From my own experience I am bound to say that one may drink a very great deal of yankona without experiencing any of these symptoms. The visitor to the Pacific who fondly hopes that a single draught of the national beverage will send him careering over the country with a clear head but rebellious legs will be woefully disappointed. On one occasion I joined a party of investigation to test in propriâ personâ the effects of a carouse. We drank a bucketful of strong yankona between the three of us in three-quarters of an hour, until, to put it plainly, we could hold no more. The effect was negative. We felt no stimulation, no soothing, no depression. Our lower limbs continued to behave as lower limbs should. The drink neither kept us awake nor sent us to sleep, and it left no headache behind it. So far from the hands trembling in the act of grasping, one of our number played a better game of billiards that afternoon than usual. We felt a little sick, perhaps, but not more than if we had been compelled to swallow the same extravagant quantity of any other liquid.
A SUBSTITUTE FOR ALCOHOL
We noticed the familiar numbing sensation of the fauces and the soft palate which swallowing strong yankona always induces. For a time the quantity of saliva was increased, and it became more viscid than usual. Europeans who are accustomed to drink yankona in moderate quantities find, not only that it quenches thirst better than any other beverage on a hot day, but that it acts as a mild stimulant to social conversation, and to the fullest enjoyment of tobacco. Its capacity for loosening the tongue is fully recognized by all those who have to conduct native meetings. Native chiefs of high rank, confronted with each other, are usually tongue-tied with awkward constraint, but as soon as the yankona cup has gone
round, their reserve is dispelled like the mists of a summer morning, and they become prone to betray confidences that would otherwise have remained locked in their bosoms. Europeans have discovered an even more useful quality in yankona. The great temptation that besets lonely Englishmen in tropical countries is intemperance, which grows upon some of them until they lose all power of resistance to the vice. Some confirmed drunkards have cured themselves by substituting yankona for spirits. They drink, it is true, incredible quantities of the root, but it satisfies the craving for a stimulant, without producing intoxication. In this respect it is a pity that yankona cannot be acclimatized in Europe.
It is a common fallacy among writers of the South Seas that "the natives of the Pacific Islands use a fermented beverage called kava." So far from its being fermented, kava is always drunk as soon as it is made, and any dregs left in the bowl over night are unfit to drink the next morning, because by that time fermentation has generally begun. Those who desire to know more of the chemical analysis of yankona can consult the monograph on the subject given by Dr. Lewin with the German love of ponderous detail before the German Medical Society in 1885. The chief physiological influence of the drug in the human body is exercised on the motor nerves, but the sensory fibres are also affected, and the influence is cumulative. The alcoholic extract, when evaporated to the consistency of soap, is as active as cocaine, weight for weight, in inducing local anæsthesia.
There is, no doubt, in these days, a greater consumption of yankona than in heathen times, for at present the consumption is limited only by the supply. Except in favoured localities, such as the island of Koro, the root requires from two to five years to come to maturity, and demands a good deal of attention during its growth. The importation of the dried root from other islands in the Pacific has certainly made the natives independent of the green crop; but since a single root of the ordinary size generally suffices only for a single occasion, and its equivalent in dried root cannot be purchased
at the local stores for much less than 2/- a pound (a pound being the minimum required for an evening yankona party)—the constant use of the root is beyond the power of any but the richer natives. Natives probably drink yankona once a day throughout the year, far less, in fact, than persons of the same rank in Tonga, where the pounding stones are never silent. Commoners, unless they are in attendance on chiefs, go many days without tasting it.
In one respect there are signs of a change for the better. The custom of chewing the green root not only tended to foster a taste for drinking in the young person selected to prepare the bowl, but was probably the means of communicating the bacilli of disease through the saliva. There are Europeans who defend the dirty habit on the ground that pounding reduces the woody fibre to dust which cannot be removed by the strainer, and who allege that the root is merely masticated, and leaves the mouth uncontaminated as it went in. But this comfortable belief received a rude shock when the experiment was made of weighing an ounce of the root before and after chewing, and it was found that the ounce had increased by something more than 10 per cent. Happily, the Tongan chief is the arbiter elegantiarum to the Fijian Courts, and it is fast becoming the fashion to regard the habit of chewing yankona in its proper light and to substitute the pounding stones of Tonga.
DISCOURAGED BY MISSIONARIES
The Wesleyan missionaries have attacked yankona drinking with a fiery zeal which is scarcely commensurate with the importance of the subject, for if it is a vice at all, it cannot reasonably be condemned for bringing in its train any of those social evils that are due to alcohol. A large number of the native teachers wear a blue ribbon on their shirt-fronts in token that they have abjured tobacco and yankona, and suspend conspicuously in their houses a card bearing the legend, "Sa tabu na yaqona kei na tavako" (drinking and smoking are forbidden). In the interests of the mission the wisdom of this crusade may well be questioned, for the path of virtue for the native has been made dull enough already by the prohibition of all his ancient heathen distractions, and to curtail any more of his pleasures would be to invite an