Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
the laws for your country before redistributing these files!!!
Please take a look at the important information in this header.
We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
electronic path open for the next readers.
Please do not remove this.
This should be the first thing seen when anyone opens the book.
Do not change or edit it without written permission. The words
are carefully chosen to provide users with the information they
need about what they can legally do with the texts.
**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*
Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
further information is included below. We need your donations.
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a 501(c)(3)
organization with EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-6221541
As of 12/12/00 contributions are only being solicited from people in:
Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa,
Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Montana,
Nevada, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota,
Texas, Vermont, and Wyoming.
International donations are accepted,
but we don't know ANYTHING about how
to make them tax-deductible, or
even if they CAN be made deductible,
and don't have the staff to handle it
even if there are ways.
As the requirements for other states are met,
additions to this list will be made and fund raising
will begin in the additional states. Please feel
free to ask to check the status of your state.
International donations are accepted,
but we don't know ANYTHING about how
to make them tax-deductible, or
even if they CAN be made deductible,
and don't have the staff to handle it
even if there are ways.
These donations should be made to:
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
PMB 113
1739 University Ave.
Oxford, MS 38655-4109
Title: The Garotters
Author: William D. Howells
Release Date: May, 2002 [Etext #3237]
[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
[The actual date this file first posted = 02/05/01]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Project Gutenberg Etext of The Garotters, by William D. Howells
*****This file should be named gartt10.txt or gartt10.zip*****
Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, gartt11.txt
VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, gartt10a.txt
This etext was produced from the 1897 David Douglas edition by David
Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions,
all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a
copyright notice is included. Therefore, we usually do NOT keep any
of these books in compliance with any particular paper edition.
We are now trying to release all our books one year in advance
of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
Please be encouraged to send us error messages even years after
the official publication date.
Please note: neither this list nor its contents are final till
midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month. A
preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
and editing by those who wish to do so.
Most people start at our sites at:
http://gutenberg.net
http://promo.net/pg
Those of you who want to download any Etext before announcement
can surf to them as follows, and just download by date; this is
also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext02
or
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext02
Or /etext01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
as it appears in our Newsletters.
Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work. The
time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc. This
projected audience is one hundred million readers. If our value
per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
million dollars per hour this year as we release fifty new Etext
files per month, or 500 more Etexts in 2000 for a total of 3000+
If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
should reach over 300 billion Etexts given away by year's end.
The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
Files by December 31, 2001. [10,000 x 100,000,000 = 1 Trillion]
This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
At our revised rates of production, we will reach only one-third
of that goal by the end of 2001, or about 3,333 Etexts unless we
manage to get some real funding.
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
We need your donations more than ever!
Presently, contributions are only being solicited from people in:
Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa,
Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nevada,
Montana, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Carolina,
South Dakota, Texas, Vermont, and Wyoming.
As the requirements for other states are met,
additions to this list will be made and fund raising
will begin in the additional states.
These donations should be made to:
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
PMB 113
1739 University Ave.
Oxford, MS 38655-4109
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation,
EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-6221541,
has been approved as a 501(c)(3) organization by the US Internal
Revenue Service (IRS). Donations are tax-deductible to the extent
permitted by law. As the requirements for other states are met,
additions to this list will be made and fund raising will begin in the
additional states.
All donations should be made to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation. Mail to:
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
PMB 113
1739 University Avenue
Oxford, MS 38655-4109 [USA]
We need your donations more than ever!
You can get up to date donation information at:
http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html
***
If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
you can always email directly to:
Michael S. Hart
hart@pobox.com forwards to hart@prairienet.org and archive.org
if your mail bounces from archive.org, I will still see it, if
it bounces from prairienet.org, better resend later on. . . .
Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
We would prefer to send you information by email.
***
Example command-line FTP session:
ftp ftp.ibiblio.org
login: anonymous
password: your@login
cd pub/docs/books/gutenberg
cd etext90 through etext99 or etext00 through etext02, etc.
dir [to see files]
get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
GET GUTINDEX.?? [to get a year's listing of books, e.g., GUTINDEX.99]
GET GUTINDEX.ALL [to get a listing of ALL books]
**The Legal Small Print**
(Three Pages)
***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
you may distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
you got it from. If you received this etext on a physical
medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etexts,
is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and
without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
any commercial products without permission.
To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
works. Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
receive this etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims
all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
time to the person you received it from. If you received it
on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
receive it electronically.
THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
may have other legal rights.
INDEMNITY
You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
following that you do or cause: [1] distribution of this etext,
[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the etext,
or [3] any Defect.
DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
or:
[1] Only give exact copies of it. Among other things, this
requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
etext or this "small print!" statement. You may however,
if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
including any form resulting from conversion by word
processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
*EITHER*:
[*] The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
does *not* contain characters other than those
intended by the author of the work, although tilde
(~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
be used to convey punctuation intended by the
author, and additional characters may be used to
indicate hypertext links; OR
[*] The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
form by the program that displays the etext (as is
the case, for instance, with most word processors);
OR
[*] You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
or other equivalent proprietary form).
[2] Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
"Small Print!" statement.
[3] Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
already use to calculate your applicable taxes. If you
don't derive profits, no royalty is due. Royalties are
payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
periodic) tax return. Please contact us beforehand to
let us know your plans and to work out the details.
WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
in machine readable form.
The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
Money should be paid to the:
"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
hart@pobox.com
*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.12.12.00*END*
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 Caesars.
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 Caesar,
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.
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--cocon 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 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 Caesar'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-general 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 Simeon 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 resultats,
monsieur,
presque pas de resultats.'
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 deperit.'
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