In the Strange South Seas

by Beatrice Grimshaw

It is certainly not like any sort of waking life one has hitherto known, to find that the market of Papeëte—one of the principal sights of the place—is held on Sunday mornings before sunrise. One might have supposed that such a supremely indolent people would scarcely choose the most inconvenient hour of all the twenty-four for a general gathering. But they do choose it, and the visitor who wants to see the market must choose it also.

L———— calls me, herself, at some unearthly hour, not much after four, and I get up and dress in the warm darkness. It is the hot season at present and the air, night and day, is very like a hot bath, and not far behind it in temperature. I have been loafing about the town during the previous day in rather thin shoes, and my feet have been almost blistered by the heat of the ground striking up through light soles, so that I cannot walk very far, and am glad to find the market close at hand.

L————, in a fresh muslin nightdress (she has something like fifty or sixty of them), acts as guide. She has put a new coronet of flowers in her hair, and before we reach the market she proceeds to dress me up Tahiti fashion, with, long necklaces of sweet white blossoms round my neck, falling all over my dress, and a heavy crown of closely woven gardenias on my head, instead of my hat, which she removes, and politely carries. She wants to pull my hair down as well, but in a temperature of eighty degrees the idea does not sound tempting, so I decline to follow Tahitian custom further. Besides, there is really no knowing where she would stop!

There is not yet a glimmer of daylight when we enter the market-place, and flaring lamps and torches cast huge flickering shadows all over the gay assembly. Fruit and fish for the most part are the wares—but such fish, and such fruit! Where one would look at home for white and grey turbot, pallid plaice, zinc-coloured herrings, here one may see the most gorgeous shapes of gold and scarlet and green; of iridescent rose, silver, orange; of blue, brilliant as a heap of tumbled sapphire, and pearl as bright as the lining of a shell. Tahiti is famous for its beautiful fish, and indeed these in the market look almost too poetically lovely to eat.

Then the fruit! bananas as big as cucumbers, as small as ladies’ fingers (after which, indeed, this little sugar-sweet, variety is named), dark red bananas, flavoured like a peach, large bloomy ones, tasting and looking like custard within; smooth yellow ones, like those exported to other countries, whither the daintier fruits will not safely go—pineapple in rough-skinned heaps (one learns soon in Tahiti how to eat a pineapple, and that is to peel it, cut it into largest possible lumps, eat the latter undiminished even if they make you speechless, and never, never, shoe the fruit)—oranges of several different kinds, custard-apples, rose-apples, paw-paws, melons, avocado pears, guavas, mangoes, and other fruits the name of which I have never heard—all lying together in masses under the lamplight, costing not as many halfpence to buy as at home they would cost shillings.

The native beauties are here in a merry crowd, intent quite as much upon enjoyment as on business. Scarcely one but wears a flower behind her ear—and if you have ever been in the South Seas, you will know what that pretty little signal means, but if you have not, why then I shall not tell you—and all are so wreathed, and crowned, and necklaced with woven blossoms, that the air is heavy with scent, and the market-place looks as though the transformation scene of a pantomine were just about to begin, with a full chorus of flower-decked nymphs appearing for the dance.

One exceedingly pretty girl, with a perfect cataract of black hair overflowing her pale green gown, and a pair of sparkling dark eyes that could never be matched outside the magic lines of Cancer and Capricorn, is making and frying pancakes with something fruity, nature unknown, inside them. She has half a dozen French officers about her, enjoying breakfast and flirtation at the same time. Another, who is selling a number of the oddest little parcels imaginable, made out of cut-up joints of bamboo, carefully sealed, is doing a good trade among the coloured and semi-coloured ladies. L———— says she is selling readymade sauces, to be eaten with fish or meat, and adds that she herself will show me what Tahitian sauces are like later on, because there is no one in the whole group fit to act as scullion to her in that important matter—or words to the same effect.

Strange-looking mountain men are here, dressed in shirt and kilt of cotton cloth, patterned in flowers and leaves as big as soup-plates. The former garment is a concession to Papeete—outside the town, the “pareo” or kilt alone forms the Tahitian full-dress suit. These men have come in to sell the “fei,” or wild banana, which is only found on the highest and most perilous of the mountain precipices. To get it, the Tahitian must climb where not even a goat would venture to go, and make his way back, having secured the fruit, carrying a bunch that is a heavy load, even on level ground. Many are the lives that have been lost gathering the “fei,” but the Tahitian, like all islanders, is something of a fatalist, and the death of one fruit gatherer never stops another from going a-hunting in the very same place next day.

There is something about the same “fei” that is worth noting. It is one of the standing dishes of the islands—a cooking banana, large, and well-flavoured when baked, but not so attractive on the whole as many of the other kinds. The Tahitian, however, ascribes to this variety a certain magic property, not unlike that of the fabled lotus. If you eat of the “fei,” he says, especially if you eat freely of it, you will fall under the spell. For ever, in its working, it binds you to Tahiti. You may go away, and without any intention of returning, say goodbye to the islands, and place many thousand miles of land and sea between yourself and sweet Tahiti, saying to yourself that you and Papeëte have no more to do with one another for ever.... Yet by-and-by—some day, one knows not when; it may be soon, or it may be late, but it will surely come—you will return to Tahiti. The spell of the fei will work, and draw you back again.

So the natives said, and I thought the fancy a pretty one, and wondered whether it had really any connection with the lotus myth, and then forgot all about it.