CHAPTER I
DEATH AND THE DEVIL
The relation between modern medicine and primitive witchcraft became so important to me during my years of health campaigning in the South Pacific that I think I should say something here to indicate the islander’s daily reliance on sorcery’s touch with the powers of darkness. During all my work among the remoter tribes I was not received and respected as a university M.D., but as a novel sort of witch doctor who had come among them with a stronger magic than the old. Otherwise I could have made no headway at all. My assistants and I were professional sorcerers, backed by Government; we were that, or we were nothing.
It was some time before I got a glimmer of this native point of view, then I began to take advantage of it. I had to. I had to let them believe that I was a mystic with a ritual that would take away the diseases with which sorcery had cursed them. When I gave tuberculin injections to the wild men of Malaita they believed that I was doing something to remove a wicked spell. In thousands and thousands of cases which I have treated, either for cure or diagnosis, they have gone away with the same simple faith. Good magic has been working against bad. At first I worried about fooling all the people all the time. Then I followed the only expedient that is practical in jungle medicine.
When we regard the native tribe as a unit we must not push the witch doctor aside as a buffoon and a faker. Let’s give the devil-man his due and mark the fallacy of the smug European who sits among dark races with the idea of “giving them good laws” and “teaching them morality.” This white man forgets that from the dawn of time the medicine man has held a position that is both useful and important to the tribe. Communities with no prison system must be controlled by a hand which, to them, reaches into the Invisible. In the old days sorcery was the prerogative of the chief, and sorcery was a hereditary and honored profession. And even today the wizard, either a chief or a commoner, is there to fend the people from epidemics, to cure their ills, to curse the enemy and to shield his flock from the invasion of evil spells—“and to sustain all those subtle influences that go to form the social cement that marks the difference between a community and a horde of men,” as Pitt-Rivers expressed it.
The sorcerer occupies, in his way, the same position as the Christian priests who bless the armies and the harvests and metes out spiritual justice to the sheep and the goats. When he tells the natives of ancient Christian miracles, why should they value his words beyond those of their own miracle workers?
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I have remarked on the crude killings of the puri-puri men, and their more subtle methods of removing unwanted tribesmen by what seemed to be the power of suggestion; the Pacific native is almost universally a believer in ghosts and devils. Am I going too far when I say that man’s first religion was a form of spiritualism? Life departs, but the soul lingers, and the simple believer listens to hear the testimony of the grave.
I had been working in Melanesia for years before I began to appreciate how much they are governed by the powers of darkness, by the casting of spells to kill or cure. In the days when cannibalism and war were unchecked, tribal and personal grudges were settled in a more horrid way. In these milder times it is enchantment upon which the clansman depends for vengeance.
I wrote to Dr. Walter Bradford Cannon of Harvard’s Physiology Department, in reply to a query of his:—
“Your letter brings up a very interesting question which is much in dispute. Dr. A. Montague, Chief Medical Officer of Fiji and a resident in the group for thirty years, did not believe in ‘voodoo death,’ that is, death caused by fear. Personally, I believe he was wrong, as I know of several instances.
“Dr. Phillip S. Clarke, of North Queensland, formerly practised just north of Cairns where he had a kanaka come to his hospital and announce that he was going to die; that he had had a spell put on him, and there was nothing that could be done about it. Dr. Clarke had been acquainted with this man for some time. He gave him a most thorough examination including examination of stool and urine, and found everything normal. The man kept on eating and smoking, but lay in bed and gradually seemed to grow weaker. Clarke was friendly with a better-educated kanaka, a foreman, whom he brought to the hospital ward; this man leaned over the patient, then turned to Clarke and said, “Yes, Doctor, close up [soon] he die.” The bewitched man died at eleven next morning, lying in bed with a cigarette in his mouth. Clarke did a postmortem on him and found nothing that could in any way account for the death.
“I stayed ten days at a Seventh Day Adventist mission station, Mona Mona, a few miles above Cairns. On the outskirts was a group of non-converts, among them Nebo, a famous witch doctor. The missionary’s right hand man was Rob, a convert. I had been there before and knew Rob. Now the missionary told me that Rob was ill in bed and wanted me to see him. I found that he had no temperature, no pain, no symptoms or signs; but he was evidently quite ill. He had told the missionary that Nebo had ‘pointed a bone’ at him, therefore he was going to die ‘close up.’ We got Nebo in, put the fear of God in him and—more important—told him that his supply of food would be shut off if anything happened to Rob; so Nebo leaned down and assured Rob that it was all a mistake, a joke, and that he had never pointed a bone at him. The relief was almost instantaneous; that afternoon Rob was back at work.
“The witch doctor can ‘point a bone’ from a great distance and the bone is supposed to pierce his victim’s body. However, it is necessary for the victim to know that he has been worked upon. Volumes have been written upon this subject, and I can recall endless illustrations of this magic, many of which have come under my personal observation.
“Among native medical students in the senior year I devote one period to the subject of magic, partly because of personal interest in the reactions I get, partly for the emphasis I try to lay on the foolishness of sorcery. There are records of Native Practitioners themselves having died of draunikau, and the medical class is always composed about half of Fijians and the rest Polynesians with an occasional Micronesian. The Polynesians of the present generation do not know this magic; but to the Fijians, even to the educated ones, draunikau is a dreadful word. When it is mentioned the student’s face becomes a mask; I catch the look of worry and fear.
“The practice is still in evidence back in the hills and remote places where in Christian Fiji, with 93 per cent literacy, there are still famous witch doctors. The only Fijian I have ever known to be unafraid of draunikau[4] is a man named Malakai, who has been working for me now for thirteen years. He has actually defied one of the most powerful witch doctors in Fiji to do him any harm. Incidentally, the native theory is that magic cannot affect the white man.”
Ndrau-ni-kau is the Fijian word meaning “magic-of-leaves.” You might call it the foundation of the old-time religion. No Melanesian believes that he can grow ill or die from natural causes like dysentery or influenza—look for the enemy who has hired a sorcerer to lay you low. Even the diagnosis of the District Medical Officer will not change the native mind. The curse is on him, therefore the cursed will die unless some more potent witch doctor is called in to magic away the spell. The Melanesian’s ghost-religion is dreadful. When a man dies and is planted underground his soul loses its kindly nature; your sweet and gentle mother or father or grandfather turns into a tevoro, a fiend plotting mischief to his own. And the tevoro becomes a principal actor in the long ritual which brings a plague on your house.
The professional making of a draunikau is as complicated a process as that used by the demonologists of medieval Europe. As in the cruder magic of the puri-puri men, the practitioner obtains a bit of clothing or hair or feces from his victim’s person. These things, mixed with leaves, are shut up in a bamboo joint—or more modernly, in a bottle. The mage who follows this craft is merely employed by the hater to work evil on the hated.
Although the approved methods might be roughly classified as the Seven Ways of Cursing, one general practice is for the performer to take his bottle of draunikau to some chosen graveyard where the tevoro lies underground. The curse called tava vatu is said to be the most difficult to beat. Among the graves grows a special plant called uthi whose leaves the magician roasts on hot stones, and calls out that this is the draunikau by which So-and-so must die; out of the smoking leaves the voice of the victim cries aloud. Then the draunikau is buried and the victim will die in about four days, unless the curse is prayed off by a rival expert, who sprinkles his own special brew on the hot stones and repeats, “This is the sorosorovi by which the man shall live.” The sorosorovi, wrapped in leaves, is taken to the sick man’s house and displayed so prominently that the tevoro will mistake it for the draunikau and float into it. So now he’s caught, and the benevolent witch doctor throws the package into water. The devil is foiled, and becomes so angry that he will enter the body of the witch doctor who first summoned him, and this man will die in four days.
Kena balavu is a slower torment; every time you heat the draunikau the object of hatred becomes ill; when it cools he becomes better. The patient’s sickness is determined by the mixture put in the bottle. If it is a hair from his head, then he will have head-sickness, if parings from his toenails, then foot-sickness, and so on. A rival doctor may lift the spell by finding the bamboo where the hell’s broth is buried; he will heat the bamboo and rinse it in salt water, then dose and massage the sufferer with magic leaves. The sorcerer who comes to cure is called the “antagonist.” Before the antagonist digs up the draunikau he must pour kava for four nights over the spot where it is buried. But if the patient dies, then the witch doctor who cursed him must save his own life by stealing to the victim’s body and jabbing it with some sharp instrument, or, after the man is buried, he must pierce the grave with a spear. Otherwise the magician will die in four nights. And if friends wrap a breadfruit in mummy-apple leaves and put it under the corpse’s arm, the evil wizard will die of heart disease.
Kena leka is another hot-stone draunikau, very swift because the death ritual has been said by moonlight. The tevoro floats from the grave to some large tree by a lake or river. Sova yanggona is among the most popular of the curses. On the grave of one of the victim’s ancestors a libation of kava is poured, with supplications for death. Tei nia, the coconut curse, is said to have no antagonism. The operator waters sacred ground with kava, then plants a coconut. When it sprouts he transplants it—and his man is dead.
Ndrimi is a Solomon Island importation. Dip your finger in the magic-of-leaves and touch the hated one. The more potent ndrimi doctors can bring sickness by pointing a finger. This power gives Solomon Islanders a prestige in Fiji. If a black boy from Bougainville wants a pretty local girl he merely says ndrimi—and gets her.
The classic forms have often inter-pollenized, and Christianity and water-front trading have added comedy. There are a number of specialists who mix whisky and the Bible with their efforts to kill or cure. Hard liquor is forbidden the natives, so a full bottle adds charm to necromancy. One of our native medical practitioners witnessed the work of an up-to-date witch doctor, called in to antagonize a draunikau. He prescribed a tablespoonful of whisky and a verse from the New Testament, then began taking his own medicine, in liquid form. As our N.M.P. reported it, “He seemed quite drunk.”
This modern technique, plus the dreadful sova yanggona, had to do with a recent cause célèbre, which I am leading up to. Here the magicians used the lantern-and-mirror technique. They went by night to an ancestral cemetery where one man held a lantern, another a mirror and the third poured kava with the death-prayer. Pleased with his drink, the tevoro awoke.... Look in the mirror and see his cruel face! See, he is shaking the grave-dust from his body! Now ask him to follow you!
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What I have heard has come to me after much curious prying. I had been down there nearly twenty years before I could dig any of it out. It is not general knowledge among the whites. The missionaries should have known, but too many of them never turn to see what’s going on behind their backs. Superior natives, especially Fijians, have furnished the most valuable data. Benuve Vakatawa, N.M.P., whose work had been among his people, became quite an authority. Once I asked him how the native reconciled the two religions, the old gods and the new God. Did they not call upon Jehovah and Jesus to protect them from the evil old Fijian divinities? He shook his head. I asked, “What is the true religion in Fiji, Christianity or Magic?” He said unhesitatingly, “Magic.” Christianity was just a cloak, held up before European eyes to hide the worship of devils and satanic miracles. The people did not want Europeans to interfere with ancient demonology, he said, but Christianity had its place—it was “society,” as the European knows it in his dances, theaters and ouija-board parties. It had an amusement value.
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I have told how native medical students reacted to my lectures on magic. Vakatawa, however, thought that the old-time religion was losing ground; that the N.M.P.’s as well as the native pastors were drifting away from it. The pastors, for instance, had learned to keep a little iodine and a few simple home remedies around the house and were going to the N.M.P. for medical treatment. But many of these native Christian teachers still saw the witch doctor first, and only got around to the scientifically trained practitioners when the old way didn’t seem to work. However, the Native Medical Practitioner with his better education and better methods is getting about, and modern medicine is slowly commencing to take its place in Fijian lives.
What Pitt-Rivers said in defense of the witch doctors is certainly true of the influence they still exert. The old tribal habit of killing strangers because they had “salt water in their eyes” probably dates back to sorcerers who noticed that epidemics followed visitors. Let’s say this for the primitive medicine man. He had his own kit of remedies, many of them effective—probably herbs, massage and hydrotherapeutic treatments. He knew about fractures and their care; even today you rarely find there a deformity following a fracture, yet in native life there are many cracked and broken bones.
The witch doctor still bolsters the old moral code. Vakatawa has seen a witch woman tell a sick girl that the gods had cursed her for loose living. The girl was weak with dysentery and confessed that she had cohabited with more than twenty youngsters. The witch said, “Tell everything or you will die.” But the poor child died with the last sin unconfessed. Here was a recorded failure in magic in a district where Vakatawa had his hands full; the inhabitants were going to the witch doctor and the medical doctor at the same time. If the patient recovered the magician was praised; if he died the physician was blamed.
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Who is the god of gods to whom the Fijian secretly prays for harm to his enemies? Maybe he is Dengei, most powerful of their evil pantheon—yet who is to say, when there are so many? Several of them appear as great sharks, making mischief, bearing ill tidings. There are the two siren goddesses, Yalewamatagi, who lure handsome young men to sin with them, then leave them dead in the bush. Daucina, an oversexed man-god, is the dread of young girls who wander by night. Death often follows his brutal ravishing.
During the gold rush on Viti Levu in 1932 many natives were afraid to go into the mines. Wasn’t it known to all magicians that Tui Mateinagata, the Snake-bodied One who hides in gold, was lurking in a cave at Tavua, and that his seven heads of gold and silver would destroy all trespassers? And the witch doctors whispered that the veins would soon play out, for Tui Mateinagata knows how to hide his treasure. There’s the old crab-goddess, too, whose bite is poison; but it is to Dengei, lord of origins and of evil, that the magicians fondly turn. He too is a great serpent, and frequents the caves of Nakauvandra in the north. His magic made and populated Fiji. The god admired two eggs in the nest of the kitu bird, and decided to hatch them himself; the issue was a boy and a girl, whom he separated for five years by the trunk of a giant tree. One day they peeped around the tree and said, “Great Dengei has hatched us that we may people the land.” Dengei, complimented, produced growing things for food, flowers for adornment, fire for cooking. The first humans would have been immortal, but they disobeyed their god and were punished with sickness and death.
Another story of origins is not so flattering to the Fijian who, according to the tale, was born before all others. But he acted wickedly and his skin darkened, so he received little clothing. The people of Tonga,—Polynesians, by the way,—were not so naughty with Dengei, who rationed out clothes to them which kept their skins much lighter. The white man was the great beneficiary. He was born last, behaved like a perfect gentleman, and Dengei rewarded him with so much to wear that his complexion became the beau ideal.
The Polynesians of Tonga say that the gods held a meeting and decided to create humanity. They baked three figures of clay. The first to come out didn’t seem to have baked long enough; he was disagreeably white and looked half-raw. The second was a Tongan, a beautiful olive-brown, and the gods admired him so much that they forgot the third figure until a voice from the oven cried, “I am burning!” Sure enough, the poor fellow was roasted nearly black; so they sent him west and he became a Fijian.
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The absent treatment of sorcerers has no effect on the white man, so natives say; but old Thakombau, inwardly infuriated by a snub, might or might not have been the instrument that changed England’s royal succession.
In the early ’80’s, H.M.S. Bacchante brought two royal midshipmen to Fiji. They were the Duke of Clarence, heir to the throne, and his younger brother Prince George, who later became King George V. Ex-King Thakombau was the nearest thing to a monarch that Fiji could produce, and now he was a Christian. He entertained the visitors at a great kava ceremony where the long line of meke singers sat cross-legged and clapped hands to the chanted welcome, “Mbula, mbula mai!” Dancers had impersonated the animals, birds and fishes, comedians had impersonated dogs quarreling over a bone, long lines of men had coiled across the green in the contortions of the snake-god Dengei, or undulated in the beautiful surf dance. There was the presentation of the tambua. To the Fijian this sacred whale’s tooth is the prize of prizes; it is gold, it is magic. If a tribesman offers a tambua to you, you may refuse the gift; if you take it you must grant any boon the giver asks—even the murder of your best friend, the yielding up of your favorite wife. There’s a long tale of crime and punishment connected with the giving of the tambua.
This was royal ceremony. Maybe in the back of Thakombau’s sly head there was a picture of another meke over which he had presided often in his days of power. The Dance of the Cannibals.... Massed warriors were roaring out the notes to the boom of heavy drums.... Human meat was about to be cooked.... High voices in a savage tenor would cry out, “Puaka balavu!”... The bodies were ready for the oven.... Then, “Sa rawa tu!”—“It is prepared.”
The English royal visitors had settled under the flower-pavilion and the makers of yanggona were at work. They were making kava by the old method—chew the root and spit the juice into a great bowl. The drink was ready. The honorable cupbearer knelt and received a portion in a polished coconut shell, rose and bore the cup to the more important guest. Offering it, he knelt before Britain’s heir apparent. But Clarence, who had seen native saliva go into the bowl, was not amused, so the story goes. He pushed the cup aside and made a wry face. Grim silence followed. The cupbearer rose and knelt before young George, whose tact was equal to the occasion. He took the shell and tossed his portion off with gusto; then reached down and spun the cup across the mat—the highest compliment. Loud clapping of hands with cries of “Mbula vinaka!”
The time came for King Thakombau to make his speech. With florid generosity he dwelt upon the greatness of England and the benefits Victoria had conferred upon his people. Then abruptly he turned to the Duke of Clarence and said, “You have been afraid to drink the yanggona of Fiji. A true man knows no fear. Because you are not brave you will never become King of Veretania.” Then pointing to George, “You are a brave young man, you are not afraid of our customs. You will be the King, and a great one.”
The Duke of Clarence died without succeeding to the throne. George became King of England. Yet they say that the native draunikau has no effect on a white man, and that puts a big hole in the story. From time immemorial, on the other hand, the chief has had the right to bewitch. Thakombau, on or off the throne, was a king; and there is some reason to believe that he used his ancient right.
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A recent case of witchcraft struck in high places and involved two of Thakombau’s grandsons, Ratu Pope (pronounced Pope-ee) and Ratu Sukuna.
Ratu Sukuna graduated from Oxford with a degree in law. Caucasian in feature, handsome by any standard, Sukuna offered himself to the Empire in 1914; because his Empire refused the service of natives, he enlisted in the Foreign Legion, gained his sergeancy and a decoration, and came home with a well-earned wound-stripe. He was one of the few properly educated Fijians. True, Ratu Devi, his brother, later studied medicine in New Zealand. Devi’s annoyance was his great personal charm with women in the wards, who wouldn’t let him alone. In Fiji he is now an unusually successful District Medical Officer.
Ratu Sukuna holds important government positions in Fiji, where he is in the anomalous position of one who tries to carry two races on his shoulders. In England and France he adapted himself to foreign languages and customs. In his heart, under the borrowed gloss of alien culture, he is still sufficiently Melanesian to avoid the ancestral graveyard after dusk; the educated half of him scoffs at the idea of ghosts, yet he admits freely that when he passes the family plot in the dark of the moon he feels an unpleasant something clawing at his shoulders.
His cousin, Ratu Pope, was a famous character in Fiji, and was always intimate with Sukuna, whom he admired prodigiously. By nature a sportsman, in youth he was a great cricketer. He was schooled at the Methodist College in Sydney, but had the accent of the English country gentleman. His athletic figure was impressive in the short, white sulu, above sturdy bare legs and feet; from the hips up he dressed in the British tradition, sports coat for the morning, dinner jacket or tails for ceremonial occasions—much as the well-born Highlander wears his kilt with all the conventional fixings.
He had the charm and wit which we associate with exiled kings. When the Duke of Windsor visited Fiji as Prince of Wales he was delighted with Pope. Pope was, by courtesy, banished for many years to Mbau, the enchanting island his wise ancestors had chosen for their capital; soft winds cool it, blow away mosquitoes; above the royal bure looms a great rock, the little Gibraltar where Grandfather Thakombau was supposed to have been hemmed in before he gave his domain to England. Governor Sir Eyre Hutson decided to exile Pope because he had rather innocently defaulted. As chief of his province he had been Assistant District Commissioner, hence a tax collector. It was his free-hearted Melanesian generosity that put him on a bad spot: When you have money, spend it on your people and your friends. Generosity is godlike, stinginess is for the worms. Let me tell it in Pope’s own way:—
“I had no trouble at all collecting the silly taxes. Tax gathering is a royal prerogative. So the Government sent me up a little iron safe, to put the money in, you understand. Well, months went by and one day a chap from the Government came in a launch—rather a blighter, I thought. We had a spot of whisky and a cigar and he said, ‘Ratu, the tide’s turning and I must be pushing on. I’ve called, you know, to take back that tax money.’ I said, ‘I’m rather afraid, old boy, that I can’t lay my hands on it now.’ He seemed a bit miffed and said, ‘But didn’t we send you an iron safe to put it in?’ ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, ‘it’s over there in the corner. If you look at it you’ll see that the door’s wide open.’”
Royal prerogative had scattered the money in several ways—but always for the good of the people of Mbau. Ratu Pope had set up shower baths in all the village houses, and built a reservoir to supply fresh water. The reservoir remained dry while an offended Government interned Pope on his ancestral isle—until he paid the bill. “It’s only a few hundred pounds,” he complained, laughing at himself, “and as all I have is invested in rather poor coconuts, I’ll be Methuselah, I fancy, before I’m free again.” However, a relenting Government allowed him to come to Suva to see the cricket matches—he’d have died without that. Also they let him meet the tourist boats, the best possible advertisement for the Fiji Islands.
When the late Martin Egan and his traveling partner Wallace Irwin were his guests at Mbau, in 1927, they brought back stories that illustrated Pope’s quick come-back. One night they were sitting by lantern light under the breadfruit trees, smoking the long Coronas Pope adored. He said, “It’s a bit tiresome, being cooped up here. One longs for travel. I am very fond of the National Geographic Magazine.” He called for copies, turned to a back page. “I think I prefer your clever advertisements. Look at this, for instance”—showing the New York Life Insurance Company’s stock advertisement, the one with the modest skyscraper. “My word, it seems to go up twenty-five or thirty stories!” Martin Egan told him that Al Smith and his pals were building a skyscraper that would be about a hundred stories high. Pope objected, “But doesn’t one get blood pressure, going so high in a lift?” Egan said that everybody in New York had high blood pressure so what was the difference?
Ratu Pope looked at him gravely. “That fellow Frederick O’Brien who wrote the White Shadows twaddle visited me last year. When he left I wondered if all Americans were such damned liars.”
He showed his guests Thakombau’s cannibal temple, the one he preserved for sentiment’s sake. The shaggy thing, on a base of high stone terraces, is immensely out of scale with the low village houses. Pope took an honest pride in the deeds of his grandfather, much as Grant’s descendants might in the surrender at Appomattox. He pointed out a hole in the ground, right in front of the temple, and said, “The stone of sacrifice used to stand here. It was built rather like a very wide gravestone, with a depression in the top for the—er—victim’s head. I gave it to our local church to use as a baptismal font. Would you like to hear the ceremony of a cannibal execution? Grandfather sat on the second tier and the people formed a semicircle below. Around the stone the priests drew lots as to whether the poor fellow was to be buried or—er—eaten. The latter usually won, I’m afraid. It was purely economic, you see. Well, four powerful executioners came along carrying the victim lashed to a plank. They held him in the correct position, and when Grandfather gave the word they would bash the fellow’s head smartly against the stone. They were so very skillful that I doubt if the poor chap even felt it.”
That was Ratu Pope, playboy king who spoke up-to-date King’s English, liked American magazines, excelled at cricket, brought European ideas to a cannibal capital, and then....
Late in 1936 he was taken to the hospital in Suva, far gone with diabetes and cirrhosis of the liver. He should have had faith in the British doctors; he knew them all, and respected their work. As he weakened he called for his wife, Andi Torika, and whispered, “I have been bewitched. They have put a draunikau on me.” His wife nodded. But who was working the black magic? Pope whispered, “My cousin Sukuna.”
The accusation, by way of native grapevine telegraph, soon reached the ears of Ratu Sukuna, who was horrified. Why in the world would he want to put a draunikau on good old Pope? What silly nonsense! They had been pals ever since they were knee-high. Sukuna went straight to Ratu Pope’s bedside. A gifted speaker with a feeling for the niceties of language, he sat beside the dying man and strove with him, gently. At last Pope nodded and asked forgiveness. No, Sukuna could not have brought about the evil spell. But somebody had paid a witch doctor for this draunikau. Yes, agreed Sukuna, and went sadly away from the man who had been cursed—by somebody.
A short time afterward Sukuna was in his schooner, sailing from Viti Levu to Lakeba. Suddenly he called out, “Turn back!” For in the water, skimming along his course, he had seen the family totem shark. That could mean only one thing—death of a near relative. When he returned to Suva, his cousin Ratu Pope was dead.
There followed a battle of magic and countermagic, ghost against ghost, throughout Thakombau’s old empire. The persons concerned in it were too noble to be ignored. All this, mind you, happened only about three years ago. It began with Ratu Pope’s dying whisper into the ear of his faithful wife, Andi Torika. She belonged to the same matangali as Ratu Wailala, powerful sub-chief in Taveuni. To Wailala the widow sent a present of ten tambuas, a dangerous gift, for under the eyes of the gods the recipient must grant a favor. Ratu Lala, Lord of Taveuni, was on Andi’s bad books; he stood in royal succession; if he lived his son might sit on Pope’s shadow-throne.
This was politics, in a conflict between two branches of an old ruling family. Seventy-five years ago it would have meant war. Today it was draunikau. Ratu Wailala took Andi’s tambuas, which had come with a request to put a draunikau on Ratu Lala, accused of Pope’s death by magic. Wailala was also jealous of Lala’s title, and went about the curse in classic style. He presented a tambua to another chief, with the request that a draunikau be arranged for Lala. This chief took the tambua to Mosese, a very able witch doctor.
That was in mid-April, 1938. In the dark of night Mosese and Kalepi, his assistant, with a local chief, stole over to the grave of Ratu Lala’s grandfather and carried with them the proper leaves and kava root for the Sova Yanggona (the Pouring Kava) ritual. They crouched at the foot of the mound where the dead man’s legs would be pointing. Mosese, seated between his two associates, lifted the bowl to his lap, then six times raised it to his head. Kava was made according to ceremony. Now it was ready. The performers clapped three times; Kalepi filled a drinking bowl and presented it to the dead chief with the request that Ratu Lala’s life be taken away. Six times the libation was poured on the head of the grave to fill the mouth of a thirsty tevoro.
The tattler was a woman who had started out before the break of day to fish for prawns. She lost her way, shuddered by the cemetery, then paused in a paralysis of fear. There were voices by the grave of Nagolea, there was the scent of uthi, the graveyard flower. She peered, she saw three crouching figures making draunikau. For days she was too frightened to tell.
Then, on April 15, 1938, Ratu Lala went to Suva and grew dizzy as he walked. He knew why, and sent for the powerful sorcerer Ngio from Ngau, whom he employed to combat the evil magic. Ngio told him that his sickness started from Taveuni, and there the draunikau would be found. That night Ratu Lala had a dreadful dream. A chief who had been dead twelve years came in and poked him with his walking stick, saying, “Who is this man sleeping in my house?” Lala returned to his home in Taveuni, and when another sick spell came on he heard gossip about the three men who had made draunikau. He sent for the sorcerers, ignored their pleas of innocence and had them beaten with ropes. They went to the hospital, still denying their share in black magic. Wailala also feigned innocence, but a constable included him with the others.
Ratu Lala’s witch doctor, the gifted sorcerer from Ngau, assembled his colleagues, hoping that their combined magic would offset the dreadful Sova Yanggona. One night Lala dreamed that he saw the gods in a meeting; a short man knelt at Lala’s doorway, holding up a tambua with the request for death. A voice wailed, “Ratu Wailala’s tambua cannot be returned with mercy on Lala’s life!”
It was on September 17, to be exact, when I was with Dr. Strode, inspecting the hospital at Suva. We found Ratu Lala in bed with an abscess of the neck, and his morale completely shattered. He had told the world that he expected to die of a draunikau.
On Wednesday, September 21, Dr. Strode and I went to a luncheon at Government House. And what did we see? Sitting calmly beside Mr. Monckton, Secretary of Native Affairs, was Ratu Lala. Only four days had passed since he had about given up the ghost, and now he was in high spirits, telling the Governor fine stories and eating with gusto. His explanation was straightforward. Oh, that witch doctor, Ngio from Ngau, had an antagonism that was too strong for black magic to withstand. He had worked from the Bible, and that was big medicine; he would open the Good Book at random and interpret past, present and future; but invariably he would return to the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, and from that he could foil any ghost or devil that ever flew over Fiji.
Ngio the gospel-wizard came to Suva later and boasted of his holy magic to all and sundry.
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Exhibitions of fire walking, given by a priestly cult from the island of Mbengga, are too well known now to permit much discussion. Before these shows became popular features for tourist ships and visiting royalty I saw them dozens of times on their native ground. There have been any number of scientific treatises written to account for the phenomenon of bare Fijian feet which remain unscorched after contact with burning stones. As a physician I have studied the condition of the fire walkers before and after the ordeal, and I have always gone away with the feeling that I have seen a miracle. The old Mbengga myth which says that Ra Duna the Eel taught the hero Koma how to do the trick seems about as good an explanation as any I have heard.
Among the dark islanders magic things are usually grim, although there is a faded myth about the neli people, a race of elves with long golden hair. They dance by moonlight, and if one of the golden hairs touches a peeping mortal he forgets how to find his way home. They say that native boys and girls who stayed out late usually blamed it on the neli. But belief in the little folk is passing.
The giving of curses is a serious everyday affair. In groups less advanced than Fiji the witch doctor commits simple murder. I have mentioned the Poisoner’s College at Mou. And there is the celebrated case of Captain Bell, Government tax collector, who went out in the Solomons on his unpopular errand and was speared by savages, sent to carry out a practical draunikau.
Inspector Bill Tully was down in the primitive New Hebrides. One morning his breakfast had been laid on a veranda; below many natives were gathered for a lecture. Tully sat down to breakfast when a witch doctor, in full paint, stepped up and flourished a bamboo wand, telling the world he held the magic that would kill. “Go ahead,” challenged Tully, so the magician tapped his wand on a plate. A little powder sifted out. Scornfully the young inspector blew it away and ordered his boy to bring bacon and eggs.
Bill finished his breakfast in full view of a very watchful audience. So far so good. But he had scarcely bolted the last scrap when he felt a griping in his stomach; cold sweat broke out, and he knew that he had turned pale green. He must have been a sickening sight, for the gawping natives screamed and scampered to the woods. It took Bill some minutes to recover equilibrium. Then he remembered. He had taken a rather large dose of calomel, and the darned stuff had begun to operate shortly after the wizard tapped his plate.
Polynesian magic is not so black, perhaps, as that you’ll find all over Melanesia; but it is always there, hiding behind Christianity or even higher education. In the Cook Islands a father cursed his pretty daughter. He had elephantiasis, and she had jeered him for his “big-leg.” “Very well,” he said, “and may your especially beautiful legs, which have caused too much trouble already, swell up and become big as mine.” Accordingly her legs swelled, and she was disfigured. True, she had been sleeping in her father’s house for years, and the filarial mosquito is no respecter of persons.
The Maoris of New Zealand are superior Polynesians. When I was making a survey there Dr. Ellison, himself half Maori, told me of a case that had come under his direct observation. The Polynesians, he reminded me, are practically all spiritualists, and the average Maori has forgotten more about spiritualism than the European medium will ever know. Among the Tohunga cult there is power to bring death by a secret wish; in the Melanesian draunikau the victim is not affected until he knows that the curse is on him. But the Tohungas never telegraph their punches.
Dr. Ellison told me that a Mr. Haberley, half-Maori and an acquaintance of mine, was interested in the Wellington Museum and in search of fine Maori carvings. The quest took him to the region where Rua the Prophet held forth. Haberley found many neglected and rotting relics, but Rua defied him to lay hands on them. However, the collector took them to the museum. It wasn’t long before a serious illness overtook Haberley, who fell back on the customs of his mother’s people. He was of the Taranaki Maoris, so it was all in good form when he called in another Tohunga necromancer from Taranaki. Out of Mr. Haberley’s suavely educated lips came the command, “Save me if you can, and if you can’t, finish off Rua.” Very promptly the Tohunga put the bee on Rua the Prophet, who died during my survey of New Zealand. Haberley also died.