CHAPTER V
WARFARE
The state of incessant intertribal warfare in which the first missionaries found the Fijians has led certain writers to represent them as a bloodthirsty and ferocious race whose sudden conversion to the ways of peace could only be accounted for by supernatural agency. There was one missionary, however, whose zeal in the cause of his church never obscured his natural truthfulness. "When on his feet," says Thomas Williams, "the Fijian is always armed.... This, however, is not to be attributed to his bold or choleric temper, but to suspicion and dread. Fear arms the Fijian.... The club or spear is the companion of all walks; but it is only for defence. This is proved by every man you meet: in the distance you see him with his weapon shouldered; getting nearer, he lowers it to his knee, gives you the path, and passes on."[35]
The same writer puts the annual losses in battle, without counting the widows strangled to their husbands' manes, at from 1500 to 2000. But this estimate was made when every tribe had muskets, and the possession of fire-arms emboldened tribes to take the field who would otherwise have agreed with their enemy quickly. None of the great confederations existed before 1800: the influence of Mbau scarcely extended beyond the mangrove swamps that face the island stronghold; Somosomo did not claim sovereignty even over the whole of Taveuni; even Rewa and Verata might have reckoned their territory in acres. In the eighteenth century, therefore, a belligerent tribe could put but a handful of men
into the field, armed with weapons no deadlier than the spear and the club. As late as Williams's day the great confederations of Mbau and Rewa could not, even with the help of mercenaries from Tonga and elsewhere, raise an army of 1500 without immense difficulty; and, if the annual slaughter amounted to less than 2000 out of a population of 150,000 almost constantly at war when three out of every five men carried a musket in addition to his other arms, the mortality from war must formerly have been quite insignificant.
It used, I know, to be said that the mortality was less with fire-arms than with native weapons, and this was true if the victims of native marksmanship only were taken into account, but the moral effect of gunpowder made the club and spear more deadly. The trade muskets which were imported in the early days by the traders in enormous quantities were flintlocks and "Tower" muskets, and when fretted by rust were often more dangerous to the man at the stock than to the man at the muzzle. The native marksmanship, always erratic, was not improved by a custom, common in Vatulele and other parts of the group, of sawing off the greater part of the stock, and firing with the barrel poised in the left hand at arm's length.
WAR FOSTERED MORALITY
Few native traditions have come down to us from the eighteenth century, but there are so many references in tribal histories to an upheaval among the inland clans obliterating all earlier historical landmarks, that there is ground for believing that the wars before 1780 were little more than skirmishes, and that war on a larger scale began with the convulsion that drove so many of the inland tribes to seek asylum on the coast, and left so profound an impression on the traditional poetry. War on a destructive scale is impossible among a people split up into petty joint families, each bent upon defence rather than conquest. In order to understand the political state of Fiji two centuries ago one must examine the institutions of other races that are still in the same condition. The natives of the d'Entrecasteaux Islands as I saw them in 1888 afford an excellent illustration. As we travelled along the coast we found that every village
had its frontier, a stream-mouth, or a sapling stuck upright in the sand, beyond which none would venture. The natives did their best to dissuade us from crossing these boundaries by representing their neighbours as thirsting for the blood of strangers. But on the other side of the frontier we found a meek folk, lost in wonder that we had come through the last stage of our journey unscathed, so cruel and ferocious were its inhabitants. Every man lived in active terror of his neighbour, and went armed to his plantation, but this did not prevent him from being a most skilful and industrious husbandman, or from living to a good old age. The fear being mutual, there was, in reality, scarcely any war; an occasional attack upon a woman or an unarmed man served to keep the hereditary feud alive.
The social evils of such a state of morcellement may easily be exaggerated. The trivial loss of life is more than counterbalanced by the activity, alertness and tribal patriotism which are fostered in an atmosphere of personal danger. Every man having a selfish interest in the increase of his own tribe, public opinion compelled the observance of those customary laws that guarded the lives of women and young children. The lazy could not then idle away their day in philandering with the women; the adventurous could not evade their share of the communal labour by paying long visits to distant islands, even if they did not find enough to sate their taste for adventure at home. The insouciance that has followed the decay of custom was impossible, because the tribe that gave way to it was lost. The teaching of all history is that man deteriorates as soon as he ceases to struggle either against hostile man or unkind nature. A barren soil, an overcrowded community, or a fauna dangerous to man will serve the need, but in a country where there is food without tillage, land enough for twenty times the population, and no man-eating tiger or poisonous snake, there must be war to keep the people from sinking into paralyzing lethargy. It must be remembered that the most devastating wars are less destructive than mild epidemics. The slaughter in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, estimated at 80,000 in France