There was silence for a space, and the elders of Rara sat with bowed heads. Then Bonawai, the crafty, spoke, “See that ye tell no one, for if the coast people hear this tale how shall we endure their ridicule when they ask us, ‘Why went ye up against Rara? Did ye hunger for fish?’ Therefore hide this thing, and let no one know it.”
FOOTNOTES:
[3] A reed-lance tipped with ironwood (toa) with which the game of tinka is played.
[4] Women and children—non-combatants.
THE FIRST COLONIST.
This is a true story, or at least it is as true as any other that depends for its details upon tradition. It is the story of a man who had an opportunity and used it; who, being but a shipwrecked sailor, knew how to make himself feared and respected by the arrogant chiefs who had him at their mercy; who tasted the sweets of conquest and political power; and who brought about, albeit indirectly, the cession of Fiji to England. Many have the dry bones of the story—how the Swede, Charles Savage, a shipwrecked sailor or runaway convict, armed with the only musket in the islands, raised Bau from the position of a second-rate native tribe to be mistress of the greater part of the group; and how after a few years of violence and bloodshed he was killed and eaten by the people of Wailea who thus avenged hundreds of their countrymen whom Savage had helped to bring to the ovens of Bau. To clothe these dry bones with living flesh we must turn to native tradition,—those curious records, often silent as to great events, while preserving the most trivial details—often indifferent to sequence, always disdainful of chronology.
Fiji is linked to the rest of the Pacific by that romantic history, stranger and more absorbing than any fiction, which ended in the tragedy and the pastoral comedy of Pitcairn Island; for Lieutenant Hayward, who was despatched from Tonga in a native canoe by Captain Edwardes of the Pandora to search for the missing mutineers of the Bounty, was the first white man of whose landing in Fiji we have any authentic record. His visit was forgotten by the natives in the horror of the great pestilence, the Lila balavu, or wasting sickness, the first-fruits of their intercourse with the superior race. “From that time,” says an epic of the day, “our villages began to be empty of men, but in the time before the coming of the sickness every village was so crowded that there was no space to see the ground between the men, so crowded were they.” From this pestilence dated the custom of strangling those sick of a lingering illness lest they should, in the malignity of misery, spit upon the food and lie upon the mats of the healthy, and thus make them companions in their suffering. No wasting sickness was like the great Lila, for men and women lay till the bark-clothes rotted from their bodies, and their heads seemed in comparison to be larger than food-baskets; and they were so feeble that they lacked the strength to pull down a sugar-cane to moisten their parched throats unless four crawled out to lend their strength to the task.
Twelve years passed. The places of the dead were filled. The crops and animals wasted in the funeral feasts were again abundant, when the men of the eastern isles saw white men for the second time. On a night in the year 1803 there was a great storm from the east. When morning broke and the men of Oneata looked towards the dawn, they saw a strange sight. On the islet Loa, that marks the great reef Bukatatanoa, red streamers were waving in the wind. Strange beings, too, were moving on the islet—spirits without doubt. There were visitors in Oneata, men of Levuka in the island of Lakeba, offshoots in past time from distant Bau, holding special privileges as ambassadors who linked the eastern with the western islands. Two of these, bolder and more sophisticated than the natives of the place, launched a light canoe and paddled cautiously towards Loa. They gazed from afar, resting on their paddles, and returned with this report: “Though they resemble men, yet they are spirits, for their ears are bound up with scarlet, and they bite burning wood.” Then the elders of Oneata took much counsel together, wishing yet fearing to approach the spirits that were on Loa; but at last they bade the young men launch the twin canoe Taiwalata, and sailed for Loa. And as they drew near, the strange spirits beckoned to them, until at last they drifted to the shore and took them into the canoe to carry them to Oneata. But one of them they proved to be mortal as themselves, for he was buried on Loa, being dead, whether of violence or disease will never now be known. Here the traditions become confused. There were muskets and ammunition in the wrecked ship, but the men of Oneata knew nothing of their uses, else had the history of Fiji perhaps been different. They hid the casks of powder to be used as pigment for the face, and the ramrods to be ornaments for the hair. And one of them, says the tradition, smeared the wet pigment over hair and all, and when it would not dry as charcoal did, but lay cold and heavy in the hair, he made a great fire in the house and stooped his head to the blaze to dry the matted locks! None knew what befell. There was a sudden flash, very bright and hot, and a tongue of flame leaped from the head and licked the wall, and the chief sprang into the rara with a great cry, for his hair was gone, and the skull was more naked than on the day when he was born. It was, they said, the work of spirits; and they used the black powder no more.