Picking Cocoanuts.
OWNERSHIP OF TREES
We come now to a feature in the rights of property that is very hard for a European, trained in the systems that are based upon the ancient Roman law, to comprehend. The doctrine ab inferno usque ad cœlum has no bearing in the islands of the Pacific. As I have already said, land as land had no value. Its value arose only from its potential produce. The thing treated with most consideration among primitive peoples is human labour, and the products of it. In Rome, and therefore of course in modern Europe, if a man plants fruit-trees on another's land, he has no claim to them. They belong to the soil in which they grow; but in Fiji, while you may be wrong in planting cocoanuts upon land which belongs to your neighbour, you do not on that account part with your rights over the product of your labour. The land remains his, but the trees are yours, from the surface of the soil to the topmost frond. You have, moreover, in virtue of your property in the trees, a right of way over his soil to get at your trees. To our minds this seems very unjust, but it must be remembered that in a country where the population is sparse, and where cocoanuts have at once a commercial value which
land does not possess, cocoanut trees are held in far higher estimation than the soil in which they grow. As a general rule this conflicting form of tenure does not arise through the secret planting of trees. The tree owner or his father has, in almost every case, asked the leave of the owner of the soil before planting his cocoanuts. Where two men are connected through the marriage of their children or by merely personal friendship, this is a very common form of mutual obligation. In the case of chiefs, moreover, it is no uncommon thing for the overlord to pick out the pockets of soil most suitable for the growth of cocoanuts, and to order his vassals to go and plant them there. The tenants still possess their rights over the soil, but they would not dare to claim the nuts growing upon them. The distinction may be best seen by comparing the crops of yams or plantains. The tenants would take the first-fruits to the chief, preserving the rest for themselves, but they would take all the cocoanuts, even after expending their own labour in gathering and husking them. This form of tenure has been a great embarrassment in settling the ownership of land. Now that modern ideas have begun to take root, and that every land-owner hopes to let his land to a European at a fixed annual rent, payable in cash, the owners of the trees confront him at every point with their claims. The result is that the rights in the trees are very often disputed. European notions have been dimly seized upon, and land-owners stand upon their rights as if they had been bred under the English law of Real Property. The only way to settle these disputes is to buy out one of the claimants. Where this is not done, the owners of the trees should be allowed to have twenty-five years' usufruct of them, after which they and all others they may have planted in the interim should pass to the owner of the soil.
Tenures in Rewa
Rewa is the most perfect example of a Fijian state known to us. Even its disruption in the great war with Mbau in 1845 has not been able to snap the ties that join the various units to the central power. So intimately is the question of its political constitution connected with the tenure of land that it is impossible to avoid giving it at some length.
The supreme government of the state was vested in the spiritual and temporal chiefs, the Roko-tui Ndreketi and the Vunivalu, who was the head of Nukunitambua. Unlike the system in the rival confederation of Mbau and many other native states, the spiritual chiefs had not yet parted with their executive power, nor had the Vunivalu yet succeeded in reducing them to a position of secondary importance. Before the great war between Mbau and Rewa, every clan had its part to play in the state. Below the two great families of Narusa and Nukunitambua, the spiritual and the temporal, which divided the power between them, were the six clans that formed the Sauturanga (lit. defence of the chiefs). These clans owed the superior chiefs no service but that of leading the army into battle and of conducting ambuscades. They also supplied the matanivanua (heralds or aides-de-camp). In order of battle they were the horns of the net—that is to say, while the main body of the army held back in cover, they led simultaneous flanking movements under cover of the grass or trees, and fell upon both flanks of the enemy at once, driving them into the arms of the main body, who were lying in wait. They were land-owners, and received thokovaki rent from their tenants, but they supplied no thokovaki produce to the two governing families.
CONSTITUTION OF THE STATE