South Sea Yarns

by Basil Thomson

From contemporary traditions we gather that the comet had three tails, the centre tail being coloured and the two outer white; that it rose just before daybreak, and that it was visible for thirty-seven nights in succession. Was this the comet of 1803, or Donati’s? Here, as in all ages and countries, the comet was believed to be an omen of coming evil—not the ravages of the unknown plague, but the death of some great chief. In like manner the comet of 1843 presaged the fall of Suva, and that of 1881 the death of King Cakobau.

Bau was now rising into fame. Her people, like their neighbours of the Rewa delta, had swept down from the sources of the Rewa, the cradle of the race, had for a time held a precarious footing among the older tribes by dint of constant fighting, and had at last fought and schemed their way to independence. Opposite to their stronghold Kubuna lay the tiny island of Bau, protected from a land attack by two miles of shallow sea.

Bau, or Butoni as it was then called, was occupied by the chiefs’ fishermen, who bartered their fish for the produce of the plantations on the mainland. But the security of their island made them insolent, and, to punish them, the chiefs resolved to attack and occupy their village. The incursion was made about the year 1760, and the fishermen were banished from the place for a time. With the help of their dependants the chiefs scarped away the side of the hills and reclaimed land from the shallow sea, facing it with slabs of stone. Thenceforth Butoni was known as Bau, the place of chiefs.

Secure in their island stronghold, the chiefs of Bau soon forgot their common origin with the poor relations they had left behind on the mainland to cultivate the plantations. The pursuit of arms has in every age conferred aristocracy, while the cultivation of the food on which warriors and cultivators alike exist has ever tended to sink men to serfdom. Under Banuve, the son of Durucoko, Bau had begun to make her power felt. Banuve had a definite policy; he tolerated no rivals. When the chief of Cautata presumed on his relationship to Bau by his mother, no warning was given him. He was attacked in the night, and his stronghold of Oloi burned. Yet this harsh discipline failed to satisfy his jealous kinsman. Intrenchments could be rebuilt, and half-beaten tribes are doubly dangerous. Eight times was Cautata rebuilt, and eight times was it reduced to ashes; nor was there peace until earth had been brought as a soro, and Cautata had acknowledged herself to be a hewer of wood and a drawer of water for Bau. But Banuve did not often risk open battle when there were so many who would fight for fighting’s sake. In his day Bau was first known as the nest in which plots were hatched, because Bau knew that the whale’s tooth proffered to an ally in secret was a surer weapon than the club. When the comet threw its glare over Bau, presaging evil, there were two States against whom Banuve’s plots could not prevail. Seven miles north of the little island was Verata, an intrenched fort in a deep bay that faces the island of Viwa. Till Bau was colonised, Verata drew tribute from the coast as far as Buretu, and the struggle for the mastery was ever impending. To the southward was Dravo allied with Nakelo, too strong to be yet attempted.

Such was the position of Bau when the pestilence reached it, by means, it is said, of a canoe from Ovalau. Cholera, dysentery, or whatever it may have been, it struck chief and commoner alike. “Their limbs became light, and when they would walk they reeled and fell, and where they fell they lay; nor was there any to tend them, for all were stricken alike. Then did war cease, for the strong warriors were stricken and withered like the daiga that droops in the evening. They were as men bereft of sense, for those who had strength launched the canoes and sailed away, and the sick died more swiftly when there was none left to bring them food: their bodies rotted in the houses, or were devoured by the hogs. Yet the living could not escape by flight, for the pestilence, borne on the wind that filled their sails, overtook them even in the place whither they fled.... None can tell the terror and the pity of that time.”

From Bau, however, they did not attempt to escape, for the sickness was raging on the mainland opposite to them, and beyond the mountains there were none but enemies. They stayed and sickened and died, and the last to die was Banuve, surnamed Sevuniqele (“the first-fruits”), their Vunivalu. And his spirit went and stood on the bank of the swift stream at Lelele, and Cema answered his cry, and brought to him the vesi canoe on which chiefs only may embark. And he crossed the eel-bridge and made ready his stone to throw at the great pandanus by which the love of wives is proved. And his stone went true to the mark. So he rested, knowing that his wives must soon follow him to bear him company in the world of spirits. Nor did he wait in vain, for on that very day four of his wives were strangled and buried with him in the same tomb. Henceforth he was not Banuve, but Bale-i-vavalagi (“He-who-fell-by-the-foreign-pestilence”). The doom of the forked star had fallen.

Banuve’s eldest son, Ra Matenikutu (“The lice-killer”), succeeded naturally to the office of Vunivalu; but the rites of confirmation could not be performed until the arrival of the men of Levuka, whose peculiar province it is to conduct the ceremony. The traditions of Oneata say that they took with them to Bau on this occasion one of the white men; but the historians of Bau affirm that they came bringing with them no strangers, but a canvas house and the first foreign possessions seen by the Bauans.

We shall never know now what became of the red-capped sailors cast upon the reef at the ends of the earth in that stormy night of 1803. Perhaps they perished of the disease they brought with them; perhaps, like Gordon in the New Hebrides, they were sacrificed to the Manes of those whose death they had unwittingly brought about. Their fate is not even one of the thousand mysteries of the sea which men would fain solve.

On the day fixed for the rite there was another portent. The sky was cloudless at high noon, when the sun suddenly paled and turned to the colour of blood. The air grew dark, the birds settled on the trees to roost, and the stars came out. There was silence among the people sitting before the spirit bure, Vatanitawake—the silence of a great fear. Then the god entered into one of the priests, and he screamed prophecies in the red darkness, foretelling war and the greatness of Matenikutu, the son of Bale-i-vavalagi, and crying that the face of the sun was red with the blood that he should shed.

This dramatic scene was no invention of the elders of Bau, for the tradition of the eclipse is to be found in Rewa, in Nakelo, and in Dawasamu, and in every case the day is fixed as the day of the confirmation of Ra Matenikutu. He saw many strange sights during his stormy reign, but assuredly none more weird and terrible than this scene in the lurid twilight, when he was declared Vunivalu.