the
starboard bow; almost abeam arose our destination, Nuka-hiva, whelmed in
cloud; and betwixt and to the southward, the first rays of the sun
displayed the needles of Ua-pu. These pricked about the line of the
horizon; like the pinnacles of some ornate and monstrous church, they
stood there, in the sparkling brightness of the morning, the fit
signboard of a world of wonders.
Not one soul aboard the _Casco_ had set foot upon the islands, or knew,
except by accident, one word of any of the island tongues; and it was
with something perhaps of the same anxious pleasure as thrilled the bosom
of discoverers that we drew near these problematic shores. The land
heaved up in peaks and rising vales; it fell in cliffs and buttresses;
its colour ran through fifty modulations in a scale of pearl and rose and
olive; and it was crowned above by opalescent clouds. The suffusion of
vague hues deceived the eye; the shadows of clouds were confounded with
the articulations of the mountains; and the isle and its unsubstantial
canopy rose and shimmered before us like a single mass. There was no
beacon, no smoke of towns to be expected, no plying pilot. Somewhere, in
that pale phantasmagoria of cliff and cloud, our haven lay concealed; and
somewhere to the east of it—the only sea-mark given—a certain headland,
known indifferently as Cape Adam and Eve, or Cape Jack and Jane, and
distinguished by two colossal figures, the gross statuary of nature.
These we were to find; for these we craned and stared, focused glasses,
and wrangled over charts; and the sun was overhead and the land close
ahead before we found them. To a ship approaching, like the _Casco_,
from the north, they proved indeed the least conspicuous features of a
striking coast; the surf flying high above its base; strange, austere,
and feathered mountains rising behind; and Jack and Jane, or Adam and
Eve, impending like a pair of warts above the breakers.
Thence we bore away along shore. On our port beam we might hear the
explosions of the surf; a few birds flew fishing under the prow; there
was no other sound or mark of life, whether of man or beast, in all that
quarter of the island. Winged by her own impetus and the dying breeze,
the _Casco_ skimmed under cliffs, opened out a cove, showed us a beach
and some green trees, and flitted by again, bowing to the swell. The
trees, from our distance, might have been hazel; the beach might have
been in Europe; the mountain forms behind modelled in little from the
Alps, and the forest which clustered on their ramparts a growth no more
considerable than our Scottish heath. Again the cliff yawned, but now
with a deeper entry; and the _Casco_, hauling her wind, began to slide
into the bay of Anaho. The cocoa-palm, that giraffe of vegetables, so
graceful, so ungainly, to the European eye so foreign, was to be seen
crowding on the beach, and climbing and fringing the steep sides of
mountains. Rude and bare hills embraced the inlet upon either hand; it
was enclosed to the landward by a bulk of shattered mountains. In every
crevice of that barrier the forest harboured, roosting and nestling there
like birds about a ruin; and far above, it greened and roughened the
razor edges of the summit.
Under the eastern shore, our schooner, now bereft of any breeze,
continued to creep in: the smart creature, when once under way, appearing
motive in herself. From close aboard arose the bleating of young lambs;
a bird sang in the hillside; the scent of the land and of a hundred
fruits or flowers flowed forth to meet us; and, presently, a house or two
appeared, standing high upon the ankles of the hills, and one of these
surrounded with what seemed a garden. These conspicuous habitations,
that patch of culture, had we but known it, were a mark of the passage of
whites; and we might have approached a hundred islands and not found
their parallel. It was longer ere we spied the native village, standing
(in the universal fashion) close upon a curve of beach, close under a
grove of palms; the sea in front growling and whitening on a concave arc
of reef. For the cocoa-tree and the island man are both lovers and
neighbours of the surf. ‘The coral waxes, the palm grows, but man
departs,’ says the sad Tahitian proverb; but they are all three, so long
as they endure, co-haunters of the beach. The mark of anchorage was a
blow-hole in the rocks, near the south-easterly corner of the bay.
Punctually to our use, the blow-hole spouted; the schooner turned upon
her heel; the anchor plunged. It was a small sound, a great event; my
soul went down with these moorings whence no windlass may extract nor any
diver fish it up; and I, and some part of my ship’s company, were from
that hour the bondslaves of the isles of Vivien.
Before yet the anchor plunged a canoe was already paddling from the
hamlet. It contained two men: one white, one brown and tattooed across
the face with bands of blue, both in immaculate white European clothes:
the resident trader, Mr. Regler, and the native chief, Taipi-Kikino.
‘Captain, is it permitted to come on board?’ were the first words we
heard among the islands. Canoe followed canoe till the ship swarmed with
stalwart, six-foot men in every stage of undress; some in a shirt, some
in a loin-cloth, one in a handkerchief imperfectly adjusted; some, and
these the more considerable, tattooed from head to foot in awful
patterns; some barbarous and knived; one, who sticks in my memory as
something bestial, squatting on his hams in a canoe, sucking an orange
and spitting it out again to alternate sides with ape-like vivacity—all
talking, and we could not understand one word; all trying to trade with
us who had no thought of trading, or offering us island curios at prices
palpably absurd. There was no word of welcome; no show of civility; no
hand extended save that of the chief and Mr. Regler. As we still
continued to refuse the proffered articles, complaint ran high and rude;
and one, the jester of the party, railed upon our meanness amid jeering
laughter. Amongst other angry pleasantries—‘Here is a mighty fine ship,’
said he, ‘to have no money on board!’ I own I was inspired with sensible
repugnance; even with alarm. The ship was manifestly in their power; we
had women on board; I knew nothing of my guests beyond the fact that they
were cannibals; the Directory (my only guide) was full of timid cautions;
and as for the trader, whose presence might else have reassured me, were
not whites in the Pacific the usual instigators and accomplices of native
outrage? When he reads this confession, our kind friend, Mr. Regler, can
afford to smile.
Later in the day, as I sat writing up my journal, the cabin was filled
from end to end with Marquesans: three brown-skinned generations,
squatted cross-legged upon the floor, and regarding me in silence with
embarrassing eyes. The eyes of all Polynesians are large, luminous, and
melting; they are like the eyes of animals and some Italians. A kind of
despair came over me, to sit there helpless under all these staring orbs,
and be thus blocked in a corner of my cabin by this speechless crowd: and
a kind of rage to think they were beyond the reach of articulate
communication, like furred animals, or folk born deaf, or the dwellers of
some alien planet.
To cross the Channel is, for a boy of twelve, to change heavens; to cross
the Atlantic, for a man of twenty-four, is hardly to modify his diet.
But I was now escaped out of the shadow of the Roman empire, under whose
toppling monuments we were all cradled, whose laws and letters are on
every hand of us, constraining and preventing. I was now to see what men
might be whose fathers had never studied Virgil, had never been conquered
by Cæsar, and never been ruled by the wisdom of Gaius or Papinian. By
the same step I had journeyed forth out of that comfortable zone of
kindred languages, where the curse of Babel is so easy to be remedied;
and my new fellow-creatures sat before me dumb like images. Methought,
in my travels, all human relation was to be excluded; and when I returned
home (for in those days I still projected my return) I should have but
dipped into a picture-book without a text. Nay, and I even questioned if
my travels should be much prolonged; perhaps they were destined to a
speedy end; perhaps my subsequent friend, Kauanui, whom I remarked there,
sitting silent with the rest, for a man of some authority, might leap
from his hams with an ear-splitting signal, the ship be carried at a
rush, and the ship’s company butchered for the table.
There could be nothing more natural than these apprehensions, nor
anything more groundless. In my experience of the islands, I had never
again so menacing a reception; were I to meet with such to-day, I should
be more alarmed and tenfold more surprised. The majority of Polynesians
are easy folk to get in touch with, frank, fond of notice, greedy of the
least affection, like amiable, fawning dogs; and even with the
Marquesans, so recently and so imperfectly redeemed from a blood-boltered
barbarism, all were to become our intimates, and one, at least, was to
mourn sincerely our departure.
CHAPTER II—MAKING FRIENDS
The impediment of tongues was one that I particularly over-estimated.
The languages of Polynesia are easy to smatter, though hard to speak with
elegance. And they are extremely similar, so that a person who has a
tincture of one or two may risk, not without hope, an attempt upon the
others.
And again, not only is Polynesian easy to smatter, but interpreters
abound. Missionaries, traders, and broken white folk living on the
bounty of the natives, are to be found in almost every isle and hamlet;
and even where these are unserviceable, the natives themselves have often
scraped up a little English, and in the French zone (though far less
commonly) a little French-English, or an efficient pidgin, what is called
to the westward ‘Beach-la-Mar,’ comes easy to the Polynesian; it is now
taught, besides, in the schools of Hawaii; and from the multiplicity of
British ships, and the nearness of the States on the one hand and the
colonies on the other, it may be called, and will almost certainly
become, the tongue of the Pacific. I will instance a few examples. I
met in Majuro a Marshall Island boy who spoke excellent English; this he
had learned in the German firm in Jaluit, yet did not speak one word of
German. I heard from a gendarme who had taught school in Rapa-iti that
while the children had the utmost difficulty or reluctance to learn
French, they picked up English on the wayside, and as if by accident. On
one of the most out-of-the-way atolls in the Carolines, my friend Mr.
Benjamin Hird was amazed to find the lads playing cricket on the beach
and talking English; and it was in English that the crew of the _Janet
Nicoll_, a set of black boys from different Melanesian islands,
communicated with other natives throughout the cruise, transmitted
orders, and sometimes jested together on the fore-hatch. But what struck
me perhaps most of all was a word I heard on the verandah of the Tribunal
at Noumea. A case had just been heard—a trial for infanticide against an
ape-like native woman; and the audience were smoking cigarettes as they
awaited the verdict. An anxious, amiable French lady, not far from
tears, was eager for acquittal, and declared she would engage the
prisoner to be her children’s nurse. The bystanders exclaimed at the
proposal; the woman was a savage, said they, and spoke no language.
‘_Mais_, _vous savez_,’ objected the fair sentimentalist; ‘_ils
apprennent si vite l’anglais_!’
But to be able to speak to people is not all. And in the first stage of
my relations with natives I was helped by two things. To begin with, I
was the show-man of the _Casco_. She, her fine lines, tall spars, and
snowy decks, the crimson fittings of the saloon, and the white, the gilt,
and the repeating mirrors of the tiny cabin, brought us a hundred
visitors. The men fathomed out her dimensions with their arms, as their
fathers fathomed out the ships of Cook; the women declared the cabins
more lovely than a church; bouncing Junos were never weary of sitting in
the chairs and contemplating in the glass their own bland images; and I
have seen one lady strip up her dress, and, with cries of wonder and
delight, rub herself bare-breeched upon the velvet cushions. Biscuit,
jam, and syrup was the entertainment; and, as in European parlours, the
photograph album went the round. This sober gallery, their everyday
costumes and physiognomies, had become transformed, in three weeks’
sailing, into things wonderful and rich and foreign; alien faces,
barbaric dresses, they were now beheld and fingered, in the swerving
cabin, with innocent excitement and surprise. Her Majesty was often
recognised, and I have seen French subjects kiss her photograph; Captain
Speedy—in an Abyssinian war-dress, supposed to be the uniform of the
British army—met with much acceptance; and the effigies of Mr. Andrew
Lang were admired in the Marquesas. There is the place for him to go
when he shall be weary of Middlesex and Homer.
It was perhaps yet more important that I had enjoyed in my youth some
knowledge of our Scots folk of the Highlands and the Islands. Not much
beyond a century has passed since these were in the same convulsive and
transitionary state as the Marquesans of to-day. In both cases an alien
authority enforced, the clans disarmed, the chiefs deposed, new customs
introduced, and chiefly that fashion of regarding money as the means and
object of existence. The commercial age, in each, succeeding at a bound
to an age of war abroad and patriarchal communism at home. In one the
cherished practice of tattooing, in the other a cherished costume,
proscribed. In each a main luxury cut off: beef, driven under cloud of
night from Lowland pastures, denied to the meat-loving Highlander;
long-pig, pirated from the next village, to the man-eating Kanaka. The
grumbling, the secret ferment, the fears and resentments, the alarms and
sudden councils of Marquesan chiefs, reminded me continually of the days
of Lovat and Struan. Hospitality, tact, natural fine manners, and a
touchy punctilio, are common to both races: common to both tongues the
trick of dropping medial consonants. Here is a table of two widespread
Polynesian words:—
_House_. _Love_.
{12}
Tahitian FARE AROHA
New Zealand WHARE
Samoan FALE TALOFA
Manihiki FALE ALOHA
Hawaiian HALE ALOHA
Marquesan HA’E KAOHA
The elision of medial consonants, so marked in these Marquesan instances,
is no less common both in Gaelic and the Lowland Scots. Stranger still,
that prevalent Polynesian sound, the so-called catch, written with an
apostrophe, and often or always the gravestone of a perished consonant,
is to be heard in Scotland to this day. When a Scot pronounces water,
better, or bottle—_wa’er_, _be’er_, or _bo’le_—the sound is precisely
that of the catch; and I think we may go beyond, and say, that if such a
population could be isolated, and this mispronunciation should become the
rule, it might prove the first stage of transition from _t_ to _k_, which
is the disease of Polynesian languages. The tendency of the Marquesans,
however, is to urge against consonants, or at least on the very common
letter _l_, a war of mere extermination. A hiatus is agreeable to any
Polynesian ear; the ear even of the stranger soon grows used to these
barbaric voids; but only in the Marquesan will you find such names as
_Haaii_ and _Paaaeua_, when each individual vowel must be separately
uttered.
These points of similarity between a South Sea people and some of my own
folk at home ran much in my head in the islands; and not only inclined me
to view my fresh acquaintances with favour, but continually modified my
judgment. A polite Englishman comes to-day to the Marquesans and is
amazed to find the men tattooed; polite Italians came not long ago to
England and found our fathers stained with woad; and when I paid the
return visit as a little boy, I was highly diverted with the backwardness
of Italy: so insecure, so much a matter of the day and hour, is the
pre-eminence of race. It was so that I hit upon a means of communication
which I recommend to travellers. When I desired any detail of savage
custom, or of superstitious belief, I cast back in the story of my
fathers, and fished for what I wanted with some trait of equal barbarism:
Michael Scott, Lord Derwentwater’s head, the second-sight, the Water
Kelpie,—each of these I have found to be a killing bait; the black bull’s
head of Stirling procured me the legend of _Rahero_; and what I knew of
the Cluny Macphersons, or the Appin Stewarts, enabled me to learn, and
helped me to understand, about the _Tevas_ of Tahiti. The native was no
longer ashamed, his sense of kinship grew warmer, and his lips were
opened. It is this sense of kinship that the traveller must rouse and
share; or he had better content himself with travels from the blue bed to
the brown. And the presence of one Cockney titterer will cause a whole
party to walk in clouds of darkness.
The hamlet of Anaho stands on a margin of flat land between the west of
the beach and the spring of the impending mountains. A grove of palms,
perpetually ruffling its green fans, carpets it (as for a triumph) with
fallen branches, and shades it like an arbour. A road runs from end to
end of the covert among beds of flowers, the milliner’s shop of the
community; and here and there, in the grateful twilight, in an air filled
with a diversity of scents, and still within hearing of the surf upon the
reef, the native houses stand in scattered neighbourhood. The same word,
as we have seen, represents in many tongues of Polynesia, with scarce a
shade of difference, the abode of man. But although the word be the
same, the structure itself continually varies; and the Marquesan, among
the most backward and barbarous of islanders, is yet the most
commodiously lodged. The grass huts of Hawaii, the birdcage houses of
Tahiti, or the open shed, with the crazy Venetian blinds, of the polite
Samoan—none of these can be compared with the Marquesan _paepae-hae_, or
dwelling platform. The paepae is an oblong terrace built without cement
or black volcanic stone, from twenty to fifty feet in length, raised from
four to eight feet from the earth, and accessible by a broad stair.
Along the back of this, and coming to about half its width, runs the open
front of the house, like a covered gallery: the interior sometimes neat
and almost elegant in its bareness, the sleeping space divided off by an
endlong coaming, some bright raiment perhaps hanging from a nail, and a
lamp and one of White’s sewing-machines the only marks of civilization.
On the outside, at one end of the terrace, burns the cooking-fire under a
shed; at the other there is perhaps a pen for pigs; the remainder is the
evening lounge and _al fresco_ banquet-hall of the inhabitants. To some
houses water is brought down the mountains in bamboo pipes, perforated
for the sake of sweetness. With the Highland comparison in my mind, I
was struck to remember the sluttish mounds of turf and stone in which I
have sat and been entertained in the Hebrides and the North Islands. Two
things, I suppose, explain the contrast. In Scotland wood is rare, and
with materials so rude as turf and stone the very hope of neatness is
excluded. And in Scotland it is cold. Shelter and a hearth are needs so
pressing that a man looks not beyond; he is out all day after a bare
bellyful, and at night when he saith, ‘Aha, it is warm!’ he has not
appetite for more. Or if for something else, then something higher; a
fine school of poetry and song arose in these rough shelters, and an air
like ‘_Lochaber no more_’ is an evidence of refinement more convincing,
as well as more imperishable, than a palace.
To one such dwelling platform a considerable troop of relatives and
dependants resort. In the hour of the dusk, when the fire blazes, and
the scent of the cooked breadfruit fills the air, and perhaps the lamp
glints already between the pillars and the house, you shall behold them
silently assemble to this meal, men, women, and children; and the dogs
and pigs frisk together up the terrace stairway, switching rival tails.
The strangers from the ship were soon equally welcome: welcome to dip
their fingers in the wooden dish, to drink cocoanuts, to share the
circulating pipe, and to hear and hold high debate about the misdeeds of
the French, the Panama Canal, or the geographical position of San
Francisco and New Yo’ko. In a Highland hamlet, quite out of reach of any
tourist, I have met the same plain and dignified hospitality.
I have mentioned two facts—the distasteful behaviour of our earliest
visitors, and the case of the lady who rubbed herself upon the
cushions—which would give a very false opinion of Marquesan manners. The
great majority of Polynesians are excellently mannered; but the Marquesan
stands apart, annoying and attractive, wild, shy, and refined. If you
make him a present he affects to forget it, and it must be offered him
again at his going: a pretty formality I have found nowhere else. A hint
will get rid of any one or any number; they are so fiercely proud and
modest; while many of the more lovable but blunter islanders crowd upon a
stranger, and can be no more driven off than flies. A slight or an
insult the Marquesan seems never to forget. I was one day talking by the
wayside with my friend Hoka, when I perceived his eyes suddenly to flash
and his stature to swell. A white horseman was coming down the mountain,
and as he passed, and while he paused to exchange salutations with
myself, Hoka was still staring and ruffling like a gamecock. It was a
Corsican who had years before called him _cochon sauvage—coçon chauvage_,
as Hoka mispronounced it. With people so nice and so touchy, it was
scarce to be supposed that our company of greenhorns should not blunder
into offences. Hoka, on one of his visits, fell suddenly in a brooding
silence, and presently after left the ship with cold formality. When he
took me back into favour, he adroitly and pointedly explained the nature
of my offence: I had asked him to sell cocoa-nuts; and in Hoka’s view
articles of food were things that a gentleman should give, not sell; or
at least that he should not sell to any friend. On another occasion I
gave my boat’s crew a luncheon of chocolate and biscuits. I had sinned,
I could never learn how, against some point of observance; and though I
was drily thanked, my offerings were left upon the beach. But our worst
mistake was a slight we put on Toma, Hoka’s adoptive father, and in his
own eyes the rightful chief of Anaho. In the first place, we did not
call upon him, as perhaps we should, in his fine new European house, the
only one in the hamlet. In the second, when we came ashore upon a visit
to his rival, Taipi-Kikino, it was Toma whom we saw standing at the head
of the beach, a magnificent figure of a man, magnificently tattooed; and
it was of Toma that we asked our question: ‘Where is the chief?’ ‘What
chief?’ cried Toma, and turned his back on the blasphemers. Nor did he
forgive us. Hoka came and went with us daily; but, alone I believe of
all the countryside, neither Toma nor his wife set foot on board the
_Casco_. The temptation resisted it is hard for a European to compute.
The flying city of Laputa moored for a fortnight in St. James’s Park
affords but a pale figure of the _Casco_ anchored before Anaho; for the
Londoner has still his change of pleasures, but the Marquesan passes to
his grave through an unbroken uniformity of days.
On the afternoon before it was intended we should sail, a valedictory
party came on board: nine of our particular friends equipped with gifts
and dressed as for a festival. Hoka, the chief dancer and singer, the
greatest dandy of Anaho, and one of the handsomest young fellows in the
world-sullen, showy, dramatic, light as a feather and strong as an ox—it
would have been hard, on that occasion, to recognise, as he sat there
stooped and silent, his face heavy and grey. It was strange to see the
lad so much affected; stranger still to recognise in his last gift one of
the curios we had refused on the first day, and to know our friend, so
gaily dressed, so plainly moved at our departure, for one of the
half-naked crew that had besieged and insulted us on our arrival:
strangest of all, perhaps, to find, in that carved handle of a fan, the
last of those curiosities of the first day which had now all been given
to us by their possessors—their chief merchandise, for which they had
sought to ransom us as long as we were strangers, which they pressed on
us for nothing as soon as we were friends. The last visit was not long
protracted. One after another they shook hands and got down into their
canoe; when Hoka turned his back immediately upon the ship, so that we
saw his face no more. Taipi, on the other hand, remained standing and
facing us with gracious valedictory gestures; and when Captain Otis
dipped the ensign, the whole party saluted with their hats. This was the
farewell; the episode of our visit to Anaho was held concluded; and
though the _Casco_ remained nearly forty hours at her moorings, not one
returned on board, and I am inclined to think they avoided appearing on
the beach. This reserve and dignity is the finest trait of the
Marquesan.
CHAPTER III—THE MAROON
Of the beauties of Anaho books might be written. I remember waking about
three, to find the air temperate and scented. The long swell brimmed
into the bay, and seemed to fill it full and then subside. Gently,
deeply, and silently the _Casco_ rolled; only at times a block piped like
a bird. Oceanward, the heaven was bright with stars and the sea with
their reflections. If I looked to that side, I might have sung with the
Hawaiian poet:
_Ua maomao ka lani_, _ua kahaea luna_,
_Ua pipi ka maka o ka hoku_.
(The heavens were fair, they stretched above,
Many were the eyes of the stars.)
And then I turned shoreward, and high squalls were overhead; the
mountains loomed up black; and I could have fancied I had slipped ten
thousand miles away and was anchored in a Highland loch; that when the
day came, it would show pine, and heather, and green fern, and roofs of
turf sending up the smoke of peats; and the alien speech that should next
greet my ears must be Gaelic, not Kanaka.
And day, when it came, brought other sights and thoughts. I have watched
the morning break in many quarters of the world; it has been certainly
one of the chief joys of my existence, and the dawn that I saw with most
emotion shone upon the bay of Anaho. The mountains abruptly overhang the
port with every variety of surface and of inclination, lawn, and cliff,
and forest. Not one of these but wore its proper tint of saffron, of
sulphur, of the clove, and of the rose. The lustre was like that of
satin; on the lighter hues there seemed to float an efflorescence; a
solemn bloom appeared on the more dark. The light itself was the
ordinary light of morning, colourless and clean; and on this ground of
jewels, pencilled out the least detail of drawing. Meanwhile, around the
hamlet, under the palms, where the blue shadow lingered, the red coals of
cocoa husk and the light trails of smoke betrayed the awakening business
of the day; along the beach men and women, lads and lasses, were
returning from the bath in bright raiment, red and blue and green, such
as we delighted to see in the coloured little pictures of our childhood;
and presently the sun had cleared the eastern hill, and the glow of the
day was over all.
The glow continued and increased, the business, from the main part,
ceased before it had begun. Twice in the day there was a certain stir of
shepherding along the seaward hills. At times a canoe went out to fish.
At times a woman or two languidly filled a basket in the cotton patch.
At times a pipe would sound out of the shadow of a house, ringing the
changes on its three notes, with an effect like _Que le jour me dure_,
repeated endlessly. Or at times, across a corner of the bay, two natives
might communicate in the Marquesan manner with conventional whistlings.
All else was sleep and silence. The surf broke and shone around the
shores; a species of black crane fished in the broken water; the black
pigs were continually galloping by on some affair; but the people might
never have awaked, or they might all be dead.
My favourite haunt was opposite the hamlet, where was a landing in a cove
under a lianaed cliff. The beach was lined with palms and a tree called
the purao, something between the fig and mulberry in growth, and bearing
a flower like a great yellow poppy with a maroon heart. In places rocks
encroached upon the sand; the beach would be all submerged; and the surf
would bubble warmly as high as to my knees, and play with cocoa-nut husks
as our more homely ocean plays with wreck and wrack and bottles. As the
reflux drew down, marvels of colour and design streamed between my feet;
which I would grasp at, miss, or seize: now to find them what they
promised, shells to grace a cabinet or be set in gold upon a lady’s
finger; now to catch only _maya_ of coloured sand, pounded fragments and
pebbles, that, as soon as they were dry, became as dull and homely as the
flints upon a garden path. I have toiled at this childish pleasure for
hours in the strong sun, conscious of my incurable ignorance; but too
keenly pleased to be ashamed. Meanwhile, the blackbird (or his tropical
understudy) would be fluting in the thickets overhead.
A little further, in the turn of the bay, a streamlet trickled in the
bottom of a den, thence spilling down a stair of rock into the sea. The
draught of air drew down under the foliage in the very bottom of the den,
which was a perfect arbour for coolness. In front it stood open on the
blue bay and the _Casco_ lying there under her awning and her cheerful
colours. Overhead was a thatch of puraos, and over these again palms
brandished their bright fans, as I have seen a conjurer make himself a
halo out of naked swords. For in this spot, over a neck of low land at
the foot of the mountains, the trade-wind streams into Anaho Bay in a
flood of almost constant volume and velocity, and of a heavenly coolness.
It chanced one day that I was ashore in the cove, with Mrs. Stevenson and
the ship’s cook. Except for the _Casco_ lying outside, and a crane or
two, and the ever-busy wind and sea, the face of the world was of a
prehistoric emptiness; life appeared to stand stock-still, and the sense
of isolation was profound and refreshing. On a sudden, the trade-wind,
coming in a gust over the isthmus, struck and scattered the fans of the
palms above the den; and, behold! in two of the tops there sat a native,
motionless as an idol and watching us, you would have said, without a
wink. The next moment the tree closed, and the glimpse was gone. This
discovery of human presences latent overhead in a place where we had
supposed ourselves alone, the immobility of our tree-top spies, and the
thought that perhaps at all hours we were similarly supervised, struck us
with a chill. Talk languished on the beach. As for the cook (whose
conscience was not clear), he never afterwards set foot on shore, and
twice, when the _Casco_ appeared to be driving on the rocks, it was
amusing to observe that man’s alacrity; death, he was persuaded, awaiting
him upon the beach. It was more than a year later, in the Gilberts, that
the explanation dawned upon myself. The natives were drawing palm-tree
wine, a thing forbidden by law; and when the wind thus suddenly revealed
them, they were doubtless more troubled than ourselves.
At the top of the den there dwelt an old, melancholy, grizzled man of the
name of Tari (Charlie) Coffin. He was a native of Oahu, in the Sandwich
Islands; and had gone to sea in his youth in the American whalers; a
circumstance to which he owed his name, his English, his down-east twang,
and the misfortune of his innocent life. For one captain, sailing out of
New Bedford, carried him to Nuka-hiva and marooned him there among the
cannibals. The motive for this act was inconceivably small; poor Tari’s
wages, which were thus economised, would scarce have shook the credit of
the New Bedford owners. And the act itself was simply murder. Tari’s
life must have hung in the beginning by a hair. In the grief and terror
of that time, it is not unlikely he went mad, an infirmity to which he
was still liable; or perhaps a child may have taken a fancy to him and
ordained him to be spared. He escaped at least alive, married in the
island, and when I knew him was a widower with a married son and a
granddaughter. But the thought of Oahu haunted him; its praise was for
ever on his lips; he beheld it, looking back, as a place of ceaseless
feasting, song, and dance; and in his dreams I daresay he revisits it
with joy. I wonder what he would think if he could be carried there
indeed, and see the modern town of Honolulu brisk with traffic, and the
palace with its guards, and the great hotel, and Mr. Berger’s band with
their uniforms and outlandish instruments; or what he would think to see
the brown faces grown so few and the white so many; and his father’s land
sold, for planting sugar, and his father’s house quite perished, or
perhaps the last of them struck leprous and immured between the surf and
the cliffs on Molokai? So simply, even in South Sea Islands, and so
sadly, the changes come.
Tari was poor, and poorly lodged. His house was a wooden frame, run up
by Europeans; it was indeed his official residence, for Tari was the
shepherd of the promontory sheep. I can give a perfect inventory of its
contents: three kegs, a tin biscuit-box, an iron saucepan, several
cocoa-shell cups, a lantern, and three bottles, probably containing oil;
while the clothes of the family and a few mats were thrown across the
open rafters. Upon my first meeting with this exile he had conceived for
me one of the baseless island friendships, had given me nuts to drink,
and carried me up the den ‘to see my house’—the only entertainment that
he had to offer. He liked the ‘Amelican,’ he said, and the ‘Inglisman,’
but the ‘Flessman’ was his abhorrence; and he was careful to explain that
if he had thought us ‘Fless,’ we should have had none of his nuts, and
never a sight of his house. His distaste for the French I can partly
understand, but not at all his toleration of the Anglo-Saxon. The next
day he brought me a pig, and some days later one of our party going
ashore found him in act to bring a second. We were still strange to the
islands; we were pained by the poor man’s generosity, which he could ill
afford, and, by a natural enough but quite unpardonable blunder, we
refused the pig. Had Tari been a Marquesan we should have seen him no
more; being what he was, the most mild, long-suffering, melancholy man,
he took a revenge a hundred times more painful. Scarce had the canoe
with the nine villagers put off from their farewell before the _Casco_
was boarded from the other side. It was Tari; coming thus late because
he had no canoe of his own, and had found it hard to borrow one; coming
thus solitary (as indeed we always saw him), because he was a stranger in
the land, and the dreariest of company. The rest of my family basely
fled from the encounter. I must receive our injured friend alone; and
the interview must have lasted hard upon an hour, for he was loath to
tear himself away. ‘You go ’way. I see you no more—no, sir!’ he
lamented; and then looking about him with rueful admiration, ‘This goodee
ship—no, sir!—goodee ship!’ he would exclaim: the ‘no, sir,’ thrown out
sharply through the nose upon a rising inflection, an echo from New
Bedford and the fallacious whaler. From these expressions of grief and
praise, he would return continually to the case of the rejected pig. ‘I
like give present all ’e same you,’ he complained; ‘only got pig: you no
take him!’ He was a poor man; he had no choice of gifts; he had only a
pig, he repeated; and I had refused it. I have rarely been more wretched
than to see him sitting there, so old, so grey, so poor, so hardly
fortuned, of so rueful a countenance, and to appreciate, with growing
keenness, the affront which I had so innocently dealt him; but it was one
of those cases in which speech is vain.
Tari’s son was smiling and inert; his daughter-in-law, a girl of sixteen,
pretty, gentle, and grave, more intelligent than most Anaho women, and
with a fair share of French; his grandchild, a mite of a creature at the
breast. I went up the den one day when Tari was from home, and found the
son making a cotton sack, and madame suckling mademoiselle. When I had
sat down with them on the floor, the girl began to question me about
England; which I tried to describe, piling the pan and the cocoa shells
one upon another to represent the houses, and explaining, as best I was
able, and by word and gesture, the over-population, the hunger, and the
perpetual toil. ‘_Pas de cocotiers_? _pas do popoi_?’ she asked. I told
her it was too cold, and went through an elaborate performance, shutting
out draughts, and crouching over an imaginary fire, to make sure she
understood. But she understood right well; remarked it must be bad for
the health, and sat a while gravely reflecting on that picture of
unwonted sorrows. I am sure it roused her pity, for it struck in her
another thought always uppermost in the Marquesan bosom; and she began
with a smiling sadness, and looking on me out of melancholy eyes, to
lament the decease of her own people. ‘_Ici pas de Kanaques_,’ said she;
and taking the baby from her breast, she held it out to me with both her
hands. ‘_Tenez_—a little baby like this; then dead. All the Kanaques
die. Then no more.’ The smile, and this instancing by the girl-mother
of her own tiny flesh and blood, affected me strangely; they spoke of so
tranquil a despair. Meanwhile the husband smilingly made his sack; and
the unconscious babe struggled to reach a pot of raspberry jam,
friendship’s offering, which I had just brought up the den; and in a
perspective of centuries I saw their case as ours, death coming in like a
tide, and the day already numbered when there should be no more Beretani,
and no more of any race whatever, and (what oddly touched me) no more
literary works and no more readers.
CHAPTER IV—DEATH
The thought of death, I have said, is uppermost in the mind of the
Marquesan. It would be strange if it were otherwise. The race is
perhaps the handsomest extant. Six feet is about the middle height of
males; they are strongly muscled, free from fat, swift in action,
graceful in repose; and the women, though fatter and duller, are still
comely animals. To judge by the eye, there is no race more viable; and
yet death reaps them with both hands. When Bishop Dordillon first came
to Tai-o-hae, he reckoned the inhabitants at many thousands; he was but
newly dead, and in the same bay Stanislao Moanatini counted on his
fingers eight residual natives. Or take the valley of Hapaa, known to
readers of Herman Melville under the grotesque misspelling of Hapar.
There are but two writers who have touched the South Seas with any
genius, both Americans: Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard; and at the
christening of the first and greatest, some influential fairy must have
been neglected: ‘He shall be able to see,’ ‘He shall be able to tell,’
‘He shall be able to charm,’ said the friendly godmothers; ‘But he shall
not be able to hear,’ exclaimed the last. The tribe of Hapaa is said to
have numbered some four hundred, when the small-pox came and reduced them
by one-fourth. Six months later a woman developed tubercular
consumption; the disease spread like a fire about the valley, and in less
than a year two survivors, a man and a woman, fled from that new-created
solitude. A similar Adam and Eve may some day wither among new races,
the tragic residue of Britain. When I first heard this story the date
staggered me; but I am now inclined to think it possible. Early in the
year of my visit, for example, or late the year before, a first case of
phthisis appeared in a household of seventeen persons, and by the month
of August, when the tale was told me, one soul survived, and that was a
boy who had been absent at his schooling. And depopulation works both
ways, the doors of death being set wide open, and the door of birth
almost closed. Thus, in the half-year ending July 1888 there were twelve
deaths and but one birth in the district of the Hatiheu. Seven or eight
more deaths were to be looked for in the ordinary course; and M. Aussel,
the observant gendarme, knew of but one likely birth. At this rate it is
no matter of surprise if the population in that part should have declined
in forty years from six thousand to less than four hundred; which are,
once more on the authority of M. Aussel, the estimated figures. And the
rate of decline must have even accelerated towards the end.
A good way to appreciate the depopulation is to go by land from Anaho to
Hatiheu on the adjacent bay. The road is good travelling, but cruelly
steep. We seemed scarce to have passed the deserted house which stands
highest in Anaho before we were looking dizzily down upon its roof; the
_Casco_ well out in the bay, and rolling for a wager, shrank visibly; and
presently through the gap of Tari’s isthmus, Ua-huna was seen to hang
cloudlike on the horizon. Over the summit, where the wind blew really
chill, and whistled in the reed-like grass, and tossed the grassy fell of
the pandanus, we stepped suddenly, as through a door, into the next vale
and bay of Hatiheu. A bowl of mountains encloses it upon three sides.
On the fourth this rampart has been bombarded into ruins, runs down to
seaward in imminent and shattered crags, and presents the one practicable
breach of the blue bay. The interior of this vessel is crowded with
lovely and valuable trees,—orange, breadfruit, mummy-apple, cocoa, the
island chestnut, and for weeds, the pine and the banana. Four perennial
streams water and keep it green; and along the dell, first of one, then
of another, of these, the road, for a considerable distance, descends
into this fortunate valley. The song of the waters and the familiar
disarray of boulders gave us a strong sense of home, which the exotic
foliage, the daft-like growth of the pandanus, the buttressed trunk of
the banyan, the black pigs galloping in the bush, and the architecture of
the native houses dissipated ere it could be enjoyed.
The houses on the Hatiheu side begin high up; higher yet, the more
melancholy spectacle of empty paepaes. When a native habitation is
deserted, the superstructure—pandanus thatch, wattle, unstable tropical
timber—speedily rots, and is speedily scattered by the wind. Only the
stones of the terrace endure; nor can any ruin, cairn, or standing stone,
or vitrified fort present a more stern appearance of antiquity. We must
have passed from six to eight of these now houseless platforms. On the
main road of the island, where it crosses the valley of Taipi, Mr.
Osbourne tells me they are to be reckoned by the dozen; and as the roads
have been made long posterior to their erection, perhaps to their
desertion, and must simply be regarded as lines drawn at random through
the bush, the forest on either hand must be equally filled with these
survivals: the gravestones of whole families. Such ruins are tapu {29}
in the strictest sense; no native must approach them; they have become
outposts of the kingdom of the grave. It might appear a natural and
pious custom in the hundreds who are left, the rearguard of perished
thousands, that their feet should leave untrod these hearthstones of
their fathers. I believe, in fact, the custom rests on different and
more grim conceptions. But the house, the grave, and even the body of
the dead, have been always particularly honoured by Marquesans. Until
recently the corpse was sometimes kept in the family and daily oiled and
sunned, until, by gradual and revolting stages, it dried into a kind of
mummy. Offerings are still laid upon the grave. In Traitor’s Bay, Mr.
Osbourne saw a man buy a looking-glass to lay upon his son’s. And the
sentiment against the desecration of tombs, thoughtlessly ruffled in the
laying down of the new roads, is a chief ingredient in the native hatred
for the French.
The Marquesan beholds with dismay the approaching extinction of his race.
The thought of death sits down with him to meat, and rises with him from
his bed; he lives and breathes under a shadow of mortality awful to
support; and he is so inured to the apprehension that he greets the
reality with relief. He does not even seek to support a disappointment;
at an affront, at a breach of one of his fleeting and communistic
love-affairs, he seeks an instant refuge in the grave. Hanging is now
the fashion. I heard of three who had hanged themselves in the west end
of Hiva-oa during the first half of 1888; but though this be a common
form of suicide in other parts of the South Seas, I cannot think it will
continue popular in the Marquesas. Far more suitable to Marquesan
sentiment is the old form of poisoning with the fruit of the eva, which
offers to the native suicide a cruel but deliberate death, and gives time
for those decencies of the last hour, to which he attaches such
remarkable importance. The coffin can thus be at hand, the pigs killed,
the cry of the mourners sounding already through the house; and then it
is, and not before, that the Marquesan is conscious of achievement, his
life all rounded in, his robes (like Cæsar’s) adjusted for the final act.
Praise not any man till he is dead, said the ancients; envy not any man
till you hear the mourners, might be the Marquesan parody. The coffin,
though of late introduction, strangely engages their attention. It is to
the mature Marquesan what a watch is to the European schoolboy. For ten
years Queen Vaekehu had dunned the fathers; at last, but the other day,
they let her have her will, gave her her coffin, and the woman’s soul is
at rest. I was told a droll instance of the force of this preoccupation.
The Polynesians are subject to a disease seemingly rather of the will
than of the body. I was told the Tahitians have a word for it,
_erimatua_, but cannot find it in my dictionary. A gendarme, M. Nouveau,
has seen men beginning to succumb to this insubstantial malady, has
routed them from their houses, turned them on to do their trick upon the
roads, and in two days has seen them cured. But this other remedy is
more original: a Marquesan, dying of this discouragement—perhaps I should
rather say this acquiescence—has been known, at the fulfilment of his
crowning wish, on the mere sight of that desired hermitage, his coffin—to
revive, recover, shake off the hand of death, and be restored for years
to his occupations—carving tikis (idols), let us say, or braiding old
men’s beards. From all this it may be conceived how easily they meet
death when it approaches naturally. I heard one example, grim and
picturesque. In the time of the small-pox in Hapaa, an old man was
seized with the disease; he had no thought of recovery; had his grave dug
by a wayside, and lived in it for near a fortnight, eating, drinking, and
smoking with the passers-by, talking mostly of his end, and equally
unconcerned for himself and careless of the friends whom he infected.
This proneness to suicide, and loose seat in life, is not peculiar to the
Marquesan. What is peculiar is the widespread depression and acceptance
of the national end. Pleasures are neglected, the dance languishes, the
songs are forgotten. It is true that some, and perhaps too many, of them
are proscribed; but many remain, if there were spirit to support or to
revive them. At the last feast of the Bastille, Stanislao Moanatini shed
tears when he beheld the inanimate performance of the dancers. When the
people sang for us in Anaho, they must apologise for the smallness of
their repertory. They were only young folk present, they said, and it
was only the old that knew the songs. The whole body of Marquesan poetry
and music was being suffered to die out with a single dispirited
generation. The full import is apparent only to one acquainted with
other Polynesian races; who knows how the Samoan coins a fresh song for
every trifling incident, or who has heard (on Penrhyn, for instance) a
band of little stripling maids from eight to twelve keep up their
minstrelsy for hours upon a stretch, one song following another without
pause. In like manner, the Marquesan, never industrious, begins now to
cease altogether from production. The exports of the group decline out
of all proportion even with the death-rate of the islanders. ‘The coral
waxes, the palm grows, and man departs,’ says the Marquesan; and he folds
his hands. And surely this is nature. Fond as it may appear, we labour
and refrain, not for the rewards of any single life, but with a timid eye
upon the lives and memories of our successors; and where no one is to
succeed, of his own family, or his own tongue, I doubt whether
Rothschilds would make money or Cato practise virtue. It is natural,
also, that a temporary stimulus should sometimes rouse the Marquesan from
his lethargy. Over all the landward shore of Anaho cotton runs like a
wild weed; man or woman, whoever comes to pick it, may earn a dollar in
the day; yet when we arrived, the trader’s store-house was entirely
empty; and before we left it was near full. So long as the circus was
there, so long as the _Casco_ was yet anchored in the bay, it behoved
every one to make his visit; and to this end every woman must have a new
dress, and every man a shirt and trousers. Never before, in Mr. Regler’s
experience, had they displayed so much activity.
In their despondency there is an element of dread. The fear of ghosts
and of the dark is very deeply written in the mind of the Polynesian; not
least of the Marquesan. Poor Taipi, the chief of Anaho, was condemned to
ride to Hatiheu on a moonless night. He borrowed a lantern, sat a long
while nerving himself for the adventure, and when he at last departed,
wrung the _Cascos_ by the hand as for a final separation. Certain
presences, called Vehinehae, frequent and make terrible the nocturnal
roadside; I was told by one they were like so much mist, and as the
traveller walked into them dispersed and dissipated; another described
them as being shaped like men and having eyes like cats; from none could
I obtain the smallest clearness as to what they did, or wherefore they
were dreaded. We may be sure at least they represent the dead; for the
dead, in the minds of the islanders, are all-pervasive. ‘When a native
says that he is a man,’ writes Dr. Codrington, ‘he means that he is a man
and not a ghost; not that he is a man and not a beast. The intelligent
agents of this world are to his mind the men who are alive, and the
ghosts the men who are dead.’ Dr. Codrington speaks of Melanesia; from
what I have learned his words are equally true of the Polynesian. And
yet more. Among cannibal Polynesians a dreadful suspicion rests
generally on the dead; and the Marquesans, the greatest cannibals of all,
are scarce likely to be free from similar beliefs. I hazard the guess
that the Vehinehae are the hungry spirits of the dead, continuing their
life’s business of the cannibal ambuscade, and lying everywhere unseen,
and eager to devour the living. Another superstition I picked up through
the troubled medium of Tari Coffin’s English. The dead, he told me, came
and danced by night around the paepae of their former family; the family
were thereupon overcome by some emotion (but whether of pious sorrow or
of fear I could not gather), and must ‘make a feast,’ of which fish, pig,
and popoi were indispensable ingredients. So far this is clear enough.
But here Tari went on to instance the new house of Toma and the
house-warming feast which was just then in preparation as instances in
point. Dare we indeed string them together, and add the case of the
deserted ruin, as though the dead continually besieged the paepaes of the
living: were kept at arm’s-length, even from the first foundation, only
by propitiatory feasts, and, so soon as the fire of life went out upon
the hearth, swarmed back into possession of their ancient seat?
I speak by guess of these Marquesan superstitions. On the cannibal ghost
I shall return elsewhere with certainty. And it is enough, for the
present purpose, to remark that the men of the Marquesas, from whatever
reason, fear and shrink from the presence of ghosts. Conceive how this
must tell upon the nerves in islands where the number of the dead already
so far exceeds that of the living, and the dead multiply and the living
dwindle at so swift a rate. Conceive how the remnant huddles about the
embers of the fire of life; even as old Red Indians, deserted on the
march and in the snow, the kindly tribe all gone, the last flame
expiring, and the night around populous with wolves.
CHAPTER V—DEPOPULATION
Over the whole extent of the South Seas, from one tropic to another, we
find traces of a bygone state of over-population, when the resources of
even a tropical soil were taxed, and even the improvident Polynesian
trembled for the future. We may accept some of the ideas of Mr. Darwin’s
theory of coral islands, and suppose a rise of the sea, or the subsidence
of some former continental area, to have driven into the tops of the
mountains multitudes of refugees. Or we may suppose, more soberly, a
people of sea-rovers, emigrants from a crowded country, to strike upon
and settle island after island, and as time went on to multiply
exceedingly in their new seats. In either case the end must be the same;
soon or late it must grow apparent that the crew are too numerous, and
that famine is at hand. The Polynesians met this emergent danger with
various expedients of activity and prevention. A way was found to
preserve breadfruit by packing it in artificial pits; pits forty feet in
depth and of proportionate bore are still to be seen, I am told, in the
Marquesas; and yet even these were insufficient for the teeming people,
and the annals of the past are gloomy with famine and cannibalism. Among
the Hawaiians—a hardier people, in a more exacting climate—agriculture
was carried far; the land was irrigated with canals; and the fish-ponds
of Molokai prove the number and diligence of the old inhabitants.
Meanwhile, over all the island world, abortion and infanticide prevailed.
On coral atolls, where the danger was most plainly obvious, these were
enforced by law and sanctioned by punishment. On Vaitupu, in the
Ellices, only two children were allowed to a couple; on Nukufetau, but
one. On the latter the punishment was by fine; and it is related that
the fine was sometimes paid, and the child spared.
This is characteristic. For no people in the world are so fond or so
long-suffering with children—children make the mirth and the adornment of
their homes, serving them for playthings and for picture-galleries.
‘Happy is the man that has his quiver full of them.’ The stray bastard
is contended for by rival families; and the natural and the adopted
children play and grow up together undistinguished. The spoiling, and I
may almost say the deification, of the child, is nowhere carried so far
as in the eastern islands; and furthest, according to my opportunities of
observation, in the Paumotu group, the so-called Low or Dangerous
Archipelago. I have seen a Paumotuan native turn from me with
embarrassment and disaffection because I suggested that a brat would be
the better for a beating. It is a daily matter in some eastern islands
to see a child strike or even stone its mother, and the mother, so far
from punishing, scarce ventures to resist. In some, when his child was
born, a chief was superseded and resigned his name; as though, like a
drone, he had then fulfilled the occasion of his being. And in some the
lightest words of children had the weight of oracles. Only the other
day, in the Marquesas, if a child conceived a distaste to any stranger, I
am assured the stranger would be slain. And I shall have to tell in
another place an instance of the opposite: how a child in Manihiki having
taken a fancy to myself, her adoptive parents at once accepted the
situation and loaded me with gifts.
With such sentiments the necessity for child-destruction would not fail
to clash, and I believe we find the trace of divided feeling in the
Tahitian brotherhood of Oro. At a certain date a new god was added to
the Society-Island Olympus, or an old one refurbished and made popular.
Oro was his name, and he may be compared with the Bacchus of the
ancients. His zealots sailed from bay to bay, and from island to island;
they were everywhere received with feasting; wore fine clothes; sang,
danced, acted; gave exhibitions of dexterity and strength; and were the
artists, the acrobats, the bards, and the harlots of the group. Their
life was public and epicurean; their initiation a mystery; and the
highest in the land aspired to join the brotherhood. If a couple stood
next in line to a high-chieftaincy, they were suffered, on grounds of
policy, to spare one child; all other children, who had a father or a
mother in the company of Oro, stood condemned from the moment of
conception. A freemasonry, an agnostic sect, a company of artists, its
members all under oath to spread unchastity, and all forbidden to leave
offspring—I do not know how it may appear to others, but to me the design
seems obvious. Famine menacing the islands, and the needful remedy
repulsive, it was recommended to the native mind by these trappings of
mystery, pleasure, and parade. This is the more probable, and the
secret, serious purpose of the institution appears the more plainly, if
it be true that, after a certain period of life, the obligation of the
votary was changed; at first, bound to be profligate: afterwards,
expected to be chaste.
Here, then, we have one side of the case. Man-eating among kindly men,
child-murder among child-lovers, industry in a race the most idle,
invention in a race the least progressive, this grim, pagan
salvation-army of the brotherhood of Oro, the report of early voyagers,
the widespread vestiges of former habitation, and the universal tradition
of the islands, all point to the same fact of former crowding and alarm.
And to-day we are face to face with the reverse. To-day in the
Marquesas, in the Eight Islands of Hawaii, in Mangareva, in Easter
Island, we find the same race perishing like flies. Why this change?
Or, grant that the coming of the whites, the change of habits, and the
introduction of new maladies and vices, fully explain the depopulation,
why is that depopulation not universal? The population of Tahiti, after
a period of alarming decrease, has again become stationary. I hear of a
similar result among some Maori tribes; in many of the Paumotus a slight
increase is to be observed; and the Samoans are to-day as healthy and at
least as fruitful as before the change. Grant that the Tahitians, the
Maoris, and the Paumotuans have become inured to the new conditions; and
what are we to make of the Samoans, who have never suffered?
Those who are acquainted only with a single group are apt to be ready
with solutions. Thus I have heard the mortality of the Maoris attributed
to their change of residence—from fortified hill-tops to the low, marshy
vicinity of their plantations. How plausible! And yet the Marquesans
are dying out in the same houses where their fathers multiplied. Or take
opium. The Marquesas and Hawaii are the two groups the most infected
with this vice; the population of the one is the most civilised, that of
the other by far the most barbarous, of Polynesians; and they are two of
those that perish the most rapidly. Here is a strong case against opium.
But let us take unchastity, and we shall find the Marquesas and Hawaii
figuring again upon another count. Thus, Samoans are the most chaste of
Polynesians, and they are to this day entirely fertile; Marquesans are
the most debauched: we have seen how they are perishing; Hawaiians are
notoriously lax, and they begin to be dotted among deserts. So here is a
case stronger still against unchastity; and here also we have a
correction to apply. Whatever the virtues of the Tahitian, neither
friend nor enemy dares call him chaste; and yet he seems to have outlived
the time of danger. One last example: syphilis has been plausibly
credited with much of the sterility. But the Samoans are, by all
accounts, as fruitful as at first; by some accounts more so; and it is
not seriously to be argued that the Samoans have escaped syphilis.
These examples show how dangerous it is to reason from any particular
cause, or even from many in a single group. I have in my eye an able and
amiable pamphlet by the Rev. S. E. Bishop: ‘Why are the Hawaiians Dying
Out?’ Any one interested in the subject ought to read this tract, which
contains real information; and yet Mr. Bishop’s views would have been
changed by an acquaintance with other groups. Samoa is, for the moment,
the main and the most instructive exception to the rule. The people are
the most chaste and one of the most temperate of island peoples. They
have never been tried and depressed with any grave pestilence. Their
clothing has scarce been tampered with; at the simple and becoming tabard
of the girls, Tartuffe, in many another island, would have cried out; for
the cool, healthy, and modest lava-lava or kilt, Tartuffe has managed in
many another island to substitute stifling and inconvenient trousers.
Lastly, and perhaps chiefly, so far from their amusements having been
curtailed, I think they have been, upon the whole, extended. The
Polynesian falls easily into despondency: bereavement, disappointment,
the fear of novel visitations, the decay or proscription of ancient
pleasures, easily incline him to be sad; and sadness detaches him from
life. The melancholy of the Hawaiian and the emptiness of his new life
are striking; and the remark is yet more apposite to the Marquesas. In
Samoa, on the other hand, perpetual song and dance, perpetual games,
journeys, and pleasures, make an animated and a smiling picture of the
island life. And the Samoans are to-day the gayest and the best
entertained inhabitants of our planet. The importance of this can
scarcely be exaggerated. In a climate and upon a soil where a livelihood
can be had for the stooping, entertainment is a prime necessity. It is
otherwise with us, where life presents us with a daily problem, and there
is a serious interest, and some of the heat of conflict, in the mere
continuing to be. So, in certain atolls, where there is no great gaiety,
but man must bestir himself with some vigour for his daily bread, public
health and the population are maintained; but in the lotos islands, with
the decay of pleasures, life itself decays. It is from this point of
view that we may instance, among other causes of depression, the decay of
war. We have been so long used in Europe to that dreary business of war
on the great scale, trailing epidemics and leaving pestilential corpses
in its train, that we have almost forgotten its original, the most
healthful, if not the most humane, of all field sports—hedge-warfare.
From this, as well as from the rest of his amusements and interests, the
islander, upon a hundred islands, has been recently cut off. And to
this, as well as to so many others, the Samoan still makes good a special
title.
Upon the whole, the problem seems to me to stand thus:—Where there have
been fewest changes, important or unimportant, salutary or hurtful, there
the race survives. Where there have been most, important or unimportant,
salutary or hurtful, there it perishes. Each change, however small,
augments the sum of new conditions to which the race has to become
inured. There may seem, _a priori_, no comparison between the change
from ‘sour toddy’ to bad gin, and that from the island kilt to a pair of
European trousers. Yet I am far from persuaded that the one is any more
hurtful than the other; and the unaccustomed race will sometimes die of
pin-pricks. We are here face to face with one of the difficulties of the
missionary. In Polynesian islands he easily obtains pre-eminent
authority; the king becomes his _mairedupalais_; he can proscribe, he can
command; and the temptation is ever towards too much. Thus (by all
accounts) the Catholics in Mangareva, and thus (to my own knowledge) the
Protestants in Hawaii, have rendered life in a more or less degree
unliveable to their converts. And the mild, uncomplaining creatures
(like children in a prison) yawn and await death. It is easy to blame
the missionary. But it is his business to make changes. It is surely
his business, for example, to prevent war; and yet I have instanced war
itself as one of the elements of health. On the other hand, it were,
perhaps, easy for the missionary to proceed more gently, and to regard
every change as an affair of weight. I take the average missionary; I am
sure I do him no more than justice when I suppose that he would hesitate
to bombard a village, even in order to convert an archipelago.
Experience begins to show us (at least in Polynesian islands) that change
of habit is bloodier than a bombardment.
There is one point, ere I have done, where I may go to meet criticism. I
have said nothing of faulty hygiene, bathing during fevers, mistaken
treatment of children, native doctoring, or abortion—all causes
frequently adduced. And I have said nothing of them because they are
conditions common to both epochs, and even more efficient in the past
than in the present. Was it not the same with unchastity, it may be
asked? Was not the Polynesian always unchaste? Doubtless he was so
always: doubtless he is more so since the coming of his remarkably chaste
visitors from Europe. Take the Hawaiian account of Cook: I have no doubt
it is entirely fair. Take Krusenstern’s candid, almost innocent,
description of a Russian man-of-war at the Marquesas; consider the
disgraceful history of missions in Hawaii itself, where (in the war of
lust) the American missionaries were once shelled by an English
adventurer, and once raided and mishandled by the crew of an American
warship; add the practice of whaling fleets to call at the Marquesas, and
carry off a complement of women for the cruise; consider, besides, how
the whites were at first regarded in the light of demi-gods, as appears
plainly in the reception of Cook upon Hawaii; and again, in the story of
the discovery of Tutuila, when the really decent women of Samoa
prostituted themselves in public to the French; and bear in mind how it
was the custom of the adventurers, and we may almost say the business of
the missionaries, to deride and infract even the most salutary tapus.
Here we see every engine of dissolution directed at once against a virtue
never and nowhere very strong or popular; and the result, even in the
most degraded islands, has been further degradation. Mr. Lawes, the
missionary of Savage Island, told me the standard of female chastity had
declined there since the coming of the whites. In heathen time, if a
girl gave birth to a bastard, her father or brother would dash the infant
down the cliffs; and to-day the scandal would be small. Or take the
Marquesas. Stanislao Moanatini told me that in his own recollection, the
young were strictly guarded; they were not suffered so much as to look
upon one another in the street, but passed (so my informant put it) like
dogs; and the other day the whole school-children of Nuka-hiva and Ua-pu
escaped in a body to the woods, and lived there for a fortnight in
promiscuous liberty. Readers of travels may perhaps exclaim at my
authority, and declare themselves better informed. I should prefer the
statement of an intelligent native like Stanislao (even if it stood
alone, which it is far from doing) to the report of the most honest
traveller. A ship of war comes to a haven, anchors, lands a party,
receives and returns a visit, and the captain writes a chapter on the
manners of the island. It is not considered what class is mostly seen.
Yet we should not be pleased if a Lascar foremast hand were to judge
England by the ladies who parade Ratcliffe Highway, and the gentlemen who
share with them their hire. Stanislao’s opinion of a decay of virtue
even in these unvirtuous islands has been supported to me by others; his
very example, the progress of dissolution amongst the young, is adduced
by Mr. Bishop in Hawaii. And so far as Marquesans are concerned, we
might have hazarded a guess of some decline in manners. I do not think
that any race could ever have prospered or multiplied with such as now
obtain; I am sure they would have been never at the pains to count
paternal kinship. It is not possible to give details; suffice it that
their manners appear to be imitated from the dreams of ignorant and
vicious children, and their debauches persevered in until energy, reason,
and almost life itself are in abeyance.
CHAPTER VI—CHIEFS AND TAPUS
We used to admire exceedingly the bland and gallant manners of the chief
called Taipi-Kikino. An elegant guest at table, skilled in the use of
knife and fork, a brave figure when he shouldered a gun and started for
the woods after wild chickens, always serviceable, always ingratiating
and gay, I would sometimes wonder where he found his cheerfulness. He
had enough to sober him, I thought, in his official budget. His
expenses—for he was always seen attired in virgin white—must have by far
exceeded his income of six dollars in the year, or say two shillings a
month. And he was himself a man of no substance; his house the poorest
in the village. It was currently supposed that his elder brother,
Kauanui, must have helped him out. But how comes it that the elder
brother should succeed to the family estate, and be a wealthy commoner,
and the younger be a poor man, and yet rule as chief in Anaho? That the
one should be wealthy, and the other almost indigent is probably to be
explained by some adoption; for comparatively few children are brought up
in the house or succeed to the estates of their natural begetters. That
the one should be chief instead of the other must be explained (in a very
Irish fashion) on the ground that neither of them is a chief at all.
Since the return and the wars of the French, many chiefs have been
deposed, and many so-called chiefs appointed. We have seen, in the same
house, one such upstart drinking in the company of two such extruded
island Bourbons, men, whose word a few years ago was life and death, now
sunk to be peasants like their neighbours. So when the French overthrew
hereditary tyrants, dubbed the commons of the Marquesas freeborn citizens
of the republic, and endowed them with a vote for a _conseiller-général_
at Tahiti, they probably conceived themselves upon the path to
popularity; and so far from that, they were revolting public sentiment.
The deposition of the chiefs was perhaps sometimes needful; the
appointment of others may have been needful also; it was at least a
delicate business. The Government of George II. exiled many Highland
magnates. It never occurred to them to manufacture substitutes; and if
the French have been more bold, we have yet to see with what success.
Our chief at Anaho was always called, he always called himself,
Taipi-Kikino; and yet that was not his name, but only the wand of his
false position. As soon as he was appointed chief, his name—which
signified, if I remember exactly, _Prince born among flowers_—fell in
abeyance, and he was dubbed instead by the expressive byword,
Taipi-Kikino—_Highwater man-of-no-account_—or, Englishing more boldly,
_Beggar on horseback_—a witty and a wicked cut. A nickname in Polynesia
destroys almost the memory of the original name. To-day, if we were
Polynesians, Gladstone would be no more heard of. We should speak of and
address our Nestor as the Grand Old Man, and it is so that himself would
sign his correspondence. Not the prevalence, then, but the significancy
of the nickname is to be noted here. The new authority began with small
prestige. Taipi has now been some time in office; from all I saw he
seemed a person very fit. He is not the least unpopular, and yet his
power is nothing. He is a chief to the French, and goes to breakfast
with the Resident; but for any practical end of chieftaincy a rag doll
were equally efficient.
We had been but three days in Anaho when we received the visit of the
chief of Hatiheu, a man of weight and fame, late leader of a war upon the
French, late prisoner in Tahiti, and the last eater of long-pig in
Nuka-hiva. Not many years have elapsed since he was seen striding on the
beach of Anaho, a dead man’s arm across his shoulder. ‘So does Kooamua
to his enemies!’ he roared to the passers-by, and took a bite from the
raw flesh. And now behold this gentleman, very wisely replaced in office
by the French, paying us a morning visit in European clothes. He was the
man of the most character we had yet seen: his manners genial and
decisive, his person tall, his face rugged, astute, formidable, and with
a certain similarity to Mr. Gladstone’s—only for the brownness of the
skin, and the high-chief’s tattooing, all one side and much of the other
being of an even blue. Further acquaintance increased our opinion of his
sense. He viewed the _Casco_ in a manner then quite new to us, examining
her lines and the running of the gear; to a piece of knitting on which
one of the party was engaged, he must have devoted ten minutes’ patient
study; nor did he desist before he had divined the principles; and he was
interested even to excitement by a type-writer, which he learned to work.
When he departed he carried away with him a list of his family, with his
own name printed by his own hand at the bottom. I should add that he was
plainly much of a humorist, and not a little of a humbug. He told us,
for instance, that he was a person of exact sobriety; such being the
obligation of his high estate: the commons might be sots, but the chief
could not stoop so low. And not many days after he was to be observed in
a state of smiling and lop-sided imbecility, the _Casco_ ribbon upside
down on his dishonoured hat.
But his business that morning in Anaho is what concerns us here. The
devil-fish, it seems, were growing scarce upon the reef; it was judged
fit to interpose what we should call a close season; for that end, in
Polynesia, a tapu (vulgarly spelt ‘taboo’) has to be declared, and who
was to declare it? Taipi might; he ought; it was a chief part of his
duty; but would any one regard the inhibition of a Beggar on Horse-back?
He might plant palm branches: it did not in the least follow that the
spot was sacred. He might recite the spell: it was shrewdly supposed the
spirits would not hearken. And so the old, legitimate cannibal must ride
over the mountains to do it for him; and the respectable official in
white clothes could but look on and envy. At about the same time, though
in a different manner, Kooamua established a forest law. It was observed
the cocoa-palms were suffering, for the plucking of green nuts
impoverishes and at last endangers the tree. Now Kooamua could tapu the
reef, which was public property, but he could not tapu other people’s
palms; and the expedient adopted was interesting. He tapu’d his own
trees, and his example was imitated over all Hatiheu and Anaho. I fear
Taipi might have tapu’d all that he possessed and found none to follow
him. So much for the esteem in which the dignity of an appointed chief
is held by others; a single circumstance will show what he thinks of it
himself. I never met one, but he took an early opportunity to explain
his situation. True, he was only an appointed chief when I beheld him;
but somewhere else, perhaps upon some other isle, he was a chieftain by
descent: upon which ground, he asked me (so to say it) to excuse his
mushroom honours.
It will be observed with surprise that both these tapus are for
thoroughly sensible ends. With surprise, I say, because the nature of
that institution is much misunderstood in Europe. It is taken usually in
the sense of a meaningless or wanton prohibition, such as that which
to-day prevents women in some countries from smoking, or yesterday
prevented any one in Scotland from taking a walk on Sunday. The error is
no less natural than it is unjust. The Polynesians have not been trained
in the bracing, practical thought of ancient Rome; with them the idea of
law has not been disengaged from that of morals or propriety; so that
tapu has to cover the whole field, and implies indifferently that an act
is criminal, immoral, against sound public policy, unbecoming or (as we
say) ‘not in good form.’ Many tapus were in consequence absurd enough,
such as those which deleted words out of the language, and particularly
those which related to women. Tapu encircled women upon all hands. Many
things were forbidden to men; to women we may say that few were
permitted. They must not sit on the paepae; they must not go up to it by
the stair; they must not eat pork; they must not approach a boat; they
must not cook at a fire which any male had kindled. The other day, after
the roads were made, it was observed the women plunged along margin
through the bush, and when they came to a bridge waded through the water:
roads and bridges were the work of men’s hands, and tapu for the foot of
women. Even a man’s saddle, if the man be native, is a thing no
self-respecting lady dares to use. Thus on the Anaho side of the island,
only two white men, Mr. Regler and the gendarme, M. Aussel, possess
saddles; and when a woman has a journey to make she must borrow from one
or other. It will be noticed that these prohibitions tend, most of them,
to an increased reserve between the sexes. Regard for female chastity is
the usual excuse for these disabilities that men delight to lay upon
their wives and mothers. Here the regard is absent; and behold the women
still bound hand and foot with meaningless proprieties! The women
themselves, who are survivors of the old regimen, admit that in those
days life was not worth living. And yet even then there were exceptions.
There were female chiefs and (I am assured) priestesses besides; nice
customs curtseyed to great dames, and in the most sacred enclosure of a
High Place, Father Siméon Delmar was shown a stone, and told it was the
throne of some well-descended lady. How exactly parallel is this with
European practice, when princesses were suffered to penetrate the
strictest cloister, and women could rule over a land in which they were
denied the control of their own children.
But the tapu is more often the instrument of wise and needful
restrictions. We have seen it as the organ of paternal government. It
serves besides to enforce, in the rare case of some one wishing to
enforce them, rights of private property. Thus a man, weary of the
coming and going of Marquesan visitors, tapus his door; and to this day
you may see the palm-branch signal, even as our great-grandfathers saw
the peeled wand before a Highland inn. Or take another case. Anaho is
known as ‘the country without popoi.’ The word popoi serves in different
islands to indicate the main food of the people: thus, in Hawaii, it
implies a preparation of taro; in the Marquesas, of breadfruit. And a
Marquesan does not readily conceive life possible without his favourite
diet. A few years ago a drought killed the breadfruit trees and the
bananas in the district of Anaho; and from this calamity, and the
open-handed customs of the island, a singular state of things arose.
Well-watered Hatiheu had escaped the drought; every householder of Anaho
accordingly crossed the pass, chose some one in Hatiheu, ‘gave him his
name’—an onerous gift, but one not to be rejected—and from this
improvised relative proceeded to draw his supplies, for all the world as
though he had paid for them. Hence a continued traffic on the road.
Some stalwart fellow, in a loin-cloth, and glistening with sweat, may be
seen at all hours of the day, a stick across his bare shoulders, tripping
nervously under a double burthen of green fruits. And on the far side of
the gap a dozen stone posts on the wayside in the shadow of a grove mark
the breathing-space of the popoi-carriers. A little back from the beach,
and not half a mile from Anaho, I was the more amazed to find a cluster
of well-doing breadfruits heavy with their harvest. ‘Why do you not take
these?’ I asked. ‘Tapu,’ said Hoka; and I thought to myself (after the
manner of dull travellers) what children and fools these people were to
toil over the mountain and despoil innocent neighbours when the staff of
life was thus growing at their door. I was the more in error. In the
general destruction these surviving trees were enough only for the family
of the proprietor, and by the simple expedient of declaring a tapu he
enforced his right.
The sanction of the tapu is superstitious; and the punishment of
infraction either a wasting or a deadly sickness. A slow disease follows
on the eating of tapu fish, and can only be cured with the bones of the
same fish burned with the due mysteries. The cocoa-nut and breadfruit
tapu works more swiftly. Suppose you have eaten tapu fruit at the
evening meal, at night your sleep will be uneasy; in the morning,
swelling and a dark discoloration will have attacked your neck, whence
they spread upward to the face; and in two days, unless the cure be
interjected, you must die. This cure is prepared from the rubbed leaves
of the tree from which the patient stole; so that he cannot be saved
without confessing to the Tahuku the person whom he wronged. In the
experience of my informant, almost no tapu had been put in use, except
the two described: he had thus no opportunity to learn the nature and
operation of the others; and, as the art of making them was jealously
guarded amongst the old men, he believed the mystery would soon die out.
I should add that he was no Marquesan, but a Chinaman, a resident in the
group from boyhood, and a reverent believer in the spells which he
described. White men, amongst whom Ah Fu included himself, were exempt;
but he had a tale of a Tahitian woman, who had come to the Marquesas,
eaten tapu fish, and, although uninformed of her offence and danger, had
been afflicted and cured exactly like a native.
Doubtless the belief is strong; doubtless, with this weakly and fanciful
race, it is in many cases strong enough to kill; it should be strong
indeed in those who tapu their trees secretly, so that they may detect a
depredator by his sickness. Or, perhaps, we should understand the idea
of the hidden tapu otherwise, as a politic device to spread uneasiness
and extort confessions: so that, when a man is ailing, he shall ransack
his brain for any possible offence, and send at once for any proprietor
whose rights he has invaded. ‘Had you hidden a tapu?’ we may conceive
him asking; and I cannot imagine the proprietor gainsaying it; and this
is perhaps the strangest feature of the system—that it should be regarded
from without with such a mental and implicit awe, and, when examined from
within, should present so many apparent evidences of design.
We read in Dr. Campbell’s _Poenamo_ of a New Zealand girl, who was
foolishly told that she had eaten a tapu yam, and who instantly sickened,
and died in the two days of simple terror. The period is the same as in
the Marquesas; doubtless the symptoms were so too. How singular to
consider that a superstition of such sway is possibly a manufactured
article; and that, even if it were not originally invented, its details
have plainly been arranged by the authorities of some Polynesian Scotland
Yard. Fitly enough, the belief is to-day—and was probably always—far
from universal. Hell at home is a strong deterrent with some; a passing
thought with others; with others, again, a theme of public mockery, not
always well assured; and so in the Marquesas with the tapu. Mr. Regler
has seen the two extremes of scepticism and implicit fear. In the tapu
grove he found one fellow stealing breadfruit, cheerful and impudent as a
street arab; and it was only on a menace of exposure that he showed
himself the least discountenanced. The other case was opposed in every
point. Mr. Regler asked a native to accompany him upon a voyage; the man
went gladly enough, but suddenly perceiving a dead tapu fish in the
bottom of the boat, leaped back with a scream; nor could the promise of a
dollar prevail upon him to advance.
The Marquesan, it will be observed, adheres to the old idea of the local
circumscription of beliefs and duties. Not only are the whites exempt
from consequences; but their transgressions seem to be viewed without
horror. It was Mr. Regler who had killed the fish; yet the devout native
was not shocked at Mr. Regler—only refused to join him in his boat. A
white is a white: the servant (so to speak) of other and more liberal
gods; and not to be blamed if he profit by his liberty. The Jews were
perhaps the first to interrupt this ancient comity of faiths; and the
Jewish virus is still strong in Christianity. All the world must respect
our tapus, or we gnash our teeth.
CHAPTER VII—HATIHEU
The bays of Anaho and Hatiheu are divided at their roots by the
knife-edge of a single hill—the pass so often mentioned; but this isthmus
expands to the seaward in a considerable peninsula: very bare and grassy;
haunted by sheep and, at night and morning, by the piercing cries of the
shepherds; wandered over by a few wild goats; and on its sea-front
indented with long, clamorous caves, and faced with cliffs of the colour
and ruinous outline of an old peat-stack. In one of these echoing and
sunless gullies we saw, clustered like sea-birds on a splashing ledge,
shrill as sea-birds in their salutation to the passing boat, a group of
fisherwomen, stripped to their gaudy under-clothes. (The clash of the
surf and the thin female voices echo in my memory.) We had that day a
native crew and steersman, Kauanui; it was our first experience of
Polynesian seamanship, which consists in hugging every point of land.
There is no thought in this of saving time, for they will pull a long way
in to skirt a point that is embayed. It seems that, as they can never
get their houses near enough the surf upon the one side, so they can
never get their boats near enough upon the other. The practice in bold
water is not so dangerous as it looks—the reflex from the rocks sending
the boat off. Near beaches with a heavy run of sea, I continue to think
it very hazardous, and find the composure of the natives annoying to
behold. We took unmingled pleasure, on the way out, to see so near at
hand the beach and the wonderful colours of the surf. On the way back,
when the sea had risen and was running strong against us, the fineness of
the steersman’s aim grew more embarrassing. As we came abreast of the
sea-front, where the surf broke highest, Kauanui embraced the occasion to
light his pipe, which then made the circuit of the boat—each man taking a
whiff or two, and, ere he passed it on, filling his lungs and cheeks with
smoke. Their faces were all puffed out like apples as we came abreast of
the cliff foot, and the bursting surge fell back into the boat in
showers. At the next point ‘cocanetti’ was the word, and the stroke
borrowed my knife, and desisted from his labours to open nuts. These
untimely indulgences may be compared to the tot of grog served out before
a ship goes into action.
My purpose in this visit led me first to the boys’ school, for Hatiheu is
the university of the north islands. The hum of the lesson came out to
meet us. Close by the door, where the draught blew coolest, sat the lay
brother; around him, in a packed half-circle, some sixty high-coloured
faces set with staring eyes; and in the background of the barn-like room
benches were to be seen, and blackboards with sums on them in chalk. The
brother rose to greet us, sensibly humble. Thirty years he had been
there, he said, and fingered his white locks as a bashful child pulls out
his pinafore. ‘_Et point de résultats_, _monsieur_, _presque pas de
résultats_.’ He pointed to the scholars: ‘You see, sir, all the youth of
Nuka-hiva and Ua-pu. Between the ages of six and fifteen this is all
that remains; and it is but a few years since we had a hundred and twenty
from Nuka-hiva alone. _Oui_, _monsieur_, _cela se dépérit_.’ Prayers,
and reading and writing, prayers again and arithmetic, and more prayers
to conclude: such appeared to be the dreary nature of the course. For
arithmetic all island people have a natural taste. In Hawaii they make
good progress in mathematics. In one of the villages on Majuro, and
generally in the Marshall group, the whole population sit about the
trader when he is weighing copra, and each on his own slate takes down
the figures and computes the total. The trader, finding them so apt,
introduced fractions, for which they had been taught no rule. At first
they were quite gravelled but ultimately, by sheer hard thinking,
reasoned out the result, and came one after another to assure the trader
he was right. Not many people in Europe could have done the like. The
course at Hatiheu is therefore less dispiriting to Polynesians than a
stranger might have guessed; and yet how bald it is at best! I asked the
brother if he did not tell them stories, and he stared at me; if he did
not teach them history, and he said, ‘O yes, they had a little Scripture
history—from the New Testament’; and repeated his lamentations over the
lack of results. I had not the heart to put more questions; I could but
say it must be very discouraging, and resist the impulse to add that it
seemed also very natural. He looked up—‘My days are far spent,’ he said;
‘heaven awaits me.’ May that heaven forgive me, but I was angry with the
old man and his simple consolation. For think of his opportunity! The
youth, from six to fifteen, are taken from their homes by Government,
centralised at Hatiheu, where they are supported by a weekly tax of food;
and, with the exception of one month in every year, surrendered wholly to
the direction of the priests. Since the escapade already mentioned the
holiday occurs at a different period for the girls and for the boys; so
that a Marquesan brother and sister meet again, after their education is
complete, a pair of strangers. It is a harsh law, and highly unpopular;
but what a power it places in the hands of the instructors, and how
languidly and dully is that power employed by the mission! Too much
concern to make the natives pious, a design in which they all confess
defeat, is, I suppose, the explanation of their miserable system. But
they might see in the girls’ school at Tai-o-hae, under the brisk,
housewifely sisters, a different picture of efficiency, and a scene of
neatness, airiness, and spirited and mirthful occupation that should
shame them into cheerier methods. The sisters themselves lament their
failure. They complain the annual holiday undoes the whole year’s work;
they complain particularly of the heartless indifference of the girls.
Out of so many pretty and apparently affectionate pupils whom they have
taught and reared, only two have ever returned to pay a visit of
remembrance to their teachers. These, indeed, come regularly, but the
rest, so soon as their school-days are over, disappear into the woods
like captive insects. It is hard to imagine anything more discouraging;
and yet I do not believe these ladies need despair. For a certain
interval they keep the girls alive and innocently busy; and if it be at
all possible to save the race, this would be the means. No such praise
can be given to the boys’ school at Hatiheu. The day is numbered already
for them all; alike for the teacher and the scholars death is girt; he is
afoot upon the march; and in the frequent interval they sit and yawn.
But in life there seems a thread of purpose through the least
significant; the drowsiest endeavour is not lost, and even the school at
Hatiheu may be more useful than it seems.
Hatiheu is a place of some pretensions. The end of the bay towards Anaho
may be called the civil compound, for it boasts the house of Kooamua, and
close on the beach, under a great tree, that of the gendarme, M. Armand
Aussel, with his garden, his pictures, his books, and his excellent
table, to which strangers are made welcome. No more singular contrast is
possible than between the gendarmerie and the priesthood, who are besides
in smouldering opposition and full of mutual complaints. A priest’s
kitchen in the eastern islands is a depressing spot to see; and many, or
most of them, make no attempt to keep a garden, sparsely subsisting on
their rations. But you will never dine with a gendarme without smacking
your lips; and M. Aussel’s home-made sausage and the salad from his
garden are unforgotten delicacies. Pierre Loti may like to know that he
is M. Aussel’s favourite author, and that his books are read in the fit
scenery of Hatiheu bay.
The other end is all religious. It is here that an overhanging and
tip-tilted horn, a good sea-mark for Hatiheu, bursts naked from the
verdure of the climbing forest, and breaks down shoreward in steep
taluses and cliffs. From the edge of one of the highest, perhaps seven
hundred or a thousand feet above the beach, a Virgin looks
insignificantly down, like a poor lost doll, forgotten there by a giant
child. This laborious symbol of the Catholics is always strange to
Protestants; we conceive with wonder that men should think it worth while
to toil so many days, and clamber so much about the face of precipices,
for an end that makes us smile; and yet I believe it was the wise Bishop
Dordillon who chose the place, and I know that those who had a hand in
the enterprise look back with pride upon its vanquished dangers. The
boys’ school is a recent importation; it was at first in Tai-o-hae,
beside the girls’; and it was only of late, after their joint escapade,
that the width of the island was interposed between the sexes. But
Hatiheu must have been a place of missionary importance from before.
About midway of the beach no less than three churches stand grouped in a
patch of bananas, intermingled with some pine-apples. Two are of wood:
the original church, now in disuse; and a second that, for some
mysterious reason, has never been used. The new church is of stone, with
twin towers, walls flangeing into buttresses, and sculptured front. The
design itself is good, simple, and shapely; but the character is all in
the detail, where the architect has bloomed into the sculptor. It is
impossible to tell in words of the angels (although they are more like
winged archbishops) that stand guard upon the door, of the cherubs in the
corners, of the scapegoat gargoyles, or the quaint and spirited relief,
where St. Michael (the artist’s patron) makes short work of a protesting
Lucifer. We were never weary of viewing the imagery, so innocent,
sometimes so funny, and yet in the best sense—in the sense of inventive
gusto and expression—so artistic. I know not whether it was more strange
to find a building of such merit in a corner of a barbarous isle, or to
see a building so antique still bright with novelty. The architect, a
French lay brother, still alive and well, and meditating fresh
foundations, must have surely drawn his descent from a master-builder in
the age of the cathedrals; and it was in looking on the church of Hatiheu
that I seemed to perceive the secret charm of mediæval sculpture; that
combination of the childish courage of the amateur, attempting all
things, like the schoolboy on his slate, with the manly perseverance of
the artist who does not know when he is conquered.
I had always afterwards a strong wish to meet the architect, Brother
Michel; and one day, when I was talking with the Resident in Tai-o-hae
(the chief port of the island), there were shown in to us an old, worn,
purblind, ascetic-looking priest, and a lay brother, a type of all that
is most sound in France, with a broad, clever, honest, humorous
countenance, an eye very large and bright, and a strong and healthy body
inclining to obesity. But that his blouse was black and his face shaven
clean, you might pick such a man to-day, toiling cheerfully in his own
patch of vines, from half a dozen provinces of France; and yet he had
always for me a haunting resemblance to an old kind friend of my boyhood,
whom I name in case any of my readers should share with me that
memory—Dr. Paul, of the West Kirk. Almost at the first word I was sure
it was my architect, and in a moment we were deep in a discussion of
Hatiheu church. Brother Michel spoke always of his labours with a
twinkle of humour, underlying which it was possible to spy a serious
pride, and the change from one to another was often very human and
diverting. ‘_Et vos gargouilles moyen-âge_,’ cried I; ‘_comme elles sont
originates_!’ ‘_N’est-ce pas_? _Elles sont bien drôles_!’ he said,
smiling broadly; and the next moment, with a sudden gravity: ‘_Cependant
il y en a une qui a une patte de cassé_; _il faut que je voie cela_.’ I
asked if he had any model—a point we much discussed. ‘_Non_,’ said he
simply; ‘_c’est une église idéale_.’ The relievo was his favourite
performance, and very justly so. The angels at the door, he owned, he
would like to destroy and replace. ‘_Ils n’ont pas de vie_, _ils
manquent de vie_. _Vous devriez voir mon église à la Dominique_; _j’ai
là une Vierge qui est vraiment gentille_.’ ‘Ah,’ I cried, ‘they told me
you had said you would never build another church, and I wrote in my
journal I could not believe it.’ ‘_Oui_, _j’aimerais bien en fairs une
autre_,’ he confessed, and smiled at the confession. An artist will
understand how much I was attracted by this conversation. There is no
bond so near as a community in that unaffected interest and slightly
shame-faced pride which mark the intelligent man enamoured of an art. He
sees the limitations of his aim, the defects of his practice; he smiles
to be so employed upon the shores of death, yet sees in his own devotion
something worthy. Artists, if they had the same sense of humour with the
Augurs, would smile like them on meeting, but the smile would not be
scornful.
I had occasion to see much of this excellent man. He sailed with us from
Tai-o-hae to Hiva-oa, a dead beat of ninety miles against a heavy sea.
It was what is called a good passage, and a feather in the _Casco’s_ cap;
but among the most miserable forty hours that any one of us had ever
passed. We were swung and tossed together all that time like shot in a
stage thunder-box. The mate was thrown down and had his head cut open;
the captain was sick on deck; the cook sick in the galley. Of all our
party only two sat down to dinner. I was one. I own that I felt
wretchedly; and I can only say of the other, who professed to feel quite
well, that she fled at an early moment from the table. It was in these
circumstances that we skirted the windward shore of that indescribable
island of Ua-pu; viewing with dizzy eyes the coves, the capes, the
breakers, the climbing forests, and the inaccessible stone needles that
surmount the mountains. The place persists, in a dark corner of our
memories, like a piece of the scenery of nightmares. The end of this
distressful passage, where we were to land our passengers, was in a
similar vein of roughness. The surf ran high on the beach at Taahauku;
the boat broached-to and capsized; and all hands were submerged. Only
the brother himself, who was well used to the experience, skipped ashore,
by some miracle of agility, with scarce a sprinkling. Thenceforward,
during our stay at Hiva-oa, he was our cicerone and patron; introducing
us, taking us excursions, serving us in every way, and making himself
daily more beloved.
Michel Blanc had been a carpenter by trade; had made money and retired,
supposing his active days quite over; and it was only when he found
idleness dangerous that he placed his capital and acquirements at the
service of the mission. He became their carpenter, mason, architect, and
engineer; added sculpture to his accomplishments, and was famous for his
skill in gardening. He wore an enviable air of having found a port from
life’s contentions and lying there strongly anchored; went about his
business with a jolly simplicity; complained of no lack of
results—perhaps shyly thinking his own statuary result enough; and was
altogether a pattern of the missionary layman.
CHAPTER VIII—THE PORT OF ENTRY
The port—the mart, the civil and religious capital of these rude
islands—is called Tai-o-hae, and lies strung along the beach of a
precipitous green bay in Nuka-hiva. It was midwinter when we came
thither, and the weather was sultry, boisterous, and inconstant. Now the
wind blew squally from the land down gaps of splintered precipice; now,
between the sentinel islets of the entry, it came in gusts from seaward.
Heavy and dark clouds impended on the summits; the rain roared and
ceased; the scuppers of the mountain gushed; and the next day we would
see the sides of the amphitheatre bearded with white falls. Along the
beach the town shows a thin file of houses, mostly white, and all
ensconced in the foliage of an avenue of green puraos; a pier gives
access from the sea across the belt of breakers; to the eastward there
stands, on a projecting bushy hill, the old fort which is now the
calaboose, or prison; eastward still, alone in a garden, the Residency
flies the colours of France. Just off Calaboose Hill, the tiny
Government schooner rides almost permanently at anchor, marks eight bells
in the morning (there or thereabout) with the unfurling of her flag, and
salutes the setting sun with the report of a musket.
Here dwell together, and share the comforts of a club (which may be
enumerated as a billiard-board, absinthe, a map of the world on
Mercator’s projection, and one of the most agreeable verandahs in the
tropics), a handful of whites of varying nationality, mostly French
officials, German and Scottish merchant clerks, and the agents of the
opium monopoly. There are besides three tavern-keepers, the shrewd Scot
who runs the cotton gin-mill, two white ladies, and a sprinkling of
people ‘on the beach’—a South Sea expression for which there is no exact
equivalent. It is a pleasant society, and a hospitable. But one man,
who was often to be seen seated on the logs at the pier-head, merits a
word for the singularity of his history and appearance. Long ago, it
seems, he fell in love with a native lady, a High Chiefess in Ua-pu.
She, on being approached, declared she could never marry a man who was
untattooed; it looked so naked; whereupon, with some greatness of soul,
our hero put himself in the hands of the Tahukus, and, with still
greater, persevered until the process was complete. He had certainly to
bear a great expense, for the Tahuku will not work without reward; and
certainly exquisite pain. Kooamua, high chief as he was, and one of the
old school, was only part tattooed; he could not, he told us with lively
pantomime, endure the torture to an end. Our enamoured countryman was
more resolved; he was tattooed from head to foot in the most approved
methods of the art; and at last presented himself before his mistress a
new man. The fickle fair one could never behold him from that day except
with laughter. For my part, I could never see the man without a kind of
admiration; of him it might be said, if ever of any, that he had loved
not wisely, but too well.
The Residency stands by itself, Calaboose Hill screening it from the
fringe of town along the further bay. The house is commodious, with wide
verandahs; all day it stands open, back and front, and the trade blows
copiously over its bare floors. On a week-day the garden offers a scene
of most untropical animation, half a dozen convicts toiling there
cheerfully with spade and barrow, and touching hats and smiling to the
visitor like old attached family servants. On Sunday these are gone, and
nothing to be seen but dogs of all ranks and sizes peacefully slumbering
in the shady grounds; for the dogs of Tai-o-hae are very courtly-minded,
and make the seat of Government their promenade and place of siesta. In
front and beyond, a strip of green down loses itself in a low wood of
many species of acacia; and deep in the wood a ruinous wall encloses the
cemetery of the Europeans. English and Scottish sleep there, and
Scandinavians, and French _maîtres de manœuvres_ and _maîtres ouvriers_:
mingling alien dust. Back in the woods, perhaps, the blackbird, or (as
they call him there) the island nightingale, will be singing home
strains; and the ceaseless requiem of the surf hangs on the ear. I have
never seen a resting-place more quiet; but it was a long thought how far
these sleepers had all travelled, and from what diverse homes they had
set forth, to lie here in the end together.
On the summit of its promontory hill, the calaboose stands all day with
doors and window-shutters open to the trade. On my first visit a dog was
the only guardian visible. He, indeed, rose with an attitude so menacing
that I was glad to lay hands on an old barrel-hoop; and I think the
weapon must have been familiar, for the champion instantly retreated, and
as I wandered round the court and through the building, I could see him,
with a couple of companions, humbly dodging me about the corners. The
prisoners’ dormitory was a spacious, airy room, devoid of any furniture;
its whitewashed walls covered with inscriptions in Marquesan and rude
drawings: one of the pier, not badly done; one of a murder; several of
French soldiers in uniform. There was one legend in French: ‘_Je n’est_’
(sic) ‘_pas le sou_.’ From this noontide quietude it must not be
supposed the prison was untenanted; the calaboose at Tai-o-hae does a
good business. But some of its occupants were gardening at the
Residency, and the rest were probably at work upon the streets, as free
as our scavengers at home, although not so industrious. On the approach
of evening they would be called in like children from play; and the
harbour-master (who is also the jailer) would go through the form of
locking them up until six the next morning. Should a prisoner have any
call in town, whether of pleasure or affairs, he has but to unhook the
window-shutters; and if he is back again, and the shutter decently
replaced, by the hour of call on the morrow, he may have met the
harbour-master in the avenue, and there will be no complaint, far less
any punishment. But this is not all. The charming French Resident, M.
Delaruelle, carried me one day to the calaboose on an official visit. In
the green court, a very ragged gentleman, his legs deformed with the
island elephantiasis, saluted us smiling. ‘One of our political
prisoners—an insurgent from Raiatea,’ said the Resident; and then to the
jailer: ‘I thought I had ordered him a new pair of trousers.’ Meanwhile
no other convict was to be seen—‘_Eh bien_,’ said the Resident, ‘_où sont
vos prisonniers_?’ ‘_Monsieur le Résident_,’ replied the jailer,
saluting with soldierly formality, ‘_comme c’est jour de fête_, _je les
ai laissé aller à la chasse_.’ They were all upon the mountains hunting
goats! Presently we came to the quarters of the women, likewise
deserted—‘_Où sont vos bonnes femmes_?’ asked the Resident; and the
jailer cheerfully responded: ‘_Je crois_, _Monsieur le Résident_,
_qu’elles sont allées quelquepart faire une visite_.’ It had been the
design of M. Delaruelle, who was much in love with the whimsicalities of
his small realm, to elicit something comical; but not even he expected
anything so perfect as the last. To complete the picture of convict life
in Tai-o-hae, it remains to be added that these criminals draw a salary
as regularly as the President of the Republic. Ten sous a day is their
hire. Thus they have money, food, shelter, clothing, and, I was about to
write, their liberty. The French are certainly a good-natured people,
and make easy masters. They are besides inclined to view the Marquesans
with an eye of humorous indulgence. ‘They are dying, poor devils!’ said
M. Delaruelle: ‘the main thing is to let them die in peace.’ And it was
not only well said, but I believe expressed the general thought. Yet
there is another element to be considered; for these convicts are not
merely useful, they are almost essential to the French existence. With a
people incurably idle, dispirited by what can only be called endemic
pestilence, and inflamed with ill-feeling against their new masters,
crime and convict labour are a godsend to the Government.
Theft is practically the sole crime. Originally petty pilferers, the men
of Tai-o-hae now begin to force locks and attack strong-boxes. Hundreds
of dollars have been taken at a time; though, with that redeeming
moderation so common in Polynesian theft, the Marquesan burglar will
always take a part and leave a part, sharing (so to speak) with the
proprietor. If it be Chilian coin—the island currency—he will escape; if
the sum is in gold, French silver, or bank-notes, the police wait until
the money begins to come in circulation, and then easily pick out their
man. And now comes the shameful part. In plain English, the prisoner is
tortured until he confesses and (if that be possible) restores the money.
To keep him alone, day and night, in the black hole, is to inflict on the
Marquesan torture inexpressible. Even his robberies are carried on in
the plain daylight, under the open sky, with the stimulus of enterprise,
and the countenance of an accomplice; his terror of the dark is still
insurmountable; conceive, then, what he endures in his solitary dungeon;
conceive how he longs to confess, become a full-fledged convict, and be
allowed to sleep beside his comrades. While we were in Tai-o-hae a thief
was under prevention. He had entered a house about eight in the morning,
forced a trunk, and stolen eleven hundred francs; and now, under the
horrors of darkness, solitude, and a bedevilled cannibal imagination, he
was reluctantly confessing and giving up his spoil. From one cache,
which he had already pointed out, three hundred francs had been
recovered, and it was expected that he would presently disgorge the rest.
This would be ugly enough if it were all; but I am bound to say, because
it is a matter the French should set at rest, that worse is continually
hinted. I heard that one man was kept six days with his arms bound
backward round a barrel; and it is the universal report that every
gendarme in the South Seas is equipped with something in the nature of a
thumbscrew. I do not know this. I never had the face to ask any of the
gendarmes—pleasant, intelligent, and kindly fellows—with whom I have been
intimate, and whose hospitality I have enjoyed; and perhaps the tale
reposes (as I hope it does) on a misconstruction of that ingenious
cat’s-cradle with which the French agent of police so readily secures a
prisoner. But whether physical or moral, torture is certainly employed;
and by a barbarous injustice, the state of accusation (in which a man may
very well be innocently placed) is positively painful; the state of
conviction (in which all are supposed guilty) is comparatively free, and
positively pleasant. Perhaps worse still,—not only the accused, but
sometimes his wife, his mistress, or his friend, is subjected to the same
hardships. I was admiring, in the tapu system, the ingenuity of native
methods of detection; there is not much to admire in those of the French,
and to lock up a timid child in a dark room, and, if he proved obstinate,
lock up his sister in the next, is neither novel nor humane.
The main occasion of these thefts is the new vice of opium-eating. ‘Here
nobody ever works, and all eat opium,’ said a gendarme; and Ah Fu knew a
woman who ate a dollar’s worth in a day. The successful thief will give
a handful of money to each of his friends, a dress to a woman, pass an
evening in one of the taverns of Tai-o-hae, during which he treats all
comers, produce a big lump of opium, and retire to the bush to eat and
sleep it off. A trader, who did not sell opium, confessed to me that he
was at his wit’s end. ‘I do not sell it, but others do,’ said he. ‘The
natives only work to buy it; if they walk over to me to sell their
cotton, they have just to walk over to some one else to buy their opium
with my money. And why should they be at the bother of two walks? There
is no use talking,’ he added—‘opium is the currency of this country.’
The man under prevention during my stay at Tai-o-hae lost patience while
the Chinese opium-seller was being examined in his presence. ‘Of course
he sold me opium!’ he broke out; ‘all the Chinese here sell opium. It
was only to buy opium that I stole; it is only to buy opium that anybody
steals. And what you ought to do is to let no opium come here, and no
Chinamen.’ This is precisely what is done in Samoa by a native
Government; but the French have bound their own hands, and for forty
thousand francs sold native subjects to crime and death. This horrid
traffic may be said to have sprung up by accident. It was Captain Hart
who had the misfortune to be the means of beginning it, at a time when
his plantations flourished in the Marquesas, and he found a difficulty in
keeping Chinese coolies. To-day the plantations are practically deserted
and the Chinese gone; but in the meanwhile the natives have learned the
vice, the patent brings in a round sum, and the needy Government at
Papeete shut their eyes and open their pockets. Of course, the patentee
is supposed to sell to Chinamen alone; equally of course, no one could
afford to pay forty thousand francs for the privilege of supplying a
scattered handful of Chinese; and every one knows the truth, and all are
ashamed of it. French officials shake their heads when opium is
mentioned; and the agents of the farmer blush for their employment.
Those that live in glass houses should not throw stones; as a subject of
the British crown, I am an unwilling shareholder in the largest opium
business under heaven. But the British case is highly complicated; it
implies the livelihood of millions; and must be reformed, when it can be
reformed at all, with prudence. This French business, on the other hand,
is a nostrum and a mere excrescence. No native industry was to be
encouraged: the poison is solemnly imported. No native habit was to be
considered: the vice has been gratuitously introduced. And no creature
profits, save the Government at Papeete—the not very enviable gentlemen
who pay them, and the Chinese underlings who do the dirty work.
CHAPTER IX—THE HOUSE OF TEMOANA
The history of the Marquesas is, of late years, much confused by the
coming and going of the French. At least twice they have seized the
archipelago, at least once deserted it; and in the meanwhile the natives
pursued almost without interruption their desultory cannibal wars.
Through these events and changing dynasties, a single considerable figure
may be seen to move: that of the high chief, a king, Temoana. Odds and
ends of his history came to my ears: how he was at first a convert to the
Protestant mission; how he was kidnapped or exiled from his native land,
served as cook aboard a whaler, and was shown, for small charge, in
English seaports; how he returned at last to the Marquesas, fell under
the strong and benign influence of the late bishop, extended his
influence in the group, was for a while joint ruler with the prelate, and
died at last the chief supporter of Catholicism and the French. His
widow remains in receipt of two pounds a month from the French
Government. Queen she is usually called, but in the official almanac she
figures as ‘_Madame Vaekehu_, _Grande Chefesse_.’ His son (natural or
adoptive, I know not which), Stanislao Moanatini, chief of Akaui, serves
in Tai-o-hae as a kind of Minister of Public Works; and the daughter of
Stanislao is High Chiefess of the southern island of Tauata. These,
then, are the greatest folk of the archipelago; we thought them also the
most estimable. This is the rule in Polynesia, with few exceptions; the
higher the family, the better the man—better in sense, better in manners,
and usually taller and stronger in body. A stranger advances blindfold.
He scrapes acquaintance as he can. Save the tattoo in the Marquesas,
nothing indicates the difference of rank; and yet almost invariably we
found, after we had made them, that our friends were persons of station.
I have said ‘usually taller and stronger.’ I might have been more
absolute,—over all Polynesia, and a part of Micronesia, the rule holds
good; the great ones of the isle, and even of the village, are greater of
bone and muscle, and often heavier of flesh, than any commoner. The
usual explanation—that the high-born child is more industriously
shampooed, is probably the true one. In New Caledonia, at least, where
the difference does not exist, has never been remarked, the practice of
shampooing seems to be itself unknown. Doctors would be well employed in
a study of the point.
Vaekehu lives at the other end of the town from the Residency, beyond the
buildings of the mission. Her house is on the European plan: a table in
the midst of the chief room; photographs and religious pictures on the
wall. It commands to either hand a charming vista: through the front
door, a peep of green lawn, scurrying pigs, the pendent fans of the
coco-palm and splendour of the bursting surf: through the back, mounting
forest glades and coronals of precipice. Here, in the strong
thorough-draught, Her Majesty received us in a simple gown of print, and
with no mark of royalty but the exquisite finish of her tattooed mittens,
the elaboration of her manners, and the gentle falsetto in which all the
highly refined among Marquesan ladies (and Vaekehu above all others)
delight to sing their language. An adopted daughter interpreted, while
we gave the news, and rehearsed by name our friends of Anaho. As we
talked, we could see, through the landward door, another lady of the
household at her toilet under the green trees; who presently, when her
hair was arranged, and her hat wreathed with flowers, appeared upon the
back verandah with gracious salutations.
Vaekehu is very deaf; ‘_merci_’ is her only word of French; and I do not
know that she seemed clever. An exquisite, kind refinement, with a shade
of quietism, gathered perhaps from the nuns, was what chiefly struck us.
Or rather, upon that first occasion, we were conscious of a sense as of
district-visiting on our part, and reduced evangelical gentility on the
part of our hostess. The other impression followed after she was more at
ease, and came with Stanislao and his little girl to dine on board the
_Casco_. She had dressed for the occasion: wore white, which very well
became her strong brown face; and sat among us, eating or smoking her
cigarette, quite cut off from all society, or only now and then included
through the intermediary of her son. It was a position that might have
been ridiculous, and she made it ornamental; making believe to hear and
to be entertained; her face, whenever she met our eyes, lighting with the
smile of good society; her contributions to the talk, when she made any,
and that was seldom, always complimentary and pleasing. No attention was
paid to the child, for instance, but what she remarked and thanked us
for. Her parting with each, when she came to leave, was gracious and
pretty, as had been every step of her behaviour. When Mrs. Stevenson
held out her hand to say good-bye, Vaekehu took it, held it, and a moment
smiled upon her; dropped it, and then, as upon a kindly after-thought,
and with a sort of warmth of condescension, held out both hands and
kissed my wife upon both cheeks. Given the same relation of years and of
rank, the thing would have been so done on the boards of the _Comédie
Française_; just so might Madame Brohan have warmed and condescended to
Madame Broisat in the _Marquis de Villemer_. It was my part to accompany
our guests ashore: when I kissed the little girl good-bye at the pier
steps, Vaekehu gave a cry of gratification, reached down her hand into
the boat, took mine, and pressed it with that flattering softness which
seems the coquetry of the old lady in every quarter of the earth. The
next moment she had taken Stanislao’s arm, and they moved off along the
pier in the moonlight, leaving me bewildered. This was a queen of
cannibals; she was tattooed from hand to foot, and perhaps the greatest
masterpiece of that art now extant, so that a while ago, before she was
grown prim, her leg was one of the sights of Tai-o-hae; she had been
passed from chief to chief; she had been fought for and taken in war;
perhaps, being so great a lady, she had sat on the high place, and
throned it there, alone of her sex, while the drums were going twenty
strong and the priests carried up the blood-stained baskets of long-pig.
And now behold her, out of that past of violence and sickening feasts,
step forth, in her age, a quiet, smooth, elaborate old lady, such as you
might find at home (mittened also, but not often so well-mannered) in a
score of country houses. Only Vaekehu’s mittens were of dye, not of
silk; and they had been paid for, not in money, but the cooked flesh of
men. It came in my mind with a clap, what she could think of it herself,
and whether at heart, perhaps, she might not regret and aspire after the
barbarous and stirring past. But when I asked Stanislao—‘Ah!’ said he,
‘she is content; she is religious, she passes all her days with the
sisters.’
Stanislao (Stanislaos, with the final consonant evaded after the
Polynesian habit) was sent by Bishop Dordillon to South America, and
there educated by the fathers. His French is fluent, his talk sensible
and spirited, and in his capacity of ganger-in-chief, he is of excellent
service to the French. With the prestige of his name and family, and
with the stick when needful, he keeps the natives working and the roads
passable. Without Stanislao and the convicts, I am in doubt what would
become of the present regimen in Nuka-hiva; whether the highways might
not be suffered to close up, the pier to wash away, and the Residency to
fall piecemeal about the ears of impotent officials. And yet though the
hereditary favourer, and one of the chief props of French authority, he
has always an eye upon the past. He showed me where the old public place
had stood, still to be traced by random piles of stone; told me how great
and fine it was, and surrounded on all sides by populous houses, whence,
at the beating of the drums, the folk crowded to make holiday. The
drum-beat of the Polynesian has a strange and gloomy stimulation for the
nerves of all. White persons feel it—at these precipitate sounds their
hearts beat faster; and, according to old residents, its effect on the
natives was extreme. Bishop Dordillon might entreat; Temoana himself
command and threaten; at the note of the drum wild instincts triumphed.
And now it might beat upon these ruins, and who should assemble? The
houses are down, the people dead, their lineage extinct; and the
sweepings and fugitives of distant bays and islands encamp upon their
graves. The decline of the dance Stanislao especially laments. ‘_Chaque
pays a ses coutumes_,’ said he; but in the report of any gendarme,
perhaps corruptly eager to increase the number of _délits_ and the
instruments of his own power, custom after custom is placed on the
expurgatorial index. ‘_Tenez_, _une danse qui n’est pas permise_,’ said
Stanislao: ‘_je ne sais pas pourquoi_, _elle est très jolie_, _elle va
comme ça_,’ and sticking his umbrella upright in the road, he sketched
the steps and gestures. All his criticisms of the present, all his
regrets for the past, struck me as temperate and sensible. The short
term of office of the Resident he thought the chief defect of the
administration; that officer having scarce begun to be efficient ere he
was recalled. I thought I gathered, too, that he regarded with some fear
the coming change from a naval to a civil governor. I am sure at least
that I regard it so myself; for the civil servants of France have never
appeared to any foreigner as at all the flower of their country, while
her naval officers may challenge competition with the world. In all his
talk, Stanislao was particular to speak of his own country as a land of
savages; and when he stated an opinion of his own, it was with some
apologetic preface, alleging that he was ‘a savage who had travelled.’
There was a deal, in this elaborate modesty, of honest pride. Yet there
was something in the precaution that saddened me; and I could not but
fear he was only forestalling a taunt that he had heard too often.
I recall with interest two interviews with Stanislao. The first was a
certain afternoon of tropic rain, which we passed together in the
verandah of the club; talking at times with heightened voices as the
showers redoubled overhead, passing at times into the billiard-room, to
consult, in the dim, cloudy daylight, that map of the world which forms
its chief adornment. He was naturally ignorant of English history, so
that I had much of news to communicate. The story of Gordon I told him
in full, and many episodes of the Indian Mutiny, Lucknow, the second
battle of Cawn-pore, the relief of Arrah, the death of poor
Spottis-woode, and Sir Hugh Rose’s hotspur, midland campaign. He was
intent to hear; his brown face, strongly marked with small-pox, kindled
and changed with each vicissitude. His eyes glowed with the reflected
light of battle; his questions were many and intelligent, and it was
chiefly these that sent us so often to the map. But it is of our parting
that I keep the strongest sense. We were to sail on the morrow, and the
night had fallen, dark, gusty, and rainy, when we stumbled up the hill to
bid farewell to Stanislao. He had already loaded us with gifts; but more
were waiting. We sat about the table over cigars and green cocoa-nuts;
claps of wind blew through the house and extinguished the lamp, which was
always instantly relighted with a single match; and these recurrent
intervals of darkness were felt as a relief. For there was something
painful and embarrassing in the kindness of that separation. ‘_Ah_,
_vous devriez rester ici_, _mon cher ami_!’ cried Stanislao. ‘_Vous êtes
les gens qu’il faut pour les Kanaques_; _vous êtes doux_, _vous et votre
famille_; _vous seriez obéis dans toutes les îles_.’ We had been civil;
not always that, my conscience told me, and never anything beyond; and
all this to-do is a measure, not of our considerateness, but of the want
of it in others. The rest of the evening, on to Vaekehu’s and back as
far as to the pier, Stanislao walked with my arm and sheltered me with
his umbrella; and after the boat had put off, we could still distinguish,
in the murky darkness, his gestures of farewell. His words, if there
were any, were drowned by the rain and the loud surf.
I have mentioned presents, a vexed question in the South Seas; and one
which well illustrates the common, ignorant habit of regarding races in a
lump. In many quarters the Polynesian gives only to receive. I have
visited islands where the population mobbed me for all the world like
dogs after the waggon of cat’s-meat; and where the frequent proposition,
‘You my pleni (friend),’ or (with more of pathos) ‘You all ’e same my
father,’ must be received with hearty laughter and a shout. And perhaps
everywhere, among the greedy and rapacious, a gift is regarded as a sprat
to catch a whale. It is the habit to give gifts and to receive returns,
and such characters, complying with the custom, will look to it nearly
that they do not lose. But for persons of a different stamp the
statement must be reversed. The shabby Polynesian is anxious till he has
received the return gift; the generous is uneasy until he has made it.
The first is disappointed if you have not given more than he; the second
is miserable if he thinks he has given less than you. This is my
experience; if it clash with that of others, I pity their fortune, and
praise mine: the circumstances cannot change what I have seen, nor lessen
what I have received. And indeed I find that those who oppose me often
argue from a ground of singular presumptions; comparing Polynesians with
an ideal person, compact of generosity and gratitude, whom I never had
the pleasure of encountering; and forgetting that what is almost poverty
to us is wealth almost unthinkable to them. I will give one instance: I
chanced to speak with consideration of these gifts of Stanislao’s with a
certain clever man, a great hater and contemner of Kanakas. ‘Well! what
were they?’ he cried. ‘A pack of old men’s beards. Trash!’ And the
same gentleman, some half an hour later, being upon a different train of
thought, dwelt at length on the esteem in which the Marquesans held that
sort of property, how they preferred it to all others except land, and
what fancy prices it would fetch. Using his own figures, I computed
that, in this commodity alone, the gifts of Vaekehu and Stanislao
represented between two and three hundred dollars; and the queen’s
official salary is of two hundred and forty in the year.
But generosity on the one hand, and conspicuous meanness on the other,
are in the South Seas, as at home, the exception. It is neither with any
hope of gain, nor with any lively wish to please, that the ordinary
Polynesian chooses and presents his gifts. A plain social duty lies
before him, which he performs correctly, but without the least
enthusiasm. And we shall best understand his attitude of mind, if we
examine our own to the cognate absurdity of marriage presents. There we
give without any special thought of a return; yet if the circumstance
arise, and the return be withheld, we shall judge ourselves insulted. We
give them usually without affection, and almost never with a genuine
desire to please; and our gift is rather a mark of our own status than a
measure of our love to the recipients. So in a great measure and with
the common run of the Polynesians; their gifts are formal; they imply no
more than social recognition; and they are made and reciprocated, as we
pay and return our morning visits. And the practice of marking and
measuring events and sentiments by presents is universal in the island
world. A gift plays with them the part of stamp and seal; and has
entered profoundly into the mind of islanders. Peace and war, marriage,
adoption and naturalisation, are celebrated or declared by the acceptance
or the refusal of gifts; and it is as natural for the islander to bring a
gift as for us to carry a card-case.
CHAPTER X—A PORTRAIT AND A STORY
I have had occasion several times to name the late bishop, Father
Dordillon, ‘Monseigneur,’ as he is still almost universally called,
Vicar-Apostolic of the Marquesas and Bishop of Cambysopolis _in
partibus_. Everywhere in the islands, among all classes and races, this
fine, old, kindly, cheerful fellow is remembered with affection and
respect. His influence with the natives was paramount. They reckoned
him the highest of men—higher than an admiral; brought him their money to
keep; took his advice upon their purchases; nor would they plant trees
upon their own land till they had the approval of the father of the
islands. During the time of the French exodus he singly represented
Europe, living in the Residency, and ruling by the hand of Temoana. The
first roads were made under his auspices and by his persuasion. The old
road between Hatiheu and Anaho was got under way from either side on the
ground that it would be pleasant for an evening promenade, and brought to
completion by working on the rivalry of the two villages. The priest
would boast in Hatiheu of the progress made in Anaho, and he would tell
the folk of Anaho, ‘If you don’t take care, your neighbours will be over
the hill before you are at the top.’ It could not be so done to-day; it
could then; death, opium, and depopulation had not gone so far; and the
people of Hatiheu, I was told, still vied with each other in fine attire,
and used to go out by families, in the cool of the evening, boat-sailing
and racing in the bay. There seems some truth at least in the common
view, that this joint reign of Temoana and the bishop was the last and
brief golden age of the Marquesas. But the civil power returned, the
mission was packed out of the Residency at twenty-four hours’ notice, new
methods supervened, and the golden age (whatever it quite was) came to an
end. It is the strongest proof of Father Dordillon’s prestige that it
survived, seemingly without loss, this hasty deposition.
His method with the natives was extremely mild. Among these barbarous
children he still played the part of the smiling father; and he was
careful to observe, in all indifferent matters, the Marquesan etiquette.
Thus, in the singular system of artificial kinship, the bishop had been
adopted by Vaekehu as a grandson; Miss Fisher, of Hatiheu, as a daughter.
From that day, Monseigneur never addressed the young lady except as his
mother, and closed his letters with the formalities of a dutiful son.
With Europeans he could be strict, even to the extent of harshness. He
made no distinction against heretics, with whom he was on friendly terms;
but the rules of his own Church he would see observed; and once at least
he had a white man clapped in jail for the desecration of a saint’s day.
But even this rigour, so intolerable to laymen, so irritating to
Protestants, could not shake his popularity. We shall best conceive him
by examples nearer home; we may all have known some divine of the old
school in Scotland, a literal Sabbatarian, a stickler for the letter of
the law, who was yet in private modest, innocent, genial and mirthful.
Much such a man, it seems, was Father Dordillon. And his popularity bore
a test yet stronger. He had the name, and probably deserved it, of a
shrewd man in business and one that made the mission pay. Nothing so
much stirs up resentment as the inmixture in commerce of religious
bodies; but even rival traders spoke well of Monseigneur.
His character is best portrayed in the story of the days of his decline.
A time came when, from the failure of sight, he must desist from his
literary labours: his Marquesan hymns, grammars, and dictionaries; his
scientific papers, lives of saints, and devotional poetry. He cast about
for a new interest: pitched on gardening, and was to be seen all day,
with spade and water-pot, in his childlike eagerness, actually running
between the borders. Another step of decay, and he must leave his garden
also. Instantly a new occupation was devised, and he sat in the mission
cutting paper flowers and wreaths. His diocese was not great enough for
his activity; the churches of the Marquesas were papered with his
handiwork, and still he must be making more. ‘Ah,’ said he, smiling,
‘when I am dead what a fine time you will have clearing out my trash!’
He had been dead about six months; but I was pleased to see some of his
trophies still exposed, and looked upon them with a smile: the tribute
(if I have read his cheerful character aright) which he would have
preferred to any useless tears. Disease continued progressively to
disable him; he who had clambered so stalwartly over the rude rocks of
the Marquesas, bringing peace to warfaring clans, was for some time
carried in a chair between the mission and the church, and at last
confined to bed, impotent with dropsy, and tormented with bed-sores and
sciatica. Here he lay two months without complaint; and on the 11th
January 1888, in the seventy-ninth year of his life, and the
thirty-fourth of his labours in the Marquesas, passed away.
Those who have a taste for hearing missions, Protestant or Catholic,
decried, must seek their pleasure elsewhere than in my pages. Whether
Catholic or Protestant, with all their gross blots, with all their
deficiency of candour, of humour, and of common sense, the missionaries
are the best and the most useful whites in the Pacific. This is a
subject which will follow us throughout; but there is one part of it that
may conveniently be treated here. The married and the celibate
missionary, each has his particular advantage and defect. The married
missionary, taking him at the best, may offer to the native what he is
much in want of—a higher picture of domestic life; but the woman at his
elbow tends to keep him in touch with Europe and out of touch with
Polynesia, and to perpetuate, and even to ingrain, parochial decencies
far best forgotten. The mind of the female missionary tends, for
instance, to be continually busied about dress. She can be taught with
extreme difficulty to think any costume decent but that to which she grew
accustomed on Clapham Common; and to gratify this prejudice, the native
is put to useless expense, his mind is tainted with the morbidities of
Europe, and his health is set in danger. The celibate missionary, on the
other hand, and whether at best or worst, falls readily into native ways
of life; to which he adds too commonly what is either a mark of celibate
man at large, or an inheritance from mediæval saints—I mean slovenly
habits and an unclean person. There are, of course, degrees in this; and
the sister (of course, and all honour to her) is as fresh as a lady at a
ball. For the diet there is nothing to be said—it must amaze and shock
the Polynesian—but for the adoption of native habits there is much.
‘_Chaque pays a ses coutumes_,’ said Stanislao; these it is the
missionary’s delicate task to modify; and the more he can do so from
within, and from a native standpoint, the better he will do his work; and
here I think the Catholics have sometimes the advantage; in the Vicariate
of Dordillon, I am sure they had it. I have heard the bishop blamed for
his indulgence to the natives, and above all because he did not rage with
sufficient energy against cannibalism. It was a part of his policy to
live among the natives like an elder brother; to follow where he could;
to lead where it was necessary; never to drive; and to encourage the
growth of new habits, instead of violently rooting up the old. And it
might be better, in the long-run, if this policy were always followed.
It might be supposed that native missionaries would prove more indulgent,
but the reverse is found to be the case. The new broom sweeps clean; and
the white missionary of to-day is often embarrassed by the bigotry of his
native coadjutor. What else should we expect? On some islands, sorcery,
polygamy, human sacrifice, and tobacco-smoking have been prohibited, the
dress of the native has been modified, and himself warned in strong terms
against rival sects of Christianity; all by the same man, at the same
period of time, and with the like authority. By what criterion is the
convert to distinguish the essential from the unessential? He swallows
the nostrum whole; there has been no play of mind, no instruction, and,
except for some brute utility in the prohibitions, no advance. To call
things by their proper names, this is teaching superstition. It is
unfortunate to use the word; so few people have read history, and so many
have dipped into little atheistic manuals, that the majority will rush to
a conclusion, and suppose the labour lost. And far from that: These
semi-spontaneous superstitions, varying with the sect of the original
evangelist and the customs of the island, are found in practice to be
highly fructifying; and in particular those who have learned and who go
forth again to teach them offer an example to the world. The best
specimen of the Christian hero that I ever met was one of these native
missionaries. He had saved two lives at the risk of his own; like
Nathan, he had bearded a tyrant in his hour of blood; when a whole white
population fled, he alone stood to his duty; and his behaviour under
domestic sorrow with which the public has no concern filled the beholder
with sympathy and admiration. A poor little smiling laborious man he
looked; and you would have thought he had nothing in him but that of
which indeed he had too much—facile good-nature. {86}
It chances that the only rivals of Monseigneur and his mission in the
Marquesas were certain of these brown-skinned evangelists, natives from
Hawaii. I know not what they thought of Father Dordillon: they are the
only class I did not question; but I suspect the prelate to have regarded
them askance, for he was eminently human. During my stay at Tai-o-hae,
the time of the yearly holiday came round at the girls’ school; and a
whole fleet of whale-boats came from Ua-pu to take the daughters of that
island home. On board of these was Kauwealoha, one of the pastors, a
fine, rugged old gentleman, of that leonine type so common in Hawaii. He
paid me a visit in the _Casco_, and there entertained me with a tale of
one of his colleagues, Kekela, a missionary in the great cannibal isle of
Hiva-oa. It appears that shortly after a kidnapping visit from a
Peruvian slaver, the boats of an American whaler put into a bay upon that
island, were attacked, and made their escape with difficulty, leaving
their mate, a Mr. Whalon, in the hands of the natives. The captive, with
his arms bound behind his back, was cast into a house; and the chief
announced the capture to Kekela. And here I begin to follow the version
of Kauwealoha; it is a good specimen of Kanaka English; and the reader is
to conceive it delivered with violent emphasis and speaking pantomime.
‘“I got ’Melican mate,” the chief he say. “What you go do ’Melican
mate?” Kekela he say. “I go make fire, I go kill, I go eat him,” he say;
“you come to-mollow eat piece.” “I no _want_ eat ’Melican mate!” Kekela
he say; “why you want?” “This bad shippee, this slave shippee,” the
chief he say. “One time a shippee he come from Pelu, he take away plenty
Kanaka, he take away my son. ’Melican mate he bad man. I go eat him;
you eat piece.” “I no _want_ eat ’Melican mate!” Kekela he say; and he
_cly_—all night he cly! To-mollow Kekela he get up, he put on blackee
coat, he go see chief; he see Missa Whela, him hand tie’ like this.
(_Pantomime_.) Kekela he cly. He say chief:—“Chief, you like things of
mine? you like whale-boat?” “Yes,” he say. “You like file-a’m?”
(fire-arms). “Yes,” he say. “You like blackee coat?” “Yes,” he say.
Kekela he take Missa Whela by he shoul’a’ (shoulder), he take him light
out house; he give chief he whale-boat, he file-a’m, he blackee coat. He
take Missa Whela he house, make him sit down with he wife and chil’en.
Missa Whela all-the-same pelison (prison); he wife, he chil’en in
Amelica; he cly—O, he cly. Kekela he solly. One day Kekela he see ship.
(_Pantomime_.) He say Missa Whela, “Ma’ Whala?” Missa Whela he say,
“Yes.” Kanaka they begin go down beach. Kekela he get eleven Kanaka,
get oa’ (oars), get evely thing. He say Missa Whela, “Now you go quick.”
They jump in whale-boat. “Now you low!” Kekela he say: “you low quick,
quick!” (_Violent pantomime_, _and a change indicating that the narrator
has left the boat and returned to the beach_.) All the Kanaka they say,
“How! ’Melican mate he go away?”—jump in boat; low afta. (_Violent
pantomime_, _and change again to boat_.) Kekela he say, “Low quick!”’
Here I think Kauwealoha’s pantomime had confused me; I have no more of
his _ipsissima verba_; and can but add, in my own less spirited manner,
that the ship was reached, Mr. Whalon taken aboard, and Kekela returned
to his charge among the cannibals. But how unjust it is to repeat the
stumblings of a foreigner in a language only partly acquired! A
thoughtless reader might conceive Kauwealoha and his colleague to be a
species of amicable baboon; but I have here the anti-dote. In return for
his act of gallant charity, Kekela was presented by the American
Government with a sum of money, and by President Lincoln personally with
a gold watch. From his letter of thanks, written in his own tongue, I
give the following extract. I do not envy the man who can read it
without emotion.
‘When I saw one of your countrymen, a citizen of your great nation,
ill-treated, and about to be baked and eaten, as a pig is eaten, I
ran to save him, full of pity and grief at the evil deed of these
benighted people. I gave my boat for the stranger’s life. This boat
came from James Hunnewell, a gift of friendship. It became the
ransom of this countryman of yours, that he might not be eaten by the
savages who knew not Jehovah. This was Mr. Whalon, and the date,
Jan. 14, 1864.
‘As to this friendly deed of mine in saving Mr. Whalon, its seed came
from your great land, and was brought by certain of your countrymen,
who had received the love of God. It was planted in Hawaii, and I
brought it to plant in this land and in these dark regions, that they
might receive the root of all that is good and true, which is _love_.
‘1. Love to Jehovah.
‘2. Love to self.
‘3. Love to our neighbour.
‘If a man have a sufficiency of these three, he is good and holy,
like his God, Jehovah, in his triune character (Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost), one-three, three-one. If he have two and wants one, it is
not well; and if he have one and wants two, indeed, is not well; but
if he cherishes all three, then is he holy, indeed, after the manner
of the Bible.
‘This is a great thing for your great nation to boast of, before all
the nations of the earth. From your great land a most precious seed
was brought to the land of darkness. It was planted here, not by
means of guns and men-of-war and threatening. It was planted by
means of the ignorant, the neglected, the despised. Such was the
introduction of the word of the Almighty God into this group of
Nuuhiwa. Great is my debt to Americans, who have taught me all
things pertaining to this life and to that which is to come.
‘How shall I repay your great kindness to me? Thus David asked of
Jehovah, and thus I ask of you, the President of the United States.
This is my only payment—that which I have received of the Lord,
love—(aloha).’
CHAPTER XI—LONG-PIG—A CANNIBAL HIGH PLACE
Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, nothing so
surely unmortars a society; nothing, we might plausibly argue, will so
harden and degrade the minds of those that practise it. And yet we
ourselves make much the same appearance in the eyes of the Buddhist and
the vegetarian. We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites,
passions, and organs with ourselves; we feed on babes, though not our
own; and the slaughter-house resounds daily with screams of pain and
fear. We distinguish, indeed; but the unwillingness of many nations to
eat the dog, an animal with whom we live on terms of the next intimacy,
shows how precariously the distinction is grounded. The pig is the main
element of animal food among the islands; and I had many occasions, my
mind being quickened by my cannibal surroundings, to observe his
character and the manner of his death. Many islanders live with their
pigs as we do with our dogs; both crowd around the hearth with equal
freedom; and the island pig is a fellow of activity, enterprise, and
sense. He husks his own cocoa-nuts, and (I am told) rolls them into the
sun to burst; he is the terror of the shepherd. Mrs. Stevenson, senior,
has seen one fleeing to the woods with a lamb in his mouth; and I saw
another come rapidly (and erroneously) to the conclusion that the _Casco_
was going down, and swim through the flush water to the rail in search of
an escape. It was told us in childhood that pigs cannot swim; I have
known one to leap overboard, swim five hundred yards to shore, and return
to the house of his original owner. I was once, at Tautira, a pig-master
on a considerable scale; at first, in my pen, the utmost good feeling
prevailed; a little sow with a belly-ache came and appealed to us for
help in the manner of a child; and there was one shapely black boar, whom
we called Catholicus, for he was a particular present from the Catholics
of the village, and who early displayed the marks of courage and
friendliness; no other animal, whether dog or pig, was suffered to
approach him at his food, and for human beings he showed a full measure
of that toadying fondness so common in the lower animals, and possibly
their chief title to the name. One day, on visiting my piggery, I was
amazed to see Catholicus draw back from my approach with cries of terror;
and if I was amazed at the change, I was truly embarrassed when I learnt
its reason. One of the pigs had been that morning killed; Catholicus had
seen the murder, he had discovered he was dwelling in the shambles, and
from that time his confidence and his delight in life were ended. We
still reserved him a long while, but he could not endure the sight of any
two-legged creature, nor could we, under the circumstances, encounter his
eye without confusion. I have assisted besides, by the ear, at the act
of butchery itself; the victim’s cries of pain I think I could have
borne, but the execution was mismanaged, and his expression of terror was
contagious: that small heart moved to the same tune with ours. Upon such
‘dread foundations’ the life of the European reposes, and yet the
European is among the less cruel of races. The paraphernalia of murder,
the preparatory brutalities of his existence, are all hid away; an
extreme sensibility reigns upon the surface; and ladies will faint at the
recital of one tithe of what they daily expect of their butchers. Some
will be even crying out upon me in their hearts for the coarseness of
this paragraph. And so with the island cannibals. They were not cruel;
apart from this custom, they are a race of the most kindly; rightly
speaking, to cut a man’s flesh after he is dead is far less hateful than
to oppress him whilst he lives; and even the victims of their appetite
were gently used in life and suddenly and painlessly despatched at last.
In island circles of refinement it was doubtless thought bad taste to
expatiate on what was ugly in the practice.
Cannibalism is traced from end to end of the Pacific, from the Marquesas
to New Guinea, from New Zealand to Hawaii, here in the lively haunt of
its exercise, there by scanty but significant survivals. Hawaii is the
most doubtful. We find cannibalism chronicled in Hawaii, only in the
history of a single war, where it seems to have been thought exception,
as in the case of mountain outlaws, such as fell by the hand of Theseus.
In Tahiti, a single circumstance survived, but that appears conclusive.
In historic times, when human oblation was made in the marae, the eyes of
the victim were formally offered to the chief: a delicacy to the leading
guest. All Melanesia appears tainted. In Micronesia, in the Marshalls,
with which my acquaintance is no more than that of a tourist, I could
find no trace at all; and even in the Gilbert zone I long looked and
asked in vain. I was told tales indeed of men who had been eaten in a
famine; but these were nothing to my purpose, for the same thing is done
under the same stress by all kindreds and generations of men. At last,
in some manuscript notes of Dr. Turner’s, which I was allowed to consult
at Malua, I came on one damning evidence: on the island of Onoatoa the
punishment for theft was to be killed and eaten. How shall we account
for the universality of the practice over so vast an area, among people
of such varying civilisation, and, with whatever intermixture, of such
different blood? What circumstance is common to them all, but that they
lived on islands destitute, or very nearly so, of animal food? I can
never find it in my appetite that man was meant to live on vegetables
only. When our stores ran low among the islands, I grew to weary for the
recurrent day when economy allowed us to open another tin of miserable
mutton. And in at least one ocean language, a particular word denotes
that a man is ‘hungry for fish,’ having reached that stage when
vegetables can no longer satisfy, and his soul, like those of the Hebrews
in the desert, begins to lust after flesh-pots. Add to this the
evidences of over-population and imminent famine already adduced, and I
think we see some ground of indulgence for the island cannibal.
It is right to look at both sides of any question; but I am far from
making the apology of this worse than bestial vice. The higher
Polynesian races, such as the Tahitians, Hawaiians, and Samoans, had one
and all outgrown, and some of them had in part forgot, the practice,
before Cook or Bougainville had shown a top-sail in their waters. It
lingered only in some low islands where life was difficult to maintain,
and among inveterate savages like the New-Zealanders or the Marquesans.
The Marquesans intertwined man-eating with the whole texture of their
lives; long-pig was in a sense their currency and sacrament; it formed
the hire of the artist, illustrated public events, and was the occasion
and attraction of a feast. To-day they are paying the penalty of this
bloody commixture. The civil power, in its crusade against man-eating,
has had to examine one after another all Marquesan arts and pleasures,
has found them one after another tainted with a cannibal element, and one
after another has placed them on the proscript list. Their art of
tattooing stood by itself, the execution exquisite, the designs most
beautiful and intricate; nothing more handsomely sets off a handsome man;
it may cost some pain in the beginning, but I doubt if it be near so
painful in the long-run, and I am sure it is far more becoming than the
ignoble European practice of tight-lacing among women. And now it has
been found needful to forbid the art. Their songs and dances were
numerous (and the law has had to abolish them by the dozen). They now
face empty-handed the tedium of their uneventful days; and who shall pity
them? The least rigorous will say that they were justly served.
Death alone could not satisfy Marquesan vengeance: the flesh must be
eaten. The chief who seized Mr. Whalon preferred to eat him; and he
thought he had justified the wish when he explained it was a vengeance.
Two or three years ago, the people of a valley seized and slew a wretch
who had offended them. His offence, it is to be supposed, was dire; they
could not bear to leave their vengeance incomplete, and, under the eyes
of the French, they did not dare to hold a public festival. The body was
accordingly divided; and every man retired to his own house to consummate
the rite in secret, carrying his proportion of the dreadful meat in a
Swedish match-box. The barbarous substance of the drama and the European
properties employed offer a seizing contrast to the imagination. Yet
more striking is another incident of the very year when I was there
myself, 1888. In the spring, a man and woman skulked about the
school-house in Hiva-oa till they found a particular child alone. Him
they approached with honeyed words and carneying manners—‘You are
So-and-so, son of So-and-so?’ they asked; and caressed and beguiled him
deeper in the woods. Some instinct woke in the child’s bosom, or some
look betrayed the horrid purpose of his deceivers. He sought to break
from them; he screamed; and they, casting off the mask, seized him the
more strongly and began to run. His cries were heard; his schoolmates,
playing not far off, came running to the rescue; and the sinister couple
fled and vanished in the woods. They were never identified; no
prosecution followed; but it was currently supposed they had some grudge
against the boy’s father, and designed to eat him in revenge. All over
the islands, as at home among our own ancestors, it will be observed that
the avenger takes no particular heed to strike an individual. A family,
a class, a village, a whole valley or island, a whole race of mankind,
share equally the guilt of any member. So, in the above story, the son
was to pay the penalty for his father; so Mr. Whalon, the mate of an
American whaler, was to bleed and be eaten for the misdeeds of a Peruvian
slaver. I am reminded of an incident in Jaluit in the Marshall group,
which was told me by an eye-witness, and which I tell here again for the
strangeness of the scene. Two men had awakened the animosity of the
Jaluit chiefs; and it was their wives who were selected to be punished.
A single native served as executioner. Early in the morning, in the face
of a large concourse of spectators, he waded out upon the reef between
his victims. These neither complained nor resisted; accompanied their
destroyer patiently; stooped down, when they had waded deep enough, at
his command; and he (laying one hand upon the shoulders of each) held
them under water till they drowned. Doubtless, although my informant did
not tell me so, their families would be lamenting aloud upon the beach.
It was from Hatiheu that I paid my first visit to a cannibal high place.
The day was sultry and clouded. Drenching tropical showers succeeded
bursts of sweltering sunshine. The green pathway of the road wound
steeply upward. As we went, our little schoolboy guide a little ahead of
us, Father Simeon had his portfolio in his hand, and named the trees for
me, and read aloud from his notes the abstract of their virtues.
Presently the road, mounting, showed us the vale of Hatiheu, on a larger
scale; and the priest, with occasional reference to our guide, pointed
out the boundaries and told me the names of the larger tribes that lived
at perpetual war in the old days: one on the north-east, one along the
beach, one behind upon the mountain. With a survivor of this latter clan
Father Simeon had spoken; until the pacification he had never been to the
sea’s edge, nor, if I remember exactly, eaten of sea-fish. Each in its
own district, the septs lived cantoned and beleaguered. One step without
the boundaries was to affront death. If famine came, the men must out to
the woods to gather chestnuts and small fruits; even as to this day, if
the parents are backward in their weekly doles, school must be broken up
and the scholars sent foraging. But in the old days, when there was
trouble in one clan, there would be activity in all its neighbours; the
woods would be laid full of ambushes; and he who went after vegetables
for himself might remain to be a joint for his hereditary foes. Nor was
the pointed occasion needful. A dozen different natural signs and social
junctures called this people to the war-path and the cannibal hunt. Let
one of chiefly rank have finished his tattooing, the wife of one be near
upon her time, two of the debauching streams have deviated nearer on the
beach of Hatiheu, a certain bird have been heard to sing, a certain
ominous formation of cloud observed above the northern sea; and instantly
the arms were oiled, and the man-hunters swarmed into the wood to lay
their fratricidal ambuscades. It appears besides that occasionally,
perhaps in famine, the priest would shut himself in his house, where he
lay for a stated period like a person dead. When he came forth it was to
run for three days through the territory of the clan, naked and starving,
and to sleep at night alone in the high place. It was now the turn of
the others to keep the house, for to encounter the priest upon his rounds
was death. On the eve of the fourth day the time of the running was
over; the priest returned to his roof, the laymen came forth, and in the
morning the number of the victims was announced. I have this tale of the
priest on one authority—I think a good one,—but I set it down with
diffidence. The particulars are so striking that, had they been true, I
almost think I must have heard them oftener referred to. Upon one point
there seems to be no question: that the feast was sometimes furnished
from within the clan. In times of scarcity, all who were not protected
by their family connections—in the Highland expression, all the commons
of the clan—had cause to tremble. It was vain to resist, it was useless
to flee. They were begirt upon all hands by cannibals; and the oven was
ready to smoke for them abroad in the country of their foes, or at home
in the valley of their fathers.
At a certain corner of the road our scholar-guide struck off to his left
into the twilight of the forest. We were now on one of the ancient
native roads, plunged in a high vault of wood, and clambering, it seemed,
at random over boulders and dead trees; but the lad wound in and out and
up and down without a check, for these paths are to the natives as marked
as the king’s highway is to us; insomuch that, in the days of the
man-hunt, it was their labour rather to block and deface than to improve
them. In the crypt of the wood the air was clammy and hot and cold;
overhead, upon the leaves, the tropical rain uproariously poured, but
only here and there, as through holes in a leaky roof, a single drop
would fall, and make a spot upon my mackintosh. Presently the huge trunk
of a banyan hove in sight, standing upon what seemed the ruins of an
ancient fort; and our guide, halting and holding forth his arm, announced
that we had reached the _paepae tapu_.
_Paepae_ signifies a floor or platform such as a native house is built
on; and even such a paepae—a paepae hae—may be called a paepae tapu in a
lesser sense when it is deserted and becomes the haunt of spirits; but
the public high place, such as I was now treading, was a thing on a great
scale. As far as my eyes could pierce through the dark undergrowth, the
floor of the forest was all paved. Three tiers of terrace ran on the
slope of the hill; in front, a crumbling parapet contained the main
arena; and the pavement of that was pierced and parcelled out with
several wells and small enclosures. No trace remained of any
superstructure, and the scheme of the amphitheatre was difficult to
seize. I visited another in Hiva-oa, smaller but more perfect, where it
was easy to follow rows of benches, and to distinguish isolated seats of
honour for eminent persons; and where, on the upper platform, a single
joist of the temple or dead-house still remained, its uprights richly
carved. In the old days the high place was sedulously tended. No tree
except the sacred banyan was suffered to encroach upon its grades, no
dead leaf to rot upon the pavement. The stones were smoothly set, and I
am told they were kept bright with oil. On all sides the guardians lay
encamped in their subsidiary huts to watch and cleanse it. No other foot
of man was suffered to draw near; only the priest, in the days of his
running, came there to sleep—perhaps to dream of his ungodly errand; but,
in the time of the feast, the clan trooped to the high place in a body,
and each had his appointed seat. There were places for the chiefs, the
drummers, the dancers, the women, and the priests. The drums—perhaps
twenty strong, and some of them twelve feet high—continuously throbbed in
time. In time the singers kept up their long-drawn, lugubrious,
ululating song; in time, too, the dancers, tricked out in singular
finery, stepped, leaped, swayed, and gesticulated—their plumed fingers
fluttering in the air like butterflies. The sense of time, in all these
ocean races, is extremely perfect; and I conceive in such a festival that
almost every sound and movement fell in one. So much the more
unanimously must have grown the agitation of the feasters; so much the
more wild must have been the scene to any European who could have beheld
them there, in the strong sun and the strong shadow of the banyan, rubbed
with saffron to throw in a more high relief the arabesque of the tattoo;
the women bleached by days of confinement to a complexion almost
European; the chiefs crowned with silver plumes of old men’s beards and
girt with kirtles of the hair of dead women. All manner of island food
was meanwhile spread for the women and the commons; and, for those who
were privileged to eat of it, there were carried up to the dead-house the
baskets of long-pig. It is told that the feasts were long kept up; the
people came from them brutishly exhausted with debauchery, and the chiefs
heavy with their beastly food. There are certain sentiments which we
call emphatically human—denying the honour of that name to those who lack
them. In such feasts—particularly where the victim has been slain at
home, and men banqueted on the poor clay of a comrade with whom they had
played in infancy, or a woman whose favours they had shared—the whole
body of these sentiments is outraged. To consider it too closely is to
understand, if not to excuse, the fervours of self-righteous old
ship-captains, who would man their guns, and open fire in passing, on a
cannibal island.
And yet it was strange. There, upon the spot, as I stood under the high,
dripping vault of the forest, with the young priest on the one hand, in
his kilted gown, and the bright-eyed Marquesan schoolboy on the other,
the whole business appeared infinitely distant, and fallen in the cold
perspective and dry light of history. The bearing of the priest,
perhaps, affected me. He smiled; he jested with the boy, the heir both of
these feasters and their meat; he clapped his hands, and gave me a stave
of one of the old, ill-omened choruses. Centuries might have come and
gone since this slimy theatre was last in operation; and I beheld the
place with no more emotion than I might have felt in visiting Stonehenge.
In Hiva-oa, as I began to appreciate that the thing was still living and
latent about my footsteps, and that it was still within the bounds of
possibility that I might hear the cry of the trapped victim, my historic
attitude entirely failed, and I was sensible of some repugnance for the
natives. But here, too, the priests maintained their jocular attitude:
rallying the cannibals as upon an eccentricity rather absurd than
horrible; seeking, I should say, to shame them from the practice by
good-natured ridicule, as we shame a child from stealing sugar. We may
here recognise the temperate and sagacious mind of Bishop Dordillon.
CHAPTER XII—THE STORY OF A PLANTATION
Taahauku, on the south-westerly coast of the island of Hiva-oa—Tahuku,
say the slovenly whites—may be called the port of Atuona. It is a narrow
and small anchorage, set between low cliffy points, and opening above
upon a woody valley: a little French fort, now disused and deserted,
overhangs the valley and the inlet. Atuona itself, at the head of the
next bay, is framed in a theatre of mountains, which dominate the more
immediate settling of Taahauku and give the salient character of the
scene. They are reckoned at no higher than four thousand feet; but
Tahiti with eight thousand, and Hawaii with fifteen, can offer no such
picture of abrupt, melancholy alps. In the morning, when the sun falls
directly on their front, they stand like a vast wall: green to the
summit, if by any chance the summit should be clear—water-courses here
and there delineated on their face, as narrow as cracks. Towards
afternoon, the light falls more obliquely, and the sculpture of the range
comes in relief, huge gorges sinking into shadow, huge, tortuous
buttresses standing edged with sun. At all hours of the day they strike
the eye with some new beauty, and the mind with the same menacing gloom.
The mountains, dividing and deflecting the endless airy deluge of the
Trade, are doubtless answerable for the climate. A strong draught of
wind blew day and night over the anchorage. Day and night the same
fantastic and attenuated clouds fled across the heavens, the same dusky
cap of rain and vapour fell and rose on the mountain. The land-breezes
came very strong and chill, and the sea, like the air, was in perpetual
bustle. The swell crowded into the narrow anchorage like sheep into a
fold; broke all along both sides, high on the one, low on the other; kept
a certain blowhole sounding and smoking like a cannon; and spent itself
at last upon the beach.
On the side away from Atuona, the sheltering promontory was a nursery of
coco-trees. Some were mere infants, none had attained to any size, none
had yet begun to shoot skyward with that whip-like shaft of the mature
palm. In the young trees the colour alters with the age and growth. Now
all is of a grass-like hue, infinitely dainty; next the rib grows golden,
the fronds remaining green as ferns; and then, as the trunk continues to
mount and to assume its final hue of grey, the fans put on manlier and
more decided depths of verdure, stand out dark upon the distance, glisten
against the sun, and flash like silver fountains in the assault of the
wind. In this young wood of Taahauku, all these hues and combinations
were exampled and repeated by the score. The trees grew pleasantly
spaced upon a hilly sward, here and there interspersed with a rack for
drying copra, or a tumble-down hut for storing it. Every here and there
the stroller had a glimpse of the _Casco_ tossing in the narrow anchorage
below; and beyond he had ever before him the dark amphitheatre of the
Atuona mountains and the cliffy bluff that closes it to seaward. The
trade-wind moving in the fans made a ceaseless noise of summer rain; and
from time to time, with the sound of a sudden and distant drum-beat, the
surf would burst in a sea-cave.
At the upper end of the inlet, its low, cliffy lining sinks, at both
sides, into a beach. A copra warehouse stands in the shadow of the
shoreside trees, flitted about for ever by a clan of dwarfish swallows;
and a line of rails on a high wooden staging bends back into the mouth of
the valley. Walking on this, the new-landed traveller becomes aware of a
broad fresh-water lagoon (one arm of which he crosses), and beyond, of a
grove of noble palms, sheltering the house of the trader, Mr. Keane.
Overhead, the cocos join in a continuous and lofty roof; blackbirds are
heard lustily singing; the island cock springs his jubilant rattle and
airs his golden plumage; cow-bells sound far and near in the grove; and
when you sit in the broad verandah, lulled by this symphony, you may say
to yourself, if you are able: ‘Better fifty years of Europe . . .’
Farther on, the floor of the valley is flat and green, and dotted here
and there with stripling coco-palms. Through the midst, with many
changes of music, the river trots and brawls; and along its course, where
we should look for willows, puraos grow in clusters, and make shadowy
pools after an angler’s heart. A vale more rich and peaceful, sweeter
air, a sweeter voice of rural sounds, I have found nowhere. One
circumstance alone might strike the experienced: here is a convenient
beach, deep soil, good water, and yet nowhere any paepaes, nowhere any
trace of island habitation.
It is but a few years since this valley was a place choked with jungle,
the debatable land and battle-ground of cannibals. Two clans laid claim
to it—neither could substantiate the claim, and the roads lay desert, or
were only visited by men in arms. It is for this very reason that it
wears now so smiling an appearance: cleared, planted, built upon,
supplied with railways, boat-houses, and bath-houses. For, being no
man’s land, it was the more readily ceded to a stranger. The stranger
was Captain John Hart: Ima Hati, ‘Broken-arm,’ the natives call him,
because when he first visited the islands his arm was in a sling.
Captain Hart, a man of English birth, but an American subject, had
conceived the idea of cotton culture in the Marquesas during the American
War, and was at first rewarded with success. His plantation at Anaho was
highly productive; island cotton fetched a high price, and the natives
used to debate which was the stronger power, Ima Hati or the French:
deciding in favour of the captain, because, though the French had the
most ships, he had the more money.
He marked Taahauku for a suitable site, acquired it, and offered the
superintendence to Mr. Robert Stewart, a Fifeshire man, already some time
in the islands, who had just been ruined by a war on Tauata. Mr. Stewart
was somewhat averse to the adventure, having some acquaintance with
Atuona and its notorious chieftain, Moipu. He had once landed there, he
told me, about dusk, and found the remains of a man and woman partly
eaten. On his starting and sickening at the sight, one of Moipu’s young
men picked up a human foot, and provocatively staring at the stranger,
grinned and nibbled at the heel. None need be surprised if Mr. Stewart
fled incontinently to the bush, lay there all night in a great horror of
mind, and got off to sea again by daylight on the morrow. ‘It was always
a bad place, Atuona,’ commented Mr. Stewart, in his homely Fifeshire
voice. In spite of this dire introduction, he accepted the captain’s
offer, was landed at Taahauku with three Chinamen, and proceeded to clear
the jungle.
War was pursued at that time, almost without interval, between the men of
Atuona and the men of Haamau; and one day, from the opposite sides of the
valley, battle—or I should rather say the noise of battle—raged all the
afternoon: the shots and insults of the opposing clans passing from hill
to hill over the heads of Mr. Stewart and his Chinamen. There was no
genuine fighting; it was like a bicker of schoolboys, only some fool had
given the children guns. One man died of his exertions in running, the
only casualty. With night the shots and insults ceased; the men of
Haamau withdrew; and victory, on some occult principle, was scored to
Moipu. Perhaps, in consequence, there came a day when Moipu made a
feast, and a party from Haamau came under safe-conduct to eat of it.
These passed early by Taahauku, and some of Moipu’s young men were there
to be a guard of honour. They were not long gone before there came down
from Haamau, a man, his wife, and a girl of twelve, their daughter,
bringing fungus. Several Atuona lads were hanging round the store; but
the day being one of truce none apprehended danger. The fungus was
weighed and paid for; the man of Haamau proposed he should have his axe
ground in the bargain; and Mr. Stewart demurring at the trouble, some of
the Atuona lads offered to grind it for him, and set it on the wheel.
While the axe was grinding, a friendly native whispered Mr. Stewart to
have a care of himself, for there was trouble in hand; and, all at once,
the man of Haamau was seized, and his head and arm stricken from his
body, the head at one sweep of his own newly sharpened axe. In the first
alert, the girl escaped among the cotton; and Mr. Stewart, having thrust
the wife into the house and locked her in from the outside, supposed the
affair was over. But the business had not passed without noise, and it
reached the ears of an older girl who had loitered by the way, and who
now came hastily down the valley, crying as she came for her father.
Her, too, they seized and beheaded; I know not what they had done with
the axe, it was a blunt knife that served their butcherly turn upon the
girl; and the blood spurted in fountains and painted them from head to
foot. Thus horrible from crime, the party returned to Atuona, carrying
the heads to Moipu. It may be fancied how the feast broke up; but it is
notable that the guests were honourably suffered to retire. These passed
back through Taahauku in extreme disorder; a little after the valley
began to be overrun with shouting and triumphing braves; and a letter of
warning coming at the same time to Mr. Stewart, he and his Chinamen took
refuge with the Protestant missionary in Atuona. That night the store
was gutted, and the bodies cast in a pit and covered with leaves. Three
days later the schooner had come in; and things appearing quieter, Mr.
Stewart and the captain landed in Taahauku to compute the damage and to
view the grave, which was already indicated by the stench. While they
were so employed, a party of Moipu’s young men, decked with red flannel
to indicate martial sentiments, came over the hills from Atuona, dug up
the bodies, washed them in the river, and carried them away on sticks.
That night the feast began.
Those who knew Mr. Stewart before this experience declare the man to be
quite altered. He stuck, however, to his post; and somewhat later, when
the plantation was already well established, and gave employment to sixty
Chinamen and seventy natives, he found himself once more in dangerous
times. The men of Haamau, it was reported, had sworn to plunder and
erase the settlement; letters came continually from the Hawaiian
missionary, who acted as intelligence department; and for six weeks Mr.
Stewart and three other whites slept in the cotton-house at night in a
rampart of bales, and (what was their best defence) ostentatiously
practised rifle-shooting by day upon the beach. Natives were often there
to watch them; the practice was excellent; and the assault was never
delivered—if it ever was intended, which I doubt, for the natives are
more famous for false rumours than for deeds of energy. I was told the
late French war was a case in point; the tribes on the beach accusing
those in the mountains of designs which they had never the hardihood to
entertain. And the same testimony to their backwardness in open battle
reached me from all sides. Captain Hart once landed after an engagement
in a certain bay; one man had his hand hurt, an old woman and two
children had been slain; and the captain improved the occasion by
poulticing the hand, and taunting both sides upon so wretched an affair.
It is true these wars were often merely formal—comparable with duels to
the first blood. Captain Hart visited a bay where such a war was being
carried on between two brothers, one of whom had been thought wanting in
civility to the guests of the other. About one-half of the population
served day about on alternate sides, so as to be well with each when the
inevitable peace should follow. The forts of the belligerents were over
against each other, and close by. Pigs were cooking. Well-oiled braves,
with well-oiled muskets, strutted on the paepae or sat down to feast. No
business, however needful, could be done, and all thoughts were supposed
to be centred in this mockery of war. A few days later, by a regrettable
accident, a man was killed; it was felt at once the thing had gone too
far, and the quarrel was instantly patched up. But the more serious wars
were prosecuted in a similar spirit; a gift of pigs and a feast made
their inevitable end; the killing of a single man was a great victory,
and the murder of defenceless solitaries counted a heroic deed.
The foot of the cliffs, about all these islands, is the place of fishing.
Between Taahauku and Atuona we saw men, but chiefly women, some nearly
naked, some in thin white or crimson dresses, perched in little surf-beat
promontories—the brown precipice overhanging them, and the convolvulus
overhanging that, as if to cut them off the more completely from
assistance. There they would angle much of the morning; and as fast as
they caught any fish, eat them, raw and living, where they stood. It was
such helpless ones that the warriors from the opposite island of Tauata
slew, and carried home and ate, and were thereupon accounted mighty men
of valour. Of one such exploit I can give the account of an eye-witness.
‘Portuguese Joe,’ Mr. Keane’s cook, was once pulling an oar in an Atuona
boat, when they spied a stranger in a canoe with some fish and a piece of
tapu. The Atuona men cried upon him to draw near and have a smoke. He
complied, because, I suppose, he had no choice; but he knew, poor devil,
what he was coming to, and (as Joe said) ‘he didn’t seem to care about
the smoke.’ A few questions followed, as to where he came from, and what
was his business. These he must needs answer, as he must needs draw at
the unwelcome pipe, his heart the while drying in his bosom. And then,
of a sudden, a big fellow in Joe’s boat leaned over, plucked the stranger
from his canoe, struck him with a knife in the neck—inward and downward,
as Joe showed in pantomime more expressive than his words—and held him
under water, like a fowl, until his struggles ceased. Whereupon the
long-pig was hauled on board, the boat’s head turned about for Atuona,
and these Marquesan braves pulled home rejoicing. Moipu was on the beach
and rejoiced with them on their arrival. Poor Joe toiled at his oar that
day with a white face, yet he had no fear for himself. ‘They were very
good to me—gave me plenty grub: never wished to eat white man,’ said he.
If the most horrible experience was Mr. Stewart’s, it was Captain Hart
himself who ran the nearest danger. He had bought a piece of land from
Timau, chief of a neighbouring bay, and put some Chinese there to work.
Visiting the station with one of the Godeffroys, he found his Chinamen
trooping to the beach in terror: Timau had driven them out, seized their
effects, and was in war attire with his young men. A boat was despatched
to Taahauku for reinforcement; as they awaited her return, they could
see, from the deck of the schooner, Timau and his young men dancing the
war-dance on the hill-top till past twelve at night; and so soon as the
boat came (bringing three gendarmes, armed with chassepots, two white men
from Taahauku station, and some native warriors) the party set out to
seize the chief before he should awake. Day was not come, and it was a
very bright moonlight morning, when they reached the hill-top where (in a
house of palm-leaves) Timau was sleeping off his debauch. The assailants
were fully exposed, the interior of the hut quite dark; the position far
from sound. The gendarmes knelt with their pieces ready, and Captain
Hart advanced alone. As he drew near the door he heard the snap of a gun
cocking from within, and in sheer self-defence—there being no other
escape—sprang into the house and grappled Timau. ‘Timau, come with me!’
he cried. But Timau—a great fellow, his eyes blood-red with the abuse of
kava, six foot three in stature—cast him on one side; and the captain,
instantly expecting to be either shot or brained, discharged his pistol
in the dark. When they carried Timau out at the door into the moonlight,
he was already dead, and, upon this unlooked-for termination of their
sally, the whites appeared to have lost all conduct, and retreated to the
boats, fired upon by the natives as they went. Captain Hart, who almost
rivals Bishop Dordillon in popularity, shared with him the policy of
extreme indulgence to the natives, regarding them as children, making
light of their defects, and constantly in favour of mild measures. The
death of Timau has thus somewhat weighed upon his mind; the more so, as
the chieftain’s musket was found in the house unloaded. To a less
delicate conscience the matter will seem light. If a drunken savage
elects to cock a fire-arm, a gentleman advancing towards him in the open
cannot wait to make sure if it be charged.
I have touched on the captain’s popularity. It is one of the things that
most strikes a stranger in the Marquesas. He comes instantly on two
names, both new to him, both locally famous, both mentioned by all with
affection and respect—the bishop’s and the captain’s. It gave me a
strong desire to meet with the survivor, which was subsequently
gratified—to the enrichment of these pages. Long after that again, in
the Place Dolorous—Molokai—I came once more on the traces of that
affectionate popularity. There was a blind white leper there, an old
sailor—‘an old tough,’ he called himself—who had long sailed among the
eastern islands. Him I used to visit, and, being fresh from the scenes
of his activity, gave him the news. This (in the true island style) was
largely a chronicle of wrecks; and it chanced I mentioned the case of one
not very successful captain, and how he had lost a vessel for Mr. Hart;
thereupon the blind leper broke forth in lamentation. ‘Did he lose a
ship of John Hart’s?’ he cried; ‘poor John Hart! Well, I’m sorry it was
Hart’s,’ with needless force of epithet, which I neglect to reproduce.
Perhaps, if Captain Hart’s affairs had continued to prosper, his
popularity might have been different. Success wins glory, but it kills
affection, which misfortune fosters. And the misfortune which overtook
the captain’s enterprise was truly singular. He was at the top of his
career. Ile Masse belonged to him, given by the French as an indemnity
for the robberies at Taahauku. But the Ile Masse was only suitable for
cattle; and his two chief stations were Anaho, in Nuka-hiva, facing the
north-east, and Taahauku in Hiva-oa, some hundred miles to the southward,
and facing the south-west. Both these were on the same day swept by a
tidal wave, which was not felt in any other bay or island of the group.
The south coast of Hiva-oa was bestrewn with building timber and
camphor-wood chests, containing goods; which, on the promise of a
reasonable salvage, the natives very honestly brought back, the chests
apparently not opened, and some of the wood after it had been built into
their houses. But the recovery of such jetsam could not affect the
result. It was impossible the captain should withstand this partiality
of fortune; and with his fall the prosperity of the Marquesas ended.
Anaho is truly extinct, Taahauku but a shadow of itself; nor has any new
plantation arisen in their stead.
CHAPTER XIII—CHARACTERS
There was a certain traffic in our anchorage at Atuona; different indeed
from the dead inertia and quiescence of the sister island, Nuka-hiva.
Sails were seen steering from its mouth; now it would be a whale-boat
manned with native rowdies, and heavy with copra for sale; now perhaps a
single canoe come after commodities to buy. The anchorage was besides
frequented by fishers; not only the lone females perched in niches of the
cliff, but whole parties, who would sometimes camp and build a fire upon
the beach, and sometimes lie in their canoes in the midst of the haven
and jump by turns in the water; which they would cast eight or nine feet
high, to drive, as we supposed, the fish into their nets. The goods the
purchasers came to buy were sometimes quaint. I remarked one outrigger
returning with a single ham swung from a pole in the stern. And one day
there came into Mr. Keane’s store a charming lad, excellently mannered,
speaking French correctly though with a babyish accent; very handsome
too, and much of a dandy, as was shown not only in his shining raiment,
but by the nature of his purchases. These were five ship-biscuits, a
bottle of scent, and two balls of washing blue. He was from Tauata,
whither he returned the same night in an outrigger, daring the deep with
these young-ladyish treasures. The gross of the native passengers were
more ill-favoured: tall, powerful fellows, well tattooed, and with
disquieting manners. Something coarse and jeering distinguished them,
and I was often reminded of the slums of some great city. One night, as
dusk was falling, a whale-boat put in on that part of the beach where I
chanced to be alone. Six or seven ruffianly fellows scrambled out; all
had enough English to give me ‘good-bye,’ which was the ordinary
salutation; or ‘good-morning,’ which they seemed to regard as an
intensitive; jests followed, they surrounded me with harsh laughter and
rude looks, and I was glad to move away. I had not yet encountered Mr.
Stewart, or I should have been reminded of his first landing at Atuona
and the humorist who nibbled at the heel. But their neighbourhood
depressed me; and I felt, if I had been there a castaway and out of reach
of help, my heart would have been sick.
Nor was the traffic altogether native. While we lay in the anchorage
there befell a strange coincidence. A schooner was observed at sea and
aiming to enter. We knew all the schooners in the group, but this
appeared larger than any; she was rigged, besides, after the English
manner; and, coming to an anchor some way outside the _Casco_, showed at
last the blue ensign. There were at that time, according to rumour, no
fewer than four yachts in the Pacific; but it was strange that any two of
them should thus lie side by side in that outlandish inlet: stranger
still that in the owner of the _Nyanza_, Captain Dewar, I should find a
man of the same country and the same county with myself, and one whom I
had seen walking as a boy on the shores of the Alpes Maritimes.
We had besides a white visitor from shore, who came and departed in a
crowded whale-boat manned by natives; having read of yachts in the Sunday
papers, and being fired with the desire to see one. Captain Chase, they
called him, an old whaler-man, thickset and white-bearded, with a strong
Indiana drawl; years old in the country, a good backer in battle, and one
of those dead shots whose practice at the target struck terror in the
braves of Haamau. Captain Chase dwelt farther east in a bay called
Hanamate, with a Mr. M’Callum; or rather they had dwelt together once,
and were now amicably separated. The captain is to be found near one end
of the bay, in a wreck of a house, and waited on by a Chinese. At the
point of the opposing corner another habitation stands on a tall paepae.
The surf runs there exceeding heavy, seas of seven and eight feet high
bursting under the walls of the house, which is thus continually filled
with their clamour, and rendered fit only for solitary, or at least for
silent, inmates. Here it is that Mr. M’Callum, with a Shakespeare and a
Burns, enjoys the society of the breakers. His name and his Burns
testify to Scottish blood; but he is an American born, somewhere far
east; followed the trade of a ship-carpenter; and was long employed, the
captain of a hundred Indians, breaking up wrecks about Cape Flattery.
Many of the whites who are to be found scattered in the South Seas
represent the more artistic portion of their class; and not only enjoy
the poetry of that new life, but came there on purpose to enjoy it. I
have been shipmates with a man, no longer young, who sailed upon that
voyage, his first time to sea, for the mere love of Samoa; and it was a
few letters in a newspaper that sent him on that pilgrimage. Mr.
M’Callum was another instance of the same. He had read of the South
Seas; loved to read of them; and let their image fasten in his heart:
till at length he could refrain no longer—must set forth, a new Rudel,
for that unseen homeland—and has now dwelt for years in Hiva-oa, and will
lay his bones there in the end with full content; having no desire to
behold again the places of his boyhood, only, perhaps—once, before he
dies—the rude and wintry landscape of Cape Flattery. Yet he is an active
man, full of schemes; has bought land of the natives; has planted five
thousand coco-palms; has a desert island in his eye, which he desires to
lease, and a schooner in the stocks, which he has laid and built himself,
and even hopes to finish. Mr. M’Callum and I did not meet, but, like
gallant troubadours, corresponded in verse. I hope he will not consider
it a breach of copyright if I give here a specimen of his muse. He and
Bishop Dordillon are the two European bards of the Marquesas.
‘Sail, ho! Ahoy! _Casco_,
First among the pleasure fleet
That came around to greet
These isles from San Francisco,
And first, too; only one
Among the literary men
That this way has ever been—
Welcome, then, to Stevenson.
Please not offended be
At this little notice
Of the _Casco_, Captain Otis,
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