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 (the artist's patron) makes short work of
a protesting Lucifer.  We were never weary of viewing the imagery,
so innocent, sometimes so funny, and yet in the best sense--in the
sense of inventive gusto and expression--so artistic.  I know not
whether it was more strange to find a building of such merit in a
corner of a barbarous isle, or to see a building so antique still
bright with novelty.  The architect, a French lay brother, still
alive and well, and meditating fresh foundations, must have surely
drawn his descent from a master-builder in the age of the
cathedrals; and it was in looking on the church of Hatiheu that I
seemed to perceive the secret charm of mediaeval sculpture; that
combination of the childish courage of the amateur, attempting all
things, like the schoolboy on his slate, with the manly
perseverance of the artist who does not know when he is conquered.

I had always afterwards a strong wish to meet the architect,
Brother Michel; and one day, when I was talking with the Resident
in Tai-o-hae (the chief port of the island), there were shown in to
us an old, worn, purblind, ascetic-looking priest, and a lay
brother, a type of all that is most sound in France, with a broad,
clever, honest, humorous countenance, an eye very large and bright,
and a strong and healthy body inclining to obesity.  But that his
blouse was black and his face shaven clean, you might pick such a
man to-day, toiling cheerfully in his own patch of vines, from half
a dozen provinces of France; and yet he had always for me a
haunting resemblance to an old kind friend of my boyhood, whom I
name in case any of my readers should share with me that memory--
Dr. Paul, of the West Kirk.  Almost at the first word I was sure it
was my architect, and in a moment we were deep in a discussion of
Hatiheu church.  Brother Michel spoke always of his labours with a
twinkle of humour, underlying which it was possible to spy a
serious pride, and the change from one to another was often very
human and diverting.  'Et vos gargouilles moyen-age,' cried I;
'comme elles sont originates!'  'N'est-ce pas?  Elles sont bien
droles!' he said, smiling broadly; and the next moment, with a
sudden gravity:  'Cependant il y en a une qui a une patte de casse;
il faut que je voie cela.'  I asked if he had any model--a point we
much discussed.  'Non,' said he simply; 'c'est une eglise ideale.'
The relievo was his favourite performance, and very justly so.  The
angels at the door, he owned, he would like to destroy and replace.
'Ils n'ont pas de vie, ils manquent de vie.  Vous devriez voir mon
eglise a la Dominique; j'ai la une Vierge qui est vraiment
gentille.'  'Ah,' I cried, 'they told me you had said you would
never build another church, and I wrote in my journal I could not
believe it.'  'Oui, j'aimerais bien en fairs une autre,' he
confessed, and smiled at the confession.  An artist will understand
how much I was attracted by this conversation.  There is no bond so
near as a community in that unaffected interest and slightly shame-
faced pride which mark the intelligent man enamoured of an art.  He
sees the limitations of his aim, the defects of his practice; he
smiles to be so employed upon the shores of death, yet sees in his
own devotion something worthy.  Artists, if they had the same sense
of humour with the Augurs, would smile like them on meeting, but
the smile would not be scornful.