Transcribed from the 1908 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
IN THE SOUTH SEAS
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.
