Sweet vengeance! They, those prating white men skunks,
Our wives defiled, our land made one vile hell;
Cursed missionaries, and traders on night-drunks—
Ah! I’ve a tale, when dead, their God to tell!
He’s dead now and the day is not far off when the whole race will have passed away before the tramp of the Western whites, vanished for ever, for all men know that as soon as the white race creeps into the household of the dark race of the South Seas race extinction commences, and so the Fijians, Marquesans, Samoans, Tongans, indeed all the original inhabitants of the South Sea Isles, are diminishing before the civilisation and Christianising work of the whites, which means annihilation of the brown race and brings before us the inevitable thought that it would have been better for the race and its posterity for the Islanders to have eaten all the whites instead of cohabiting with them. But it is too late, they are now completely in the power of the “great white hand,” as I heard an old chief express it, and soon the half-caste of Chinese, niggers, exconvicts and the ne’er-do-wells of the Australian cities will tramp over the graves of the dead men and women who sang by forest huts and danced by the glimmering fires in the days when the white surfs ran up the shores singing into foams and silence.
Personally I do not believe that the drastic change to other conditions has anything to do with the diminishing population of the varied races of the South Seas, and all men who have experienced life in those clinics know that rum and syphilis, putrefying the milk of the South Sea babies, and the preventives to motherhood are the sole causes of race extinction, and these causes have of course been introduced by the whites and all the other semi-civilised races. I am simply stating facts as I know them, and I have not the slightest idea in my mind that railing against those evils will better things; indeed to attempt to better the conditions might lead to more disastrous complications, like the sailor who went down into the hold of the ship’s magazine to find where the leak was, struck a match and blew the ship up. And so things are best left as they are; as useless to attempt to change them as to seek to revise a man’s temperament. I myself have made many attempts to change my own temperament, but I think till I die I shall dream and dream and always be under the control of that unfortunate impulse that does the very thing which at that particular time I should not have done. How often do we embrace with affectionate trust our enemy and scorn the advice of our best friend! And so the world jogs along, always busy righting the wrongs of life and more often than enough writing beautiful epitaphs on the tombstones of men who cannot read them.
Such is my experience of life, and I have been obliged to be pretty observant and have not travelled this world over without noticing the special points that influence existence. It is really wonderful how observant some men are and how unobservant other men are. I knew a man who had done nothing but roam his life away over the seven seas to the mountain peaks of the world. “What is Rio like?” I said, “and the Amazon?” “All right I guess,” he answered. “What’s it like in Pekin?” I ventured to ask again. “All right I guess,” was the growled reply as he squirted out of his grizzly mouth an eggcupful of tobacco juice. I probed him all ways to get a glimpse of his views of the world and experience, but never got him beyond the “all right I guess.” Another time I came across a young fellow who had passed through the same places like a race-horse. “What’s Rio like?” I asked him. At once his face lit up and we had to hold him down as the flood of description he poured into our ears overwhelmed us. So you see it’s a matter of the observant temperament that makes the tale-teller and it’s ridiculous for anyone to think that a man has to camp on the top of a mountain or up a palm-tree for twenty years before he can describe the surrounding country or the height and character of the tree. Nature is very easy to scan and appreciate; it’s only men and women that it takes years to understand thoroughly, and then you may be wrong.
Preparing Copra