Then followed prayers and addresses in the vernacular by teachers, chiefs, and deacons, with hymns interspersed; and all the time, as in home churches, only more so, there was a continual dropping by the children of the coins they were to contribute to the collection, only, as not at home, the sound was the clink of silver, and not the clank of copper.
Afterwards the five young men with their wives, who were going to Chalmers’ Mission Station at Saguane, were asked to come on the platform, and each gave a short address. Finally the collection was made as the congregation passed out of church in island groups. Mabuiag contributed £8 10s.; Badu and Moa, £8 0s. 9d.; Prince of Wales Island, £1; and the South Sea men of Mabuiag, £11 2s., making a total of £28 12s. 9d. During the year £64 15s. 1d. has been collected at the Sunday offertory at Mabuiag, consequently Chalmers took back as the Mabuiag subscription to the London Missionary Society £40 10s., this amount being the local “May” collection and half the weekly offerings for the year, a very creditable amount.
Mabuiag is the only native church which has a collection every Sunday; during the four months we were in Murray Island there was no collection, they have one only during their “May,” and I was told that their last collection amounted to less than 10s.!
Isaiah invited all our party to luncheon with Tamate, and he gave us a first-rate midday dinner of pig, fowl, ham, yams, and sago cooked in an earth-oven; cake, tinned fruit, bananas, and water-melon, with ginger ale and coconut water to drink.
After dinner a large quantity of food was heaped in front of the mission house by the natives, and a speech was made stating that the island was so unfertile that they could not give so much as they would like. There was one large live turtle, and a cooked and cut-up one, dugong meat, fish, dampers, tins of meat, yams, taro, sweet potatoes, two bunches of bananas, and plenty of coconuts. When we had photographed the heaps of food, “Teapot,” a Samoan, gave a very clever dance to the beating of an empty kerosine tin. Teapot flung an axe backward and forwards, up and down, and every possible way, catching and twisting it with great dexterity.
The present of food was then distributed. To Tamate was given the live turtle, a lot of coconuts, and other fruit; to the “Doctor,” twenty coconuts and five sweet potatoes. I was very pleased at this further proof of the friendliness of the natives; other people also received a share of the present.
Later in the afternoon a dance was performed by some thirty men in the palm grove within the Mission compound. This was the Pibi kap, sometimes called “Kwoiam’s dance,” after the legendary warrior of the island—it was a war dance performed after a successful fight. Some of the men had variously painted themselves with red and black and yellow ochre; they wore chaplets of young coconut leaves or white feathers in their hair, crossed shoulder-belts and petticoats of the same yellow, or yellowish green coconut leaves, streaming armlets to match, and bands round their legs and ankles. They held bows and arrows in their left hands, and in their right each carried a coconut, or pawpaw, to represent a decapitated human head.
It would be tedious to describe in detail the various movements of the dancers. Usually they advanced in single file, with a skipping movement, holding the body somewhat bent, then, resting for a moment on one leg, would beat the air two or three times with the other leg, then stoop, resting on both feet, and trail the “head” on the ground, then advance with various skipping movements; occasionally they would rapidly dance on the tips of their toes, as if they were boring into the ground, sometimes the bow would be held horizontally, at others vertically, and almost continuously the “head” would be trailed backwards and forwards in the sand; every now and again the cry of victory would be raised. Some old women excited by the memory of former days could not refrain joining also in the dance.
Imagine a “May Meeting” in Exeter Hall closing with a war dance!